The Future of the Energy Sector Rests on Energy Efficiency. Global Energy Partners is Leading the Way

What's going on, everyone? It's Daniel Litwin, the voice of b to b coming at you from the Irving Convention Center for Charge Expo twenty twenty four. We're sitting down today with Mr. Mike Finney. He's president. Yes. I love the salute. Mister Mike Finney is president of Global Energy partners, Mike. Thank you so much for taking some time to chat today. How you doing? Yeah. I'm doing great. I'm doing better today than I was yesterday. And, yeah, it was a good day too. Okay. Yeah. Well, I like that. If every day is better than the last, then things are good. Right. Things are good. I love Hey, ma'am, thank you so much for taking some time to chat. And, again, you know, throw your hat in the ring to talk about the larger ecosystem of energy, utilities, sort of environment stakeholders. Yeah. And, you know, help shed some light on y'all slice of that industry and the major conversations the industry today. So why don't we start with just giving our audience some context? Yeah. What does global energy partners do in this larger ecosystem? What role do y'all play in helping, advance some of the major trends that are shaping the industry. So our our, great question. Thank you. Our our core competency is power reduction, energy reduction. Many many of our clients think about energy in one way. They think about how how can I sure it at the least amount? You know, my price per watt, how can I get that down? But we want to flip that on its head. We wanna show them How can we use your inefficient your your energy more efficiently? How can we make optimize your lighting system? How can we optimize your HVAC system? There's, for almost anybody listening, I bet you we can increase the efficiency of your HVAC system, twenty percent. And that's sight unseen. So we walk into a a facility. We start doing a power quality assessment, and then we show guaranteed, you know, predictable energy reduction solutions for that client. You had asked about utility scale. Obviously, Most people are in the UPS game, but we have some we we have some partners in in that realm, and we actually filter electricity for for utilities. Wow. Okay. Great. Got one, a large one on the East Coast that we've we've written up a report and a case study with as well. So, All things energy efficiency is what global and energy partners is. At this expo, we brought a semi truck, and we've got we're featuring one of our our newest technologies that's a, a cab APU, auxiliary power unit. Wow. It is marched or geared right towards idle reduction or idle elimination, much, there's there's there's too much waste of diesel and strain on engines because of idle. In the trucking industry, if you're if you're a a van, that's running your if you're a fleet, if you run a operate a fleet and you're idling, please come talk. Yeah. They're in your police department or if you're you know, running, wire, and you're sitting in your, your, your van all day long, or if you're a firefighter, or whoever, if sitting out there and you're idling, come travel. We'll eliminate that. Well, y'all are in literally every slice of energy efficiency. Then. No. We did. No. No. No. We we gonna sharpen our our we hydrogen's a big deal here. We're learning a lot about, So, I mean, for every technology that we've onboarded and that we championed, there's fifty more that we've looked at, and, not that they're not great, but we We we have a rigorous process that if you can't prove the energy reduction, then we're not gonna try to push it on our clients. So Yeah. That's how we keep, keep every everybody happy. Yeah. Well, and I think that highlights too. The fact that there's still so many sectors and slices of, you know, I have the larger ecosystem of energy consumption that still need focused energy efficiency solutions. I think speak to just the era we're in where mass electrification of systems, you know, evolution of our relation to energy consumption and power generation is helping people better understand that, you know, the biggest lift, new infrastructure is not always the answer, even though it's gonna be part of the equation, sometimes just making best use of the energy that you're already generating and using, is gonna be a better foundational element. Right? Right. That's perfect. I mean, I I definitely couldn't have said it any better. It's everybody's talking about, let's make more energy. Yeah. If we don't look at the back end, and how we're using and consuming energy. And I I can give you some examples. Yeah. There was a, you know, a brand new build one million dollar or, I'm sorry, one million square foot facility that we we looked at. They have a bunch of HVAC units on on top of the roof. Were, you know, it's three three months of operation. And, their thermostats were not centrally controlled. They were all independent of each other. Sure. And simple switch on that, is a fifteen percent energy in improvement on the HVAC side. So why, you know, why ask for more energy when we can simply use the energy in a more efficient manner. Yeah. And that's happening. That's a, you know, that's a That's a great, you know, big facility. Absolutely. A lot of money behind it. So, that's where we come in. If we could, we can mop up those inefficiencies, you're calling for less. Love it. Yeah. Just to look, you know, big picture. I I do a lot of interviews on, you know, the trend of sort of industry four point o and the smart layer of data analytics that are being added on top of manufacturing facilities, commercial facilities, etcetera. Talk to us a little bit about how that trend of converting your environment into a smart one smart buildings, smart factory, whatever. How that is creating more demand for energy efficiency? Because I imagine when you started looking at your whole ecosystem in that way, it becomes obvious that there are more areas where you could maximize efficiency, energy, or otherwise. If you can't prove what you're doing, improve it on a micro scale of this is, you know, this is how many watts you used to have, and this is how we're filtering the electricity or whatever it might be. This is how much diesel you spend. This is how much idle you had last month, and now look at it. If you can't prove that, and put it in the hands of your consumer or your customer. You're just you're behind the time. And some of those Those technologies that we had vetted in the past have amazing. They are provable technologies, but they haven't gone the step of you know, taking the analytics side of it and and actually monitoring and guaranteeing those those reductionary measures. Right. But it's information age. You know, I I there's no there's no handshake deals getting done anymore. It's not, hey, I'm gonna make this happen for you. I promise. Yeah. Right. Will prove it. Yeah. Proof is in the pudding. Definitely. Definitely. Well, you'd expect, you know, in this era of, adding a data layered almost every level of operations, that it would be data forward, which is great to hear. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that y'all are involved with providing energy efficiency solutions to utilities, right, and helping support the grid itself and being more energy efficient. Tell us a little bit more about some of the trends in that slice of the pie. Right? Where they may be facing some pressures where they're realizing our current way of operating is not that efficient. And where are major conversations around improving energy efficiency in the grid? So, with with the utility specifically, one of a one of the components that we champion is a it's basically a harmonics and a and a superior cap bank, capacitor bank. It filters the electricity coming in. We're going out of the utility. Why that's important is because of all the renewable energies that coming into the grid, those are, less, I I they're considered dirty electricity. Sure. And we need more filter on that electricity to to make sure that we're delivering the quality of electricity that needs to be done. So that's the for for the utility scale on the utility side, that's one of the measures that we take. We also have a two thousand watt solar panel. That takes it's a we really wanna get it, into Hawaii and and in Denver and really, you know, aesthetically pleasing environment. Sure. You don't want to be able to, you know, you don't wanna be taking five hundred acres for utility scale solar farm. Sure. We could do it in a hundred and fifty, two hundred acres. So, there's there's products like that geared towards the utility side. Arrival. Obviously, UPS is uninterrupted power supplies or something that everybody's looking at Tesla's involved, then, you know, everybody is playing in that game, and that's something that we can help out of it as well. Definitely. Now if we look at, you know, one of the major trends at the conference today is around getting a pulse for where we need more industry collaboration to help advance, electric vehicle infrastructure, right, development, research, coordination, user experience, you name it. Right? How is that larger trend that's involving almost every stakeholder in, this larger EUV industry, how's that intersecting with some of the work y'all are doing? Where are you feeling some of the pressures or, opportunity I, it's it's funny. That's that's why we brought the truck in. That's why we're featuring that. So it's not our our truck is not a, a Navy vehicle. Sure. Two months ago, that truck was a diesel truck just like any other that you drive up and down the highway and see. Yeah. We put our our internal cab APU unit on that truck, that that specific it's it's not a model truck. It's actually in the field. It's out there. We've recorded that it's forty eight percent less idle time. So how it works is you disengage the truck. You turn it off. Our unit kicks on. Keep the cab thermostatically controlled. Mhmm. He keeps the driver nice and cool, nice and quiet. You know, provides the energy, enough energy to do that. It's got a fast start capability, but this is bridging the gap between where diesel trucks are, where semi trucks are right now Yeah. And where a full blown EV, you know, infrastructure, you know, our everybody's goal. Yeah. But this is a realistic, overnight. We can implement it overnight to get it and bridge the gap, and at least eliminate idle. So which idle costs are significant and Yeah. And environmentally significant, not just economically significant. Well, you know, that's really important too because, you know, we've been seeing in the news, things like, you know, OEMs kind of stepping back a little bit from their EV commitments and saying, don't know if the market's really there yet for us to completely shift our operations to just go fully v. Right. And I think that highlights that in this larger energy transition, in every form that it takes, it's really a protracted timeline. Like, it's gonna take a while. And so thinking of solutions that can act almost as lily pads for the industry to bounce off of. And, stack on top of for further innovation are gonna be really key. And I see technologies like that as playing through the road. Ribbit, man. I'll be I'll be a big lily pad, you know, getting us to to that area. I love that, you know, that's, it's feasible. It's, it's economical. It's environmental, but it does pull us towards that that end goal. Totally. That we can all we can all agree on. So if if we can be a piece of that pie, you know, we'll Like I said, rivet, rivet. Yeah, rivet, rivet. I like it. That might be the tagline of the day. That's great. On your hashtag. Literally of chatted on my forehead. The, the other thing I wanted to pick your brain on is on the, facility side of things. So, You know, I know there are a lot of sort of larger, standards always for how should we align our energy efficiency to regional, state level, federal, or internationally recognized standards. There's a lot of them. There's a popular one, obviously, ISO fifty thousand one, but, you know, a lot of facilities are finding that they have a lot of room still to improve on their energy efficiency. Where are some of the areas, especially in commercial facilities and manufacturing facilities where you see the most energy inefficiency? That with some focused investments, you they would see massive improvements. So anything that the global energy partners teams offer is is under a three year ROI. Okay. K. Easiest way to answer that would be HVAC HVAC is this huge pull, point of load, many many people just assume they buy a new variable speed HVAC unit, and they think, okay, we're we're good. I've got the most sufficient HVAC system in the world. Right. We're available right now. Well, there's HVAC controls that can that are aftermarket products Mhmm. Easy to implement If you have an on-site, HVAC, PM account, easy easy to install, easy to implement. You're talking about a one to two year ROI no utility rebates. We engage a lot of utilities. That's another reason we're here to, their their custom rebates department. There's money out there to pay for these upgrades. You don't have to worry about a huge capital investment from your your company or corporation or That's right. Small business. So HVAC, lighting, inefficiencies, school districts, unfortunately. They use bond money to build new schools a lot of times, and they, you know, the older schools are just kinda left out in the dust. But these these lighting inefficiencies, we can we can see an improvement over fluorescent lighting in the ninety percent. You know, by by upgrading to a European light that we've we've brought to market. And so lighting, HVAC, and then power quality itself. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So most most people don't, and businesses don't think about that. But there's, and I'll use beer as an example. I like beer. I think you like it. Let's go. Yeah. Give me an IPA after the scene. Imagine the utility as a, as a bartender. K. And your facility is is is the bar. Okay? Utility delivers you a a beer. And that beer has got thirty percent foam. I'm really happy about that. Yeah. You know, maybe if you're in Europe and you like the foam or whatever. But here in America, you want you want less of that foam. Yeah. Well, that phone is K VAR. It's unused reactive power. Coming from the utility. You want KVA. You want K w. You know, you want usable, tangible, real power. Right. If you filter it in the right way that we can we can eliminate the K bar, and recycle it, not not eliminate it, but recycle it into usable real power. Right. So that is step one phase one and I walk into a facility, we're measuring and finding out how much real power you have and how much you're paying for that you're not able to use. That's a great analogy because it's like you wouldn't see I know. I'm saying, man, you know, I should have used that analogy. You know, it's like you wouldn't just be like, oh, too much foam. Yeah. And we just keep pouring and pouring and pouring until I've got it. Right? Yeah. Or that foam is gonna stay there? Right. Exactly. And essentially, really what you're talking about is like do you just want to expend more energy to get to the amount of usable power that you need or do you just want to Yeah. Generate and, you know, consume power in the most efficient way possible Yeah. From the get. So Yeah. And you guys, you at home? Don't say I didn't come up with that analogy, although I see it every time I drink a beer. We'll credit it to you. Yeah. Just just Google, power factor, beer example, and it explains it better than I just did. Love it. Yeah. Well, last question I've got for you then is looking ahead, at major opportunities or challenges in twenty twenty four for creating energy efficiency, setting new standards, you know, up conversation across multiple stakeholders. Where do you see some of those challenges or opportunities and how should the industry prepare to take advantage of those or maneuver them, you know, I think, the common theme at this, that that we've kinda learned at this convention is that utility, you know, to marry with, with a lot of these logistical centers, and I think if we can all work together that we we can make this all work to you know, all all work more rapidly than it is now. Right. But, you know, I wish I had a crystal ball. I wish I I could tell you more about how to make it work. I I just know that a lot of people coming up with innovative solutions continuing to press the envelope, bringing bringing the the utilities as long as they're receptive to these measures. I think that's how it, you know, it's innovation works, and entrepreneurship works. And we, as a company, global energy partners, we're gonna keep looking for those energy reducing solutions, to deliver, to, and champion to, to our clientele. I love it. And like you said, you know, sometimes it's Instead of looking at the big picture, look at that first step you can take. Oftentimes, that first step can deliver, you know, exponential returns, whether that's in, you know, cost reduction or just, energy saved or recycled or reused, how how ever it might be. That is probably where the industry should be putting a lot of its energy as it looks to the longer, like, twenty fifty, even twenty thirty style, timelines that it has. You can't you can't achieve the goals that they want without, you know, with existing measures or with one measure. Everything needs to work together. Yeah. You know, every kind of power, you know, generation that we we've already come up with or or need to come up with. Yeah. So you just it's gotta be a lot of lot of people working in in the same direction. That's why I'm excited for, trade shows like this where we're seeing a lot of that cross industry collaboration and conversation. And I appreciate you throwing your hand in the ring and being part of that conversation today. So Riv it, man. River it, ribbon. Exactly. Folks. Thank you. Again, we've been chatting with Mike Finney, president of Global Energy Partners. Folks wanna learn a little bit more about global energy partners, the work y'all are doing, maybe get in touch, where should we point them? Our website, w w w dot global energy dot partners, So throw you a little curve I like it. Dot com dot partner. So And you can you can find out about us. You can shoot us an email or a message We've got a landing page specifically for that that truck unit. Nice. If you're a logistical company, you know, definitely come chat with us. We'd we'd love to, to, to show you what we got. Perfect. Global Energy dot partners, you hear you're here first. Alright. Rivet. Rivet. We'll wrap with that one. Thank you, Mike, and thank you, everyone. Yeah. No. I love it. And thank you folks for joining in on this conversation with us today. Tune in for more from us here at Charge Expo twenty twenty four.