What If Data Centers Paid You?

So much of the energy conversation for consumers is about how much they pay. And if bills weren't going up, I just don't think there'd be such a big outcry against large loads, data centers and the like coming online. But bills are going up. People are feeling stressed. Hi, my name is Jigar Shah, and I'm a clean energy entrepreneur. And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications executive. and this is Energy Empire. What's up, Jared? I like it. Now that it's been the second week you've used that intro, I think I like it. I think we're going to have to keep using it. I'm working on it. The more I say it, the more it's feeling real. And thanks to this podcast and just a natural growth in my business, which you've been such an incredible mentor and encouragement for me, I got my first speaking engagement request that has nothing to do with you. I didn't even tell you this. I love it. I love it. So that was really exciting. And I also am going to be a guest on another podcast. Wow. I also thought you crushed it with Rosie. I did not know all of that backstory on Rosie. It's like so inspiring, but I'm excited about this episode. I have been good friends with Nick Chassett for such a long time, and it's been extraordinary to see his growth from the governor's office to running, I think it was at the time, East Bay CCA, which is now Ava Clean Energy, and now running Octopus here in the United States. And I mean, just so much stuff going on. I'm really excited because Octopus is a very buzzy company. And I particularly think they do a great job with their marketing and PR. And their branding is very unusually creative. And I mean, their logo is pink. Like it's not what you usually expect to see from an energy company. One of the things I find fascinating is that as you and I have been working on like grid utilization, right, through our work with Deploy Action, Octopus has really defined the category of grid utilization, particularly in the UK. And now they're bringing all of that here to the US. I saw that Octopus just, you know, like announced a big deal with lunar energy. They announced a big deal around providing low cost electricity paired with batteries in Texas. And so it feels like they're putting together a bunch of solutions that can be paired with data center load growth to figure out how we use the grid, you know, that we've already paid for more efficiently. They're definitely one of the most exciting companies in that space right now. And so I'm really excited to learn from Nick today. It is so good to see you, Nick. You have been on a tear. I think I interviewed you on stage at Dervos last year. And then since that time, you have just been making announcement after announcement after announcement. Like, it feels like you must be like living on a plane or something. Something, something like that. Yeah, we're keeping real busy here at Octopus. There's just so much to do, right? We got to put batteries in every house and we got to work with every utility to make that actually remunerative for the consumer. Well, it's a weird thing, right? Because I mean, right now there's all this hatred for data centers, right? In places like Loudoun County, Memphis, you know, Tucson, basically everywhere a major hyperscaler is trying to build. There's a lot of local concerns, right? People are worried about their electricity bills going up and what, you know, a massive data center would do. But you guys basically have turned the entire argument on its head, right? You're sort of saying the fight's structured the wrong way, right? So for somebody who's skeptical of data centers, what is upside down about the way that they currently connect to the American power system? And, you know, how do we design those connections so that data centers improve grid utilization? Because that's really what you guys did in the UK, right? is you turned all of this stuff upside down. Yeah, look, everything we do, it's about putting the consumer at the heart of the transaction, at the heart of the design. And the way we think about data centers largely today is one where it's a big data center developer working with a big utility to connect a big piece of infrastructure. And the impact downstream are sort of a secondary in the design. And that's not necessarily because the utility doesn't want to take the consumer into account. It's just that's the regulatory construct of large loads, put a connection request in, and they build around it. The octopus strategy is actually the consumer can be part of the solution. And being part of the solution, you get to the core of what they're concerned about, which is the rate affordability, what their bill is going to be. So if we say every household has a role to play in increasing the ability to connect a large load, And that large load is going to create good construction jobs. So there's the secondary effects. But we're also going to drive down the consumer bill because we're going to put a battery in every household. We're going to connect every device in the home and flex that device in a way that is really indiscernible to the consumer in their day-to-day life. But is it going to save $10, $20, $30, $40 a month on their bill? Suddenly you've turned something that seemed like a real inconvenience at best and potentially kind of a cause of concern at worst into something people want. The octopus model, they are really started before the data center boom, the renewable boom in the UK. It was the case that it was impossible to build an onshore wind turbine in the UK because of community opposition in rural parts of England. Nobody wanted to see a big wind turbine go in their neighbor's land and ruin, from their perspective, their viewshed. We flipped it on its head by saying there's a wind turbine in your community. You see that wind turbine and you sign up for Octopus Energy. Whenever that wind turbine is spinning, you get a discount on your bill. And the faster it spins, the bigger the discount. Suddenly, we went from being nearly impossible to cite onshore wind to 10,000 rural communities across the United Kingdom asking for Octopus to put wind turbines in their community because they saw a tangible benefit. They saw a lower bill. And we think that's the same dynamic that needs to be implemented across this country. And frankly, globally, we think about the data center buildup. Well, that's a really compelling story. And I don't think something like a concept that's familiar to most Americans. So I definitely want to get into that. But for a listener who hasn't heard this term before, talk to us a little bit about virtual power plants. What are they? So instead of one giant power station churning out electricity for the whole country, talk about like how virtual power plants work with all these smart devices? How does it work in practice? What types of devices are we talking about? And how does that all come together to be something that could compete with a gas plant? Energy is actually fairly simple, right? You know, there's a megawatt hour of supply and there's a megawatt hour of demand. And utilities are constantly trying to find that balance between the demand for megawatts and their ability to supply those megawatts. What a virtual power plant does is it plays on the reduction side of the ledger. It reduces the demand for megawatts and megawatt hours during key points of tension and stress on the grid, or frankly, any time of the grid, frankly, because a virtual power plant can be a solution to almost any grid challenge that you have. But it's a reduction in demand that then allows for the supply that needs to be put on the network to be reduced as well. And a reduction of a megawatt hour is just as good as the supply of that megawatt hour if the utility has confidence that that megawatt hour is not going to be used. And that's where scaling of virtual power plants comes into play and wanting a diversity of different assets where it's thermostats, where it might be more of a statistical approach where you say, all right, if a 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 thermostats, if I flex 10,000, 50,000 thermostats down two degrees, that's going to say X number of megawatt hours. And I'm confident that that reduction is going to happen to 95% probability. I like to pair that though, with lots of batteries and lots of solar storage, where I know it's a metered kilowatt hour of production from the solar into the battery, the battery stores it and discharges it when the system needs it. And then I might pair that with electric vehicles that are very easy to manage charging around. And then there's complementarity over the course of the day. Thermostats are really good at reducing consumption in that four to nine period. Batteries give you a lot of flexibility, maybe from six to nine p.m. And then EVs, you start managing charging from eight to 10 p.m. because you can charge them overnight and still give people the experience they want, which is a fully charged car at six o'clock in the morning. So you feather these different asset classes. You deliver what the utility really wants, which is a reduction that is contracted and they're confident about in megawatt hour demand. And then it looks no different than a traditional power plant that's injecting supply into the grid. I've been shocked actually at like just how good Octopus has been in simplifying this for the consumer, right? I mean, I think one of the things you guys launched in the UK recently was the partnership with BYD, where you sort of said, hey, you know, here's a car and you can basically fuel it for free if you let us fuel it during the times when the wind's blowing really hard or, you know, the sun's shining, right? And so it does feel like you guys have made all of this complex stuff much more accessible right So how does that work in the UK The UK and Europe broadly have an advantage most of the US doesn have which is consumers can choose their electricity supplier. So Texas is the one state in the US that has the conditions like Europe around a real free choice for residential consumers. But that ability to choose your supplier unlocks a lot of opportunity. And that's really what we've leveraged, right? The building block of the Octopus businesses, we provide consistent, trustworthy, and great experience to the customers who buy 6, 12, 18-month energy supply plants. When you build that trust, the consumer starts to say, all right, well, I'm willing to go beyond just buying a commodity service from you. Maybe I will buy a car from you or a heat pump or a battery. So we built that trust. We start to be able to move deeper into the relationship with the consumer. And that has led to offers like PowerPack, where we lease the consumer a BYD car, we install a charger in their home, and we give them unlimited free charging of their EV within certain parameters for 399 pounds a month. That's really amazing. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, though, is how have you guys, you know, targeted low income communities? Because obviously, a lot of these things you find, you know, when you say the word EV, you're really focused on, you know, higher income communities, etc. Like, how have you guys really, you know, focused on serving all residents in the UK? Well, I think in the UK with EVs, right, EVs are now the least expensive cars to operate by a long way. And that's, you know, even more magnified right now with the significant rise in the price of gasoline across the world, but particularly in places like the United Kingdom. We've actually started leasing used EVs. So we're bringing the price point of getting into an EV down so that it's accessible to all consumers. That's, you know, I'd say probably one of our major areas focus. And look, the Octopus business operates at a scale today. More than 8 million households in the UK are served by Octopus Energy, where we're serving every slice of the income pie from the highest income to the lowest income and everyone in between. And the solutions that we offer are participated in by all those households. If anything, the flexibility rates that we offer that allow people, in some cases, to save fairly small amounts of money on their bill, attract more low and moderate income households. Because saving a couple dollars a week, $5, $10, $15 a month, is going to mean a heck of a lot more for somebody who is working hard to make ends meet than somebody who's really high income. And so we see that. We actually see a lot of participation in these programs from our moderate income customers. So as you and I talked about earlier in the conversation, you guys have been pretty active. So for the PJM states, you partnered with Voltus, right? Voltus will sign a contract with the hyperscalers across a number of measures, Octopus being one. And then that gives you the revenue certainty to go forward and give people a better price on retail power, right? Which is great. And then you separately took a majority stake in Uplight in March. Uplight is a service provider to a lot of electric utility companies that are investor-owned utilities. So now you have this ability to work through the bureaucratic investor-owned utility and say, hey, you should provide this as a speed to power for the data centers that you're trying to bring online, right? Like, I'm curious just like whether the U.S. just makes it too hard to do business or whether the prize is big enough for you guys to be able to like, you know, go through three different business models to serve the United States? Look, the U.S. is a massive set of markets, right? It's at least 50 different electricity markets. And, you know, you have Washington, D.C. that has its own regulatory commission. So that's 51. And then you have electricity co-ops and munis. So, you know, it's a lot of variety, but it is a massive prize. But in some sense, the fact that it is broken up into different market structures and the landscape is so diverse does create a big opportunity for us to really get to the core of how do we solve massive problems for consumers and how do we solve massive problems for utilities, right? I think too much of the business in the U.S. today is around solving a very discreet or regulatory box. Deliver me a 30 megawatt VPP program. Deliver me a home energy report program where we're going to send emails and mailers to 500,000 customers. Those are discreet and solvable, but you're not delivering massive value. $10 million, $50 million, $100 million of value every year to the utility or to the electricity consumers. And I think we really need to shift towards solving massive problems at scale for the wide variety of utilities and large customers that are out there. And so we have to do it, you know, in our case, through the provision of, you know, best-in-class flexibility technology and best-in-class of customer engagement around load flexibility. Would it be easier to do that under a single market construct? Yeah, probably. But if we had a single market construct, there'd probably be lots of players who are doing it already too. So it has created a lot of white space to think expansively about how do we actually turn flexibility into this multi-billion dollar solution to the challenge of our day, which is low growth and rate affordability. We think that between Uplight, our retail businesses, partnerships like the one we have with Lunar, we're actually positioning ourselves to be able to touch all of the different entry points to deliver these huge solutions to utilities. Nick, so Octopus is mostly active in Texas right now, but you spent your whole career prior to this in California at the California Public Utilities Commission and Governor Brown's office, and as the founding CEO of a company called AVA. So talk us through how different those two markets really are. What's working in Texas that doesn't work in California and vice versa? What's working in California that Texas hasn't figured out? So if you could take the best parts of both, what would that look like? Gosh, as a Californian, it's hard for me to acknowledge just how right Texas is getting it these days. But I have to say, I am loving living in California, but working a lot in Texas because Texas has really understood that we are at least in this moment in a time when freedom of market structure and freedom to go and build is what is going to allow both clean energy resources to scale because they are the best, fastest, and cheapest type of electricity generation available to us, while also seeing economic development and load growth. So Texas is getting a lot right. Right now, Texas is beating California in storage deployment, in solar deployment, and large load growth. Those are all really sort of positive things. And we're starting to see actually lots of Texans adopt electric vehicles too. So Texas is getting a lot right. I do think California tends to be a little bit stuck on its past successes and likes to talk about all the great things that it has done. And I don't want to minimize those. We would not be where we are globally in energy storage in particular without the leadership that California played 10, 15 years ago and saying, yes, we're going to deploy grid scale batteries to solve the fact that we're retiring peaker plants. The one thing I'm still struggling with, though, is that if you take some resident that is pissed off about data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, in some ways, Octopus looks like a tech company to them, don't they? And so in some ways, you're saying, hey, give us access to your thermostat. Give us access to your EV. Give us access to all this stuff. And trust us, we're way different than the other tech companies who are building those data centers that are across the street from your house, right? And so I'm trying to figure out like this person's protesting the data center on this side. But on this side, you're saying, trust me, like we're going to like negotiate a good deal for you and something that's in your favor. This is why the Texas model is so important, though, Jigar. And it's that if you're just selling somebody software to manage their thermostat or their battery or their EV, it does just feel like a tech company that is saying they're going to give you these benefits. and then they may or may not show up on my bill. But when I'm your electricity supplier and I'm telling you, I'm giving you 50% off the cost of charging your car, it's just on the bill. The bill was gonna be 150 bucks and now it's 120 bucks. And I show you on my bill that you use this many kilowatts to charge your car, the rate would have been 15 cents and now I'm gonna charge you seven and a half cents. So having that billing relationship, having that core retail electricity supply relationship with the consumer does fundamentally change the relationship between us, the tech company, and the consumer. But it also changes the perception of value So much of the energy conversation for consumers is about how much they pay And so much of the tension that we facing today in the U is about bills going If bills weren going up I just don think there be such a big outcry against large loads data centers and the like coming online But bills are going up People are feeling stressed. And so as a retailer, because we own that billing relationship, we're able to communicate the benefits and actually deliver the benefits of flexibility directly to the consumer. And that's actually one of the challenges we observe a lot of big utilities have. So getting back to the question about California, the California utilities are struggling today communicating the benefits of virtual power plants. You know, there's an alphabet soup of programs, ELRP, et cetera, to help consumers participate in VPPs. But consumers don't really see those benefits clearly articulated on their bill. I signed up for something. The signup process was too complicated. It took too long. Maybe I did it. And they said I was going to save 50 bucks, 100 bucks on my bill. And it probably is there somewhere, but I don't know how to read my PGD bill anyway. So I don't even know if the benefit came or not. And so I think that's where there's a huge opportunity in how we communicate the benefits of flexibility to the consumer. The flip side of that is we have more EVs in California than we have in any other state. We have more solar and storage in California than any other state. So the potential is just so massive. We just have to figure out a way to help consumers actually see what's happening and see what the benefits of managed charging are or VPP participation are in a way that they can actually understand and like actually accept as being good for their lives. This is why I'm always yelling in my other podcast. It's such a great point, Nick. And like, I feel like we're constantly circling back to this point about the importance of excellent communications, marketing, and branding. and I want to make sure that we spend some time talking about the brand for Octopus because I think you guys just do such a fantastic job with it. Most energy companies are pretty boring. Oh, yeah. Come on. It's your brand ambassador over there is Constantine, the pink octopus. Lift it up so we can see it. And our friends on YouTube want to see it. It's so cute. Octopus is anything but boring on branding. There's your mascot. You have an actual fan Club, which I love and I can't wait to talk about. Tariffs where customers pay less the time the wind is blowing hardest. So what role has this branding and comms work played in Octopus's success? And what does Octopus do operationally with regards to branding that an investor-owned utility CEO literally can't? I mean, it's one of the differentiators in our space that I want to see more CEOs embracing like you have. Look, what does Octopus do, right? We think first and foremost about what the experience needs to be. And Constantine is a great sort of articulation of sort of the playfulness of how we want the experience to be. But it starts really with the way we treat our customers and the experiences that we create. So I'll give one great example. When you call an energy specialist in the UK and you might have to wait for a minute or two on hold, the song that is being played is the number one chart song from when you're 14 years old because when you're 14 years old that's sort of typically sort of when like your taste in music is starting to shift and you you know we we know that people have sort of fond nostalgic memories for sort of music of that era of their life is it magic how do you do such a thing AI? No, I mean, look, I think, you know, if the recognized phone number, it connects to the account, the account that knows, you know, the year that the consumer was born. So brilliant. It ties back. But it's a design choice that's made, right? That's a design choice that is made for how people are going to interact with the brand. And I think that particular example is so emblematic of sort of every sort of choice that is made along the way of, you know, from when someone visits the website to when they use the app to when they see our ads on billboards it's always with what is the customer experience going to be so getting back to the point around u.s utilities why couldn't a u.s utility fundamentally change the whole experience for a customer to make it actually fun and enjoyable and not something that's a burden there's no regulator that says you can't do that certainly it's not sort of the normal course of business. But I do think this is where there's such massive opportunity for our US utilities to really rethink customer experience. Dominion Virginia Power would never. It's so funny. I want to go a little bit deeper on your fan club because it's a really interesting model. So on last week's episode, we focused on wind power and the local opposition that stopped a lot of US projects for wind power. Octopus has flipped that in the UK as you were explaining to us earlier. And your fan club is essentially a tariff that drops the price for customers who live near a wind farm. So tell us a little bit more about the wind fan club. How does that work? And what effect do you think it has had on public attitudes towards wind power in the UK? Well, I'll answer that last question first. And it has fundamentally changed public perception towards hosting wind turbines in your community, because it's created this tangible benefit not just for the landowner who's getting a lease for having the turbine on their particular plot of land, but for everybody in the community. And that's reflected by the fact that thousands, tens of thousands of communities have been asking to host a fan club wind turbine. I love it. Do you know who was responsible for that epic pun? Do you know who first came up with that? I don't want to say a name and get it wrong. So, well, I want to meet your creative team. Please introduce me because they're brilliant. I mean, it's what they've done. I would like the beating heart of Octopus. The beating heart of Octopus are the marketing and creative team. And they're some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with. And it's actually sort of not something you would expect in an energy company that we would have multiple people in our executive leadership team who come from a marketing and creative background. in what is typically viewed as a fairly boring and stayed industry. I want a masterclass. I want them to be on the stage at RE+, teaching a masterclass to all of the other fellow marketing and communications professionals about what the process was like in developing this brand and all of the fun elements of this brand, because I really think that we need to see more of that from your peers. So kudos. I'm so serious. Please introduce me. Absolutely, Jamie. And look, we actually are launching a consultancy to do just that, right? There's the marketing, but there's also sort of a whole operating model around how we provide customer service. And we've been getting lots of inbound from utilities, governments. How do you operate like an octopus? And so we're actually launching a consultancy to work with those folks to do just that. So I'll make that introduction, but I'm sure my consultancy folks would love to hear from any listeners who would like to operate like an octopus. Sign me up. Sign me up. I'd love to operate like an octopus. I'm curious, though, just to circle back a little bit. You know, the part of what I don't understand in this moment, and maybe I need to talk to your marketing team, is that right now what the Trump administration is really pushing is we should build a natural gas power plant right behind your data center and put all that pollution right into your local community because that's what achieves speed to power, right? And I think what you guys are pushing instead is why don't you fund 10,000 home batteries in Ohio or Tennessee County, right? I'm just trying to understand why this message has been so hard to break through in the United States. I think first and foremost, it's a reticence of your system operators to allow that distributed solution to displace gas behind the meter. Actually, we know that the evidence is that distributed batteries have lower failure rates than a single large gas point that's a single point of failure. So the actual reliability dynamic really does suggest that that distributed solution is going to be a more reliable asset. But utility planners and operators just aren't used to it. We do in the UK have the great luck of having, I would say, the most forward-looking distribution network in the world, UK power networks, that has really leaned into understanding how can distributed flexibility operate with their control room to be able to deliver these outcomes. And that's what's allowed us to pursue these distributed speed to power solutions that really create win-wins. And I think community opposition is just going to force it, right? You may want to put a power plant behind the data center but that board of supervisors in that county is just going to say no And it that that local sort of power is just going to be such a barrier to development that utilities and the hyperscalers are going to need to engage differently. And, you know, we're really excited to partner there to demonstrate what is possible. I mean, absolutely. We know that the polling data is backing up everything that you're saying. We know that if these data centers are powered with clean energy, they are more likely to earn the public support. And that's where our favorite acronym, Beyonce, bring your own new clean power comes into play, which is essentially what you're talking about. And I think this is such a creative solution. And I'm excited to see this model proliferate. And no one wants an old jet engine powering a data center behind their house. No one wants that. And when those assets are built, no one's going to want to run them either because they're just really expensive to run. So even when we build reciprocating gas or other simple cycle turbines behind the meter, they may be relatively low capex, but they're really high marginal costs. So you're going to have this ongoing effect that they're going to drive electricity prices up, which is going to create a recursive loop of the benefits of flexibility because we're going to dispatch flexibility to keep prices down so you don't dispatch those engines. And then those asset owners are left with stranded assets that are sitting on their balance sheets and they're like, why did I make this investment in the first place? I could have gotten the double benefit of relying on flexibility. Absolutely. Great point. Nick, all right. Let's wrap it up here. It's May, 2026. Five years from now, May, 2031. Tell me, what does this look like in your perfect world? Is every American household with an EV connected to a VPP? Are we even halfway there? And throw out a number. How many gigawatts of VPP capacity do you think we have delivering to the grid by then? Well, I'll throw out a number first. I love it. like, you know, be able to like, go back in five years and tell you if you're wrong. So in the DOE VPP liftoff report written by the famous Jen Downing, it says that we're going to be at 160 gigawatts of VPPs that are subscribed into a VPP by 2030. Even in spite of Trump, do you still stand by that? That was a Biden era. Okay. Because you've got carrier, you've got all the appliance manufacturers, they're all in, right? So like, I think, and frankly, I think Trump is forcing us there because this DOE is doing such a poor job of organizing the data centers to integrate into the utilities that they're being forced into VPPs because it's the only thing that can show up and solve the problem in months and not years. I'm going to think about it in the context of the numbers of households, right? I believe we'll see tens of millions of households will have batteries. So if you have 10 million, 15, 20 million households, each have a 10 kilowatt hour state standalone battery, you know, that's 20 gigawatts right there. We're going to see tens of millions of EVs on the road. Every single one of them will, you know, in one shape or form be participating in a flexibility program. Every new air conditioner will be connected and optimized. So, you know, what's the math there? Is it 160 gigawatts? I'm taking the over. Damn, you heard it here first. And don't forget about the water heaters, my friend. And the water heaters. And we're not even in, you know, commercial industrial. I think the trajectory that we're on for load flexibility is really unbeatable. And it's not going to be driven by policy one way or the other is going to be driven by the progress forward adoption of technology that is just better and cheaper. And when things are better and cheaper, consumers buy them. Well, Nick Chasset, thank you so much for being here and look forward to seeing you soon. Yeah, great. Thank you. I'm going to keep an eye out for my Constantine in the mail. I have two, two follow ups here, Jamie Constantine, and I'm going to connect you with Pete Miller, that created director of Octopus. Thank you so much. Great. Thanks, Nick. Energy Empire is supported by S2G Investments. If you haven't checked out their podcast, I highly recommend it. They have a great recent episode on the long-term effects of the Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In the episode, Sanjeev Krishnan, Franco Sullivan, and Bala Nagarajan make a compelling case that this disruption could be the most powerful accelerant for renewable energy in a generation. And in future episodes, they'll be exploring how those forces are reshaping our food systems and ocean intelligence. Sound interesting? Go find the S2G podcast and start with the global energy order has changed. Now what? I love Nick. I mean, it's hard to get him to like laugh. I have to say like, he's a little serious for me, but like we got him laughing, which I think was good. And like, it's just, you know, it's one of those things where he is so driven to figure this out and it's great to see. Yeah. It was great to finally meet him. I've heard his name so much for the last couple of years. And so it was nice to have this deep dive into what he's trying to do and, and the lessons learned in the UK, how they apply here. I'm really excited to see how these solutions get actually applied in the market by some of these hyperscalers. It's also interesting to see a CEO where marketing and comms is woven into their corporate DNA. And so it's not something that's other for him, right? It's right in the middle of exactly what his remit really is. Absolutely. I think the creative branding of their quote unquote fan club where they pay their customers when the wind blows the hardest is just so brilliant. I would love to see that type of like very B2C focused marketing applied more by other companies in the space. I just think they have a really fresh take and they've clearly been very thoughtful about it and invested, you know, the creativity and the resources that it takes to do a really great job in that area. So that's definitely a big differentiator. And one of the reasons that I think that they're going to be very successful. It's also fantastic to see them as a partner for us on the podcast. You know, they have been an early supporter of the podcast and recently came in as a sponsor. And we're going to, you know, do a really cool new feature with them. So I'm super excited about rolling it out. So with the support of our friends at Octopus Energy, we're launching a new segment called Ask Jigger. Yeah, the idea is exactly what it sounds like. You send in your energy questions and I answer them on the show and the ones I can't answer, Jamie answers. And like, it's stuff you've actually been sitting with. Like, why is my bill double what it was yesterday? You know, should I go solar now or wait? Like, what the heck is going on with nuclear, right? Why would people possibly, you know, value a company with no revenues at $10 billion? Like whatever is bugging you, I'll give you a straight answer. Awesome. Well, since I'm here, I'm just going to go ahead and go first and ask you the first question. With all the talk about switching to electric everything, heat pumps, EVs, induction stoves, that's the one thing I haven't done. Where do you actually start? Like say someone wants to electrify their life. What's the first thing that they should do? Well, I think the first thing I tell people is not to throw out stuff that works. Like, it's amazing to me how many people are like, but I'm guilty. Like, I just want to like replace my stuff with electrify everything. And I was like, your car still works. Don't get rid of it until you're ready to buy a new car, right? Your air conditioning and heating systems still work. Don't get rid of it until you're ready to get a new one, right? On the stove thing, you know, I think that's a personal choice. I don't know if the stoves ever break. At least I've never had one that broke. But like the induction stove thing is hard though. It took me three years to convince my wife that an induction stove wouldn't make the food taste different. And we have that vacation house up in Deep Creek, Lake Maryland. And so we started with induction stove there and she loves it. And so now she's like, this is great. But we have this like really fancy wolf stove in our Bethesda house. And so like she's not moving away from that anytime soon. Awesome. Thank you. Great answer. And thank you for relieving me of my guilt about my only gas appliance I have in my house. It is a newer stove. I think I'm going to hang on to it. All right. So we want your questions. Submit your question at octopusenergy.com slash ask dash like hyphen jigger. And the link is in the show notes. Thanks so much as always for tuning in. You can find Energy Empire wherever you get your podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or also on YouTube. The best thing you can do to support this show is rate, review, or subscribe. Thanks so much.