This Entrepreneur Is Putting Mirrored Satellites In Space To Beam Sunlight To Solar Panels At Night

Forbes

Forget about software as a service. How about sunlight as a service? This SpaceX alum seeks to supply unlimited rays by launching a constellation of mirrored satellites that will reflect solar radiation down to solar panels on Earth, even at night. It sounds unbelievable, but Reflect Orbital has already raised $8.7 million from Sequoia Capital and others to pursue the space-based system. Last year, Nowack proved the basic concept by launching a hot air balloon outfitted with an eight-by-eight-foot reflective Mylar panel to redirect sunlight to an array of standard solar panels in Pahrump, Nevada. Clouds are an obstacle, though the satellites can adjust to find clear patches as long as skies aren’t totally overcast. “Solar is a great way to make power—until the sun goes down,” he says. Along with aiming solar radiation on solar panels 24/7, he says his satellites can potentially shine light on after-dark activities such as night skiing, search-and-rescue operations and construction projects.  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00I think solar is really the future and it's, you know, it's absolutely taking off and, you know,

00:03most new energy is a solar installation, and we're only going to amplify that. If you can

00:08get rid of the nighttime thing, that's really the only thing holding it back.

00:15You're with Ben Nowak, founder of Reflect Orbital. Thanks for joining us.

00:18Yeah, thank you.

00:20So, your company, satellites, solar, energy. I have a 10-year-old son. He would love this. He

00:26loves space. He loves science. Explain to me what you guys do as if I'm a 10-year-old.

00:32Yeah, we are putting mirrors in space to reflect sunlight onto solar farms after dark. So,

00:37there's a shadow behind the earth. Sunlight hits on this side, doesn't hit on this side.

00:41Our satellites are right here, so we can reflect the sunlight right down to those shadow regions.

00:45So, it's like having like a giant mirror and pushing it down into the earth.

00:48Yeah. Yeah, we capture the sunlight in space and bring it down to solar farms,

00:52large towns. You know, if somebody needs some light, we can get it to them.

00:56How big are these mirrors?

00:58They're fairly small. You know, just like about the size of a tennis court or something like that

01:02at first. Eventually, you know, as we scale up, we launch more and more of them.

01:06Then you start making them larger and larger and, you know, you kind of do it like that. But

01:09the way to think of it is we are trying to get as much area into space as possible,

01:13as much thin plastic reflective area into space as possible and control it really well so we can

01:18get sunlight to the people who need it. And we're going to need a lot of it because there's actually

01:21a lot of people who want sunlight, especially when you start talking about gigantic billion

01:25dollar solar farms. So, we are going to put a lot of area into space.

01:28So, when they talk about tech, they always say hardware is hard. You're taking hardware

01:33and putting it in space. I can't even imagine how complex this is. Where did this idea come from?

01:38Yeah, I've been thinking about energy for a really long time. I built like a small fusion

01:41reactor in high school. Like nuclear fusion?

01:44Yeah, the simple one. It didn't make energy, but it did fuse atoms together,

01:48deuterium atoms. So, I made that in high school, made x-ray machines.

01:50Where did you get your material from?

01:52The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved it and I bought it from Airgas.

01:56Once you get the right approval, you can buy it pretty locally.

01:58All right, interesting. Okay, so you're obsessed with energy?

02:01Yeah, obsessed with energy. Built a lot of RC planes, all kinds of engineering projects in

02:05school. I was trying to make antimatter for a little while as well. Realized that was a little

02:08crazy. So, I kind of took the normal path, went to SpaceX, got an internship there my freshman

02:12year of college. How do you make antimatter?

02:15You make fluorine-18 first and that emits positrons, and positrons are antimatter,

02:21so you can use those. And I was going to try to harvest them and get some energy from that.

02:24But you need a linear accelerator in order to do that and large arrays of power. So,

02:29I remember I was going to Brigham and Women's Hospital and talking to radiologists there,

02:33looking at their linear accelerators, thinking how I was going to copy them,

02:35and they all told me to not do that. And I took their advice and I'm kind of glad I did.

02:39You and I have very different hobbies, so that's fine.

02:42What were you doing before you started Reflect Orbital?

02:44I was working at a company called Zipline. They deliver blood and medical products with drones

02:48in like Rwanda, Ghana, places like that. And they're bringing that to the US. So,

02:52I was working there when I had the idea for this. It started off, I realized that solar energy was

02:57leading the world for a long time. Solar is a great way to make power. You get free energy

03:01from the sun. It's a lot better than fossil fuels in that way. Until the sun goes down,

03:05then it stops working. And then you need something else to come in and kind of fix

03:08it because, you know, you have that variability. And you can make the solar panels more efficient,

03:12but really the problem is you're not getting the fundamental resource, sunlight. And even,

03:16you know, if you have a solar panel in Germany, you move that to the Sahara Desert, it'll make

03:20three times more energy. That's just a huge difference because of the fundamental input

03:24resource, the sunlight. And I recognized that and I was like, wow, sunlight is kind of everything

03:29with solar. It's not about the panels. It's not about how efficient they are or where they're

03:31built. It's all about the sunlight itself. And we need to get them more sunlight so that they can

03:36work at night. And I started looking at ways to move sunlight around on the earth, you know,

03:39because I saw this huge potential energy difference. And I realized the biggest potential

03:42energy difference is from space to the ground. It's kind of like a gigantic dam or like the

03:47shadow of the earth is, you know, the biggest dam ever holding back more energy than we could ever

03:51use. And, you know, all we have to do to access it is put some satellites up there and reflect

03:55some power down and mirrors are really efficient for that. So, yeah, the math works out quite well.

04:00Well, this is a wild, you know, literally a moonshot idea. How did you go from having this

04:08idea that sounds like science fiction and then quitting your job and saying,

04:13I'm going to start a company to make this happen? Yeah. I always knew there'd be a day that I'd

04:17start a company. So I've been training for it for a long time. I like, I've gone through like

04:22hundreds of ideas before having this one and I would chase them out, you know, as far as I could

04:26go before they started seeming crazy or something like that. And I developed a really good taste for

04:29it. I also built a lot of projects, you know, worked at SpaceX, but I also did tons of projects

04:34outside of work just to kind of like build up my skills, build up my endurance. What's your training?

04:39Are you a trained engineer? Yeah. Yeah. Mechanical engineering degree. But also I worked at SpaceX

04:43on Dragon 2 as an intern, did two internships there. And then, yeah, I worked at a couple

04:47startups after that. Yeah. So you have this idea to put, literally put giant mirrors in space.

04:53You had the idea. What's the next step from making that idea to actually becoming a company?

04:57Yeah. So we raised some money. Just on the idea alone? Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, I, there was a

05:04lot of, a lot of work that went into like the pitch deck and like making sure it was, you know,

05:07clean. And I did a lot of math. I did like several months to a year and a half of mathematics on my

05:12own. Just basically alone in a very small garage. And yeah, eventually, I mean, it all started

05:18working out and, you know, I could kind of prove that everything, you know, had a reason to exist.

05:22So yeah, just, we've raised eight and a half million dollars so far. And that's enough to

05:26launch a couple of satellites to space. We're launching our first one in June of next year.

05:29Wow. Yeah. And it's going to be a fairly small one, like scaled down. It'll be a 10 by 10

05:33satellite, you know, a bit brighter than the moon. It'll last about as long as a solar eclipse.

05:36And we were, you know, wondering if, you know, we were originally planning on it just being an

05:40engineering display. So we could just use it to do calculations. We were going to do it with like,

05:44you know, dozens of laboratories around the world. And a couple of our potential solar farm

05:47customers, we're going to take measurements. And then you're like, ah, what if, what if we could

05:50serve a different market? Like we should see if people want to just use this for, you know,

05:54whatever they want, you know, sunlight as a service, who else wants it? We made a quick video,

05:57got 55 million views in just a couple of weeks. And we have 182,000 applications for our sunlight.

06:03Wow. Yeah. As of just a couple of weeks ago. You're going and raising, you're going to go

06:06in and raise $8 million for just a pitch deck in hand and idea. What was like, what were you

06:10pitching? What was, what, how did you sell these VCs on this? I mean, it was a pitch deck. It was

06:15a bunch of math. It was like 50, 60 little prototypes. We also, that was across two

06:21rounds. So we also did a hot air balloon test with an eight foot by eight. Yeah. I'm going to

06:25hear about this. Your, your proof of concept here. Yeah. So we put an eight foot by eight foot

06:29Mylar mirror on the bottom of a hot air balloon and went out to the desert. Like a hot air balloon

06:33that like tourists take? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It was, yeah. Huge mirror, um, like two big pieces of

06:39plywood, like, like a ping pong ball table of a mirror. And then we had it on an actuated robot

06:44arm and we could reflect that down onto a mobile solar farm. Um, and we actually reflected sunlight

06:49down and measured the power that we delivered to these solar panels. Um, and yeah, it was basically

06:54like 2,600 X, uh, smaller scale than, than the satellites will be. Um, so you can scale everything

06:59up by that amount and you know, it worked quite well. I mean, mirrors work. We, we didn't really

07:03need to prove that, but getting the Mylar surface to be actuated well and actually perform the

07:07measurement. How does your machine is satellites? How do they do the, I can imagine the complex

07:13calculations, the micro adjustments to not to a you're hitting the sunlight and B you're, you know,

07:20take like a magnifying glass and hitting a spot on the rotating earth. Like how does that all work?

07:25Yeah. So the satellites themselves move in a similar way to a dirt biker. Then, you know,

07:30they'll rev the engine a little bit. So the back wheel speeds up and that pitches them up, or

07:33they'll hit the brakes and that'll slow down the back wheel and that'll pitch the motorcycle forward.

07:36We kind of do the same thing. Um, we just have wheels that spin up and we can rotate our satellites

07:40like this. The satellites itself is just a flat surface. Um, so there's no focusing that the

07:45satellite is doing. It's just reflecting the light from the sun down onto the ground. It's about a

07:49five kilometer diameter spot on the ground. Um, and then if you want that spot to be brighter,

07:54you just have like two satellites work together to provide the same brightness or, you know,

07:5810, a hundred, a thousand, however bright you want that spot to be. We can dim it and tailor

08:02it to whatever you want. And we can also move that around by just moving all the satellites.

08:05How high, like how strong is the sunlight?

08:08It depends on how many satellites you have working together. Um, so one satellite could be,

08:12you know, one small satellite, like the first demo one will be a little bit brighter than a full moon,

08:16um, which is pretty dim compared to sunlight. Um, but then, you know, when, once you start

08:20adding a couple hundred together, you can, you know, get to a fifth as bright as the sun,

08:23um, or even brighter than that. So you'd have a hundred satellites all focused in a one focal

08:28point. I mean, it's, it'll never be exact, like it's going to be many, um, like it'll be dozens,

08:34hundreds, thousands, um, that kind of thing. But it's also when you're talking numbers,

08:38it's really about the area that you have in space. Um, so if you make the satellites bigger,

08:42it's less satellites. You can make the satellite smaller. It's more satellites.

08:44Um, it just kind of depends on, you know, what rocket we're launching on, um, what the avionics

08:48cost and, you know, a couple of little trades like that. Is this sunlight, this solar radiation,

08:52is it safe? Are you going to like fry people? Uh, you can't fry people. Uh, well, I mean,

08:57you can, if you launch it like enough satellites, but we're not going to launch that many satellites.

09:01Um, yeah. And how, like, if this is happening, is it going to, if I'm on the ground,

09:07is it going to light my, like, I've seen your, like for solar farms, but I think you also said

09:12in your, you know, kind of thinking blue sky, it's like, Oh, like film production or like,

09:16there's a, there's a Monday night football game. And instead of having all the lights,

09:19we can direct the sunlight. Like how far out are we from that? And also if I'm living in that area,

09:24is it like, am I going to get like sun pollution? Like, am I going to get light pollution? Is it

09:28seem like it's midday because your satellites like near my house, like how does that work?

09:32Yeah. So by the end of next year, we'll be able to simulate that for the four minutes or so. Um,

09:36the year after it'll be like a half hour or something like that. Um, and it will be mostly

09:41lit up on the ground. You're not going to see like a beam coming down from space or anything

09:44like that. It's just going to be like a nice little warm light, like about like what street

09:48lights provide. Um, but it's going to be a lot higher up than street lights. So, you know, I,

09:52my house has a street light outside the window and it always glares in my window and like,

09:55it's kind of annoying. Our satellite is going to be directly overhead. So it's going to be,

09:58you know, actually quite nice. I'm like just lighting up the whole area and like very smooth,

10:02um, general light and it's not going to be spraying too much in the air. It's mostly

10:05just going on the ground. This is actually how you do, um, like dark sky safe, uh, lights,

10:11or like if you're doing stadium lighting for a soccer field, you'll have like shades on it.

10:14So it just points down. We're doing a similar thing. Um, so it's actually, you know, fairly

10:18good on light pollution. And then the light itself is just full spectrum sunlight. So it's, you know,

10:22one of the healthier forms of, of light that you can have. It's not like an led where you have a

10:26ton of, um, like blue light. And then, you know, that, and that, um, makes your melatonin receptors,

10:31like it basically blocks, um, like melatonin production. Um, so our lights don't have as

10:37much of that as, as leds for the same comparative brightness. Yeah. Not like the blue light we have

10:41all around us. Yeah. Yeah. This is hard to sleep with. How do you make money or how are you going

10:45to make money? We just offer the service. Um, so we, we kind of position ourselves as a natural

10:50resources company. So we're selling sunlight as a natural resource to people. And you know, we

10:55have figured out how to produce that. We've also figured out how to bring that to people

10:58in a way that's super fast and easy. And realistically, there's no reason you can't

11:01just get it from your phone. Like you could just text us your latitude and longitude,

11:04and we can send you some sunlight. Um, it's only going to be like a couple hundred dollars an hour.

11:08Um, and you know, that's about it. And we just need to know your coordinates and, uh, you know,

11:12know that their satellites find overhead. So the first couple will be a little, a little weird.

11:15You'll have to be, you know, doing something at the right time. So you have to kind of plan with us.

11:19Um, but the year after that, like it'll be basically like, you know, anytime within this,

11:23this window of time, you can use the service. And then as it gets more and more, it'll be like,

11:25yeah, every single night, you know, just use it if you want to. Um, and there'll be, you know,

11:29bigger commercial customers, like entire cities will be able to sign up for it as well and be

11:32like, yeah, we're booking like the next 10 years. Um, and you know, we can work with them to figure

11:35out if that makes sense. And then, you know, just get them that sunlight every single day for 10

11:38years. Um, how much are, is it going to cost to launch one of these satellites? So the first

11:44satellite we're launching, it's going to be $430,000 to launch. Uh, it's just like a little,

11:47little keeps that guy. Um, but then after that, like you can package it under the rockets in a

11:51lot better way. So you can get a lot more area into space for, for a lot cheaper. Um, it's kind

11:55of starting off in like the worst case, most expensive scenario just to make sure the satellites

11:58work. Um, but then, yeah, I mean the, the goal is really just get as much mirror area into space as

12:02possible. And when, when you're filling a rocket with these things, you can design the satellites

12:06to fit in the rocket a bit better and you can get a lot of, of, uh, area into space.

12:09So your goal is to like put, you know, spend probably hundreds of millions of dollars to put

12:14these satellites in space and then earn the money back through kind of sunlight as a service. You

12:18said like subscription model, people pay you for the hour, that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And it's

12:23a bit less than, than hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, yeah, you can, you can start

12:26bootstrapping it and like into the pens. How many satellites do you want to have up there

12:31in the end? Yeah. Um, I mean, we don't like talking numbers of satellites. We like talking

12:36about area. Um, I mean, what we want to do is want to make a difference in the U S is energy

12:41mix or the global energy mix. Like you can't really get above like 30% wind and solar without

12:46the grid becoming so unreliable that, you know, it's just not worth putting any more in. Um, and

12:51we want that to change. We want solar to be more of human's energy because the sun is just so good.

12:56It's just like this infinite energy source. Um, so you can bring that 30% up to like 50 or 60%.

13:00Um, that's really what we're shooting for. And that's like, that's the future I want to live in

13:03where everything's powered by solar energy and it just kind of feels free to use and you're not

13:07burning fossil fuels anymore. Um, and we can do that with the sun. Um, you know, the sun makes

13:11five thousand, the sun in one five thousandth of a second makes more energy than humans have ever

13:15produced. Um, so it's quite a good fuel source. Yeah. It's yeah. How many employees do you have?

13:21Oh, we're just seven full time. Okay. Yeah. Who makes your satellites? We do. Yeah. How you almost

13:27all in house. I mean, we have a couple of vendors for different parts where we like assemble

13:30everything. Um, we're putting it together and then, you know, we will phase out basically all

13:34of our suppliers. It's all, it's all in hand. Yeah. And what are the, what are these satellites

13:39look like? I know there's a giant mirror. Yeah. It's like a little, a little guy like this. Um,

13:42and then the mirror deploys out of that. Okay. Um, it's very similar to a solar sail vehicle.

13:46If you look that up, it's like a, like tape measure booms, like four tape measure booms.

13:50And they pull out this like thin reflective surface, like a potato chip bag. It's just shiny

13:54and then thin plastic. And then you just pull it really tight and it gets super shiny and flat.

13:58We have a couple of tricks to how we do that. Well, um, cause you know, cause you want that

14:01spot to be really, really sharp. So it just goes where you want it. Um, but yeah, that's,

14:04there's not that much to them. They're actually quite simple on the scale of satellites. They're

14:08much lighter than a Starlink satellite, which is, you know, SpaceX has telecom satellites.

14:11Um, and they don't have the phaser antennas. They don't have to serve like dozens of customers. It's

14:15just one satellite and we just have to move it around. You were working at Zipline right before

14:20launching this company. Yep. What were you doing specifically for Zipline? I was working as a

14:24mechanical engineer, uh, on the launcher system, uh, which is how they launch planes in the air

14:28for Rwandan Ghana. And then I met my co-founder there, Tristan. I've seen those videos are

14:32amazing. Yeah. When they, they shoot them off, they're dropping blood into it. It's insane.

14:37Yeah. What, um, what was the spark that made you say like, I'm going to leave Zipline and start

14:43this company? What was like that moment? The, the seed happened when I was watching a YouTube video

14:48on the problem of solar power in Africa. And you was looking at spending $40 billion to build a

14:52bunch of solar farms in the Sahara desert and then ship the power to Europe. And I was just

14:57blown away by the value of that. Like it's worth $40 billion to bring some, like bring energy from

15:03this place of high sunlight to low sunlight. And it immediately just clicked in my brain. Like,

15:06Oh, this is like one of the biggest gradients I've ever seen. Cause throughout my life, I've like,

15:10I've done calculations on like, what if you take all the mountains and like, you know, get energy

15:13from lowering them into the oceans? Like, okay, that would power humanity for like 200 years. Or

15:17like, what if you slowed the moon down, like, and slowed the earth down and like, you know,

15:21made a moon turbine, like how much energy would that produce? How long could that power humanity?

15:24I've done like all these calculations.

15:25Again, you and I have very different hobbies.

15:27Yeah. And I missed this one. I didn't see this one. I didn't see the sunlight gradient.

15:31And once I saw it, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. And I like just stayed up till 4am for

15:36like weeks doing math. And I was originally trying to move something around in vacuum tubes. I was

15:40like, I'll move the sunlight from this hard desert to Europe and vacuum tubes. And it was like, you

15:43know, $30 billion, which is still insane. And I was, yeah, but it was just the idea of moving

15:47the sunlight around. And then I realized like, wait, moving something from space to the ground

15:51is so much more leveraged. There's so much more energy availability. You don't have the nighttime

15:55thing and you can serve places that do have the nighttime problem. So just the difference in

15:58value is insane. And then, yeah, I mean, I had the experience from SpaceX. So I like have the

16:03confidence to just, you know, I was like, yeah, I can build a satellite. It's not gonna be that

16:06hard. And yeah, just figured everything out, started doing all the math and, you know,

16:09it works quite well. You know, with all the solar farms that we already have on earth,

16:13you know, it's already like economical. You can beat the price of batteries fairly easily.

16:17And then, yeah, it's just, you know, and then all these other markets started developing. So like,

16:21you know, there's obviously serving towns, you know, all around the world, like Scandinavia

16:25in the winter, you know, that kind of thing, you know, all the wedding proposals,

16:27all that kind of like more niche stuff. But then there's like construction projects.

16:30What do you mean wedding proposals?

16:32Yeah, we got a lot of applications for people who want to propose to their spouse.

16:35Under the sunlight?

16:37Yeah, because you could flick the satellite on. It's like, you know,

16:39I want to propose to the light of my life, but the big light from space.

16:42What about clouds?

16:44Yeah, clouds, clouds are in the way sometimes. So you got to pick the right, the right day

16:48when it's not super cloudy out. Like for us, it's not so bad because we can move the spotlight

16:52around within a couple hundred kilometer area. But if it's not the right day and your time,

16:57we can just schedule for like, you know, in the next one or two days, something like that.

17:00Does this affect the ecosystem? Like are you heating up the earth more?

17:05It affects an incredibly small piece of the ecosystem. And it's also not that much energy.

17:10So it's basically just hitting the solar farms themselves. I mean, you do the calculation now of

17:14the energy added by our system versus the energy added by fossil fuels.

17:17They're like, we add a little bit more just direct heat. But the really important thing

17:20with fossil fuels is how much CO2 you're releasing in the atmosphere. We release almost no CO2.

17:25It's just the rocket launch and that, you know, that breaks even quite quickly.

17:28But then like the long-term effects of having that CO2 in the atmosphere forever of the,

17:31you know, just burning fossil fuels is so much worse than what we're doing.

17:35It's way more total heat added.

17:36Gotcha. You're obviously an expert in energy, expert in green tech. We hear so much,

17:41there's so much hype around green tech right now. So much greenwashing, all these different ideas.

17:47So much like people on the spectrum saying like kill all fossil fuel now versus like

17:54go off fossil fuel. Like where do you see, what kind of technology and systems in place

18:00that are really going to make a difference in this climate change battle?

18:03Yeah. I think we need to use a lot more energy and it can't come from fossil fuels. So

18:09energy use per capita in the US has basically stagnated since the 1970s. We're not using more

18:14energy, even though we live in super developed places and, you know, we want to use more energy.

18:20We want to drive more places. We want to do more things. We want to refine more metals,

18:23but we don't really do that because it's not quite worth it.

18:25So we're actually getting more efficient.

18:28Maybe more efficient, maybe using less, maybe building less. I remember, you know, when I was

18:33really young, I used a whole megawatt hour of electricity. My dad got pretty mad about that.

18:37And it's like, sometimes you just can't use less. Like I thought very hard about like,

18:40how can I use less energy? And it's like, no, if I want to build the stuff that I want to build,

18:43I need to use like much more energy. And there's basically nothing that I can do about it. And it's

18:46like, you know, there's a certain amount of iron that we want to refine. There's a certain amount

18:49of stuff that we want to ship around the world. You know, it really affects the GDP when you can't

18:53use more energy. And we're kind of in that situation with fossil fuels where it's not so

18:56much that we can't use them. It's that it's frowned upon. It's that people don't use them

19:01enough. It's that it's not like, oh yeah, let's just do it. Who cares? There's like social impacts,

19:07there's consequences. And that's kind of how it starts. Right. So it's not just like this free

19:10thing that you can use. Whereas sunlight is just this kind of free thing that you can use. I lived

19:14in a van for a while. I had solar panels on my roof. And like, if I wasn't using the 400 watts

19:17that it was generating, it was just kind of a waste. Like I might as well just like make a

19:21spark and just like look at it for all day. Like it's not a waste because it's using all that

19:25energy anyway. Like van life, like a full van. Oh yeah. Why'd you do that? I like to surf. Okay.

19:32Yeah. And I don't like paying rent. Yeah. Are you still in the van? I'm not in the van. My sister's

19:36in the van now. All right. You recycled with her. Yeah. She's living her surf dreams.

19:40What do you kind of think with AI right now? We have to talk about AI, but obviously what it can

19:45do for, you know, controlling the energy in the grid. Then also the fact that these AI farms

19:52creates the, they're so thirsty for energy. Yes. Where do you, what do you see solar playing in

19:57that? Yeah. We talked to a lot of grid operators, a lot of solar farms that are, that are serving AI.

20:01It's pretty interesting because energy in the past has been like, you know, a steel mill or,

20:07you know, something random that has some variability and the grid has to keep up with

20:10that random variability. And with data centers, it's just this stable power. We need 24 hours

20:16of maximum power and it can never drop from that. And that's what data centers demand. Like, you

20:21know, that's what you need. And with solar, it's, you know, it doesn't work for that because it's

20:25like full power and then the sun goes down and it doesn't work at all. And it's like, okay,

20:28how do we fill in this? It's like, wind, wind is like, what if it's not windy? You get all these

20:31issues, batteries, that's a big problem. So you end up burning, you know, natural gas or,

20:35you know, installing a nuclear power plant, which by the way, it's, we're not currently

20:39building new nuclear power plants in the US. So that's also a big issue and it takes like

20:4217 to 22 years. So we should fix those. Like I'm very pro-nuclear, but it's not going to be

20:47immediate. You're building them in high school, so. Well, a different kind. But yeah, it's yeah,

20:54it's a huge problem. Like they need this incredibly stable baseload power. And ideally

20:59it would come from solar, but that doesn't work right now. So yeah, we come in and we can make

21:02solar more of a baseload power. We'll start off not doing, you know, fully through the night.

21:06We'll start off with just like, you know, the first couple hours after the sun goes down and

21:10before the sun rises. And that makes a huge difference. You need way less batteries. But

21:14yeah, that's where we're starting. And, you know, we're going to continue to build up the constellation.

21:17Outside of what you're building, what are kind of your big predictions for the future of energy

21:22outside of the satellites? Yeah. I mean, energy is a hard one. It's, it's one of those ones that

21:28has an incredibly, it's a very slow growth rate on new technology developments. Like it's obviously

21:34huge commercialized, like the, you know, you talk to anybody in the energy sector and they've raised

21:38like $50 billion for XYZ projects. Like, so the growth, the building is incredibly high. I think

21:44most things are going to be powered by solar in the future. I think everybody's going to have

21:46solar on their roofs. In Australia, it's actually cheaper to have solar panels on your roof,

21:51generating power than it is to have just maintenance on the power lines to your house

21:55in a lot of cases. So I think things are going to become much more local. I think things are

21:59going to become much more solar. I think solar is also a really good thing to build, you know,

22:04in developing nations like Africa, South America, places like that. It's really cheap and easy to

22:09build a solar farm. You know, it's like a bit of initial investment, but once you build that thing,

22:12it makes its power back really quickly. So it's the kind of thing that you can scale up super

22:15fast. Like you can just like stick them on the ground. You don't even have to mount it to the

22:18ground. You can just like place a panel on the ground and it starts making power. So I think

22:21solar is really the future and it's, you know, it's absolutely taking off. And, you know, most

22:25new energy is a solar installation. And we're only going to amplify that. So, you know, I like

22:30throwing that in. But I think solar is just like, you know, going to be the future and everything's

22:33going to be powered by solar quite soon. It's just like, yeah, if you can get rid of the nighttime

22:38thing, that's really the only thing holding it back. Ben, thank you so much. Thank you.

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