Design the Permits Before the Project | Malaquias Encarnacion on BESS Development

Great.

Well, I feel honored to be in the same virtual room as you having this conversation.

And obviously there's been such a big trend towards how important battery storage is for the energy transition.

And, you know, we're seeing things that used to be, let's just kind of bolt on a battery storage to this project.

Let's just kind of add some battery storage into this project where it's now starting to become something more that becomes a primary kind of objective and a primary thought of, you know, how we build these standalone projects and how important this is.

Like you say, across all of the renewable energy generation into data centers.

How are you seeing the mentality changing? of the different companies and the IPPs and developers.

How are you seeing the kind of mentality towards battery storage changing at the moment?

Well, so let me give you another long answer on that, right? I love

long

answers, by the way.

To the guys at AES and Floyd's.

I mean, that was the way they always saw it.

They always saw storage.

As you know, I was part of Floyd's, right? At some point, first at AES and then storage, then we transitioned into Floyd's.

And that was kind of their view.

From the beginning, what's up? Storgent's gonna be some kind of lich bane.

It's gonna be some kind of... you know, layer that is above all layers, right? It was going to be, in a way, if you think about it, even though storage is a combination of hardware and software, in a way, storage is kind of a software of many things, right? Because it's kind of the brains that allow to operate multiple things.

And, you know, the capabilities have not been exploded yet, right? So, I mean, the fact that you can have, you know, like a, A storage system is like an iPod that saves energy, right? So in a way, it's something that you could use for many things.

So I think we're still in the infant phases of applications, right? Of how batteries could be used in the grid for grid reliability and other things, right? So, but I think the mentality has been, I would say, adjusted in the way people see it.

So the fact that we only work, it's not that we only work, but most of our work, it's our standalone batteries, tells you something, right? It's something that you couldn't imagine something like that a few years ago.

So it was always storage plus something.

Look at the ITC itself.

It started out, you could claim ITC on batteries as long as they were integrated into solar and they had to be integrated in a very particular way.

Because otherwise it would make it very difficult to claim credits.