In the second episode of Solar Coaster Podcast, Wade Allen and Andrew Thomson from the Supply Partners Technical Team are joined by James Allston from Orkestra, a seasoned energy industry expert. Together, they dive into the blue ocean of commercial energy storage and discuss the financial benefits of adding battery capacity to a system. James explains the different types of battery technology and how businesses can model their financial returns to find their optimal battery size.
As the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Orkestra, James discusses how their software came to be, the challenges along the way and the future opportunities. The software is designed to support non-technical people in selling energy projects in an easier, faster and more accurate way than ever.
Join us for an in-depth discussion on commercial energy storage and much more. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride on Solar Coaster Podcast, your go-to for navigating the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Don't forget to subscribe and keep an eye out for the next episode!
ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster! A podcast for navigating through the ups and downs of the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Hosted by the Supply Partners Technical team and joined by industry professionals each episode to help you turn chaos into stability. We'll be talking about solar, batteries, EVs, Electrification and much more, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
LINKS:
In the second episode of Solar Coaster Podcast, Wade Allen and Andrew Thomson from the Supply Partners Technical Team are joined by James Allston from Orkestra, a seasoned energy industry expert. Together, they dive into the blue ocean of commercial energy storage and discuss the financial benefits of adding battery capacity to a system. James explains the different types of battery technology and how businesses can model their financial returns to find their optimal battery size.
As the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Orkestra, James discusses how their software came to be, the challenges along the way and the future opportunities. The software is designed to support non-technical people in selling energy projects in an easier, faster and more accurate way than ever.
Join us for an in-depth discussion on commercial energy storage and much more. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride on Solar Coaster Podcast, your go-to for navigating the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Don't forget to subscribe and keep an eye out for the next episode!
ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster! A podcast for navigating through the ups and downs of the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Hosted by the Supply Partners Technical team and joined by industry professionals each episode to help you turn chaos into stability. We'll be talking about solar, batteries, EVs, Electrification and much more, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
LINKS:
James Allston [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster, a podcast about the ups and downs of the
Andrew Thomson [00:00:04]:
Australian solar industry, brought to you by the technical team at Supply Partners with.
James Allston [00:00:09]:
Host Wade Allen and technical guru Andrew Thomson.
Wade Allen [00:00:13]:
Okay, well, welcome back to the Solar Coaster podcast, brought to you by Supply Partners, australia's leading technical distributor of solar and energy storage equipment. We are not just box movers, but we make your life a heck of a lot easier, bringing you not only technical, but sales support that you need in your business. So you can hopefully stay in the cart on this crazy ride we call the Australian solar industry. My name is Wade Allen, and with me always is my right hand man, Andrew Thomson. Our local what are you, Andrew?
Andrew Thomson [00:00:48]:
You're the it solar guru, solar wizard.
Wade Allen [00:00:51]:
Indeed, our technical guru. How are you doing today?
Andrew Thomson [00:00:54]:
Doing well. I'm pretty excited for this podcast.
Wade Allen [00:00:56]:
Indeed. This is going to be a great podcast and without a doubt, the most sort of topical thing in our industry right now. And it's exciting and it's always evolving and that is energy storage. Everybody wants to know about it. And if you heard our last podcast, we touched on residential. Today we're going to focus on commercial, and to do so, we have brought in a guest who is at the forefront of a game changing software platform that is helping all of you out there that are at the front lines, banging on doors, getting in front of decision makers. And they have developed a tool to make your presentations, your solutions, your life way more legitimate and way easier. From Orkestra, we have the co-founder, the co-CEO, the co cheese, Mr. James Allston. Thank you, sir, for coming.
James Allston [00:01:48]:
Thank you very much, Wade. Yeah, good to be here.
Wade Allen [00:01:50]:
Well, yeah, and thank you for coming all the way up here. You reside in Hobart?
James Allston [00:01:55]:
I do, yeah. We have 100% remote team of which the team is spread out across the eastern seaboard. But, yeah, I live with my family down in Hobart.
Wade Allen [00:02:04]:
How post COVID of you guys?
James Allston [00:02:05]:
Yeah, very much.
Wade Allen [00:02:07]:
It makes it easy, doesn't it?
James Allston [00:02:08]:
Oh, yeah, it was easy during COVID as well, I have to say.
Wade Allen [00:02:11]:
But no, we really appreciate you making the trip up here because it makes it so much better to have you here as we like to also record this with video, not just audio. And so how do you like the studio? It's pretty.
James Allston [00:02:24]:
Oh, it's very nice. Yeah, very cool. I need one in my office.
Wade Allen [00:02:28]:
Yeah. Well, that's our awesome technical team behind the scenes over there. Luke and James shout out. Thanks, boys. So let's start with a little bit of the history of Orkestra. James, how did it all start and why?
James Allston [00:02:42]:
Yeah, it's a really interesting story, actually. We started off, or I started off as running a management consultancy in New Energy. We call it New Energy Ventures. And we worked with a lot of energy companies and property developers and large energy consumers to basically help them understand the new energy space. So that was a combination of technical, commercial and regulatory advice that we were handing out. And in the course of doing that work, we started developing a lot of models to model new energy projects. So we modelled embedded networks and virtual power plants and what we called second generation PPAs, which integrated with retail contracts. And these were all built in Excel, but we started to touch the sides of Excel's capability, particularly around tariff modelling. Yeah. So we got to the point where we were like, some of these models would take a minute just to process, and we're like, this is just unworkable as a business. So we started moving bits of that, of what we'd built in Excel and putting it into Python code and then having Excel as a front end UI and Python in the back end. And then when COVID hit in 2020, all of our forward revenues dried up as a little management consultancy. No one really wanted to spend any money on strategy projects at that point. And fortunately, we're in lucky position that we had some money in the bank and government was throwing money at small businesses to keep us alive. And we put all of that money from the liberal government thank you very much, into a project looking at the best places in Australia for commercial industrial batteries and virtual power plants. We wrote a white paper still on the new Energy Ventures website and it basically, I think, fired the stardeas Garden for commercial energy storage in Australia. We had lots of large companies set up businesses based on our research and our work there. And to do that research, we wrote a whole package of Python code to do battery modelling. So we put this white paper out in the world and then suddenly everyone wanted to talk to us about battery modelling. And it was at that point we decided that we might need to start thinking about turning this into a piece of software. So I found a graduate engineer, taught him how to do front end development, and we created the initial version, one of the software, by about a year later. After releasing the white paper, we raised some money about ten months after that, and we're about to raise our seed round again in the next coming months. So, yeah, it's a pretty amazing ride, but it's been very much a business that has started in a very grounded place in deep technical commercial modelling at a consulting level, and then taking that knowledge and embedding it into software and making that software available to a much broader audience and to people beyond a technical nature as well. So we're really trying to support people in a selling capacity with this software.
Wade Allen [00:05:45]:
Yeah, it's a great piece of software.
James Allston [00:05:47]:
Thank you.
Wade Allen [00:05:50]:
From what I've played around it's amazing. So why storage? Did you just see that? That was where everything was headed and.
James Allston [00:05:58]:
There was no solution where everything was headed. I mean, it was at a time where everyone was talking about Hornsdale Power Station, and it was a huge amount of interest that was generated right across the board for storage in Australia. And everyone wanted to talk about Contingency FCAS and wholesale market arbitrage, which are the things we'll talk about later in this podcast. But we realised that there must be a really big opportunity in commercial storage that no one had really looked at. All right? So a lot of people were installing residential batteries to improve solar self consumption and maybe provide some backup power, and there's these utility scale batteries that are going on, but no one's talking about commercial energy storage. And when we started doing the analysis, we were like, Holy crap, this is such a big opportunity. And we've had subsequent conversations with people in the space where they're like, oh, yeah, we did some modelling and the numbers were getting so good that we had to tone down the economics because we thought that we were just going to now, but too much commercial energy storage? I'm like, well, that's dumb. This is clearly a huge opportunity. And the barriers that are there are barriers that can be solved with software. So one of the big barriers is just being able to articulate the commercial value of these opportunities to decision makers in a way that's really easy to do. And that doesn't require years of knowledge of tariff modelling, of energy modelling, of designing battery models that you can, and trying to do this in Excel, which, frankly, we think is impossible, and been able to do that in literally minutes. And that is like, in removing that barrier, we have unlocked this whole opportunity for the industry.
Wade Allen [00:07:41]:
The amount of scenarios you can create in a matter of minutes is unbelievable. But we will get into that.
Andrew Thomson [00:07:49]:
Can I just add?
Wade Allen [00:07:49]:
Yeah.
Andrew Thomson [00:07:50]:
I guess over the years, I've attempted, I guess, doing proposals using other software. I think Homer Pro has been used by engineers globally. I consider myself quite it savvy. I've also been in the industry for quite a while, been involved with PPA projects, have a good understanding of all the aspects. But I really struggled using Homer Pro, just a very complicated piece of software that also looks quite, I don't know, antiquated. Yeah. So when we first come across Orkestra, I believe it was at Smart Energy Conference in Brisbane last year, you were doing a presentation. We had no idea who you were, but we thought, hey, we'll give it a go. And I tell you what, we were blown away and when the presentation finished, we just insisted on meeting you and here we are today. So we were definitely impressed.
James Allston [00:08:41]:
Yeah, I mean, when we went and spoke to our customers and we were making the trying to make the decision, do we turn this into software? We were chatting with people and like, okay, what tools are you using today? And Homer was a regular one that came up. Right. It's one of the few pieces of software that's out there that you can actually model that's affordable. Right? There's other options which are crazy expensive, but it's an affordable solution. But the common feedback was you need one analyst to do the work and then another analyst to cheque the first analyst work to make sure they've actually set it up right before you do the model run. We're like, well, that's dumb. So you need $400,000 worth of analytical resource plus a $6,000 piece of software to actually get the results. And so we're like, we need to build a piece of software that's really easy to use, right? So that someone with we sort of say, if you understand how to read an electricity bill, a commercial energy bill, and are able to translate that into a piece of software, which is a fairly straightforward process, and you understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt hour when it comes to sizing a battery, you should be able to use our software. Right? That is like the threshold that we think you should be able to have, which that is a very large number of people right.
Andrew Thomson [00:09:50]:
Should hopefully be the whole solar industry.
James Allston [00:09:54]:
Right?
Andrew Thomson [00:09:54]:
So that's yeah, we're working on that.
James Allston [00:09:58]:
We're working on reading tariffs, but like, that we wanted to make it easy to use, we wanted to make it really fast. So you talked about being able to model hundreds of simulations so you can model 250 different solutions. So different sizes of solar, different sizes of battery, changing tariffs, other sort of changing aspects around the site. And you can do 200 in one hit. We've paralysed that so that all the software is built in AWS. So rather than Homer, where it's a native app, our software is hosted on AWS. When you hit the run button, we take those 250 different solutions that you would need modelled and we give each one its own cloud computer and run them all in parallel time. And so if you ran the analysis on a state of the art MacBook Pro like I have, it's about 4 hours to do that analysis, we can knock it out in under 60 seconds. So it's just absolutely game changing, being able to take all this incredible horsepower and be able to put that into the hands of the average solar installer man.
Wade Allen [00:11:00]:
You could do this right in front of the customer.
James Allston [00:11:02]:
I mean, that's the thing. You really wanted to you can so if the customer has their bill available right there, and you have the interval data, and even if you don't have the interval data, you can use data within our library. You can literally within an hour, set up the site, run several hundred scenarios and be able to have a really valuable conversation with a customer around. What is this solution going to do commercially for you as a business? So a common thing that you might hear as a solar installer is a customer might say something flippant like, I want zero bill. Well, what does that mean exactly from a commercial perspective? Does that mean that they want to go off grid? Because that's technically what zero bill would be like. No bill, right. Or does it mean that you want to have enough revenue off the system in January that it would cover the system? Or do you want enough revenue over the whole year to cover the energy bill and you don't really care about the return? Or do you just want a 15% IRR? And with this software, within an hour, frankly less, you can be able to model all those different scenarios and have a conversation with a customer about this is what zero bill might mean. And what do you actually mean if we drill down to the next level and we try and put this into really tangible, meaningful financial returns? What do you mean by that and which solution are you actually looking for here? And so this software basically takes what would be otherwise probably days of financial analysis and technical analysis and turns it into something you can do under an hour.
Wade Allen [00:12:32]:
Yeah, right. So just to bring it back a little bit before we go too far down the rabbit hole of all the tools that are available for all those listening, I'm sure they want to be able to do something like this. And there's a story in their head and they're telling themselves, I can't do this or it's too hard, or whatever. What do you see from maybe not even the salesperson, but from a business that's looking at getting into this space? What's the hardest thing for them that they're currently not getting by not having Orkestra. If they were to have Orkestra as a tool, how would that help their business?
James Allston [00:13:15]:
Right now, most businesses want to be able to grow, right? That's a pretty typical motivation for many business owners. But where do you start in that growth? Right? You need to be able to start from a position of being able to have a pipeline of projects that you can then go and build up your blue collar workforce and be able to deliver. And Orkestra makes that process so much easier to do. Right. So you might have 20 or 30 different customers, commercial customers that even installed a commercial system. And you can go through all those old customers and within Orkestra, within just a few days, probably even just a day, go through and actually identify what are the optimal solutions for these particular sites and where might be the lowest hanging fruit that we could actually go out and target. We talk about in our business, trying to empower what we call feasibility. First selling, right? So where you start off with the feasibility analysis and you go and try and identify solutions right up front or do this kind of like pre qualification even before you're talking to a customer, if you've got the data. But then in the sales process, start off by trying to model in a way that is relatively light technically compared to other ways of doing it right. You're not jumping into Helioscope and doing panel placements on a roof, you're using our software and you're using the PV Watts integration to kind of get the first pass analysis. And in doing that work and bringing the feasibility forward, you're able to take your most technical resources and you're able to push them further back in the sales cycle. So right now, most solar businesses will have that key resource within a business that is the guru, the technical guru, and for us it's about making that resource have like giving that resource superpowers. What we mean by that is that resource might be drawn into tenders and a quarter of their work actually gets utility. At the end of the day, where you've gone and done all this hard work designing a solution, doing the feasibility analysis, only to present that solution to a customer and the customer goes with a competitor that is like worst possible outcome is the most expensive resource and they're probably one of the lowest productivities in the business. We want to flip that process, right? We want to be able to empower less technical people in your business, maybe the salespeople in your organisation, to be able to have those initial conversations, to be able to take those projects that they've got that are kind of sort of semi qualified to a fully qualified project. And you might even get to the point where you could sign a letter of exclusivity or even sign a contract subject to technical due diligence where the commercials are nailed down and then you send your technical guys to site. Then you go and make sure there's enough capacity in the main switchboard. Then you go and do the fine panel placement on the roof for these projects. And then those technical resources get a multiplication benefit out of their productivity of where they are today. And it's that that will allow solar businesses to be then be able to scale really effectively. Whereas right now to scale means that you have to find another one of these technical people into the business and they become the choke point to the organisation. Now, there's going to be other choke points, like we're removing one of the critical ones and you're going to find other choke points obviously around that mix. You need salespeople that have enough technical knowledge to be able to get into the software. You can't just put anyone in there and you need to have the blue collar workforce afterwards to be able to deliver these projects. But we're dealing with one of the most complicated ones, the hardest to train. Right. You can't go and take any old person and put them in that highly technical role. You need someone with years of experience and we want to be able to take that person and make them so much more powerful than they were before.
Wade Allen [00:17:05]:
That is incredible.
Andrew Thomson [00:17:07]:
Just touching on a point that you mentioned before regarding all of the Feasability analysis and when you're talking about a zero bill, what does that mean? A good example that's come up recently is leading into the end of financial year. I'm getting a lot of inquiries from customers who are saying that, hey, my customer, they have a grant, they have to spend it by end of financial year. We want to give them the biggest, the best system that they can get. So with Orkestra, I suppose in that case, IRR is probably meaningless. It's just here's the capital outlay. What is the best system that we can achieve with this? And Orkestra would be a tool to.
James Allston [00:17:42]:
Yeah, yes, in some ways it would be. But do you just want to go and sell them the bigger system or do you want to go and sell them the biggest system and show the most value that you could possibly get off that system? One of the things that the industry kind of gets stuck on, and this is kind of a legacy of the residential industry, right, is that in the residential space, it's the biggest system you can get on for the cheapest price and no one really cares about the financials. In fact, I could probably guarantee you that most residential systems that have been put in today won't get the payback that anyone's promising them, right. Because they're oversized and the customer's load doesn't coincide with the generation and most of the energy has been getting sent straight to grid and you can see that in the electricity price in the grid. Right. I think that's the other thing. This is real. And if you take that approach and you apply that to the commercial space, you're going to fail. You need to think as a solar installer about the revenue that your system is going to generate by installing it and being able to present that revenue in a really, really accurate way and start talking about returns. So when we look at a battery and we say, are we just going to go and use this battery for solar self consumption? I can guarantee you in a commercial and industrial space that battery will fail economically. Right. You need to now look at a broader range of different revenue options and when you start to open your mind around the different revenue options that are out there, then you will make these opportunities stack up. And it's that approach that I think is really critical. So yeah, you can get that grant money, but what if you can get that grant money. Plus you can show the customer how, with this installation, you're going to get this return that's going to be far more powerful than the next guy who's just said, oh, yeah, we can get a cheaper system.
Wade Allen [00:19:37]:
That's almost perfectly leading us into what I wanted to talk about, and that is the value stack. And your presentation that you gave at the Brisbane Smart Energy Conference talked about that. Exactly. That if you're just going to put in a battery, it's not going to add up. But if you're talking about other things and you guys have the tools built right into this and that's in the site adjustments and in other things. So why don't we just crack open that door a little bit and we can talk technical? But also, let's talk layman as well when we talk about these certain things. So there was basically two different stacks. There was a simple stack and a more complex stack. Let's talk about that simple stack right now.
James Allston [00:20:22]:
Yeah, we talk about them as simple and advanced. Right. And in our world, simple is exclusively behind the Metre value. Right. And what we mean by that is value that is obtained from direct tariff benefits or some other benefit that is created in that side. And you're not looking front of metre. And by front of metre, we're talking about participating in energy markets. So basically, the same kind of revenue that you might get at the Tesla bid battery, you can tap into those with a commercial battery or even a residential battery in certain situations. So those are the sort of the distinction that the simple, which is behind the Metre only and advanced, which is front of Metre, includes the front of metre stuff. So let's talk about the simple stuff. So the common approach and what a novice to the commercial battery space will think is, I'm going to take the same approach that done for my residential batteries and I'm going to apply this for commercial. And as I said before, that'll fail. All right? And the reason for that is that when you're doing these batteries, you need to be looking at a difference between the charging and discharging value, sort of the arbitrage benefit from the rate that you charge at versus the rate that you sell. You export out of the battery at of around $0.30. That's like a really good sort of rule of thumb. So you think about what that $0.30 might be. That might be the difference between the export rate that you are exporting into the grid and the peak import rate. Now, $0.30 is achievable in the residential space. There's tariffs in Oz grid, which are good examples of where you might find that. But in the commercial space, that's pretty rare, right? And there will be cases that it works, but it's rare. So when you take that out of the mix, you go, well, what are you left with? Well, actually there's a lot. So one of the big benefits and one of the sort of foundational elements to a commercial battery value stack will be demand charge reduction. So a common approach in the commercial space will be that you'll have a nice commercial load profile. So if you look at a load profile, you'll have a base load and then at around 08:00 in the morning, all the HVAC turns on, all the lights turn on, and then the load that then goes back down around sort of six or 07:00 in the evening. When you put solar on that, it eats out that load profile, but you end up with this little peak at the end of the day. And then if you add a battery to that, it can slice off that peak. It's actually the amount of work that it has to do to reduce demand at the end of the day diminishes this quite significantly, because Solar has done most of the work of actually removing the kind of energy use in the middle of the day. And you get this little tiny peak, and so batteries come along, and they can clean up that peak really nicely. Yeah.
Wade Allen [00:23:07]:
And also cover a cloud.
James Allston [00:23:09]:
Cover a cloud.
Wade Allen [00:23:10]:
If your peaks in the middle of the day and you're trying to get that down and it just happens to be an awful day, that's where the battery can step in as well and almost guarantee you that you can keep that peak demand under a certain threshold.
James Allston [00:23:22]:
Exactly. So that might be that's. We see demand charge reduction as foundational to the valleystack in any case. Right. But it'll kind of be network specific as to when that works. So there's all the networks in Queensland great. Where we are today, you're in a perfect state for doing battery projects in New South Wales might be there will be some that will work, some that won't. In Victoria, most cases won't work except for power core. And in the other states, it's kind of like a little bit sort of specific to the tariffs that are on. So you kind of need to software like Orkestra, because you need to be able to quickly model these projects, work out whether they're valuable or not, and then proceed on. Right. So that qualification process, you need to integrate into your sales process to actually work out whether you've got something interesting there.
Wade Allen [00:24:14]:
Sorry.
James Allston [00:24:15]:
Go ahead.
Andrew Thomson [00:24:15]:
Sorry. And it's probably not just the network provider as well. But in my experience, there's particular types of customers where perhaps the peak duration was quite long across the day that a battery just didn't stack up because the peaks were too long. And you simply couldn't put enough solar into those battery to get them charged and cover that. It didn't make it feasible. But in the past we could spend two weeks and have multiple people involved just to get to the end outcome. That battery is not going to solve their issue.
James Allston [00:24:45]:
Yes, exactly. And that's the classic situation, right. You spend two weeks building an excel model just to get to the end of, like, so close and it's not going to work.
Wade Allen [00:24:55]:
Delete a cell.
James Allston [00:24:56]:
Exactly. Whereas literally, it's a drop down change this run, and like, five minutes later you've got the answer right as to whether it's going to but you raise a really interesting point and I would really encourage you listeners not to try and pregues the outcome. Sure, right. So when we were writing that white paper I referred to in the beginning, we kind of had these kind of like, preconceived thoughts around, oh, yes, this is the type of return that we might expect out of this particular project. And we got to a point where we're like, we have got to stop trying to guess what's going to happen, because you just can't get all the information into your head. You've got to look at a confluence of the tariff, the load profile shape and the nature of that tariff and what kind of tariff it is, and the solar and the batteries like, it's all those different parts that all work together as an ecosystem that actually bring together how it's actually going to work. So there's kind of like some basic rules of thumb that, of course, more expensive demand tariffs lead to better battery outcomes. But in the case you just outlined, you can have a perfectly flat load profile.
Wade Allen [00:26:04]:
Yeah.
James Allston [00:26:05]:
You can have a data centre, right, like a load profile, which is about as flat as it gets. But if that data centre is sitting on a time of use tariff, where there's a time of use window between five in the afternoon and eight in the evening, and you stick a battery on that, it'll perfectly slice off that peak and you'll basically step down and the battery will get a lovely return. Right, because it's a really consistent you can basically bank all the demand saving that you're going to get from that particular period, because there's no potential change or volatility that you have to account for in that. So I would really encourage listeners to be like, don't try and overly pre qualify your opportunities. There are some rules that you can apply, but you do need to use a piece of software like Orkestra to really identify whether the opportunity is going to be viable or not.
Wade Allen [00:26:57]:
And I just want to do a quick little aside here. Load profiles, obviously, you guys have some generic ones built in, but what is the easiest way to upload someone's load profile and where do you get that?
James Allston [00:27:12]:
Yeah, you ultimately have to go back to the customers retailer to ask them for the load data. But what we've tried to do with Orkestra and you talked about the library there, is what incentive does the customer have if you just go to them and say, well, I can't. Do any modelling until you give me the load data. Customers got absolutely no idea whether this is going to be a wild goose chase or it's actually going to lead to something valuable. So the intention of the library is that you can find a similar load profile. So I've got 100 different commercial load profiles in there. You can find a similar one to the site. You can rescale that load profile either by the total load of the year or the maximum demand, and then apply the actual tariff from the site, which should be easy. To transcribe off a bill and then go and do some basic modelling and go, well, look, this project is probably going to actually deliver a really good outcome. Would you now like to go and do the work to actually go and get this load data? And now the customer goes, oh, wow, this is actually maybe a really good opportunity, and they're incentivized to actually go and do that work because it's not always easy. There are changes that are coming where we might be able to make that easier in the future, where there's potential integrations in with open access for the load data, but today there's no other way around it. You've still got to get that information from a retailer or the distributor to be able to then load that data into Orkestra. We've changed it so that we've made the upload process as easy as possible. So you can upload a range of different formats and it kind of like massages and makes it easy to deal with that data. But, yeah, unfortunately, there's no way around that process.
Wade Allen [00:28:51]:
And that's the NEM twelve file, right?
James Allston [00:28:54]:
The CSV. Yeah. So there's a few different formats, but NEM Twelve is the common format that you'll get out of most distributors.
Wade Allen [00:28:59]:
And is it hard to get that from a distributor?
James Allston [00:29:02]:
No, there's a standard process for all retailers, so if you're with Shell Energy or Original, whoever it is, they'll have a form that's probably on their website. In most cases you literally just fill in the name of that customer. Need to list the Nimmies, the National Metre Identifiers for the different metres and request the period that you want that data from, submit it to the retailer. And that data typically should come back within two to three business days. And if it's not, there's a problem and you should probably talk to the Ombudsman. But that data should be readily available and it shouldn't be any more complicated than doing that process.
Andrew Thomson [00:29:40]:
I'm not sure if it's the case anymore, but in the past, at least with Ergon in North Queensland, they actually charged a fee for that. But we found that once we got the customer to a point in time where they were happy to engage you to do some more detailed feasability analysis and perhaps pay a fee, that's your foot in the door, perhaps they might not engage somebody else. So once you're at that stage, it really puts you at a higher level above everybody else.
James Allston [00:30:04]:
Yeah. There's this great German saying which translates to English is, what's, for free isn't worth anything. If you get people to pay, they're more likely to take this. What do you do? Seriously?
Wade Allen [00:30:14]:
Get in the game, baby.
James Allston [00:30:15]:
Skin in the game.
Wade Allen [00:30:16]:
When you upload the load profile and you do all this analysis, so the site adjustments, you can change tariffs on the fly, right?
James Allston [00:30:27]:
Yeah.
Wade Allen [00:30:27]:
So taking someone from one tariff and putting them, qualifying them and putting them onto another one, whether that's through the demand reduction or whatever the case may be, talk us through that just a little bit.
James Allston [00:30:40]:
Yeah. So one of the common things that you'll find in the commercial industrial space is that the tariff may change once you go and install some technology, even with solar. Right. So it's not uncommon within a commercial retail, electricity retail contract, that if the load profile materially changes, which would happen, of course, obviously, when you install solar, that you need to go back to the retailer and renegotiate that contract with them. So right up front, we were like, we got to just make sure that this is really, really easy for someone to do within our software. So within our scenarios and our site adjustments, you can put in a new retail contract or you can look at a network tariff change. So another common one is that you might move a customer from being a large business customer on a demand tariff to a small business customer under the threshold. So there's some depending on which state you're in, it would either be 100 megawatt hours or 160 megawatt hours per annum, and you may move a customer from that over that threshold to under that threshold. And when you do, you may be able to completely remove the demand charges for that customer. Yeah, sure, their per kilowatt hour rates will go up, but that networked tariff benefit of changing from that demand tariff to being a non network benefit or non demand tariff may be huge.
Wade Allen [00:32:06]:
Oh, yeah. Especially when their loads outside of solar and battery are almost diminished.
James Allston [00:32:12]:
Exactly, yeah. Another situation might be you have a solar system that you've installed on a site and your intent was to kind of, like, get them over this threshold, but you didn't quite get there. You're still at like, 110 megawatt hours and you've got this system which is exporting heaps of energy, but you can't count that. There's no sort of net benefit that's been counted here. It's all the import. And so with a battery, relatively small battery, typically, you might be able to take some of that export, use it later in the day and then reduce the import overall for that site. And that might be the means of which you're actually able to make this battery work. So back to the concept of valleystacks this is a classic case of where you might be able to start valleystacking, right? You might be able to have that sort of time of use benefit, but you also are going to take that customer from a large customer tariff to a small customer tariff and that the total value of those two things together might be the thing that actually makes the difference. Yeah.
Wade Allen [00:33:14]:
What else is in the basic stack?
James Allston [00:33:16]:
Backup powers is a really big one. Right? So I think as an industry, as an energy industry, we tend to get locked into the like here's the energy savings, whereas there's actually when you start to think about other stuff that's outside of the energy bin, you can potentially have some huge benefits. So you might have a customer which is on a skinny part of the grid and the, ergon network, and they want to improve their feasability because every time their site goes out, they might have like even if the even if the site switches off of five or 10 seconds, they may need to run around and cheque all the machines for an hour before they can switch everything back on. And that has an obvious productivity cost. That may be like thousands of dollars that business needs to spend not just on the labour to go and do that, but also the lost productivity of the site. And then you might have a site where it might be out for hours and the lost productivity of that site for a battery you can claim all of that benefit. Right.
Wade Allen [00:34:22]:
Yeah.
James Allston [00:34:22]:
And you can put that against the upfront capital cost and you might have a battery which is marginally going to pay or not going to pay, and you add that backup power benefit on top of the energy benefits and suddenly you're like a two year payback.
Wade Allen [00:34:39]:
What's the best way to find that out? Is it just to ask the business owners?
James Allston [00:34:44]:
Exactly. And we've just released this functionality in Orkestra, and we've tried to set up the functionality in such a way that you can have a conversation with the site manager of a site and say thinking back over the last few years, how many outages were there of less than a second? And how many outages were there of less than an hour? And how many outages were there of less than up to 4 hours? And you can have that conversation with them, put the numbers of outages in there and then we will stochastically, which means to randomly generate those outages within our software and then work out well, how would have a battery been able to deal with those situations? And you can then use that to evaluate the total value of the battery being there and the kind of earnings that it would get from providing that backup and then put that straight into the returns of the battery.
Wade Allen [00:35:40]:
That's awesome.
James Allston [00:35:41]:
Yeah.
Wade Allen [00:35:42]:
Now something we were talking about earlier, and I just want to sort of plug it in. Here is the other new thing that you guys have done where you can choose two different sort of life expectancies of a battery. You can use the warranted battery life expectancy or you can adjust it to.
James Allston [00:36:02]:
A more realistic yeah, I mean, this is a pretty advanced functionality, so I don't expect everyone to be using this, but yeah, this is a pretty cool feature where up until this week we're releasing this feature. This week, you could only put in like a warranty sort of degradation. So you might have like a time based degradation curve where every year it might degrade by 2% or something like that or you might have a degradation based on cycles. So you might have the battery has only got 4000 cycles and then it's considered dead or out of warranty. And so you can put in a linear degradation based on that and we go getting lots of feedback from our customers that look, that's great, but we want to be able to show an upside case to customers where the battery is probably not going to degrade at the warranty degradation. It's probably going to be much better than that and we want to be able to show how what happens with the true degradation curve and a true degradation curve is nonlinear. So actually a battery will degrade and you'll notice this with your phone, right? The phone will slowly degrade, and you'll slowly lose the charge of it. And then at some point, maybe two or three years down the track, it just falls off. And then you've gone from having maybe 12 hours of charge, and then within a few months, you're down to, like, 6 hours of charge, and you're constantly plugging it in. And batteries in the commercial space will kind of do something fairly similar. They are much better because the difference between a consumer battery and a commercial scale battery is typically in the cooling and being able to keep the cell temperature right down so it'll last a lot longer. But overall that curve will still exist. It'll just be extended out for much longer.
Andrew Thomson [00:37:44]:
Where are you getting this information from? Because if a manufacturer was to provide this, which I'd be highly doubtful that they would, but if they did that would just be basically their test in a lab. Whereas I found is that the Battery Testing Institute or facility in act that have a lot of the major brands on test have many years of real world data battery replacements. Have have you reached out to them?
James Allston [00:38:08]:
No, I mean personally not I mean the team may have.
Andrew Thomson [00:38:11]:
Yeah.
James Allston [00:38:14]:
You will occasionally find this information in research papers. You'll find this information if some of the battery manufacturers will actually want to promote this information and put it in there into the technical specifications. As I said, I would generally see this as a pretty advanced functionality that's probably left to someone that really understands how to read these technical specifications and translate it into the software. We tried to do it in a way that's really easy to do and it's not complicated to do, but it's not something that you need to do on your first pass. This might be the thing that you do on your 7th or 8th pass when you're trying to you've kind of got this project basically to the end and you're just wanting to go back to the customer and go hey, we ran an extra model, and we reckon you might be able to squeeze an extra percentage of IRR if you consider that above. There's another curve for this battery which is above the warranty and that might be the thing that gets the customer off the fence and makes the investment.
Wade Allen [00:39:10]:
Right.
Andrew Thomson [00:39:11]:
I think that's great because if you look at battery warranty documents, it'll be okay. We guarantee that there'll be 60% left at the ten year mark or once this energy throughput is reached. If you review solar panel documentation, they'll actually say 2% in the first year, 0.2% annually after that. So to actually have some data that you've researched to put against that is just going to make a far more accurate proposal and maybe the difference between getting across the lines.
James Allston [00:39:36]:
Exactly, I mean, back to our core foundations. It's about fast, easy and accurate. And this is about accuracy. This is a feature that goes straight to the core of producing really accurate outcomes.
Andrew Thomson [00:39:46]:
Excellent.
Wade Allen [00:39:47]:
Talking about accuracy, why don't we go into the complex model or the advanced stack? Yeah, and let's not go down the rabbit hole too far. Let's sort of stick our ass over the fence here. What does that one look like?
James Allston [00:40:01]:
Yeah, so the advanced value stack is about taking the value stack that you get for any large utility scale battery and basically bringing that value behind the metre. And you need to do that by employing the services of an aggregator or building your own aggregator. And we've got some customers who are trying to take their solar business and turn them into aggregation businesses. ShineHub is a really good example of one that's happened in the residential space. And when you do that, you'll be able to access a couple of different revenue streams that can really turbocharge the returns of a battery. The first and the easier one of the two is wholesome market arbitrage. So you can set up a battery on an on market child metre, which is using some of the regulatory framework which exists within the embedded network frameworks. And you can give that battery access to the wholesale market whilst also getting network benefits for the gate of the site. Right. So for the whole site we'll get network benefits and that battery will be able to trade in and out of the wholesale market without actually changing the network bill, without changing the retail bill of that whole site and you don't need to change retailer in that situation, right? You don't have to go and take that whole site and make it spot exposed to get that benefit. And that is like one of the probably of the advanced value stack items. It's probably one of the easiest to set up and the quickest to get your benefits from. The sort of fundamentals of that is you're buying energy when it's cheap and you're selling energy when it's expensive. So you'll buy energy probably in the middle of the day when there's negative prices caused by lots of excess solar in the market. And then you might be selling it in the evening when everyone's back at home and cooking their dinners. And the prices might jump from up to $300 a megawatt hour in those sort of short periods around 06:00. And it's that difference. At the very beginning, I talked about how you want that $0.30. That translates to $300 a megawatt hour. And so it's that difference that you're trying to seek out with a battery and trying to basically take that value and putting it against the upfront investment and getting that return. So that's like the first of them, of the advanced ones, and it's probably the easiest one to set up. And there's lots of providers out there that can kind of support that setup. The more advanced one is Contingency FCAS. So FCAS is Frequency Control, ancillary service, and in our grid we need to manage the frequency. Everyone would probably be familiar with this. They'd have inverters that have frequency management requirements now under as seven. Well, there's a whole market that's dedicated towards managing frequency. Contingency FCAS deals with events where you might have Loyang Power Station trip off the grid or Lidel, or you may have the Queensland interconnector goes down and then suddenly the grid has to respond pretty much instantly with more supply. And battery are fantastic for doing this, right? You can deploy them in milliseconds and be pushing energy in. And by using this framework, you can kind of attribute value to the battery just for sitting there and being able to respond to these events. So it's not even discharging energy in most cases. It's just making money until these events occur. So you need an aggregator, you need someone to be able to aggregate these assets together and be able to bid in those assets on your behalf. You need the functionality of the battery to be able to respond to when these frequency events occur. But if you have those two, then it's basically money for nothing in many cases where you might have a battery which is participating in the Contingency F gas market and it's only needing to inject an hour of energy over a whole quarter to actually participate in that market. But it's getting paid for every minute that it's in that market.
Wade Allen [00:44:17]:
Far out.
James Allston [00:44:18]:
Yeah. So it's a way of really turbocharging the benefits of it.
Andrew Thomson [00:44:24]:
Do you see this as an added value in addition to, for example, Wade mentioned about peak reduction. So this is something absolutely. So if they were to put a proposal forward for peak reduction and then say, look, we may be able to provide you additional benefits, here's a simulation. If we were to take advantage of the FCAS market, let's go and talk to an aggregator to see if we can work out some sort of arrangement.
James Allston [00:44:47]:
Exactly. And we talk about the value stack. For batteries, it is literally a stack, right? So you've got at the bottom of the stack is demand charge reduction in the advanced value stack. The next layer of that stack is wholesome market arbitrage. And then the final part of that stack is Contingency FCAS. There's no reason why that battery needs to be doing all of those things on day one, right? So you may sell the battery simply on demand charge benefits. And it might be very marginal, but you basically say to the customer, look, this is marginal today, but we're working with these partners to unlock this battery and in the future it'll be this. And you can show them the pathway. You can go, here's case A, demand charge only. Here's case B, demand charge plus wholesome market arbitrage. Here's case C, demand charge plus holster market arbitrage plus FCAS. And you can show them, if you want to, like a management consultant like me, show them in a waterfall chart. Or you can just show them like, here's the three cases. And this is how the value is going to build over time so that you can kind of get your foot in the door, get that battery deployed. What you also find is, and this is like a nice little benefit that people don't really think about, is that the more you build the value, the more revenue that you're bringing in, the larger the battery can get.
Wade Allen [00:46:01]:
Yeah, right.
James Allston [00:46:03]:
So you might start off where the battery kind of breaks even with a 50 kilowatt battery, let's say, and then.
Wade Allen [00:46:12]:
You add water kilowatt, hour kilowatts.
James Allston [00:46:15]:
This is a good question because in these advanced value stacks, what we're doing was we're talking about power functions, right? They're all trying to inject lots of energy very quickly to get value. So for demand, it's about that little peak that you're trying to slice off. For wholesale market arbitrage, it's about be able to push as much energy into those critical peak events. When the energy market goes to $15,000 a megawatt hour in Contingency FCAS, it's about being able to push ten minutes of energy really fast into the market. These are all power functions, meaning that don't put too much capacity in guys. When you're looking at commercial batteries, 1 hour batteries are actually really good. They're hard to find. Most people want to sell you two hour batteries because they've come from a backup power background and now they're taking these Pat trees that were good for backup power and they're trying to appoint them in power functions. But actually it's the 1 hour batteries, even if they're like a higher dollars per kilowatt hour cost, are likely to end up with a better return.
Wade Allen [00:47:15]:
Oh, wow.
James Allston [00:47:15]:
Okay.
Wade Allen [00:47:16]:
Good to know.
James Allston [00:47:17]:
Yeah. But back to my point before is that if you have that 1 hour 50 kilowatt battery that breaks even for demand charge reduction, when you add the wholesale market arbitrage, it may increase the battery size by 50%. And when you add the best battery size, right? So when we modelling battery curves, we think about we model a range of different sizes. So we might model from, say, 25 in increments of 25 kw. So we're modelling all of them. And when you model that range, you can get like a net present value or an IRR. So the return for each one of those different batteries, when you add the value on top, what you see is that the maximum, the best battery, from a financial perspective, it shifts up the size. So for demand charge only, it might be 50. Best net present value when you add the next one, might be 100. The next one when you add Contingency FCAS, might be 200. And so you can start off by just get your foot in the door, put in the first battery, but have that eye to not only will you be able to improve the return for the customer by adding additional value, but you may actually be able to go and sell them more battery capacity when you go in there at that value as well. This is kind of like opening the door to massive potential for businesses that are really thinking about this in an advanced way. You don't need to be doing advanced batteries on day one, right? So as a solar installer, don't look at this opportunity and go, oh my God, this is just for the really big guys like Shell Energy. No, it's not. This should be for everyone. Part of us building the software was about trying to make it easy for people to get into this market and democratise the knowledge that's required to actually access this market. And you can go out there and go and find the simple battery value stacks, go and find the ones that are demand charge reduction. Maybe you can move that customer from that large business tariff to a small business tariff. Maybe it's just a backup power scenario and you can get those batteries in. Go and learn by doing by doing those projects. And as you kind of build your portfolio of batteries out there, the more batteries that you have in your portfolio, the more likely it is that you're going to be able to really effectively unlock those advanced value stacks. Right. Once you get to a threshold of a megawatt, you might even be able to bid your own batteries into the Contingency FCAS market as an aggregator. That's kind of like perhaps the potential endgame as a business, but it's like you don't need to be doing that on day one to make these batteries work.
Wade Allen [00:50:01]:
I suppose the lowest hanging fruit for solar installers out there would be going back to existing customers because that's the easiest people to sell to again. So if they're going out there to their existing customers, we're looking for someone that they've put PV on before they're putting a shit tonne into the grid or clipping because they're on an export limitation or something like that and looking to add a few of those value stacks up by putting a battery in. And if you've done your job properly and you're still in touch with that person and maybe you're even monitoring that, you might even be able to do that all that feasability without even calling them up to start. The first call could be, hey, look at this.
James Allston [00:50:45]:
Absolutely. I mean, you could go and hire an engineering grad on an internship for a week and sit them in front of Orkestra and just go through all your old opportunities and identify the ones where it might not even be batteries, right? It might just be taking an old STC system that was sold with 30, putting in 100 kw or putting in 200 kw or whatever it is. You can just focus on these low hanging fruit. This software makes it so easy that you can basically do that work. Whereas previously having to go through and punch in all the numbers and grind away in something like Excel or Homer just created real artificial barriers to making that type of work happen. Whereas now with this, you can just have a temporary resource that you can train up briefly on how to do this kind of analysis, and they can be smashing out analysis to pre qualify your next round of projects.
Andrew Thomson [00:51:42]:
Two thoughts spring to my mind. A lot of the larger battery that I'm quoting are because the end user has said, hey, I want a 200 kilowatt system, and can you quote on a battery as well? And then the company will get a price on a battery, they'll put it forward to the customer, the customer will just go, you know what, too expensive, I'll just go solar only. So straight away, here's an opportunity for Orkestra to actually provide a feasibility analysis behind that and hopefully get more sales across the line. Or another thought could be as well is even if the customer hasn't mentioned battery, if you're doing a proposal for them, it may only take five minutes to go, okay, here's a proposal with a battery added. I know you didn't say anything, but look at this. And then we should hopefully see more batteries going in, more revenue for the business.
James Allston [00:52:24]:
100%. Yeah. The other thing is, what we tried to do with Orkestra is make it really easy to model a range of different sizes. So rather than going in with a preconceived idea, okay, I'm putting 200 solar in, so I'm going to put in 100 kilowatt hour battery, right? There's like some artificial rule of thumb, which frankly is crap, right? There is no rules of thumb about what is the best battery size to go with the solar size because it doesn't relate anything to do with the solar, right? It relates to the load profile and the tariff. And so with this software, you should be able to model a range of sizes and then once you've modelled that range of sizes, you go, well, the best size to go with this particular site is not 200 kw, it's 100 return. Is this not this thing which is not going to break even. You can take those projects that might not have worked where the customer said too much, it's cost and you can bring them to a point where it's a lower spend with a higher return and it's actually going to get along across the line. Or you can take those projects that you had no idea what the benefits are going to be and now you can articulate those benefits to a customer.
Wade Allen [00:53:33]:
Well, before we wrap up, because we've been babbling on for a bit here, there is a big thing that I wanted to talk about before we do, and that is probably one of the largest hurdles that our customers out there face and that is financing. So what has Orkestra done and I already know the answer to this, what has Orkestra done to solve this problem?
James Allston [00:53:58]:
Yeah, I mean, this is a work in progress for us, but we've released a couple of months ago a feature which we've called Business Model Builder. And Business Model Builder allows you to take the cash flow statement of a project, right? So the upfront investment and the ongoing benefits that you're going to go, regardless of the different value stack that you've got, and start to split up the value of that to the different parties that might be involved in a project. So a simple example is, say, a power purchase agreement where you might have a three party relationship. So you're going to have you as the installer, you're going to have a financier that's going to finance the system and you're going to have an end customer. And you now need to look at what is the return for each of these different parties and be able to articulate the return for those parties in a really easy to do way. And Business Model Builder allows you to literally within about five minutes, design that business model and be able to visualise the different parties and then be able to tune the returns for each of the parties to make sure that you're distributing enough value. This obviously has got all the PPA providers and finances in the country extremely excited about what we're building. Because now they can do this work that previously, which you would have done in Excel, which might have taken days of work in Excel you can do in five minutes. This is kind of like blowing the doors off of that particular opportunity. We're looking to take that to the next level and turn Orkestra into a bit of a financial marketplace where you can kind of add finance to a project. It's a work in progress for us, but we've already got some initial engagements that are kind of locked in to make that happen. So that's kind of the next phase for us. And this should really make it much, much easier to get through that process of articulating the benefits to a customer. And if a customer doesn't have the cash on hand, be able to direct them to an alternative route of financing the project, that should unlock the project. There's a really interesting statistic that I heard from Smarties the other day, which is that a project is that the chances of selling a project will move from, I think she said 5% to 30%. If you attach a financing option to a project, if you think about what that means to the industry, every single proposal that goes out should have finance on it. It should not be something that is an option. It should always be on the proposal. And so as a business, we're trying to move towards making that easier and easier to do and be able to very quickly add finance to a solution and then be able to send what the financed option looks like to a customer.
Wade Allen [00:56:50]:
That's awesome. Yeah, that's so great. I love it. So what's next for Orkestra? I mean, you guys are always innovating and evolving. What are you working on now?
James Allston [00:57:00]:
Yeah. I mean, for us we've got a lot of stuff cooking and we've got some product twos, which I'm very keen to talk about. In a few months time we're still in stealth mode, but for us it's really on the we're trying to improve the sort of analytical foundations of our tool and one of the big next cabs off the rank for us is probably going to be around EV chargers. So within the next sort of four to six months, we're going to have some really exciting EV charger features in the tool that will allow people to look at what happens when you install an EV charger and what's the sort of serviceability of that EV charger. So a common issue might be that you have a business that wants to install maybe ten EV chargers, but there's a connection limit for that side. They will have negotiated a connection limit. And you don't want to go over that because if you do, you may enter into a world of pain as a business that's trying to install these. And there's ways that you can install these assets and still have them serviceable and not exceeding those limits. So there's no tools out there right now to do that, right, that's in the world of Excel to do that kind of work. And so we're releasing features to be able to make that much easier, releasing other features to improve how you deal with existing solar as an example, that needs a bit of work within our tool. We're also wanting to, on the sort of sell front, make it so that it gets increasingly easy to kind of sell through the tool. So initially been able to, we're going to be releasing a feature that will push out all the outputs of the tool in a consistent format so you can link it in with existing proposal generation processes. So lots of solar companies will have some kind of combination of Excel plus PowerPoint or Excel plus Adobe InDesign. And we want to be able to knit our outputs into those proposals and make it really easy for customers to do that. We want to have a global defaults so that as a business, you can set certain defaults that you want and that all your parties within the business are using. We want to integrate in with different proposal generation tools out there. So there's some products like PandaDoc and Quilla that are really advanced, that can do full digital proposals, that it can have, click to sign, that would be a game changer for many solar businesses, integrating directly into those software and allowing that to be done in a much more efficient way. And then obviously that financial marketplace that we talked about as well, we're being able to have that integrated into the tool. And so that you can within the tool, have your project. And then you might have three business model variants of that. So it might be the cash upfront purchase, it might be the PPA solution and it might be the lease solution, or you might have to show what's going to happen if you add a VPP to this solution. And be able to start sort of thinking about how you might distribute the different cash flows to the different parties that are involved in that sort of project.
Andrew Thomson [01:00:00]:
So the only thing I can see kind of missing from the lineup at the moment is actually doing the designs panel layouts. Is that something that's in your vision, or would you rather leave that to the companies already doing that?
James Allston [01:00:11]:
Yeah, very much the latter. We don't want to build another version of Helioscope or Pvsys. That is not what we want to do. We've very clearly as a business decided that our job is in financial feasibility. There are lots of tools out there for doing panel placement and they're really good at what they do, right. We can take the standard CSV output that you would get out of PVSyst or Helioscope and you can directly load it up into the software. And at some point I imagine we'll probably build API integrations into those software as well because we don't want to be in that position where we're doing that type of work. We are working on some features that kind of will perhaps streamline that a little bit. So we want to be able to identify what's the maximum roof area for a site and therefore that might create an upper limit to the types of sizes that you can put on it. But we don't want to do that. Next step across into SLDs and panel placement and other stuff that really is it's the domain of technical pieces of software. Our job is about financial feasibility and making that bit really done really, really well and trying to make it done so easily. Back to our sort of the mantra of fast, easy and accurate, trying to bring forward that financial feasibility to as early in the sales cycle as you possibly can get it right. So not just the qualification of projects, but the pre qualification of projects and being able to do that work with a customer, work out whether you've even got a project, work out if the customer is mucking you around or they're serious. And it's at that point that you can deploy your technical resources and go and do that work that kind of takes a lot of time to do.
Andrew Thomson [01:01:55]:
And I guess going back to a discussion we had earlier, the unemployment rate in Australia is extremely low. Businesses everywhere are struggling to get employees to fill roles electricians. So upskill the workers that you already have.
James Allston [01:02:08]:
Exactly. Give your workers superpowers. That's one of the things that as a business we think about is like, go and take the existing resources that you have and make them two, three, four times more productive and that's the way that you're going to grow. I keep coming back to the statistic that for us as a planet, to reach net zero, we have to decarbonize our entire electricity system. To do that, and to get on track for net zero, we have to be deploying five times as much wind, three times as much solar and 26 times as many batteries as we did in 2020, every single year to 2030. We are not going to get there through human resources, right? We simply cannot train enough people quick enough to be able to get there through that. So we have to do this through means of productivity. So, sure, we might be able to double our resources base over that ten year period, but we're going to have to really take to do a lot of the work. In the short term, it's about making those resources that you have in your organisation double or triple as efficient as they are today at their jobs and doing that using software year over year, year over year.
Wade Allen [01:03:31]:
Well, James, this has been enlightening, to say the least, and I really, really want to thank you again for coming here. That was awesome. Thank you.
James Allston [01:03:39]:
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Wade Allen [01:03:41]:
Where can people find Orkestra?
James Allston [01:03:45]:
You can hop on our website. So we're Orkestra with a K energy and sign up for a trial. There's a three week trial. You can hop on there. We have lots of support resources. When you get into the software, there's full onboarding checklists and little tips and tricks that are scattered throughout the software, making it really easy to kind of enter into the software. Lots of example projects in there. We have a full knowledge base so that once you've signed up and we've got an account, you can hop into that knowledge base and you can kind of educate yourself how to use different parts of the software. We also have a really amazing customer success team which is headed up by Georgina Hale, who's got eight years of experience in retail before she came to us. So she knows everything there is to know about energy tariffs. And those resources can kind of help you get going and be really productive really quickly because it's all about trying to this is a new piece of software. There is going to be a small learning curve. We've got that learning curve down to about an hour or an hour and a half. And if you invest a lot of invest that time, then you will get through that and then you'll be start to being productive.
Wade Allen [01:04:54]:
Yeah, I can say Georgina helped me a lot in the modelling that I've done for some of our customers. It was like, I don't know how I'm going to do this. And she was great. And you know what? You guys don't use loom. It was something else. It was so awesome. It was like these videos and instructions she sent me. I was like, this is the best.
James Allston [01:05:12]:
Yeah. We have lots of resources that are on scribe and scribe that just makes it really easy to kind of enter in and get productive really quickly as part of the onboarding process. If you want us to do your first project for you, we can do that, right? You can have your project that you've got coming up and you want to kind of model it within the software, send us your load profile data and send us a bill and we can set up that project as one of your first projects and that can form a template to other projects that you're going to do in the future. That's another point, which is that we've tried to make this software really scalable by using templates. So once you've set up the templates, you can just reapply those templates again and again and again and you don't need to be starting from the ground up every single time. So you can once you know, as you kind of get more into the software and you get more information in there, the time of which you can model should go from being like an hour on the first project down to like ten to 15 minutes within four or five projects.
Andrew Thomson [01:06:17]:
So talking about the load profiles that you've loaded into the system, because this is awesome, gone are the days where you have to go and fit some manual data logging equipment, leave it there for a week, and then base your full design over a week's worth of data logging. You've loaded in a lot of different load profiles for different sorts of businesses.
James Allston [01:06:35]:
Exactly. So, yeah, we've got sort of 100 different commercial load profiles which are in there, which will completely anonymize. You can't work out who they are. They're just anonymous load profiles that can be rescaled. And you've got a whole year of data. So you can look at seasonal effects, you can look at effects over different weeks or during all effects within a day and be able to rescale those and reuse these. So it really just reduces the barriers to being able to get in and start being really productive in the software. We don't want you to be sitting there going, oh, I haven't got the load data, so I can't get going. We want you to get in there, get productive, get the first results out, and I'll share them digitally through the software. That's another thing, is you can theme the results and you can send those out to a customer and you can present this analysis as your own.
Wade Allen [01:07:24]:
Awesome. All right, well, again, that was Orkestra with a K energy. You could also get Andrew or myself at support@supplypartners.com.au. We can help you with maybe your first one as well. But thanks again, James, and thank you all for listening.
James Allston [01:07:39]:
No worries. Thanks again.