Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Terrawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

This week, we're bringing you a special episode of The Green Blueprint, a show about the stories behind first-of-a-kind climate projects. In this episode: Terawatt Power's first commercial electric truck charging depot, which opened in April near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It was a significant milestone for the industry. So how’d Terawatt pull it off? Host Lara Pierpoint talks to Terawatt’s founder Neha Palmer about the financing, offtakes, and market demand for electrified trucks. It’s the kind of deep-dive conversation we love to have here on Catalyst, so we think you’ll enjoy it. In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terrawatt Infrastructure with a bold mission: create the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution. Within its first year, Terrawatt secured a billion-dollar investment. But as the company developed plans for a nationwide charging network, it confronted the daunting challenge of building infrastructure for an electric truck market that barely existed.  High-profile bankruptcies like Nikola Motors cast long shadows over the sector's viability, raising questions about whether heavy-duty transport can truly be electrified. In this episode, Lara talks with Neha about how Terrawatt aims to transform freight transport despite market skepticism. Neha explains Terawatt’s strategic approach to site selection, innovative charging designs for fully-loaded trucks, and the vision for a revolutionary California-to-Texas network. Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, and increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data plus tools that they’ve never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Mark your calendar for June 12, 2025. Latitude Media is holding its fourth Transition AI Conference in Boston. This year's theme, energy infrastructure in the era of AI-driven load growth. We're going to bring together investors, developers, researchers, and tech companies to talk about the creative ways to meet data center demand, and companies include Fervo Energy, Form Energy, Scale Microgrids, Spark Fund, KKR, Generate Capital, Orenia, FlexGen, National Grid Partners, and more. Plus, we're going to have a live open circuit episode featuring Caroline Golland from Google

and a live green blueprint episode featuring Rick Needham from Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Get your ticket at latitudemedia.com slash events. Podcast listeners get 10% off their ticket. Use the code latitude pods 10 at checkout. Latitudemedia.com slash events. We will see you at Transition AI. Hey, everyone, Daniel Waldorf here. I'm the producer of Catalyst.

So if you wanted to pick one of the hardest problems to solving climate tech, near top of that list would be electrifying heavy transport. It's a problem we've talked about on this show. Fuel and molecules just have significant advantages over electrons and batteries, at least in the arena of hauling heavy things over long distances. A case in point, Nicola Motors' high-profile bankruptcy back in February. The collapse of the company raised a serious question. Is electrifying heavy transport just too hard of a problem to solve right now? Maybe, but maybe not. Just last month, another company called Terawatt Power opened its first commercial heavy duty charging depot near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

It was a significant milestone for the industry. So how did Terawatt pull it off? And what comes next for electrified heavy transport? This week, we're bringing you an episode of the Green Blueprint. It's a show about the stories behind first-of-a-kind climate projects. And it's hosted by a friend of this show, Lara Pierpoint, who has guests hosted before. Laura is the managing director of Trellis Climate, and she talks with TerraWatt's founder, Neha Palmer,

about the financing, the off-takes, and the market demand for electrified trucks. The kinds of questions that are, you know, the DNA of Catalyst, so we think you'll like it. We will be back next week with a new episode, but for now, here's Laura and Neha. Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. The trucking industry has an emissions problem.

Heavy-duty trucks make up less than 5% of vehicles on the road, but they generate nearly 25% of transportation emissions. Electrifying these massive vehicles seems like a no-brainer. But some skeptics say it's just not possible. Nea Palmer, however, is not one of those skeptics. This is a transition that is happening. When Neha Palmer co-founded TerraWatt infrastructure in 2021, she wasn't just building a charging company. She was creating an entirely new category of infrastructure. While passenger EVs had a decade-long head start, heavy-duty electric trucks were still in their infancy. But she saw their path to electrification as inevitable. The analogy I love to use is transition

that happens once every century. So you had the railroads, and that required a significant amount of investment very quickly. Then you had the National Highway Network. And now you have an overlay on both of those, really, which is the electrification of those modes of transport. The complexity of the challenge is staggering. A single site for heavy-duty truck charging requires finding the perfect location, securing megawatts of power, navigating the permitting processes that have never seen this type of infrastructure before, and then convincing fleet operators to take a chance on a technology that's still evolving. And the road has been bumpy. Well, this is a trouble sign for the electric vehicle industry as Nicola Motors,

headquartered in Coolidge, filed for bankruptcy this morning. Earlier this year, Nicola Motors, once a promising pioneer in zero-emission trucks, filed for bankruptcy after a spectacular rise and fall. Critics pointed to it as proof that electrifying heavy-duty transport was simply too difficult. You know, I certainly hope it's a blip. You know, we need as much investment into the technology of the vehicle itself, as we do in the charging, to make all of this a reality. But in April, Terawatt proved the doubters wrong when it opened its first commercial heavy-duty charging depot near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The ports are technically separate, but operate as one big complex. They're the biggest container ports in the U.S.

And it wasn't just a charging station. It was the first node in what will become a network of sites across all of Southern California. In California, we have built what I think is the best work of sites, and three of them will be live this year with the Port of L.A. Long Beach site being the first one. We'll have a third one that's further north near the intermodals, and so with those three sites, we kind of have amazing coverage of the entire L.A. Basin. I'm Lara Pierpoint, and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We've already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial, and they need to get financed and built at scale.

We don't have decades to get them commercialized. We have years. This week, we're talking about the monumental challenge of electrifying heavy-duty trucking with Neha Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Terawatt Infrastructure. We know that this is a trillion-dollar investment over years, and so the scale that we're talking about and the impact that we need to make, even with a few sites, is going to require lots of capital. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform, When it counts, learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy,

by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they

work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-F-T-T-P-R.com. com. Terawatts approach is ambitious. Shortly after launching in 2021, the company secured a huge chunk of capital from investors.

Very amazingly, you secured a billion dollars in funding led by Vision Ridge just after you launch, really. This was about a year after you launched as a company. So can you tell us a bit about what convinced investors at that stage to make such a big commitment to your vision? When you think about our, you know, sites that we're starting to build out, the billion $1 billion is not going to last that long to build that many assets. And so it was really the vision from the beginning that this is not just a small-scale effort.

It's going to be something that requires significant capital. And there'll have to be multiple billion-dollar raises, frankly, to get this even off the ground. Terawatt doesn't just install chargers. It acquires the real estate, works with utilities to secure power, installs chargers and associated infrastructure, and ultimately handles ongoing operations and maintenance. Really, our business model is investing into these sites and taking that CAPEX burden away from our customers, allowing them to engage in a more OPEX basis, and also taking away the pain of working with utilities when they're used to buying fuel, of the time that takes to put the construction together, all of the investment, and really making that a seamless process for them as they changed to electric vehicles over time. Terawat began piloting its business model in 2022. Then in October 24, it opened its first full-scale commercial site near LAX.

This site is for passenger vehicles, and in this case, that mostly includes rideshare companies. It's not suited for big semi-trucks. On the rideshare side in dense urban markets where there's a lot of traffic we're hearing from operators, it's cost-ecrative for them to run EVs instead of traditional vehicles because of the fuel savings. The market momentum is slower for medium and heavy-duty charging. In part, that's because of what we mentioned. at the top, the electric semi-truck industry has struggled to take off. And it's tough to make the case for building chargers when there aren't trucks to charge.

But NAA is optimistic that that market is going to tip with more big trucks being electrified. We've had almost close to 20 years of learning on the passenger side. On the electric truck side, it's certainly earlier days. And so you see a lot of the same things you saw on the passenger side. You're seeing improvements in battery pack costs and performance of the vehicle. themselves, and as that starts to mature, you're starting to see more and more demand. The heavy-duty charging facility near the ports of L.A. and Long Beach, the Terawatt opened this year, is called Ranchero Dominguez. It features pull-through stalls that can accommodate full

tractor trailers, which is a unique feature, and up to 125 trucks can charge there in one day. It marks the beginning of what Terawatt envisions as a network of charging stations all along the I-10 corridor, all the way from California to Texas. We call it kind of a corridor, but it would start the port of Long Beach and go all the way to El Paso, Texas. And so allowing somebody in an EV truck to travel that confidently, knowing that they had charging along the way, that would accommodate the range of the vehicle. I talked with Neha about TerraWatt's audacious plans for heavy-duty electric vehicles and her outlook for the industry. I started by asking her about the passenger vehicle side of the business because the LAX project was TerraWatt's first full-billed charging site. and a major proof point for the company.

So you started off near LAX. Can you talk a little bit, first of all, about why you chose that particular site? Yeah, so, you know, ride share autonomous vehicles has always been a focus for us from the beginning, and a huge number of rideshare rides are initiated from airports. It's also a location that's near a major stadium and a lot of other good venues that would require rideshare

to be part of that ecosystem. So the location just made sense. from density of demand. It also was, you know, a site that was, you know, for sale. Oftentimes, we might be excited about a specific geography or, you know, geo-fenced area, but there may not be any flat lots or open lots or undeveloped lots to go and work with. So this was something that allowed us to engage in this area. And it was the right size for the application we were trying to put in,

which was what ended up being about 30 chargers focused on passenger review. vehicles with enough space for, you know, driver's lounge and, you know, all the space for all of the electrical equipment, chargers, everything else that we needed. So the last piece that is always so important. And I'm making it sound like an afterthought, but it really is the most critical thing. And the thing that we almost always think about first once we identify a location is it had power. So it had five megawatts of power that was available from day one. We just had to start construction on our site. And the utility had to do. a little bit of construction on their end. But we knew that we could get that power from day one

to allow us to serve that many chargers all at one time. So really it had that confluence. I call it the Venn diagram of the things we need, which are our customer demand, available real estate. It didn't have the right zoning at the time, but we worked on that. And then the last piece and the most important piece being the power available at the site as well. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about the development for the site. Can you walk us through some of the things that you had to do around permitting, site preparation, all that sort of stuff. What did it look like to get ready to build it? Yeah, and so this is something that's always fun when you're starting a new industry. I came from data centers, and we had this whole pattern of recognition for data

centers, too, when it was early days we'd go into new jurisdictions, and people would say, I don't even know what that is. Certainly that everyone knows what that is in the world now, but for our EV charging, there's oftentimes not any code available in the planning code for how do you permit, how do you entitle a EV charging hub? So we worked very closely with the city of Englewood, who is a fantastic host for us here in this site, to understand what their existing code was and how we might fit into it.

It had to go through a whole process with the city council, the planning council, to have them understand what the project was, what kind of benefits it would bring to the community. And then they had to actually put new language in their code to allow the entitlement of this. And so that's something that we find in many new, you know, HJs

or authorities having jurisdiction that we enter. They may have never seen this before. So we have the benefit of having done it now. We could hold up this template, but this was the first time. And so we did have to work through that process with the city. Again, they were, you know, super, super collaborative.

And so we were able to do that, but that did take time. So it wasn't like, you know, day one, we have closed on this real estate site. We know exactly where to go to file for the, permit, et cetera. There was a little bit of legwork to do ahead of that in the entitlements to get the right zoning for the site. And then there was a whole permitting process and kind of a little

bit, same thing again. There have not been many of these installations at this scale built anywhere. And so it takes some time to work with, you know, the city engineers to get them to understand, like, here's what this looks like, here's our electrical design. This is what a typical site looks like. And so we ran that process with the city again, again, very collaborative. But, you know, anytime you have to do a little bit of educating and collaborating, it does take more time. Sure. Okay. Well, and then let's talk for a second about your hardware supply. So there are a lot of different charging companies that supply hardware for passenger vehicle charging. So how did you think about that? How did you select your hardware provider? And is it kind of a single provider that you

always work with? Or how do you think about your supply chain here? Yeah. So it's interesting you say supply chain because there's so many components, not just the chargers. For this site, for the chargers, you know, we wanted to make sure that we had a partner that was going to be working with us to maintain that high up time. And so we worked with that partner really closely to make sure that, you know, any kind of visibility software we were building was going to be very compatible with their chargers. That's a level of integration that's generally not there. Generally, there's probably, you know, call it four to eight would be a large. large installation of chargers in one location.

This is a much larger deployment that I think most charger companies are used to doing in one location. So the concept was a little bit different for them as well, I believe. And so working really closely with them to make sure that our software worked with their hardware, that we were able to do what we needed to do to have the remote network operating center, have the visibility they needed. So there was a lot of work up front to make sure. And again, we're also deploying our software.

for the first time. So a lot of work to make sure that there was a level of collaboration. So when we look for hardware providers, obviously the hardware has to work. It has to be high quality. But the real table stakes for us is collaboration. And so ensuring that they were willing and able to do that level of collaboration. Another piece is spare parts. It seems really simple that if you create chargers, you would have a full spare parts program, but that's not the case for all charger providers. So making sure that they had a robust program here in the U.S. Oftentimes you have chargers coming from other geographies, and so they might be deeper there, but not here in the U.S.,

so deep spare parts program. And then also just techs that are available and understand that technology. Again, it's a very global supply base, and so you might have depth in Europe, but you may not have many techs that know that equipment here in the U.S. So really thinking through that whole aspect of how do we make sure that we're going to have the highest uptime we possibly can. And so kind of one last question about this, well, a couple of questions actually about this commercial site.

So one of the things that comes up pretty frequently on the show is the question around, do I use an engineering procurement and construction firm to build something or do I do it myself? And some really interesting impacts flow from those decisions, particularly when you're building things that are effectively first of a kind. So can you talk a little bit about how you were thinking about managing the construction on this first site and what you ultimately decided? So for this first site, we did work with an EPC firm. And I think we learned a lot about working with an EPC firm. One thing that we learned is, you know, the civil aspect of our sites is very heavy. If you look at a site, actually, I think sometimes people look and they're like, oh, that's interesting. It's like, you know, 30 chargers are nice and pretty standing on the ground.

But you don't see what's happening below ground, which is massive duck banks. We oftentimes put in extra capacity. So when the charger power might go up, we would have the capability to actually make that change over pretty quickly. So future proofing, underground. And so there's a lot of stuff happening below the grade. And I think that's one thing that we learned and that EPC, if you think about it, the civil trade, and I'm actually a civil engineer, is very local. So having that local expertise is very, very critical for the types of things we build because, you know, the type of soil that you're dealing with, the codes that are, you know, related to how much rainfall, you know,

ends up in an area, et cetera, is oftentimes really contingent upon local expertise to understand those characteristics and how the local planning commissions and engineering leaders in those planning commissions will think about our construction. So something that we had to kind of learn the first time. And so how we contract in the future would be really taking that lesson in hand. With the first commercial site belt, Neha and the Terawatt team turned their attention to their flagship heavy-duty project. Rancho Dominguez at the Port of Long Beach, which had actually already been underway for years. More about that after the break.

Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near-real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver?

Easy enrollment creates momentum. Proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energy hub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it, Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone.

It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks, instead of engaging journalists or producing content?

Are you wondering why your competitors are getting press and you aren't? Fish Tank PR is an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. FACTS PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early stage and established companies. Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible, compelling stories that resonate with the media, Fishtankpr.com. Check out fishtankpr.com. That's f-i-s-sh-h-fishankpr.com. Okay, this is very cool. And it sounds like tons and tons of lessons learned from this first site that then launched you into building your second site.

at the Port of Long Beach. So can you talk a little bit about how that project got started, at which point you started thinking about doing this particular project, working into the heavy-duty vehicle space? How did that all begin? So it's interesting. Our vision for the company, really from the very beginning, was focused on being able to electrify the heavy freight industry.

And so the gleam in our eye was this segment. You know, we started engaging in the search for sites Right when we started this business, you know, in early 21, heavy-duty fleets tend to focus on locations that are near ports, in warehouse hubs, near intramodals. And so the port of L.A. Long Beach was a location where there already is an intense push for electrification. There's a green lane at the port. So if you are in a zero-emission vehicle, you actually can get into the port faster with less wait time. Time is money for these guys. And so there's some significant upside for them to be able to do that. In Southern California, you also have something. called the wear rules where non-zero emission vehicles going in and out of warehouse hubs

can start to incur fines for those warehouses. And so there is a push in the area for electrification with the port kind of being ground zero, the nexus of a lot of those efforts. And so finding a site near the port was kind of our first order of business when we started the, you know, started the company. And so it took us a while to find an ideal site. And when we did, it was pretty expensive. You know, it was probably going to be the biggest single real estate investment we had in the portfolio at the time. As a result, you know, we had to look really carefully at this investment and make sure it was the right location. Again, close to the port, but not in the port or on top of the port. So really understanding

the characteristics of the flow of traffic from the port to different locations that those vehicles go to, understanding the density of the flow of traffic because, you know, the port of L.A. Long Beach is the biggest container port here in the U.S. Freight goes in every single direction from that port. Are we on the right trajectory coming out of that site? So we did a lot of interesting things. Everything from, you know, looking at anything that was available publicly from the Department of Transportation on freight flows, all the way to having someone just stand on the corner one day and count how many trucks went by in a specific two-hour period. So we really put a lot of thought and energy into deciding on this as a location for

that really important first heavy-due. site. I love that story so much because I feel like so often we tell the stories of guts and glory for startups. And then it's really important to remember that some of what makes startup successful is exactly that as an employee with a lawn chair sitting on the side of the freeway counting trucks at various points to influence how this decision went. And can you say a little bit about how that felt to kind of finally make a decision on this site? Because this was a pretty huge moment for the company to ultimately make this down selection and put, as you put it, like a fair amount of money on the line to make the site acquisition happen. I mean, the location has to be

there. And that's why I talked about the Venn diagram. So we got comfortable with the location. This site also had something really incredible where you don't find this in many locations, which is seven megawatts of power available from day one. So that amount of power allowed us to do a lot of great things with this site. It was, you know, a corner lot. It had the right dimensions. It had a lot of space. So the site characteristics were great as well. You know, we had started to build these other sites, and so we kind of had an idea of what that process is for entitlements. So kind of everything started to tick all the boxes and that got us comfortable with it. But ultimately, we got super excited, actually, not just comfortable, excited about this location based on everything I just

said and we're excited to get this into our portfolio and under construction. So, and then you're starting to design the site. So let's talk a little bit about this. One of the things that you had mentioned earlier was that you offer the opportunity for folks to pull in, not just with these bobtail sort of front end of the trucks, but really a fully loaded truck that actually has a trailer behind it. So were you already sure at that point that you wanted to offer that kind of charging capability? Or were you really thinking about, you know, what would the site layout look like? What were some of the tradeoffs around these different options for charging? So again, there's very few sites that have this scale of power and size. that would allow that many chargers in one location and that many trucks to charge in one location. So we're kind of, you know, I won't say, you know, making it up, but we were doing a lot of kind of product assessment and design to understand what would customers need. And if you look at a lot of the sites that are out there today and even sites that customers have behind their fence, when they have the charging, it's usually just for a bobtail stall. So this was a little bit of a tug-of-war between the finance team and the product team. The product team came from places that had worked with semi-trucks before, and so they really were pushing for those pull-through stalls saying, hey, if you look at the traffic flow patterns, they're going into the port or out of the port with the trailer attached to their tractor. It's going to be a really big lift for them to have to find a place to put the trailer, you know, the trailer, detach it, come in in charge, or, you know, just be in a position where they don't have the trailer for whatever reason.

and there are between loads to come back to the site, charge, and then go back and get their trailer, just a lot of work. And so it wouldn't be really a great customer experience if they had to do that. The tussle with the finance team was, well, if you have more chargers, you can potentially make more revenue from a site, right, and have more utilization. So we landed kind of on a compromise, but we wanted to optimize the site for the pull-through. So we got as many pull-throughs on the site as possible. And then when we had more power and space left, we added in a process.

some bobtail charging that will also allow, you know, smaller box trucks or even light duty vehicles that need a huge amount of power, a high power charge, to charge there. And when we had, you know, the kickoff event, we had a bunch of customers in the site, and they were all just marveling and really kind of gleeful about the fact that we had that many pull-through stalls. That's awesome. I can't wait to ask you a year from now how the utilization goes on both sides of those. I'm sure you all are dying to know that, too.

Very cool. let's talk about those customers for a sec because they're obviously very key to the equation here. So can you say a bit about what your customer interactions were like, particularly for this project? When did you start engaging them to understand what they might want and what sort of contracts they might be willing to sign up for and when? And how did those negotiations go? Yeah, so we started engaging customers the minute we had the site. It is really hard to have a conversation with a customer if they can't even imagine the location. So generally speaking, we don't start conversations until we have the specific

site in mind and even a layout. That said, what's interesting is it takes us, call it 18 months to 24 months to find a site, get it entitled, permitted, constructed, and then an operational. Most vehicles make vehicle purchasing decisions at the most a year in advance, sometimes six months in advance. So they may decide that they want to buy a few EVs and, you know, have those six months later. Charging doesn't come that quick. So for this first one, it was a little bit of lining up those timelines. And so one thing that we did see is we got closer and closer to project completion a lot more engagement from these fleets because they could actually come to the site and see, oh, you've got this thing paved and this is what the flow looks like. And it's really going to

come to fruition. I think there is, in any industry that's new and nascent, a lot of discussion of we could build this or we could build that. But by having actually done it, and it's in sight and operational, we actually saw, even the week before we launched, we were doing site tours with lots of customers, and that turnaround from site tour to contract was starting to happen a lot faster. Because, of course, it's ready to go from day one, but also just being able to see it is everything. Very cool. So can you say a bit more in detail? When was the first customer contract signed? Like, what had you done or completed at the site that got the first person in the door to say yes and actually sign on the dotted line? It honestly was about two.

years ago. So it was a customer that has pretty good experience with electric vehicles. They're one of the first movers in the industry. They have a larger fleet of EVs than most fleets do. I think they have well over 50 right now. And so they had some good experience where, and they were at a point where they were starting to outgrow their on-site charging. And they're also located close to us. So again, it was a good validation of that location selection. But the conversation really was like, hey, we've never done this off-site. We don't know how it's going to work. We'll take a chance with you guys. You know, there was some pre-existing relationships there that maybe help grease these kids, but, you know, they really were taking a chance that we were going to do what we said, build the site,

deliver it, and that it would fit into their operations. And so now that it's live, I'm super excited to see how it fits in. I think it's going to be a lot more utility than they probably thought. This does open up a lot of different use cases like top-off charges. The amount of power we have per charger allows it to charge, you know, a vehicle to charge much faster than most behind the fence chargers. And so having that capability can sometimes allow for a double shift of a vehicle where if it was a slower charge, they could use it for one run, has to come back to the yard, spend, you know, six to 12 hours charging and then can go out again. But if you can, you know, top off, you might be able to get two runs in a day and all of a sudden the utilization of that vehicle is doubled. So, you know, I think those are the types of conversations we were having, the hopes that they had that we had. And now we'll see how this actually plays out.

So my next question is how, as you're building this site at the port, you're obviously, I'm sure, in the process of thinking about your next site and the one after that and the one after that and a whole fleet of sites to come, particularly on the I-10 corridor in California, but maybe elsewhere too. So tell us about what comes next. What is the next site that's going to come online? How are you thinking about your future build out? How many sites are you working on all at once? Yeah, so for this, this definitely is the first of a couple of projects. We have our next site that will come online in the summertime that will be in the Inland Empire, which is after a vehicle goes to the port, it generally goes to the

Inland Empire, which is the giant warehouse district for the port here in California. And so we'll have a second site there in a few weeks. months. And it really is thinking about this as a network, right? These are moving assets. I mentioned that top-off charge that could be really beneficial to higher utilization of these pretty expensive vehicles for now. And so really excited that that will allow a lot more operational flexibility for EV fleets to move freight around the area. And so we call it a lane in the freight industry. So the lane between the port and the inland empire is a very important lane. And having charging on both ends just allows a lot more confidence electrification.

Having the capability to maybe have a contract that allows access to both sides, which we're seeing the demand for now, is also really freeing and exciting for customers. If they had to do that on their own, they would have to figure out a location that they had to find nexus to near the port and one near the inland empire. And oftentimes these are dredge companies where their main operations may be near the port, but they are just delivering to their customers in the inland empire. so don't really have access to sites there. So it's super exciting that this will be the first node in the network.

You mentioned the I-10 project, and that's also super exciting, and this is also the first node in that. What's interesting is, you know, we know that the site's going to corridor will take a little bit of time to build. And already, as I mentioned at the top of our discussion, that technology is starting to change. So those sites are generally about 150 miles apart. We know that the range is generally much, much longer than that. Another thing that's happening is we're starting to see standardization of the charging infrastructure. It seems really simple, but the connector has to be the same from all the charging providers,

and all of the trucks have to use the same connector. And so there's a global body called Sharon that has been working on that protocol for quite a well now. It does seem like that they're finally at a place where that specification is built out enough that we have confidence of what to build along that corridor that can serve any kind of truck. You know, our customers are not generally going to have just one type of vehicle. They will have multiple models in their fleets. And so they want to know that if they have a contract with us or anybody else, or even if they're putting in infrastructure behind their fence,

that they don't have to put in different infrastructure for different vehicles. That sounds crazy to a fleet, right? But we are starting to get that maturity in technology and the industry that's really making that project super exciting and viable. If I wired $100 million into TerraWatt's bank account tomorrow, what would you do with it? You know, I mentioned the location piece, and I think that we're already doing this, and so maybe it's not, you know, different. And we have raised quite a bit of capital, so we have a little bit of freedom to do this. But, you know, I would make sure that we're investing

into the next generation locations where we know this will be needed. So sometimes, you know, there's places where there just is no power. It will take four plus years to get there. So if you're able to have that site and start to develop it quicker, you would have that when that demand comes to that market. But I think the thing that we are really thoughtful about right now and I think that we're going to be able to do a lot of great work with is how we use the energy that's available at a site. So there's a lot that we're learning, again, from seeing the utility of these sites. And these sites are designed for every vehicle to come in at the exact same time and be the top of the charge curve pulling the full power of the charger at the same time.

And that just doesn't happen. And so there are ways that we can actually, you know, We have seven megawatts in the street of power from the utility at our heavy-duty site, but maybe instead of serving 20 chargers, we can serve 25 chargers with that. Or we can serve higher power at each charger with that. So I would invest it into making sure that we're being really thoughtful about that piece of it. Because, again, I mentioned that power is the first thing that we always look for once we find those two other things. And being able to be more efficient with that is great for us. We have more capability to the site, but it's also great for the utility.

You know, we're in an era where they are under pressure to do all kinds of things and, you know, build really fast for lots of increasing electricity demand. And so removing some of that pressure for them allows us to work more collaboratively with them as well. So I would invest it into that. I don't think it takes $100 million, but sometimes money is speed. But I love that a piece of your answer is making your financial team happy by making sure that you're optimizing and increasing utilization. So that's awesome. I always have to keep them happy. Thank you so much.

This has been such an awesome interview. It's really interesting to hear about all the things that you've done on your journey and the challenges you've overcome. So we wish you all the best. Nahab Palmer is a co-founder and the CEO of TerraWatt Infrastructure. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Laura Peerpoint. Our producer is Aaron Hardick.

Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Markwand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you'd like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to the green blueprint at latitudemedia.com. You can listen to the green blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers

who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is the green blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.