Sonnen GmbH

Those are not the batteries that we use.

So along the way, we met and were introduced to and partnered with a German battery company named Sonnen.

Sonnen operates the most advanced virtual power plant in the world in Belgium.

And they've been operating virtual power plants in Germany and other parts of Europe for the past 15 years.

Europe preceded us on this renewable energy transition, right? And so they'd already kind of gone through these processes.

um a lot of the older homes uh unfortunately burned but there were a lot of homes that did not that that were up there but as a lot of times happens after this after the power after the fire came through and uh did its devastation um there were rains that caused catastrophic flooding and so the road up to eagle point the main road completely washed out as well and so not only is there not power there's not a way to restore the power because there's no road for the utility trucks to go up.

So there is a back way to get up there, which I've talked with a lot of the remaining cabin homeowners up there, as well as the resort.

So we've partnered with our partners at Sonnen.

which has been running VPPs in Massachusetts and the broader region for years.

And then there's Sonnen, the German battery company with a program called Sonnen Connect, specifically for homeowners in National Grid and Eversource service territories in Massachusetts.

They are paying battery owners $600 to $900 per year guaranteed just to let Sonnen manage the battery's participation in these grid programs.

That's right.

People are getting paid.

What I want you to understand is that the structure of what's being built here, the Piccolo platform is the marketplace infrastructure, the digital layer that connects buyers and sellers.

The aggregators like Voltus, Leap, and NLX are the participants who pull together these distributed resources and bid into that marketplace.

The hardware companies? Tesla, Sonnen, Carrier, Resideo.

But the, probably the game changer was, uh, about 10 years ago when Tesla came out with the Powerwall 2, and that was a benchmark product that came out.

Previous to that, Sonnen, which was a German company, came out with the, the Sonnen, um, Eco System, which was a best-in-class home battery backup system, which I purchased, and it was ex- very expensive at the time.

But the engineers at Tesla with the Powerwall 2 really made home energy storage with batteries coupled with the solar in an affordable, very reliable manner, and the software was really good.

So since then, I guess it's been three, over three f- maybe four years now since the Powerwall 3 came out, and that's even less expensive and even more advanced.