Good afternoon and welcome to 2022 and welcome to our first energy seminar for 2022. Before I introduce today's illustrious speaker, I'd like to let you all know, including the registered students who the team is who puts on the energy seminar, so you need some advice and assistance. My name is John Wyant. I'm the faculty coordinator, director of the energy seminar. We also have on the webinar a dais here, Sarah Weaver, who should come on right now, who's the outreach director at the Precord Institute and the logistics showrunner of the energy seminar. We also have Evan Sports, who does our Zoom setups when we're in Zoom. Zoom mode. I don't know, Paula Charles, our RA, who was originally going to fly back in today to the Bay Area. I don't know if she has the course assistant is on or not, but you'll be hearing, if you haven't already heard from her, you'll also hear from her soon. I'd also like to give a special shout out to Dinesh Morjani, who was a kind of early mid-career student in the course last year and had some experience, considerable experience and clean tech and clean tech investing. I believe Kathy Hanemar, speaker today, was one of several hot prospects he put us onto and perhaps helped recruit. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speaker today, who 10 years ago or so was sitting where many of you would be if we were in a video auditorium as a student first as an undergrad in civil environmental engineering and then as a master's student in computer science. She then went out as students in those programs often do to change the world and has actually been really successful already on that. As you can see, she's won almost all the awards available to people under 35 and as my calculations indicate, she's probably not quite yet 35, so she'll probably win a few more. Kathy is actually a co-founder and president of Dandelion Energy, which also has won many awards and been singled out as a rising star in the clean tech space. This company grew out of, some of you may know it, the Alphabet X Lab Megaplex, which I had trouble keeping track of. So here, as she is uniquely qualified to do so, Kathy's going to tell you all about her clean tech startup journey of Dandelion Energy with a very unique and important business model in my opinion. So Kathy, I'm going to now turn it over to you. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much, John, and thanks for such a generous introduction. So I did bring a few slides to share just to tell you all a little bit about what we're doing at Dandelion, but I also encourage questions and yeah, I would love to make sure that this is interactive as possible given the webinar format. So let me go ahead and present. So our real mission at Dandelion is heat without fire. So heating and cooling actually as well without combusting fossil fuels. And we're really starting on that by trying to make geothermal heat pumps mainstream specifically for the residential use case. So these are single family homes that typically use boilers or furnaces today. And we're really trying to pave the way to transition all of those homes to heat pumps starting with geothermal heat pumps. This is actually, I mean, one of the things when I was starting to learn about heat pumps, I was working as a product manager at Google X. And my job was to find big opportunities for X to go after new businesses that they could create. And one thing that I hadn't really appreciated that captured my attention was just how much money people spend on heating. I grew up in New Hampshire, my home growing up used fuel oil. So I don't know why I was so surprised by this probably because I wasn't paying those bills when I was a kid. But it's really one of the biggest energy expenses that consumers have. And in cold places, the money that we spend on heating on fossil fuels for heating is often a lot more than we even spend on electricity for the home. So you can see that most homes today are heated by fuels, not by electricity. There are some that are heated by electricity. They tend to be in the Southeast. But in most of the country, people are using natural gas and then more expensive fuels like fuel oil and propane. And we, you know, when looking at this market, it was kind of clear when you looked at the numbers that if you wanted to start a company that had a goal of switching all of those homes over to a renewable source of heating and cooling, it really made sense to start in the Northeast. And this is because there are a lot of people in the Northeast, so a lot of houses. And almost all the fuel oil used in this country is used in the Northeast. Only 10% of people in the country use fuel oil, but they're almost all in the Northeast. And fuel oil is really expensive. It's really annoying to use. So people are ready for an alternative. So it's like a great place to start. And some people ask me, is geothermal a technology you can use anywhere in the country? And the answer is yes. Technically you can. You don't need specific ground conditions really for it to work. It's really more of an economic question. And in the same way that solar, you can do it anywhere in the country. But California has an amazing market for it because electricity is expensive and it's really sunny. It's analogous for geothermal in the Northeast. It's very cold in the winter. It's warm in the summer. And the heating fuel alternatives tend to be very expensive. So it's a very economically appealing place to start a heat pump company. So before I go any further, let me tell you what geothermal heat pumps are. There are really two types of heat pumps that exist for heating and cooling homes. There are what are called air source heat pumps. And there are what are called ground source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps. Those two ways of calling them are the same concept. Dandelion today does ground source heat pumps. So this is a depiction of what that could look like. It's not exactly accurate, but it's the right idea. So you have a heat pump that sits in the basement, typically where a furnace or boiler used to be. And that heat pump is connected to ground loops. And these are plastic pipes, HDPE plastic pipes, about an inch and a quarter in diameter. And we install those ground loops almost always. We install them vertically. So they go down into the ground. You can install them horizontally if you have enough yard, but most homes don't. So we install vertically. And they're typically 300 to 500 feet deep. So these are not shallow holes. These are quite deep, which is one of the challenges of installing a geothermal heat pump. And those pipes are just circulating water with a propylene glycol antifreeze. And that water as it circulates through those pipes is absorbing heat from the ground. The ground tends, it's just a large thermal mass. It tends to maintain a fairly stable temperature a year round, around 50 degrees where we work. And so even in the winter, when it's really cold out, that ground has some heat content. And as the water warms, as it's circulating through the ground, that warm water warmer than the air outside water will come back to the heat pump. That heat pump will then exchange that heat with a refrigerant inside the heat pump, and then use a compressor to boost the temperature so that you can exchange what is now, you know, 110 degree refrigerant, 120 degree refrigerant heat from that with the air inside the house and circulate that air through duct work. And that's how it works. It can also reverse. So actually in this picture, you're seeing the depiction of how it would look in cooling mode where that heat pump is circulating cool air from the house and then dumping the excess heat from the house into the ground, which is still only about 50 degrees. So in the summer, it cools the house in the winter. It warms the house. And doing it this way is actually the most efficient way you can do heating and cooling for homes. So it's incredibly efficient because you're never trying to overcome a temperature gradient that's too big because that ground is always going to be a pretty stable temperature year round. One thing I'll say about geothermal is that it's really not a new technology. It's quite old, quite established. It's been around for decades. 20% of the homes in Sweden already use geothermal for heating and cooling. So Dandelion definitely did not invent this. We are just the first company in the US that's really had the capital to look at this concept and this technology and ask why isn't this taking off today? Why has this been so expensive historically? And what problems can we solve to make it much less expensive and much more scalable? So this is actually a real cost competitive option for normal people. Okay, so how are we doing that? Exactly.  And on the technical technology side, there are three main buckets. There are lots of things that are not technology. We've also had to do that I'll talk about as well. But on the technical side, we've really had to do a much better job at evaluating how much ground loop any given home requires in order to have enough heating or cooling. We've had to really figure out how do you get the right set of drilling equipment so that drills to put in those ground loops can actually fit in people's yards. Actually, a lot of the drills that were available to do this before, they literally did not even fit in somebody's yard. So half the homes we've installed couldn't have done geothermal just because their yard was too small. And then lastly, we're really investing in proprietary heat pumps that make the installation much simpler and much more just you know, take out the furnace put in the heat pump. Whereas in the past, it's been it's required much more design, much more changes to the house itself in order to make it work. And I'll describe what I mean. But before I dive into these different areas, I'm just going to glance at the Q&A. Let me see. So Judith said what if there is no existing basement? That is a good point. I said the heat pump would be in the basement. But what I should have said is it just kind of goes wherever the furnaces. So if there's no existing in my house, my furnace is in a closet.  In the Northeast where we work almost everyone has a basement. So I got a little bit lazy with how I described that. Yes. And then Blair brings up this point about how she had to get a hot water heater on short notice, because a lot of people wait until their equipment breaks before they get new equipment. This is actually a really big issue in this industry. It's very much a break fix industry. And that is difficult for geothermal because right now we need a lot of planning in order to put them in. I mean, even to get a permit for geothermal takes a month usually or more. So we're actually working today on some ideas for how we could come up with sort of a break fix product that sort of gives the homeowner working, heating or cooling as they wait for the permit to get the ground loops installed. But this is an unsolved problem today. Okay, I'll take a few more. So we have what refrigerant do we use today? We just use R410A. So very standard refrigerant. We do not currently have plans to switch to CO2. We like to use refrigerants that are very well accepted in, for example, by the companies that produce compressors and other components, just to take, you know, a lot of our businesses reliability and cost effectiveness. But there is a movement within the whole industry to refrigerants that don't cause global warming when they're emitted or don't cause as much. And so I do think we'll be switching out refrigerants soon. And then I'm just going to take one more, then I'm going to come back to these in a few minutes. But I noticed Alan said, why is this better than an air source heat pump? And I feel like this is actually a really good question. So I don't think this is better than an air source heat pump in all cases. An air source heat pump looks very similar, works very similar to a ground source heat pump. Let me go back. So an air source heat pump, you could think of it as looking very similar to this concept, except instead of these ground loops, you would have an outdoor compressor sitting next to the house like you would see with an air conditioner, which is a type of air source heat pump. And that compressor would be exchanging heat with the air to understand why you might want a ground source heat pump there. There are really, I would say two things that a ground source heat pump gets you. So one is the ground is a stable temperature year round, the air fluctuates in temperature year round. So if you're in a place like New York or Boston in the winter, when you need heating the most, it will be very, very cold out and there will not be much heat in the air. This can be quite challenging for an air source heat pump because it's trying to get heat out of the air. And so as a consequence, the air source heat pump will require a lot more electricity to pull enough heat out of the air in the winter than a ground source heat pump would require. And similarly in the summer, that air source heat pump will require a lot more electricity to reject heat into the very hot air than a ground source heat pump would require to reject heat into the cool ground. And not only that, but in very cold places like in Maine, you just can't get enough heat out of the air on the coldest days to satisfy the heating needs of most homes, especially retrofit homes that are not as well insulated. And so the ground source heat pump lets you get enough heat because you're drawing from the ground. That said, in a location like Stamford, California, air source heat pumps make a lot of sense and in fact probably make a lot more sense than ground source heat pumps because the air is a fairly mild temperature year round, so you really just don't get as much benefit by being connected to the ground. I would say in addition to the homeowner benefits of the ground source heat pump having more heat capacity when it's cold and also using less electricity, utilities have really embraced it in the northeast where we work primarily because it helps so much with their summer peak issues. So the load factor of ground source heat pumps is very helpful to utilities. It uses much less electricity on the hottest days of summer and adds demand to the grid at night and in the winter and other times when traditionally the grid has excess capacity. So there's a lot of storage type of benefit to the grid of deploying ground source heat pumps and from a systems perspective some of the studies on this have shown it's just you need to add much much much electrical capacity to the grid if you electrify heating using ground source versus air source. So I would say there's certainly houses where air source makes more sense and houses where ground source makes more sense but both are really useful tools to have and I would say necessary tools for electrifying heating. Okay so I'm going to keep going and then we'll go back to the Q&A. So one of the things that Dandelion has done that's really decreased the cost of drilling in our market is we've taken a more data driven approach to the answering the question how much drilling does a given home need. The way that contractors were determining how much drilling a home needed before Dandelion was they were using a rule of thumb and that rule of thumb was 150 vertical feet per ton of heating capacity and just to give you a sense a typical home in New York might require about five tons of heating capacity. So no matter where that home was in New York people would just install 150 feet per ton and that is sort of how it was done. Now the problem with that is the amount of drilling that you need or the amount of ground loop you need is a function of what is the geology in a given location. So if you're in for example a place with very shallow bedrock and you're drilling mostly through rock you don't need as much ground loop as if you're in a place that has a lot of soil or sand above rock because rock is very conductive so it's very good at exchanging heat and so when you use a rule of thumb like 150 feet per ton you're really assuming the worst case scenario is always going to be the case because that's kind of what you need for a rule of thumb of thumb to work because it's very you can't really be wrong or the home will not be warm enough. So instead of doing that what we've done is we've used the monitoring data on all of the heat pumps we've installed to get a much better sand geological maps and a data set that we actually purchased from a company that used to do thermal conductivity testing over the course of many decades to come up with our own map of thermal conductivity on a more granular basis throughout the territory we do business and so we're able to pinpoint with much greater accuracy for a given home in a given location with given geology how much ground loop does that particular home need and to give you a sense of how meaningful this has been for us our average feet per ton is just over a hundred so in some places we do 200 feet per ton in some places we do less than 100 feet per ton but on average I think it's around 110 feet per ton instead of 150 feet and you know each each foot of drilling costs about $20 so really getting to decrease our amount of loop needed for our average home is extremely meaningful to the economics and that allows us to pass that savings onto the homeowner we don't need to give them more loop than they actually need to heat and cool their home sufficiently one thing that is really encouraging about this is every time we install another home we get we get to fine tune that data set and so this serves as sort of a business advantage for dandelion but also we pass those savings onto our homeowners in the form of lower prices which lets more people afford to do this and it pencils out for more homes secondly before dandelion the rigs that were used to install these systems tended to just the water well rigs and the reason water well rigs were the go to is just because so few geothermal systems were being installed that it didn't really make sense for drilling company well there weren't really any geo oh there were okay i'll be fair there were like one there's there was one geo specific drilling company in the midwest but in the northeast there were no geo specific drilling companies and the water well companies that did exist it didn't make sense for them to invest in rigs that were tailored to this job because there just weren't enough jobs to justify it so everyone trying to install geo was borrowing equipment from water well which is a different type of well um with different needs and sort of like force fitting it to geo because that was the equipment that was around and unfortunately water well equipment just doesn't fit in a lot of suburban yards and so a lot of homeowners just weren't really able to do it and so just by really asking the question okay if you could use the best drill equipment for this purpose what would it look like and experimenting with that we've been able to hone in on a much smaller and lighter weight set of equipment that fits in yards but is also just a lot less expensive and a lot less dangerous so that's been really helpful in opening up the market and letting a lot more homeowners do this and as more and more homeowners can do this all homeowners get to enjoy economies of scale because our costs go down when we have more homeowners that qualify within a given area um and then lastly we're really invested in the heat pump itself this is something that we're doing right now actually um we we've been able to translate a lot of our learnings around why heat pumps are hard to install um what what features of homes sort of make them expensive into the right features in a new heat pump product that we think will really allow us to sort of sidestep a lot of these issues so to give you a specific example one thing that we've seen is that a lot of homes just don't have enough electrical capacity to their house to switch to a heat pump and they require what's called a main panel upgrade so they we have to get the utility to come in and upgrade the electrical service in order for that house to be able to support a heat pump what we've done is really tried to design a heat pump that will trigger the need for that upgrade much much much less often because of how we've designed the electrical system and um this should make installations for those homes much more straightforward because main panel upgrades cost like five to seven thousand dollars and require intervention by a utility so it's just very difficult to to arrange so there's um a long list of examples like that where we've noticed you know what are all the barriers that make swapping a furnace for a heat pump harder than swapping a furnace for a furnace and how can we design a heat pump that really just looks to the house more like a furnace so that we're not triggering as much as many of those problems which again ultimately results in cost savings to to homeowners okay i'm going to go back into the q and a for a few a few questions and then i'll come back to some of the non-technical um non-technical innovations i guess that we're bringing to the problem of switching homes over to heat pumps so i am not going in any particularly good order but my sarah might help me with that later on so i'm just going to dive in and sort of choose at random but does dandelion also work with multifamily housing not today we really focus on single family homes and um i think we'll probably stick with either single family or very small multifamily like town homes or you know i don't think we'll go to like high rise anytime soon just because the solution you can do that with geothermal absolutely it's just the solution is different enough from what we do today that i think that will not be on the in the near future okay and then wine alan i think i've already answered a good question from alan but nonetheless i will answer this one why not use multiple much shallower holes connected horizontally that is a good question and actually it's very timely so one of the things we're really focused on is right now is looking at creative new approaches for the ground loop and and how we could um potentially avoid the need for drillers all together um i don't i think with the shallow homes connected horizontally maybe that is one solution that we should evaluate i think the challenge is connecting a lot of shallow home uh holes to each other can be time consuming and creates a lot of failure points and also you don't you can't go too shallow or else the weather actually does impact the first layer of ground so it is and then you don't have quite you know a lot of yards are quite small so it's like when you go horizontally you run out of space fairly quickly but that idea is exactly the type of idea that we're really trying to evaluate today to think of other approaches for the ground loop that are a little less traditional and might be um easier to install so you're thinking along the right lines um okay and then i'm gonna answer dandelion's genesis was at x could you talk a little bit about what x particularly helped with in terms of rnd innovation how did the spin out process work how easy was it to spin out of x so yes i would say that x helped in a in quite a few ways i would say one of the important ways for me personally was um i at the time i was at x i really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur at all and i i really wasn't an entrepreneur at all at that time but i got to practice kind of being an entrepreneur with training wheels because my job was to evaluate new business opportunities and then run really small early stage teams to try to figure out if they had potential but i was an employee and i worked at a huge company and i had a ton of support all around me and i was taking like no risks for myself personally so it was like uh building the skillset of an entrepreneur kind of but um with no feeling of psychological risk or really any financial risk or any financial upside but it was just like a very um protected cove of entrepreneurship that really was i think very critical for me as somebody who really did not imagine myself to to be an entrepreneur or somebody who would go start a company and do fundraising and you know be the CEO and hire everyone and do all of those things and so um so while x was very helpful in that they have a lot of resources so we could i could hire consultants and do market studies and do customer interviews and like i had all of this money to do those things for this very risky idea that we didn't really i didn't even know what the idea really was it was like a very amazing um situation to sort of just get to experiment and learn and be curious and sort of build a hypothesis but i think also just like having i don't know if i would have been able to go straight from my mindset before that role to being an entrepreneur i just think it might have been a bit unlikely and that might be different for many of you um especially those of you at the business school who are likely thinking about entrepreneurship so in terms of what the spin out process is like at the time i was at x it was not very well established so there was no spin out process and um as i learned more about geothermal and the customer interviews came back and they just seemed so good like i i was so convinced that customers did want this and the market survey came back and it just looked like wow there's so much money to be made in this market if you did it right and just like every time we asked a question at least from my perspective the answer we got just um deep end to my conviction that heat pumps were going to be the answer for how we elect by heating and cooling and geothermal had an important role to play um so i just kind of found myself feeling like it was inevitable that it was a huge opportunity that it was really critical for the energy transition and that it was doable as a startup i mean a lot of a lot of x projects like the self-driving car most famously it would be hard for a random person which i considered myself to be to just like go and start a company like that especially in 2017 um before no one was interested in clean tech um this company i just knew like you wouldn't have to raise that much money to get started and i found that very appealing because i could have the chance to iterate and to build up you wouldn't have to start with some massive round which i wouldn't have had i didn't know how i would go about raising a massive round so over time it became clear as i was doing this work with an x that while the project looked really promising it didn't look like a very good fit for google there were a lot of reasons for that but i would say you know it just became clear this is going to be a good place to start with this type of business would be single family residential in the northeast and it would involve doing things like drilling 500 foot holes in people's yards like that's just not um what alphabet really wants to do for good reasons and so i wasn't prepared to let the idea go because at that point i had just become so invested in it and that's why i pitched to x let me spin this out you guys will get the benefit of some equity in this new company and if it does well you'll get credit for having incubated it i'll get the freedom to try to build this business because i really believe in it and it could be a really win-win situation um and while i think you know from the beginning there was a lot of support for me and for that pitch figuring out the details to be honest with you is quite challenging because there wasn't a template and there were many stakeholders and many different interests and so i think it took probably like six to nine months of negotiation to spin out dandelion but through that process now x has sort of a more well-defined spin out process so today they welcome people to they want entrepreneurial people to join x and they want to give people within x an easier way to spin out concepts so it's something that they've really encouraged and tried to promote internally okay so i'm going to keep going um i'm just going to like quickly check the time okay we have some time left i'll try to go a little faster so in addition to the technical things that i presented to you i think a lot of what we had to do especially at the beginning was just make geothermal easier to transact for customers like a lot of what we did for the first year or two of the company was focused on this because in the past getting geothermal for your house was kind of like getting a very specialized home renovation project where like sometimes there was a contractor in your area that could do it and sometimes there wasn't and there was like no standardization at all when it came to pricing or quality and so it was it was just very difficult for a typical homeowner to navigate this process and only the most motivated and sort of um i guess wealthy people really were able to take this on so we've really stood on the shoulders of solar in building out this process but today we have tried to make it as seamless as possible for homeowners so you can sign up online if you're in our service territory we'll do a sales call with zoom so with one of our with one of our sales reps to look at your specific house and figure out how much money you would save by switching from let's say oil to geothermal and then if a homeowner signs a quote with us they can just take a few photos that we tell them to take it will design a system for them and handle the full installation permitting um you know project management everything you would expect sort of in an analogous way to solar and then i haven't talked as much about this but one of the things we realized from the beginning is that people will only do this most people sorry you can only scale this type of business if you can make the cost of geothermal uh make sense for people so if it's cheaper to just buy a furnace people just buy a furnace it has to actually make financial sense for people to invest in geothermal so um we're aided by the fact that there's actually very good incentives for geothermal so a lot of utilities have an incentive because geothermal actually helps the grid run better and there's also the same investment tax credit that helps solar helps geothermal so um we have two ways of buying the product homeowners can buy it upfront so pay for the full price upfront and then their payback period is variable depending on the house but it's around five to seven years typically or they can pay using a financial product alone we do only loans we don't have pps or leases today and it's not even our alone we partner with a third party bank but a lot of homeowners choose to pay nothing upfront and then their monthly payment that they pay for the geothermal system plus the electricity to run the geothermal system still costs less than what they were paying each month on average to buy heating fuel and that is really why a lot of people buy this product um okay i'm wrapping up and then we can go to questions but one of the things that is obviously very meaningful or maybe it's not obvious one of the things that's very meaningful to me and what that really captured me about geothermal from the beginning is for most homeowners it really is one of the number one things they can do to decrease their own personal carbon footprint um and that kind of makes sense when you think about how much energy it takes to keep a home at 70 degrees year around when it's you know 30 degrees all winter and then 80 90 degrees in the summer it makes a huge difference and um once you put those ground lips in they're going to last as long as the home itself so one thing i really that's very um fulfilling for me is that each time we put a geothermal system in a home that home has been converted and it will really never have a good incentive to go back to fossil fuels and then lastly uh we're really with this type of business you know it's very operationally complex compared to many businesses you know it's real physical world we have all these people going into homes and moving things around and um contracting is sort of a notoriously difficult business when it comes to to homeowners and so to be successful we know like we really have to we've been focused on being like really trying to go above and beyond for our homeowners and really trying to do an ever better job and just create products that are just easier and simpler and higher quality each year um because a lot of our business comes from referral and we just know like spreading the word spreading awareness having people go into a home heated with geothermal and feel what it's like all of those things will ultimately be the things that need to happen for this to scale so really um yeah this is one of the things that really drives our decision making in our business okay I think this this is it so I will stop sharing and I will look at this q and a one second as I rearrange my windows while you're doing that there do seem to be a lot of questions regarding new markets I think people want to join your team and are interested in are you looking at other markets we saw Canada where it's obviously cold I know there's snow in the northwest today you have other questions about California where we desperately need to achieve our targets we could use this like this if you've looked at California have you looked at developing countries where air conditioning for example might be a higher priority well yes let's let's go into those topics absolutely thank you um we're hiring so many people this year I think we're literally hiring 100 people this year or so so we would love anyone who's interested in joining our team but in terms of market yes so because of that last slide I showed you just like they need to do a really high quality job with homeowners the operational complexity the fact that our benefit our economics benefit so much from density we've had to be very strategic about how we grow the business in order to sort of like build a working cell of business that actually works really well has great economics works well for customers it's sort of like you know the template of what we want to achieve and we've really tried to do that in New York so we've stayed very focused in New York um and only in the past year have we really even expanded into Connecticut and Massachusetts neighboring states um and those expansions have gone pretty well actually I think we waited long enough and like honed things well enough in New York that the expansion to those neighboring states has been not going one fairly smooth so far and sort of as those um as that plays out and we see that it gives us confidence to continue our expansion but still I think in a measured way so um we will probably continue to expand within the northeast and then I would guess our next market will probably be the Midwest because it needs a lot of heating and there's a lot of propane California is the market that I love so much and live here so I would love to expand to California I think that um it will happen but it is it is not one of the nearest term markets because electricity is very expensive compared to gas and this is a challenge for heat pumps as many of you probably know so in order to enter the California market we will just um need to have the right set of products to to make sure that it is in homeowners financial best interest to switch we we want to be able to offer a product where the homeowner is financially motivated to switch off of gas which most people in California have to a heat pump which uses electricity and just given the dynamics in California that is a little bit challenging today but I'm sure as the regulatory landscape is changing I expect that to change fairly quickly um and then in terms of international I think Canada is the most obvious international market to expand to first it's very close actually to New York it's quite similar in many ways and they have really good incentives for geothermal heat pumps I think air conditioning in hot parts of the world it's it's honestly not clear to me whether our solution is the solution that will solve that problem I mean I think yeah I think with I think with geothermal it does do air conditioning it does do it much more efficiently but you have a relatively complex more expensive upfront less expensive over time solution um I'm not sure we'll see what happens in those markets but I think it could it could make more sense to approach it with another another form of storage potentially the other group of questions seem to be regarding the um space heating or cooling delivery system so starting with when you replace a furnace are the ducts and machinery to force the air through uh the same or do you have to think about changing them uh more proactively if you put a new system in have you thought about simultaneously changing the delivery system either through the existing ducting or maybe even going from um air to water who knows mm-hmm yeah yeah it is that is a topic I think about so much but okay so one of the primary challenges of heat pumps is the duct work tends to be undersized for heat pumps so if you have a home that already has ducts that were built for a furnace they're probably too small to work well with a heat pump and so today we do um you know a lot of our evaluation and sort of site survey is to figure out do we need to upgrade the duct work for this system to work if we do and usually you know we can do some minor modifications to try to make it work well but like that costs money and it adds complexity and it adds time and it's just like friction and so one of the challenges that we're really trying to solve with this heat pump that we're uh working on is what if we built a heat pump that was compatible with whatever duct work the furnace like if the furnace worked with the duct work this heat pump will work with that duct work that would be sort of the ideal solution because then you just want to make that swap out as easy and simple and cheap as possible while delivering a very good customer experience and end product because every time you have to add another thing to do to make the heat pump work it's almost like excluding more and more homes that will not make the decision to do it and so we're really I mean like the north star is make a heat pump installation as easy and straightforward as the furnace installation and not having to touch the distribution system is certainly um better if we can get away with it there will be some homes where we have to address it and I think I don't know if you guys know what a ductless mini split is but for um air source heat pumps have a product where you have you can kind of mount what a head on a wall maybe you have seen this in a restaurant or another building where there's sort of like a console amounted on the wall and it does heating and cooling and it's connected by refrigerant line to a compressor that's outside the house that type of product is really nice because you don't need to worry about what the distribution system is that console just goes on the wall and it does the heating or cooling and can kind of ignore whatever was there before so I think um bringing some of those concepts to the geo market which doesn't really have them yet very well will be a good step forward as well in those cases where you can't there is no duct work or you like a house that uses steam for example to distribute heating and you'll never be able to retrofit steam with a heat pump great with that said thank you Kathy for a terrific seminar and a great slam bang start for our 20 22 energy seminar program I see Paula Charles our aforementioned course assistant is in the webinar now I wonder if she could come on camera hi there so Paula was actually in the class last year and will be moderating your follow-on section in a few minutes with the registered students in the class who are able to join join in apologize you want to say anything about about that I know yeah any uh so today's discussion session is open to every student so you can just join with the leak should be on canvas if you can find it just email me and I'll send it to you again your email address is what's your email address uh I'll write it in the chat okay so hold on for a second um so at that said I think we're all we all have our marching orders here and I'd like to thank Kathy once again for showing what a Stanford student can do and I'm relatively sure to amount of time to get things moving uh rapidly we were chatting a little bit before it seems like the this is part of a trend that's not only uh steadily increasing but accelerating towards clean tech our entrepreneurship and we have Kathy to thank as being one of the earlier examples for this kind of business model so thank you all very much and we'll see you all again next week thank you


So, my name is Heidi Waterhouse, I'm here to talk to you about deploying radically and democratizing release because I think it's super exciting. And I was explaining this to my team last night, we went out to the really fancy cocktail restaurant Avian and there were reasons. So first you have to understand that deployment is not release. It's not the same thing. Deployment is getting your code out on the server, out on production. That's all it is. Release is something different. So let's talk about Martin Luther and Shea Guevara and what they have in common. A lot of people don't believe that they have a lot in common, with one of them being a sort of constipated churchman and one of them being a sort of cranky revolutionary. It's possible. But they're both radicals. They both saw the value of change.  I would like to make it better for a lot of people all at once. And given that, here's the things that they want to change. They both believed in universal literacy. Everybody should be able to read. They both believed in marriage of the clergy. Shea was a little unclear on why we had clergy but if we did have them they should get married. And they were both really into overthrowing corrupt leaders. In democratic release, everyone is empowered. Democratic release is saying people get to push things to production and then let them out in the world to test them and we don't need to have a ton of controls on that. We don't need to say everything has to run through everybody. And that's pretty scary for people who are living in controlled and regulated industries but the thing is we need to control what gets out to the public. Democratic release is like a reverse and online. We should be able to pull it and say I want to see the release in production for myself. You should have that power. That's the whole thing about andon lines. They're very empowering. If anybody can stop the line, why can't anybody start the line? Release is about business needs. It's about money. Release is about the things that we're doing to make money with our software and if we're not thinking about it that way, why are we conflating that with deploy? So there's two quotes here. I already said, nines don't matter if the customer is unhappy by charity majors. And every business person I've ever talked to, customers don't count without revenue. It doesn't matter how many customers you have if they're not paying you money. Sorry, that's just the way it works. Sometimes we have customers who might pay us money someday and we're excited about that. But on the whole, if they're not getting value, they're not paying us money and we really want to talk about getting money. So Martin Luther says, what if the people could self serve? He wanted them to be able to self serve religion, but I want you to be able to say your customers can self serve their own software. They can say, I want that feature or I don't want that feature. Power to the people, right? Shay says, disempowerment leads to disengagement. If you don't have the power to do something, you kinda check out. If you can never push to production, if you never see your stuff live, you kinda check out. So how do we liberate the code from the constraints of either the Catholic Church or capitalism, or the change board? Who are nice people, but how do we get out from under them? How do we get it out in the wild? Well, feature flags.  The world is your oyster, all you have to do is decide who to turn it on for. And so I need to tell you what a feature flag is. The simplest explanation I've come up with so far is, a feature flag is a way to control code after you deploy it. After it's out in the world, you can change how it behaves. Martin says, we all deserve grace. Everybody deserves this power and beautiful release. And Shea says, something very similar when you think about it. We all deserve rights. We all deserve this power and this capacity. And I think software is a place that we could be more liberatory. We could be more reformatory. We could be doing more to make it individualized. So Toggle, our mascot says, go faster, be safer, and include everyone in the business decisions about who gets to see software. Include the customers. Here is my link for getting the free t-shirt again. We are, as always, hiring and we are starting to look at remote hires. So if you have not applied before, you could try it again. Thank you very much for your time.