EP 56 – Samridh Goyal – Founder & CEO at Solar Horizon – Nations of Energy “Prosumers” Not Just Consumers

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Zal Dastur 0:01
Hi, everybody, welcome to the Social Innovation Podcast. I’m here with Samridh Goyal, the CEO of Solar Horizon, which is a rooftop solar energy developer in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the show.

Samridh Goyal 0:15
Hi, Zal, good to be here. Thanks for having me on. Good afternoon.

Zal Dastur 0:19
I know, Sam, that you’ve been in the solar industry for quite a while. So why don’t you give our listeners just a little bit of a background of how you ended up in solar, and then sort of what you’ve been doing there?

Samridh Goyal 0:28
Sure. This takes me back almost Well, 12 years, I felt a calling to do something bigger than the startup I was involved in at the time. And I was lucky to get admitted to MIT for an executive course on creating new ventures in clean energy, which was the catalyst, you know, it helped me understand exactly what is this renewable energy space, why it’s going to be important, and more importantly, how to get involved and do something meaningful. So I started out my career at a German solar panel manufacturer called Solar World, handling the Indian market in the South Asian subcontinent. That’s where I cut my teeth as a young pup, with a lot of bright solar panels in my eyes. But over the years, I came to quickly recognize that business model innovation is much needed. And that’s when I broke out on my own in 2014, to set up solar horizon, which was a development company focused on zero capex solar installs, basically using the power purchase agreement or PPA model, where we originate, develop finance and construct solar systems on large multinational rooftops, without any upfront cost to the client, whereby they pay on a pay per use model for the solar energy consumed. So in short, the customer who is using the power doesn’t need to fork out a couple of million bucks upfront. And instead, they can enter into a long term contract to pay for the energy that they use at a significant discount to good prices.

Zal Dastur 2:02
So you said that you got the inspiration to start this company while you were at MIT? Or while you were doing the MIT course? What was it particular about solar that drew you to that?

Samridh Goyal 2:12
Good question. So I am a city boy, I have grown up in the urban jungles my whole life. And I felt that for the urban landscape, solar energy makes a lot of sense. Because we already have a lot of rooftop space, we have the sun falling on these buildings, and a lot of people consuming power under those rooftops. That’s where I saw the opportunity to solve a problem rather create value. So in short, I felt that solar is the right technology for the urban setting. And in fact, it has proven itself to be so over the last decade.

Zal Dastur 2:43
brings me into my next question about what you’ve seen in terms of the changes over the last 12 years in solar in this part of the world, particularly because I think Asia can be considered late adopters to the party.

Samridh Goyal 2:59
Yes, and no. Firstly, just to correct that point, while Europe was the initial catalyst, Asia actually caught on quite quite quickly, back in the day, India and China and Japan, were some of the leaders. And today in fact, they’re some of the world’s largest solar markets. So just just wanted to correct that point. So always I’ll remind me if your first question,

Zal Dastur 3:19
well, it was more about where you see the changes in the last 10 years in the solar space in here in Asia.

Samridh Goyal 3:24
So there has been a sea change, okay, in short, solar prices have come down by almost 80%. The cost of generation of solar energy. This is primarily due to the panel price decrease. As you know, there is a Moore’s Law where as production increases, or doubles prices come down to the production capacity for solar panel has increased by 1000 percentage points over the last 10 years. And that’s driven the cost down. So as cost reduces, it becomes more competitive against grid energy, therefore creating more savings for the customers. So it is primarily due to the large scale adoption and production of solar panels, whereby the cost of generation has come down enough whereby the adoption becomes very economically viable. So the one big one is the cost reduction. The second one is the efficiency increase. In short, we have been designing more efficient ways of layering silicon, in fact, looking at new materials as well to generate more power per square foot than we could in the past. So in short, with the cost decrease and the efficiency increase solar power today, for example, in Singapore, we are selling solar power at a 60% discount to the headline grid rate. And you can only imagine that when we can offer you 60% savings in energy prices by switching to green energy without paying the upfront investment. That makes a lot of sense. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Zal Dastur 4:49
Now 100% And I think all around the world, we’re seeing that renewable energy prices are becoming cheaper than the traditional fossil fuel prices. But what is stopping During the development or the deployment of more of this in places like Singapore, which are very densely populated, have lots of buildings, lots of sun, what’s restricting because I read somewhere that I think it only provides maybe less than 10% of Singapore’s energy at the moment from renewable.

Samridh Goyal 5:16
A far less, far less, give me some numbers. Singapore has a traditional generation capacity of 11 gigawatt hour of fossil fuel energy. The current demand is eight gigawatt hour. Solar is currently producing some 0.2 gigawatt hour at best if you take the peak output and known across all solar systems, there’s roughly around 550 megawatts deployed in Singapore. But the thing is, there’s only one constraint, which is available space. Singapore solar market is booming. So just to give you an idea, when I started out in 2014, there was roughly 30 megawatt installed by 2018, there was around 100. By 2020, there was 350. But 2022, or the end of this year, we’re going to be a 550 megawatt. So it is an absolute exponential scale. And to give you some more feeling, Indonesia, which is a country that is infinitely larger than our little island only has about 150 megawatt installed. So it gives you a perspective that Singapore is actually one of the leaders in Southeast Asia for solar adoption, the primary challenge being scarcity of land, therefore, we are maxing out every single rooftop inch that we can find. And one of the big drivers has been the government programs to support it. There has not been any subsidies. Unlike Europe, where you were paid premium rates to inject solar power into the grid, you were offered capital subsidies in India, for example, in Singapore subsidy is a vulgar word. We don’t believe in subsidizing the industry. But we believe in supporting it in many other ways, such as streamline regulation, such as net metering programs that I can pump my excess solar energy into the grid and get paid for that, such as streamline licensing and permitting, such as a big marketing push by the government, which is Singapore’s green plan. And as part of the Singapore green plan, where they aim to achieve 2000 megawatts of solar installed, when by 2030, which is short seven years away. We’re already one quarter of the way there. So I think really, now is the time for solar energy to make its mark. And while I don’t see us reaching 10% of Singapore’s needs, in the next three or four years, I do believe over the next 15 or 20 years, we should start to see very meaningful shifts in the energy mix. For example, the government has now announced a target of net zero by 2050. Net Zero is a massive undertaking, it is essentially a program to replace gigawatts of fossil fuel electrons that are floating around in the grid. And some of the ways they’re going to do that. We can talk about it later when we get there. But there are some really innovative programs coming coming up in Singapore.

Zal Dastur 8:00
So you mentioned Singapore’s green plan, which is does seem to be quite an ambitious goal. And instead of targets that Singapore is set you were involved a little bit in helping to put that together?

Samridh Goyal 8:12
Well, I would say indirectly, yes. Being one of the kind of key active solar development companies, one of the pioneer companies, as we’re called, we certainly have been pushing the government agenda of winning the country, there has been several industry consultation papers over the years. In fact, solar Horizon, our company, was the first company to sign long term power purchase agreements with a lot of government linked companies in Singapore. So we help do the first solar PPA project in the marine sector with capital. The first one in the defense sector with St. Engineering, the defense manufacturer, most recently, the first one in the large scale telecom sector for SingTel. So in a way, we were the ones who helped catalyze these programs, which are now evolved into large deployment programs, where the mainstream industry has come in. And finally one of my personal contributions, I’ve always been a green champion for Singapore. As you may know, in my background, I have spoken at UN conferences at the International Green Building conference in Singapore International Energy week. And my key message has always been to replicate the successful model that Singapore government adopted. And in fact, all of this culminated in the post COVID kind of era. Just as we were coming out, Singapore’s government announced this fantastic green plan, which commits to like I said, 2000 megawatts, which is a six to eight times increase 100% increase in deployment of solar. And you know what, the first time they announced their first target, they made it the second time they announced the second target, they exceeded it. So in fact, I am very confident that working together with our industry and our government, we can indeed achieve these lofty targets. And one very clear example is now looking at innovative solutions to overcome the land scarcity. So if you don’t have land, where else can you Start on the water. So floating solar has been one of Singapore’s great achievements. In fact, they have developed one of the world’s largest floating solar power plants in one in the tango reservoir. Most recently, one of the other competitor companies, I shouldn’t say competitors, but one of the other companies has done a floating solar in the Johor straits. So what we are now seeing is that Singapore after piloting, floating solar is now going to double down exponentially. Because not only does floating solar overcome the land challenge, it also provides extra cooling and saving of evaporation for the water. And in fact, in floating solar power plants, the panels that we use are called bifacial, which means they can generate from both sides, so you have some additional reflection of sunlight that hits the water and reflects back up and adds a bit of uplift to the yield. The challenge is that it is more expensive, because clearly, we have to design floating mounting structures and ballast that can handle gale force winds. And plus we have to put underground cabling and pull up to the nearest substation. So there are a set of challenges. But in short, in order to increase the solar energy mix in the grid, Singapore has come up with all sorts of innovative solutions, including floating solar, as well as mobile solar panels, where you can deploy a large scale utility utility sized farm, and then move it when the landlord needs to take its land back. So yeah, these are just some examples of how the the industry and government has worked together. And where solar Horizon has played its role.

Zal Dastur 11:30
So what would you say in terms of some of the policies that Singapore has adopted that other countries could potentially learn from? I mean, apart from just setting very ambitious goals, and having a plan to hit those goals, which Singapore more often than not, once they set a goal, they tend to hit or exceed it? What are the other policies that other countries can look to adopting, especially in this part of the world to help grow that industry there?

Samridh Goyal 11:58
Again, great question. And see, this is where Singapore is quite unique. Unlike a lot of the other big countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore has a completely open electricity market. It has basically taken the grid monopoly away from the government and open it up to the private sector. This is the big difference in countries like Indonesia, or Malaysia, where it is the government run entity that controls the grid as a monopoly. So what happens in that situation, a lot of solar generation is heavily licensed, heavily restricted. In fact, one of the other policies that Singapore did in this vein of open electricity market was to allow the grid to be used as a giant battery, whereby solar generators in one point of the island generating excess power from large rooftops that can be consumed by the tenant can pump that energy back into the solar grid into the Singapore grid, and another customer can draw upon it and some other node, and the grid facilitates what’s called Open Access, which means I can use the grid as my battery and get paid for every electron that I generate, right, according to the Singapore pool price by opening up the grid and streamlining licensing and permitting and encouraging private energy generation and consumption was the way Singapore greatly accelerated its targets. And that has been the biggest challenge for countries like Indonesia, Indonesia has 170 gigawatt potential, that’s 170,000 megawatts of solar potential, and yet, there’s less than 100 megawatts. So it is the challenge of the incumbent grid operator, that is generally the big clunky machine that has built these rather aging grid systems, transmission systems, and control generation to large centralized nodes. This is what brings me to one of my passions, which is what we talked about earlier, distributed generation, the centralized generation, enabling those with smaller nodes to generate and consume their own power, while remaining connected to the centralized grid system for stability and backup.

Zal Dastur 13:57
I was gonna say that’s the dream of of solar right to be able to have enough people be able to set up their own power and be able to be putting it back into the system. I think I read about a Nigerian lady who got so fed up with waiting for the government to turn on her electricity, she set up her own solar plant, and supposedly it’s powering a church to schools, a nursery, and she went and did this all on her own. So obviously, there are models that are happening is the problem with this model, around the fact that people are not able to get access to the grid to maybe put that back or be or take out when they need what is going on in terms of what needs to change for a decentralized approach to be more effective.

Samridh Goyal 14:40
Sure, well, first of all, it is already pretty effective right? The aim of energy should be to reduce losses from the point of generation through the transmission to the point of consumption, the further energy travels the higher the losses are. So in the case of solar, I am generating at the point of consumption, and I am consuming as I’m generating So there’s no wastage. So actually, technically speaking, it is a more efficient way to deliver power, the challenge becomes the amount of power usage visa vie the available rooftop. So in a place like Nigeria, or in other parts of, you know, rural India, or Bangladesh, power usage is minimal, therefore, with a couple of solar panels and a small battery of your goal, but in places like Singapore, where we have, frankly in a criminal usage of energy when it comes to the large hotels and malls, that are blasting their air conditioning at 18 degrees Celsius, so that people have to wear jumpers in an office. Now, in those situations, a lot of the rooftops are simply not big enough to power the entire building usage. This is where the kind of philosophy of working hand in hand with the grid, which is what we espouse, makes a lot of sense, whereby the grid is already there, it is not about trying to replace the grid, that would not make sense. It is about how can we offset what we use from the grid and reduce losses and enjoy cheaper, cleaner power. So in short sell, you know, for distributed energy to take off, a lot of the grids in the region must start to deregulate, to de monopolize to decentralize to allow private generators to come into the space using economies of scale using innovation, using business model innovation to reduce the cost of generation and deliver that power cheaper and faster to the end customer. And there’s actually quite a bit of to talk about in the technology element. And I’d like to take a couple of minutes towards the end to talk about what are the technology innovations, particularly in the information age that are coming our way. But I do want to say is out there is another very important obstacle, which is the upfront cost. For example, a landed home in Singapore, one of the nice good class bungalows could probably fit around 30 kilowatt, generating around 30,000 kilowatt hour a month, that system would cost around 50 grand saying, but with today’s energy prices, given the war in Europe, given the energy crunch, given the supply chain disruption from China and the post pandemic recovery, energy prices in Singapore have risen by 40% over the last six months. It’s insane. So in this climate, if you invest 50,000, you have a payback of less than five years, against a warranted lifecycle of 25 years. So it’s a great investment for those who have the cash. Now take that situation to a dweller in an HDB. They don’t have a rooftop and HDB is the public town town housing in Singapore. But they don’t have rooftops. Right? So where are they going to put solar, now they can do some community solar programs, they can write on the town council solarization. But the individual homeowner in Singapore doesn’t have a rooftop to deal with. So that’s the second challenge. What is the cost? Second is the availability. And this is where the business model innovation comes in. Finally, the banks in Singapore are offering green loans to finance solar systems akin to the solar home loan system. So what we can now do, even those with a smaller landed property, not necessarily a good class bungalow can take a loan from the bank that will finance the Solar System purchase. And they can pay the loan back through the savings from their energy. Now in these situations, it makes a lot of sense for the homeowner to utilize his available space to bring his bill down, and to not fork out a large amount of money which he may not have access to, but rather leveraging finance. So that in my view is one of the key ways to unlock and accelerate the distributed solar revolution, which is well underway.

Zal Dastur 18:20
And you wanted to talk about some of the technology and the technology innovation that’s come up in this space.

Samridh Goyal 18:26
That is right, that is right. So let me describe a situation. Okay. In my mind, I’m an entrepreneur. So I always look at what is the current problem? Or what is the current situation? How can we optimize it? How can we make it more efficient? How do we make it better, right? So let me describe a situation, I have a nice big landed home, on one side of the island, I have a nice solar system that’s generating a lot of clean power and pumping it into my house and the balance going back to the grid. Now let’s say I go on a long holiday, I am generating solar power that is being fed into the grid. You on the other hand, have a nice apartment on one side of the country, you are connected to that same grid. But as of now you’re unable to use my excess solar power that was generated 10 kilometers away. Because there is absolutely no way to transact outside of the grid connection, ie there is no ability for decentralized transactions currently, because the grid is the verifiable authority. It is grid when they send me an electricity bill that I believe it is correct. They are an authority that is verifiable, and that has a level of trust. So if I generate 10 units of power here, and I simply tell you, hey, sell 10 units of your power from the grid or actually solar energy that I have sent to you and pay me for that at this rate. You’re not going to do that. How do you not have generated 10 or 12 or 15? So the absence of a decentralized verification system is what is holding back peer to peer energy trading. Sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it? Sounds a bit like distributed ledger technology sounds a bit like the crypto verse sounds a bit Like the blockchain enabled businesses primarily currently in the financial industry. And that’s exactly the solution. As of now, the technology limitation is I cannot track a green electron once it has entered the grid. Because I have basically injected of small straw into a massive swirling pool, I cannot track electron as an electron, right, an energy electron doesn’t matter if it’s green or brown energy doesn’t recognize whether it’s renewable or not, a device or a switch doesn’t recognize it recognizes an electron. So if I cannot today track my green electron that I have pumped into the grid, nor can I schedule it, I cannot pump that same electron through the sea of 1000s of millions of electrons all the way to find your node. Right. So that is my challenge. What I can do today is using a counting based system that the grid offers me for every 10 units of excess green power I pump into the grid, I can record that as a credit. And then you will take out 10 units of green power from the grid and record that as a debit, and it will be recorded on our individual accounts. And we can do an offset. So to some extent, we can do peer to peer trading. Currently, this is restricted to large scale customers. But what we see is happening is the advent of distributed ledger technology into renewable energy generation. If I can have a blockchain enabled system that can be connected to my solar system, and have an app or some form of transaction mechanism that can record every electron on an indelible, verifiable, unchangeable record that can be trusted by the other peer, then I can start to transact my excess energy with your demand. While I’m using the grid as my battery bank and my transmission line, I am no longer dependent on the grid for energy accounting, I am no longer dependent on the grid to verify and be the authority. This is the revolution that you know, people call Power to the people bringing in technology to enable peer to peer energy trading, using DLT, or distributed ledger technology, and winning away from the grid as the only mechanism to do that. This is the future dial and it is happening now. It really is,

Zal Dastur 22:14
is this technology only available in less urban li dense places.

Samridh Goyal 22:20
Actually the opposite. One of the companies that came up with a power Ledger was based out of Australia, right the developers in Sydney. In fact, there have been some pilots and trials in Singapore. So it actually makes a lot more sense in an urban setting. Because a lot of customers who want solar energy don’t have rooftops, they live in apartment blocks. So the difference here is, instead of a homeowner with a landed landed bungalow they call landed homes in Singapore. What it can be is if I have a factory or a warehouse, where I have a much larger rooftop, and I’m only using 20% of that energy. In that case, I can let’s say there’s a third party service provider intent, who comes into the picture offers to buy back all my energy at a fair price implements the blockchain or the DLT mechanism to then transact that energy to a lot of smaller, different tiers. That’s how it can work. And it can scale where we are essentially bypassing the grid to go to the generators themselves. In this case, they could be SMEs or commercial or industrial factories, or even a floating solar farm, and then buy that power from them directly. And transact in a way that is safe and verifiable. Therefore, using a lot of the excess power, rather than pumping it back into the grid,

Zal Dastur 23:32
but are you talking about then setting up almost like a secondary power grid within a city

Samridh Goyal 23:38
of virtual power grids out as a virtual power grid?

Zal Dastur 23:42
Speaking of Australia, and Singapore, I actually wanted to get your thoughts on the Sun cable, the connection between the northern territories and Singapore. I mean, for people that aren’t familiar, this is a basically a solar farm, supposedly one of the biggest in the world. And they’re going to connect that farm via undersea cable to Singapore, and with the aim of powering quite a large percentage of Singapore actually. And do you see this as a way that countries are going to become the new like the new oil? So if you’re if you’re a country, which has a lot of big space, much like Australia, you’re gonna be able to export energy at a great rate, just like the the Middle Eastern countries were able to export their oil energy?

Samridh Goyal 24:26
Yeah, it’s I’m glad you brought this up. In fact, I had alluded to some of the other programs earlier and this is a follow up, frankly, it was literally a pipe dream. Okay, excuse the pun. But interestingly enough, there has been a recent shift in Singapore, which is to look at x importing renewable energy from its neighbors via what is called the interconnectors, the interconnectors. Europe, unlike ASEAN is a completely integrated energy market. I can buy gas from Russia in Germany. because there’s pipeline going across three countries, I can generate solar power in Spain and buy it in Germany because the energy exchanges are interlinked. This is what is now slated to happen in ASEAN, the ASEAN integrated power grid, whereby the various countries across ASEAN will be laying down interconnectors that go across borders to carry renewable energy from those areas that can be produced cheaply and pumped into those areas that have a high demand for it and can pay a high price. So the interconnectors in fact that Singapore, there was a recent tender launched and there were bids for hundreds of megawatts to set up firms and for example, Indonesia in the real provinces, and connect under undersea cables to Singapore, or via Malaysia where there’s already a couple of interconnectors across the causeway. But with Australia, it is very far away. We are talking almost 6000 kilometres of undersea cable, as we spoke earlier, right at the start, what was one of the drivers of renewable energy adoption, the decrease in cost? It was because energy was much cheaper with solar that the market was incentivized to adopt it. Now, if you’re going to add the cost of a 6000 Kilometer undersea cable that will require a large amount of maintenance and monitoring and a huge additional capex. I am simply not convinced it will be more attractive or cheaper than energy sources of renewable energy sources elsewhere, let alone the ones that are much closer to Singapore like in Indonesia. So while the idea is good, and they are some big billionaires with lots of capital throwing at this thing, I feel it’s a moonshot. And there is another challenge, which is the incumbents in Singapore, the government in the same way it is doing now with renewable energy 2030 years ago, 40 years ago, invited the big power generation and oil companies to set up in Jurong Island to come and set up and guaranteed them demand and price to come and put up the investment required to power Singapore, which was 15 $20 billion. At that time, all of that power generation is still there, all of those utilities still need to make money. So for me, if suddenly there’s going to be 30 or 40 percentage of incumbent power replaced, there’s going to be a lot of unhappy utilities and a lot of unhappy investors. And Singapore doesn’t like to do that. They don’t like to shaft the investors who came in to power the country. There is also the other thing, which is the political interests. Indonesia itself has announced 170 or 100 gigawatt plan, Malaysia itself has announced Net Zero targets. Renewable energy is precious, because there’s high demand for it. So why would they give away their renewable energy to Singapore when they need it for their own targets, unless Singapore is willing to pay a much higher price. So for me, while I think there is a reasonable path towards the interconnectors over the next 10 to 15 years, I simply don’t see the cost economics being favorable. So there is a wait and watch approach, we for one sole horizon are not entering the fray, we’re not prepared to be loss leaders nor bring our investors to the table and ask them to put down millions of dollars to lose money to wait for the future. So we are going to be maybe not the first movers in this, we’re going to wait and watch and see what happens. And in the meantime, we’re working very hard to secure as many actual rooftops that are there. So we can put up power plants, you know, secure those rights for the next 2030 years. So let’s see, in short, some cables on cable, a pipe dream, but one that seems to be moving a lot of doubt and skepticism. But you know, early adopters and innovators always face that, let’s see what happens. Let’s see if it becomes real. And let’s see if it becomes cost effective. Yeah, I

Zal Dastur 28:29
think what you’re saying is absolutely spot on, that we do need people to be trying these big, massive projects, even if maybe they aren’t as successful as they think that they might turn out. But you need to have this sort of audacious entrepreneurship. And you know, when I look at the sort of visuals from this project, the scale of building this many panels on that sort of size, I’m sure the technology will be leveraged in other ways in other areas to create more efficient, larger solar fields. I wanted to ask you, because you were talking about in this, you’re talking 10 to 15 years, and you know, those are kind of time horizons. Is that quick enough? Is that fast enough? Is that a fast enough adoption rate to sort of stave off one and a half degrees of global warming or even two degrees of global warming? Are we moving at a fast enough pace here?

Samridh Goyal 29:20
The answer is no. Straight up, the answer is no. However, live forever or die trying IE, even if we may not make it in time, we got to try. We have to push it. So when we talk about global warming and global temperature rise, truth is a few gigawatts and a tiny island like Singapore and going to make a dent anyway, Singapore going net zero is not going to move the needle at a global scale by even nanobots like a nano meter, you know, but we’re going to try we’re gonna do it. If the world does go into the energy crisis, which it kind of is already there will be certain countries who are energy independent and can survive on their own. In fact, that’s a big motivation now in Europe, right? Europe just announced its single largest plan for renewable energy adoption just two days ago. And why? Because they’re being held hostage by Russia and gas. So the geopolitical issues in the world and the economic incentive are what really is driving renewable energy adoption. So to answer your question, will it be fast enough? Probably not, doesn’t mean, we don’t do it. Not at all. So yeah, we’ve got to just keep trying and as an industry as a global collective, recognize that we do have the potential to power the entire planet from renewable resources, but it is going to take trillions of investment into reshaping the way energy is generated, transmitted. In the grid systems are age old, clunky things built 5060 years ago. So imagine the amount of sunk cost that was put in. So in order to now reshape and replace those, we will need technology, we will need entrepreneurs, we will need a lot of dumb money, institutional capital that just needs to be deployed somewhere at scale. So, you know, general partners can feel good. But the truth is, and I am a firm believer of this, I have devoted my career to it. I believe the revolution will happen at the distributed energy level, I believe that working hand in hand with the incumbents with the existing grid structure, by leveraging distributed energy and bringing in storage, which is the holy grail, that we will be able to indeed set up nations of energy independent prosumers, no longer consumers, but prosumers, who are giving back the excess energy into the grid, rather than simply taking. So it’s a lovely vision, it is happening, things are moving fast, in some places, slower and others. But in general, I remain very positive, very committed, dedicated to this vision of bringing in energy independence through distributed energy generation, and using distributed ledger technology. Right. A lot of it is basically decentralized, distributed, and bringing it to the people.

Zal Dastur 31:54
Sam, I think you know, you and I can talk all day on this. But I appreciate your time. And I’ve really enjoyed our chat. So thank you very much.

Samridh Goyal 32:02
Likewise, Alex, it’s really good to have an open conversation about what’s happening. And I’d like to leave one key message to the audience, which is, guys, we all have to play our part, right? So any which way we can be involved without even being more mindful of our own energy consumption? Let’s start there. Or being able to adopt solar or try something new. We got to do it. It’s up to us and we have the tools in our hands. So let’s let’s get to work.

Zal Dastur 32:30
I couldn’t agree more. And that is a great way to end this this episode. Thanks so much, Sam.

Samridh Goyal 32:35
Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity.