Fresh intel from state utility regulatory filings

Latitude Media covering the new. of the energy transition. I'm Shell Khan, and this is Catalyst. What tends to happen with a lot of this stuff is redaction for essentially the equivalent of trade secret reasons. And this is nothing new, but it tends to be very frustrating when you'll have pages and pages of text and then blacked out is the one number that says how much this gas plant is going to cost.

Right. Or the the one thing that says the mode for this data center is this and it's been blanked out. Coming up, Matt Bullard and I dig for buried treasure inside the reams of documents coming out of state public utilities commissions. Catalyst is supported by Fishtank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fishtank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with.

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I'm Shale Khan. I invest in early stage technologies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right, so Some of you may already know this, but my first job, my very first job out of college, was working at the California Public Utilities Commission, the state regulator for utilities. in California. I had fallen in love with energy for whatever reason. I've never quite been able to explain it all these years later.

But I didn't really know what to do with myself and I sort of found an end to the CPUC. It wasn't a long time that I was there and I learned, among other things, that I don't like working for bureaucratic organizations. But I will say that in my brief tenure there, I think I learned more about how the electricity and gas markets actually work.

than any other role that I've ever had since. And this was like close to 20 years ago. It's just so important to understand the regulatory construct and the process that leads to

to regulation and ultimately to decisions in the electricity and the gas sector, which all is born out of these public utilities commissions. The other thing that is so interesting about them is that there is an enormous amount of information and insight and data that is in the public domain through these regulatory processes, but is buried in esoteric, long, hard-to-read PDFs that they post on their website.

So I've really enjoyed that my friend Nat Bullard, who you've heard for on this podcast uh many times. has started to chronicle some of the interesting findings that he's getting out of using LLMs to pull insight from public utility regulatory filings through a company that he co-founded called Halcyon, which

Which does this in general and builds all sorts of information tools out of these capabilities. Nat has started to publish a sort of regular Update newsletter type of thing of interesting little tidbits from what's happening across the country in state utility commissions. So I decided to have Nat on to talk through some of the more interesting ones and give us a little flavor of what's happening at the state level right now as utilities.

wrangle with the multiple challenges they are facing, ranging from large loads. i.e. data centers entering their territories, trying to keep rates down for customers, trying to manage their other large customers who are increasingly irked by the preference given to the data centers, and so on. So Nat and I had a fun conversation about a bunch of these. Also, before we begin, I'm hosting another Ask Me Anything episode where I will answer your questions large and small about

Whatever you want. I think you know the types of things that we like to talk about here. If you want to ask a question, which I hope that you will, just email us at catalyst at latitude media.com. That's catalyst at latitude media.com. And for now, here's Nat, welcome back as always. Sheel, thank you for having me back. It's great to be here as always. Let's do a a little tour of state regulatory filings, state utility regulatory filings. For a fun tidbit.

All right. So you you picked out a bunch that you thought of were particularly interesting or I guess indicative of something that's happening in the moment. So I want to start in Pennsylvania. What's going on in Pennsylvania? So I remember a couple years ago when I started having to think about how the court system works for purposes of jurisprudence in the United States, and I learned about this thing called on Bunk, E-N space, B-A-N-C.

Which means that all of the members of a particular court, all the presiding judicial officers, get together and partake in a hearing or a proceeding all at once. And as you can imagine, it doesn't usually happen that way. You usually have one judge do something and then maybe you need to get others to help, you know, concur with an opinion or whatever.

But it's not something that I'd actually heard about much in a judicial context. And now I start to hear about it in the Public Utility Commission context. in Pennsylvania. And this has come up in Pennsylvania where there's this on bond hearing about large load interconnection read data centers. And this is the first time that I'd ever seen one of these things to the point where I had to ask uh a friend of ours and an advisor.

Uh, does this happen very often? To which the response is no. Like this almost never happens that you get everybody together at once. And in fact, typically that would only happen for something like restructuring a generation fleet. or getting to set new retail markets, like some big kind of market and state defining

thing that would be happening in any particular market. So getting everybody together like this is pretty interesting because obviously it's a kind of an accelerated way to make sure that everybody's bought in on a decision. But it also tends to bring all the players to the yard too. This is going to bring all of the different interveners, all of the different expert testimonies and things like that all together into one place.

Um and one of the the things that you're finding in this process in Pennsylvania is First of all, not surprisingly, there's just a ton of data center operators uh and also the data center coalition, which is the sort of, you know, group that works on their behalf coming together to make an argument. But so too are all of the utilities. And they start putting together some eye-popping numbers in terms of exactly what's going on in the States. So one of one of my particular favorites was um

From Duquesne Light, which has a relatively small service territory. And they said that there are four projects in advanced stages of connection essentially in their service territory.

that could add 40% to their demand. And one really big hyperscale thing could add 30% to their demand on its own. So this is there's a reason why this is an on banque proceeding because we're we're now in a place that we probably haven't seen since the US was being electrified full stop, where people are showing up and saying, Hello, I have one thing that will materially change the shape of load and demand pretty much forever. Yeah, it's wild.

And we're seeing that sort of all over the place, like not literally everywhere. It is still true that data center development is somewhat clustered, but less and less clustered, it seems, as time goes on. And the scale of these things are so big and some of these markets are so small that they're just swamping utility territories. That I there's another one that's like a Uh Rappahannock Co-op or something like that. I'm butchering it, but there's do you know the one that I'm talking about?

One of my favorites, the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. I know it very well because it serves the territory adjacent to where my folks had their farm in Virginia. Yeah. Okay. And they said they're like, We have to do that. There's another one where it's like two hundred percent of their peak load or something like that. More than more than that, Shail. So they said, hi, we have a 1.2 gigawatt summer peak node. We have individual interconnection requests that are four times that size.

Uh and so they're basically they're saying A, we need to do something different physically in the physical grid to do that. But B, we also need to come up with a different regulatory construct in which to do it. In it in sort of in two dimensions. One of them is How are we going to, you know, how are we going to get this paid for uh if it's done? Because basically you're building on behalf of a a handful of customers as opposed to

I don't know, a hundred thousand customers in the service territory. B, how are they gonna pay how are we gonna make sure that they pay for it? And uh the other one is what if they don't show up? What if we build for them? And then they don't actually materialize. You know, which is the nor the I think that could normally happen in normal grids.

You plan for demand uh that never materializes and then what? If they plan for the kind of demand that wouldn't materialize until the year twenty two fifty without without data center mode, who's going to be paying for it? I was thinking about

Like so this is happening all over the place. And in fact, I think uh on a on our list of things to talk about, there are more large load interconnection dockets to talk about because this is sort of like one of the bigger things that's happening all over the place. Uh and and it is, as you said There's a lot of nuance to it that has to be figured out in each individual case. There are these questions of how you structure the tariff in the first place, how you ensure

Cost allocation is done right. Are you demanding some sort of flexibility or bring your own generation or bring your own storage or whatever it might be? How how does the asset interact with the grid? Is there demand response? I mean, there's like a million things.

to figure out. But it's interesting the fact that this is happening in so many places kind of all at once, and at least in some of the places, the magnitude of the impact that it will have on the overall system. I was trying to think back on the last time that some that this sort of level of change was afoot in electricity, in that

quick a time frame. And I wonder whether we could make one argument it was like when we were doing our natural gas build out in the country, but I that felt like it it was over the course of a decade or something like that. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't quite as dramatic. But maybe it was deregulation.

It was like the period when what is it, fourteen states or seventeen states, something like that, deregulated over the course of a few years and then Enron like put a put a stop to the rest of it. But that feels like the last time I can think of where we had this like total transformation of a a large market, but occurring at a state level because of how everything is now because of the states are the jurisdiction that matter here. So it's yes at the state level

You had deregulation, uh, and you had the Enron sort of phenomenon. You had this massive boom in combined cycle gas turbine build that crested in the early two thousands and then burst, like went away for for quite some time. Um we know in terms of load growth on a percent basis, you know, in the nineteen fifties it was close to ten percent per per annum.

But I would posit that in terms of thinking about the the full physical and regulatory construct of the grid, you'd probably have to go back to more like the nineteen thirties and think about building in the far west. building at the same time a massive amount of generation built by the state, to be clear, with transmission owned by the government, to be clear. And then with at the same time loads that came along uh you know, sort of coincident with that for things like smelters.

The kind of things that when they eventually departed the field ended up creating the capacity or the the the the generation capacity in the grid spare to allow data centers to get built in the first place. So I I think it's been a very long time. I don't think that really anyone has got the muscle for this because it's not been in anybody's lived experience.

Really. And so we're having to think about it pretty fresh. There are people who have dealt with rapid growth. There are people that have dealt with deregulation. There are people that have dealt with large load customers. But all of these things at once, and also a new type of large mode customer that has different characteristics than what you might have had before, is quite a lot to deal with in one go. Not to mention as you said, the risk that

Some of it isn't gonna happen. I mean the certainty that some of it is. Right, but how much and which one? Yeah. This is the development business fundamentally. And I think it's something that has been elided from the conversation in a lot of cases. Uh, you know, if if this was if we were talking about purely a supply push, like we were doing just generation without the demand there, anybody who's ever been in the power generation business is going to tell you.

Obviously not all of these things are going to show up. But the demand side has not typically even pulled into that kind of conversation before and asked the same questions. Are you going to build every single planned prospective hyperscale data center that you have on paper right now? The answer is no. How long are you gonna operate it for, right? We're building infrastructure that in assumes that that tariff we're giving you is gonna be getting paid for.

I don't know, decade, two decades, whatever it might be. That's right. Uh, and this stuff could change quickly. All right. Uh let's jump to another one in this category. I'm gonna jump to number three on the list that you sent me because it it's relevant to the point that you just made about the nineteen thirties where we're building out

um manufacturing infrastructure too. So one of the interesting side effects sort of of this this data center boom in electricity is that it does affect the other existing large load customers who do exist. Uh, albeit not in the numbers and not with the growth that we see in in data centers. So let's talk about Kentucky.

And let's talk about specifically Eastern Kentucky. The East Kentucky Power Cooperative, again, to be fair, not really on my radar in my previous life, you know, covering electricity demand growth. uh has set out to do its own, again, essentially custom data, the data center large mode tariff. And it's now working its way through the state utility commission discussions.

At which point Nucor enters the chat. Nucor, uh, the mini mill steel producer, which obviously uses an almost entirely electrified process for its energy input. has said, hey, we're the biggest load in eastern Kentucky, and we have been for a long time. And we want to be very clear that we are an intervener and read in on this process because it impacts us.

Uh also sort of implicit in that kind of to what we were just talking about is we've been around for a while and we're going to be around for a while. Uh we're not new, we operate under existing structures, we would like to be abreast of what's happening here, to to put to put it very gently.

But more importantly, it's serve as a reminder that there are other large modes that are out there. In fact, there's another one in the region, which is the Blue Oval plant, uh being built by Ford and SK On to do batteries. That's like a couple hundred megawatt load on its own. It's not a five gigawatt, you know, prospective hyperscale data s data center complex, but it's very big. And it's the kind of thing that that typically has relied upon

the grid written large to provide most of its power. And so if you're going to have large mode tariffs that come into these kinds of market structures, Everybody else that either needs one of those themselves now or might need one in the future or has been a beneficiary of a well-functioning grid to begin with is gonna kind of wanna be read in on this problem.

It's it's real it's really it's important to see and I think it I I said this sincerely, to see incumbency sort of jump into these discussions as well, and to some ways as a reminder that There is still a lot of other stuff out there that's happening, but also that, you know, w we we sh we should be judicious in our thinking about everyone getting their own custom new large mode tariff and what that's gonna mean.

Yeah, and I think it speaks to one of the adverse side effects of the AI boom that I think it goes under discussed, which is that If you believe that there are limited resources specifically in the form of large load interconnection capacity, which there are limited resources in large load interconnection capacity, then anything that is not a data center is currently battling against data centers to try to find a site.

And that's an issue if we want to reindustrialize the United States, right? Like all this new manufacturing that we hope to build in the United States, those are large loads. Those need tens or hundreds of megawatts. at an individual site. And I can tell you for certain that it is getting harder and harder to find a site to put any of that stuff because there are data center developers hunting around the entire country trying to find anywhere where that is possible.

So it it's making it and that's difficult for manufacturing, for you know, industrial electrification. of whatever stripe. I mean even down to the scale of like fleet EV charging for medium and heavy duty vehicles. Like it's it's a challenge that is being presented specifically by the Growth of Data Center.

And and not only that, it's a particular class of customer which and I think we talked about this in in our yearly pod and our yearly DAC podcast earlier this year. That is almost uniquely underexposed economically to the cost of electricity relative to the gain to be had from its access. If you jack the price of electricity 30% for somebody that makes

steel using an electric arc furnace, it will materially impact the cost of the steel that is being made. If you do the same for people that are doing data center operations, uh, especially for training, where the premium is on being fast. It's just not going to be as big of a deal. You've got a unique willingness to pay from one class of customer to

Now this is a question that I have, which I don't know if you can or have pulled out from this data though, which is we talk about that in principle. Is it happening in practice? In other words, are these large load tariffs that are being introduced at a premium to other industrial rates in the same territory. Like our our utilities and our regulators getting on board with and our large loads or your data centers being saying okay to the concept that they will actually pay more.

So there we're in the realm of redaction to some extent, but also a lot of these are very early. They're mostly under deliberation right now, uh, and we don't have a lot of clarity on that. But it's something we need to get clarity on. Is and and within that, what are the exact conditions of it? Is it an adder to an existing rate? Is it a newly agreed flat rate? Does it escalate? You know, what's its duration? All of these things are

deeply relevant. And, you know, the fascinating thing about all of them is that for as much as this is like crunchy and quantitative outcome, it's just gonna be like a line and, you know, it's gonna be like a line in a document somewhere that just says what it is. Are you tired of overpaying for big name PR firms but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks?

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Alright, well that's a good segue into Uh, something that is not directly about large load interconnection tariffs, but I would say is the fear everyone is trying to avoid with all these new large loads. And stepping back. is the f greatest fear that I have about energy, honestly, for the next few years, which is that electricity rates are going to be rising.

They have been rising more than histor historically. I mean, I live in California where they've been rising like crazy, but even outside of California, right? They they have been rising. I worry they're gonna rise a lot more. If we don't get this large load interconnection thing right, but also for a variety of other reasons, right? We'll we'll talk more, I think, a little bit later about the cost of new gas bills.

where we have a bill that is making its way through Congress right now that's gonna affect the cost of renewables. Like there's a lot of inflationary trends in that. And that that poses a bunch of challenges. So you've pulled some interesting data on on rate increases. Again, this is not rate increases for large loads necessarily. This is more retail rates. But talk to me about Vermont, Mississippi.

So so I I I sort of deliberately cast my eye into some of the smaller utilities, service territories, things like that. And to be clear, actually not just electricity, but also gas and water. Because these small these small places get less sunlight on them, uh, they almost definitionally serve a smaller group of customers, in many cases who are of a particular

a pr a particular kind of economic alignment. Like they like, you know, if it's a small town in the middle in in the middle of the country, they probably have fewer very large load, you know, ratepayers. They might be most almost entirely residential. Uh, and three, their reset cycle on this stuff probably isn't that frequent. Some of these places don't do a rate reset for a decade, which if you think back to rates that you might have set at a period of zero growth.

uh and essentially zero interest rates and now jumping forward ten years to do a reset, you've got a nonlinear gap up that happens. So Vermont Yeah, everybody's favorite utility, the village of Gluckno Electric Light Department, you know, requested a 21.5% rate increase effective July 1. And this, by the way, wasn't that

a couple of weeks ago basically. You know, not a California style process that's gonna go on for three years and get covered in the newspaper and get picked up by a lot of different interveners and advocates and whatnot uh. You know, the the the the village of Ludwig Electric Light Department says I need twenty one and a half percent increase now.

basically. And, you know, the the the pushback from the Department of Public Services basically saying, no, like we we need to set a conference to actually discuss this. You can't just go and do that. And that's one of many of these things that keep coming up. You know, we see this all over the place.

in some of these smaller service territories. And we we should remember that the these are, you know, inherently regressive. The impact of rates inherently h hit people on fixed incomes and lower incomes higher. So y you can imagine, especially if we have these changes that are happening in in with the bill in Congress.

If you imagine this sort of written large across many, many different places all at once, it's going to be a bit of a mess. I'll give you this other one you mentioned, Mississippi, uh the Great River Utility Operating Company. In this case, it's doing, it's talking about its gas raids. has basically said that they're going to go and scrub what has been a kind of tiered sewer, sorry, not gas, but sewer uh rate. And they're just going to scrub it from three different tiers into one.

Which again is going to massively impact the people that were on the lowest tier of rates, uh, that is now jumping up to one fixed higher tier. with almost like no deliberation and and no discussion. They've gone to quote immediately all rate tiers, mitigated rates, and residential metered rates in favor of one statewide residential flat rate for water and sewer services.

Ouch. Like that's a big deal for the people that had been used to a residential mitigated rate that would have been a third maybe of what the new rate might end up being. Do you worry as I do about retail electricity prices? I gas too I guess, but I I think a more about electricity. Do you worry about how much retail electricity prices are gonna rise in the next Five to ten years.

I do because we've we've we've made it very difficult Uh rather we've taken away a lot of the instruments that were meant to help suppress those rates by sort of distributing the cost across federal government expenditures and tax, you know, tax rebates and whatnot. in favor of uh nothing that really helps support fast moving new generation. But also we have labor.

shortages. We have still a fairly fl a pro inflationary environment for for a lot of different things going in. We have the challenges of the cost of infrastructure itself. Transformers are not getting any cheaper anytime soon. So I am concerned about this. the kind of mechanisms that we're familiar from early in our career that can respond to that, namely build a bunch of cheap distributed renewable generation right now, uh are are impaired to some extent by current legislation.

Maybe, maybe the maybe we will find just how flexible and fast and low cost some of these renewable generation elements can be to get to market very, very quickly, but that does nothing for the cost of wires. It does nothing for the cost of transformers. Uh it does nothing for the cost of labor necessarily. So I am concerned about about that. And again, it's a th these are sort of muscles that we haven't had to really uh exercise in quite some time in the US.

I was having a conversation recently with one of my colleagues about this and at EIP and you know, I was saying, Okay, like my I'm my conviction is growing stronger and stronger that rates are gonna be somewhat inflationary broadly across the board for for a while. So then I thought, okay, my I'm a venture investor. Like what should I be betting on that is a effectively a bet on on rising rates, distributed energy resources being one sort of obvious

Potential category there. The other one that he pointed out that like should be obvious but wasn't to me for reasons that you will appreciate was is energy efficiency, which is a category that has just ended up very unloved in sort of tech and venture circles. And and you're a student of Cleantech One dot oh as I am and in the history of this sector. Do you have any like lessons you've taken away from how to scale energy efficiency businesses or technology?

Cause it feels like this is a moment when efficiency should be the thing, but you just don't see that much of it in terms of like true new innovation happening. No, I mean like like like th if if I think back to one of the 1.0 examples. You could show people material savings on their bill by implementing behavioral responses, by doing something to help them with more efficient devices. And it just didn't seem it like it somehow didn't seem to impress people.

uh in the same way that offsetting all of their demand through a you know a home PPA might have. whether or not the economics of it fundamentally were like a good a good idea for somebody or not. People always wanted they they wanted something more. And I and I think that there's the psychology of I'm doing less or I'm getting less is probably a challenge. Uh, you know, I would welcome another set of approaches, but is behavior going to be enough? To do that.

I don't know. Is it, you know, is is yet another kind of behavioral approach to saving money when to work? Is it going to be about shifting load around in the house? I mean, back in the day it was. You'd better run your washing machine at night because that's when the rates are lowest. Now is it gonna be

something else. Is it something you could automate away? Um or you know, one one aspect is is this something that we've already kind of internalized by just getting a nest thermostat already and people just don't think about it. You know, like what are the what are the equivalent things like that, but where you could make money? Certainly Nest was a handsome exit for its venture investors.

But how many of those are we going to find and how many of those are are applicable across a broad bigger, broader market? know, right?

Okay. Well let's m back to your list of interesting tidbits from regulatory filings. Um You did some clever sleuthing to find some cost data on natural gas on on what combined cycle turbines, which is a topic of much discussion these days. In part, I think in particular spurred by the CEO of Nextera, who has been I think in the context of uh advocating for continued tax credits for solar and wind and just support for solar and wind and storage, saying like,

You know, we're gonna build lots of new natural gas in the United States, new gas generating capacity, I should say. Um, but it's worth noting not only is the timeline elongated by the turbine shortage. But also the costs have gone up a lot and he's cited some numbers that are that are sort of anecdot. So I think more data that that supports or doesn't support the how much is it going to cost to actually build these plants is is pretty valuable because it speaks to

alternatives, but it also speaks to what we were talking about before, like where rate's gonna go. So anyway, what'd you learn? So yeah, uh I I actually really appreciated uh the next era CEO's comments, which were at CERA week. where he said, you know, it's gonna be about twenty four hundred dollars a kilowatt to build a new gas plant. And that number has essentially become gospel to the point that it is picked up from third parties now.

like that that according to so and so was something a a number that originated from a talk on the stage. And to an extent it was kind of the inspiration for the work that we did to say

Well can we demystify that a little bit? Like I you know, I as an old analyst I'm as fond of anek data as the next guy. But I think it's important to put some some reality to it. So, you know, we we did it we did a sort of canvas across Everything we could find across all 50 US states, we got about 55 gigawatts of plants and like uh more than a hundred individual plants and way more than that number of of different generators.

And what we see is that actually his number's not bad.$2,400 a kilowatt. What we see by 2031, 2032 is about$2,230 to$2,240 a kilowatt. And legitimately double what it was just a couple of years ago. And this is also a case where where you know the the kind of The the gold standard here is the EIA's cost of generation uh publication that it does every couple of years. And they published this just in twenty twenty four and the benchmark

price and after after engineers had looked through it was somewhere in the range of about eleven hundred to twelve hundred dollars a kilowatt for a combined cycle plant. And that's just a uh conclusion not found in evidence if you look into what's actually there and what's happening. So yeah, I will say, uh, to the next era CEO's credit, his number's pretty good uh in terms of describing reality. But the important thing too is to just keep a change log on all of this.

How are those prices going to move? Are new a as new assets enter, where are they gonna be priced? How are the timelines on which these things are being built going to change? How much is the cost of construction going to change? And that's all the kind of information that Uh in an ideal world would be disclosed through some kind of

project update documentation that's made public, but it definitely is not. It's the kind of thing that comes in, you know, financial responses to requests for information and things like that, all nested within particular proceedings and particular states. But in aggregate, you know, an important story to get to get wrapped up and told clearly.

All right. I want to wrap with a random tariff that you found in South Dakota for a startup that uh, you know, does interesting things in cla in climate tech that we've talked about the category before, but t talk to me about South Dakota. So South Dakota, not a particularly big service territory. Um it has a a major utility there called Otter Tail.

Dremain's one of my favorite named uh animal themed uh power power utilities up there with Bear Valley Electric in California. And it has designed a sort of one-of-one tariff uh for Antor. Um, so and Torah receive a state grant. along with another large sort of large energy user or large energy player, a a a quote international cheesemaker, uh in April. And ongoing now is this discussion for this

sort of one-of-one tariff that is quote, deviating from standard rate schedules and it's applicable basically only to Antura. So we're watching it proceed through the process. um without without at the moment like a great deal of detail. A lot of it is still being sort of covered up by the by the the nature of the process, but we'll find out later on. But it is a fascinating case. Like you don't have to be the world's biggest company to get a custom tariff.

But you might also have to be operating in a small service territory, relatively speaking, to be able to do it. And again, what I find so interesting about all this stuff is that they're they're they're not really to my mind at the level of trade secret, but they are at the level of comparative advantage.

But at the same time, these are they are el there's elementation of all of this decision making process and the result that's in the public sphere if you know where to go and get it. You know, it uh I I joke about this with somebody and they're like, like how much stuff are you looking at? I was like, well

It's like a denial of service attack, basically, through public disclosure, be like, We'll give you everything you want as long as you don't mind reading a landscape printed PDF of an Excel file. That has been turned into 1500 JPEGs and uploaded in one go. But the you know, the end back to the Antora thing.

It's it's neat. It's a good thing to be watching. It's probably the first of it's the first of its kind there in the state. But then the question will be like how can we learn from this and everybody get more efficient at doing things like this? faster and ideally cheaper and better as we look across all the different markets everywhere. All right, Nat, this was fun as always. Keep hunting. I will. Those regulatory dockets. We'll we'll find some more tidbits and talk about it again.

Awesome. Thank you, Shell. Always a pleasure. Nat Bullard is the co-founder of Halcyon. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand, Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.