AI, Energy and Climate: AI and energy access: Bill Lenihan

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Join us as we talk with leading experts to explore the intersection between these critical issues that will impact the future of each and every one of them.

[MUSIC] Hi, I'm David Sandalo, this is the AI Energy and Climate Podcast. Artificial intelligence is deploying most rapidly in developed economies. One concern often raised is that AI will create a new digital divide with developed economies and China racing out ahead in gaining benefits from the technology while emerging economies lag behind.

In part for that reason, I was especially interested to learn about the work being done at Zola intelligence. A Silicon Valley-based company with AI tools that says its mission is to provide reliable, affordable energy to billions of people who lack it around the world. And so I was especially delighted when Bill Lennaham, the founder and CEO of Zola intelligence agreed to join me for a conversation on the podcast. Bill hits a background at Goldman Sachs, Dane and other companies, and as you'll hear,

brings enormous expertise and vision to his role. This topic was especially on my mind because my Center at Columbia at the Center at Global Energy Policy recently launched a new high-level commission on universal energy abundance, shared by former President of Chile, a Michelle Bachelet. My colleague and friend Jason Bordoff just discussed these topics with Raj Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation on the Columbia Energy Exchange, in an episode that I recommend highly.

I want to thank the great team at the Zaya sustainability prize for alerting me to the very interesting work underway at Zola intelligence. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with CEO and founder, Bill Lennaham. Welcome to the AI energy and climate podcast. Happy to be here, David. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for coming. So I've been reading about your work. It's Zola intelligence.

“You have some very interesting business. Could tell us what do you do?”

Well, thank you for that compliment.

You know, it's always struggle with distilling it down to something simple, but it is simple at the end of the day. What we are is we're we're an automation company.

We happen to use agetic technology in order to drive this automation and our core focus is energy provisioning and emerging markets. So we're we're we're looking to solve some structural problems, 3 billion people across the planet. You're not at access to reliable affordable energy. And we're looking to look to solve the problem with with agetic technology automation technology. Let's come back to the specific spot your business, but maybe just spend a moment on the energy access problem, which you just pointed to.

You said 3 billion people, like energy access. Could you still elaborate on that and how you got inspired to work on this? You know, how I got inspired to work on it was a trip to Africa, my first trip to Africa. And it was maybe on the second or third day that I was there. I was visiting at the time. The company was offered electric. They were think of them like an energy service provider. They were installing small lithium ion batteries and solar panels in the homes of farmers in the Serengetti. Taking care of seeing out of the house to provide more light.

So the kids can study and family can have dinner and connectivity in terms of charging their cell phones.

And I visited one of the first larger scale systems customers.

“And I witnessed a massive problem that was being saw and the problem being full workflow. How do you get to these families? How do you install these systems? How do you maintain these systems?”

And then of course, once the systems are on the ground, how do they optimize energy flows? And I saw an ascent technology that was doing some pretty interesting things. And in this circumstance, I saw the company solve a problem. Light up this home in the middle of the night. And I saw the impact it had on the community and I was sold on it. But it is a big problem. It's bigger than people think. We hear a lot of data around a few hundred million people in Africa, a few hundred million people in Latin America and Southeast Asia that do not have access to energy.

Most of the time people are just talking about connections. Do they have some connection to some form of energy.

But as we all know in our markets, having a connection and having reliable affordable energy is totally different. And by our estimation, there are three billion people.

And all the businesses and the schools and the hospitals, all the office buildings and everything that supports those three billion people suffer from unreliable and unaffordable energy. And that's the problem we're trying to solve. That's interesting. And I'm the statistics just from a moment. I've read lower numbers that I think you're disilluding to like 607 million people in absolute poverty when it comes to energy. And obviously that's an enormous amount in a huge moral problem. But your three billion figure includes not just people with almost no access to energy, but also people who have unreliable energy is that the basic idea.

“When people tend to talk in those numbers, they talk about connections. Do they have access? Is there a poll or a transformer outside their home that they could connect to?”

And those numbers are right in that context. But if you connect to that energy source and you get five hours of energy a day, is that reliable, affordable energy? Is that energy as we think about energy and it's not? You know, there's something like 40 million people in in Lagos, Nigeria. They get four to five hours of energy a day. And a lot of them have a grid outside their home, but are they connected?

Is that real? That's not how we think about reliable, affordable energy. It's not how we think about the problem. The problem is a lack of reliable, affordable energy. And that's three billion.

And by the way, I want to highlight some work that's being done by the center, I'm at Columbia, the center on global energy policy along with the Rockefeller Foundation.

“We've recently convened a high-level panel, a universal energy abundance. I think it's got a lot of potential to deliver some very helpful recommendations in this basis.”

And I form a President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and has a number of high-level experts on this panel. I'm not personally involved in looking forward to my colleagues work on this topic. And then coming back to the energy access problem, in particular, AI, because we are the AI energy and climate podcast here, I'm curious how do you see AI issues helping to address the energy access problem? Yeah, I think the simplest way I can explain that is to explain the kind of close to 15 years that we've been operating in Africa.

So, or even take it back to the experience I had in Africa, with this in this community and with this customer, what was clear to me, when I went to visit our car broke down, I had to walk for two hours. It's an hour and a half to get to the house. The problem, ultimately, was only understood face-to-face. It was solved by sending someone out on a motorcycle to out to the community and then install the system and then upload the system and then 10 hours later, 12 hours later, the problem was solved.

But in the meantime, this customer did not have energy for a month, because that whole process of getting it back up and running was, it took us, it took somebody to decide to go out in the field and try to solve the problem in the field and everything was incredibly manual.

That cost gets put onto the customer and it's inefficient in the form of how it delivers the energy, so it manifests itself to the customer in the form of really expensive energy and really unreliable energy.

“The service of energy provisioning is unreliable.”

So, to me, three years ago, we kind of woke up, we were operating these energy service businesses, we had built some pretty good automation software.

We had aggregated a lot of really good data, and we understood the workflow very, very well here, and at that point, the chat, open AI was was launched to the world and it was at that point where we felt that there was now a delivery mechanism to all this, all this great data, all this great workflow, there was an ability to deliver. Decision-making judgments process to workflow, that was more efficient than anything. And that's really the core concept here, and it's an important point in our markets is, in our markets, in developed markets in the US, if you look at workflow, it's pretty automated at this point.

That 70% of sales is automated in 60% of services automated. That's not the case in our markets, in our markets, the automation world, the sales forces of the world, they don't operate in our markets.

Our markets are very, very manual, everything is manual, so the automation level in our markets is like zero, or maybe 10%.

“That's what's driving the inefficiency, that's what's driving the problem.”

So what we're doing is we're taking these markets from zero to 10% automation to very high level, so we're kind of leapfrogging traditional automation software into agentic. And so we're not installing fragmented pieces of software, we're supplying a unified package of data and decision-making to everybody in the workflow from human agents to AI agents. And that group is seamlessly managing this whole process. How do you effectively sell these systems? How do you configure these systems? How do you install the systems?

How do you manage the system? How do you finance the customer as one unified unified team?

And what we found in our first implementation is that it does two wonderful things.

It drives customer outcomes, so our first customer in Tanzania that we installed this in which was offered electric. The NPS score for our customer to their customers went up from 40 to 80. So their customers, there was a massive value proposition to their customers, and that's kind of what happens. If you give people reliable affordable energy, they're going to give you a high NPS high NPS score. But it also delivered an ROI to our customer, return on investment to our customer.

And that's the other big sort of game-changing improvement in this model is that now you have a business that's sustainable delivering ROI delivering great outcomes to customers. And then that company can be financed. And it can grow and it can solve more problems and power more facilities and power more home. So it's this kind of flywheel. So to speak, all driven by just driving massive, agetic efficiency into the energy delivery market. Fascinating. Well, why I lots of questions. Let me just start with data.

“And I think classically, one hears that in the global south, there just isn't an update it to do these types of projects.”

What type of data do you have? What type of data do you need in order to do this? We have a lot of data. It was one thing that we did and we were smart about it. Because if you go back to the previous theory, see, the previous theory was we were a technology company, but we had to do the installation. We had to do the financing. We had to do the operations in maintenance, the service to the customer.

Because there was no other companies that could do that. So we had to be very vertically integrated. And you're talking about solar installations maybe, or mainly your solar installations. Yeah, yeah. So back to my story, offgrad electric, what they were doing was they were installing lithium ion batteries and solar panels.

It was connected to kind of central command because of payments. Because everybody paid mobile.

“So that was the counter-intuitive thing. It was very digital.”

The country was very digital from a capital formation of payments perspective. And we had to connect to that system and that connectivity that system provided the data. So as we built out this business model, we were able to aggregate data on selling. How do you work through with a customer, the right configuration and pricing? We were able to, because of payments, get gather very good data on energy credit,

which fed into our financing tools that we now sell. We had very good data. We started to build more sensors on the system. And so that network architecture for service was aggregating data and humans were making decisions around how do we fix this? How do we fix this? Do we go in the field? Do we not go in the field? What have you? How was 15 years of that?

“Of this early unique data flow and workflow that we had to aggregate because it was the only way we're going to drive efficiency into the business.”

So that's the data that I'm referring to.

That ultimately we just packaged into artificial intelligence to do mass data analytics and judgments and decision making that feeds into all of our teams.

That ultimately provide the service to the customer. So another constraint to concern that I sometimes hear is the data collected in one geography, it may not be applicable in another geography to what extent have you found that to be an issue? The workflow is very traditional. It's complex because of the dynamics of emerging markets.

But how do you selling? It's unique to selling in emerging markets. The problems that we're solving are universal, unreliable on affordable energy. And so, and this is the one great thing about artificial intelligence, it takes all the data, all of it. It doesn't matter if it's Tanzania or Ivory Coast or Dominican Republic or Saudi Arabia.

It aggregates it, it provides inference and it provides judgment. And then a human ultimately makes the call on the on the on the on the decision. So if I were to if I were to wait it, I would say that, you know, it's 80, 90 percent is cross mortar.

And then you always have edge cases depending on the country that you're at your end.

But it's the financing information that we have aggregated to properly underwrite and price customers in Tanzania is wildly applicable to Dominican Republic.

“Say more about who your customers are. Are you selling mainly to solar developers to utilities to other categories of companies?”

Yeah, it's a it's a it's a great question and it's actually. It's been an eye opener for for for me so in my mind when we launched this. The the archetype customer would be a distributed renewable energy integrator someone who is who is. But installing these systems across their countries or cities and then wanting to manage them as an energy service. So that would be like off grid electric we built that business in Tanzania that was our first customer we integrated the technology.

And that tends that still tends to be. You know, a good percentage of our customers. So we go into markets and we assess those markets and there's distributed renewable energy companies. They could be solar home system companies they could be doing C and I installation they could be property developers that are building. You know, mass amounts of homes and they want to ensure that there's a distributed backup system or a primary system in this community.

So that's kind of one form the other form that's that's more emerging here and we're about to announce our first.

Our first customer in this regard. We're all communications providers and and and this is. Again, not something I really anticipated but now that we're working with one makes makes a lot of sense. So if you're if you're in our markets telecommunications providers. They they obviously provide data and mobile capability to their to their countries.

There are also there are also capital formation all the payments are typically done on their rails and they provide warranty services. So they're they're kind of data infrastructure companies and they deliver that data in the form of data and minutes and also inform of.

So.

“Intuitively integrating our data capability with their data capability allows them to sell energy.”

As well as data and minutes and payments and and do that very effectively because of their existing data rails and they're existing data infrastructure and they're existing customer relations.

So I'm I'm really really excited again every customer that we work with I asked myself. How can we you know what what's the level of increase of NPS customer you know happiness on the here for them and then ROI. And I feel like the telecommunications providers are are in a great position to provide reliable affordable energy across their their countries alongside everything else that they're already doing for their countries. Now. This podcast is underwritten and part by the US Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.

Its editorial content is completely independent and the views expressed are exclusively those of participating experts. It is presented live without editing. For further information about the UAE's efforts in the areas of artificial intelligence and technology. Go to the website of the embassy at www.ue-emBC.org and search for UAE-US tech cooperation. We thank them for their support.

We thank everybody who's supporting this podcast for their support and we look forward to it developing and growing. Over time because the issue is so important. MPS by the way, it's was maximum potential score of like at that rate. Sorry net promoter score. You know, and that's the same or I was hearing that wrong.

So our audience played as well. What is yeah, I apologize. No, it's kind of the way we think about it.

“It's the question is like, would you recommend this company?”

And it's a one or a zero or a ten or a zero, you know, that kind of thing. And it's just kind of as I think about the purest form of flattery from your customers. Would they promote you? And that's the measure that we track for our customers. Got it.

So another constraint in emerging markets is often just less like a purchasing power. The end user is don't have the money to pay for the service and that it works this way up the chain. To what extent is that a barrier to what you're doing or a challenge for you? Yeah, I know.

“It's it's not at all because again, like what's our what's our promise?”

Our promises you will deliver more reliable, more affordable energy.

And so, you know, that's always been.

That's always been the the pushback to everything we've ever done from the very beginning. In the very beginning, people were like, okay, you've got a customer who burns carousine in their home and spends four dollars a month on that carousine. How are you ever going to get them to pay ten dollars to support a lithium ion battery and a solar panel? And then what you say to them is is okay, but we're giving them 20,000 times the amount of energy here. So it's more reliable.

So the outcome is is better and reliability of energy is everything to customers and we think about hospitals and everything reliability is at a lower price per kilowatt hour. So it and and what we found is ultimately if you can deliver that proposition, they will pay four dollars to ten because they're getting a better product at a better price point.

So that that has never been the core issue is unaffordable unreliable energy.

If you can deliver reliable affordable energy that the pocketbook doesn't matter. You're saving money ultimately. What so what's your capital structure? Have you raised what private capital or and what stage you at in terms of raising capital for this.

About three years ago when we had this crazy idea that we had we got good data and we got good workflow and now we can maybe wrap it in an energetic platform.

And that's that's all we've raised. So we will at at some point.

“Probably soon rather than later just because some of these projects that we're doing are a lot bigger than we had anticipated raised a series series B.”

The back to data from in it. Data is pretty valuable. I wonder are you looking to monetize the data you're collecting in some way or do you fight a invaluable kind of independent of your use and in these particular projects.

No, no, I mean our data the data so first of all, like the data is owned by the customer.

Here and all we're looking to do right now and there's so much opportunity to do it is ensure that the data is driving efficiency in the in the business model on behalf of our of our customers. So no, we don't we we're not thinking of other revenue streams for the data. We're just trying to make sure that this this model of energy delivery is the most efficient possible.

“It's such a big problem as a trillion dollar problem and it's best use is the data's best use is get people reliable for will energy and that's where we're going to focus.”

Are there any particular examples or poster children of places where your intelligence product is making a difference right now the collective point to. Yeah, well, like I said, we've we've done we've implemented now in in two countries. So I don't have a lot of great geographic breath and stories, but I do have great use cases. And I should say that our customers have great have great use cases. You know, the the the wonderful thing about this technology is it's agnostic to who you are.

You can you can apply it to off grid farmers and in in the Sarangetti and up to hospitals in in the cities. It's community level electrification. So with that comes some really kind of cool stories. I may give you that one that one story here and we we have those our customers have those every single day where you.

You provide reliable affordable energy for the first time in a community or in a home or what have you in the you can imagine that the impact to the family into the community is profound.

We we've we've introduced larger scale systems recently and we've got like the American clinic in. In a Russia Tanzania has installed the system and you know for the first time they have consistent refrigeration for for for medicines for blood. That's a storage their their their systems. They're now 24 hours of power within the facilities so the lights don't go out anymore when you know there's a birth. And it's it's that issue is one of the biggest issues health issues in these in these countries is is women.

You know having babies and and the lights going out the energy going out at the time or just you know medical equipment not being able to work at the world. Being able to work at the right time because there's don't energy and the American clinic can give you a daily. You know sort of sort of use case on on on how just that base need of energy has massively improved its ability to provide service to the to the community. Well I've been working on a distributed solar project in Mongolia and would love to follow up with you on this Mongolia turns out the capital city of Mongolia.

Mongolia on but tour has some of the dirtiest there in the world is really horrific as a result of the use of coal based heating in the in the very cold winters there and there's pilot projects to deploy solar power along with solar heating of different kinds.

“In these areas and I think it's got a lot of potential to reduce some of the horrific air pollution so after this let's follow up on this bill.”

I'd love to hear out whether you're product has any potential benefits for the people in Mongolia who are suffering enormously under this terrible air pollution. No it it does it does I mean I think are you know I would love to displace coal we we do a lot of displacement of diesel which is pretty similar there there's something like. I don't know 50 million diesel generators in Nigeria and and it is it is the most expensive porous form of energy in the in the world it's very easy to displace with with batteries and and and and and solar.

That delivers the service that make sure that that maintains the network ensures the sustainability of that energy source over time.

“See the where the where the market's got into some trouble and this is why I don't you know I think that the hard this hardware solution does work.”

Is it's not sustainable so you can take a diesel generator out and if you put a battery and a solar panel. And in its place but you don't have the ability you're on the maintenance behind it the service behind it to maintain that. And you're pushing the onto the homeowner or to the business who has no idea how to maintain these systems. What what happens is it breaks down they have to buy a new one but they don't have the capital to buy the new one as opposed to having a company behind it delivering the sustainable service.

They're not paying for the hardware they're paying for the service and you've got a company behind it that's ensuring that the network stays up.

So I would love I'd love to talk to you about that I haven't had a use case where I've displaced coal I'd never even heard of coal being a distributed energy source but.

That's wonderful let's let's let's let's we'll follow for sure well. Let's see where starting to run out of time here I wonder before we close up any topics that we haven't touched on that you want to highlight or any any questions. I should have asked and I didn't from your standpoint.

“I don't I don't think so I think you did I think you did a pretty good job I mean we we talked about.”

Where we're going where the technology is going and how it's an improvement on on the on the legacy technology. So we're going to talk about how we're going to do that in terms of energy production and distribution the hardware but also importantly in terms of the the automation and the the intelligence layer.

We talked about how big the problem is and and.

How global it is how it's kind of consistent in a lot of ways the problem which allows us to systematize the the the solution so.

“I think you I think you did it yeah I mean really well I you and I were connected by the team at the science sustainability prize which is a prize awarded by the government of the UAE for.”

The tremendous contributions and sustainability and you want that prize you're company one that prize several years ago curious what impacted winning that prize have for you. And it was more that that model we had before the kind of technology plus distribution plus finance model that we were rolling out across Africa and you know anybody who operates in these markets Africa in particular money is very scarce it's so hard to come by and we needed it badly and they were able to provide it but it over and above that.

I think it was the credibility that it provided a kind of way raised awareness kind of like you and I are doing right now with this podcast like we need awareness we need people to kind of see what's going on in the market and the solutions that are there. So they can get behind so the work and get behind it and and that prize did did both for us it was really instrumental it's been my privilege to be a member of the selection committee for that prize for many years now and I'm just really impressed by what.

So it's great to hear that testimony from you and that had a great impact for you and your your company time I guess time to wrap up and I always close the podcast with two questions for our guests and the first question is how are you using AI tools in your day to day life these days. You know I mean I use it I use anthropic personally I find it to be a pretty good pretty good writer and and so I it supports more my personal side and some investigating things that are going on with my family and how to solve problems more personally.

Of course that we're we're pushing it in I mean we're pushing it into energy provisioning but we're also from a business perspective we're pushing it into every function that we're operating in today my my my view is. You know AI coupled with humans creates super humans and everybody is smarter more productive better decision makers and better collaborators when they're utilizing and when they're partnered with it. I'm pushing it into engineering into supply chain into sales and into everything so.

Yeah yeah well I'm going to start with King Leopold's ghost I that was the I read that what I don't suggest is you read it on your way to Africa for the first time which is what I did my first trip there. I kind of set me back a little bit a couple of days here but it's it's it's it's a great book it's a good it's told from the context of the Congo but it's more general in terms of you know what happened.

To that continent during that during that period and I think that it just better than any book it kind of illustrates.

“That control of your own sovereign national resources is really important and as we're emerging into this world where you know I believe that data is a sovereign natural resource.”

How important it is that they are owned and controlled by their people by their by their countries and we didn't get into it but it's actually this partnership I'm we're working on on the telecom side.

I think it's very important for principle that the data resides in the in the countries it's it's their resource and I think the lesson of King Leopold's ghost reinforces that.

“It you know I was I worked in in private equity which is kind of the dark side a little bit for a long period I before I moved to try to be an entrepreneur and I think it's like the quintessential entrepreneur.”

I think it's like the kind of building a revolution from scratch against all odds and you know how to how to take on massive structural challenges here so 1776 is a pretty inspirational for me.

I got to go with my with my favorite author of all time Stephen King and the stand I've read almost all of his books and the stand is is amazing and I just love Stephen King because you know I think he I don't know I people.

“I don't think appreciate how complex his story lines are and his characters are and the stand is about as complex as it gets here so that would be my that would be my third.”

A three tremendous recommendations bill thank you so much for all of your inspiring work it is tremendous to talk and thank you for joining us on the AI energy and climate podcast. Now I really appreciate it David thank you for giving me an audience thank you. This has been the AI energy and climate podcast a special production of the DSR network. [Music]