David Fessler w/Andrew Gordon – Home Energy Storage PES

Dave Fessler: Hello, I'm Dave Fessler, Energy and Infrastructure Strategist at The Oxford Club. I've been writing a lot about home energy storage in Energy & Resources Digest and to my Advanced Energy Strategist subscribers recently. After speaking with Adam Sharp a couple of months ago about private equity opportunities in electric vehicles and driverless cars, I decided to reach out to the team at Early Investing once again. This time, the topic at hand in private equity opportunities is home energy storage. Today I'm speaking with co-founder of Early Investing LLC Andy Gordon about what opportunities he's seeing for energy investors in the private equity market, specifically in home energy storage. Welcome, Andy. Andy Gordon: Pleased to be here, Dave. Dave Fessler: As a refresher, can you give Oxford Club Members an idea of what's going on in private equity right now that energy investors should pay attention to? Andy Gordon: Sure, Dave. I've been following the opening of a new market made up of not public companies, but private companies. Now, private companies have been around forever. You know that. What has changed is now anybody, not just the wealthiest investors, can invest in these very young, very small companies. It's a chance to buy shares years before a company does an IPO. By an IPO, I mean when a company joins a publicly listed stock exchange like Nasdaq. And why is that a big deal, Dave? Well, in a word, price. Everybody now has the opportunity to get into these high-growth companies at a fractional cost of what they would pay for shares on the first day of an IPO. Think of companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter. No matter how much you like these companies, you weren't allowed to invest in them before they went public. Dave Fessler: Right. Andy Gordon: That's no longer the case. Now you can invest in the future Twitters, Ubers and Airbnbs. As you can imagine, these young companies are disrupting everything, every industry across the board, and that includes energy – your specialization, Dave. Let me give you one example of how new technology is disrupting energy. Google has used its artificial intelligence unit – it's called DeepMind – to cut its energy bills at its various data centers by around 40%. It'll be saving literally tens of millions of dollars a year. That's pretty amazing, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. This is a great time to be looking at energy startups. Dave Fessler: Well, as you know, I own a 205-year-old farmhouse here in Pennsylvania, and I get about 60% of my electricity from solar energy. I have a 10-kilowatt ground-mounted solar array in a field near my home. Next year, I'm planning to double the size of it. This is something I've been passionate about for some time, and I'm always looking for ways to increase our efficiency. I've already replaced most of our lighting with LED bulbs, and now I've started looking at home storage units to further increase our efficiency. This is a market on fire. Last year, it grew 243% over 2014. I've been profiling several lithium producers to play this trend. But you found another way to play this, right? Andy Gordon: I have, Dave, and it has to do with the home, but taking a different approach from your efforts. I think most everybody has heard of Nest, right? It's the thermostat startup Google bought a couple of years ago for over $3 billion – I think it was $3.2 billion. Dave Fessler: Sure. Andy Gordon: Nest generated a bunch of copycats, other companies using the thermostat to control and hopefully lower energy use in the home, but with a slightly different mix of bells and whistles. As far as I'm concerned, that's old technology, at least in the startup world. I'm not interested. But I've found a company that has taken a completely different approach to saving energy in the home. It targets a home's vents, Dave, and it makes complete sense. Its technology can close the vents of rooms you're not in or don't use, and it's able to learn. So, for example, it can figure out when you go to work and when you come home. As one of the founders of this company told me recently, you can make a 3,500-square-foot home as efficient as a 2,000-square-foot home. That's well over a 30% savings on your energy bills. Dave Fessler: And the name of this company? Andy Gordon: Well, the name is Keen Home. You can find it on the web at KeenHome.io. More importantly, it's right now testing the waters on a startup portal, and hopefully it'll be starting a raise on the same portal soon. We're waiting to hear word on that, Dave. So if you're interested in investing, go to SeedInvest.com. Again, it's a website specializing in startup investing. We know the folks there. They're great, capable people. They run a great site, and they'll take care of you if you have any problems making the investment online. Dave Fessler: Well, Andy, it looks like home energy storage is going to be a sector our investors definitely want to be in. Thanks for sharing your ideas with our viewers today, and thanks again for your time. Andy Gordon: My pleasure, Dave. I look forward to catching up with you again soon. [End of Audio]