Not Your Father’s Data Center - Backup Power Generation in Data Storage with Natural Gas

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

In the data center world, when one mentions a backup power generator, one assumes diesel. Enchanted Rock Chief Commercial Officer Allan Schurr said it’s time to think differently. Enchanted Rock’s solution is one powered by natural gas.

Welcome to Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, brought to you by Compass Data Centers. We build for what's next. Now here's your host, Raymond Hawkins. Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. We are recording on Cinco de Mayo, May 5th, with Enchanted Rock's Chief Commercial Officer, Alan Schur, out of Houston, Texas. Alan, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate you being here. It's great to be with you today on Cinco de Mayo. That's right. The world is still thinking about a global pandemic, but it seems to be getting

better every day. I think I saw on the news we're over 100 million vaccinated in the U.S., so it feels like there's optimism. How's it feel down there in Houston? I think the same. You know, people are talking about traveling. I've been on planes now in the last couple of weeks for the first time in a long while, and it's busy at the airport, it seems. Well, I will say I've checked into hotels twice in the last 30 days, which I hadn't done twice in the last 15 months. So it feels like we're getting what will start to feel a little more normal. It should be an interesting summer, I think. I think the same news story that I saw with the 100 million figures said they're trying to get up to 160 million by

4th of July. So I think the summer is going to be an active outdoor summer. I've heard the term many times over, pent-up demand. I think we're going to get to see what pent-up demand really looks like over the course of this summer. People are tired of being home and excited to go see friends and family and travel. And I'm interested to see how the global supply chain of all things, cars, I know we hear about chips. And I just think everything. I think we're going to stress the system on the upside now that we've stressed it on the downside uh here in the next few months i think it'll be fun to watch absolutely all right so we want to talk about enchanted's business of providing backup power and generation but doing it through natural gas i think that's the headline

is i think about what you guys do and and for those of us in our audience that are data center folks, we all think of batched up generation. We think about getting permits and rolling out a diesel generator and talking about fuel contracts and polishing the fuel and belly tanks and how many hours can we run. And we're sort of consumed with, oh, well, when you say generator, you mean diesel. And your way of doing it is totally different. So just at a headline, tell us at a headline how that differs. Yeah, so natural gas has not historically been a suitable substitute for backup applications. And there's some reasons for that. But we've, both from an engineering standpoint and a business model standpoint changed out those fundamentals. And so now we meet the same kind of technical performance

at a actually a lower price point than diesel. So it really is a place where you can have cleaner, cheaper and same or even better performance than diesel vacuum. Maybe heresy in the data center world, but innovations often are something that are completely unexpected. So that's our business. We do it at over 200 locations today, providing backup as a service to customers that want ultra high levels of reliability that's cleaner and cheaper than buying and operating and maintaining their own diesel backup plan.

So, Alan, I'm fascinated by the, hey, now we can do it at a lower price point. So let's come back to that. But you said 200 plus locations. Let's start there. This is not y'all's first rodeo. And for those of us that don't know, Alan in Houston and I'm in Dallas, so rodeo talk is very much comfortable for us. We recognize that might not be for all of our audience, but not Enchanted Rock's first

rodeo. Y'all have been doing this for other people in other industries. So give us a little of that history, a little bit of feel that'll make people go, okay, this is new to us in the data center space, but it's not new. It's not new. And it's really been a long time to get where we're at. So we started providing resiliency solutions to customers in 2009. Hurricane Ike came through the Houston area in 2008 and created tremendous stress on the electric grid, a lot of long-duration power outages, and we observed some very large customers in the form of water districts in particular that lost their diesel plant because of both maintenance practices and difficulty getting fuel. And we saw an opportunity to provide higher levels of maintenance and the operation support to ensure

that backup plants performed like they were supposed to. So our first genesis was actually diesel generators. We simply installed diesel plant and then had higher levels of performance based on a more aggressive or thorough maintenance cycle that was attached to that. So we did that for probably two years, building out over 100 megawatts of backup plant and very large installations in the water district and water supply field. We then did a bit of a, you know, probably 45 degree pivot. And we saw in the ERCOT market in Texas, the wholesale market that governs wholesale power transactions, was in the news a lot in February, as a lot of people know, even around the the world that ERCOT was starting to create market conditions where peaking energy could be supplied in a competitive market and so using similar diesel technology we built merchant plants those were not backing up power for a particular customer

they were connected to the grid in different regions around the ERCOT market. And they would be dispatched when economic conditions were showing tight supplies. And so again, diesel powered, they were both tier four I and ultimately tier four final technology. And we would dispatch those when the price at ERCOT went above the strike price for running those generators. That's a lot of info and I want to make sure I unpack it and I understand it correctly. So you see demand coming out of Hurricane Ike, or you see a market opportunity coming out of Hurricane Ike that said, hey, folks that have been responsible, particularly water

authorities, with preparing for an outage did this based on diesel, but they didn't have rigorous enough maintenance schedules or robust enough fuel contracts, or even just the physical ability to deliver the fuel. So they had outages and you said, hey, we could help with that. And you started to help with diesel plants. That was the beginning of the business. That's how you guys saw a market opportunity. Did I get that one right? You got that right. That's exactly right. And then the second phase is, so you guys started to say, hey, we can maintain these generators better than other people can. A more rigorous, robust diesel generator maintenance and operations process will help our customers. So that was phase one. Then phase two, because of ERCOT allows you

to supply energy onto the grid in peak and they pay peak prices for it. You guys saw a market opportunity to provide, and I'm not going to use the right term, but provide adjunct generation onto the grid. That's not your primary business, but you did that as a way to capture financial opportunities when the prices were right. Do I get that phase properly? Yeah, I think phase two was that set of assets, which we developed then at about 10 or so sites, were exclusively for what we call grid support

services, your adjunct services. So they were not- Grid support services. I like that phrase. So really meant not for a particular client, but rather meant for the grid where it's having constraint, which is causing price increases, allowed you to support the grid at economically favorable conditions for Enchanted. That's correct. That's correct. So that was 2012 to 2014 or so. Got it. Love that. And then we decided, sort of like the peanut butter and chocolate, we decided to marry those two models together and say, if we could provide backup as a service that also could access the wholesale market, we could really grow as a substantial offering in the market. And we decided then too,

we didn't want to do that with diesel. We didn't want to do it with diesel because the logistics of managing hundreds and ultimately thousands of sites, the fueling contracts, the logistics during emergencies when you really need power in an emergency, often the road conditions and other situation makes it difficult to get that kind of refueling. So we felt that the low price of gas, the clean environmental properties, the fact that we use an underground fuel delivery network and aren't subject to above ground risk conditions. We put all those things together and said, what we need is a natural gas generator to do the same thing. And it did not exist in the market. I got to be careful here because right to you said it, you used a word at the beginning that

could be viewed as heretical, right? This notion that we're doing something different. My industry, the resiliency and the reliability of my industry is built on diesel generators and a fuel contract to back it up. And people look at that and go, okay, that's bulletproof. We're always going to be up. But I think the point I hear you making is, hey, Raymond, when all the roads are flooded, having a truck somewhere that says they'll bring you diesel fuel, if they can't drive over the roads, there's an issue there, right? And ultimately, there's a finite supply of fuel on site.

And to me, that's what makes this fascinating. So I want to be careful because I still run diesel generators at all our facilities today, and we still have fuel contracts. But the notion that we have underground fuel delivery, I think, is an incredible risk mitigator. So take it from there. That is a fascinating angle to me for why this works. Right. And I can cite examples where those diesel contracts don't mean anything when proverbial hits the fan. You can't get those deliveries. They can be commandeered by others. Not just the roads are causing problems. The winter storm just a few months ago, we actually rented diesel trucks. We still run that diesel fleet that I talked about before, the merchant fleet. We rented

trucks in advance. We had our own dedicated drivers. They showed up at the racks to refuel and the racks were without power. There was no fuel to get. They just had no energy because the grid across the board was down. That's right. So they couldn't pump out of their tanks into your truck. That's right. And Hurricane Harvey, the refinery shut down. There weren't shipping to the racks. So there's so many risk factors in the above ground fuel delivery network that we wanted to avoid that. So in 2014, we decided to pivot to natural gas, go find the right technology that would allow us to meet the technical performance requirements of backup generation. And they're rigorous, has to start fast.

Above all, it has to have very strong transient responses, has to be utility grade power. Most natural gas, virtually all natural gas, still today has a different mission in mind. They want to be grid synchronous machines. They lean on the grid for voltage and frequency and don't have to start fast. They just want to be efficiently running. And that's not the mission of backup power. Backup power doesn't run many hours and it needs to start very fast and it has to be able to carry transient loads like a diesel does so we engineered with our engine supplier a very specific technical package that meets those requirements so we can get into the technical questions if you

want but we can match the diesel performance requirements we've been told by data center operators and others that what we do doesn't exist. And then they look at our test data and they say it now does. So it gave us many, many advantages. The engineering performance of the generator now, we could check that box.

Now we had to demonstrate that because of the cleaner environmental footprint, particularly air emissions, but also things associated with sound, that we could scale faster. We can achieve the kind of air permits that are more administrative in nature, don't require public hearings because the emission levels are orders of magnitude cleaner than diesel. Even clean diesel, we're at least 20 times cleaner in most emissions. Oh, my goodness. So dramatically different.

Yeah, that's a very friendly thing for permitting. That also lets us have a more predictable scaling, and it lets us run without hours limitations. And that is what lets us do non-emergency runs in support of grid services. And those revenues are sufficient to offset the premium price of a typical gas generator compared to diesel and then some. So you made the point early, Alan, that, hey, we could ultimately do this at a lower price point. Is that how you get there is by being able to generate some revenue from the, I shouldn't say generate some revenue from the generator. That sounds a little funny, but, but but but you know is that how you achieve the lower price point is by being able to sell back some of the power that's how we do it and we do it better than anybody because it requires 724 monitoring of complex grid price signals operating margins across many different

you got to catch it when when the window's right you got to catch it yeah right you can't You can't show up on Monday and go, hey, we should have done that Thursday. Well, not only that, but that window sometimes lasts only 10, 15 minutes. So we do pay attention to those. We have the algorithms to automatically dispatch. We'll capture those streams when the price is more than our marginal cost of operation. So let me ask a silly question there, Alan. Being a Texan and being here in the ERCOT grid, I understand how it works in ERCOT. Tell me how this works in the East Grid

or the West Grid. Yeah, so those markets are somewhat different in that instead of it being a mostly all-energy market, which ERCOT is, they are capacity and less on the energy side. But still, there's opportunity in the energy market. So in the California independent system operator or the PJM market, which spans from Illinois to New Jersey down to Virginia and other markets like that, there are capacity payments that you can bid into and qualify for it. So you get paid to be on standby, but in exchange for being on standby, you have to bid in your price of operation every day. I gotcha. And sometimes you get a day's notice that you're going to run and sometimes there's an emergency and you just have to run.

So it's a little different mix of revenues, but it's nonetheless the same basic principle. The grid needs help. They're willing to pay for that help the structure of those payments might be different by different market and certainly the market rules are very localized on how you have to participate that's where scale matters the economies of our ability to operate in each of those markets at scale so we can do that better than most people can stand up that same capability internally. So the principle is the same outside of Texas, where it's a non-regulated market. The mechanism and the process might be a little bit different, but the principle is the same.

You can generate revenue from your generators when the grid is stressed and the economics make sense for your business. It even happens around the world. We're seeing the same kinds of price signals from grid operators all over the world. We're active in the Europe market where they're seeing the same kinds of price signals from grid operators all over the world. We're active in the Europe market where they're seeing the same kinds of dynamics. All right. Well, we kind of jumped off the deep end. Alan, how does a UC Davis guy get into this business? Tell us a little bit of your journey. We probably should have started there. And so shame on me for jumping right in. Go back to the beginning and you started at PG&E and they make the news occasionally these days. Go back to the beginning and tell us how you ended up at Enchanted Rock. So I did get an engineering degree at UC Davis, a different kind of Aggie for those

from Texas, UC Davis. That's right, exactly right, different Aggie, right? But I went to work actually right out of college working for PG&E and started working in big, super critical gas power plants and decided, even with my engineering background, I didn't feel like that was the right direction to go at PG&E. I wanted to do something that was a little less formulaic and routine. moved into working with large commercial industrial customers on energy use issues and spent about a dozen years in different roles at pg e including the deregulation of the california market and in fact i met my wife over a power outage so i think it was destiny that there was going to be a it worked out yeah that's good yeah exactly so i i've always been in the energy space sometimes in the technology side, sometimes working directly with the commercial industrial customers, sometimes working with utilities. I spent about 10 years at IBM. I worked at a startup software company.

And I found myself seeing the Enchanted Rock model as like the right place at the right time, where the grid is really undergoing a big change. The character of the grid is transforming a little bit all the time. Coal power plants are retiring, nuclear plants are retiring, more renewables are creating a more uncertain mix of energy supplies. And so the grid operator is desperate for these grid support services that I described earlier. They really do want fast ramping, quick response, long duration assets.

And while battery storage can provide some of those services, when there's a long duration event, they aren't going to cut it until there's an innovation around long duration storage, which is still coming. Yeah, I was just going to say, we can't get enough stuff stored for a long enough period of time. That technology doesn't exist. All right, well, I'm going to give you a couple questions to think about. We're going to rattle off our first three trivia questions. As our listeners know, we do four trivia questions. You've got to answer all four, not you, Alan, but our listeners,

to get entered in the drawing for the $500 Amazon gift card. In honor of Alan being in Houston, even though he's a California guy, lives in Houston now. I was thinking, okay, energy companies in Houston, what do we go with? I think Enron probably is the most infamous energy company in Houston. So no guilt by association. That's just how we picked it. So the infamous Enron, first three trivia questions, let's go with who was their CEO? Who was Enron's CFO, and what year was Enron founded? So those for our listeners, those are your first three questions. Yes,

you can Google them. Everyone asks that. Yes, you can Google them. But we need four right answers for you to get entered in the drawing. Who is the CEO of Enron, CFO of Enron, what year were they founded? And we'll give you the fourth question at the end. All right, Alan, back to you. And now that we got our trivia questions out of the way, tell me as you and your personal experience, UC Davis, look like lifetime California guy, moving to Texas in the late teens, what's it like making the switch from California to Texas? Well, I actually moved to Colorado for about 15 years in the middle there. Okay, all right. So a new guy to Texas either way. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you a quick personal funny story. When I was living in

Colorado, one of my daughters was looking for an engineering school herself to go to, and she looked all over the country, ended up at SMU, and just loved the feel, the vibe of Dallas. So we started coming to, you know, moving her in, moving her out as parents do. My second daughter ends up going to TCU. So it was destiny that I needed to come to Texas anyway. I couldn't avoid it. Yeah, your girls were just, they were just early indicators.

They were just canaries in the coal mine. That's correct. One's a Mustang, one's a frog. So it's class. And they're rivals, right? One's a Mustang, one's a Frog. So it's a lot of class. Well, good stuff. Now, they both finish up at SMU and TCU? They sure did.

Great schools, by the way. All good. Good stuff. Well, as of this recording, my two graduated from college on Saturday. So both of them finished up school. So I just got a raise. So I'm not sure how I'm going to manage life now that I got two college graduates, but exciting stuff. Well, good things. All right. So we welcome you to Texas. Glad that your kids led the way with their SMU and TCU adventures, both great places

to go to school. All right. So I love this idea. I love the concept. Do you mind, and don't violate any NDAs or anything, but do you mind telling us one or two customer stories? And what I'd love to hear from a customer story is two, if you could. I'd love to hear one that's not in our industry and one that is, if you could. But I'd love to hear how does the conversation start? Because I think, to your point, that the diesel is sort of ingrained. How do you guys start that talk and if you can reference a name that'd be great but but no pressure to do that if you can't. Well let me let me break the market into kind of two different parts of the market. There's those businesses that today already buy diesel for every new facility and data

centers fit that. A new hospital will put diesel generation in today. So in that scenario, we don't have to convince them that resiliency is a problem that they need to put a solution behind. They already know that it's core to their business. There are some sort of subtleties to that. In that situation, we're really trying to make the case that we have a better, faster, cheaper solution. Cleaner, for sure. Cleaner means faster permitting times, less community objections in some markets, the flexibility to generate a revenue stream that makes it cheaper. And most importantly, for those types of businesses,

they have to know that it meets their performance standards for start times, transit response. The ISO 8528 standard is what we can peg our test data to, and we can demonstrate that we meet those same performance standards. We've been told by engineers that they haven't seen diesels that work as well as what we do. So we're very proud of that technology, but that's only for those businesses that already have resiliency as part of their design. There's a much bigger market of businesses that can't afford resiliency, even if they had wanted it. And we've looked into it and it's been too expensive. And maybe it's expensive in a headache. And there are much bigger numbers of customers. The market is bigger for companies that would

love to have no power outages because that's just about everybody, but haven't found a way to afford backup power. And because of our economic leverage of these assets, we can drop that price of resiliency so low that they suddenly are now in the market. And that opens up a lot for us. So as an example with hospitals, even though they might put in some diesel, they rarely will back up the whole hospital, been too expensive. We'll back up the rest of it. So we'll actually coexist on a hospital campus

with diesel for compliance, because there's still a belief that you have to have diesel for the life safety roads, even though, well, the problems we mentioned earlier, the COVID has not caught up with that in most states. Some are changing that, but we can wrap the rest of the campus. So when the power goes out, both systems start up, the natural gas microgrid along with the diesel generator. The diesel generator senses the grid is back up and shuts back down. And we can carry the entire hospital for days to weeks

using that underground infrastructure we talked about earlier. Why is that important? Well, because beyond the ICU loads and the red plugs in the rooms, if there's an extended power outage, the rest of the hospital, all of the patients in other wards,

they have to be prepared for evacuation. Procedures get canceled when there's a power outage. Some of those procedures are some of the highest revenue producing procedures for a hospital. So there's an economic case that's very strong with backing up an entire hospital. That hospital story is different for every industry, but there's a story just like it, HEV stories. As I hear you describe it, you said that the natural gas microgrid the diesel generator senses that utility is back on. That looks like utility power to the diesel generator and he can go back offline? That's correct. It looks just like utility

power. The voltage is back up, the frequency is stable. And so it thinks that the grid is back up and it just goes in and shuts down. backup mode, but backup on this, you called it the natural gas microgrid. I like that. Okay. All right. So I get hospitals and I get data centers. Those are clear applications that I'm familiar with. Talk with me about people. I liked your comment that, hey, there's a whole industry that hasn't embraced the notion of backup power because it's out of reach economically. What are industries that they look at this and go, hey, this is good for me? Well, one that's shown to be very important and is now even considering themselves critical infrastructure is grocery and pharmacies. So the grocery industry does not routinely back up grocery stores. They may back up some of their distribution centers, but even that is not as common as you would expect. Grocery stores now can cost effectively maintain higher levels of inventory in their stores. It's very expensive when there's

a power outage. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of perishable food can be tossed out when there's a power outage. And so we have a partnership with HEV grocery stores at Texas Grocery Chain, coming up your way to Dallas-Fort Worth soon. Yeah. A relationship with Walmart. We're doing the same thing for them where now their stores can maintain continuous operation even in emergencies. They never have to be closed.

So in hurricanes or in the recent cold snap, when people had to throw out their own food, they were able to go to their local HEV, buy food, buy medicine, buy water. The stores were open. Lights were on. They were charging their phones. They were charging their medical devices. They were getting on the store's Wi-Fi. So they're becoming like community centers. Oh, emergency community centers because they can be online. Yeah. So that's an example, I think, of an industry that has changed its common practice because prices for backup can be lower than what they had before. It's much easier for them to do this. Just a quick example, last summer's hurricane season, so 2020, Hurricane Hannah hit early in the summer on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

It was supposed to come ashore at Corpus Christi. It actually came ashore about 100 miles south in McAllen, Texas, near the border. Predicting where that was going to come ashore and trying to mobilize portable diesel generators, which is the sort of standard practice if you do have backup often they're temporary and you move them around where you think you need them, would have been extremely difficult for a grocery operator or others that are taking that strategy. For us, we energized 28 microgrids in advance of landfall.

We let the storm come ashore and that there was no interruption whatsoever in utility service for those customers. And that once the storm came ashore and that there was no interruption whatsoever in utility service for those customers and that once the storm came ashore after it had moved and wobbled a little bit south the power was restored a couple of days later of those 28 14 of them would have had power outages but didn't the other 14 experienced no interruption and probably would not have anyway, but proactively we put them in an island mode so they were protected from the grid during that hurricane coming ashore. Were those 28 customers multiple industries? Were they all grocery stores or were they multiple? There was a large number of grocery customers in that area, but there were others too. All customers though that said, hey, I don't want

the risk of going down. I'm going to proactively be ahead of this curve. And at least 50% would have lost power. And to your point, grocery store, there's this power not only is the cash register not ringing anymore, but the negative cash register in the back when the fridge and the freezer go off because things are perishing. They only have a few hours to make some moves there. But we have customers in assisted living facilities, hospitals, chemical plants, food processing, distribution logistics. Assisted living. I would think manufacturers where plant and equipment maximizes its economic utility by

running 24-7, I think that those robust manufacturing facilities, this would be a solution for. Yeah, especially when they're making a very high value product or when you have an outage, it takes sometimes days or even more than a week to get back into production because of the impact on the production equipment of continuous process. So those are all candidates as well as we talked about data centers. We actually do have a data center. We can't yet disclose it, but we have a data center customer that is coming online this year. Got it. Well, you told us 2009 and the Hurricane Ike was the beginning of Enchanted Rock thinking

about this. Is that when the company started? Give us a three-minute Enchanted Rock, how the business got started and where it is today and where the future looks. It was actually started in 2006. It was a bit of a distributed energy consulting business at that time until the vision, I think, emerged post-Hurricane Ike. And I went through the genesis of those different transformations. Where we're going from here is a significant amount of expansion outside of Texas. We've already got projects now going up in the Great Lakes region. We've got some work going on outside of Texas along the Gold Coast. We're even active with possible clients in the Dublin, Ireland data center market in your world, in part because

the grid conditions there are extremely impacted by data center growth. And they have a similar kind of grid volatile amount of wind on the grid in the Irish market. They need those grid support services. And you combine those circumstances with the EU's focus on greenhouse gas reductions and other emissions requirements. And it's, again, a great situation for making that change from traditional diesel to a more modern and lower cost gas equivalent. Alan, early on, you mentioned 200 customers. Is that 200 microgrids installed or is that 200 customers and some of them have multiple microgrids installed? Some of them have multiple microgrids installed.

Again, Walmart and HEB would be a good example. HEB, right. So it's over 200 sites and over 20 accounts probably. Alan, my industry in the data center space, we're pretty comfortable with the diesel footprint. What's the footprint look like for these microgrid facilities? Yeah, I'm glad you asked because natural gas is a less dense fuel. So usually to get the same output, you need a bigger footprint. One of the innovations that Enchanted Rock went through when it was back in 2014, looking for that prime mover engine was also a unique design that we've patented that

gives you the same power density, the same amount of output per square foot as diesel. Boy, that's hard to believe for many people, but what we've done is we've innovated the airflow of the exhaust heat to go vertical. So instead of having a radiator on the drive shaft, we've instead disassociated with the drive shaft and used electric fans to exhaust the heat vertically. We can now sit generators side by side, very dense installations, so that we match the diesel footprint with clusters of generators. It's a crude analogy, but you've turbocharged it. You've allowed to move the air

off so you can now got turbocharged micro good natural gas generators. All right. Right and because of this same design they're also much quieter. The current genset that we provide doesn't require additional sound attenuation typically 68 decibels at seven meters is the ISO standard. So very quiet, very neighborhood friendly. So with low emissions and no smoke with quieter, we know that that is a big plus for a lot of our customers that are looking for back power. Well, I'll tell you, our customers in the cloud space, you've hit on two home runs, right? All about permitting and making sure that we're not damaging the environment by our exhaust fumes, right? Those diesel generator permits are tough to get.

And then how much noise we make. I mean, you want to talk about two hot button issues. Those are big. And the fact that those fit nicely into your solution and then tied into your delivery, underground delivery, I think you guys got yourselves a winner. I can add one more thing that I think you're probably hearing, we're hearing it too, and that is the sustainability goals of your customers, the companies that we try to serve,

they're trying to reduce their carbon footprint, and we can substitute normal methane, natural gas, with renewable natural gas. It's done on a displaced type arrangement, much like a solar power purchase agreement, you know, that might not physically be delivered to your site, but on an annual accounting basis, you're generating enough renewable electricity to offset your electricity consumption. The same thing can be done with renewable natural gas. This comes from landfills, dairy farms, other capture mechanisms for methane that would otherwise be vented and is much more potent as a greenhouse gas anyway. Still a greenhouse gas,

right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Fascinating. So we can buy that, inject it into the pipelines and we can have a zero carbon or even negative carbon backup plant that meets ESG goals of our customers as well. You can technically do biodiesel, right? You can do that. It does not perform in the engine like normal diesel. This renewable natural gas is a methane molecule and it's blended in with the pipeline. So effectively, it has no impact on the performance of the backup. I got to think, Alan, I'm bouncing around subjects. You mentioned Ireland. I got to think that you guys would be such a great fit in Europe. So much tougher to permit there and the grid's got issues there. I think you guys would be a great story in Europe.

Especially in the UK and Ireland where they don't have the benefit of what they call the copper plate grid in Europe where there's you know significant cross-border energy transfers there is local shortages going on in some data center markets in Europe Amsterdam is pretty well documented Frankfurt Dublin or Ireland yeah and Ireland is our starting point because we know that there's a lot of U.S. companies with Irish operations. Well, I got to tell you, Alan, this has been a great story to hear. We got to cram in another trivia question. In honor of your kids, we're

going to go with three trivia questions, Dan, not one. We're going to go with the year Enron closed its doors. What is SMU's mascot and what is TCU's mascot? So for those of you who listen to our podcast, that's six trivia questions to get in for the $500 Amazon drawing. Alan, Chief Commercial Officer at Enchanted Rock, love the name. Okay, before we go, you got to tell us how does Enchanted Rock tie into the business? Because that's a great name. Well, so for people not in Texas, Enchanted Rock is kind of like the Ayers Rock of Hill Country, Texas. There's a granite hill, I wouldn't call it a mountain coming from Colorado, but it's a hill outside of Austin. And it's a very popular

destination for hikes. And our founder would go there frequently when he was figuring out his next thing to do back in 2006 would camp there or hike there and he named the company after Enchanted Rock and in a world where so many company names are indistinguishable from others uh Enchanted Rock always creates a pause by our customers really wanting to know this same story. So Enchanted Rock is really just a place, but it's a unique name. And just as a quick piece of trivia on Enchanted Rock, when it heats up in the afternoon during hot days, it sounds like Rice Krispies. It's sort of a snap, crackle, pop of the granite. As it expands, yeah, yeah.

So it was called because of that effect how cool is that well so enchanted rock was the founder's muse and it got in the name and it gets people to ask questions and it's memorable i love that i love how a colorado guy shows no respect to the bumps and hills in texas the man from the land of the 14th uh what do you all call them the 14ers out there, I think. Is that what they call all the peaks? Yeah, yeah. So I ride a road bike and they call us the flatlanders down here, right? I mean, a hill to us is 200 feet. People in Colorado laugh at us. They're like, no, no, no. We're going for 8,000 feet of climb today. We just can't do that here.

You could climb every hill in Texas and not get 8,000 feet of climb. You said it, not me. It is flat down here. Well, Alan, we really, really appreciate it. I want to remind everybody of our last three trivia questions. Enron closed its doors, SMU's mascot, TCU's mascot. Thank you for joining us. A great story. Love seeing

what you guys do in the future. I think it's a unique way to think about backup power and love how you're opening the opportunity to industries that couldn't do it before. Those are all great and love to see where things go for our fellow Texas company, Enchanted Rock. Alan, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Raymond.

I enjoyed it.