Listen in and learn the story behind the very first Exchange-Traded Fund focused on local energy. Gabriela Herculano, CEO and Co-Founder of iClima Earth, shares with host Bill Nussey how the fund evolved, the transparent model for the underlying index, and a simple way for everyday investors to bet on local energy, DERs, and as iClima refers to it, Smart Energy.
Here are some of the highlights from their discussion…
“Two years ago, when we were putting together all this data and all these numbers and understanding how the grid was going to become green, we realized that 25% of all that solar energy was going to be at the point of consumption and that we were going to reshape our dated fossil fuel based, centralized grid in a very material way. And I became nearly obsessed about that idea.”
“[We see this transition as five D’s] We’re decentralizing the grid. [It is becoming] digital because there are a lot of assets that need to be optimized and aggregated — we’re doing this with 5G and internet of things. And it decarbonizes because the solutions are renewable energy in nature. We’re advancing this because these technologies are deflationary and the last D is that it is going to be incredibly disruptive.”
“We realized that exchange traded funds, ETFs, were becoming incredibly popular. It’s a very transparent tool, it’s very democratic. You put together this portfolio of interesting, listed companies. And you explain very clearly what are the rules? What is the data that you use to come up with this list of incredible companies that are in line with a specific theme? And then we said, “We have our why, we have our what, and we have our how. Let’s do this.” And that’s why we started iClima almost three years ago.”
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Climate Tech Finance – Canary Media
Full Transcript
Bill Nussey:
Welcome to everybody in the Freeing Energy world. We have another great podcast for you today. I’m really excited. Gabby, as she tells me I should call her, is an incredibly accomplished financial executive having done 25 years in energy and finance and M&A, working at huge companies like at AES and General Electric. And a few years ago, she and a friend of hers from the Wharton Business School decided to get together and do something that no one else to my knowledge has tried to do. They had a concept that local energy was a thing, long before they ever heard of what we do here at Freeing Energy. They arrived at the same correct idea independently, and decided to create an ETF, which is for those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s sort of like a mutual fund, but it’s so much cooler. And we’re going to hear all about what that is today.
Gabriela Herculano:
Thank you so much, Bill, for having me. I was looking forward to this podcast.
Bill Nussey:
You had an interest early on in infrastructure challenges in Brazil, and that’s kind of what maybe set you in this direction. Why did you at a young age, living in Brazil decide that infrastructure was something you were interested in? What sparked that?
Gabriela Herculano:
My mom has a PhD in sociology. My dad has a PhD in political science, and my mom used to do a lot of research on environmental justice. We have these huge hydro plants in Brazil, and whenever you build up the water in the reservoirs, you have to really displace a lot of people. And that process usually coincides with very low-income level population that gets just thrown out of their houses, and you have water building up. Usually that is a big environmental problem. Water is extremely heavy. So you have erosion everywhere and methane, because we don’t cut the trees to build the reservoirs. It’s too expensive to do that. And we’re talking about massive, massive hydro projects. Itaipu, I don’t know if you know about this plant, is that 12,600 if I recall correctly,
Bill Nussey:
That’s huge. Huge.
Gabriela Herculano:
… megawatt power plant. Gigantic. It’s incredibly scary. When you go there and you touch the walls, you feel the water, you feel the vibration, literally is incredible. So you see the turbines’ kinetic energy, the turbines spin and to generate electricity and you feel that vibration. The turbines are incredibly big. So I was exposed to that from early on, and I grew up listening to my mom complain about all these issues and how the government was just keen on, “We got to grow. We got to grow. That constraints our GDP growth. We need to become an industrial economy. We need… That’s the way.” And that was during military dictatorship. We had that until 1989 in Brazil. And I was like, “Yeah, I hear all her points, but we do have to grow.”
Gabriela Herculano:
And that elasticity to GDP, if you are an emerging economy, you need the consumption of electricity grows much more. We’re about to start in a completely different phase as we electrify transportation and heat, is going to be the other way around. The more developed economies are going to have an elasticity to GDP that is going to be much bigger than in South America, Southeast Asia or Africa. But that was not the case in the ’80s and the ’90s. So I had this very unique upbringing, and for me, the key point was, how are we going to finance? This is constraining our growth. We don’t have the means to invest in infrastructure. It is crucial. We’re talking about people buying their first TV, their first refrigerator, empowering that with electricity for the very first time.
Gabriela Herculano:
We’re talking big grid. We’re talking about this very long transmission lines that bring not fossil fuel electricity, but big hydro to basically Sao Paulo and Rio, which is half of the GDP of the country. And you have to build the hydro plants whenever they are. So it’s always been in the public press in the meeting a very big time, this gigantic projects that had to be financed, that they had so many issues but they had to be done. I grew up in that environment, and for me, it was all about the financing side.
Bill Nussey:
So let’s talk a little bit about the arc of your career. You started out on the sell side as an advisor to major companies, and then you moved over to the buy side. So pretend that a lot of our people listening in don’t even really understand what that means. Buy side and sell side. Take us through your career at a high level, and why that’s a substantial shift in the thinking for someone who’s in the world of finance.
Gabriela Herculano:
Yeah. Well, I’ll start again with my parents. And it sounds like that, we always end up there. I disappointed them deeply in a way, because after I went to college in Brazil and I tried to go to college in the U.S. They said, “No, you got to stay here. You go for graduate school.” I’m like, “Okay.” Then they were like, “Okay, now you’re going to get your PhD in what? Economics?” And I was like, “No, I’m not getting a PhD. I’m getting an MBA in finance. I’m going to go work at Wall Street.” And they were like, “Oh really? Why?” I was like, “That’s how we finance things. That’s how we change the world, is through finance and investments.” And eventually they said, “Okay, do as you please.” So I did. I joined Lehman Brothers in the ’90s.
Gabriela Herculano:
That was actually before I went to Wharton. And we were privatizing a lot of the utility companies in Brazil, both on the energy side and the telecom. So Lehman was trying to do what’s called the sell side. You advise the owner of the asset. In this case, the government in Brazil, on how to go about doing that and how to put together the auction and in the most transparent way. And then private owners come. And then that is buy side advisory when you’re advising the buyers. So all the big banks try to do the sell side because you know you’re going to get paid because you will sell the asset successfully.
Gabriela Herculano:
So Lehman, because had a lot of track record in other jurisdictions, had a lot of experience and got a lot of sell side mandates. I worked on both sell side and buy side. So buy side, you work a lot of valuation on strategy to due diligence to evaluate a company, but you make a bid and sometimes you’re not the winner bid and there’s that winner’s curse. Sometimes because it is an auction, you have to pay very close to your reservation price. So that was a lot of capital, yes, pouring into Brazil and Latin America in the ’90s. And that’s exactly what I thought was very badly needed. And these companies were transformed.
Bill Nussey:
Well, let’s talk about iClima. And you graduated from Wharton, you came to the UK, which is where you are now, as you said earlier, and somewhere along the line, you decided to go from working at larger companies to creating your own organization. What was the spark that started that, and tell us a little bit about how you and your co-founder decided to leave the world of big financing, get to the world of big finance by a small company?
Gabriela Herculano:
Yes. So Shaila and I work together at G Capital for many years. So we have that background, that risk assessment type of experience. And I bring the private-public as in listed securities and private equity investment where you invest in private assets. And she brings public-private in a different way. She used to work for the World Bank, so private sector and government. So we bring these two ideas, and after she left G Capital, she went to work for Fitch, trying to build their ESG practice.
Gabriela Herculano:
And about three years ago, we met socially, actually an interesting event about circular economy and we shared notes. It was like, aha moment. I was telling her, “I’m really struggling. I was working for this family office trying to help them put a portfolio together for climate change mitigation.” And I said, “I can only come up with investments in the renewable energy space, but there’s so much more to climate change mitigation than renewable energy.” And she’s like, “Yeah. And I’m so disappointed with VSG because it’s such a beautiful concept, but it’s being translated into this black box scorecards.” And whenever you speak to a different data provider, they will have a different methodology. And they’ll say, ‘My scorecard is better than yours.’ And that’s really not the way we’re going to advance the agenda on the sustainability agenda. This beautiful concept that it really matters how you do and what you do from an environmental, social and governments perspective.
Gabriela Herculano:
We realized that exchange traded funds, ETFs were becoming incredibly popular. It’s a very transparent tool, it’s very democratic. You put together this portfolio of interesting, listed companies together. And you explain very clearly what are the rules? What is the data that you use to come up with this list of incredible companies that are in line with a specific theme? And then we said, “We have our why, we have our what, and we have our how. Let’s do this.” And that’s why we started, iClima almost three years ago.
Bill Nussey:
This is so cool. And so you guys are a small organization running your own mutual fund hedge fund, but it’s available to everyone to participate in and everything you do about it is transparent. So the thesis and the decisions that you use are available to anyone to look at and make their own decisions, which I think is just really cool. Just for our audience, what is the biggest difference between say, I guess a mutual fund and an ETF, mechanically?
Gabriela Herculano:
An exchange traded fund is a different reper. Is more tax efficient, it is completely liquid. So you buy the net asset value of the underlying securities. So it’s incredibly transparent. And like you said, it trades as if it were a stock. So you have these funds that you can get in and get out as you please at any given time. So you don’t have to wait for specific… Some mutual funds that have completely different liquidity points. And when you can get in and you get out, and with Exchange Traded Funds, it’s exactly as if it were a stock, at any given moment, you can choose to get in or to get out. It’s an architecture that is incredibly robust and you create the baskets. And if you have a divestment, you sell the underlying securities and you return the funds to the investor. So for these variety of reasons, it became a 10 trillion AUM assets under management type of-
Bill Nussey:
$10 trillion. So ETFs had turned into a 10 trillion Euro. Okay. Wow.
Gabriela Herculano:
10 trillion globally. And of course the U.S… the vast majority of it is a very popular instrument in the U.S. as well. But having said that, we were very critical of the ETFs this listed funds that are out there trying to represent the story of climate change in some shape or form. So some of them they call themselves net zero or low carbon. And they commingle many ideas, the idea of users doing less harm usually is Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Decarbonization is a cost line item. Correlation is not causation. They’re not causing, they’re not leading, they’re not providing the solutions. So that’s what we thought was very much needed, is to focus on the solutions. What are the solutions? How do we decarbonize transportation, energy, communications, food? How do we do that?
Gabriela Herculano:
And that’s what took us 18 months to develop. And that’s the beauty of startups. You have a clear problem that you try to address. And usually you do it in a different way. You don’t have legacy issues or any other reasons why you wouldn’t do something in a certain way. So, it took us 18 months. We look for the data ourselves going through financial reporting. Like you said, we’re a small team of eight, but our analysts are incredibly committed to this idea. And we scrub the financial statements for all these companies. They’re listed, so they have to report. And we found the data. So we came up with something that we thought was really unique. And then Bill, I have to share with your audience how we met.
Gabriela Herculano:
About, I would say, two years ago, when we were putting together all this data and all this numbers and understanding how the grid was going to become green. We realized that 25% of all that solar energy was going to be at the point of consumption, and that we were going to reshape our dated fossil fuel based, centralized grid in a very material way. And I became nearly obsessed about that idea. We were looking very much for public representation. So the companies that are already listed and there are embracing and trying to further develop the solutions for this decentralized grid, where electricity gets produced at the point of consumption. We’re decentralizing the grid, it is digital because it’s a lot of assets that need to be optimized and aggregated. And we’re doing this with 5G and internet of things. And it decarbonizes because the solutions are renewable energy in nature. We’re advancing this because these technologies are deflationary and then less D is that is going to be incredibly disruptive. And you-
Bill Nussey:
You’re missing my favorite D I have to say. My favorite D is-
Gabriela Herculano:
Really.
Bill Nussey:
… democratizing energy. And that’s the part that threatens the utilities the most, because everybody… In fact, I would argue that local energy is a good energy proxy for what you’re doing with ETFs. It’s democratizing Wall Street. You can have a small group of people with a great idea. Don’t have to start with a hundred-million-dollar fund. You can come up with your idea, you can create the vision, you can articulate it, and then you can just start. And local energy is the same thing. It’s a way for somebody individually or a small group of people to become their own electricity generators and all the upside and benefits. Actually, there’s probably monetary a lot more upside to creating an ETF than there is for putting solar on your roof, but there of the same spirit.
Bill Nussey:
And you don’t have to work at Goldman Sachs in order to have a thesis and execute it in public markets. And I don’t have to work at Southern Company or Georgia Power in order to generate my own electricity. And I think there’s a wonderful thesis. And I think there’s many smart people that are writing books about how the world is Uber and Lyft and others. The world is moving more towards this democratization-decentralization. So it’s a big theme, and it’s cool to think about how energy and Wall Street or finance are coming together on that as well. I hadn’t really thought about that till today.
Gabriela Herculano:
Is a big thing and in the D for democratizing is brilliant. I love it. I’ll have to quote you on that one and add a D to the description. I love it. But I do have to say Bill, that we launched this fund and that was eight months ago. And people go like, “Really Gabby. I don’t see that happening. You remember we are in London. There’s no sun here.” And I’m like, “Well, first of all, you’re missing the point that these companies are most and foremost in the U.S. And potentially in other jurisdictions like Australia, where that local solar,” the way you beautifully put it is about 8%. Last year 8% of all the electricity consumed in their largest grid came from that local solar from those solar rooftops.
Gabriela Herculano:
So it’s not that I’m advocating and suggesting that we have a beautiful portfolio of companies that are all based in the UK where the radiation level is not very big, but we get a lot of pushbacks until very recently where we’re being bombarded by questions from investors and journalists, because in these energy crisis that we’re facing exacerbated out of the invasion of Ukraine, people are looking for what are the solutions in the short term? There are very few things that we can do in the very short term, but one of them is that local solar, the other one is energy efficiency, which I know you talk a lot about that in your book. That is the most impactful solution ever, the electricity that never gets consumed because even renewable energy has a carbon footprint.
Gabriela Herculano:
So all of a sudden now people are like, “Tell us more, because this is really interesting. And we had not realized how big this is going to be.” And I just heard Ursula von der Leyen the President of the European Commission talk about that. So now people are like, “Okay, yeah, this is a solution. And this could be really big.” And the eyes are… That’s one of our predictions that 2022 is the year where some acronyms like V2G and VPPs Vehicles to Grid and Virtual Power Plants will become famous ones. Because we’re going to start to talk a lot about these solutions.
Speaker 1:
ETFs are opening the door for everyday investors to participate in the larger publicly traded companies in emerging new segments, like local energy. The pipeline of very early-stage climate related companies that can feed these ETFs is growing at a staggering pace. The pace is quickly becoming what our host and author Bill Nussey calls a “Tectonic milestone for clean tech investing.” Nussey argues in his new book, Freeing Energy that, “Clean tech or climate tech investing represents the biggest business opportunity in history.” He writes that, “Many of the world’s most inspiring leaps in progress occur when governments, private business and thousands of people align with large sums of capital toward truly grand challenges.” Nussey goes on in Freeing Energy to point out that Goldman Sachs predicts $16 trillion could be invested through 2030 in renewable energy infrastructure. U.S. Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s estimate is even higher, a $23 trillion market by 2030. And most recently global strategy firm, McKinsey says, “The world needs to invest $9.2 trillion per year.”
Speaker 1:
Nussey goes on to write, “The scale of these investments is breathtaking. Remember these figures represent investments, not handouts, write offs or expenses. For every trillion dollars put into renewable energy investors will receive even more money back over time. Of course, the returns for the planet’s future are priceless. If the governments of the United States, the European Union, China and India decide to step up and more aggressively invest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions these numbers will be 50% to 100% higher. To help get your head around the scale of these numbers consider what it will take to put $10 trillion to work. Over 20 years, investing this money will require thousands of companies, each investing hundreds of millions of dollars every single year for decades. This means millions of new jobs, tens of thousands of startups and economic prosperity spread across the U.S and the world.”
Speaker 1:
This is well illustrated in a fascinating March 1st, 2022, article from Canary Media. The article notes that in the last week of February 2022 alone, a half a billion dollars of venture capital flowed into clean tech companies and the focus was on solar software. The articles author writes, “The cash flowing to them, suggests that software to enhance the solar business is no longer an auxiliary function to a niche industry. It’s a billion-dollar market in the making.” How can you be a part of all of this? We shared a link to the Canary Media article in our show notes if you want to read the full story. And you can learn more about Freeing Energy, the book by visiting freeingenergy.com. Now let’s get back to Bill and Gabby for even more.
Bill Nussey:
You guys have two big ETF funds. And tell us briefly about the other one that isn’t about local energy, and then let’s dive in a little bit on how do you choose the companies that go into your local energy ETF?
Gabriela Herculano:
Yeah. The other idea is…That’s the name of the fund, Climate Change Solutions. So the idea is that we can move away from our business-as-usual high emissions. We can go from point A to point B instead of driving internal combustion engines, which is the business as usual, you can drive a Tesla, but our idea is that we need to represent the solutions and the companies behind that in a more comprehensive way. So it’s not just about Tesla, is Tesla BYD, NiyoX Bank. All these pure players that are really putting a lot of effort into bringing to market this completely new concept that we take to another level because optimizing those batteries inside these electric vehicles is… And that’s the link that we do to one of your beautiful chapters in the book. What Uber, Lyft did for cars and Airbnb did for housing, we’re going to be doing with our next big investments as households, the electric vehicle with that battery inside and the solar rooftop. So it’s the same way as aggregation and optimization of these assets and a way for asset owners to monetize that.
Gabriela Herculano:
So, that is really big. And we tell that climate change solution story from these lenses of very comprehensive solutions, but we also have things like telepresence, and Zoom epitomizes that idea and became very popular out of COVID, a sad reason, but that idea that we can do really good business and good communication without necessarily zigzagging the planet on airplanes that have high emissions. So there’s a lot of technical calculations behind this, but we look for this. We look for the companies with solutions that preclude emissions from ever taking place. So to use it some more household names Beyond Meat or Oatly, as opposed to your beef burger and all the emissions that come from that cattle. Plant-based diet is a relevant solution or a meal kit, a company like HelloFresh, which is big in the U.S., but actually is a company headquarter in Germany.
Gabriela Herculano:
It’s less waste meal kit. So you buy exactly what you’re going to cook. And that waste doesn’t go to landfills. Methane is a very damaging gas. So there’s a lot of logic and we’re stepping on the shoulders of great research done by other people like Project Drawdown. So very comprehensive set of solutions that preclude emissions from ever taking place. So again, it’s innovation. We’re problem solving our biggest problems and moving away from the high emissions way we’ve lived our lives to live a more sustainable life.
Bill Nussey:
So you’ve thought about the fundamental economic drivers of local energy, more than probably anybody I know. I’ve thought about it more than most and you have thought about it even more because you’ve looked at it so systematically. And it’s what I would think of as first principles. So what kind of companies are in your shift, your smart energy fund? What are the criteria for them to become part of that basket of public companies?
Gabriela Herculano:
So you have to be in line with seven specific solutions. So the distributed power sources, which is that core technology, the solar rooftop. That’s the key technology that epitomizes that idea. We have companies like Sunrun, Sunnova and SunPower. They very much epitomize this idea. Sunrun is very big name in the U.S. in this space is the largest market share. It’s for Sunrun is a residential provider of solutions. So they will install the solar rooftop. Then you have energy storage because as we know the sun doesn’t shine all the time and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. So the storage element is a very important one. And in here we get a bit technical because we do talk a lot about behind the meters, so at point of consumption, but the technically distributed renewable energy or renewable resources is asset sub 50 megawatt in size.
Gabriela Herculano:
So you could have what you refer to as communal solar, for example, is not technically behind the meter, but is in that range size wise. So we have, for example, a company like Stem or Fluence, which is a company we recently added. So companies in the… So Fluence for example, is very close to having $1 billion in revenue and they do have utility scale. It’s not a small company. They’ve been operating for 14 years. It’s actually a joint venture between AES and Siemens. There’s a lot of IP, there’s a lot of knowhow and they wrap this very well, Bill. They wrap up software with hardware. So actually Fluence they like to say that they’re somewhat agnostic on the specific chemistry for the battery. But they wrap a lot of software because it’s a very complex asset to optimize. And they do that sometimes in front of the meter, sometimes behind the meter.
Gabriela Herculano:
So, that’s the energy storage. Then we have the microgrid and smart grid, which is a fundamental piece of this equation for you to be able to operate in a little bit of a bigger scale than just out of a home. We want to have these solutions that are very relevant for commercial users and industrial users. So that’s microgrid and smart grid. Then we have the smart houses because it’s all about making those houses efficient. It’s all about that convergence of the 5G and the internet of things and that house of the future. We like to say that future is here. We already have the means of doing all that, smart meters, smart thermostats burning methane if you don’t have a heat pump yet, converting that methane boiler to a heat pump. That’s very much what we’re talking about.
Gabriela Herculano:
Then there’s an element of software’s and systems. And we have some companies that are not necessarily pure players, only focusing on distributed generation because it is somewhat of an emerging application. But we have a company like Schneider Electric that is really a big player in the distributed generation space. We have a lot of systems to optimize these assets. And then we have one of my favorites where we really see a lot of potential, is the vehicles to grid in the EV charging, which we have as a solution for smart energy. Not because they range anxiety from an electric vehicle ownership perspective, but because they manage and optimize these powerful assets, which are the batteries inside these electric vehicles. Some people don’t realize that more than 80% of all the clean storage capacity we have on the planet right now is inside those electric vehicles, and that vehicles to grid, Volkswagen is embracing it in a very material way.
Gabriela Herculano:
And some of these internal combustion engine car makers are as well. Ford, the Lightning truck is a very… Exactly. A very popular one in the U.S. Their electric version is bidirectional. So you can use those. It’s a really large battery if I recall correctly. It’s 115-kilowatt hour battery and you can use that to power your home. So in the next snow [garden 00:00:31:15] those that have this pickup truck, they’ll be able to use that. And there we have some really unique companies like NUVVE. NUVVE’s the only pure player in the public space. And then the last solution is virtual power plants. And that’s where we actually have Tesla as a solution, even though they are not predominantly an energy name, yet. We future proof the ETF so that we can have companies that we expect they will be really big providers of smart energy solutions.
Bill Nussey:
Wow. What’s amazing me about what you just outlined Gabby is that it’s one of the most thoughtful dissections of local energy. But as I’ve gone through some of your materials, the depth behind the decisions, the clarity of the models, you’ve just gone over in five or six minutes verbally. I mean, this is months, years’ worth of work by really smart people. This isn’t just business. This is about people. It’s about changing lives. And I hear that when you guys talk, and I see that in your materials. And so I think that’s one of the reasons that you will undoubtedly be as successful as anybody, if not more than most, because you’re bringing a broader view with an incredible amount of horsepower to drive it.
Gabriela Herculano:
Thank you, Bill. That makes my day, because we’ve worked so hard and I think we’d like to think that we’re being as objective as we can. We look at the data and we’re connecting the thoughts, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm that comes out of the conclusion of how big and beautiful this is going to be, and not political, because the solutions is such a no brainer. Better minds will prevail. It’s not a political decision. Is what makes economic sense because of that deflationary power, because it democratizes access to energy and something that hopefully soon we will find a way to do this. We think that there’s a way for us to also do social impact out of this, because this is the way we’re going to power the last billion, is exactly with that. Same way that in Brazil and in Africa we leapfrog landlines with mobile phones, we’re going to do the same with these exact technology.
Bill Nussey:
Everybody listening is now completely clear why iClima and Gabby and Shaila are some of my favorite people. So let’s wrap up as we do on the Freeing Energy podcast with four lightning round questions. And I’m really anxious to hear your answers to this given how much I think heart and spirit and huge objective horsepower you bring to this. So what excites you most about being in the clean energy business?
Gabriela Herculano:
I think it’s because I close my eyes and I can almost see. I can see the world in 2030 being fundamentally a different place. It will change everything, and it’s going to be extremely fast. Cars, as we know it, will cease to exist. They’ll be computerized, power plant on wheels. We’re going to make sense out of those batteries and that is going to… We really extrapolate things. You won’t even need 20% of all the space that is used in the U.S. to park those cars, because they will be autonomous and driving around. So we’re going to be able to do other things with that space. For example, the world in 2030, which is just around the corner will be a much more democratic and sustainable place because of clean energy.
Bill Nussey:
There’s this great saying that, “We always overestimate what we can do in a year and always underestimate what could be done in 10.” So I agree with you and I share your optimism. Second question. If you could wave a magic wand and change just one thing towards a clean energy future, what would it be?
Gabriela Herculano:
Well, I don’t think we will need a magic wand. I hope that better minds will prevail. We need you guys in the U.S. to… Again, better minds prevailing. We need a new version of Building Back Better. Building Back Better was going to extend the investment tax credit for 10 years for that solar roof top. So put it in place for 10 years and raise it from 24% to 30%. The solutions are already price competitive. We do not need that fiscal physical stimulus, but of course it helps. It helps with the adoption and it helps with this virtual circle of things that then will unfold. So, we don’t really need a magic wand. We just need better minds to prevail and for a new version of Building Back Better to pass, which I really hope it will before the summer.
Bill Nussey:
What do you think will be the single most important change in how we generate, store and distribute electricity in just five years?
Gabriela Herculano:
It will be vehicles to grid, because they will be right there. That adoption to vehicles to grid is going to be… already is. 20% of all the cars sold in Europe and in the UK last December were full BEVs, Battery Electric Vehicles. So that adoption is accelerating massively. So it’s making sense of the assets that we already have, that V2G I think is going to be really big.
Bill Nussey:
And final question. I’m sure you get ask, as I do people say, “Well, what can I do? This is giant slow moving government policies. What can I do to make a difference to help us get to a clean energy future faster?”
Gabriela Herculano:
I think as homeowners, I know myself, I live in London, but I’ve been for a really long time trying to put that solar rooftop and the batteries. And it’s a little bit of work. We don’t have a Sunrun or a Sunnova or a SunPower here. So it’s more work on us to put together the pieces, but just carve out time in your schedule to look at this. And I think a lot of people will because the amount of money that we’re paying to fuel the car, it just keeps going up and the electricity bills just keep going up. So more people will be compelled to put the time and a little bit of effort to figure this out. And I think that that will go a long way.
Bill Nussey:
Well, Gabby, this has been a pleasure. I’ve learned a ton. I hope everyone leaves this call with a sense that local energy is real, it’s everywhere. And there is another voice, another set of voices out there helping shape it, drive it and make it successful. So thank you so much for your time and all the great work that you and your team are doing.
Gabriela Herculano:
Thank you for the work that you do.
