Why Building Decarbonisation Keeps Stalling

In this episode of Climate Confident, I sit down with Puja Balachander, CEO and co-founder of UpGreen, to explore how commercial landlords and asset managers can accelerate energy efficiency retrofits while keeping costs down.

Buildings account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, yet many remain inefficient due to financial and logistical barriers. UpGreen tackles this by reducing upfront retrofit costs and enabling landlords to recapture savings from tenants, turning sustainability upgrades into a viable business strategy.

We discuss:

• Why 87% of UK commercial buildings must undergo energy upgrades within the next five years to meet regulations.
• How UpGreen's model cuts retrofit costs by up to 80% while recovering 60% of expenses through tenant savings.
• The hidden inefficiencies preventing widespread adoption of energy retrofits, despite their cost-effectiveness.
• The challenges of scaling retrofits across different markets, from the UK’s public energy performance data to Germany’s fragmented regulations.
• The future of retrofits beyond energy efficiency, including climate adaptation measures for flood and heat resilience.

This episode offers practical insights for commercial landlords, sustainability professionals, and policymakers looking to unlock the full potential of building decarbonisation.

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Climate Confident to stay ahead of the latest sustainability trends.

🔗 Show links:
🌍 Learn more about UpGreen: getupgreen.com
📩 Contact me: tomraftery@outlook.com

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Transcript

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We can usually recover on average, around 60% of the costs over the course of their tenants leases through that tenant cost recovery process and up to I mean, that's like sort of the average case scenario. I'd say like the best case scenario is we've seen funds where we can even make it a source of revenue so we can actually 4x their initial investment in those retrofits. And that's not even talking about the carbon savings, of course. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 210 of the Climate Confident podcast, the go to show for best practices in climate emission reductions and removals. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and if you haven't already, be sure to follow this podcast in your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. Before we dive into today's show, a huge thank you to this podcast's incredible supporters. Your backing keeps this podcast going and I truly appreciate each and every one of you. If you'd like to join our community, you can support the show for as little as three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee. Just need to click the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or visit tinyurl. com slash climate pod. Now in today's show, I'm thrilled to be talking to Puja Balachander and in the coming weeks, I'll be talking to. Jenny Morgan about her book on cancel culture. Chris Doherty, the CEO of Joulen, and we'll be talking about electricity grids. Sandhya Sabapathy, who's the head of environment and net zero at Entain. And Faustine Delassalle, who's the executive director of the Industrial Transition Accelerator, and we'll be talking about industrial decarbonisation. But back to today's show, and as I mentioned, my special guest today is Puja. Puja, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Thanks so much for having me, Tom. I'm Puja. I'm the CEO and co founder of Upgreen. At Upgreen we support commercial landlords, large asset managers and property investors to improve the energy efficiency of their building portfolios at scale. And we do so in a couple key ways. One is that we reduce the amount of capex required to actually do those retrofits in the first place. And we align interests with tenants as well so that we're able to actually capture back some of those savings that they achieve as a result of those retrofits so that owners actually get an ROI on their initial investment while they still get a net savings. Nice. And how did you come up with this idea, Puja? Because you are co founder and CEO of Upgreen. So where did it all come from? What's the origin story? Yeah, so I actually have nothing to do with real estate and have never kind of worked in this area before. I started my career actually in government. So I was working in the US in the Obama administration. Then I worked for the World Bank and then I worked for the city of Austin. So kind of local all the way to sort of international level government organisations around making public services more effective. And mostly worked in kind of product and design and innovation along those lines on everything from preventing seniors from falling, to police accountability and child welfare system reform. So really, really quite wide ranging stuff, but always in the sort of like innovation design product space. And then went ahead and did my MBA. That's what brought me to the UK initially. And so I did that at Oxford where I started my first company and that was in health tech. We were digitizing child psychology interventions and making them accessible to parents of children under five. That was an exciting journey, and we, after about three years, ended up selling it to a U. S. company that now sells it into state and local child welfare agencies, so a bit of a full circle moment in my career there. But after that, I started working for a VC that invests in early stage climate tech startups, called Carbon 13. And in the process, that's really where I came up with the idea for UpGreen. I was getting pitched by so many companies that were working in the built in environment and basically working on this retrofit challenge which is that all of these interventions around retrofit have existed pretty much forever. You know, insulation is not new. Double glazing your windows is not new. Like, none of this is new stuff. And in fact, it's all pretty cheap stuff, too. It's not just, it's not that it's expensive or something, or there's new technology that you need to validate and then roll out. Yet, there is so like so much less of it is in the market than there should be. You know, the U. K. has one of the oldest housing stocks in the world. Commercial buildings here waste around 20 to 30% of energy annually in the U. K. around 87% of buildings require these upgrades within just the next five years to meet regulatory standards as well. So it's not that there isn't an incentive to make these things happen yet, Mhm. they're just not happening at the scale that you would expect them to be so often, you know, I come from an innovation background. You often look for, like, what is the weird behavior that doesn't seem to make sense? And this is like a very obvious sort of why isn't this already happening kind of moment? And so basically, like what I was getting pitched by a lot of these companies was that the reason this isn't happening is because the data is missing on these buildings and to some extent that's true. So when we've even spoken to real estate investors or landlords, sometimes they don't know the year that the building was built. Or, just really basic stuff about the buildings that are in their portfolios. Of course, they know, you know, the rent per square foot and they have predictions on what that rent per square foot will be. But I think other than that, a lot of that information on those buildings is lost or missing or just, in a different part of the organization. it's quite siloed, something along these lines. So people were pitching us that that data is just missing, so people don't actually know what to do. And then the other side is that, okay, then once they have that data, there's actually so much of it, it's difficult to then make sense of it all, to understand, okay, what's to make a business plan that you can actually, you know, invest into basically for some of these retrofits. And to some extent, you know, I believed it. I have seen that that is actually a problem, but there were two challenges that I found in in my VC job. So one was that, just everyone was coming up with the same thing. It just felt like a really, really crowded space. And then I think the other side was that, okay, now there are some leading players in that area. There are some strides being made around getting the data and making, and there are consultants who have been supporting with this. Yet these projects are still not happening. So it feels like everyone is swimming in reports. Everyone knows what to do, but no one is doing it. And so then I reached out to, as part of our diligence process, some of the real estate investors, property managers, whoever, that are sort of in our network. And what I heard across the board was that, yeah, it's all well and good to get this report, but actually we don't have the capex to invest in improving the buildings. So when they actually make these initial transactions, and they have these predictions of like, okay, I can increase the rent by this much over this time period, I'll make this much money on it, I'll exit it in this time frame, you know, they're not taking into account that they're going to make a massive investment in retrofitting over that time period. And so they've never budgeted that in. So they're not going to do it. It doesn't make sense for their business model. And so that was sort of the aha moment for me that I, that felt like the gap between where everyone else is sort of focusing and where the actual barrier to implementation lies. And so that's what I, that's what really started me on my journey with upgrading was, okay, how do you, first of all, reduce that capex required in the first place to something that's more realistic. And then the other side is, okay, is there a way, and as part of that is there a way to even get back some of that money because, you know, their tenants are the ones that are actually getting these operational savings at the end of the day, you know, the big game changer would be, how do you turn this from a compliance expense that no one wants to make into actually a source of revenue where people really see it as an investment? Okay. So then you set up UpGreen to do this. Exactly, exactly. And I, and definitely there's been so much iteration in terms of how we do that. So the 1st, for example, 1 of my 1st ideas was that we would generate carbon credits for these projects, so effectively in the same way that, you know, you generate carbon credits from preserving a forest or from planting a tree. You would generate carbon credits from basically saving carbon from doing these retrofit interventions on buildings that otherwise wouldn't have had these retrofits done. And that way you can fund them separately as well, because different people can effectively invest in those projects, generate carbon credits and get, the offsets from doing that, basically. And so I thought that would be like a kind of elegant solution, but that being said, I actually looked into it and it was an incredibly complex way of doing that. So one of the challenges with that, I think one of the core challenges was that you have to prove additionality when you're generating a carbon credit. So, I mean, this is something I know from my day job in climate VC, but basically if you're generating a carbon credit, you need to prove that this carbon removal wouldn't have happened in any other way if you weren't there, which is really difficult to do in this context, because you're not basically saying, you know, you're protecting this forest, which would have otherwise been, exploited for some reason or other. You're basically saying. You're investing in this building that would never have been invested in, and it's quite difficult to prove that it would never have been invested in, basically, without you. Okay. I think the, and so that's like the core challenge, I would say. And that's what makes it really difficult to create a framework that's then verifiable, and that other people will buy credits from, and all these things. And of course, then, even assuming you did all that, every carbon credit project struggles with actually pre selling those credits. There are so few buyers, all of these sort of things. So it basically felt like actually quite an inefficient way of solving the problem. And in the process of doing this whole carbon credit, like sort of deep dive, I found that there are enough savings and sort of levers that you can pull to make just the core business work. So what I mean by that is there are a few levers that change the economics of these retrofit projects. So one is the projects that you do themselves. Most of the time when people get sort of a retrofit plan, they get a comprehensive retrofit plan. So they get everything that you could possibly do to make this building as energy efficient as possible, rather than actually, here's like the minimum few things that would make the biggest difference per pound spent. And so I think the first is, okay, what are the projects you're actually choosing? You can like significantly narrow that list by being quite intense about, what the ROI is on each of those interventions and the specific attributable ROI to each one. So that's one. The other is the savings that you're getting from that. So who is the savings going to and how much of it can you take back? So, for example, if I'm able to do some insulation on a building and I know that that will save you like 10% on your bills, we can capture, 2% of that, we can capture, 99% of that 10% that you're saving, and that will change the economics of your project as well. And then finally, another lever is around the pricing of the interventions themselves. So if you you Google and you go on Trustpilot and you find someone to do insulation in your house, they will give you a certain price that's usually, about 30% margin on whatever their materials costs and labor costs something along these lines, because of course they have to make money too. But when you're able to actually aggregate a lot of those projects and give them in volume, a) it makes their job easier because they're doing the same project over and over. They're not doing, having to like spec and design something new for each building, which is what happens when you put so many of these things together. The other side is that of course, you're giving them a lot more business, and so you end up getting a discount. So instead of let's say a 30% margin, you get a 10 or 20% margin, which significantly reduces the cost at that scale. And so the price at which you're doing these projects is another sort of lever that you have around reducing that cost. So I think between the projects you're actually doing, the price at which you're doing them and the savings you're able to recover, you can significantly change those unit economics to make those retrofit projects work. Those are really the levers that Upgreen is focused on. So we have an analysis sort of product that identifies those minimum projects necessary across a portfolio that will move your EPC to the minimum standard at the lowest cost. Then we have a network of installers. So we've partnered with the Installation Assurance Authority and we've partnered with 150 installers through them to effectively get much better pricing on those projects that we bring to them. And then finally, we work with their tenants. actually scope how much money they will save based on the project that we're doing in their unit. And then we set a fee that's a percentage of that savings. Basically, they pay us monthly and we pass that back to the owners. So we're able to change those unit economics. And just to give you some high level numbers, we can generally reduce the cost of a retrofit compared to like a full plan by around 80%. And then we can usually recover on average, around 60% of the costs over the course of their tenants leases through that tenant cost recovery process and up to I mean, that's like sort of the average case scenario. I'd say like the best case scenario is we've seen funds where we can even make it a source of revenue so we can actually 4x their initial investment in those retrofits. And that's not even talking about the carbon savings, of course. okay. Can you talk about the carbon savings? Yes, we definitely can. So I could to give you like a little bit of context in the first place the built environment contributes around 40% of global carbon emissions. So it is a massive chunk in terms of what we're talking about. Commercial buildings waste 20 to 30% of energy annually. And I think that the interesting thing to think about there is that there are sort of a few things that are really contributing to that commercial energy usage. One is their operational usage, right? So, for example, if you're in a restaurant or using an oven or stove or whatever, all of those things take power, sometimes gas, sometimes electricity. But all of those contribute to your energy usage. On the other hand, there's the things that are due to your building. So that's embodied carbon. That's like the actual material of your building, which is not as much what we're focused on, but things like, okay, you're running, your heating, but you're running it over time because your building is really leaky or your windows are really leaky or whatever it is. We're really focused on those sort of fabric elements of the building itself that make the biggest difference in terms of the energy usage of those commercial units. The other thing to note, I think I mentioned this earlier is that 87% of buildings require upgrades within five years to meet the current regulations that are out there. So there are sort of, you know, incentives for getting this stuff done. And there's a deadline basically. I think in terms of the carbon numbers more than a billion square feet of commercial property in the UK. That's under EPC E. So, you know, C is kind of the, the goal that we're trying to get to by 2030, but there's still a billion square feet of property that's, you know, two levels below that or below. And that technically at the moment can't be let or sold. So according to the current regulation, if it's under EPC E, they need to bring it up to at least an E in order to even rent it or sell it, even to renew the current tenants leases. So there's a significant sort of like urgency on that side as well. And what we know is that each square meter releases around 11. 65, so around 12 kilograms of CO2 emissions per year. So our beachhead, so just that EPCE and below that needs to be done immediately releases around 190,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. So it's a pretty big, just even though that, that beachhead market of what needs to change immediately is a massive opportunity. And as you're extending and kind of just doing this low hanging fruit stuff across and getting it to the minimum energy efficiency standard by 2030. You can really make a dent in that 40%. Right. Okay. And you're talking specifically about the UK. How does the UK compare to other countries in tackling energy efficiency? I mean, you said it's got some of the oldest housing stock and property stock in the world. How are other countries doing? And is this something that you'll be able to help other countries with as well? I mean, you're building your platform based on regs in the UK, will that be transferable? Can you kind of copy and paste into other markets? So you do have quite a similar regulatory environment in the EU. For example, I mean, each country does differ slightly, but for example, Germany, France have very, very similar kind of regulatory regimes. There's some countries that are much, much further ahead. So countries like the Netherlands, for example, one of our clients has some buildings in the Netherlands as well. We were speaking to their team and they literally couldn't find a single building that was bad, or badly performing enough for us to be able to support them with because they've already needed to renovate everything to get it to a certain standard. So they're really thinking about getting things from a C to an A, not getting things from an E to a C. So I think there are countries where regulation has already incentivised quite a bit of progress, which, to be honest, is not really our focus. So we haven't really focused as much on those markets. But I would say places like Germany, places like France have a lot of the same characteristics as the buildings in the UK. That being said, I think the UK is actually relatively further ahead because of the public data that's available. So France and the UK actually have all of the energy performance data. So all of these commercial buildings as well as residential buildings, commercial buildings need to have an energy performance assessment done every 10 years. And all of that data is currently public in the UK, and that's actually quite helpful. I mean, there's a lot of problems with it. Lots of startups will tell you, or lots of people will tell you about all the problems with energy performance certificates and how inaccurate they can be. But that being said, at least you have a baseline on all the buildings, which does not exist, for example, in a place like Germany, where that is not public data. So when we work with our clients that have buildings in Germany, they have to send us individual kind of PDF reports for each building that has not all of this data, but some of this data in it. You have to parse through it and sort of you lack that much larger data set to effectively build like AI algorithms or ML algorithms that would help make your predictions much, much more accurate. So I think that's definitely a challenge in the German market in particular. And that's actually where we're starting at the moment outside the UK. So we are working with our current clients that have holdings in Germany as well for us to start working on some of those buildings. But yeah, these are exactly kind of the challenges that we're running into. The other thing that we have struggled with in, in that market as well is that, they do their energy performance assessments on a building level and not a unit level. So that's the other nice thing about the UK is that you effectively have much more specific data because you have data on every single unit within a building, which helps us in our, especially in our model, because we work with tenants actually recover some of their costs. So we need to know on a per unit level what's what's in it for them specifically, not just what's in it for their building. So I think that's that's a bit of a struggle as well as we're having to adapt our algorithms and our product to be able to actually predict what's happening on a per unit basis based on the information we have on a building. And so that's a little bit of a challenge in the German market as well. And part of our internationalisation challenges. But that being said, I think a lot of the regulatory environment is quite similar. I think some of the data availability is different and the way they measure energy efficiency can be a little bit different. I think the final thing is that in Germany in a lot of these countries, the way the regulations work in terms of how much the tenant is responsible for versus how much the owner is responsible for can be super different. So for example, in Germany, you can pass on a lot more of the costs for renovations, if it's certain types of renovations to a tenant. So effectively, you can either increase their rent or increase their service charge to cover those costs, which reduces, I suppose, our value proposition in those markets. But I think the nice thing is that when we, it is like, I guess ours is a bit more of a tenant friendly proposition. So effectively, rather than just increasing your rent, we will actually save you some money and like quantify that we're taking we'll allow you to still keep some basically. So as opposed to just going off of the costs. And likely having that be more than any savings that you're going to be achieving, because we sort of do that optimisation problem in the first place of only doing the projects where capturing back a portion of the savings will cover the initial costs, you're guaranteed to basically not have to pay more than that. And so, I think in that way, we've been trying to figure out kind of what our marketing strategy is in in Germany and in places where those regulations kind of exist, because effectively, this is a much more tenant friendly way of getting those same interventions done than just having that cost blindly passed on. Right. And you're originally from the US are you looking at the North American market as well? We are. I think there's definitely much more variability in terms of the energy efficiency regulation and how strict people are in even on a city by city basis, let alone on a kind of state by state basis, for example, in the US. So, for example, New York has I'm forgetting what the number is, but it's a local law, something that basically has a carbon limit. So you, you basically have a carbon threshold for the amount of carbon that your building can emit, and then you pay taxes on anything above that. So, there's a lot more incentive, basically, to actually retrofit the older buildings in New York. Also, the other side is like New York City has older buildings compared to, let's say, the West Coast. And so you have more opportunity as well. So a lot of the same incentives exist there. We are looking at the US market as well. We just haven't, a lot, our current clients have mostly their holdings in the EU and UK. So we're really focused on sort of expanding through the properties that they already have. California also has something quite similar. We've just applied to something with San Francisco around doing something similar for their city. But yeah, I think we're in much earlier days. There is a lot of data available though on US buildings as well. They have an Energy Star dataset that's similar to the EPC dataset, but updated more regularly and in a better, slightly better quality. So I do think actually once we get to that market, It will actually be easier to roll out, but we'll have to be a lot more specific in terms of where those geographies are that are enabling for our solution. I think eventually we'd like to use the data that we've collected on doing all of these projects and understanding where they were before, what we've done and how the energy performance improves over the course of whenever that tenant's lease ends. So three years, eight years, whatever. We'll kind of get that longitudinal data that will enable us to eventually finance retrofit. So I think we'll eventually move from being this kind of implementer hoovering up the low hanging fruit retrofit across these markets to a financer of retrofit, both for energy efficiency, but also maybe even more interestingly for climate adaptation. I mean, that's a much bigger market, right? There's a lot of buildings that need flood protection, fire protection, all of these things that eventually come down to large CapEx investments that you need to make, or, or smaller, but whatever, CapEx investments that you need to make in retrofitting these buildings to be capable of withstanding the future. And so, we can be the ones who finance that because we have the data set and the relationships with tenants, owners, and installers to do so. Okay. And I mean, just taking a step back and kind of a macro view, what role do you see startups like yours playing in bridging the gap between legislation and market readiness? Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit the nail on the head. You know, the legislation exists. But until the unit economics work and the business case works, no one is going to move. And to be honest, there's very little incentive for the legislators to actually enforce laws when the unit economics and business model doesn't work. Because, if you want a thriving commercial real estate sector in your city, you're not going to force people to spend a bunch of money they don't have. Or force them to pay fines to do so or something along these lines, you know, it's very difficult even once you've set that law to then enforce it In light of kind of economic and social development goals as well. It's a ripe area for startups to basically figure out how to correct some of those market inefficiencies. So I think it wasn't until we tried and we really kind of Frankensteined together this model around how do we reduce the capex as much as possible by looking at the projects that we're actually doing, the price that we're doing it at, and the savings that we can get back from tenants. And it was only once you had all three of those things that you could make the unit economics kind of work. No one of them was enough. And so, it was only over time that you were able to figure out, okay, like, this is how you can kind of rearrange these players to make it work and sort of make that legislation doable. And then, of course, like now we work with a lot of councils. We work with a lot of government bodies who are interested in making our model more widespread because it's a way of aligning everyone's interests and making it so that your economic goals are not sort of in conflict with your carbon and climate change mitigation goals. So I think there's a huge role for startups to play in identifying so many of those opportunities. Like, for example, again, in my VC job, there are so many people that are looking at things like regenerative agriculture, another area where, you know, it seems like a no brainer, you know that it will increase yields over time, but there's this like time in between where you know, your returns are going to be lower, and it is a CapEx investment in the first place in terms of foregone income in that early, early time period, and then there's all of these other sort of like almost fake feeling barriers to the barriers to market, right, things like you've already invested in certain equipment that now you won't be able to use, or you're locked into contracts, or you have a bunch of fertiliser sitting in your warehouse that you now need to use. You know, there's so much of that stuff that feel fake, but actually are real reasons why these things don't happen. And so I think, you know, there's so many startups that I see coming through the door as well, who have really identified where there's sort of this no brainer solution that in theory works economically. In theory, it works in terms of the climate as well in terms of human health, you know, not using all these pesticides and all these things. It's a very good thing. It you know, checks all these boxes yet it's not happening. So I would I think like what I often tell the startups that I work with or the founders I work with is like look for these sort of weird behaviors where something that's a no brainer isn't being used or something that seems bad for everyone is happening all the time and figure out how you can change those market incentives to get a different behavior done. Or get to see a different behavior at the end of the day. And you've worked with some high profile clients like Siemens and Durham County Council. What have been the key learnings from these projects, do you think? I mean, I think a huge learning is that everything takes longer than you think it will, right? I mean, that's the first, right? I mean, I think one of the one of the big ones, not facetiously is that there are tons of stakeholders involved in these sort of things. So, for example, you have the asset managers who are actually managing these buildings. You have the actual tenants, you have the tenants agents that are the ones that are making sure that these buildings are occupied. You have to align so many different people's interests in order to make this whole puzzle work. And so I think so much of that stakeholder engagement that's been happening through Durham Council or through Siemens Real Estate. I mean, you're working with these massive organisations, like I think taking everyone's opinion into consideration for what seems like, you know, especially for me when I first started, it was like, well, easy. We have a product. We did the, we just, just let us do the work now it's done. but I think there's just so many more, people and interests that need to be aligned, perhaps, then you think I think that's one of my first probably takeaways. I think the other in terms of working with Durham and in working with a lot of these other councils is that there are both a lot of real constraints in terms of, there's just very limited budget, for example, in a lot of these councils for doing this kind of work. And so even if you're telling them it's 80% less than it would have been, they can't pay that 20%. And so. More and more, you're realising, okay, this like financing aspect of what we do and being able to forward finance things is actually really, really important. So I think that has maybe moved up on the agenda in terms of working with at least like the public sector sort of bodies that we're working with. I think the other thing that we learned is that there are a lot of like Again, these sort of fake barriers as well. So, for example, it's not just the CapEx, it's that, people are scared of basically spooking their tenants. So they, you know, they, they won't even kind of like mention that there's works that need to be done in their building because suddenly the tenant will say, Oh yeah, you're right. You know, these works do need to be done. You should do that. And they don't want to be in under sort of more scrutiny by their tenants potentially. The other side is like, you know, for example, we worked with a smaller landlord that only had eight buildings in East London but one of the challenges that we faced with them was that No news was good news between the tenant and the landlord. So opening any sort of line of communication, there was just such an uphill battle with getting that. And we learned that kind of, it's actually more effective for us to approach the tenants directly than it is sometimes to, have the landlord introduce us. So there's so many of these kind of learnings there's even things like, for example, people want the projects that we do insured, which is sort of a duh moment, but it wasn't until one of our clients asked us, you know, okay, now you're doing these 50 projects, is the quality of them insurable that we realised, okay, okay, we need to be able to insure these projects and that adds 20% to our costs. And then another side is that they're like, okay, when the tenants are actually paying us back, is that taxable revenue? Or is it counted as a reimbursement for what we've already spent? And we've had to look into that and speak to lawyers and accountants. And then it's like, yes, it is actually taxable revenue. And so that's another bit that we have to like, sort of take into account with our model as well. So I think it's only in the process of doing it and working with these much larger players that need to comply with all these regulations and have these massive sort of compliance. departments, again, like with the councils, they can never tender. So if they're, if they're running a procurement process, even if they want to work with us, we need to find at least two other people who can deliver the same service. Ironically, we have to find our own competitors, but we haven't, we, we struggle to sometimes find people that are doing the same thing that we are to get them to even bid for things. And so I think there's just like so many of these kinds of barriers that you don't realise. When you're thinking of your elegant startup idea in your head and, and in particular, when you're working with a lot of these much larger players that are, you know, we're working with Around Town, for example, and they're a publicly traded company. I mean, it's just so much more risk averse than, than you expect. And looking ahead, looking at the future of the built environment and the future of UpGreen. What, what trends are you most excited about? I think future of built environments. There is just so much both existing and new technology to be deployed. I think people are genuinely so excited. I mean, there are so, for example, I mean, again, in my VC, we will get so many material startups that are coming up with new sort of carbon negative materials for the built environment or much more effective ways of or cost effective ways of doing of heating a building that sort of thing. So there's so many kind of jets in terms of technology where like a real true new innovation is necessary where there are so many of those and people are actually much more willing to trial those things and bring them in and bring down the carbon as as a way of tackling that 40% number, you know, like you're biting down some of that. Then there's this whole category of like all this technology that already exists that just needs to be deployed, like the easy stuff like insulation things that we're doing. And then it's more about like, okay, what are the market inefficiencies that need to be corrected to roll those out? And then I think as the legislation actually ramps up. So right now we're looking at C by 2030. But they're looking at things like B and A by 2040 2050. So there are more ambitious targets coming up as well. And I think hopefully that will spur more ambitious action. But like I said, the legislation is not enough. It just changes the goalpost. Eventually, you still need to change the unit, economics, the economics and business model of, you know, that intervention to make it work with people's business plans. And so that will bring some new challenges as well as some new opportunities, which I think is exciting. And then finally, like I said, I think the next big thing in built environment is not just carbon mitigation or energy efficiency. It's actually going to be adaptation as well. So there's a ton of retrofit that needs to happen for, for example, like cooling buildings much more effectively in a zero carbon way as the climate heats up. And I think there are huge opportunities in that area as well. Okay, cool. Left field question. Nice. could have any person character alive or dead, real or fictional as a spokesperson for zero carbon buildings, what would it be? Who would it be and why? That's a good question. I need to think on that one. Maybe the Lorax. From, from Dr. Seuss, you know, he's the Lorax, he speaks for the trees. I think something along those lines, an an interesting little character like that could be a fun one for, for the built environment, but maybe more seriously, I think I'm trying to think who's the sort of like dirtiest business person, the most sort of like Ayn Rand esque like business person that would, that, that, that could make it, that, that really will show that this is you know, an economic proposition at the end of the day, not sort of a do gooder proposition. I think that's sort of the, I mean, that's a, that's a challenge that we are getting as well all the time is that we're sort of, for example, referred to an ESG team or a sustainability team, and it isn't until we kind of get to the asset manager or the fund manager who really sees that, oh, this is like a chance for me to save money or make money great. Then things move so much so much faster than when we're sort of stuck in that other stuff part of the business. So I think my you know, like my rose colored glasses on is like I love I would love to have the Lorax be our spokesperson. I think my True. My clear eyed glasses on maybe, I don't know, like Peter Thiel or someone who I kind of detest in real life, but maybe would get the right people moving. Fair enough. Fair enough. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Puja. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? I don't think so. I think we've discussed most of what I wanted to hit on. I think the last thing that I would say is maybe, around just the role of the tenants of these buildings. So, you know, we're looking at commercial buildings really who we're talking about are small and medium enterprises that are the ones who are both suffering because they've seen energy bills skyrocket and their margins go down pretty significantly, and they represent, you know, 90% of businesses globally. They contribute 50% of global employment. They have limited budgets and even assuming they kind of wanted to do, quote unquote, the right thing around mitigating their carbon and making themselves more efficient, they would be facing the challenge of, okay, they have a high upfront cost. And then they have to get permission from their landlord and deal with all this complication in order to even do that. And so I think in all of this, it can be really easy to sort of either tinker around the edges where it's, you know, there's kind of three things that, that impact their energy bills, right? There's their actual consumption, like how are they, You know, what are the appliances that they use? That sort of thing for their building, then there's their actual fabric of their building, which matters, And they have no control over. And then the energy prices, which matters. And they have no control over. And so I think through our partnerships and, and, you know, our approach, for example, we also work with a company called Tariff Tribe. they'll help companies get a better tariff. So we're able to actually work on those two biggest explaining factors, the bit of their building and the price, the things that they currently have no control over. And so I think both by sort of aligning those interests, because they do get a savings at the end of the day at no upfront cost And doing so in a way that like really is tackling a big pain point for them. I think the one thing that I do really care about is that we, we, are really SME and tenant friendly. It is not kind of a purely. You know, we're, we're trying to put all the costs on them, which is often sort of the default when, you know, you're looking at owners who who are not wanting to invest in something and wanting to pass those costs on. Yeah, makes sense, Cool. Great. Puja, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? You can go to getupgreen. com to find out more about us, especially if you're an SME or you Or you're a homeowner or so either if you are looking at your own home or your apartment, it doesn't matter if you're renting or owning actually, or if you're a small business, again, whether you're renting or owning your unit, you can fill in just a quick like four questions. It takes under two minutes to put in, and you can get a quote on how much we can finance up front, how much your savings would be, what your monthly fee would be, and how much carbon and energy you would save by doing those interventions. So I'd encourage you to go try that for yourself and check us out and we'd love to work with you. Superb, great. Puja that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.