#198: Rob van Haaren (Proximal Energy) — Powering The Solar Revolution

Rob van Haaren [00:00:00]:
The cost of solar has come down so much that you cannot even buy glass at the price of buying a solar panel that has the glass in it because of the agreements that the panel manufacturer has with, the glass companies. So the cost of that come down over a 100 x. This panel back here used to cost probably about $3,000 in today's, money where panels used to be over a $100 per watt. Right now they're about 15, 20¢ per watt. So a huge cost reduction. Yeah. So solar has become competitive with, with fossil fuel based assets in the market.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the lay of the land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Rob Van Herren. Rob is a Dutch born entrepreneur and CEO of Proximal Energy, a Cleveland based software as a service company transforming asset management for solar and energy storage projects. Rob has long been interested in renewable energy engineering. He holds a master's degree from Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Engineering, in addition to a PhD from Columbia University as well, with a focus on utility scale energy storage optimization and engineering.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:35]:
He also has over a decade of experience bridging academia and industry working as a photovoltaic and storage analyst at First Solar. Since founding Proximal, Rob leads a remote AI driven team to deliver advanced analytics and agentic tooling that help large asset managers optimize performance and reliability in utility scale projects spanning multiple gigawatt hours of storage. In addition to his work at Proximal, Proximal, he is also an expert in residence at Bright Energy Innovators, which we've heard about from Rick Stockburger back on episode 161. As you'll hear in our conversation today, Rob is an engineer, a problem solver, and a deep thinker who is passionate about transforming the way society manages utility scale energy. And we're lucky to have him as a founder in Cleveland. I really enjoyed this conversation with Rob, and I hope you all will as well. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped 100 of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:51]:
I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you too are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. We first met at this this local gathering of folks who were interested in what Polly would call, you know, deep and meaningful discussions about pressing issues facing civilization. I think is the framing. And the the topic of the day at that time was energy and environment and climate and, you know, these kinds of topics. And it I think it was a particularly fun time to meet you specifically as someone who had so clearly, you know, thought deeply about that set of topics before.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:03]:
And that was before I even knew you were a founder and building these companies in the space of energy and and clean energy specifically. So I I really just wanted to start there. If you could kinda take us through the evolution, if you will, of of your intellectual journey through energy and what kind of sparked your interest?

Rob van Haaren [00:04:25]:
Sure. Yeah. I can certainly do that. Because because really growing up, I think I was interested in a lot of things, actually. Like, you know, early on, I wanted to become an archaeologist because I wanted to be like Indiana Jones. Then I wanted to become then I actually spent a lot of time wanting to become a a fighter pilot in the air force in the Dutch air force, which by the way, there's only, like, 10 spots for every 100,000 applicants because we don't have that many planes out there. So so I went through the selection process and was, like, in the later stages, we had to fly, like, simulators and stuff like that. But then I failed because of a stupid mistake I made during one of those simulator flight tests.

Rob van Haaren [00:05:04]:
And, I needed to have, like, a backup option. Right? So I applied to the University of Eindhoven where they had this really interesting program called innovation sciences or in Dutch, Technische Inovaatze Wetenskaper. And, and innovation sciences was was a beautiful program because it kind of mixed the technical side of innovations to the societal side and, like, the psychology of decision making and things like that and understanding how innovations actually actually spread through society and what you need to do in order to make that process more successful. Great book, by the way, Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers. It's like the Bible to me. It's it's a beautifully written book about how you can optimize the adoption of ideas within, within organizations or societies. And it's a really cool book on that topic.

Rob van Haaren [00:05:58]:
So within innovation sciences, I was focused on sustainable energy technology. That was always kind of like my my passion early on. I don't know where that came from. Maybe it's because my mom always made me turn off the lights, whenever I left the room, and she was very strict about that. We needed to save energy wherever possible because it just impacted our our finances. So I got into sustainable energy technology also because early on, I saw so much potential in solar energy. And it's such a beautiful technology. Right? It's so simple.

Rob van Haaren [00:06:29]:
Like, you have your solar panel and, like, this one over there. That one's from 1970, by the way. Wow. The old school one. But you have your solar panel and, you know, you just convert photons from the sun into electricity. And it's such a beautiful technology. It's so simple. And the input energy is so abundant.

Rob van Haaren [00:06:47]:
So it just made total sense. See, I've got into sustainable energy technology for that reason and started working on all these different projects related to, the energy transition, whether it's solar, wind, energy storage, hydrogen as well. And just understanding all of the pros and cons of all these technologies and and learning about how we can best implement them in our society and in the energy industry specifically. So yeah. So that that was my early kind of move into to the energy space. And then after my undergrad in Eindhoven, I applied to Columbia University to to the earth and environmental engineering department over there. And I worked on a topic slightly different from the energy industry. It was actually focused on waste management, different composting methods, and, like, their environmental impact and, and the economics associated with it, which was a really cool topic.

Rob van Haaren [00:07:43]:
But I knew I I noticed during my master's degree that I just wanted to get into solar. So I applied for my PhD program. I applied to a research group in the same department called the Center For Life Cycle Analysis, which was doing a lot of research on solar energy, environmental impact of solar projects. And I spoke with the professor there and just wanted to do work on a topic that was very pressing in order to further grow the adoption of solar technology, which is really the grid interaction of solar power. So that's really during my PhD. It's really where I started learning about these kind of interactions between generation assets and also load assets on the grid and how they always need to be balanced at any point in time in order to keep your grid up and running.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Was there a particular, like overexposure to to solar in the Netherlands, or it was just something that that you had noticed growing up? And I I love the framing by the way of of its simplicity. I don't remember who had said it, but I always it sticks in my mind that nature had figured out solar energy a long time ago. And, you know, we're we're just kinda playing catch up to photosynthesis

Rob van Haaren [00:08:52]:
here. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. There's this fun comic on this, this this this cartoon, I guess, this caricature that's trying to drill down into into the ground to find energy. And the sun is shining on its on the character's neck, and it's, like, hot and all that stuff. And, like, and he's like, there must be energy down there somewhere. You know? But meanwhile, we're receiving 1 kilowatt of power from the sun under full sunlight conditions per square meter of of surface area.

Rob van Haaren [00:09:19]:
So it's, yeah, it's so abundant. People don't even realize it. But, yeah, where I think, really, the, that in the Netherlands, it's just like it's it's the country that's 2 thirds under sea, level. Right? So there's there's no country that would be more concerned about, sea level rise than the Netherlands itself. Right? So and, actually, it's a fun story. In 1995, we had very high water levels in the, in our rivers. And I grew up in a small town that was surrounded by dike. Kind of like the the story of the the boy that, you know, saved this town by, preventing the dikes from breaking by sticking his thumb into the into the hole that he noticed.

Rob van Haaren [00:10:01]:
What happened was that in 1995, my family had to evacuate, because the water level was so high that there there was danger that the dikes would be breaking. So we left our house. We tried to move as many things up to the 2nd floor as possible because of, you know, obviously, the damage it could do. And then I still remember and I was at 8 years old. Right? So I still remember my dad telling me that, Rob, if if we if the dikes actually break and we come back into the house, you're allowed to take the garden hose from outside and then spray the walls on the inside of the house because there would be, like, dirt and sand everywhere. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:41]:
Yeah.

Rob van Haaren [00:10:42]:
He he he was telling me that I could then do that, and I was hoping so much that the dykes would break. You know? I I couldn't wait for that moment to just, yeah, spray the inside of our living room where I grew up. But but, yeah, it's it's, it's definitely like a big topic in the Netherlands. And obviously, decades ago already, probably a 100 years ago, the the water engineering really, and and building engineering structures to protect our land from, from flooding became a huge topic of of engineering at universities. So yeah. Now it's so interesting with wind and solar that we can actually, like, tackle the problem at the root cause by simply trying to prevent more carbon dioxide, and and, of course, methane reaching the atmosphere. So, I guess that's where it started.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:32]:
Yeah. So I I can understand how your interest maybe ultimately brought you through the world of of academia, you know, completing this this PhD in in engineering with with the focus around energy storage and its optimization. I'm always curious about this transition from academia to, you know, application from from theory to practice and where you began to feel, you know, an entrepreneurial inclination about the problem space you were exploring and just just your whole, like, the evolution of that thinking.

Rob van Haaren [00:12:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And, you know, a lot of people who've, completed their PhDs, they end up working in completely different fields. Right? They'll join, like, you know, a consulting company or something like that, and they'll they'll be working on completely different topics from what they actually focused on in their research. But I was, I just kind of lucky that, I ended up working almost exactly in the, in in the same space, in the same industry, same topic as my dissertation. And in fact, during during my PhD program, I was actually an intern at First Solar where I started my career afterwards. I always joke that I still think I have the record longest internship at First Solar because I was there for 2 two and a half years as an intern.

Rob van Haaren [00:12:49]:
Getting to know the company, working together with my, you know, future colleagues because I ended up, getting the job there. But it was, like, the best possible way to transition from academia into a professional career because, first of all, my for my interview, with First Solar, I literally booked the conference room for my interview myself. And then I sat down with my future boss, and his question was, how can you when can you start? So it was a really easy transition for me, and I was so excited to kind of take all my learnings from my dissertation defense and take that into my professional career. So I could really get a, you know, a head start, and really start providing value to to the company to First Solar from the get go.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:35]:
What what were you working on at First Solar?

Rob van Haaren [00:13:38]:
Yeah. So so I was basic it was the coolest job ever. Like, I was an entrepreneur within the organization. You know, my topic was on solar plus storage, okay, in in my dissertation, right, in my act in my PhD. At First Solar, you know, for solar manufacturers, cap and telluride solar panels, actually in Ohio. In Perrysburg, they have a massive manufacturing facility where solar panels are being manufactured. It's a it's a beautiful engineering feat over there in our own state. Right? It's it's pretty fascinating.

Rob van Haaren [00:14:12]:
For solar, my my job was to take the panels that there was actually a project development team as well that was building these projects out in the field. My job was to look at the synergies from combining those large scale solar assets with energy storage systems. And this was, like, back in 2014, 20 15. So we're pretty early on in terms of, like, looking at combining PV plus storage on the same site. So it's it's all about, like, you know, taking taking this energy resource of a solar power plant and turning it into a reliability asset. My former colleague, used to used to always say reliability is the most important thing for utility. That's the most important thing. The the the second most important thing is is reliability at the lowest cost, but reliability is first.

Rob van Haaren [00:15:06]:
So we really did a lot of work trying to educate utilities across the US to help them understand the benefits of combining these two assets on the same site. And, and, actually, we we set it a whole bunch of different start up companies in the United States, and we also visited large manufacturers of batteries in China and and other places to see where the storage industry was going so that we could strategically set up for solar for success in this, in this area of PV plus storage. So yeah. So that was that was my job there, and it was the best job ever. I was still doing all of the, like, project finance modeling and the techno economic modeling that I was really that I did a lot also during my PhD. But at the same time, I learned so much about running a business and understanding how communication works or sometimes doesn't work in large organizations. So it was, like, the best, yeah, the best, possible way for me to get introduced to entrepreneurship while being part of a much larger organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:12]:
Well, and it it it seems like it in parallel to to that work and and some of the the studies you were undergoing that you you had this, like, entrepreneurial, I don't know, side hustle alternative explorations. It also seemed like if there was a a theme to them, it it it was maybe tethered to this this interest in the power of the crowd, and crowdfunding. And I I love to just

Rob van Haaren [00:16:37]:
Yeah. Sure. About about detour. Yeah. Definitely. That brings me back because that's that's a while ago. Yeah. So and and this started actually during my, time at Columbia University already because while studying and doing research on solar plus storage, my buddy and I were, like, wondering how is it possible for us to help out in the solar industry? Can we build our own solar project? Right? And we noticed that, you know, living in New York City in a shoe in an apartment the size of a shoe box, you know, we didn't have our own roofs to put a solar panels on, obviously.

Rob van Haaren [00:17:16]:
Right. So so we were like, why why can't we and there's still a lot of capital. Like, there are people who live in New York. I mean, you have to be like a millionaire in order to live in New York City these days. So so we were thinking, like, what other buildings are out there that need solar panels on them where it can be some, like, synergistic value to be had that people could then help make possible. So so we were thinking of this platform, a software software interface where people would be able to see the top down view of a roof. And we were hoping mostly to get, like, schools, public schools roofs and and private schools. And that there will be a layout of solar panels on that top down view, and people who would be interested in contributing to the solar project could then effectively click the solar panels that they wanted to fund.

Rob van Haaren [00:18:05]:
And this way, they could or are hopeless to let them make a return on their investment eventually. That ended up not working for various reasons, but we can get into that later. But that was the overall idea that we wanted to enable all this capital in New York City to literally help schools get more solar on their roof and use some of the data perhaps to teach about geometry and, like, what the incidence angle of the sun to the solar panel, how that impacts how much electricity you're generating. There's so much, like, educational value to all that data. We're already picturing, like, the cafeteria would have, like, a TV that showed production of that day, and you can literally see the clouds moving over the system. It would be awesome. Right? But we ended up not achieving what we wanted to achieve because back when we started, it was not possible yet to give people a return on their investment, on their contributions to the solar project. I actually or this was also during the time when when cryptocurrencies became a thing.

Rob van Haaren [00:19:04]:
And I actually created a Coinbase account early on because I was like, we gotta look into maybe if we can use crypto for giving people a return or something. Yeah. So we looked at all these things and ended up it ended up not working. But I had spent so much time on the UI. I was like, why don't we take this platform that we have now and turn it into a personal crowdfunding platform? And this idea kind of stems from the fact that my wife and I, we always used to create this collage of pictures from the year that we had spent together, because, you know, around the holidays, we really like to make jigsaw puzzles. So we would take that collage of pictures and get a custom jigsaw puzzle sent to our house, and we put the puzzle together at the end of the year. It was really fun. And I was thinking we can apply the same thing for personal crowdfunding platforms.

Rob van Haaren [00:19:56]:
Imagine a canvas with a collage of pictures behind it, and every click that you do on the canvas will expose some of those pictures underneath. And each of those clicks would be $10 worth of funding to that person doing the campaign. So this can be for, like, you know, surgeries, for weddings, for honeymoons, for any kind of topic. So I spent a lot of time turning what was called Divvy Power, which was the kind of solar crowdfunding platform into coverme.com, which was the personal crowdfunding, platform. Yeah. And launched that product and learned so much about entrepreneurship in the process. One of the things was focus on product is good, but you also have to focus on marketing. And I did 0 of that.

Rob van Haaren [00:20:43]:
So big lesson learned there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:46]:
So the the groundwork, I I would say, is is laid here in, you know, setting the context for for founding, you know, Proximal Energy. You have, really this extensive history thinking through solar plus storage. You have this applied experience through First Solar. You have, you know, your your entrepreneurial explorations and the and the learnings from those. Take us to the the founding of of Proximal Energy. What it what is it? And, you know, where did the the kind of founding inspiration for it come from? And we'll we'll follow the journey from there.

Rob van Haaren [00:21:18]:
Yep. Sure. So Proximal Energy is a is an asset management software platform that helps large scale solar and energy storage project owners to squeeze the maximum possible financial efficiency out of their assets. So basically, what we do is we tap into the project data feed. There's a central control room where all the data from all the sensors in these large scale projects comes together. And then through a connection into that, it's called SCADA system, you can then pull all that data. So this can be, like, up to second by second data from, I think, about, like, half a 1000000 sensors throughout the plant. And then, of course, the the goal is to make sense of that data, right, and to provide actionable insights for the project owner, but also the maintenance provider, potentially any OEMs, so manufacturers of all the components in the site, as well as, EPC companies.

Rob van Haaren [00:22:11]:
So these are the engineering, procurement, and construction companies that are actually building these sites that are interesting in the quality of the asset that they put together. So so the way we started is because I I was doing some consulting in the, energy industry for some solar developers and for energy storage companies, and I I got to interact with my now CTO, Marcus. And and he was talking about how in his job, because he was a performance engineer before, how much he disliked working with our actual competitor in the space and the the lack of features they had, how much they were overcharging for their product, and it was just he was unhappy with it. And he ended up, switching away from that provider, at his former job, you know, we got together and we were at some point, like, this and this is kind of like a very unsexy way to start, a business. You can start a business because the existing players in the market are not really doing a good job. You know, and we had come from this background of AI and large language models and machine learning, reinforcement learning. So we were so excited to bring artificial intelligence into this space of asset management and just performance monitoring of these big assets because there's so much data there. Not just structured data like time series data, but there's also so much unstructured like contracts and user manuals and offtake agreements and things like that, where, of course, large language models are perfect for navigating all that information and allowing an asset manager to to more efficiently run their assets and and do their daily jobs.

Rob van Haaren [00:23:57]:
So basically, we got together and we said, hey, why don't we put a plan together for this new company? I put a pitch deck together. We ended up talking to a, potential customer who ended up being our first customer. They made a huge commitment to us by giving us some prepaid service fees that are not going to be credited to their account until, like, 2 years later. So we had some, like, financial runway, and this way we basically just started and bootstrapped the company. So, so, yeah, that's that's the founding of the Proximal Energy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:30]:
To help me and and perhaps others, you know, gain a a fuller appreciation of of the problem space, how would you describe, like, what we need to understand about energy and energy management and how this industry has changed over time, and what are the actual problems that you are helping these these companies solve?

Rob van Haaren [00:24:48]:
Yeah. Well, everybody knows that solar has gotten extremely popular. Right? Not just on residential and commercial industrial, like rooftop systems, but also in these large scale projects throughout the US. And what has happened in the industry is that the cost of solar has come down so much that, I mean, you cannot even buy glass at the price of buying a solar panel that has the glass, in fact, in it because of the agreements that the panel manufacturer has with, the glass companies. So the cost of that come down so much, like, over a 100 x. This this panel back here used to cost probably about, like, $3,000, in today's, in today's, money and right now their panels used to be, like, over a $100 per watt Right now, they're about like $0.15, $0.20 per watt. So a huge cost reduction. Yeah.

Rob van Haaren [00:25:44]:
So solar has become competitive with fossil fuel based assets in the market. But what also has happened is that in this road to becoming more competitive, the maintenance providers for these large scale projects have seen their prices just drop precipitously to a level where it's almost like some companies are starting to back out of deals because the price they're going to get for it is just not gonna give them any margins. So what you see happening is that providers are selected, which are who are cutting corners in order to make it pencil in for themselves. And, of course, that leads to lower availability levels in some of these projects. And this can be because of, like, you have overall system availability reductions, specifically related to inverters because most issues in a solar project is is associated with the inverters, which turn the direct current into alternated current on-site. But also there's some grid availability issues, meaning, you know, there can be curtailment signals. Curtailment means that a solar power project has to reduce its output because the grid cannot handle that much solar electricity at that point in time. There's even negative electricity pricing on the grid, which is really interesting topic.

Rob van Haaren [00:26:59]:
So, yeah, you see the availability levels of these projects is going down. There's more and more issues. And at the same time, panels are getting thinner and even bigger, so they tend to break more often during high wind conditions. And so there's there's all these factors that just have caused availability of of projects just have gone down. And there's a big need for a good software application to, first of all, detect that and also to manage those outages. Because, you know, big example we always bring up, and this is actually related to energy storage projects, is that specifically for energy storage projects, 40% of the revenue that an energy storage project generates in Texas, our operating grid is called ERCOT there, 40% of the revenue is generated in the top 10 days of the year. So in 10 days, you make 40% of your annual revenue. Now imagine that during one of those hot summer week, which is typically where prices are very elevated and and where you generate that revenue.

Rob van Haaren [00:28:04]:
Imagine if you have an outage there, right, and the inverter goes offline and, you know, there's, it needs to get fixed because, you know, you have some revenue that you're leaving on the table there. Now the maintenance provider may not have their scheduled maintenance event until, let's say, 2 weeks from now. But it's much, much better for you to actually, as a project owner, to actually get the problem resolved as quickly as possible. Right? But right now, that kind of communication and that kind of optimization of, hey, how much does it cost to do a truck roll, and how much is the benefit from, recovering some of these revenue losses that we see, that optimization is not done in any software packages. So so what we're doing is really with the project owner in mind and with the goal of maximizing assets ROIs is to really get to the the the optimum decision making around how you manage these projects. When do you send technicians out to go fix problems? So, yeah, that's that's the goal.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:04]:
I wanna put a pin in, negative electricity pricing to come back because I'd how would you like to hear about that? So, you know, with that that framing of it, you know, you had mentioned that at its inception, you were able to convince, you know, a a formidable organization to believe in the vision, of of of Proximal and what you were building. I'm curious what what that looked like. Like, what what was the vision that you painted for them, the kind of context you just laid out, the the set of problems that these kinds of companies experience in a world where Proximal Energy has come to fruition? What what does this all look like?

Rob van Haaren [00:29:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So what what's interesting here is that that first company was actually an EPC company. Right? So they're the ones designing the project and then constructing it. Sorry. EPC is? Engineering procurement and construction. And, of course, like, originally, our focus was really on, the project owner, which is really the customer to the EPC company.

Rob van Haaren [00:30:02]:
Right? Because the EPC company is building this for the project owner eventually doing this work for the owner. But what's really interesting is that and and and by the way, network is just such a big reason why you move your company in a certain direction, right, and why you take on jobs. You know, we had just such a good relationship with this organization. It's called McCarthy Building Companies. They're a pretty famous solar builder in the United States. So so we had such tight relationships with this company that we were, we were almost, like, became part of their team. And they were in a situation where they had their EPC business up and running, and then they're getting their services started up. So they're building their own operations and maintenance team.

Rob van Haaren [00:30:47]:
And, of course, an O and M team needs to have some kind of event detection in place. Right? Like, hey. Something fails on the site. We need to go look at it. We don't just need to go look at it, but we we need to know ideally remotely what's going on so that we can then dispatch a crew to fix the problem with the right spare parts along with it in the truck So we don't have to go back and forth because some of these projects, Jeff, are 5 miles long. So you have 5 miles on one end, like a 800 megawatt project. It's just so massive. So so we, so we early on started working with them in order to get software platform tailored to their needs.

Rob van Haaren [00:31:32]:
And we we were okay with this because we knew that the needs of an EPC company were very similar to that of a project owner, as well as, of course, their their the maintenance provider too. So so it'll be this this similar needs. So what we what we did was we had all these meetings with their internal teams and ended up literally just putting wire frames together, talking about, like, hey, how you know, what are really the goals that we're trying to solve with this problem? And a big goal that they were trying to solve was, you know, when you do EPC, that's like for a large solar project can be like 3, 4 years or so to design and build and then commission a solar project. But then there's like 25, maybe 30 years worth of data that's generated throughout the life of that project. Now as a company, McCarthy's mission is to build better plans. So what they wanna do is they wanna utilize some of the data that's generated throughout the project life to feed that back into their EPC decision making so that they can actually build better plans by knowing a lot more information about how all of the inverters, solar panels, trackers, how all of these components are performing out in the field. And so that feedback loop for them was extremely important. And, you know, we are 100%, on board with building out those features on the platform so that they can enable that kind of information flow to build to to build out to improve their core business, right, of of building these solar projects.

Rob van Haaren [00:33:01]:
And we're super excited and privileged to work with those guys. It's been it's been a great journey. And like I said, they believed in us early on. We were able to execute on this prepaid service fee agreement. And, yeah, it's just been a pleasure interacting with them on a weekly basis, sometimes multiple times a week to get feedback on our platform the way it looks now and and to integrate new features that they're looking to have

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:26]:
Just for the the sake of our conversation here, I'd love to layer Cleveland into this journey and tell us a bit about Proximal as it relates to Cleveland and and how the two intersect.

Rob van Haaren [00:33:38]:
Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, Proximal is headquartered in Cleveland Heights. It's not the place where you would expect some SaaS software company to be, to be based. But yeah. I mean, the the reason why we got here, right, is because my wife is originally from Cleveland, and, you know, we met in New York City. I always joke about the people who moved to Cleveland because I get the question a lot. Like, why did you move to Cleveland? You know? It's the perennial question.

Rob van Haaren [00:34:05]:
It's the perennial question. Yeah. Exactly. So I always joke about, like, you know, you you either moved to Cleveland because you grew up there and you ended up going to school in a different place, and then you moved back to Cleveland. That's option number 1. Option number 2 is that you're the spouse of that person. That and that and that was my situation. So, you know, we were living in New York City.

Rob van Haaren [00:34:27]:
We're like, where are we gonna start a family? It's it was not gonna be in, like, Manhattan, so we decided to move closer to the in laws. And, yeah, they're very close, 3 blocks away, so we got a lot of help, which helps a lot because, of course, the other grandparents are across the pond and the Netherlands. So, yeah. So so, that's how I got to Cleveland, and it was really just, you know, our company is AI first and remote first. So we're all working from our homes. We don't have an office. One thing that I I do like to brag about is that our company spends 1 week every 2 months or so together in an cool Airbnb in a city where we all decide, like, oh, yeah, let's go there. And so we spend good money on, like, a really nice Airbnb.

Rob van Haaren [00:35:15]:
And as the team is growing, it's it gets harder and harder to find a place that can accommodate all of us. But it's it's a really cool way of working because so you can save on a lot of money as a startup and run your company lean by having people work from home, but you are missing out on some of that, like, company culture and and team building. So having this week altogether in a very close space, you get to know each other very well. We get to solve some really cool problems together as we kinda brainstorm about some of the new features that we're looking to build out. Yeah. We just end up having a lot of fun there. And so as a remote first company, that's how we that's how we do our work. Most of their teams well, 2 other guys are based out of Boise in Idaho, and one guy is based out of California.

Rob van Haaren [00:36:02]:
Yeah. We just get together. Sometimes it's close to one of our customers, so we get to actually meet with them in person as well. Sometimes it's in a place that we just wanna go visit. So that's really nice. Yeah. And it's and I mentioned AI first, meaning we try to incorporate as many AI features into our platform that our companies or our customers really are looking to have. So we brainstorm with them about new features, like, hey.

Rob van Haaren [00:36:25]:
Can we implement large language models to review your contracts and to extract KPIs from those contracts that you can then track on the platform. They're like, yeah, let's do it. Or like, okay, we're gonna go for it. So so AI first in that manner, but also in the way we work. A lot of our competitors, actually, they're built on top of code bases that are like 15 years old. And it's very hard to build new features on top of that. Plus they have like a team of 100 of people. So I mean, as your company grows, the efficiency of the work that every single employee can get done reduces a little bit.

Rob van Haaren [00:37:05]:
So your kind of your per employee output reduces over time because of the red tape and all the silos of communication, etcetera. But we're kind of in a unique spot right here, right? Because we can build our company using AI tools that allow us to code like 10 times faster than we otherwise would be able to do. Plus, we keep this knowledge of what everybody's working on in a very small group. So the efficiency of building out a platform, you know, hats off to the rest of my team because they're really just stars in the product development side. They've built an amazing platform, in a very short period of time that now competes with some of these other platforms that have hundreds of people that have worked on in the past for many years. And we're 1 year old. So, yeah, we're we're moving very quickly, and I think the timing is just perfect in this AI era of coding very quickly and and building out your platform.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:59]:
Right. What are what are you most excited about looking forward? I I know you've, you know, since been able to bring on quite a few other partners to the business at gigawatt level scale of of energy. What, what does it look like going forward?

Rob van Haaren [00:38:16]:
Yeah. Sure. Well, I'll tell you. I was watching some, videos of Optimus, the humanoid robot that, Yep. Yep. That Tesla is is building. There's one video that just came out that blew my mind where the robot was, like, walking down kind of a hill with some, like, like wood chips on there. It was like, basically, like, some soil and mold.

Rob van Haaren [00:38:41]:
And at some point, the robot and I think what I read was that the robot was effectively blinded. It it was not using its vision capabilities. It was basically walking without, like, as a blind person effectively. And at some point, the left foot of the humanoid robot flipped. And if you look at this video, you see the robot acting in a way that a human would in the exact same way. Using your arms in order to stop you from falling and using the other foot to regain balance. And it actually prevents it fall after it flips with one foot. Really fascinating.

Rob van Haaren [00:39:19]:
And I am so excited about the development of robotics in the renewable energy and storage space because cost efficiency is so important in our industry. As you can imagine, some of these massive $1,000,000,000 facilities, they don't have someone on-site 247. You know? And if something breaks, more often than not, you should be able to at least do some, like, investigations, inspections of the issue by having potentially a humanoid robot that's sitting on-site just waiting to do work to be dispatched to one of these, let's say, inverters, open it up, and see what's going on. Oh, look. There's a rodent infestation in the inverter. So we you know, clearly, that's something that needs to get resolved because they're, you know, chewing through the comms cables. So I think there's a huge opportunity for robots along with, of course, AI and a good software platform to connect all these things together that we can further improve the efficiency, uptime, and availability of these, large scale solar and storage sites. And we're even gonna get to a place where those robots will literally be installing the projects themselves.

Rob van Haaren [00:40:29]:
I think that might be, to a lot of people, very dystopian future, but I think it's really gonna be beneficial to really make solar and energy storage even more cost competitive than it is right now in the market so we can help get fossil fuels out of the picture more quickly. So I'm really excited about that future. And and as a as a software platform that is AI first, you know, I'm gonna be the first one to preorder an Optimus robot so that we can start messing around with it and, and having it fix things on-site.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:03]:
Well, with with that in mind, I always love to ask ultimately what success looks like for you. Personally, what what's motivating you through all this and through the the vehicle of Proximal Energy, you know, when you think about long term vision for renewable energy management, kind of the integration of AI into this whole space and and the work you're doing in shaping that future. What's the what's really the impact that you hope to have looking at?

Rob van Haaren [00:41:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I think I think overall, our our definition of success should be able to get measured through the impact that we can have on the ROI of assets of our customers. Right? If we're able to make the projects of our customers to be more economic financially efficient, to have higher returns, then that is the goal that we're going after. And, of course, what that means is that if solar and storage projects become more financially viable and financially attractive, you'll see more money flowing into this space so that we can accelerate the adoption of of renewable energy. However, I think with the Pure as especially as a startup and as a Pure customer focus, in the short term, we want to make the lives of asset managers easier. Because right now an asset manager will have like 20 or 25 projects under their supervision.

Rob van Haaren [00:42:32]:
And it's almost impossible to keep track of all of these projects and all the issues that are happening on-site. There's, like, hundreds of email threads in their inbox, one associated with every single issue where they need to know what's going on. Like, you can imagine it's such a it's such a beautiful combination of structured and unstructured data, where if you pull those two things together and you you build the right tools around it from a large language model perspective and from a data analytics perspective, you can really provide asset managers with the ability to manage perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of projects and actually get better output on all of those projects itself. So, yeah, we really we're looking to make the lives of of our customers easier. And, you know, one thing as we build out new features, and I love this about our company, the the product developers, the software developers in our company that are building the tools, that are building new features, they're the ones first presenting it to our customers. Right? There's no layer of, like, sales engineers or something in between. Having that direct interaction with the people that do the work and the people who benefit from the work that they do, building out these things is such a inspiring and rewarding moment when that happens. When you see people like, oh my gosh.

Rob van Haaren [00:43:53]:
This always takes me, like, 3 hours a week, and I hate doing it. Now you just it's a single click of a button. You know? It's just, yeah, it's a really nice, nice feeling. Yeah. We just like to fix things for our customers, you know, make their lives easier and and allow them to be more efficient.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:11]:
Yeah. I I do think that that feedback loop of as as an engineer, as a product builder, seeing the the feedback and the immediacy of it and the impact that it has on the customer, it it's such a powerful motivator and and way for you to empathize with with your customer.

Rob van Haaren [00:44:29]:
Yeah. For sure.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:31]:
So I feel like it it was pretty inevitable in building both a company in the energy space and also doing it in Cleveland that that you would cross paths with Bright at some point in this journey. So so tell us about, you know, the the the work you're you're doing with them and,

Rob van Haaren [00:44:48]:
Yeah. Sure. Just

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:49]:
yeah. Their their role in the ecosystem here. Yeah.

Rob van Haaren [00:44:52]:
Yeah. So Bright, as probably most people know, who listen to podcasts, is is an incubator for energy companies, based out of Warren, Ohio. So very tightly connected with the rest of the ecosystem here in Northeast Ohio. And, I came across Bryte many years ago, but back when it was still called dBiTE. And I was so excited about this organization, but didn't actually get to interact with them more closely at a later stage. I met with Jing at some point who is currently the I think she's the program director at the organization and now lead managing director if I'm not mistaken. But we sat down together for coffee, and she basically sold me on, you know, becoming like a mentor to other young entrepreneurs, perhaps still students who are at the university and they have an idea and they want to, you know, see if they can build a company around it. And I think it's a really amazing opportunity for me to interact with some of these other crazy people.

Rob van Haaren [00:45:54]:
Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to be so obsessed with the problem that they're solving, you know, like to a level that you could consider them to be crazy. And I get to actually use some of my experiences, teach them to iterate and to be in constant contact with your customers, like the lessons I learned from from my crowdfunding companies. And and so I'm an expert in residence there. I don't like the name expert in residence, but whatever. I help them out with their value propositions. I I really love working on pitch deck with some of these companies together and, yeah, and and and financial projections. So I have a really cool template that originally stems from Air CFO. Shout out to folks from Air CFO.

Rob van Haaren [00:46:37]:
It's a really nice open source, like, Google's Sheets based model that I actually help other companies with getting it populated so that they can get their due diligence materials together for, fundraising. So, yeah, I really enjoy working with Bryte, and there's so many smart people in that team. And, of course, his focus on energy is is where I belong, where my passion is. And, yeah, I'm excited to spend more time with them. I definitely have, like, a limited period now that my startup is is doing pretty well, but I try to spend as much time as possible to, to give back to the to the new generation of entrepreneurs.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:15]:
What what do you feel have been the the greatest of earned learnings that you've taken with you in the journey thus far? You know, it's hard to kinda offer blanket advice, you know Yeah. With with your teacher hat on. What what what would you advise yourself?

Rob van Haaren [00:47:30]:
Yeah. Good question. Well, definitely, the the aspect of getting your product out to the customer and just iterating based on customer feedback. I mean, it's it's it's really, a big learning I had from that crowdfunding platform work that I did. Also, marketing is equally as important as as building a product. We're actually trying our best to build publicly. So on LinkedIn and other platforms, we try to talk about what we're building and, like, get people's feedback on what we're building. I think that's another big learning that I think I have had personally because I'm more of like an engineer who's, like, very product focused.

Rob van Haaren [00:48:08]:
Yeah. And and aside from that, I think inspiration, I think, is such a key aspect. Right? Yeah. As an entrepreneur, of course, you are the one who is passionate about your company and the business you're building. But you also need to inspire the people that work for you at the company. And that starts out with hiring and simply selecting the right people for the jobs. And I think we're so lucky with the team that we have where every single person on our team is is just so driven to, again, help our customers with making their their lives easier. To be honest with you, like, from an inspiration perspective, I have to do very little, because they are already inspired.

Rob van Haaren [00:48:52]:
But what I noticed from especially my job at First Solar that I worked very closely with, of course, my manager at the time, Scott and the CTO, Rafi. And they were just 2 extremely inspiring people to work for, like giving you credit in front of customers. And, like, that's such to me, that was such a, big help And I try to now, you know, do some of that in our own company so that I can give people the the credit when they deserve it because obviously, a company is is built on top of great employees. So, built by great employees. So Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'll I'll state as learnings.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:35]:
Excellent. In the spirit of learnings, I I did wanna ask about growing up and the influence of the Netherlands in your, you know, philosophy and approach because, well, I mean, candidly, I've always just found the the difference in in cultures, particularly as it's applied to entrepreneurship from people who have had the experience of growing up somewhere else and now building here in America, but specifically also in in Cleveland, always just to be really fascinating. So, you know, what what you feel is is distinct, if anything, about, you know, that culture and how it's influenced your approach to building?

Rob van Haaren [00:50:13]:
Yeah. Well, I'll I'll have to say that, you know, I've been in the United States since I was 21. Old enough to party, I say something from the super bad movie, McLovin. But so so I guess I I didn't spend a lot of time in the Netherlands being surrounded by other entrepreneurs. So, of course, I know some entrepreneurs and actually, a guy in my friend's group from back home, he started a beautiful business and fitness centers and gyms in my area where I grew up I mean, at least what I noticed in him is like how driven entrepreneurs are around the world Right No matter where you are in order to run a startup, in order to get it off the ground, you need to be super driven. You need to be willing to work until late in the night where all the people are, you know, at the bars having a few beers. You know, sacrifices you have to make. And and especially, you know, I think in my case, especially being surrounded by also people here in my home.

Rob van Haaren [00:51:11]:
Like, my wife is doing most of the taking care of the children, and and I cannot imagine what it what it would be like if, you know, we didn't have that kind of support, in, in in my house and and I would have to, you know, be an entrepreneur, but at the same time, it, take take half the load, of of what my wife is doing. She's amazing. Yeah. I think that's the case no matter where you are in the world. They just need to be super driven. And aside from that, I think the Netherlands is a is a country of explorers. Right? Like, from from, you know, centuries ago, it's a country of explorers. And when Dutch people see that there's something wrong, they say something about it, and they try to do something about it.

Rob van Haaren [00:52:00]:
So it's kind of like this mindset where they kind of speak their mind and try to do something about the problems that they see in the world. So, yeah, I I'm happy that I'm from there and I, I believe I have some of that in my blood as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. What what do you take with you from competing at a national level in the Dutch championships of air rifle shooting?

Rob van Haaren [00:52:22]:
Oh my gosh. I can't believe you oh, you found it on my was it on my I found it. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. When I was, 11 years old, I was playing soccer and tennis, and then my mom said, Rob, did you know that there's a shooting range in our hometown? I was like, no. But that sounds really cool. So I did, like, I think I did a, like, a talk about firearms or something when I was 12 years old in my class.

Rob van Haaren [00:52:44]:
Like, I was teaching people about guns. It was crazy. But I ended up going there, and the guy told me that, you know, I could start shooting air pistols there. So I started going there every Tuesday or so and learning about it and just practicing. At some point, switched over to air rifle, where my coach at the time, he was really into biathlon. Like, his daughter was, I believe, the Dutch champion at biathlon, which it's not a big biathlon country because it's flat and there's barely ever snow. Yeah. But, but he started coaching me, and I ended up being much better than I expected and, ended up, like, winning the silver medal in the Dutch championship of air rifle shooting.

Rob van Haaren [00:53:27]:
So but, but again, this is a long time ago. I don't, I don't really practice it anymore. So, but

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:35]:
you you exercise your competitive nature in in company building.

Rob van Haaren [00:53:38]:
In different ways. Yeah, that's right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:41]:
Amazing. Well, as we round it out here, just for my own personal edification, if, if you'll indulge the the detour, I I would like to just hear about negative electricity pricing that we can round it out in in Cleveland.

Rob van Haaren [00:53:56]:
Nice. Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. So and it's it's really fascinating. Right? Because if you think about negative electricity pricing, what that really means is that you can take electricity off the grid and get paid for doing that. Right? So the first question is, like, how how on earth do we even have negative electricity pricing? Because somewhere, there needs to be generators out there that are willing to produce electricity and then actually pay money at the same time. Right? And the way that originates is because there's power plants on the grid that have a lot of moving parts and a lot of, like they'll experience a lot of thermal wear and tear if they were to shut down their plant and then start it back up.

Rob van Haaren [00:54:39]:
So coal fired power plants, for example, they don't like to, as they call it, cycle. Like, during the daytime, they would drop down to 20 or 30% of output. And then in the evening time, they would go back up. And because of that fact, what they do is they say, okay. We'll just bid the price of energy equal to what it would cost us in order to cycle the plant down and then back up. So that way, they are bidding negative electricity prices. Okay. And that's how negative prices originally originated.

Rob van Haaren [00:55:10]:
So they're they don't wanna shut their plants down. Therefore, you know, willing to pay money to keep producing. The second reason is because renewable energy credits. So a lot of solar and also wind projects, they get kind of a certificate for every megawatt hour of energy that they produce. And that certificate, they can then sell to, let's say, Meta or Google. And Google can then use that to say, okay. Here. Here's 1 megawatt hour of green electricity that was produced.

Rob van Haaren [00:55:38]:
We are using that to offset our total annual consumption on the grid. Renewable energy credits, of course, they're worth something. Right? So if an credit is if a a rack is is worth $10 a megawatt hour, then if you're a solar power project and you're you're capable of selling those things for $10 a megawatt hour, because of your zero marginal cost, you're gonna bid into the market at negative $10 per megawatt hour. Right? It doesn't make sense for you to bid $0 because if the price ends up closing out at, you know, negative 2, you're not producing, and you're missing out on $8 because you have you could have sold that renewable energy credit. So the negative electricity pricing, it's happening more and more often because more zero marginal energy is entering the grid through solar and wind, and they tend to also produce all at the same time, of course, for solar during the midday period where the sun is out. And, typically, it's on, like, spring days where there's not that much in AC loads on the grid, and you see just solar is producing so much power that there's just leftover electricity, and therefore, you're seeing these pricing go negative. Now what that means is that in terms of the future, we need to be okay with more solar getting curtailed. More solar is gonna just get wasted.

Rob van Haaren [00:56:57]:
Plants are gonna be shut down, let's say, 50% if there's not more energy necessary for the grid. And and this is something, of course, that can be resolved with energy storage. Right? Because the more negative electricity pricing you have, the more economic it becomes for storage to charge using energy and get paid for that and then discharge during times when prices are high and get paid again. Right? So storage is is gonna be huge, and solar is still outpacing storage at this point in time in terms of added capacity. So we're only gonna see more curtailments and more negative electricity pricing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:32]:
I have one more energy question. When and it it really comes from a place of I mean, like many technologies, but I think particularly electricity. It's really one of those societal infrastructures that we take for granted in that, you know, most of the time we don't really think about it except when it stops working.

Rob van Haaren [00:57:51]:
Same to you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:52]:
I guess, what do you wish more people understood about how it works and, like, mis misconceptions people have about it? You know, if you could wave a wand and everyone understood something about energy and the grid, what what would it be?

Rob van Haaren [00:58:07]:
Well, whilst the the thing that bothers me the most is that a lot of people don't know what the difference is between power and energy. And my fellow PhD buddy, Garrett, and I always used to send screenshots of sometimes even energy companies that are, like, selling a product, an energy efficiency product, and they get it wrong. And it's so weird that and that the reason why this happens is because the unit of watts, 1 watt, is actually a rate. So you could compare watts to miles per hour. So it's a continuous thing. Right? It's a continuous rate. I'm using and actually, 1 watt is 1 joule per second. Right? But then what happens with kilowatt hours is that you multiply that joules per second or Yep.

Rob van Haaren [00:58:55]:
You know, you multiply it again by a time unit hours, so you get back to energy. And that's something that's really confusing to people. If I could wave a magic wand, I think energy should always be expressed in some form of joules, so kilojoules, megajoules, whatever. And that we would simply get rid of watts, and we would say joules per second instead. And then all the confusion would be gone. But, of course, it's like we're baked in this way right now, and we just have to educate people to get it right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:25]:
Yep. No. That's that's a great point. That it no. It it still is confusing to me today. I always have to think extra hard about it.

Rob van Haaren [00:59:34]:
It can be tough. Yeah. For sure. Especially if you're not in the energy industry and talking and thinking about it every day, you know, it's it it is confusing. It just grew that way, and it confused people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:45]:
Mhmm. I think we can close it out then with our traditional closing question, which is for a hidden gem in Cleveland. Awesome.

Rob van Haaren [00:59:54]:
Well, I would certainly say that one hidden gem here is actually our street. We live on a street where our kids can go out to our neighbors' houses and play. We live on a street where people are organizing get togethers like a pig roast or or they're organizing like a block party or progressive dinner where you visit all the homes on your street. So that's a hidden gem, but that's not, like, accessible to anyone unless you're, like, gonna buy the house next door that might be for sale. But the other hidden gems, I should say, I wanna mention is is, a bunch of restaurants. So Doug Katz is a Cleveland or or I think he I don't know if he's originally from Cleveland Heights, but he lived here for a while. He's started a bunch of really good restaurants. He used to have fire, but now he has Dug, which is here in Klima Heights, Amba, which is, I believe, Ohio City.

Rob van Haaren [01:00:48]:
Yes. You I'm sure you've been there. And then there's now a new one in at the Van Aken marketplace called Kiln. Well, actually, I went last night, and I think all those places are amazing food. Every night when we go there, it's just the the food is so delicious. It's like a unique culinary experience that not that many people know about. So that will be my my big fan.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:10]:
I mean, I'm actually going to Kiln for the first time tonight. I'm very excited.

Rob van Haaren [01:01:13]:
Oh, you are? Awesome. That's cool. I was there last night, and Duck Hatz was actually there. So we talked with him for a little bit. So if you see him, tell him I said hi again. I will. Absolutely. Awesome.

Rob van Haaren [01:01:25]:
Amazing. Yep.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:26]:
Well, Rob, I just wanna thank you for for coming on, for sharing your story. And, yeah, it it's it's, it's great to have you as as part of as part of the community.

Rob van Haaren [01:01:34]:
Yeah. I appreciate it so much. Thanks thanks for having me on the podcast. It was a cool experience.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. My my pleasure. Truly. If people had anything they wanted to follow-up with you about, where where would you point them?

Rob van Haaren [01:01:48]:
Yeah. You could check out our website at proximal.energy. You could connect with me on LinkedIn directly if you want and, send me a message there. That would probably be the 2 best ways.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:58]:
Awesome. Perfect.

Rob van Haaren [01:02:00]:
Well, thanks for having me, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:02]:
Alright. Take care. Bye bye. That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayofthelandor@sternfa, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:28]:
And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UP Company, LLC. At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.