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Fighting Misinformation in Renewable Energy: Podcast With Atma Energy
55 Plays4 months ago
The renewable energy industry has its fair share of challenges, like misinformation and grid reliability issues. Atma Energy, co-founded by Jaro Nummikoski and Supratim Srinivasan, is tackling these problems with transparent, value-driven solar and energy storage solutions. In this interview, Jaro shares how Atma Energy educates customers and brings innovative solutions like virtual power plants to improve grid resilience. He also talks about their commitment to fostering a positive company culture and training their team to deliver genuine energy solutions.
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Transcript
Introduction to Green New Perspective Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, you are watching another episode of the Green New Perspective Podcast, the place where we host people from the clean tech space and give them a chance to introduce us all to their innovative tech aimed at combating climate change. Today we are going to focus on the renewable energy sector. and its challenges like misinformation and great reliability issues.
Yaronu Mikovsky on Renewable Energy Innovations
00:00:21
Speaker
My guest today is Yaronu Mikovsky from a company called Atma Energy and today we're going to talk about how they're tackling mentioned issues in renewables with transparency, value-driven solar and energy storage solutions. Stay tuned and enjoy!
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Can you introduce yourself and then tell me a bit more about Atma Energy? When were you founded, your mission, and what makes your company unique? So my name is Yaro Numikovsky. I'm the co-founder and CFO of Atma Energy. My co-founder, Super Tim Srinivasan and I, we met in grad school in 2012, and we were both working in in the industry in solar forecasting. um So we were doing our research in solar forecasting and after we graduated, we both got you know different different job roles in in different areas of ah the solar energy industry. I was working in utility scale solar, so we built large scale solar farms in
00:01:30
Speaker
west texas particularly serving the san antonio market and my co-founder super tim he was working on the distributed energy side so mostly in residential and commercial solar we remained friends you know after grad school and you know we had many discussions about starting a business and eventually and march of twenty twenty um and exactly March 16th of 2020, we decided to start this business. And then in March 20th, the entire world shut down for COVID. And so that was a very you know interesting start to our to our business. At that time, we were we were all remote. We had a few other members of our team. We were all working remote. So it wasn't really that big of a challenge. you know It was a little bit difficult to to reach out to customers. where you know
00:02:15
Speaker
weren't able to meet with people face to face at that time. So we worked around those challenges, but you know we started we started then in 2020 and we've been growing as a business ever since and you know doubling in size almost every year. Yeah, that leads us to today. And what inspired you to focus on providing solar and battery solutions? So for SuperTim and I, we we we really wanted to focus on providing value to customers. the value that solar We know that the value that solar has for for customers. it's um Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation and just different tactics that are not beneficial to to consumers in the solar area.
00:02:54
Speaker
so So we wanted to kind of provide a solution and provide provide a way for consumers to get a you know the best value out of solar and energy storage. um So that's kind of what drew, what led us to to found out in energy. What kind of misinformation? Oh, that's a good question. So, you know, if you're on, say, any social media website, Facebook, LinkedIn, any of those, or mostly in Facebook and those kind of places, you get lots of misinformation about, you know, oh, the government's offering a free solar program or Texas will buy solar panels for you and put them on your house. That is, that is what the industry is bombarded with, you know, non-stop, the impression that people get about solar often. um And that's unfortunate because, you know, obviously that's not true.
Misconceptions and Marketing in Solar Energy
00:03:39
Speaker
Nothing's ever free. So, but there are good government incentives for for going solar. that That is true, but it is not free. Another challenge is that there are many solar companies that come come into the market and really their primary goal is to gain a bunch of customers in a short period of time and
00:03:58
Speaker
maybe sell off ah sell off their projects and then close shop, not provide any further service to customers. And so that creates a lot of negativity in the industry from people that have gone solar. So you end up with a lot of people you know reviewing solar on on various platforms and they're saying that you know solar is not a great investment. I got solar on my house and it's it's not what I i was promised and all all those kind of things. and So that kind of just paints this picture of solar being a bad investment or not something you should do and that's that's ultimately not true. While it's not necessarily you know solar is not necessarily right for everybody but for those people that that have a great roof for it or you know are you know have the correct ah circumstances it it can be a really good investment. That's our goal as Atma Energy is to
00:04:43
Speaker
to lead people to understanding their their needs and what what the solar can truly provide for them and make that a possibility. Yeah, you mentioned that renewable energy in general has seen growth in recent years and what major trends are you seeing in solar? um So in solar, I mean, solar energy energy has been, you know, I would say pretty mainstream for the last five to 10 years. We're, of course, seeing lots of increases in you know panel efficiencies and things like that that are making solar more affordable for customers. But I would say one of the biggest trends recently in solar really comes down to energy storage. Here in Texas, back in 2021, we had a a large winter storm that
00:05:25
Speaker
knocked out ah power to a lot of the customers in Texas. It lasted for for some people you know as long as four or five days without power. At that point, people realized that you know we have some unreliability in our grid. After that, we saw a large spike in energy storage sales, and we really leaned into that heavily after that after
Impact of Texas Winter Storm on Energy Storage
00:05:46
Speaker
that time. It's always been our intent, but since that time, it's really been a lot easier because that message is there people are wanting resiliency and reliability and and that's something that solar and energy storage can provide and it does so in a green way you don't have to have a noisy polluting generator on the side of your house not saying that generators are bad generators are sort of a great purpose and for some people they are absolutely necessary if they want long-term reliability but but for a lot of people solar and energy storage works really well
00:06:20
Speaker
and How has the policy landscape for renewables changed in recent years, especially in Texas? That's where you're based, and how does this impact the companies like yours? no There haven't been any challenging policies coming up. There have actually been some beneficial ones. In Texas, we have ah our grid regulator is called ERCOT. And ERCOT recently came out with a a program called ADER. Essentially what the program is though, it allows solar and battery systems to aggregate and those aggregated systems to be used to provide services to the grid, like discharging during peak times and and that type of thing.
00:06:58
Speaker
So it's it's something that wasn't really available to to smaller energy storage systems before. um But that that recently came about in the last two, year and a half. It's been a big help for the industry in terms of how energy storage can can be utilized. Well, you mentioned challenges with miscommunication. So how do you ensure your company's values are reflected in your marketing? and communication efforts and as that least sales i think ah the the best answer to that is um
00:07:29
Speaker
our company culture when we when we make hires right now because we're still relatively small organization we have about twenty twenty five team members. I'm involved in a lot of the hiring decisions, and we get to see you know ah people personally and and learn about their the justification for you know wanting to work with us. We have a very, very strong company culture here in that you know we know our our mission is to to serve customers with the best solutions possible. So we don't necessarily hire people from existing solar energy industry. We like to train people from outside of that, outside of the industry, and you know kind of teach them
00:08:07
Speaker
People that have the same mission as us as humans, we like to train those people um in in solar energy and and then get them on the same wavelength as us. have ah We have a lot of really good leaders in our company and they all got into the same mission statement as as our founders. That helps you know kind of permeate through the organization. By having that company culture existing in the organization, that allows our messaging to come across um in a genuine way. And that's really the that's really the key point there is that because this is truly who we are and what we're looking to do, our messaging comes across as genuine and and honest. the yeah It is challenging, of course, to say, you know hey, we are we are honest. Trust us. You can't come out.
00:08:53
Speaker
that on, you know, directly. So it has to be in those unspoken things that you do in the way that you communicate with customers and the way that you interact with them. We, you know, we get a lot of praise from our customers after working with them, how communicative we were and how, you know, how would they just really enjoy the experience and making a positive customer experiences is really one of our biggest goals. And how did you come to that, that you were not actually employing people directly from solar, or at least not all, ah but doing those types of trainings? Yes. So the the reason we came to that the realization is that we dealt with and we've interviewed a lot of, or and we've actually had several people from you know the solar industry. And I'm not saying that this is ah pervasive you know throughout the industry, but ah particularly on the sales side, there there's a lot of money to be made for in
00:09:44
Speaker
in sales of solar and um and therefore people will use many different tactics to make as much money for themselves and that kind of behavior is not necessarily what we're what we're looking for as a company. I'm not saying that our our sales staff does not do well for themselves but the the key is it's not they're rewarded for providing a great value and an honest transaction to a customer rather than tricking someone into into making a decision and then only for that person to later regret their decision. So it's very hard to um untrain that behavior from from people. Once they've learned something, one way of doing it, it's very hard for us to kind of reverse that. So it's easier to start with people that have the correct behaviors in in place and teach them solar aspect. That's kind of the way we've gone about that. and That's an interesting take. We are a marketing agency, as you know, and
00:10:41
Speaker
we do what was being called a sustainable marketing. I guess that's what you've been mentioning that relies on authenticity and transparency. I mean, that's how you should communicate in in clean energy overall. But yes, I agree with you. There's a lot of greenwashing there, not just on the sales side, but on the PR side as well. So yeah it's important to talk about this. I'm glad that you do what you do and that you're trying to change this. I think it's important to mention the impact of marketing value in clean tech communications. With that in mind, how do you see the industry evolving in the next couple of years and what role will your company play in the future?
Distributed Electricity Models and Virtual Power Plants
00:11:20
Speaker
So the industry at large, you know one of the things that's happening in the energy industry or you know electricity industry, there's ah where we're coming to this shift from the centralized one-way flow of electricity to a more distributed model.
00:11:36
Speaker
um and a more resilient model. So our goal as a company is to truly to enable the adoption of virtual power plants. So virtual power plants are you know the aggregations of many different solar and battery assets, put them you know aggregate them together and to serve a purpose for the grid. As a company, we are looking to ah to provide this service to to utilities um to be kind of a turnkey provider for virtual power plants.
00:12:09
Speaker
And so we do this by by working with with consumers and with utilities and kind of bringing them together to make to make this product whole. The industry in general has kind of ah this us versus them. ah mentality when it comes to solar, us being the consumer and them being the utility. It's always a kind of a antagonistic relationship, saying that all the utilities, charging you know raising your you know electricity rates, you should go solar to combat that, get off the grid completely. um Whereas we see the the actual benefit being so much larger if you can provide solutions that that kind of bridge the gap between the consumer and the
Atma Energy's Pilot Program for Home Energy
00:12:52
Speaker
utility.
00:12:52
Speaker
are there any exciting partnerships projects announcements on the horizon of for o energy so recently in november we just announced our first virtual power plant program um with a a cooperative, electric cooperative that's here nearby in San Antonio. It's a one megawatt pilot program. um It's about 90 homes that are participating in the program. So essentially it's ah a homeowner that's interested in solar and they have the they have an energy storage system that is placed at their home that they subscribe to. And this this battery is utilized by the utility most of the time, most of the
00:13:33
Speaker
most of the year whenever there's ah you know a need for the utility say to to support the grid and then if there's ever an outage then the the battery can be is is utilized by the homeowner to provide backup. So it's it's kind of a win-win scenario for the utility and the homeowner where the utility is getting the the value out of the battery most of the time and instead of the battery just sitting there at the customer's home just waiting for an outage event. So the utility gets to utilize it and the homeowner gets to utilize it whenever there's an outage. um And therefore you're kind of, you know, everybody wins in that scenario. So we recently started this one in November. We're still enrolling participants into the program and getting those assets built. We'll look to probably complete that by the end of this year. That's one that we actually have in operation and
00:14:22
Speaker
we We have a few other ongoing conversations to build much larger virtual power plants. We're excited to you know make an announcement here in the next couple months about something much larger, um you know kind of the next steps. But as I mentioned, virtual power plants, you know being a turnkey provider of virtual power plants is kind of what we're we're really driving for as a business because it's we believe it has the largest impact to the to the state. And are there any innovations in a battery tech that you are excited about looking ahead?
Future of Battery Technology and Long-term Solutions
00:14:52
Speaker
In battery technology, yes. I mean, since I mentioned that to the winter storm that happened in 21, there have been a lot of new entrants to the battery technology industry. Right now, everything is more based on short duration energy storage, you know, lithium chemistry batteries.
00:15:09
Speaker
They all have similarities and ah some are you know somehow are a little bit safer, some are a little bit a little bit and more energy dense. I think as we go forward in the next you know few few years, five years maybe, um there's going to be some you know major advancements. It's kind of what happened in the solar energy industry where as more entrants came into the business and started making manufacturing panels, they get better and better at it. Technologies improve and you kind of start improving by leaps and bounds. With energy storage, we're where solar was about 15 years ago, so where we'll start seeing a significant ramp here in the near future. And I think long-term energy storage is something that's still kind of elusive right now, but I think we'll see we'll see some technologies that kind of rise to the top that that'll provide much more solutions you know than what we currently have.
00:15:58
Speaker
Well, we're coming to the end of our conversation here. And one of my last questions for you is what advice would you give to someone looking to enter the renewable energy industry today based on your experience? The industry is where it's it's got a ah lot of upward trajectory still. So for the next foreseeable future, renewables are going to take a ah larger larger portion of the electric share in in the US, I think in the world in general. So, you know, there's a lot of opportunities. In terms of advice, ah you know, I think being in it for the right reasons, you know, providing the value to two utilities and making sure that, you know, you're you're doing it for more than just a quick buck is key and and looking for, you know, building something that's going to last for long term because
00:16:48
Speaker
I think the the companies that you'll see starting in the next next few years will be the, you know hopefully that some of those will will be the large ones that talk about 20, 30 years from now that kind of stuck around and really made a significant change in the industry. And if someone wants to educate themselves on renewables, maybe join some Slack channels, LinkedIn groups, communities, do you have some
Educating in the Renewables Industry
00:17:12
Speaker
recommendations? And of course, tell our audience where they can find you on socials. If they want to DM you, ask you some questions. One of my favorite ways is using LinkedIn, following various various leaders in the market you know that are leading the largest companies in the industry um and following the ah the posts that they make. They're yeah they're often you know
00:17:33
Speaker
kind of provided the ah the most current news in the industry. That's one of my favorite sources for for news and information in the industry. um There are many, many, many different resources, many different conferences that that take place around the country all year. ah that's That can also be a good good source of knowledge. i mean I've been in the industry for 15 years now, so it's It's something that, you know, you accumulate knowledge over time. So there's a lot of information to be had. Don't try to learn it all at once, but find something that excites you and, you know, grab onto that and keep learning. Yes. and wait Where they can find you.
00:18:12
Speaker
Oh yes, to learn more about us, you can visit us at atma-energy.com. That's our website and yeah we have yeah some good resources for for homeowners and and just learn a little bit more about who we are as a company. Well, thank you, Ara, for being my guest here on the Green New Perspective podcast. And I wish you all the luck with the beautiful project that you mentioned that you had going on later this year. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
00:18:46
Speaker
Hey, this is the end of this conversation with Yaronu Mikovsky from Atma Energy.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:18:52
Speaker
And the end of this episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. Of course, this is the perfect time for me to introduce you to our sponsors. Their New Perspective, a Boston-based digital marketing agency working with clean tech clients only. And if you want to see what services they provide to help your business grow, please check out the info in the description. of this episode and if you want to support our efforts here at the Green New Perspective podcast, please consider subscribing to our channel on your favorite streaming platform. We are everywhere so it's easy for you to subscribe. Hopefully you enjoyed the conversation and if you did, I'll catch you in the next one. Bye!