THE Backbone of Energy Transition

companies that are at the forefront of energy transition, like the company of my friend, are really struggling to master their growth channels.

And so I brought together my best friend and my then co-founders who started to develop a pilot of what we do today at ampere.cloud. So they developed a very customized solution. This solution was so awesomely helpful to the company of my friend. So they could really run much more plans immediately with the same team than before that we, finally, in 2019 commonly decided to start ampere. cloud and bring this solution to the market in order to enable the enablers of the energy transition so to say, the companies that are building and running PV plants, but also wind plants. And this was basically my tip off with renewable energies. And since then, you will talk about it later, but we built up a team of more than 30 passionate people from many parts of Europe and even from Brazil. And we are not the only one who are passionate about energy transition, but it’s really great to see this group of people pushing forward our mission.

CA: So tell us what does PV stand for?

FS: PV stands for photovoltaic, so photovoltaic system. Yeah. What is maybe important to mention here, Chris, is that our operating system for renewables is totally agnostic to the type of energy production. Historically, we come from photovoltaic because this is where we started and developed this pilot for the company of my best friend and started ampere.cloud and the photovoltaic sector. But we have connected to wind farms. We have connected wind farms, we have connected heat, we have connected storage. So the important thing is our system is agnostic and it’s the operating system for the moment.

CA: So when you were with your best friend and the co-founders, that’s how the idea of ampere.cloud started?

Can you explain that to us.

FS: This was when things started to get concrete. So the idea, I would say indirectly already started in the preface when I connected my co-founders with my best friend and they for four years roughly started working on the pilot, but then in 2019 anmpere.cloud was founded.

CA: That’s fantastic how things develop over time and then the idea sparks. That’s fantastic. So what about the operating system for renewables are you using and why is it necessary and how does it help companies?

FS: So you have to mention that our customers are typically asset owners and/or companies that operate from a technical and financial perspective, power plants, of course, global power plants. And these companies heavily struggle with managing their growth, because we all know that we have to grow that sector. So this is what energy transition means, right? But in many parts, they are working very manually. They have manually operations for doing reporting, for doing maintenance work for all this essential task around running power plants. And our clients typically not have just one plan.

They typically have up to hundreds of plans under management. So what is important here is to raise their efficiency and their ability to run power plants with a limited amount of workforce, because this is something that is really limiting energy transition.

And this is really a threat to energy transition, that we have limited number of workforces, but for doing operations and maintenance, we will need so many people through our next decade. Therefore, our operating system is dramatically raising the efficiency of our customers by giving all the essential tools by their hand in just one system to run their whole portfolio. For many of our customers, the first time that they have their whole portfolio of plans in just one system. So this is one reason why it’s necessary. The other is that we see dramatically threat to grid stability. I mean, we come from a situation where we had a very linear electricity market that production distribution was on the hand of few companies. And now we are in a market due to energy transition that is highly, decentral, highly fragmented. So many new players in the market, completely new use cases. And we have an indeterminate feed in through decentral power generation. And this is a threat for the grids, so we could see massive blackouts. So this is why, for example, our operating system together with our hardware that we developed, this is a so called park controller can steer and control facilities from remote is stabilizing the grids. And even a third point that is very important. When we talk about energy transition, we talk about a completely new market and wherever energy is produced, it needs to be traded somehow, right? Whereas this is the market principle, but this market is still highly inefficient. So the producers and the traders are working on behalf of incorrect, instable data but the traders need to take really informed information about how to steer the facilities. So this is also something that our operating system is providing stable and accurate data in order to take the best informed decisions about how to control and steer facilities.

CA: Well that’s impressive. That’s a lot of programming you have to do for that?

FS: Actually, yes, it is. And what is impressive to me is that we started in a very niche, Chris. So we were another monitoring system at the beginning, but our vision always have been to develop the operating system for renewables, a system that is agnostic that is not just solving a narrow problem, but that is really attacking the key threats to the energy transition and we are really proud of that. And our sustainable growth has shown us that we are really able to brings this out to the market. And we will. Every day I see people outside are developing this system further and further.

CA: So you mentioned also that ou have a hardware component, explain what that is.

FS: Yeah, sure. So this is a real IOT hardware. You have to, you have to imagine that power plants need to be controlled, right? So at least the grid operator needs to be able to shut down the power plant if there’s some overload on the grid or something. →

→ In Germany, we have some really, really strict regulations on that. Also the trader needs to be able to steer the power plant, and this usually happens via a control unit. In the old market, it has been that way that this control unit really expands the special hardware that was sold to the plant operator or owner, tens of thousands of euros but we said, this is an old model and people were sometimes overwhelmed by all the technique and costs, of course. So what we did is we developed an IOT tool that we are bringing as a service into the market.

We are the first in the German market that is doing hardware as a service in that sector. And this means for our customers that they can totally rely on us. They are partly outsourcing their hardware responsibilities to us, and this tool is really working in the purest sense of IOT. So the whole calculation, everything is done by our cloud, and this device is just transmitting control orders and transmitting data. So it’s really a simple tool. There’s no display on it or something. It’s really doing just this job, and this is enough. Even if you think about that, we’re serving a market where, for example, the smallest PV plant under management of our operating system is really, I think it’s two kilobyte peaks. It’s a very small one family house unit, but the biggest is more than 150 megawatts, so really the whole range and all served by this one tool.

CA: Very impressive. So what kind of companies are using your product? And I take it the purpose is like you said, to stabilize and control their systems more efficiently. So what companies are using your product right now?

FS: So our core customer, our direct customer is typically a company that is doing operations and maintenance or for own PV plants or wind farms, or for customers farms. And this way, our typical customer has several, sometimes even several hundreds of PV plants under management and has to take care of them that they run smoothly, that they run due to regulations that they produce the power expected, because we also have to mind that there’s a market incentive behind energy transition as well. I mean, we know that energy transition is, to say is a more a moral, I think is the word, is a moral imperative. So a climate imperative, but it’s also a huge, major economic growth program globally. And this is important because companies behind the energy transition have a market incentive. So it’s not steered by nations or by governments. It’s really something, where there’s a market principle behind it. And therefore this is an investment, an investment in renewable power plants and investors need that their investment runs smoothly, that they can see how it’s generating benefits for them, and this is also guaranteed by our system that is used then by these companies, for example.

CA: That makes sense. So obviously with electricity demands increasing, because obviously a lot of people are going to electric vehicles. That’s increasing, so renewable energies obviously have a crucial role still and could only increase. So people obviously will be wanting to reach out to your product more to help with the overall working of their company. Is that a fair statement?

FS: You mean... Just to see if I understood correctly, so you mean Chris, that we are now focusing on a certain part of energy transition with our services and covering?

CA: Yes. Because I think obviously electricity is always increasing. So renewable energies, we have to look at the renewable energies as a whole, so that still has a crucial role in what you are doing. And obviously with the globe in terms of, obviously everybody’s trying to reach their net zero, their 2030 goals when it comes to sustainability matters. So obviously this is a crucial product that people need to look at. Is that correct?

FS: Absolutely. I mean, what is important here? I mean, at the moment, Chris, we serve the whole post-installation value chain of our customers. We are the very first operating system for renewables. When we talk, for example to climate and impact for our financing and funding structure, for them, it’s total crucial to understand how we help to reduce the CO2. We have calculations behind it, but what we see and what also our existing investors see is that with every renewable power plant built and operated in a lean way, we will be able to reduce the [inaudible 00:19:34] emissions and substitute the old fashioned electricity production. And with ampere.cloud, you can simply build and run more renewable energy power plants. And we directly see the impact in that field as well. So you’re totally right. We have to see it as a complete picture and maybe just to give some words on the vision, Chris, because I think this is connected here as well on our vision. We want to take a key role in every process, in every part where renewable energy is produced, distributed and used. So of course in future, this can also include immobility topics, but we do very well at the moment to focus on what we know best.

CA: So are you based just in Germany? Are you spreading your wings to different countries?

How’s that working?

FS: Yes. Good question. So we started selling our operating system to the market in March ‘22. And I think you will have in mind what also happened in March ‘22, so we went to market together, this Corona, Virus and the first moment was really a tough thing o do. So we had to pivot our sales its approach completely to a remote and digital setting. And we heavily focused the last two years on the German market. The German market within Europe is such a growth market. It’s so big in itself that it was really that we really had to prosper in sustainable growth. But now until the end of the year, we want to start bring ampere. cloud to other countries as well. So we are focusing, for example, on Spain, that can be a very good target for us. We already are kind of international through the operations of our customers because our customers run power plants in several parts of world. So we have projects in Brazil, many projects all across Europe, but now actively, we will internationalize at the end of the year, most likely to Spain and also some overseas countries are in our focus.

CA: Perfect. That’s good. So is it easy for these companies to transfer their processes to digitalization?

That’s the next question.

FS: Yes. I mean, obviously we help them to digitize a main part of their tech stack, of their operations. Because we offer them the operating system, but many of the companies, I’m not just talking about our smaller clients, also bigger up to utility scale companies, surprisingly run their operations on a manual or legacy system where this is impressive. That’s the status quo. They don’t criticize it. As an entrepreneur, I see this as a chance, but it’s also kind of threat to energy transition. So we really need to speed up the digitization in these companies that are at the forefront of energy transition, as I mentioned, and from our perspective as we do, I mean, you just decide once maybe for an operating system. As our clients just need one operating, they don’t need two or three. We make it really easy for them through our processes, but also our system itself with open interface and all that, to bring their assets to our system, so we really help them accelerate their own digitization and therefore accelerate energy transition et al.

CA: Perfect. So that being said, what countries, I know we mentioned countries earlier that you are trying to get into, but what countries right now around the G7 G20 APEC are doing things right, are forward thinking.

FS: Good question. So this is just my humble opinion, and I see it very much through the perspective of ampere. cloud of course, but to give you my opinion to this, Chris. I would always name Germany as well, because the whole energy transition topic started here some decades ago and we can really see things happening here, as I mentioned, and there are still when we have a look on the added annual capacity in photovoltaic, Germany is within the top three globally. →

→ So this is really impressive. But of course also to mention the U.S. There’s so much happening in the U.S., we would love to go to U.S., but we are really a bit hesitating because U.S. market is really, how to say, huge fragmented. I think this is really something that will be on our plate l ater on, but U.S. is also developing so strong. Also to mention overseas, China, India, just having an eye on the added end-year capacity, these are also within the top five.

And in Europe, this is also really very interesting, Spain, France, Poland.

There are many countries that are really also incentivized by the governments are developing really, really strong on that sector. So I think what we can see now, and this is undoubtable, energy transition already started. So it’s not about talking about we have to start. It’s already started, but we see that this is some data from the IAE that between 2030 and 2050, we need at least something around 600 gigawatts globally in yearly additional capacity and photovoltaic to reach net zero by 2050. This is why from an entrepreneurship point of view,

I’m so optimistic that ampere.cloud is just at the right point with the right topic and that we can help. We won’t be the only one. We won’t be the Google of energy transition, so to say, but this is also ot [inaudible 00:26:58]. We want to push things forward as we can do.

CA: You mentioned a few countries now. How does that work when it comes to renewable energy regulations? I’m sure different countries have different regulations. Is there an agreement within the countries in the renewable field about... Are they the same? How does that work with what you are doing?

FS: Interesting question. I mean, sorry that I start again mentioning Germany here, but I think at least within the European union and maybe worldwide, Germany has at least one of the most restrictive regulations when it comes to renewable energy production and feed-in. And this is mainly because, I think, it’s a small country but with a major industry sector, so that needs to run stable. We have very distributed, decentralized energy productions for renewables. This challenge will arise and therefore Germany set really strict regulations here, and many countries in the EU, but also in overseas are having an eye or two on the regulations and how they work in Germany. So they are rotating themselves on base of these regulations. And when it comes, for example, to the intermittent feed-in to the grids, I mean, we have feed-in regulations and codes in Germany that are really, really strict. I mean, to give you an idea, we have 800. It’s a small country, we have 800 local grid operators that have their own grid codes and regulations, how in their region, the feed-in works.

CA: Wow

FS: This is a mess, but this way they want to stabilize the grid, so it’s honorable. And as the yearly additional capacity in PV and wind is also rising in many, many countries over the world, they will have very similar challenges very soon. And I can guarantee you, many of them are already thinking about how to regulate the feed-in as well and many of them are having an eye, as I mentioned, on the German regulations. It’s necessary because otherwise we risk major blackouts, so yes.

CA: That makes sense. So obviously, again, we mentioned that the renewable energies is a massive, massive market. So how do you see that over the next five years, that particular sector, and then obviously as that grows, industry needs more people to be certified in this particular sector. So talk a little bit about that.

FS: I don’t have the absolute correct number by hand now for the investment side, but if I’m not wrong, it’s 14 billion of U.S. dollars in that case of investment that is needed until 2030 order to just be heads up with the capacity building for renewables. Right. And when it comes to the workforce that you mentioned, I’m quite sure that until 2050, in order to reach net zero, we will need more than 50 million additional qualified workers just in the sector of operations and maintenance globally.

CA: How many was that? 50 million?

FS: 50 million. Five-O, so this is really massive. Of course, renewable energy isn’t the only sector that will have heavy requirements when it comes to workforce. So we are in competition with other sectors. And therefore it needs smart systems like ours, for example, in order to reduce the need, to add workforce because we make processes more efficient and more automated, and therefore we can run more power plants, build, run more power plants with a smaller workforce as well.

CA: Wow. So there’s obviously massive growth.

FS: Exactly.

CA: In the next five years. That’s tremendous. So, okay. As you mentioned, you are a small company. You’ve obviously been around a couple of years and you’re currently going through a round of fresh investment. So what kind of investors are you looking for to grow obviously, ampere.cloud?

FS: The very opportunistic answer to that would be every investor that is willing to share our mission. So we could say everybody who, who believes in our mission from a certain point of view is highly welcome, but we have a focus on investors that do two things, basically. First, that bring in smart money. So we really are looking for investors that can help us to open up new markets to spread the words about our mission, about ampere.cloud to really grow. We are still a small company, but we really want to grow because we see the impact in our own market, and we really want to bring this further. And the second is that we are talking climate and impact for this. This is really the sweet spot to be honest, personally, for me, because there the smart money and sharing the same mission is really coming together and this is something that is very attractive talking from a personal point of view for me.

CA: And then last question I have for you then, how do you measure and ensure that ampere.cloud annual OS renewables are able and crucial to reach these net zero targets? Because obviously everywhere we see in the news, everybody’s trying to reach their net 2030 goals, some 2050 goals. So talk to us a little bit about that.

FS: Maybe starting for a quite general point of view, as I mentioned, we significantly help to build and operate more renewable power plants. So that’s a starting point, and every kilowatt hour that is produced by a renewable power plant is substituting a kilowatt hours that is produced by atomic power plants or coal power plant.

So on the base of this, we can do bottom up calculations on what we’ve done throughout the last two years and due to our business plan, business modeling, what we will be able, scaling throughout the next years. And this is what we directly can translate into, as I mentioned, these substitutes, renewable energy versus old energy, so to say. And this is how we calculate our impact, our footprint on the energy transition. Of course, we have exact numbers around this about... Depends on the perspective, are you having an eye on the next five years or throughout the lifetime of ampere.cloud? We can give several different calculations, but the basis is always the same. We aim that in the end we substitute kilowatt hours produced by an old fashioned, so to say, by renewable energy, and this is what we, through different ways that we talked about throughout last minutes, are significantly pushing forward.

CA: And then tell us where people can find you. Give us your website address so people know, and if there’s a phone number or email address, so people can obviously touch base if they have some questions for you.

FS: Yes. So they can always find us in Berlin when they are around. Then of course, our website is www.ampere. cloud. And you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn.

CA: Great. Thanks for your time Florian. What a tremendous insight to ampere.cloud and thank you for obviously being part of this, and we wish you all the great success for the future.

FS: Thank you very much. ■