Energy Drivers – What is the role of solar power deployment in the Canadian energy transition?

35 mins | 15 January 2024

00:00:00 – 00:00:55

Lance Mortlock

Welcome to this episode of the Energy Drivers podcast. My name is Dr. Lance Mortlock and I'm your host of today's discussion with Gursh Bal, who's the Co-Chief Executive Officer at Zeno Renewables and a Calgary local entrepreneur leading the charge on solar powered homes. Throughout our series, we invite renowned and respected Canadian energy leaders to discuss the most pertinent issues and provide thought-provoking commentary. In our recent episodes, we've spoken to executives from larger organizations about the energy transition. Today, we have decided to bring a fresh perspective from a more entrepreneurial side of our sector. Gursh co-founded Virtuoso Energy, now Zeno Renewables, with his best friend Kai in 2015. Gursh, thank you for joining our podcast.

00:00:55 – 00:00:59

Gursh Bal

Yeah, thanks for having me, Lance. It's great to see you.

00:00:59 – 00:01:42

Lance Mortlock

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. You know, some of the people that know me and are listening to this episode might have heard me talk about you and your company. In fact, I was one of your customers a couple of years ago installing residential solar panels and storage, which I'm grateful for. I was probably a difficult customer, but Zeno has been quite an interesting story, that’s for sure. So I was just wondering if you could kind of kick us off with introducing Zeno Renewables to our listeners.

00:01:42 – 00:02:35

Gursh Bal

Yeah, that's great and thanks for setting that up that way, Lance. To be fair, though, you definitely weren't a difficult customer, I think it was actually a pretty awesome experience. I remember the first days swinging by your home and I think it was right in the middle of a rugby match. So it was nice to have that aspect of things. We have right now about a little bit over 200 total team members and our focus is always on making sure that we install either solar panels, battery storage or electric vehicle charging stations in the highest quality possible and keep our clients’ goals and their desires in mind. To date, we've installed on over 2,500 homes, primarily in Alberta, that's between Edmonton, Calgary and Lethbridge, and we're currently spanning across the entire country now, with the strategic plan to be able to open ideally an office in every single province and potentially in the territories as well. As we work towards our goal of installing solar on 1 million homes by 2040.

00:02:35 – 00:03:02

Lance Mortlock

That's impressive. And like, a little bit about your journey, I guess more from a personal perspective, did you always want to be an entrepreneur and install that many solar panels on homes with that kind of vision of being getting to 1 million homes? Is that always where you saw your future being?

00:03:02 – 00:05:31

Gursh Bal

So, similar to you, I was born in England and where I’d grown up specifically was a fairly polluted area. And it wasn't like it is here, like we're in Calgary right now, and just Alberta in general is beautiful. The air is clean. Very rarely will you see pollution in the sky. That wasn't the case in terms of where I was from. And I grew up in a household that was very environmentally conscious. To be fair, though, most European families are, right? You have limited resources, it's very competitive. You don't have any space. People are living next to you and above you. You don't have a backyard in some cases, right? So when we moved to Canada, it became really clear that the opportunity here was significantly greater than what we had in England, which is part of the reason why my parents decided to move us out here. And as part of that, it was kind of hammered home to me as a kid about taking care of the environment. So being, you know, an immigrant kid, not having very much money, our annual vacations every single year were to Banff. So to answer your question more directly, Lance, solar panels wasn't necessarily always the goal. What it came down to is what did I think was the best solution available on the market that would help me align with how I was raised as an individual. And I went through a list of things that I found that were valuable, that would allow me to better serve people in developing nations when the time came. And one of the most interesting pieces of information that I came across that sold me on being an electrician, so just to put that out there, I graduated from SAIT as an electrician, was the fact that one of the greatest tools to overcoming poverty in developing nations is access to electricity. So for me, that was where the, almost the green light went off that I need to do this, I need to get in electrical. And as I was working in electrical, I worked all over the province in some places in the country as well as far as like the northern ice shelf in oil and gas and all these different industries. And I got to see some things firsthand about how hard it is to actually power our grid in the country and how much people have to sacrifice, as well as how much nature has to sacrifice in order for us to live in a certain way. And learning about energy as a whole, going through that process, landed me on the reality that solar isn't the be all and end all, but it is the best solution that we have available today. So that's why myself and Kai had a conversation, we threw all our eggs in that basket and it's been a pretty crazy journey since we started to just a little bit over eight years ago.

00:05:31 – 00:05:35

Lance Mortlock

Just out of interest, where did you grow up in the UK?

00:05:35 – 00:05:36

Gursh Bal

In Birmingham.

00:05:36 – 00:05:44

Lance Mortlock

Okay. Okay. Yeah, I've spent time there myself back in the day.

00:05:44 – 00:05:51

Gursh Bal

Yeah, it's a little bit better now. Back in the day, it was definitely a rough spot. You kind of wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible.

00:05:51 – 00:06:07

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, yeah. No, that's. That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Your point about electricity just makes such a big difference, you know, particularly in less developed countries.

00:06:07 – 00:06:44

Gursh Bal

Yeah, I think that's where we've always thought that the home was the most important piece. So we did industrial-scale projects, we did a lot of commercial projects and a lot of people know the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, we did the solar panels on those buildings in their renovation projects. But nothing ever hit quite like the residential projects did. And furthermore, this is well known in the industry, it's always said that solar is the most democratic form of energy that's available to humanity. It's a way of voting, that’s saying I want to do my part for the environment and simultaneously I want to be able to save money because obviously the financial benefits are there now.

00:06:44 – 00:07:06

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, so, you mentioned that you put, you and Kai put all your eggs in one basket. You took some significant risk. When you kind of think back over the last few years, have there been sort of significant milestones. What were the big moments that you've been through, you know, as co-founders and co-CEOs over the last couple of years?

00:07:06 – 00:09:06

Gursh Bal

I think the first one that will always stick with me is our office. Our first office was in my basement, and we used my wife's Honda CRV to do installations and we rented a random residential garage in northeast of Calgary. Which, looking back at it, it probably wasn't the best idea because it wasn't the most secure place. But that was a major milestone for us, for us to get our first office. And then furthermore for us to get our first shop. And now we have three offices and they're actually a lot nicer now. So other major milestones was getting financing from banks. I can’t tell you that's how many nights of sleep we lost where we thought we were going to lose our houses. Like, there was many moments where Kai and I were like super, super, super stressed out and just wouldn't sleep. We would just end up staying at the office or we'd end up sleeping on the floor in the office. Just be like, we can't go home. Because if we go home, that means we're quitting. And we don't want to go home because we know that we might lose our houses. So we would end up just sleeping on the floor, in the carpet, in our offices until we figured it out. And that was a major moment for us as well, too. Now we're in nice position where we kind of get the banks to fight over us a little bit, which is definitely a different situation. And then the other third and most major thing was our first hire, and that happened a little bit before the banking piece. But hiring somebody else to have access to something that's so precious to you, it's almost like the first time, if you’ve children, it’s like the first time you get a babysitter, right? You're so nervous and you're so anxious and you don't know if you're going to, if your child is going to get hurt or you don't know if the person is going to, you know, be competent enough to care of them. It was that same feeling. And there's been many other milestones over the years. But those were probably the three most consequential ones, because once we did, though, once we established ourselves in those three areas, taking the bigger risks became a lot more a lot more negotiable because they didn't seem as crazy as those first major steps.

00:09:06 – 00:09:29

Lance Mortlock

Did you get much support from the government along the way? I mean, you think about what the provincial government's trying to do, what the federal government's trying to do. You know, they're trying to stimulate the economy, stimulate, support entrepreneurs. Was that helpful over the last few years or not really?

00:09:29 – 00:11:07

Gursh Bal

Come this April, we'll be entering into our ninth year. In the first, I would say probably two or three years, there wasn't much in terms of government support. The majority of our support came from the entrepreneurial, I guess I would say the entrepreneurial community, where everybody and anybody was willing to sit down with us and have coffee and give us advice. And there's a lot of really good business people in Calgary that opened up their doors and told us like they made different recommendations. And at that point, we were just listening to everything. So, it wasn't until COVID hit that the Alberta Government brought in a program that allowed, I guess, companies and employers to be able to subsidize the cost of bringing on tradespeople. That helped significantly. So and there were federal programs like the Eco Program that allowed companies to bring in individuals and cover part of their wages if they were in the environmental-focused sector. And now there's also breaks[MB1]  and loans that are available for going solar, for example. And those ones have definitely, I guess, propelled the industry forward. But it's a mixed bag. So anytime these programs come out, there's the good and the bad around them. The good being that the industry goes rapidly and the awareness goes up. The bad being that there's going to be companies that come in that are only focused on this for financial reasons, and they'll take advantage of the programs that are available and sometimes people won't get good installations, they'll get inferior products or in some cases their systems just will never turn on because they weren't done properly. Or they, I guess the last piece about that was, or they just get gouged because the price, the price can be justified because there's a grant available. And that's the sales hook, for example.

00:11:07 – 00:11:57

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. Okay. So maybe pivoting a little bit, talking about the Canadian electricity market. With energy transition underway, provincial electricity generation profiles have been, as you can appreciate, rapidly evolving. For example, we've witnessed a fast transition from majority of coal generation to natural gas over the last decade in Alberta. And I think the last two coal facilities in Alberta are actually closed down or switched to gas at the end of this year. And in your opinion, you think about that big picture, what role does solar play in Canada's energy transition? Does it play big role? Small role? What's your sense of that?

00:11:57 – 00:15:17

Gursh Bal

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a good question. There's two types of solar, I would typically say. There is solar in a random field and there's solar on rooftops, right? And ideally, I believe that solar does play a significantly big role in Canada's future, especially in areas where nuclear and hydro are not available. Even nuclear, some of the older facilities that we have in Ontario are now starting to age out and there's going to be a major demand for additional energy to come on board. But to step back, if we're looking at the Canadian electricity grid as a whole, there's a major problem. The problem that we have, Lance, is that the grid itself is based on an active load. So what that means is that the entire amount of energy that is required, so whether it be from businesses or households or whatever it is, is the amount of energy that has to be available. So there's no real proper storage in Canada right now in in any major region, in a major way. So where solar can come in is it can help have that edge that happens during the day times, the peak demands, things of that nature. Like summer is a major issue. Air conditioning and heat pumps have now become more normalized because and I'm sure you noticed as well, our summers seem to be a lot hotter than they used to be. And it's one of the things, it's either that they're actually hotter or we've just become weaker as human beings because we are comfortable to it. Right? Either way, the problem is, is that you're seeing people installed these devices more and unfortunately the majority of people are still doing air conditioning units because the air source heat pumps are a little bit more expensive. And that creates a major spike of energy usage during the summertime. And that's where solar will come into play. It’s that typically when you need to use air conditioning the most, is when the solar is more abundant than ever and your house is a good example. So your house on average, let's say, for example, your neighbors didn't get solar, during peak times of production. So we're talking pretty much from mid-April, May, all the way until September, your house on average will power your home plus three of your neighbors. That's how much extra energy that system is able to produce. The nice thing in Alberta is you get credits for that energy that’s going back to the grid and it's because you are powering within your distribution network. So the big piece here is for residential rooftops and commercial rooftops, they really help almost make that property invisible to the grid during some peak demands. But there's the other side of the coin as well, too, where it's wintertime and it's cold, the systems don't produce as much. That's where as Canadians we have to be, we have to acknowledge the fact that there is going to be needs for natural gas or other sources of energy to be able to supplement. And, until we figure out how to be able to generate energy in a different manner, whether it be micro nuclear reactors or anything along those lines, we're going to have to utilize carbon-based energy sources. Now, if we lean on the other end in terms of these farm-based solar, those projects are fantastic. And typically you're putting in a lot of scale really quickly. So you're able to get some energy on board very fast. The issue that we're seeing, though, is that those projects are being put in without storage, so that extra energy will hit that grid and then it'll be utilized, but it dissipates really quickly versus if it was storage it could be saved for times when it's actually needed, which is generally during the nighttime or in the evening time, right?

00:15:17 – 00:15:51

Lance Mortlock

Why haven't we done that storage like what’s the blocker there industrial-scale storage? Because I mean, like the other day I had an opportunity to visit the Sheppard gas facility just outside Calgary. And, you know, the guy that runs that facility was telling me intermittency with renewables is a massive challenge in the province right now. So this this storage question, why haven't we done more there? Is that the technology or…?

00:15:51 – 00:17:07

Gursh Bal

So the technology, from my perspective, is there. The issue is the economics. So when it comes down to doing a comparative analysis of what we are currently capable of utilizing for natural gas and things of that nature, it's cheaper. And the issue is, though, there's no resilience behind that, right? Let's say, for example, similar to what happened in Texas a few years ago, you have a really bad ice storm and then all of a sudden, the above-ground lines go out. That's going to create a major problem. So even if you do have situations where you have that storage with the solar in a field, it won't solve that problem specifically. So going back to the economics piece of it, is that the majority of lithium ion batteries right now Lance are being utilized for electric vehicles, that industry is absolutely exploding. So when it comes down to the actual storage side of things, the where I think the storage industry will ramp up and where the cost will become available is when those lithium ion batteries that are in electric vehicles age out. So by aging out, I mean they hit like 10years or, you know, they fall off and for the public transport stuff and those will now become available, those will then be able to fill that gap.

00:17:07 – 00:17:14

Lance Mortlock

And this is this idea that you can reuse batteries two or three times before you need to put them in a landfill?

00:17:14 – 00:18:28

Gursh Bal

Exactly. Yeah. And there's regulations in certain countries. China in 2018 did it. They basically said that, I forget the exact year, but they said after 10 years of a vehicle, a brand new vehicle being sold in China, so whether it be like a BMW or whatever, it might be for an electric vehicle, that the manufacturer was responsible for the batteries after that and they had to repurpose them. So there was a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that. And there was a lot of different studies and a lot of actual testing that was done that showed that those battery systems would be fantastic for being used in a bus. So you could use it in something that has more space and would have the room to be able to put a battery storage system, or it could be used for utility grid storage. So you pretty much hit the nail on the head, Lance. Is that yeah, those batteries could be used for storage. It's just a timing thing. So that wave is coming now that electric vehicles are starting to get into their volume and then we'll see some of those come into the market. From a manufacturing perspective, the more manufacturers that get into the electric vehicle game, the more battery storage facilities are needed. So as that continues to grow, then the availability for storage batteries will also continue to grow. So it's a matter of years, in my opinion. We're not too far away from it and hopefully we can hold out without any major grid issues between now and then.

00:18:28 – 00:18:57

Lance Mortlock

And so do you, and you touched on this, do you believe in sort of vehicle-to-grid integration? Is that coming to Canada? Is that going to be a real thing where, you know, your Tesla is parked in your garage, you're connected to the grid. And when the grid needs power in the evening, when people are using their washing machines and their dryers and their lights, that actually the grid can get power from all those batteries in people's garages?

00:18:57 – 00:21:21

Gursh Bal

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm in a fortunate position where I was lucky enough to get a Ford Lightning, which has a 131-kilowatt pack. Now to normalize that down, a 130-kilowatt pack can power a 1,400, 1,500 square-foot house for 5 days, 4 to 5 days. The full house. And that just goes to show you how much energy it takes to move a vehicle, right? The Ford Lightning is seven tons so, it's quite heavy. That's where the future lies. To be frank with you, Lance, that's the best solution that we believe is available at a residential level, is solar coupled with an electric vehicle that can then expunge is energy into the home and can be utilized on the fly. Now, at a commercial scale, and there's different places in the UK that this is being done and other parts of Europe, there's actually apps that are out there that allow individuals to be able to sell their energy live. So, let's say, for example, you decide to go down to Kensington one afternoon and grab a cup of coffee and you plug your electric vehicle into a lamppost or a public charging station. Those public charging stations typically in Europe will have an app. So you download an app and it lets you use it, and every now and then, you could get a message. And this is where the nice piece is, is that that message could say, Hey Lance. We noticed that you're charging your electric vehicle. We are actually experiencing higher than normal usage in this area. Are you willing to give us 5 kilowatts or 10 kilowatts at this dollar amount per kilowatt? That's what we’re seeing happen in other areas where this level of sophistication is beyond what we're seeing here. But that future is coming. I mean, that's the beauty about electricity, is that it can flow very easily with little restriction back and forth. And that's similar to, you know, like anything else in life, as smartphones are powered by electricity as well, too, and the sophistication that we have on these apps is quite amazing. And the cars are controlled from apps in many cases. Like my Ford, for example, I can do, I can open the front, I can close it, the tailgate, all that kind of stuff. And I can, you know, set the temperature and whatnot. All these vehicles are much smoother when it comes down to utilizing the app because the engine doesn't have to turn over. It's instantaneous. So we're definitely heading towards a really bright future and a really exciting one. I get to live it every day, which is which is super cool. And my kids really love it as well, too. They assume that everything in the house is run off solar, even the water taps, which is kind of funny. So yeah.

00:21:21 – 00:22:25

Lance Mortlock

That's interesting. Someone was saying to me the other day, I was talking to someone in the electricity business and, and it was actually at the Energy Roundtable in Toronto and he was talking about this idea of airports where you have large volumes of vehicles parked and how you can harness, you know, once that transitions to a primary early being EVs, how you can harness all of that storage at airports, for example, by plugging those EVs into the grid. It's a massive source of storage. Maybe, maybe shifting gears a little bit, just talking about policy. We've seen recently the Alberta Government put a moratorium on renewable energy. And as a guy kind of leading the charge as it relates to renewable energy in the province, what are your thoughts on that?

00:22:25 – 00:24:46

Gursh Bal

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I have two thoughts about this specifically, which will most likely put me into a neutral position. But thought number one is that I believe that when you're doing something, it's best to plan. Now what happened in Alberta is we saw this massive rise of renewables come into the marketplace and there was some issues that came up along that process. And that was, you know, basically the way the land was being handled, the way that the stakeholders were being engaged. It was happening so rapidly that some things got overlooked. And that's why this, the moratorium kind of made sense, let's pause for a second and take a look at the improvements that we can make. Is there different ways that we can address things to be able to ensure that this doesn't happen, similar to what we saw with oil and gas, where we saw the abandoned wells and all the cleanup that ended up happening afterwards, cost the province a lot of money. So that was nice. But the other side of the coin is, what I believe that can be harmful to when you're looking, when you're trying to be proactive by stopping and analyzing, is the analysis paralysis side of things. Is that there is a reality that the only way to learn is to do, and that the issues that we're most likely going to see, we can't predict. So I do agree that it is a good idea to pause and reflect and improve, but simultaneously we need to get going again. And the reason being is that the opportunity that currently exists in our province, and we're in a very fortunate province, like there's not many provinces in the country that have the wind resources, the solar resources, run-of-the river hydro, natural gas, even coal. It's been, it's been amazing to help us develop our cities and our country as a whole, is that this same technology needs to be able to figure out its position and ground itself in our province. And if we don’t figure it out here, there's a good chance that our neighbours, and not nothing against them, I mean, obviously I'm a Canadian, so I love everybody. But, at the end of the day, Alberta has a massive opportunity. But if we don't get things into gear that those projects might start spilling into southern Saskatchewan, or they might even start to look into Manitoba where they do have nice hot summers and the grid might not necessarily be as sophisticated, but it will impact us and we could potentially lose jobs and we could lose that economic stimulation that's just sitting there waiting to be captured.

00:24:46 – 00:25:14

Lance Mortlock

Yeah Yeah, No, that's interesting. I wanted to ask you just about like your relationship a little bit with major utilities, because one of the things that you're providing is customer choice. And so how do companies like Zeno work with companies like Enmax and Epcor and other utilities, both in the province of Alberta and then more broadly, as you expand, how does that dynamic work?

00:25:14 – 00:27:36

Gursh Bal

It's a very, a great question. Again, it's a very tight dynamic, Lance. So we cannot operate without their support. There's such a huge demand for workers right now and there's not enough workers out there to be able to satisfy it. So what we try to do, and going back to the point that we need to work closely with these utilities companies, we will actually share our processes and our documents, whether it be automatic fillable forms that are encrypted and secure or even just general processes on step by step of how to best do this. We've worked with a significant amount of different utility companies and created something that we call the one best way, and we're willing to share that with all utility the companies and educate them on the best way to do things from the perspective of not having too much, too many staff members until they can get to that point, that they can find those staff members and bring them in. And just creating overall operational efficiency. So they are important to us, but they also are threatened by us. And this is the other side of the coin. So if you take a look at the market in Australia, for example, there are a number of residential solar companies and even commercial solar companies that produce more power than the major power producers through their, I would call it decentralized, but their distributed rooftops that all the power that they put into the grid at any given point to all those different households and businesses are producing more energy than like a natural gas facility or coal facility. What this could potentially do is create an issue for utilities where they don't have a clean, balanced load in regards to where that energy is coming from. And it could potentially create some issues. But it is going to be necessary, especially with the advent of electric vehicles and all these different things coming up. Elon Musk was recently at that conference of the utility companies, the global utility companies gathering, and he said that the demand for electricity is going to be threefold to what it is in 2023. And we're only going to continue consuming more electricity because all these devices are available and people want them,  right, like people want to live comfortably. So we are going to make sure that we do the best and give the best heads-up to utility companies and other companies in our space should be doing that because it is a very intimate relationship and it is a necessary relationship for us to continue thriving and, better yet, even surviving as an organization.

00:27:36 – 00:28:28

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it strikes me, that resonates with me for sure. Like we're going to be, you know, I think the idea is using less molecules and using more electrons in the future. And our economists would say at EY that the cost of energy transition in Canada alone is estimated between 60 and 110 billion every year between now and 2050 in this country. Now, that's across all sectors. But just, like, the scale of the change that is underway, like I think, like, if anyone's listening and thinking about getting into the power and utility business, like it's going to be very exciting in the next 15, 20 years, we're going to see a lot of, a lot of investment and a lot of change. What's the next major city that you guys are going to expand to?

00:28:28 – 00:29:34

Gursh Bal

That's a good question. So we're actually planning on heading out a little bit east. So, we're looking at a few different markets, primarily over in the GTA region. And we see a lot of opportunity there from existing relationships that we have. And ironically enough, you're talking about utilities. So there's a lot of good noise out there. But I'll be frank with you right now, everywhere in Canada, with the exception of the territories, they're a little bit trickier to deal with, is a really good place to go solar. Once the policy of the framework starts to change a little bit,. and what I mean by that is something that could happen in the country is maybe having a unified net metering policy, because right now every single province has a different policy and a different structure. Here it's called microgen. In BC it's the hydro credits. In Ontario, they have the FIT program and now that's a little bit different. Ideally, if we can figure out a way to unify all of that, then the marketplace will open up. So we will be in we will be in every province at one point, Lance. So I'm excited to see how that goes. Once our next office goes up, the ones following that will happen very rapidly based on our expansion plans as well too.

00:29:34 – 00:29:46

Lance Mortlock

Well, that's exciting. And I wish you and your colleagues all the best of luck with that. Thanks. Thanks for joining us, by the way.

00:29:46 – 00:30:04

Gursh Bal

Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you and thanks for trusting us and Zeno with your home and your guys’ energy requirements and also, thank you for the support from the EY team. I know we won the Entrepreneur Of The Year® Award, were one of the finalists recently, so it's been awesome working with the organization.

00:30:04 – 00:3

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, that's great. Well, listen, it was a pleasure talking to you about these thought-provoking topics. For our listeners, if you have your own questions or queries, you can reach out to EY via the attached contact details. Finishing another great conversation and episode, I wanted to mention maybe my own reflection on this fascinating conversation with Gursh. Three things. One, Zeno Renewables and other solar installation providers are on the rise. It's great to see these entrepreneurs bring insights to the energy market. The innovation, and deliver more diverse products to customers. Secondly, solar-powered deployment in Canada is increasingly important. The increased demand for sustainable energy opened the door for faster customer adoption, which should also support the energy transition efforts that we're trying to get after. And lastly, there's still some barriers to solar power deployment, particularly in managing the costs, supply intermittency. However, with a better ecosystem of collaboration, which we talked about, advanced planning systems, customers should benefit from improved reliability and affordability of solar power technologies to help overcome those challenges. So once again, thanks for joining the podcast and we'll see you at the next episode.