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Here to talk to you about your backup plan is the CEO of Jenerak, Aaron Yachfeld. Aaron, I thought it was great that you were coming on the same day that Microsoft was reaching for a big power supply solution. In terms of the weather warnings, though they seem to be increasing, we're losing power more and more often in Westchester. Do you see your sales actually kind of rising in line with climate change.
We see our sales rising in line with lower power quality matt which you know, obviously it's clear the science says, you know, air temperatures are warmer, water temperatures are warmer. This is causing more severe weather, you know, hotter droughts and heat waves and colder cold snaps, more rain, stronger hurricanes. These are the trends we've been witnessing over the last
couple of decades. And you know, and you put on top of that then the stress that the grid is under, and you know, you've got companies like the Microsoft announcement this morning with three Mile Island. You know, people are companies are are forced to try and find new power sources because the grid.
Is you know, it's stressed right now.
Do you have more sales in those states? I mean, we're always doing stories on Texas with power outages because their grid is so fragmented and fragile.
Do you see more sales and states like that? Yeah.
Nationally, we're about about six percent of single family homes have a permanently installed homestand by generator.
Texas.
Actually, you know, it's been a good state for US as as of late in terms of demand. But some of our best states are not the states you might think of. You know, places like Michigan where you've got pretty severe winter weather as well as severe summer weather, Ohio, Connecticut, you mentioned Westchester. Some of these states actually have higher rates of penetration in the product because they experience those multiple seasons.
We're showing the video of, you know, these portable generators that are gas or diesel diesel powered. What I want for Westchester is the big built in They're like these portable ones you can get for less than one thousand dollars, right, But the.
Big daddies are like thirty grand right.
They're expensive, right, I mean, Aaron. At the end of the day, we have gone through a period of you know, very stifling inflation. Have people kind of put off this purchase? You know, is this something that you find that there is kind of a hurdle here for many Americans to buy in for a new home.
There's no question.
I mean, this is a home improvement project, right, So how you feel about your home financially kind of where you're at. You know, if you're locked into a mortgage that's a low rate today, but you want to move in the future, you're probably not doing big projects in your home today until rates come down.
But we are seeing again when out it just happened.
So the product retails for around five to six thousand dollars and then it's another five to six thousand dollars to install.
It, so ten to twelve thousand.
It's definitely an expensive product when you talk about you know, the overall cost, but these are fully automatic. They run off of the homes fuel system, and it's protection, protection for your home, protection for your family. A lot of people are working from home now, right, so it can protect your livelihood as well. So we're just seeing these trends continue and you know, the product has become very popular.
What about businesses?
When I was thinking about you know, having you on this morning, I thought about a power outage at you know, a hospital for example, can be life is life threatening. Do you have sales at big businesses or institutions like hospitals.
We do.
Yeah, we have a whole division of or company that focuses on much larger generators for exactly as you said, Matt, hospitals. They're focused on data centers, manufacturing plants, distribution, government installations like wastewater treatment plants, some of the critical infrastructure. We're big in the telecommunications industry. So if you see, you know, the wireless cell towers along the highway along I ninety five, a lot of those are going to be backed up
by our generators. Anywhere there's critical infrastructure where you know, a power loss would cause significant damage or disruption to a business or to infrastructure.
How how big do your single site contracts get? I mean, if I'm on the on the one end of the spectrum, right, I can go to I guess home depot and pick up a generator for a few hundred bucks. What's the biggest single site number that you've seen?
Yeah, I mean, especially you get into some of these hyper scale data centers. You know, the Amazons, the Netflixes and the Microsoft's of the world. You're seeing some of these generator farms are up upwards, you know, to put it in context, there there's sometimes twenty thirty megawatts of power.
I mean, these are again, this is why Microsoft's got a contract with a nuclear power plant, a defunct nuclear power plant to bring it back online, because the amount of power needed for a single site is so dramatic. Now that's you know, that's out on the far edge
of the spectrum of use cases. A lot of times you're going to see for a typical grocery store or perhaps a you know, a manufacturing plant, maybe a couple of megawatts of power to keep those installations running, which is, you know, that's still a lot of power, but it's not nearly size that you'd see in some of these bigger installations.
With the data centers.
Today erin we're getting questions from viewers as well, one being is do you ever try to work with local electric companies to lower the cost for consumers.
Yeah, for us, we have programs with especially when you talk about rural cooperatives where you know, the rate payers themselves are part of, you know, solving for what they pay for their local utility. It's a little bit tougher when you get into bigger you know, some of the bigger power networks and some of the bigger utilities, but definitely on the smaller utility side.
We've put programs together in the past.
I think one of the things that you know, people are very concerned about, and this is going to be coming. It's not just that power quality is becoming more challenging with the storms and some of the grid stress, but power prices are going up, right, So just what you pay, what we pay every day for our electrical prices, you know that is that's rising. I mean, you've seen almost the doubling of power prices in some parts of the country over the last ten years, and the forecast is
for another doubling. So you're seeing people take the know kind of kind of take the situation into their own hands, whether you know, whether it's backing up their home or their business, or it's doing something to produce their own power like solar or wind or.
Something like that.
Aaron, you know, one thing I've been wondering a lot about is the stress on power grids across this country and what that means you know that we talked a little bit about climate change, but also as the needs for power increase so meaningfully with this let's say AI revolution, you were talking about rising power costs, I mean, would the cost of your products also rise meaningfully in the
next couple of years? Also given that stress and given these outages that we've seen, I mean I've lost power in my home twice this season already.
Yeah, I mean our products just moved in.
Yeah, I mean our product costs have gone up, like everybody, you know, kind of with inflation here over the last few years, it's been tough.
Things have leveled off now.
But I think what what you know, I think homeowners and what business owners are very concerned about is where do their overall utility costs go in the future. You know, we're investing very heavily in decarbonizing the grid. Right on the side, which is great, We're adding a lot of utility scale solar, a lot of utility scale wind in favor of some of the gas plants and some of the coal plants that have been traditional sources for power.
And then on the demand side, you know, you kind of hit the nail on the head.
It's not only were we're electrifying everything, Like we're electrifying things in our homes, We're electrifying things in our business. We're just at the beginning of the electrification trends in transportation. And now you've got this whole artificial intelligence you know, kind of a demand cycle here which is driving huge construction of new data centers and that's going to put a lot of stress on the grid as well.
So power prices are going up as a result.
I think our products, you know, buy and large get used for resiliency, so for you know, those times when power's out, but I think the need for that, you know, as the grid becomes under more stress going forward, we think that need is going to grow because we think power quality, I mean the data is very clear over the last twenty to thirty years, power quality has.
Gotten worse in the US well aired to your last couple of points, I mean the rising cost of power, and.
You know, the the the green side of things.
Microsoft is looking to nuclear because it's carbon free. You relaunched your solar and storage business, and Bloomberg Intelligence is focused on that, and your ev charger partnership with wall box and and Eco b Are you how optimistic. Are you for this business? And does it matter who gets elected?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, obviously I think it matters for a lot of us on a lot of points on who gets elected, right, And when it comes to power, of course, and power quality and the cost of power, I think I think, you know, from a from a bipartisan standpoint, we all agree on we want better power quality and we want to pay less for our power. So I think those things I think are are are agreeable points for the
most part. You know, how we get there is maybe the you know, is maybe where the details are are different.
But I do think that with our business, you know, when it comes to some of our solar products, our battery storage products you mentioned, our EV charging products, Matt, you know, this is about the future and trying to help homeowners reduce the cast of their power right by self production either on the rooftop with solar, but also having some amount of storage and the ability then to control kind of how those systems work together with your HVAC,
your EV charging, all of those systems together to make sure we're maximizing your ability to have resiliency, but also to.
Reduce the amount of power you use and consume.
Such a cool business for the data and me loves it, but Janai loves it too, So.
I do I want a generator before I buy other cool things.
Very cool, Aaron, thanks so much for joining us Aeron Yaxfeld.
They're the CEO of Generac