Ivy Energy: Transforming Multi-Family Developments into Power Plants with its Solar & EV Billing Platform

The transcription of the video is below.

Josh Schlipp’s background and the Origin’s Ivy Energy

Kerim: Hi everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. Today, I have with me Josh Schlipp from Ivy Energy, and we’re going to talk all about Ivy Energy, which is doing something revolutionary. This is a special company for me because I have been aware of Ivy for close to four years, and I have been an early investor and a board member at the company, for over two and a half years, at this point.

Ivy is doing something revolutionary in the solar space, especially in the American market because it is enabling multi-family properties to go solar, and it is unlocking what has always been known as the split- incentive problem between landlords and tenants, which has been one of the major roadblocks for apartment buildings going solar. 

Josh is their Senior VP of Business Development, and he’s going to tell us all about Ivy – its history, it’s story, how it started, what it’s doing, and how it’s solving this major problem of apartment buildings and multi-family properties and multi-unit properties going solar. 

So with that, Josh, good to have you. Thanks for joining, and where shall we start? Shall we start, maybe, with the origins of Ivy and a little bit of your story, and how the two merged, and then dive into the topics?

Josh: Yeah, absolutely and yeah, I think my background is probably a good starting point, and I could explain how it emerged into Ivy here and give you a little background of Ivy and how this idea really got started and how we’ve grown this business. 

I’ve actually been in Clean Tech, in some capacity for my entire career. I actually got started on the policy side, working in renewable energy policy in Washington, DC throughout my twenties and right around the time when building performance and solar started becoming really economically viable, as a business model, I transitioned into solar about about 15 years ago or so. 

Really, you know, cut my teeth in residential solar, bootstrapping residential solar startups for quite a few years, and went through a few different acquisitions. I’ve also worked for the the likes of Sunrun, for instance, obviously a large player in the publicly-traded company, but for most of the time, I’ve spent bootstrapping companies, and that runs the gamut from residential companies, origination companies. I was involved –

Kerim: And you did REPOWER, too. REPOWER was the –

Josh: Yeah.

Kerim: – very unique player. I remember that. 

Josh: A franchise model. Yeah. Yeah. 

Kerim: Which was all about bringing in contractors, educating them to do solar, essentially. Right? 

Josh: Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of that was really training local, like electrical contractors, entrepreneurs on how to build a solar business and build out a model that was replicable. That was a really fun experience. 

Interestingly enough, that’s actually where I met Dover Janis, who’s the co-founder of Ivy. Yeah, and I’ve had other experiences. I worked for a solar manufacturer, building out product strategies here in the US and bringing inverters and modules and batteries to market.

But kind of getting back to how Ivy was started, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve known Dover for quite a few years and Dover, like me, got started in residential solar, and he was transitioning into commercial solar and in that process, he met up, he was introduced to Logan Carter, who’s our other co-founder and chief commercial officer. 

When they were looking at what they’re going to do in their strategy, they really noticed that there was this gap in the commercial, say commercial and residential solar space, which is multi-family and multi-unit commercial. Buildings just weren’t going solar. 

The Split-Incentive Problem: The Problem that Ivy Energy solves for Multi-Family Buildings in the US

Just really identified that there’s this, what we call a split-incentive problem, right, which is the asset owner, the owner owns that property, and these large real estate companies really have no real incentive to install solar because there was really no mechanism to accurately recoup the costs of their investment. 

Hypothetically, you could install solar on the roof of an apartment complex or a multi-unit commercial building and raise rents, but that was all hypothetical. Right? And so, as you know, asset owners like aren’t into hypothetical and so really set out to solve this problem. 

How Ivy Energy’s Solar Billing Platform transforms Multi-Family Properties into a Mini-Utility (VPP)

And how they decided to do this is create a software platform that bills tenants directly for the electricity that is produced. And so what Ivy does at its core is we have a software platform that creates, tracks, monitors, the usage of each individual tenant, and then bills them directly.

The effect of that is that allows an asset owner to invest, either their own capital into solar or leverage a third party financing partner to invest in it, and then recoup that cost over time, through billing the tenant directly, effectively becoming their utility.

And, you know, that idea was, I think we’re seven years from the inception of the idea and I think five years, kind of the inception of the company. We just closed our Series A. Back in February, we raised $18 million, which was led by SolarEdge, and now we’re expanding.

So for the past five years, we’ve been really focused on the California market, obviously, the best solar market in the country, so tons of opportunity here. But now, we are expanding nationally. That’s one of my roles here is helping us go into new markets. 

Some of the big markets to focus on right now are Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Illinois. Texas is another one we’re looking at, but really, anywhere that the economics makes sense for solar and it’s legal for us to operate. We can support asset owners to install solar on their property. 

Kerim: Got it. So I’m going to rewind back a little bit back to this pain point because as – well, I don’t know if, as most people in the US know at this point, but as some people know in the US, we are now approximately, 7% or 8% penetrated in solar for single family homes, or actually, maybe even a bit more. I think we have about 5,000,000 homes that have gone solar, 5,000,000 single family homes of inventory of about 60,000,000 households, single family households.

Like your previous employer, Sunrun has done a million of these 5,000,000 installations, which is great, and it is great that there’s a player which controls 20% of the market there. But if we look at the remaining 40,000,000 or 45,000,000 households, which are apartment buildings or condo units or collective community housing type environments, most of these people have not put in solar for exactly the reason, the split incentive problem, which you described so eloquently, a few minutes ago, and the main reason being because there was no mechanism for the landlord to benefit from the solar because the tenant’s electric bill goes down. But there was no mechanism for the landlord to benefit from that. 

So most landlords or some landlords, put solar to offset their common area electricity usage. Some did that, but the tenants’ usage never really got offset. They never really benefited from it. They’re still buying most of their electricity from traditional sources. So there’s nearly no solar benefiting that world. 

Let’s dive into like, I remember, you know, one of the reasons why I invested in Ivy, and really in Dover is because actually, Dover was at the time, working for this other company, Complete Solar. I think it was like the origin story that I remember. He’s selling in residential solar early in his career, and he sees this apartment building, and it’s like a 10-unit little apartment building. Everybody’s running their AC, but there’s no way to put solar there. So that really pissed him off, in fact, that he actually figured out all the policy issues associated with it, how to design a really smart software solution that solves this, and essentially leveraging the virtual net metering program that came out of the California PUC. 

So let’s talk a little bit about the inner workings of how this works. Because when you are going solar with a single family home, it’s simple. You put your solar, it produces electrons, you get credit for what you produced at a certain net metering rule. 

So when you have an apartment building with 50 units or 100 units or 10 or 20 units, how does that work? Do you get credit for the whole parcel essentially? You put a large solar array on top of the building, that offsets the building’s entire, let’s assume, 80%-90% of its load. And so the landlord gets credit for all of that, from the eyes of the utility company, but then gets to charge what the tenants are using, to the tenants, for a lesser fee than they would have paid to the utility, right? That’s how it works. 

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, I appreciate you clarifying the origin of Ivy. I don’t like to tell Dover’s story for him. 

Kerim: Yeah, we’ll get him on a future solar conversation here. 

Josh: Yeah. He’d be walking down and it is like an aha moment for him. To elaborate on that, Dover had the idea of Ivy before there was policy in place that allowed Ivy to actually operate.

To elaborate more on that is like a lot of our early work was really policy work, him being heavily involved in influencing what was legal, what could happen in the multi-family and multi-unit sector here in California? We have a policy team today that that continues to do that.

And that’s especially needed too in some of the new states that we’re opening up because as you mentioned, the million solar roofs at Sunrun hit the 20% market penetration. I think we’re like 13% here in California. I think it’s 3-4% nationally. There are more advanced laws for single family homes and this multi-family is all kind of new for everybody. So we do see a lot of that policy work continuing. 

But to answer your question, like, yeah, there are various stakeholders involved here, right? So the stakeholder, number one, to us, is the asset owner, whoever owns that property, whether that’s a large publicly-traded company, or that’s one owner that owns a 20-unit apartment complex or whatever that looks like, that’s our first stakeholder. The first thing we had to look at is, why are they not investing in solar? And as I mentioned before, the reason for that is there’s no billing mechanism to recoup the cost. Right? 

Kerim: Yeah. 

Josh: And so the first thing we do is we really enable those asset owners to invest their own capital or leverage other capital. The billing mechanism allows them to do that. The tenants benefit by getting a discount off of the solar. So essentially, the way that it works, now we won’t offset 100%. Anybody who knows solar, like generally, you’re not offsetting 100% of the usage.

So the tenants are still going to get an electricity bill for a certain percentage, depending on roof space, all kinds of different factors dictate how much electricity we could offset. But let’s just say it’s 70%, and so the way that it would work is, the tenant would get a bill from their asset owner, really, we would say Ivy Energy, that would say, $70, let’s say the bill is $100 a month. They would get the $70 from the asset owner, and then the additional $30 would come from the utility. 

Kerim: And the $70 that is coming from the asset owner/Ivy’s billing system is enabling that. That is a discounted value to what it would have been had it been a utility bill. 

Josh: It’s more like if their bill was $100, now it would be $60 with the asset owner and the $30 with the utility. 

Kerim: Yeah. Makes sense. Got it. 

Josh: But it’s a dynamic. The beautiful thing about the software that we built is it’s actually tracking real time consumption. And so we incentivize the tenant to actually use more solar when solar is being produced. And so the more solar you consume, the more you save. So it’s not a totally even thing, but based on us wanting to adopt more solar, encourage people to have the right behavior, we believe that’s the right strategy.

Kerim: Yeah. And of course, there’s a lot more sophistication to the software. It doesn’t take the solar benefit and is equally distributed across the 20-tenant units or 100-tenant units, or however many there are. 

It’s also based on the tenant’s usage time of the day and taking into account whether they’re using that power when the sun is up and solar is producing or not, as well.

Josh: That’s absolutely correct. Yeah. And yes, it’s dynamic. We’re constantly doing this thing called BAL (Balance-of-System and Array Loss) optimization, which is constantly looking back and figuring out how to distribute that electricity most efficiently. So the asset owner’s actually getting the best return on their investment possible.

How Ivy turns a Solar Investment into a Profit Center by providing Solar Electricity to Renters

And so effectively, when you look at the real problem that Ivy solves is to me, it is like two things. The first thing is it’s now turned a solar investment, which could have been a liability in the past, even if it’s mandated like Title 24 does in California, into a profit center, right, which is, asset owners are always looking to make more money. That’s the beautiful thing about Ivy, as we show them a new way to create NOI for that building. 

The second thing I think is amazing about Ivy is we’re providing solar energy to renters, who otherwise, didn’t have access to solar before, and I think that is extremely significant.

I’ve mentioned, I spent my twenties working in policy. I’ve cut my teeth in this industry, trying to build new and innovative products that expand solar and renewable energy in any way. And the thing that I love about working for Ivy, and the reason I’m here personally is we are at the forefront of expanding a new way to go solar, to use electric vehicles. We haven’t even got into our lecture. I’m sure we will at some point here. But yeah, that’s why I work here. 

Kerim: And there’s one other point that I wanted to make sure we cover. From the perspective of the property owner, we talked about, how this creates a new line of income, a new revenue line and a new profit line, essentially for the property owner.

And most property owners are also, let’s assume they’re California property owners. Assume there are single family homeowners as well. Most of those folks have also put solar on their home and they’ve probably done the lease versus owned calculation, and I know some of them personally. And they are savvy enough to know that if you put solar on your own, especially with the previous net metering rules, you could get a 3, 4, 5-year payback. Now, it’s maybe 4, 5, 6 years, maybe 7 years, depending on the location and the context.

But you’re still getting a relatively quick payback on that asset, yet you get to charge electricity at a discounted rate, you know, 10-20% discount, arguably, forever to the tenants, which is still better than what they would have paid to the utility company. So it’s a really attractive, new revenue and profit line for the asset owners.

Imagine getting a four-year payback on an asset, and you get to essentially, you know, you don’t pay for electricity for, any more than the next four years, but you get to charge 80-90 cents on the dollar for the next 20, 30 years to your tenants. That’s a great deal, too. 

Josh: It is. Yeah. I think on top of that, I think the icing on the cake here is what you mentioned in the discount to the tenants. Like occupancy and turnover is one of probably the biggest, the most important thing for anybody who owns a property. Right? And the happier tenants are, the longer they stay, the less turnover or money you make. And I think investing in solar through Ivy, absolutely helps with tenant satisfaction. 

How Ivy Energy benefits Utility Companies. Ivy’s Data Services

Kerim: And we didn’t talk about, but this is something that I like to talk about. There’s also a benefit to the utility companies on this as well. You know, in the short-term, it might look like, “Oh, we’re taking away revenue from them, potentially.” But with all the increased demand on electricity with EVs, and now potentially new data centers, AI, you know, you name it, there’s going to be such high demand for electricity over the next decade that utilities are clogged up with transformers. They can’t add central power plants that quickly anymore, or never have been able to really, but now, with essentially creating, people call these VPPs, virtual power plants, I don’t like to call them VPP. They’re actual power plants. They are small power plants, but thousands of them. Ivy essentially enables thousands of small power plants on apartment buildings.

Josh: Yeah. Whether you want to call it a VPP or a microgrid, right, microgrid is kind of the new, popular –

Kerim: That has the connotation that is kind of islanded on its own. It’s not. We’re still connected to the utility too, right? 

Josh: Of course. Yeah. But I think this whole microgrid idea is an important thing. There’s always like, “What are we doing today versus what does this look like in the future?” And I do think when it really starts to benefit the utility as when we are taking some of this almost offline, right? When you have self-consumption or a very high percentage of it, self-consumption within the area which the electricity is produced, and obviously, there’s some good and bad in VNEM, from going to VNEM 2.0 to 3. 0. Obviously, everybody knows what it’s done to residential solar from NEM to NEM 3.0 and in commercial, but I think the plus side to it is, it’s forcing a battery installation. You look at Sunrun’s numbers, for instance. 

Kerim: AT 90% battery attachment rates in the last couple of quarters. Yeah, that’s incredible. 

Josh: Yeah. We foresee mul-tifamily, multi-unit to kind of start to head in that same direction. Obviously, battery costs have to keep coming down.

And the more we deploy, the cheaper that’s going to become and the reason I bring that up is like, Ivy, at our core right now, we are a billing software platform. Right? But we already have products that we are working on today, and where we see our future going is really this data center of these microgrids.

And I think the beautiful thing about, especially multi-family, right, you have 300, sometimes 200, 300, 400 units in this one community. It’s kind of the perfect, I would say structure, for creating these microgrids. Like it’s far more difficult to do it when you’re trying to do a whole community with multi-family houses and apartments and there’s some experimentation going on with that.

But I think the cool thing about we have is, is we have this captive audience that all live together, that communicate together, that are all paying the same landlord for their rent. And so I think it’s a really interesting place for us to be to lead the way nationally, in developing these, what we’re calling microgrids, today.

Kerim: Yeah, that makes sense.

How Ivy Energy works with its Developer/EPC Channel Partners in all 50 states 

So let’s also talk a little bit about EPCs, installers, integrators, contractors which are putting the solar systems and batteries in certain cases, into these properties, which is a major stakeholder class for Ivy as well.

So what is your general message to the EPC community when you are talking to them? Like, what are some of the things that you like to highlight to them about Ivy’s benefits? 

Josh: Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, I spent a lot of my time on partnerships as part of my role. Shout out to all of our channel partners. They are really what helps us drive our business. I mean, you even look back like we’re a software platform. The only way that Ivy makes money is through our software. We’re not a developer. We’re not a financer. We don’t make money margin on design or hardware or anything like that.

So we’re just in it for the software. Right? But what that means is we have to have this massive ecosystem of finance partners, the EPCs, installers, developers, real estate companies, hardware partners, the SolarEdges of the world. Right? All of those kind of combine to help us drive our business.

And, you know, really when it comes down to it, developers and EPCs are really out there, pitching these products, right? Like in order to, I think how, what our market position is right now is you can go out there and sell a multi-family or a multi-unit commercial project without billing software, but it’s not a smart idea to do that. Right? 

So you’re not going to be very effective. And so we have all of these close relationships with pretty much everybody who’s involved in multi-family. I think one of the things that, you know, with our national expansion, right, when you look back, when Ivy first started, there wasn’t a multi-family industry in California. Today, there’s a very healthy ecosystem of developers, EPCs, finance partners that have built big businesses, profitable businesses, just in California, off of this multi-family and multi-unit strategy.

So I think in California, my message is, NEM 3.0 is still a great place to be. Our NOI, our RRR on these projects under NEM 3.0 is still really good. So we got to kind of keep building on what we’ve already done. I think nationally, my message is a little different, where I think when you look back five, six years ago, what you had to do is like, we had to transition commercial installers, residential installers, whoever was really interested in figuring out a new, maybe not as competitive place, to be able to sell and start to point them in the direction.

And that’s how we created this business here in California. And now systematically, we’re going to go through, state by state and do that nationally until we’re penetrated in all 50 states. 

Ivy Energy’s Software-as-a Service Offering, Pricing, Deployment & Onboarding Processes

Kerim: So can you tell us a little bit about the software as a service product pricing, the model, like the SaaS model of the business and how it works and how you charge? And at what point does Ivy like, how do project timelines work? When does Ivy get involved in the project? How long does it usually take for a project? What does it look like for a 100-unit apartment building to go solar? I’m sure it doesn’t happen in a few weeks, like a home. 

Josh: I wish it was as fast as residential, that’s for sure. No, it’s not. Well, so first off, let me start off by this term SaaS, right? It’s very interesting where we were just on a branding and marketing call this morning, to be honest with you. And we’re like, “Hey, like who are we? Are we a SaaS company? Are we a software company or a service company?”

The truth is we’re a technology-enabled service company. That’s the easiest way to put that. And what that means is, and the reason why I say that is we are more than software, right? We are your one-stop-shop for solar billing and even ESG reporting or sustainability reporting. But let’s, let’s talk about the billing software, right, or the EV charging software. 

When you come to Ivy, the first thing we provide you with is the ability to go out there and accurately pitch a multi-unit property. And so we start very early. We’re not coming in with just the software. We actually have a modeling tool where you can come in and you just give us an address and units and EPC costs.

And then we can build a pro forma for you. And then we’ll even go and help you pitch to that project. So when you ask, when we start to get involved, we try to get involved as early as we can because as I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s really difficult or near impossible to do a multi-unit project without billing software, right?

And so they go hand-in-hand. We try to get involved very early in that process. And, you know, our partners are different. Some of our partners have been with us for five years, and they’re very well-versed in how to pitch the Ivy and the multi-family and multi-unit value proposition.

Some are just starting out, making this transition. Maybe they got a few leads because they’ve done some commercial, and they were introduced to somebody and they’re trying to figure this out. We’ll help you through that process. So that’s how early we get involved, right? 

Then after it’s contracted, we actually take care of like what we call a kickoff call, which is with, generally, the property management company, and the asset owner sometimes, but generally, the property management company, who’s going to generally facilitate how this goes in. And we want to be involved as early as we can because there needs to be essentially lease riders that are put in place. 

So then the tenants are agreeing to buy the electricity from the landlord, but then we do all the onboarding for the property. And so what that means is it is our responsibility to make sure that, you know – 

Kerim: And this is happening while the solar asset is being built on top of the building as well.

Josh: Yeah. So you would essentially contract with us, but at the same time that you would contract. So if you’re an EPC or a developer and you’re contracting a project, you’re going to contract with Ivy. Depending on if it’s a third party operated or it’s a cash deal would dictate the way that the contract would work.

But we would sign the contract at essentially the same time as they’re signing the EPC contract. Generally, that’s about 12 months. So our average, in retrofits, obviously different than new construction, new construction is going to take longer because the property’s got to be built. 

It also runs the gamut of like, when we get involved, sometimes it’s three years in advance. Sometimes it’s three months in advance. But retrofits is generally about 9-16 months or something like that. So I think our average is 12 months. 

But then we handle the onboarding of the client, and then this is really important. Even after onboarding, we’re handing all the customer service, right? So they’re going to get a bill from Ivy. And then if they have questions on that bill, if they’re not understanding anything, we’ve got an entire team that’s fielding those calls directly from the tenants, to make sure that they’re happy, they understand what’s going on.

Who are Ivy Energy’s Customers?

Kerim: And so can we talk a little bit about, I know, some of the largest players in this, especially in real estate, are a little bit more old-school, and they like their privacy. They don’t all like their names out there. But can we talk a little bit about who some of Ivy’s very impressive customers are, without naming names?

Can you talk to a little bit about how well established Ivy is in space, enabling solar for multi-family and multi-unit properties? 

Josh: Absolutely. And you’re right. The companies that we deal with, generally, don’t want us to use their names for marketing.

And we totally respect that. What I would say is the majority of our business, I would say the largest percentage is coming from, not just REITs, which are publicly-traded, but the larger asset management companies. That’s the bulk of them. So they’re the ones that – 

Kerim: The larger REITs.

Josh: Yeah, they have the most units. They generally have a lot of access to capital. And so those are generally our partners. But that being said, we have plenty of partners that own one building or three buildings or five buildings, and then we have plenty of mid-market customers as well, so it does run the gamut. I think the reason why you look at who our customers are, are the large percentage is they just own more assets. They own more units than anybody else, and so naturally, they’re going to be our core customer. 

What is next in Ivy Energy’s Product Roadmap?

Kerim: Got it. Let’s talk a little bit about, what’s in the future?

Josh: Yeah. To start off with, we haven’t talked about our EV charging service. So we actually just launched that a couple of months ago. It’s starting to gain traction. What it allows an asset owner to do is again, install EV charging, as opposed to solar, or ideally, we were talking about microgrids, right?

We’d like them to install all of it. And then it allows them to track how much is being consumed by each tenant. This is super convenient for the tenant is they get that EV charge on their electricity bills, similar to what they would get with their solar.

So that’s an exciting product for us. We call it a complimentary product in like, let’s say California, which is a really established market. For us, there’s also a standalone product. I think it is relevant to other markets because what we’re seeing is EV charging adoption is different than solar, right?

It’s more like, “Hey, we have to have EV charging, because otherwise, tenants aren’t going to, you know, especially, Millennials, Gen Zs who are buying all these EVs now, aren’t going to come and live here, unless we have some way for them to charge that. And that might be a separate motivation than solar, but we do see them tied together in the future.

So that’s kind of our newest product. I think the other exciting thing we’re working on is our market expansion, right? We can operate in 50 States right now. We launched a couple of new products that support different meter configurations that allow us to operate in places where we weren’t operating even last year.

And so I think that’s an extremely exciting development for us. We’re signing on partners all over the country right now. So if you’re hearing this, and you’re interested in learning more about Ivy, I’d love to talk to you. We can walk you through what the value proposition is in your market. If you never worked in multi-family or multi-unit before, more than happy to walk you through that. So I think those things are exciting. 

And then, we’ve got some other exciting things that we’re working on from just a data perspective where now, we have some clients that really were using our technology to just enable sustainability reporting. We see that as a future at Ivy as well. 

And then, looking further out, and the way that we see ourselves, we’re trying to position ourselves is kind of the one-stop-shop for everything that is microgrid. And when I say microgrids, right, and I’ll talk in future terms here. The way that I see and I envision and me geeking out as a lifer in Clean Tech, right, is you’re going to have all of these retrofits or a new construction is much easier to do this in, right? Let’s talk new construction, right? Set aside, leave retrofits off the side for a second. 

What does a building, an apartment building, look like in the future? It has solar. It has batteries in it, it has EV charging, it has smart appliances, IOT. You’re looking at heat pumps, you’re looking at this environment that everything can communicate with each other, right? And so we have this technology today. We haven’t deployed all of it. Some of it’s not as cost- effective as we need it to be, but it’s all very close. 

But we haven’t figured out what it’s all going to do, how it’s all going to communicate, like how we’re going to manage it all? Like, what does it all mean for the grid? And so at Ivy, we see ourselves as positioning ourselves at the center of that data. And why I see data is like all of those devices will have data, right?

And now how we utilize that data, what we do with that data, in the electricity environment, is going to be really crucial to what we, you were talking about grid stability. That’s the benefit to the utility. How do we get everything working together to create more grid stability? Right? And I think that’s the exciting part. I think that’s the more-future of stuff we’re working on. 

Kerim: Yeah. Well, like I said, in the beginning of the call, I’ve been a supporter of Ivy since its earliest days. I believe in this company, and I think you guys are doing something really amazing, enabling multi-family communities to put solar, collectively benefit from it, and attribute value to all the stakeholders, in the most efficient and proper way possible.

And, yeah, I’m really excited. And thank you, Josh, for sharing everything you did, to communicate the value of Ivy Energy to the broader world. 

Closing remarks & Ivy Energy’s asks

Any last parting words? Anything you can wish for the universe for the next 6-12 months to bring it to you, now that we’re putting this out there?

Josh: Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that, if I had one thing to wish for is I would like us to continue having positive outcomes and policy across the country. That’s my wishlist. Right? But that’s everybody who works in this. We need good policy to support both, right? We know the economics works. We know we can be competitive in an even playing field setting, and so I think that’s my wish. 

Kerim: That’s a good one. On that note, I’m going to plug in something here. I was listening to Elon and our former president talk, recently, the conversation they published. They were mostly rambling on the X. I don’t know if you listened to it, but Elon actually got in a couple of good minutes of education in there, in educating President Trump on the benefits of clean energy and solar and if he can get more, no matter who the outcome is, obviously, in this coming election, if we can get more education to the actual leaders who are making these decisions, you know, let them know that panels have gotten 15 times cheaper in the last 15 years, believe it or not, or 10 times cheaper, at least in the last 15 years.

And batteries are, too. The future is a solar plus battery, mostly. Still connected to the grid, is not going anywhere, and educate the world about how to do this in the most efficient way. 

Josh: Yeah. And I mean, to solve this issue, we need to get as much investment into it, as humanly possible. And I think that’s one thing that is beautiful about Ivy Energy’s strategy is we are tapping into this industry, this market that has never invested in it before. And we’re creating that. 

It’s a very big industry with a lot of capital to deploy. That’s what we need more of, is we need more investment and any way that we can create it is going to be a positive thing.

My other thing, I would just say, if you’re interested at all in hearing more about Ivy’s value proposition, just reach out to us directly. We love spending time with, whether that’s EPCs, developers, anybody, finance partners who see an opportunity here, like reach out to us. More than happy to have a chat.

Kerim: Great. Josh Schlipp of Ivy Energy, thank you very much for sharing and educating us on the world of solar in multi-family and multi-unit properties. Thank you. 

Josh: All right. Thank you. Appreciate it.