One of the highlights from the show was spending time with Ryan Knudson, VP of energy and sustainability for Phillips Edison and Company (PECO), one of the largest grocery-anchored shopping center owners in the country. What I love about Ryan and PECOs outlook and mission is the commitment to service, innovation and positive community outcomes. Together with my co-founder and podcast host, Dan Roberts, we recorded an episode of Renewable Rides live with Ryan to learn more about him, role, strategy, company and lessons from a career in our industry.

Ryan talked about presenting an energy utility rate forecast to his board last year showing what he expected over the next five years, built on 15 years of watching these markets closely. One board member told him it was the clearest read on energy he had seen, then added that he thought Ryan was being too conservative and that rates were going to climb even higher. The board’s response was a push to move faster on deploying solar and storage at their facilities.

Five years ago, hardly any board was asking about utility rates. Now boards are running their own math on what happens if compute demand from AI and the electrification of everything keeps pulling on the grid the way it currently is, along with the other drivers increasing rates, and they are pushing management to get ahead of it. That’s a real shift, and it changes the conversation for anyone in our category. People don’t need convincing anymore, they need help moving at the speed their own leadership is demanding.

Ryan described something he calls the triangle of death with solar deals and his solution for it. Many non-owner-occupied solar projects die before they get built because of the split incentive problem between landlords, developers, and tenants. Each party is negotiating for the same dollar, and someone usually walks when they don’t get what they want. His fix is for landlords to step into that deal directly, offering energy as a service to tenants instead of standing outside the negotiation. That reshapes how a commercial real estate owner thinks about its role, from collecting rent to managing the total cost of occupying a building.

And Ryan flagged something he’s paying attention to: solar is going to be profitable in more and more of the cheaper energy markets as data centers move in seeking power. That demand is going to change the math in those markets fast. Ryan expects places that make no sense for solar right now to look very different within three to five years, purely because the supply and demand math will force the issue.

This is worth acting on before it gets urgent. Run the numbers on your own portfolio now, while you still have time to choose a structure that fits your properties, instead of reacting to a bill that already landed. As Ryan describes it, assess your “value lanes” and dont get stuck playing in one lane. Accepting some upfront complexity in exploring options, so much more value can be unlocked. Phillips Edison went from 1 megawatt of onsite energy two years ago when Ryan joined, to setting a public goal of hosting 25 megawatts by 2030. This is being achieved because Ryan and his team, with support from the board and executive team, are doing the upfront work, innovating and continually pushing for positive outcomes.

Wonderful discussion, incredible person, industry-leading professional, and such a pleasure to record this episode together in front of a live audience. Here’s the full video of our conversation with Ryan or you can listen on Apple or any major platform.

Asked what he had learned, he said “be bold, but not reckless”.

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I have not stopped thinking about it since, his story resonates on so many levels for me personally from my days of flying aircraft with the RAF, to being on the US army base in Iraq to now building VECKTA. Reckless has consequences you do not want!

I take my role leading VECKTA very seriously. We are building a company that is changing how businesses and communities power themselves, permanently, and we have a long list of ways we know we can unlock this market at scale. Almost all of them require us to think bigger than is often comfortable or normal. This industry defends the status quo harder than most, it is entrenched by a century of regulation written for a different physical system, and it is monopolistic at its core. Nothing about it yields to a polite request.

If we are not bold we are irrelevant, and the market stays locked for another decade while everyone pays more for less reliable power. But we cannot be reckless, and in energy the difference is not academic.

The energy industry runs on technical sophistication, education, safety and financial rigor. We are putting high-voltage equipment on the roofs and in the yards of buildings full of people and products. We are asking CFOs to commit capital based on models we built for assets that will be a part of the business for 20 years.

When a project underperforms, the damage does not stay with that project; it becomes the story a whole board tells itself about onsite energy. An underperforming asset becomes the case study an incumbent utility uses to defend its existing model, and it sets the whole industry back. We have all watched what improperly sold residential solar did to consumer trust and to the companies that chased volume over quality. Some of the biggest names in that segment no longer exist. Bad projects are not a local failure; they are a levy on everyone still trying to do it properly.

So we need to challenge limits and push this industry to adapt with purpose, and we need to do it without burning the credibility that makes adoption possible in the first place.

There is a second reason, which matters just as much, if not more to me. We have responsibilities to each other. To our families and communities. To our customers, who are trusting us with infrastructure their operations depend. And to our investors, whose money we should spend as if it were our own, because functionally it is. Being bold and being a good steward are not in tension.

I look around at the moment, and I see a great deal of recklessness dressed up as courage. I see governments running trade policy by announcement, reversing themselves inside a week, and calling the volatility a strategy. I see wars being started without an end goal or plan. I see banks that managed interest rate risk so poorly that they were dismantled by a maturity mismatch anyone could have modeled.

I see multi-billion dollar companies structuring their labor costs so that the rest of the social system makes up the difference. These are not marginal firms fighting to survive; they are choosing a labor model where the shortfall is quietly transferred to the taxpayer, and it is reckless because it spends down the social contract to protect a quarterly number.

And I see an AI infrastructure buildout financed with debt, circular vendor arrangements and load forecasts inflated by speculative interconnection requests that the same project files with four different utilities, which is going to leave someone holding the cost of capacity nobody needed.

Different sectors, same pattern. Decisions driven by power, ego and short-termism, rather than the outcome, or by the people who will not be present when the bill arrives.

Colin Bell had a feedback loop most of us will never have. He was flying for his country, his family, and his life; one in three of his comrades did not come home, and the line between bold and reckless was drawn every single night in the most literal terms available. Boldness got the target marked, and recklessness got a crew killed, and the raid missed. He had no way to defer the consequence, defocus it, or externalize it onto a stakeholder who was not in the room.

We do not have that. Our consequences are diffuse, delayed and usually paid by somebody else, which is precisely why so many people get away with confusing the two. Take the delay out and most of the behavior I described above stops immediately.

I had the pleasure of looking up to bold, values-driven, and amazing parents as well as incredible leaders throughout my life and career. I want my son, E, to look up to me as a bold leader and not a reckless one. And I want him to be able to look at the people running our countries, our economies and our communities and see traits he wants to grow into, rather than ones he is embarrassed by. Right now I am not confident he would look up to public leaders with that regard, and that bothers me more than anything else I have written about here.

Simple but powerful words from a 105-year-old man who flew 50 times into the dark that I think about a lot, and I want to continue to live a life where bold, common sense, considered and trusted decisions lead to the best outcomes now and for years to come.

I have driven past that canyon plenty of times without knowing the story. Around 1909, James J. Hill’s Oregon Trunk was grading the west bank and E. H. Harriman’s Deschutes Railroad was grading the east, both racing south toward Bend. Central Oregon was a railless land, and whoever laid track first would own access to its timber, its trade and its future. The crews knew it and fought for it. They filed competing claims on the same ground, they blocked each other’s supply wagons, and there are accounts of sabotage and dynamite as the two lines climbed the same narrow gorge on opposite sides of the water.

But as is often the case, nature and geography settled the argument. The canyon pinched in near Bend, too tight for two sets of track, and the economics of the whole feud collapsed. Harriman died, the spite went out of it, and the two sides that had been sabotaging each other agreed to a joint operation over more than forty miles of the canyon. The infrastructure that was going to define the region’s economy was only completed because the rivals stopped trying to beat each other and built it together.

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The same fight, a hundred years on

We are living through the same story right now; we are just calling it data centers and energy infrastructure.

The speed of progress and the resulting demands are staggering. Artificial intelligence and compute are pulling on the grid harder than anything we have seen in generations and when combined with electrification, heating/cooling demands, reshoring, and general economic growth, the systems are under strain. AI is enabling and disrupting huge aspects of our lives. As such, the money is moving fast to build the compute and the power to serve it.

And the pattern replays what happened in that canyon. Companies race to lock up the best locations. Communities push back on the substations, the transmission lines and the water draw. There is real nimbyism, and there are real land grabs, and everyone wants to own the outcome before the other side does.

None of that is new. Major infrastructure has always arrived with conflict because it always changes who holds the power and who captures the value. The railroad did it, the interstates did it, the first power grid did it, the internet did it and so on. The pain along the way is not a sign the new innovation is wrong, it is a sign the stakes are high!

The shape of the infrastructure is changing

Here is where our story stops being similar to the railroad and starts to break from it.

The railroad was centralized by its very nature. One spine, up one canyon, dictated by geography and resources, and whoever owned that route owned the region. The old shipping lanes worked the same way, a handful of ports and passages that everything had to funnel through. Centralized systems create centralized power, and centralized power is what people fight over.

What is happening now feels different. The supply chain that used to run through a few chokepoints is distributing, and energy is doing exactly the same thing. Instead of monopolized utility territories, enormous plants and thousands of kilometers of wire, we are moving to smaller, modular, scalable assets placed close to where the power is actually used. Generation, storage and now compute, sited where they are needed rather than where a single owner can control the gate.

On the data centre side of the equation, while we are still in hyperscale mode, I see the synergies with the railroad and the race for control, supremacy and security at a country and company level. But on the compute side, as we shift from training data centres to distributed and inference-related compute, and from several monopolized models to more open source, the game will change.

US grid headroom “is already approaching zero and turns negative by 2027”, behind-the-meter will power “well over half of new US data centers in 2028+”, and the addressable market for behind-the-meter equipment crosses 50 GW a year by 2029 (SemiAnalysis, 25 June 2026). US compute buildout goes from +21 GW in 2026 to +84 GW by 2030. ABI research shows inference capacity will be 46 GW by 2035 (42% CAGR) and will exceed training capacity by 2032.

That shift in our supply chains, energy, compute, open/closed source, community voice….does something the railroad never could. It democratizes access. When the infrastructure is distributed, the ability to produce, store, and control power is distributed with it, and the fight over the single chokepoint starts to lose its point. You do not have to win the canyon if you no longer have to go through it.

How I think about our role in this

This is the part I keep coming back to. The Deschutes railroad only got built because someone finally brought the two sides together, and the benefits of that canyon line compounded for a century afterward: timber, towns, trade, a whole regional economy that would not exist otherwise. The cooperation is what unlocked it and the feud just delayed it.

The way I see my role, and the role of anyone serious about the energy transition, is to be the person doing that bringing together, earlier and on purpose. To get the companies and communities that need the abundant, reliable, affordable and clean power confidently and efficiently connected with the partners (utilities, constructors, equipment providers, financiers and so on) to achieve win-win outcomes is critical. We don’t want the power struggle and the dynamite to come out, and to design the lifeblood of our communities and economies - energy infrastructure - such that benefits compound for everyone rather than accrue to whoever grabbed the best site first. We can keep fighting bank to bank and get a slower, uglier version of the future, or we can build it together and get there faster, cleaner and with the value shared far more widely.

I know which one I would rather work on. The distributed, democratized version of this is not only possible, but it is better, and it changes the direction of economies, countries and the people who live in them. But it does not build itself, and it does not build well when everyone is guarding their own bank of the river. The canyon taught us that the hard way, we do not have to learn it the same way.

We can achieve incredible outcomes together that are enduring and massively impactful when we embrace change, innovate, adapt purposefully and empower co-creation, and that’s the mission every day!

Before I get more into our conversation, I want to explain what Voltus does, as a power plant operator, to be the last line of defense. Matthew’s pitch to a business is simple. He asks them to shift or reduce electricity use for short windows when the grid needs it and, in return, get paid for doing so.

This works at scale because the grid has more slack in it than most people assume. Matthew told me the transmission grid runs at around 60% utilization and the distribution network at around 40%. Most of that capacity sits idle outside a handful of peak hours a year. Instead of building new power plants to cover those rare peaks, Voltus aggregates flexibility across hundreds of businesses into what the industry calls a virtual power plant, one coordinated resource the grid can call on instead of firing up another generator. That said, Matthew doesn’t love this term and prefers “distributed capacity”, which I tend to agree with and find more applicable to the opportunity without it sounding too intangible.

Matthew walked me through how onsite batteries now get paid twice, once on the utility bill and once on the grid, and I told him straight out how we love this moment in time, being able to layer in different revenue stacks and different ways to pay off the asset is so powerful. I wasn’t being polite, this represents a whole business case shifting under our feet. Being agnostic and representing our customers’ best interests, the more options available in the market to monetize energy assets the more value we can continue to deliver - assessing, planning, scenario planning, and supporting the effective contracting and deployment of solutions that best meet specific needs and objectives. We can help oit customers plan, contract and deploy the batteries and onsite energy assets and Voltus can enable the monetization.

Battery hardware keeps getting cheaper, which everyone already knows. What’s newer is the second half of the equation. Voltus recently acquired a company called Brightfield specifically to pair battery installations with long-term, fixed-price flexibility contracts like the ones described above.

Matthew said that combination has moved the payback period on a commercial battery from around 8 years to about 3.5 years. For years, the pitch for an onsite battery was almost entirely about the utility bill, shave your peak demand charges, manage time of use tarrifs, but in addition, now there is a market for selling the flexibility sitting inside that battery, separate from whatever it saves on the bill.

The volatility Matthew described elsewhere in this conversation is the other side of that same coin. He gave me an example from MISO, where a single component of a commercial customer’s bill went from $500 per megawatt per year to $90,000, a 180 times increase, set by an auction that clears two months before the new price hits. That’s exactly why a business’s flexibility is worth more than it used to be. Somebody has to absorb that volatility, and increasingly, businesses with batteries and flexible load are getting paid to do it.

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My take: batteries are about to go through the same arc solar went through a decade ago, affordable, then financeable, then profitable, then standard. Matthew expects states to start incentivizing batteries the way they incentivized solar. Combine that with falling hardware costs and a growing, fixed-price market for flexibility, and the asset that didn’t pencil out at your site two years ago might pencil out now. If you looked at a battery and passed on it, I’d run the numbers again.

Full conversation with Matthew Plante:

When a company decides to get serious about onsite energy, the three main paths are:

• A consultant offers to provide an analysis

• A bid platform offers to procure it for you

• A developer, often already in the lobby, offers to deliver it

While each feels like progress, they quietly take away the thing that determines the highest value outcome: control.

Road one: the consultant study

The instinct to go down the consulting path is understandable. Energy is complex, so hire experts, commission a study and de-risk the decision.

Here is what I learned from my own years in consulting. Studies do not lower energy costs and recommendations that look elegant in a slide deck crumble when they meet procurement and development realities. Steve Jobs dismissed consultants for parachuting in, offering advice, and disappearing before the real work began, thus never learning the realities of it all, to apply to the next consulting gig.

There is also a structural problem. Every engagement starts by consolidating scattered data, rebuilding workflows, and redoing vendor analysis from scratch. I call it the reinvention tax. Hourly billing is misaligned with your incentives as it rewards scope creep and more studies, over results. Soft costs already make up 30 to 70 percent of a commercial solar plus storage project (NREL finding from Part 1). The consulting model adds to exactly the cost bucket you should be attacking. And, you are often sold the A-team and get work from the C-team, meanwhile, your data, IP and plan is reliant on those individuals. When they leave or change roles, your information goes with them.

Six months and a six figure invoice later, you will have a report. But it’s already out of date because the market has moved on, and you still do not have a price, a partner, or a project. A customer recently shared with me that he was spending $16k per day on a consultant and their per-diem for a market analysis. He felt no further ahead after a quarter of working together. The investment in consulting amounted to $960k — a significant amount of money that could have been invested in an energy asset that would have saved this much money every year.

Our Head of Operations, Calvin Fine, always says “you do not benefit from an energy system until there is steel in the ground and the system is operating”.

Note: not all advisors and consultants are bad. Many of you trust and have enduring relationships with your consultants and the outcomes can be positive. In particular, they can support with d2d execution, internal change management and technical expertise when you don’t want the fixed costs. But, I encourage you to ensure the scope is clear, incentives are aligned and your selected partner is representing you, backed by industry-leading approaches. This is how we add value to the industry when such relationships exist, we partner with and enable the best consultants/advisors to deliver, powered by the best intelligence, workflows, processes and ecosystems that are scalable, defensible, proven with aligned incentives that deliver value.

Road two: the bid platform, aka proposal machine

Bidding platforms sound like the modern answer, and the logic is half right because, as we have discussed, this is a fragmented market. Use a platform to reach them all and get their attention.

But access alone solves the wrong problem. A bid platform that simply connects you to bidders has not answered the question that matters, what should you buy? Instead, it has just multiplied the number of people telling you their answer.

Without an assessment of your sites, your loads, your tariffs, your optimal system configuration etc, more bids just means more incomparable proposals. One bidder quotes a 20-year solar-only PPA with an escalator. Another quotes a lease, and a third adds storage with a separate revenue-sharing agreement. Your team becomes a translation service and evaluation becomes a project in itself. That is how procurement processes produce a stack of paper and a problem to solve instead of a decision.

Worse are the platforms that run reverse auctions. Rewarding the lowest sticker price on an asset that must perform for twenty-five years is a design flaw, not a feature. The cheapest bid can often be the most expensive asset over the long term, and in this scenario, no one wins.

Note: Connection without intelligence is just noise with a login page and you are back to being sold to, versus buying from a position of strength. Generic outcomes and processes create substandard outcomes, for a solution that is best when tailored and customized. Furthermore, I often hear from customers that have previously tried this approach that they feel they are negotiating against two parties: the developer bidding the work and the bid platform facilitating. The suppliers get frustrated as competing for work against unproven competitors using a spreadsheet analysis is a recipe for wasted time, effort and the wrong partner winning the work. These platforms often attract suppliers desperate for work and good suppliers move on.

Road three: the friendly developer

This is the most common path and often the most expensive. A developer approaches with an unsolicited proposal and a free consultation. No RFP, no process, no procurement burden. Sign the dotted line, minimal work and you can celebrate and move on to your next task. This also plays out with a developer requiring rights to certain projects based on time horizon, cumulative project size, or geographic region, in exchange for a locked-in deal that ends up being too rigid and out of touch with what the market is delivering over time. The customer is then hesitant to move on after institutional knowledge is built, this is when rates creep up, quality reduces and friction builds - particularly because most developers do not have the capacity, geographic coverage or expertise to support the expanding scope.

But I’ll share two stories from our own customer base on how this plays against a customer’s best interests:

1. A real estate company came to us asking why energy prices were rising at a property where they had installed solar precisely to prevent that. They had sole-sourced a developer who approached them with what looked like a great deal. The inverters had failed, the system was not operating, and the installer had gone out of business. They were left with no obvious recourse, no performance guarantees, no maintenance plan, and low-quality equipment poorly installed. This is admittingly a worst-case scenario. They ended up paying to fix a system they had already paid for, and once repaired, it cut operating costs by over 40 percent, which is the painful part: the asset was right, the buying process was wrong and it ended up costing significantly more than it should have.

2. A company approached us with an energy-as-a-service bid in hand from a leading developer, recommended by their own private equity firm. The rate looked great at $0.15 per kilowatt hour against a utility rate of $0.25. They were ready to sign but after our intelligence platform and marketplace data said it was high, they ran an informed competitive process instead. They signed a deal at $0.085/kWh, locked in for 25 years with no escalation. That single decision added $4.5 million in energy cost savings and pushed total lifetime savings past $25 million.

Note: A sophisticated, well-advised buyer was about to leave $4.5 million on the table, on a deal that already looked like a win. The developer did nothing wrong; they quoted what an uncontested market would bear. There are many wonderful developers out there, and they will, given the opportunity, sell you a solution that aligns with what they offer. Run your process the right way and it does not remove opportunity for the supply side of the market, it actually creates it, because more good projects get built, more great outcomes are realized, the all-in costs reduce and we create an industry where all sides thrive.

What the three roads have in common

In each of these cases, someone else holds the information advantage, and in every case you pay for it in fees, inflated pricing, or in an asset shaped around someone else’s incentives.

The better pathway

The alternative is not complicated, and it is what this series has laid out.

Intelligence first: know your sites, your loads, and your optimal system before the market knows your name.

Curation second: a shortlist of three to six genuinely qualified suppliers, not whoever emails you or your Google search returns.

Competition third: identical data, transparent Q&A, structured scoring, and a best and final round. Control and lead throughout.

This is the model we built VECKTA around, because I have seen every other model fail buyers. Run this way, procurement compresses from six to 18 months to four to 12 weeks, and projects consistently come in 20 to 50 percent below the traditional paths, while seeign the lifetime value increase. Best of all, our customers achieve their desired outcomes with the intelligence at their fingertips and feel really great about the decisions they make.

The fiduciary bottom line

An energy system is infrastructure that will either compound value or compound regret. Every dollar of energy savings, access to energy sooner than competitors, new revenue from energy sales, operational resilience, or sustainability-related branding or fine avoidance…. flows to EBITDA, and at today’s multiples that is enterprise value, not just cost avoidance, which makes this a fiduciary responsibility. The problem these days is not the equipment, the installation or access to capital, it is the process by which we coordinate these inputs to result in a solution that delivers the results you want and need.

Buy from a place of control, know what you need, curate who you buy from and make them compete on value. The playbook exists, and the companies using it are quietly building an energy cost advantage their competitors will spend the next decade trying to explain.

The complete procurement framework is in Chapter 8 of Powering Profits. Part 1 and Part 2 of this series cover the specification and the process in detail.

When most people think about running a “competitive process,” they think this means volume, blasting out a generic RFP to a broad swath of the market, collecting quotes, and then picking a winner.

I have seen this in the business world throughout my career and it doesn’t work, it creates so much wastage on all sides of the market. It potentially works for commodities, but onsite energy is not a commodity. It is a custom solution delivered by a fragmented market. The market is made up of thousands of regional and local specialists, each with their own areas of expertise (size, technology types, self-perform, outsource, commercial models….) and the A teams are booked out. So how do you get their attention and partner for the best possible outcomes for your business?

The game is not casting the widest net, it is curating the right field, then making that field genuinely compete.

Curate before they compete

In Part 1 we determined that best practices are defining what you are buying. Now you decide who earns the right to bid and how you curate the right field. Five primary filters matter:

1. Geography and local experience. Permitting, labor laws, incentives and interconnection rules differ everywhere. Screen for recent projects in your region and evidence of standing relationships with your utility. A supplier who knows your jurisdiction keeps your project on schedule with no change orders (beyond the unexpected).

2. Size and technology fit. A contractor who has built a career on 250 kW rooftop arrays may be out of their depth on solar plus storage plus backup generation for a cold storage facility. Look for experience within about 30 percent of your target size and the same technology mix.

3. Financing fluency. Your partner must speak the same language as your CFO. If you want a PPA or energy as a service structure, ask for sample term sheets and financier references early. If they cannot deliver the structure, the price does not matter.

4. Safety, quality, and uptime. Review OSHA metrics and insurance requirements, then go further. Talk to past clients. Did projects finish on time, on budget, without incidents? A supplier with a sloppy safety culture usually has deeper operational cracks.

5. Actual capacity. The best firms juggle multiple large projects competing for the same crews and components. Ask about their pipeline and their construction windows. A partner honest about bandwidth beats one that overpromises to win the bid.

Then curate, three bidders minimum, three to six is optimal. Enough to create tension, few enough to manage efficiently and to signal to every bidder that they have a real shot as they are competing on merit against quality competition, not cowboys. This is exactly what motivates them to put their best foot forward and deliver high-value solutions.

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Run a tight, transparent window

Open the bidding window for three to four weeks for most projects. This is long enough for thoughtful proposals and short enough to maintain momentum. If your project is overly complex, extend this window accordingly.

It is best practice to host a structured Q&A where every bidder sees the same answers at the same time. No side conversations and no back channels. Schedule a single site visit; motivated suppliers want to see the property, electrical infrastructure and roof for themselves, and it makes their pricing sharper.

Here is why this structure pays you back in hard dollars. A developer’s cost of sale can run well over $100,000 per project: marketing costs, months of business development chasing opportunities that mostly go nowhere, “free consultations” and proposal costs. Those sunk costs do not disappear, they get baked into the price of every project that does move forward. Every successful project in this industry carries the weight of multiple failed pursuits. I recall in a past role, when I was a part of a pursuit for a large LNG operations project in Western Australia, we spent >$500,000 on the proposal and lost. As buyers asking people to commit time and resources to proposing, we need to really respect this notion and understand that our approach to procurment has consequences on not only our outcomes, but the entire market.

A curated, well-run process strips that waste out and creates compounding benefits for the whole market. Suppliers get a qualified, data-rich opportunity that matches their expertise, and they price it accordingly. This is a big part of why projects run through a disciplined process consistently come in 20 to 50% lower in price and with better outcomes, than traditional approaches. You are not squeezing suppliers, you are removing the inefficiency they would otherwise have to charge you for.

Evaluate on value, not sticker price

When proposals land, resist the reflex to sort by price.

Use a scorecard built on the criteria you published in the RFP, weighted and applied consistently. Build a risk heat map; equipment, warranties, interconnection assumptions, tax credit compliance, contract terms. Then run a total value analysis, normalizing every bid over the full contract life, including escalators, maintenance, and performance guarantees.

The cheapest option can often hide expensive exclusions. As John Ruskin put it, “the bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”. But if all else is equal, cost is very important. Be wary of any process built like a reverse auction or getting you quotes without this curated analysis - which is common when there is minimal upfront dilligence as there is no other way to compare and contrast. Rewarding the lowest bid in this format is how you create countless change orders, or worse yet, buy an underperforming asset you will live with for decades.

Finish with a best and final offer round for your two or three finalists. Share candid feedback on where each excelled and fell short, and give them one shot to resubmit. Negotiate on lifecycle economics, total cost of ownership, availability guarantees, degradation rates, and O&M response times, not the headline number.

What this looks like in practice

A 120-year-old food distributor ran this exact process for a new cold chain facility in Florida. Tight construction timeline, a 2 MW utility cap, shifting federal tax credit rules, tariff uncertainty, and strict insurance requirements. They compressed the journey from opportunity analysis to signed contract into two quarters, received competitive bids 20% below market benchmarks, and locked in a right-sized 1.8 MW rooftop system projected to save $5 million over its life.

Their director of construction told me the process let them take ownership at every step and make quick, well-informed decisions even while the market changed around them. That is what control feels like.

And the timeline claim is not marketing. Run deliberately, this playbook compresses what used to be six to eighteen-month procurement cycles into four to twelve weeks. Preparation creates speed, and speed matters, because incentive programs run out of money and interconnection queues fill up while committees deliberate.

Done wrong and you end up confused, overwhelmed, bombarded by quotes that you can not compare or contrast, misaligned suppliers, cost decisions vs value outcomes and an investment you lack confidence in and struggle to get internal support for.

The takeaway

Curation beats volume and structure beats instinct. A tight field of the right suppliers, competing on identical information against your specification, is how you buy a twenty-five-year asset that will deliver and exceed your expectations.

Next week, Part 3: the three well-worn paths that feel like progress- the consultant, the open marketplace, and the developer already in your lobby- and why each one quietly costs you control.

The full step-by-step playbook, from supplier vetting through contract and commissioning, is Chapter 8 of Powering Profits.

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Energy is suddenly in the press every day, the Iran conflict, data centers outgrowing the grid, costs increasing, showing up in every tank of gas and utility bill. Most of the coverage is negative rhetoric, but I see the opposite; the opportunities are immense.

The opportunity to take control of your own energy, to minimize costs, increase reliability, and reduce emissions. For those who need more power than the grid can deliver (on-premises compute, fleet electrification, growing heating and cooling loads), onsite energy is how you get it. And for those ready to go further, there is new revenue to be had through grid service opportunities, selling energy to offtakers or back to the grid.

Twenty five years ago, less than 3 percent of businesses had wifi. Today the thought of operating without it is impossible to comprehend. Right now, roughly 3 percent of businesses have onsite energy systems. In the future, we all will, we will not outsource our energy, we will control it.

Which brings me to the point of this series. How you buy these systems will determine how successful you are in this transition.

The industry is suddenly full of advice on how to buy these systems….get more bids, go standardize the formats, negotiate harder.

All fine, and all downstream of the question that actually determines your outcome.

Do you know what you should be buying before you go to market?

Because if you don’t, the market will happily decide for you. And the market’s answer will be optimized for the seller, not for you, and you will become a price taker.

This is not an off-the-shelf purchase

An onsite energy system is not toner, a router or any other commodity purchase. It is not software you can unsubscribe from next quarter. It is physical infrastructure that will sit on your roof or on your property for twenty-five years or more, wired into your operations, your balance sheet, and your risk profile.

The decisions you make in the first few weeks compound for decades. Get them right and energy becomes a P&L lever, a trusted resource, a reliable and controllable input, and even a commodity you can monetize. Get them wrong and you live with the consequences for the life of the asset.

Here is the part most buyers miss, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that soft costs, consulting, engineering, strategy, permitting, contracts, and procurement, can make up 30 to 70 percent of the total cost in commercial solar plus storage projects. Not the panels, not batteries or the construction costs, the process.

Which means the biggest lever you control is not the hardware price. It is how you buy.

What happens when the seller controls the design

We recently analyzed a solar system a customer had already installed. The solar panels were performing better than expected in terms of production, but the system was twice the size it should have been.

The developer had filled the roof with solar to maximize their contract value. The customer was overproducing energy they did not need and could not sell past their net metering limits. Still saving money versus the grid, yes. But they overpaid up front, and the oversizing eroded the project’s NPV by 50 percent.

Nobody lied. Nobody cut corners. The developer did exactly what developers are incentivized to do, deliver a project that aligned with their capabilities and sales targets. That is the quiet cost of letting the market define your requirements. Every “free consultation” is paid for many times over down the road, and oftentimes requires exclusive arrangements to remove all competition.

Developers and EPCs are experts at delivering projects. But their incentives are aligned to the technologies they know best and the commercial models they've built to push. A solar developer will sell you solar, a gas turbine supplier will sell you a gas turbine, what if you needed a battery? When they control the design, you get a system optimized for their delivery model, not your business objectives.

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Buying from a place of control & confidence

The fix is not cynicism about suppliers. The best suppliers do exceptional work, and we need them. The fix is sequencing. You define the “what,” suppliers compete on the “how.”

Before a single supplier sees your project, you should own four things:

1. Your outcomes. Economics, resilience, energy access, sustainability, defined and weighted. Is this about cutting costs/increasing revenue, protecting uptime for critical loads, hitting a sustainability commitment, or all three? Your answers shape everything downstream.

2. Your optimal system. Not a guess, a digital model considering the thousands of variables that influence the right system design, that you can test and scenario plan. Load profiles, tariff structures, roof and land constraints, renewables potential, gas access, outage risks, incentives, costs of equipment, installation, capital, and financial assumptions all need to be incorporated into your technical and financial analysis. Run this real analysis before anyone bids. This used to require months of consulting spend. It no longer does. Our platform pulls roughly 5,000 data points per facility and configures the optimal system automatically, and those estimates have proven accurate to within 10 percent of actual market bids with no data from our customers, with specific facility data, it gets more accurate and often within 3-5%. The point is not the tool, the point is the posture. You should walk into the market already knowing what a good answer looks like.

3. Your data room. Utility bills, load data, as-built drawings, roof condition, electrical infrastructure, and the assumptions behind your own model, organized and complete. Bids are only as good as the data they are built on. Garbage in, garbage out, and the garbage shows up later as change orders.

4. Your money story. Cash, loan, lease, PPA, decided early with your CFO. Each carries different trade-offs in control, balance sheet impact, and risk. If a supplier cannot structure the deal the way your finance team needs it, no headline price will save the project.

Do this work and something interesting happens: suppliers take you seriously! The best developers and EPCs are booked out and triage every opportunity that hits their inbox. A tight, data-rich brief from a buyer who clearly knows what they want goes to the top of the pile and gets their A team. A vague request gets a rushed proposal padded with risk allowances, if it gets a response at all.

Preparation creates speed, organizational buy-in and attracts the best delivery partners, which creates the highest value, certainty, and confidence.

The takeaway

A competitive process without a clear specification is just organized confusion. More bids against a vague brief means more incomparable PDFs, not more leverage.

Control is knowing what you need, what you want, and what a good deal looks like before the market knows your name. Be the price maker!

Everything else in this series builds on that foundation. Next week, Part 2: these are not commodity purchases. How to curate the right suppliers and run a process that creates real competitive tension and lifetime value vs cost-based outcomes, in weeks, not quarters or years.

This series draws on the procurement playbook from my book, Powering Profits. If you want the full framework, it is all in Chapter 8.

But when your client has $100 million in annual utility spend and a 0.5% billing error rate, you’re talking about $500,000 a year that nobody is tracking. Manufacturers not claiming exemptions they’re entitled to or companies on rate structures that haven’t been reviewed in years.

Sagiliti was created to address these gaps and opportunities, and then something interesting happens. I asked DeVynne whether the savings get ring-fenced and reinvested in sustainability or other utility initiatives. He said it’s more complicated than that. What the savings actually creates is trust. When a client sees you find $200,000 in errors they’d been paying, they start listening differently when you recommend an energy project or other solutions. The credibility has a dollar sign on it.

That’s a pattern I see on the VECKTA side too. Companies that arrive having done the unglamorous work of cleaning up their data, sorting out their billing, and knowing what they’re paying, and why, are the companies that move quickly on energy and sustainability-related decisions. The ones that haven’t done that work are the ones where the analysis bogs down movement.

DeVynne’s team used that same data-first approach to drive a 21% reduction in water use intensity at one client’s facilities. They ran a portfolio sweep and identified the two or three sites with the highest variable water spend and deployed a targeted solution there. The technology existed, what was missing was the data to flag that a solution needed to be implemented in that specific area.

I think this is the version of utility analytics that actually works. Grounded in what the data shows, honest about what will pencil out and what won’t, willing to start with billing accuracy before it starts with 2040 commitments.

DeVynne’s full conversation is on Renewable Rides. If you manage a large portfolio and you’ve never had someone audit your utility bills, it’s worth a listen before anything else.

I wrote about our resistance to change in my book, Powering Profits:

“Most of us are wired to prefer consistency and certainty; change can feel hard and scary. Behavioral economics calls this ‘loss aversion.’ It’s the idea that people feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining something of equal value. In practice, losses are about twice as powerful as gains.

In business, that tendency often means we play not to lose instead of playing to win. Trusting a fifty-year-old power line feels safer than investing in onsite energy. Renewing a costly tariff carries no career risk, while piloting a microgrid might. Laying off staff feels more ‘normal’ than cutting costs with an energy system that delivers sustainable savings. A five-year payback looks ‘long’ only because the CFO’s hurdle rate was set for quick inventory turns.”

Standing at the base of a rock face in Zion, I felt that same pull. As a non-climber, this was a chance to embrace change instead of resisting it, to face a real fear, take on a new challenge, and figure it out with peers and scouts watching. But I must admit, I was scared and nervous.

It reminded me of four things I want to carry back into how I lead and push myself personally:

1. Take a breath and calm the mind. Don’t get hung up on the negative consequences; focus on the next move, and you can get going.

2. Don’t brute-force it alone. I could have struggled through on my own, slower and more fatigued. When I listened to the guides about routes, approaches, and moves, the climb became infinitely more enjoyable and successful.

3. Use the people who went before you. Watching others climb first, learning from their line and their mistakes, and using that encouragement to commit made the next move easier.

4. Enjoy the view before the next climb. Celebrate the achievement at the top before you start worrying about what’s next. The amazing feeling of success and the chemical reactions going on, creating a concoction of emotions, is addictive.
   

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The best part of the day was watching my son work through the same fear and rewire his brain in real time. Very proud dad moment.

The parallel to business is direct. Leaders who cling to the fifty-year-old power line, the familiar tariff, the same traditional finance models, the comfortable status quo, are making the same choice I almost made at the base of that rock face: staying still because it feels safer. The energy transition rewards the same instincts that got me up that wall. Breathe, don’t fixate on what could go wrong, lean on people who have done it before, surround yourself with great people, and commit to the next move.

In a world of constant change, these are skills worth practicing on purpose, not just when a Scout troop forces the issue.

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Texas is one of the most closely watched electricity markets in the US right now, and for good reason. It has the fastest-growing demand, the most contested interconnection queue, a deregulated market structure that’s different from almost everywhere else, and a set of dynamics around natural gas, renewables, and data centers that are playing out in real time. For any business with facilities in Texas, or thinking about energy investment decisions anywhere in the country, what happens in ERCOT is worth understanding.

We sat down with Joshua Rhodes, energy researcher, professor, and commissioner at Austin Energy, to get a clear read on where things actually stand.

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The data center queue is a bubble, and the numbers are getting bigger

In 2025, Joshua called the Texas data center interconnection queue a bubble. At the time, there were more than 220 gigawatts of requests, with 70% from data centers. The ERCOT grid’s all-time peak delivery is 85.5 gigawatts. The math didn’t work then, and it works even less now.

The latest figures show 435 gigawatts of requests, 90% of which are from data centers. They want to connect within 5 years. The US electrical grid took roughly a hundred years to build to its current scale. A 5X expansion of the Texas system alone, in 5 years, utilizing global supply chains that are already stretched, isn’t physically achievable.

That said, a lot of real development is happening, bubbles leave froth. What’s changed is that ERCOT is moving to a batch study process and increasing the financial thresholds required to enter the interconnection queue. Companies that were filing the same project in 5 or 6 locations simultaneously, just to get somewhere fast and increase chances of success, will find that harder to do when the entry cost goes up meaningfully. At minimum, it takes out the small/medium-sized developers and concentrates it to the top end of town, good for utility workloads, not great for market dynamics.

For businesses planning around energy access and grid reliability, the message is that timelines for large load interconnection in Texas are getting longer, not shorter, even as the queue grows.

Infrastructure costs are rising, and that pressure isn’t going away

The surge in demand isn’t just straining grid capacity, it’s driving up the cost of the components needed to build out that capacity. Transformers are up roughly 200% from a few years ago, wires are up around 180% and switchgear has doubled or tripled in price. Classic supply and demand: when everyone wants the same infrastructure at the same time, prices go up.

The more consequential part is what happens after the buildout. Joshua’s framing is useful here. When a utility buys infrastructure at peak prices during a demand surge and then the market cools, ratepayers are still paying off the debt on that high-cost equipment. The mortgage doesn’t adjust with the market. Businesses in Texas and other high-growth markets should expect upward pressure on electricity rates as utilities absorb these costs over the next decade.

Renewables have already saved Texans tens of billions of dollars

Joshua has done counterfactual modeling on what Texas electricity costs would look like if the state had never built wind and solar. The answer is in the tens of billions of dollars more. Not as an environmental outcome, as a financial one.

The mechanism is straightforward. In a competitive electricity market like Texas, the price is set by the marginal generator, meaning the most expensive source running at any given moment. When cheap generation like wind and solar are on the system, it drives down the cost of that marginal unit and reduces prices across the board. The more low-cost capacity on the system, the lower the average clearing price.

Renewables also provide something gas can’t: cost certainty. Solar and wind are capital-heavy upfront, but the fuel cost is zero. Gas plants keep buying fuel for 30 years. Nobody can perfectly predict what natural gas costs in 2044. The 2022 energy crisis, where natural gas prices tripled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, made that risk concrete. Texas had enough wind and solar to buffer some of that shock. Markets more dependent on gas didn’t fare as well.

What the oil and gas dynamics actually mean for electricity prices

Texas produces more oil and gas than any other US state. A significant portion of the natural gas available to Texas power plants comes from the Permian Basin as a byproduct of oil drilling, not as a primary target. That creates a counterintuitive dynamic: when oil prices go up, more drillers go to work in the Permian, more associated gas comes up with the oil, and the local supply of gas increases. More supply, lower price — which puts downward pressure on electricity costs.

This relationship may shift as LNG export capacity grows. If enough US gas gets priced against global markets, where European and Asian prices can be 2 to 3 times domestic levels, the domestic price will follow. That’s not fully here yet, but it’s the direction of travel.

What businesses with onsite energy systems should take from this

The long-term argument for owning your energy hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that the grid environment around you is getting more complex and more expensive, not less. Utility rate pressure is real. Grid reliability events, like the 100,000-customer outage in San Diego that Dan mentioned on the episode, are a regular part of operations for any multi-site business.

Joshua’s single most important flag for executives was transmission. The ability to get power from where it’s cleanest and cheapest to where it’s needed requires grid infrastructure that’s currently the hardest and slowest piece to build. Businesses investing in onsite solar and storage will self consume as a primary and then ideally want to be able to sell excess generation back to the grid, not curtail it. That only works if the surrounding infrastructure can absorb it. This is where investment is needed in the infrastructure, digital and physical, to coordinate energy from all forms in an efficient and cost-effective way, creating commercial models that will drive the right outcomes for all energy users.

VECKTA works with companies across manufacturing, logistics, commercial real estate, and other asset-intensive sectors to analyze their onsite energy options and run competitive procurement processes. If you’re trying to understand what the current grid environment means for your facilities in Texas or elsewhere, we’re happy to walk through it.

It was 80 degrees; the sun was blazing; the smell of juniper trees cut through the air; sunglasses on; loving life. Just me, the road, and the kind of quiet that only exists when you’re moving fast through open country. It was a treat to myself to celebrate completing and publishing my book, Powering Profits.

Motorcycling is visceral. You feel the temperature shift as you drop into a canyon. You smell rain before you see it. You sense the weight of the air change before the weather moves in. In a world built around screens and synthetic environments, riding reconnects you with senses most of us have completely forgotten about. And those senses started lighting up!

The air cooled quickly and I caught the smell of moisture on the wind. Ahead, the sky was darkening in a way that didn’t look like a passing cloud. Then my phone, mounted to the dash, started flashing alerts: Critical: SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING. DESTRUCTIVE 80 mph winds. I was in the middle of nowhere on the open road without a bridge or overpass in sight to hide under. Within minutes, wind, lightning, thunder, and then hail hit me.

Let me tell you, riding at 65 mph in an 80mph crosswind while hail is driving into you is a painful and disorienting experience. I was soaked and cold within minutes. The question of whether to stop and wait it out, even while exposed, or keep going and ride through it didn’t have a clear answer.

I trusted my gut, slowed down, tracked the tire lines of a truck ahead to avoid riding on the slippery hail, kept my eyes further down the road than usual, and pressed through. My thinking was simple: two rubber tires moving forward felt safer than standing still, exposed to lightning and open wind for an unknown amount of time. I committed to the direction, adapted the speed and line, and kept going.

I broke through the other side of the storm, pulled into the first gas station, warmed my hands under a hand dryer in the bathroom, ordered a hot chocolate, and sat with it for a moment. I smiled. That was a crazy, dangerous experience. I had a great story to tell, and I hadn’t even reached the dirt yet, which was meant to be the hard part.

The Funny Thing About Building a Business

Within a few days of getting back from the trip, my co-founder, Dan Roberts, shared the image below and I laughed out loud. Building VECKTA has meant navigating COVID, a regional banking crisis, supply chain breakdowns, shifting policy, tariffs, elections, the emergence of AI, capital market cycles, and the ongoing challenge of building a new industry category and solution tailored to businesses and busy leaders.

None of it was in the plan and all of it had to be navigated.

That is the thing about entrepreneurship that nobody fully prepares you for. It is not the difficulty of the planned challenges that test you. You know it is going to be hard to raise capital, find product market fit, build a lasting culture, attract and retain the best talent, and build relationships and trust with individuals with whom you want to partner. The most difficult parts are the storms that appear without warning on what looked like a clear day when setting out.

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The Parallels Are Hard to Ignore

On the bike, I had checked the weather and planned the route. The radar showed something on the edge of my path, but it looked like it would miss me. I made a reasonable call with the information I had, and I still got caught in a difficult, risky situation.

Sound familiar? Every founder and operator reading this has a version of that story. The quarter that looked solid until it didn’t. The partnership that made sense until the terms shifted. The market tailwind turned headwind while you were mid-execution. The incredible hire that turned out to be toxic. You planned, you prepared, and the storm showed up anyway.

The question is never whether the storm will come. It will! The question is what you do when it arrives.

On the bike, I did not freeze (not the cold kind, as I did, haha, the decision-making kind), and I did not turn back. I slowed down, extended my sight line, found the safest available line, and kept moving. It is a very unique aspect of riding that I have always loved: when the bike gets squirrelly in gravel, sand, or other loose surface, give it more throttle, and it provides forward momentum and stability. Freak out, back off the throttle, and the nose of the bike dives and digs in, and before you know it, you are down, with little warning. Often this is the same in business, not always, and this is where the experience comes into play.

What Actually Gets You Through

Looking back on difficult chapters at VECKTA or in life, a few things stand out as the real differentiators. Not the strategy deck, not the perfect hire and certainly not the lucky timing. The things that actually mattered were:

• Knowing your destination. You do not navigate a storm well if you are unsure where you are going. Having a clear view of what we are building and why it matters has kept us on track when conditions around us were chaotic.

• Trusting your instincts, backed by real data. On the bike, I made a judgment call based on what I could feel, smell, and see, plus what the data on my phone was telling me. That combination matters as gut instinct without data can be reckless, and often data without instinct is paralysis. Together, they give you the confidence to act.

• Surrounding yourself with the right people. Riders talk about the importance of who you ride with, and for the next few days, I had the privilege of meeting and riding with some great, experienced people. In a storm or on a trail in tough conditions, it matters enormously whether the person ahead of you is a steady hand or nervous and panicking. Are they loose and controlled, or are they tight, anxious, and erratic? The same is true in business. The advisors, partners, investors, and customers who share your vision, values, and commitment to outcomes are not just a nice-to-have; they are the differentiator that gets you through.

• Committing to the decision. The worst thing you can do in a crosswind is hesitate. You lean in, hold your line, and adapt continuously. Half-committed is more dangerous than full-committed to the wrong line. In business, teams can survive bold, wrong decisions far better than they survive sustained indecision.

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The Rest of the Trip

I made it to camp, pitched my tent, got into dry clothes, ate a warm meal, and had a cold beer. I sat there reflecting on a day that had gone sideways before I even reached the route I had planned. And I felt good! It was not relief, it was awesome! That distinction matters.

The next three days delivered everything the trip was supposed to be: dirt roads, mountain passes, hot springs, caves, great people, good food, a few adrenaline spikes, and memories I will carry for a long time. None of it would have felt as earned without the storm.

That is the thing about the hard days: when you come out the other side, the camp, the beer, the view, all of it lands differently. We need to enjoy all of these moments.

The Bigger Truth

I would not trade building VECKTA for any other role. Not because it is easy, it is not. But because the combination of purpose, challenge, people, and impact is unlike anything else I have found or experienced.

The distributed energy transition is inevitable. The schedule, the speed, the cost, the detours, those are still being written. My team and I do not control all of it. But we control how we prepare, how we respond, and whether we keep moving when conditions get ugly. It is our mission to unlock, enable and orchestrate our onsite energy future for reliable, affordable, sustainable and thriving outcomes at scale.

That is enough, more than enough!

Pick your destination (and this may change), embrace the journey, surround yourself with people you trust and respect, and when the hail hits…. lean in, pick your line, and ride through it with confidence and a smile!

Power Moves

A few of my takeaways that you may enjoy sitting with and reflecting on:

1. Plan, but build your resilience for when the plan breaks. The storm was not meant to be in my path, but I still got caught in it. Great operators plan well and adapt fast. Both matter.

2. Commit to your direction, adapt your tactics. The destination did not change when the weather hit. The speed and the line did. Know the difference between strategy and tactics, and be ruthless about which one you are changing.

3. Surround yourself with people who share your values and your nerve. When things get hard, the quality of your network becomes the quality of your outcomes. Invest in those relationships before you need them.

4. Celebrate coming through the storm. The hot chocolate at the gas station mattered, and the beer at camp mattered. Build in the moments that acknowledge what you came through. As individuals and teams, we need those moments too.

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If this resonated, the full framework for turning business adversity into strategic advantage is in Powering Profits, available now on Amazon. And if you want to see how we are applying these principles in real time to the energy decisions facing businesses today, you know where to find us at VECKTA.

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I came away from our conversation thinking about one number he mentioned: 40%. That’s roughly how much US utility rates have risen over the last five years. I often cite a 24% figure, which is just the increase in commercial rates. But 40% is accurate if you consider industrial and residential rate.

Greg’s prompt to business leaders was simple: look at your energy bill, compare it to what you were paying in 2021, and ask yourself what the next five years probably look like. He wasn’t dramatic about it by predicting a collapse or promising a miracle. He pointed at the data and asked what the reasonable forecast is.

The pressures are visible. Data centers are pulling on the grid faster than new generation can come online. Geopolitics is driving up fuel costs. Transmission infrastructure is aging. None of those forces are going away. If the next five years look anything like the last five, a lot of CFOs will be looking at an operating cost line that has quietly doubled while they were focused on other things.

That’s the moment I think we’re in.

The business leaders I speak with who have deployed onsite solar and storage aren’t leading with sustainability. They’re talking about rate stability and predictability, about resilience when the grid goes sideways, about what a solar-plus-storage system looks like on a balance sheet. It’s starting to function like a long-dated hedge against utility risk. The sustainability story hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been joined by a financial one that’s a lot harder to ignore.

Greg made a point about C&I solar that I think is still underappreciated. The cheapest solar in the world is generally massive, simple, utility-scale projects in high-resource locations. The most expensive is usually small, complicated rooftop solar, especially residential. Commercial and industrial sits in a very interesting middle ground. It is not as cheap as utility-scale, but larger C&I projects are much closer to that end of the cost curve than most people realize, and critically, they are often competing against retail electricity rates, not wholesale power prices.

That changes the math as you get some of the scale benefits of bigger solar, while offsetting a much higher avoided cost of energy. That is a materially better economic position than many people appreciate, and then look at the physical asset base; warehouses, manufacturing plants, distribution centers, cold storage, retail boxes, schools and municipal buildings - huge amounts of flat, underutilized roof space, much of it doing very little beyond holding HVAC equipment.

The opportunity is not theoretical, it is sitting above our heads.

He also noted something that matches what we see every day: most solar installers in the U.S. don’t compete with each other very hard. The soft cost side of a project, which is now roughly three-quarters of total project cost, is where the real compression opportunity lives. That’s our entire thesis at VECKTA. Australia has demonstrated it’s possible; about a third of homes there have solar, install costs are a fraction of U.S. levels, and single-day installations are routine. There’s no physical reason the U.S. can’t move in that direction. The barrier is process, churn and incentive structure, which is solvable.

On the question around the ITC changes and whether that kills the market, Greg’s read was clear and consistent with what we see. There will be a rush of projects before any deadline, then a lull, then recovery. That’s exactly what happened with wind in the early 2000s, when production tax credits kept expiring and getting reauthorized. The underlying economics of solar and storage continue to improve regardless of policy. Utility rates continue to climb and those two trends are on a collision course, and policy changes the timing, not the direction.

His closing thought was straightforward: pull up your energy bill, look at what you were paying five years ago. Then think about what the grid is being asked to carry over the next five. Somewhere between those two data points, the business case for onsite energy stops being a projection and becomes the obvious answer. For a lot of commercial and industrial properties, that crossover is already here.

If you want to go deeper on the numbers, the history, and what Greg sees coming, listen to the full conversation on the VECKTA podcast.

Chapter 1 sets up the central argument. The grid that powered the last century is straining under a set of pressures it was never designed to handle: AI and data center demand, electrification, aging infrastructure and geopolitical supply chains. And right alongside that deteriorating grid, a new one is forming. Solar costs have dropped to dollars per watt. Battery storage holds twice the energy at a fraction of the cost from a decade ago. EaaS models have removed the capital barrier for companies that want the benefits without the balance sheet exposure. The paybacks that used to run 10 years are now running 1 to 4.

But the bigger shift isn’t technical. It’s how you think about energy as an asset class.

For over a century, energy has been an expense, a utility line item you managed down. That’s changing. Companies that move now aren’t just cutting costs. They’re generating new revenue streams from roof leases, grid services, and power sold to tenants. They’re protecting NOI and driving up property values. They’re building resilience that keeps operations running when the grid doesn’t. And increasingly, they’re winning contracts and retaining tenants and employees because of it.

Chapter 6 is where the financial conversation lives. It gets into the financial mechanics in plain terms: how onsite energy actually reduces a utility bill across kilowatt-hours, demand charges, time-of-use arbitrage, and export credits. It walks through the core metrics, CAPEX, OPEX, ROI, IRR, payback, NPV, and how to frame them for a capital committee. It covers every financing model from cash purchase to EaaS to PACE to property leasing, with real case studies showing the numbers. And it goes beyond the balance sheet into the strategic upsides that don’t show up cleanly in a spreadsheet but are increasingly decisive in boardrooms: operational continuity, financing advantages, regulatory protection, tenant retention, and brand equity.

I’d genuinely love to hear what resonates and what questions they raise. That’s the whole point of publishing this here first.

If you’d like to buy the book, it’s available on Amazon in kindle and paperback here.

I also recorded a Renewable Rides episode with Dan where we go deep on the book. If you’d rather listen before you read, start here.

Honestly, I am glad I took my time writing it. The energy market has been impacted by major macro shifts, which will continue to compound, and VECKTA’s reach with customers, market and our technology capabilities has been growing. As a result, I have learned so much that the version landing next week is sharper, more honest, and far more useful than anything I would have finished in 2024.

Why I Wrote Powering Profits

This book was not written for those in the energy industry or for energy experts, who like any industry group, often form an echo chamber. It was written for board members, executives, operators, enabling functions, and leaders on the front line running companies in the most dynamic environment we’ve ever seen. The pressures are real, the constraints are tightening and the landscape shifts every quarter, every week and sometimes every day!

But underneath all of that noise, one trend is no longer up for debate: the energy transition is here, and it is accelerating. The grid infrastructure is aging out, the utility commercial model is challenged and our economy of the future cannot run on the infrastructure of the last century.

One of the greatest challenges is that most of us have very little energy acumen. We never needed it; energy showed up when we flipped a switch, at a price that felt acceptable, and we got on with running our businesses. Reliability and sustainability were assumptions, not strategies.

We’re now facing a different reality.

Energy is now between 5% and 40% of operating costs for most companies, and without it, the business literally does not exist. Energy is too important to completely outsource. We have to take the steering wheel, set the course, and bring our teams and stakeholders along for the ride.

What the Book Covers

I broke the book into 3 sections that map to our core values at VECKTA, because the values are not posters on a wall; they are how you actually get this done.

1. Challenging Limits: Why the old grid model is breaking, why the resistance is louder than ever, and how to turn that inertia into momentum. This section frames the why and gives you the language to bring others along.

2. Adapting Purposefully: The practical playbook. This section covers why onsite energy is the smart move now, the 5-step roadmap from blank page to bankable plan, and the dollars and sense of making the financials work (this is the section finance leaders will care about).

3. Empowering Co-Creation: Deploying onsite energy is a team sport. This is about how to buy, run, and optimize the right system, with the right partners and in a way that compounds value across the portfolio.

My commitment to you is that it is all written in plain English. No jargon, no academic theory, just real examples, real case studies, real data, and a roadmap you can actually use.

Why This Book is Personal

For those of you who have followed my background (longer version here), this is a personal mission as much as a professional one. I have spent time in war zones, on contaminated oil and gas sites, developing mega infrastructure projects, sitting in boardrooms and have seen what energy can provide and take from businesses and society. The thread through all of it is the same: energy is the input that shapes how every other system in our world works.

If we get this right, we unlock abundant, clean, affordable, and reliable power. We win as companies, as economies, and as communities. Not just today, but for decades to come. If we get it wrong, the cost shows up in every line of the P&L, in every outage, in every margin compression, in every missed opportunity, and most importantly in the well-being of our people and our planet.

The new energy paradigm is not optional. It is here, and it is not going away. The companies that thrive will be the ones that lean in, take control, and act. It will not all go to plan, because business never does, but with the right knowledge, plan, processes, network, and buy-in, the outcomes will be positive even when they are not perfect.

The opportunities are immense. The risks of inaction are too significant to ignore.

What’s Next

Powering Profits is available on Amazon, May 19. You can find more information, including a download laying out the 5-step planning process here. I will be sharing an excerpt in next week’s newsletter.

I would love your questions, feedback, and pushback as you read through it. The whole point is to make this real for you, so the more we talk, learn and improve, the better we are.

Massive thanks to all of you who follow this newsletter, and to all who have made this possible. I appreciate your ongoing support, collaboration, partnership and friendship!

Enjoy,

Gareth

JLL employs about 1,000 sustainability and energy experts in 80 countries. And the inbound demand for their services is accelerating. Five years ago, if you were a real estate asset manager, energy was an expense line or a tenant expense, and did not feature in the day-to-day strategy. This has changed as the grid has become more stressed, reserve margins are being eroded and heading below target margins and rising costs. Today, clients are showing up at JLL asking what reliability risk looks like across their portfolio, what their exposure to rate volatility is, and what they can do about it without putting the operating business on hold or finding themselves holding stranded assets. Those conversations did not exist at that scale a few years ago.

This example that Brian laid out on asset value proves the point. A behind-the-meter solar and storage system at a 500,000-square-foot industrial facility that cuts the utility bill by $400,000 a year translates to $6–$7 million in added property value at a typical cap rate. That is not a sustainability pitch, that is a capital allocation pitch. It is also a much easier conversation to have with a CFO than any of us were having a decade ago.

The piece that does not get enough airtime is the tenant and landlord alignment. In saturated industrial and logistics markets, tenants can leave. Reliable, lower-cost, and lower-emissions energy is now part of the retention story. We are seeing more landlords realize that sharing value with their tenants, through onsite generation they control, is a way to lock in longer leases, protect NOI, and sustain/grow asset values. That is the opposite of the split-incentive story we used to tell ourselves and that held the market back.

Today, we announced a formal collaboration with JLL. The reason is simple: the market needs more integrated solutions. They have client partnerships, deep knowledge of their clients' strategies and assets, and an advisory team to support them in execution. We have the platform that turns disparate data and sprawling real estate portfolios into an intelligence-enabled strategy, a central source of truth to ensure cross-functional stakeholder alignment and a repeatable process to deploy energy systems, whether for a single site or a global portfolio.

Our marketplace then gets projects deployed faster with better economics and the right, pre-vetted partners. Those attributes remove soft costs from projects, inspire confidence to act and deliver profitable outcomes. Both of our organizations are technology agnostic and committed to delivering the best outcomes for our customers. The combined capabilities are what the real estate market has been asking for.

What I tell business leaders right now is what Brian said on the podcast. Don’t panic, and react, and don’t chase single projects. Strategically analyze the portfolio-wide opportunity, and the benefits will very pleasantly surprise you, and tend to be far more actionable than you would expect.

Worth a watch if reliability or energy costs are anywhere in your strategy.

He laughed, not a funny laugh, the tired and nervous kind.

He couldn’t give one answer. He told me about tariffs flipping every other week, steel increasing in price, fuel is up, energy is up, insurance is up and wages are up. His customers are pushing out decisions, and the other half want discounts. The variability in input costs is stressful. It felt to him like he was running a weather station instead of a business.

While I am not surprised, it did hit me because he is not alone. His feelings are becoming the norm.

We are living through a sustained period of business uncertainty. It’s not a feeling, it’s a fact. And in a world where every input seems to move, there is one input business leaders can take off the list entirely.

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The Data Tells the Story

The Q1 2026 Vistage CEO Confidence Index just dropped. It slid to 87.2 from a peak of 100.8 at the end of 2024, breaking a three-quarter run of improving sentiment. The cause is not subtle: CEOs overwhelmingly identified uncertainty, economic, policy, and geopolitical issues as their number one challenge.

A few numbers from the 1,302 CEOs surveyed that stood out:

• 45% are raising prices in the next 3 months, typically 4 to 6%, just to defend margin

• 47% are still absorbing tariff impacts with unpredictable cost structures

• 65% still expect revenue growth, but that’s down from 69% a quarter ago

• 51% expect profits to improve, but 17% expect them to get worse

• Future economy expectations fell for the first time in five quarters

The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, developed by researchers including economists at Stanford and Northwestern, shows policy uncertainty at extremely elevated levels. The U.S. trade policy uncertainty measure hit record highs in early 2025, more than doubling in March and rising well above prior peaks. U.S. and global policy uncertainty are also running at historically elevated levels.

This is not noise. It is the operating environment, and the Vistage report captures the downstream consequence in one sentence: “In the absence of predictability, planning beyond tactical reactions becomes challenging.”

That is a brutal line for a CEO to swallow. Our job is to plan, to deploy capital against conviction and to build.

When every variable moves at once, the risk is that we stop building, react, and go on the defensive, while others capitalize!

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What Is Actually Moving

Let’s be specific about what leaders are trying to manage.

• Fuel. Oil is expected to trade in the upper $90s per barrel through Q2 2026, according to ITR Economics, driven largely by the Strait of Hormuz situation. 20% to 30% of global seaborne oil and 20% of global LNG pass through a 21 mile wide chokepoint. Freight rates in the region have already spiked over 150%.

• Energy. Commercial electricity rates in the US are up 23% in the last four years. Industrial rates are up 30%. In California, the UK, and France, over 70%. Electricity tariff growth has accelerated 7x over the last 5 years compared to the 5 years prior.

• Inputs. Steel prices are up roughly 1,150% to 1,200% since 1960, based on BLS producer price index data. Fertilizers, metals, chemicals, all sitting on volatile floors. ITR projects Q4 2026 inflation will re-accelerate to 3%.

• Labor. Wages are up ~4% across both blue- and white-collar workers. Talent availability is shifting weekly.

• Technology. AI is restructuring cost bases, job functions, and competitive moats in real time.

• Policy. Policy remains volatile. Tariffs come, tariffs go, and new ones can come back under different authorities. But the Supreme Court has already struck down the broad IEEPA tariffs, and businesses are now beginning to file for refunds. The loser is largely the consumer, who paid the elevated prices and gets no refund.

• Geopolitics. A new conflict in Iran reshaped Q1 and nobody modeled that in their 2026 plans. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is what I feel is top of the current list, and the list is not going to get shorter.

So the question stops being “how do I eliminate uncertainty?” That answer does not exist. The question becomes “where can I remove volatility from my business, permanently, and redeploy that mental and financial capital somewhere I actually have to think?”

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The One Thing You Can Control

I continue to be surprised by how misunderstood energy is by executive teams everywhere. Energy is one of the few major business inputs where you can become your own supplier. You cannot produce your own steel, you cannot drill your own oil, refine your own fertilizer or manufacture your own chips. But, you can generate, store, and manage your own electricity, onsite, on your roof, on your land, behind your meter, with decades of price visibility and predictability.

Think about what that actually delivers:

• Price certainty for 25-30 years. A fixed cost of energy, modeled and known, not at the mercy of a utility rate case, a geopolitical event, or a policy reversal.

• Insulation from fuel volatility. Solar does not care about the Strait of Hormuz and batteries do not care about a pipeline attack. Your operating costs stop correlating with cable news.

• Freedom from failing infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded the US energy grid a D+ in 2025, down from C- in 2020. The average US transformer is over 40 years old, past its 25-year life expectancy. 92% of service disruptions happen in the distribution system and power outages are up 64% in the last decade. You are currently betting your business continuity on infrastructure that, if it were a kid’s report card, would get them grounded.

• Resilience that pays. One avoided outage often covers the entire investment. When the Texas grid failed in 2021, Samsung lost $270M from one plant shutting down. H-E-B stayed open because it had treated energy as mission-critical infrastructure, not a line item.

• Real economics, today. Our customers are seeing energy cost savings vs relying only on grid power ranging anywhere from 10-70%+ compared. They can source these outcomes 25-45% cheaper with VECKTA, vs being sold to by a developer or relying on in-house analysis or traditional procurement. The fastest transaction on our platform closed in 7 weeks, not the 9-18 months this industry used to require. Billion-dollar lifetime savings are not hypothetical across a portfolio of projects. Below is a recent analysis completed, by no means the best project i have seen but this is a failry standard outcome - $51M energy cost savings over the life of the asset, 5 year payback, 15% IRR. Great economics, predictable outcomes!

In a world where your executive peers are raising prices 4% to 6% just to hold margin, laying off their workforce to manage costs and losing talent by the troves, and waiting for the utility to return their call and explain the last rate increase….imagine structurally removing upto 70%+ of one of your top three operating expenses, permanently. Even if you just lock in your costs today, you will be winning.

That is competitiveness and a forward-looking, winning strategy!

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The Absurdity of the Status Quo

Step back for a second and look at the world we actually live in.

Our cars can drive themselves, AI can draft code for us, we carry 10 million songs and the sum of human knowledge in our pocket, our headphones cancel out the noise of the jet we are sitting on, our watches measure our sleep, our stress, our heart rhythm, 50-60 satellites are launched to space every week and we can get wifi anywhere in the world through starlink.

And we are still running the most strategically important input to our businesses through copper wire, wooden poles, and transformers that were installed before the iPhone existed. Where else in your business would you rely on technology that is over 30 years old, and in some cases 100 years old?! Often, we don’t use anything that is more than 5 years old.

We are buying energy the same way our grandparents did, from a monopolistic business model and at rates we cannot negotiate. Our power is delivered over infrastructure we know is failing or, at best, is constrained, priced based on fuel we do not control, routed through chokepoints we cannot defend, and regulated by policy that changes with the news cycle.

And then we are surprised when our costs go up and our reliability goes down.

We would not accept this level of dysfunction in any other part of our operation. We certainly would not accept it from a vendor. Yet for most businesses, the grid and our utility models are the largest, least competitive, least accountable vendor on the books.

Less than 5% of businesses had wifi 25 years ago, now they all do. We will see the same with onsite energy, 3% of businesses have it today, roll forward 25 years and if you don’t, you do not exist. Onsite energy is not a hedge. It is moving from passive consumer to active producer. This is not a strategy to replace utility power with onsite completely and cut the wire, this is about controlling as much of your own supply as is economically viable and based on your constraints, and then using grid power when it is affordable, reliable and clean. It is treating the most critical input to your operation the way you treat every other strategic asset: planned, measured, optimized, and owned.

Power Moves

If you are an executive, board member and business leader reading this, here is the practical call to action:

1. Baseline your exposure. Assess what rate increases and outages have cost you over the last few years. Most leaders are shocked, and ignorance here is expensive.

2. Model the alternative. Run the actual numbers for deploying onsite generation and storage vs grid only power, not generic benchmarks. Site-specific analysis with today’s tariffs, incentives, and equipment pricing. The answer will not be “no” for all of them. For many, it will be a clear yes with a 2 to 5 year payback.

3. Treat it as strategy, not a project. The companies winning here are not doing one-off installs. They are building a repeatable, portfolio-level program. Where possible, pilot, socialize the wins, ring-fence the savings, reinvest, compound and scale.

4. Start this quarter, not next year. The CEOs who are delaying capital decisions until “clarity returns” are the ones who will lose. Clarity is not coming and control is what you build in its absence.

You cannot control tariffs, you cannot control the Fed, you cannot control the next truth-social-post or the next chokepoint crisis. You can control whether your business will have to absorb annual energy bill escalations or have complete control of your destiny.

Pick the one you can actually influence.

At this point, the VECKTA team has spoken to many of the largest companies in the world, either as customers or prospective customers, about their onsite energy projects and strategies to scale. And broadly speaking, these organizations task one person, who also has many other initiatives on their plate, to plan and execute these projects.

They are faced with having to justify the project and fight for the capital (or approval or a specific capital structure) to a varied group of decision-makers and stakeholders, including IT, legal, operations, facilities, finance, and executives. These groups have different risk attitudes, concerns, and expertise to bring to the table.

These people are all important and necessary to the strategy. But how do they break the corporate permafrost and execute?

In our latest discussion for our podcast Renewable Rides, we talk through this big issue, along with another sticking point to getting projects over the finish line: how much work is a solar or storage project actually going to be?

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It is a reasonable thing to ask. Energy systems are not something most companies have managed before. The instinct is that onsite energy ownership equals complexity, which equals headcount, expenses and resources. That assumption is almost always wrong, when done right, and it is doing real damage to projects that should be moving forward.

Here is what the data from our customer base actually shows. Once a solar or battery storage system is commissioned and running, the operational lift on the site owner is minimal. For commercial solar PV, annual O&M is often budgeted at roughly $6 to $16 per kW per year (0.5-0.6% of capital costs annually), based on our marketplace data, with NREL benchmarking around $19/kW-year (or about 0.8% to 1.0% of capital cost annually). Battery systems are typically higher, often several percent of capex per year, depending on whether augmentation and performance maintenance are included. For many commercial-scale systems, that still translates to only a few thousand dollars per year for PV, though PV-plus-storage systems will be higher.

The comparison we keep using with customers is HVAC systems. Nobody asks whether their team needs to become HVAC engineers to manage a new unit. They hire a service firm. The same logic applies here. The technology is mature, the service infrastructure exists, and the asset generates value for decades with very little internal management. It requires even less oversight if an energy-as-a-service contract is signed and the developer is responsible for the asset.

The actual work, the part that requires real organizational attention, is on the front end. Choosing which sites to develop, configuring a solution that delivers the desired objectives, selecting a financing structure that fits the company’s balance sheet preferences, and aligning the internal stakeholders who all have a legitimate claim on the decision. That is where I see teams struggle because they do not have a repeatable process for it.

What happens without a process is predictable. Vendors start knocking. Proposals come in that are not comparable to each other. Business cases get rebuilt three times because finance had a question that was not addressed in the first round. A sustainability leader finds out, six months in, that a key design decision was made without their input. The project limps forward or stalls entirely, and nobody can quite explain why.

We built this process from the ground up, informed by years of project delivery, hard lessons learned, and a clear understanding of what it takes to drive coordination, alignment, and repeatable execution at scale. The result is a system that gives every stakeholder actionable intelligence, not more noise.

Instead of wasting months or years in analysis, generating static spreadsheets that distort the real business opportunity, and redesigning the process for every new project, this approach compresses the path from idea to execution. The fastest we have seen a Fortune 500 company go from a blank slate to strategy, project design, business case, internal buy-in, market engagement, RFP assessment, negotiation, and contracting is eight weeks at a cost of less than $300/site. That is extraordinary. In most cases, the same journey would take six to eighteen months and costs tens of thousands-hundreds of dollars per site! Thereafter, utilize the tools and technologies to monitor the asset, reunderwrite it and continuosly optimize it to deliver maximum value and returns on investment.

And so…. “how much work is this for my team and I?”, It depends on how you approach it. You can either fumble through it and absorb a lot of resources, time and costs, or you can maximize best practices and this becomes a very scalable, low-cost, low-risk, low-level-of-effort initiative that delivers decades of profits and busienss returns that can not be realized anywhere else in your organization.

The full conversation on this topic, including what governance setup looks like in practice and how to sequence the internal steps, is in the latest episode of Renewable Rides. Worth a listen if you are managing this question inside your organization.

Tools like Coupa and SAP are great for issuing a purchase order, but what about everything else? The analysis, the scoping, the supplier qualification, the bid management, the negotiation? The gap between where B2B buying is and where it needs to be is enormous.

I came across a recent piece from PeakSpan Capital on the state of B2B ecommerce that captured this well. It resonated because it goes to the core of why we built VECKTA and I wanted to share my perspectives. B2B commerce is underserved. The procurement of complex infrastructure is practically untouched. And as a result, businesses have historically underinvested or worse yet, bad investments.

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B2B Commerce Is Not One Thing

PeakSpan makes a critical distinction that most people miss. B2B transactions are fundamentally different from B2C:

• Custom pricing

• Multiple stakeholders

• Negotiated terms

• Fragmented suppliers

• High-touch relationships

• Longer sales cycles

• Complex product information

• Regional logistics

Sound familiar? That is every onsite energy project or large-scale infrastructure project I have ever worked on. And while this may sound overwhelming to many, this complexity is the opportunity, it is the blue ocean. We are proving every day that this is the future.

Here is where it gets interesting. Most B2B e-commerce innovation has so far focused on digitizing the buying of products, things like industrial supplies, auto parts, building materials, and food distribution. Important work, and the growth is real. Shopify’s B2B GMV grew over 145% year over year. The market is waking up.

Energy infrastructure, though, is a different beast entirely. We are not talking about buying products off a digital shelf. We are talking about technical, high-ticket price capital investments that are bespoke to every single facility. Generating and storing electricity locally, when configured correctly, can deliver immense value for decades, versus relying exclusively on the grid; cost savings and cost hedging, energy reliability, sustainable operations and brand building to name but a few benefits. That opportunity exists for a cold storage warehouse in New Jersey, a data centre in Texas and a retail location in Illinois alike, dependent on their investment and risk profiles. But the path to unlocking the opportunity looks completely different for each and a cookie-cutter approach does not just leave value on the table, it regularly delivers net-negative outcomes.

This is why a standard B2B e-commerce approach, even a good one, falls short for energy infrastructure and any “systems based” purchase for that matter. You cannot just digitize the catalog, plug in a payment gateway, and call it done.

You need a curated process.

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Simplifying Complexity

At VECKTA, we have spent years building the model for how businesses should buy onsite energy systems. Not a one-click checkout. Not a race-to-the-bottom reverse auction. And definitley not a solution that bombards buyers with dozens of proposals that are impossible to compare, contrast or award. These exist and they do not deliver confidence, value, scalability, or action. What we have built is a curated B2B procurement process that puts the buyer in a position of strength, builds trust across the ecosystem, and delivers lifelong value.

Here is what that actually means.

• Intelligence before engagement. Before a single supplier sees a project, our buyer-focused platform, has already analyzed the opportunity using 5,000+ data points per site. Customer-specific utility tariffs, consumption patterns, incentives, equipment costs, financing structures, space constraints, renewables potential, outage risks, and more. Our customers have compared all viable commercial and technical options and selected their optimal solution, before they ever approach the market. This is one of the most important shifts in the buying process: give our customers, the data, intelligence, and internal alignment they need, then enable them to tell suppliers what they need, rather than buying what the market offers them.

• Curated, not open. Our marketplace has 4,000+ suppliers in our global network, but we do not just open the floodgates and let anyone quote on an opportunity. Suppliers are prequalified and vetted. Today, projects are pre-configured based on technology, geography, project size, financing needs and contracting terms. Suppliers identify projects they are qualified to pursue and best suited to deliver. With growing Platform intelligence, market successes, lessons learned and supplier performance feedback this matching and quoting process continually improves.
  Suppliers compete on a level playing field with well-defined scopes and clear evaluation criteria. They love this because buyers are prepared, scopes are tight, and they can compete on value rather than price alone or playing procurement games (providing a laundry list of exclusions, specifying the cheapest equipment, not providing warranties, selling the A-team and delivering with unknown subcontractors, positioning for change orders, and more). They also get access to high-quality, de-risked opportunities with no wasted sales, marketing, or origination costs. All of this drives market efficiencies, cost savings, and profitable outcomes for all.

• Structured competition with human relationships. This is where most marketplace models get it wrong. They strip out the human element in pursuit of complete automation and end up commoditizing everyone involved. The best outcomes come from facilitating value-aligned partnerships. Structured data rooms with NDA gateways and immutable audit logs protect confidential information. But within that structure, suppliers can convey their unique value through our proposal, Q&A, site visit, and negotiation process, and buyers can build the personal relationships required for a 25-plus year infrastructure partnership. To date, we have now automated over 85% of the process, but the last 15% is where the human touch is critical to deals getting done.

• Procurement expertise embedded in the platform. VECKTA’s procurement expertise, best practices, and lessons learned are built into every step of the technology-enabled process, with our SMEs supporting buyers from analytics, bid evaluation through negotiation and final contracting. This is not a bolt-on consulting engagement, it is infrastructure that scales.

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What the B2B E-commerce Wave Gets Right, and Where Energy Needs to Go Further

PeakSpan’s predictions for B2B ecommerce are compelling, and several map directly to what we have built:

• Specialist B2B commerce solutions will emerge. Exactly right. Generic horizontal platforms that work for commoditized supplies do not work for energy, or any technical, infrastructure. The complexity of the transaction, the regulatory landscape, the multi-decade asset life, the financing structures all demand purpose-built vertical solutions. We are seeing that getting the processes and infrastructure right can be transferrable and our Platform is now being used by our customers to source roof replacements, energy efficiency solutions and more.

• Personalization is non-negotiable. In B2B energy, personalization is not a nice-to-have feature; it is the foundation. Every system needs to be tailored to the specific facility, its consumption profile, its utility tariff, its business objectives. When you commoditize the solution, you leave significant value on the table.

• Compliance and security matter more. Energy procurement involves sensitive financial data, operational information, and long-term contractual commitments. Our platform’s structured data rooms, NDA gateways, and audit trails are not extras. They are table stakes for enterprise buyers.

• Contracts will embed. PeakSpan predicts that B2B contracts will be fully digitized and live in harmony with payment terms, billing platforms, and ERPs. In energy, this is critical. PPAs, leases, service agreements, warranties, performance guarantees, all of these need to flow through a single system of record. This is exactly where the long-life asset management and monetization layer of our platform comes in, capturing value across 25-plus years of infrastructure ownership.
  I am a firm believer in making it as effcient and easy to contract as possible and mitigating the legal redlines and back and forth that delays/kills deals. We need terms that create value, protection and the necessary provisions for all parties. We are working actively with all sides of our marketplace to create standardized contracting term. We’re not pursuing a one-size-fits-all contract. What we’re building is a market-informed baseline learned from real deployments, with modular risk sections where buyers can adjust what truly matters to them. But, the further away from the baseline which is endorsed and priced by suppliers, the price may vary. Combine this with qualified and tailored financing sources and big barriers to contracting are removed. This will all move to smart contracting mechanisms.

• AI will accelerate everything. We agree. Our AI-enabled analytics and marketplace already automate portfolio-wide assessments, system configurations, scenario planning, marketplace orchestration, and supplier/quote analysis. But this is important: AI enhances the curated process, it does not replace it. You cannot automate away every aspect of decision-making for transactions of this complexity and consequence. Technology scales the intelligence. The curated marketplace ensures the outcomes.

The Bigger Picture

The B2B e-commerce revolution is real. The tools and platforms helping businesses buy from each other more efficiently are long overdue. But infrastructure procurement, particularly energy infrastructure, demands something different:

• It demands intelligence before action

• Curated competition, not open chaos

• Human relationships within structured processes

• A platform that understands this is not a one-time transaction. It is the beginning of a multi-decade value curve, where assets will benefit from active montoring and maintainence, upgrades and expansions to maximize their value. And for many customers, one transaction is just the first of many, and once they trust and get comfortable with the process the scopes expand.

That is the marketplace we have built at VECKTA, and we are just getting started. Stay tuned as the way our Platform, this market and B2B transactions scale is going to be super exciting.

Power Moves

Business Leaders - if you are thinking about onsite energy, start here:

1. Know before you go. Do not approach suppliers without understanding your opportunity and what’s best for you first. The difference between a well-informed buyer and one flying blind is millions of dollars and years of value over the life of the asset.

2. Demand curation, not commoditization. The cheapest bid is rarely the best outcome. Structure your procurement to enable suppliers to compete on value, not just price.

3. Think in decades, not deals. Onsite energy is not a purchase. It is an infrastructure investment with a 25-plus year value curve. Your procurement process should reflect that.

Investors - look past your traditional metrics. This is the next generation of business operations and marketplace infrastructure, and it will not look or feel like what you have invested in before. That is a great thing, you cannot AI this away. The B2B ecommerce wave is here and it is building. Energy infrastructure needs its own playbook, and this is where we have started, but it is not where we will finish. Our approach is transferable to all “complex investments” and VECKTA will unlock B2B e-commerce at scale.

Customers, Suppliers, Partners - Our mission is to simplify and modernize how companies invest. At the core of this is trusted, repeatable infrastructure that scales, especially for complex, bespoke purchases.

When buyers operate in an informed, confident, and trusted way, it unlocks more great projects, streamlines the process, and gives suppliers access to high-quality opportunities worth their time and effort. Great suppliers win work they are qualified for. More great projects get built. Companies get the outcomes they need. The whole market grows together. Our Platform captures data and streamlines every step of the way to improve the intelligence, processes and outcomes for all. The flywheel turns.

Cocreating win-win outcomes for everyone is the only way this works at scale, and it is exactly what my team and I are committed to. I continue to be inspired, excited and humbled by our customers, suppliers and investors that are creating this with us. This is just the beginning in a market that is going to be the biggest infrastructure transition of our generation. Together we will continue to build, refine and ever improve this next generation of doing business together.

Reach out, share your needs, wants, ideas and lets get after it!

It is a reasonable question. I understand the instinct. Equipment costs are delining, efficiencies improving and incentives changing. These systems are capital commitments and nobody wants to invest in something that will be cheaper two years from now, I get it! So, Dan Roberts (my cofounder), and I decided to run the numbers on a real project and see whether the wait argument holds up. It does not, and the gap is larger than I expected.

Scenario

We modeled a manufacturing facility in Southern California that consumes nearly 11 million kilowatt-hours per year from the grid. That equates to an annual electricity bill approaching $3 million. Investing in a 1.6 megawatt solar rooftop paired with battery storage for a total installation cost of $3.9 million would yield year-one savings of $615,000 and a 3.1-year payback.

The project IRR was 26 percent against an 8 percent cost of capital. The NPV, discounted at 8 percent, is $4.78 million. On that basis, the project clears every financial hurdle a company would normally set. But we wanted to answer whether holding off another year would produce a meaningfully better outcome.

Equipment Efficiencies & Price Reductions

On the solar efficiency argument: panels have improved by roughly half a percent per year in absolute terms. On a rooftop-constrained site, that means about 2.5 percent more energy output per panel each year (0.5% additional capacity on a a 20% efficient panel = 2.5% relative uplift). Across the full 25-year life of this system, the lifetime net present value of that efficiency gain is $144,000. Year-one utility savings from installing now: $615,000.

Waiting a year returns 23 cents on the dollar. I would not take that deal, and I do not think any informed financial decision-maker would either.

On batteries: the dramatic cost declines already occurred between 2015 and 2020, when prices fell by 18 to 20 percent per year. The remaining annual decline is in the 5-8% range. On this project, a 5% reduction in battery costs saves $32,000, which is less than three weeks of year-one utility savings.

The curve has already moved. Waiting for a second wave like the first one means waiting for conditions that are unlikely to return.

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Incentives

And then there is the ITC. On this site, the federal investment tax credit is worth $1.56 million on day one. Miss it, and payback stretches from 3.1 years to 6.3 years. Still a great project, but giving up that incentive is an oversight. Recovering that gap through technology savings alone would require over 7 years of 10% annual declines in battery prices, a rate not seen since 2020. Meanwhile, recovering it through lower utility bills takes two years of operation with the system installed.

Many onsite energy systems economically compete on merit today against grid power costs, and will continue to win as rates increase and we get more efficient as an industry at planning, permitting and deploying. That said, when there is free money to be had, take it, dont hope for something better as the regulatory environment can be fickle. But, be ready to jump on new opportunities as they arise and I expect we will see more local, utility and state incentives backflling the phase out of the solar tax credits.

The Cost of Inaction

What bothers me more than the technology argument is the organizational inertia problem. We analyzed a defense manufacturer in the northeast in 2020 with a sub-two-year payback and $1.2 million in projected annual savings. Internal teams could not align. The project stalled. Industrial rates in that region have since risen 26%. That system would be paid off today and generate $1.8 million a year in cost savings, based on current rates.

A food and beverage company we worked with in 2021 didn’t follow through with the project. They’ve since absorbed a 70% utility cost escalation. Another example is a past winery customer of ours that lost $750,000 in REAP grant funding simply because decisions moved too slowly.

The businesses I work with are not avoiding these projects because the economics are unclear. They are getting delayed because energy decisions sit uncomfortably across multiple departments, and building cross-functional alignment takes longer than anyone expects. The grid keeps billing in the meantime.

What I keep coming back to is this: for the right system in the right location, there is no financial case for waiting. The gains from better technology are real, but they are insignificant compared to grid savings, which will continue to increase more than we are comfortable with and our margins can handle. The cost of continued grid dependence is also real and growing. That is a straightforward calculation once you run the actual numbers. The current macro conditions (Iran, Venezuala, Ukraine…) highlight how quickly market conditions can change. Passively outsourcing the most critical input to your busienss, energy, to the grid and relying on it completley is risky busienss. Start with the slam dunk economic projects today, dont delay, delyas can cost you significantly.

Dan and I dug into this on a recent episode of Renewable Rides. If you are working through a similar decision or helping someone else make it, the episode is worth your time.

The first is buried. Their to-do list hasn’t stopped growing since 2020. Energy sits somewhere on page three, right below “figure out AI strategy” and right above “renegotiate the facilities lease.” They pay the utility bill, wince at the increases, chalk it up to inflation, and move on. When the pressure gets real, they run the same play they always run: bring in a consultant, find costs to cut, protect the core. They lay off the people who actually build the business. They trim budgets in areas with no meaningful impact. And they leave the third-largest cost center in the company completely untouched.

The second leader saw the writing on the wall. Not with perfect foresight, but with enough discipline to act. They built a roadmap, invested in onsite energy, and locked in 20-plus years of predictable electricity costs. Both of them are watching the same conflicts unfold. But while the first leader is staring at a cost forecast that looks nothing like the plan, this leader is sitting in a position of control.

The Rope Snapped

Back in June 2025, I wrote about a fraying rope, the Strait of Hormuz, and what happens when a single chokepoint holds up the global energy system. I said it was a matter of when, not if.

On February 28, 2026, the rope snapped when U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran and Iran retaliated. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows every single day, effectively closed with this act of aggression. Tanker traffic dropped to near zero. Brent crude hit $126 per barrel at its peak and is currently hovering around $94. U.S. gasoline prices jumped 19% in two weeks.

That’s not the only conflict on the board. In early January, the U.S. launched a military operation in Venezuela and arrested President Maduro, removing a major oil producer from stable supply for years. And Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds into its fourth year, keeping European energy markets on edge and global gas flows disrupted.

Three conflicts in three major energy-producing regions. One very predictable outcome for any business that hasn’t taken control of its energy supply.

“That’s Over There, Not Over Here”

The prevailing logic is that the U.S. produces more oil than it consumes, so we’re insulated. We’re not though.

Oil and gas are global commodities. When 20% of the global supply is disrupted, prices rise everywhere. As Mark Finley at Rice University’s Baker Institute put it plainly: if something goes wrong anywhere, the price goes up everywhere.

Here’s what this looks like on a P&L right now: costs are rising across multiple fronts simultaneously as a direct result of relying on energy systems you don’t control.

Electricity costs are climbing, with U.S. wholesale prices forecast to rise another 8.5% in 2026 on top of a 23% increase in 2025. Natural gas sets the marginal price of electricity in most U.S. markets, so when gas moves, your bill follows. This will become even more true as the current administration’s strategy focuses on gas for power and slows the deployment of renewables.

Input materials are surging, with fertilizer prices jumping from $475 to $680 per metric ton since the Strait closure alone. Freight costs are spiking as Maersk, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks and high costs to every shipment. And capital costs are staying elevated, with former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning that the Iran situation constrains the Fed's ability to cut rates.

What This Looks Like for a Real U.S. Manufacturer

Let me make this concrete with actual numbers from a real U.S. manufacturing facility.

In 2020, they paid $2.0 million a year for electricity. Today, that same facility pays $3.1 million, a 54.75% total increase over six years, compounded at roughly 7.5% annually. And that’s before the current geopolitical disruptions fully flow through to electricity prices.

Now look ahead. At 4% annually, the industry-standard energy escalation rate, this facility reaches $3.7 million by 2030 and $4.4 million by 2035. If the current 7.5% rate is sustained, it reaches $4.2 million by 2030 and $6.0 million by 2035. At 10%, a scenario well within the range of what three simultaneous energy conflicts can produce, the number climbs to $4.6 million by 2030 and $7.4 million by 2035.

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That’s up to $4.3 million more per year at a single facility by 2035. Not from growing the business. Just from standing still while the market moves. The passive leader looks at these numbers and calls it the cost of doing business. The proactive leader looked at the 2022 version of this chart and made a decision.

Two Leaders, Same Data, Different Outcomes

This is where they diverge. The first leader reads all of this and feels the weight of it. They consider it alongside tariff updates, workforce pressures, and board pressure on margin and pull the lever they know: cut something visible, hire someone to advise, wait for the market to stabilize.

The third-largest cost center, energy, in their business sits untouched.

The second leader reads this and feels confirmed. They made their investment two or three years ago. The energy system(s) are running. The costs are locked in and, in many cases, lower than they were even a few years ago. The ROI is compounding. While competitors scramble on electricity spend, they’re deploying that capital toward growth. They’re not immune to everything on this list, but they’ve permanently removed one of the biggest variables from the equation.

These two leaders work in the same industries, serve the same customers, and face the same macro environment. The gap between them widens every quarter.

The Alternative Is Already Here

This is not a technology problem: solar, batteries, efficient onsite generation, and smart building systems can cut fossil fuel dependency by 70% using just three core technologies. 92% of countries have enough renewable energy potential to meet their demand ten times over. The constraint isn’t supply. It’s strategy.

Onsite energy systems deliver 20 to 30 years of inflation-resistant electricity pricing. The businesses that have made this investment are cutting electricity spend, de-risking operations, and building resilience against exactly the shocks playing out right now.

The most common objection: “We’ll wait and see what happens.” That’s like waiting to put on your seatbelt after the crash. The leaders who locked in their energy costs several years ago have already paid off their investments.

Where to Start

Map your exposure. Understand your energy costs at each facility. Run location-specific escalation scenarios. The number will focus your attention.

Build your roadmap. Identify which sites have the strongest business case for onsite generation and storage. Do the analysis before you dismiss it.

Invest in control. When you own your energy system, you own that part of your cost structure. You’re no longer at the mercy of tankers, spot markets, or decisions made by politicians miles from your factory floor.

This Isn’t About Fuel. It’s About Control.

Iran, Venezuela, and Ukraine feel far away. The $94 oil, climbing electricity costs, spiking input prices, and disrupted supply chains in your next quarterly report are not far away at all. The question isn’t whether these conflicts will affect your business. They already are. The only question is which leader you’re going to be.