Clean Energy for Small Businesses & Minorities: Spotlight on Gemini

hi Anthony Welcome to our Spotlight thank you for having me this is great so can you tell me a bit more about yourself and about Gemini Solutions and what inspired you to start a company Anthony Kinslow II uh born in Asheville Tennessee grew up in Baltimore Maryland civil engineer at heart I did my undergrad at North Carolina entt proud graduate HBCU Pride Aggie pride and um it was there that I really started to lean more into the idea of climate change and addressing climate change I started in high school with watching Inconvenient Truth and that was for me where I decided that was how it was going to have an impact was in uh clean energy and climate change but I didn't really understand how until I got to anent and so after graduating uh in 2012 I went on to do my Master's in PhD in sustainable design and construction at Stanford University and so I really was able to delve deep in Energy Efficiency design of uh efficient buildings High performing buildings and while at a while at Stanford I uh I was able to intern and eventually work at the Allen Group as construction management firm and they had me at San Francisco International Airport where I was helping them understand and strategize on how to go Net Zero Energy for their whole entire airport campus but it became very clear to me that kind of as a role and as I was learning I was doing my PhD I wanted to have my own thing I wanted to create something that was addressing the challenges I saw in the in the Energy Efficiency space and that was around the idea of diversity in Energy Efficiency space and also the focus or lack thereof within the small commercial space in minority communities in particular and what I saw was that a lot of companies out there were focused on large scale commercial buildings but smaller commercial buildings building buildings under 25,000 feet make up over 92% of the commercial building stock and 50% of this commercial energy usage so it's like if we're not as the industry focusing on them at all how are we ever going to reach our climate goals so that's why I created Gemini Energy Solutions the core Energy Solutions is to democratize the clean energy transition the best way to give is is our our core technology conserve which is focused on the small commercial building space and provides investment grade ashr level two energy audits for commercial buildings what that means is when we give you a report you can take that and get a loan to uh upgrade your building right so it gives you kind of the cost analysis the savings opportunities as well as kind of what is the Net Present Value what is the payback period if you were to to change your lights or if you to upgrades your hva system so all that's in the report that we provide and what's unique about us is that we've energy audit actually has three components it has the data collection the analysis and the report writing and historically in in today's industry you hire one person to do all of it and it's usually it's energy engineer who understands the energy analysis and then can do the data collection and a report writing however that's really costly right that's a special kind of skill set you need not just higher education but also many years of experience to be that energy engineer and we just quite frankly don't have enough of them across the country nor in anywhere other than dense Metro population so R America small towns don't have access to energy Engineers to do Commercial Energy audits so what we've done is our technology automates the technical side of it and doing so decouples these three components so now we can hire and train people for individual um skill sets and and right siiz those skill sets so instead of having to have an energy energy engineer do everything we our technology Auto makes the analysis and report writing and then we hire people locally to do the data collection we call them data capture Specialists and these folks need a much lower level of um technical expertise they can be returning citizens they can be um high schoolers or college students right it it drastically increases the the option pool for people who can do this work which really just embodies what Gemini is trying to do which is use the word democratize which is increase the number of people who can have a meaningful impact in this clean energy transition and how has your software been received and what impact has it had what we've been seeing is several impacts the first is that small commercial businesses can now obtain energy audits which otherwise before were way too expensive we're talking thousands of dollars while we're at hundreds of dollars so significant drop in cost additionally we've seen nonprofits who are focused on clean energy space or want to be focused in the clean or move into the clean energy space are now able to provide this service to their Community where before there was nothing they could do right they didn't have someone or they and they cann't afford someone with that level expertise on their staff those have been the two biggest impacts what we're hoping to move into is impacting utilities and allowing them the opportunity to uh use our technology to look at from a Enterprise scale and help them in their efforts to decarbonize and Electrify the grid by having a better understanding of what's going on on the ground in communities that have been historically hard to reach and hard to serve and what were the challenges that you faced from the beginning from the starting of Gemini Solutions and how have you overcome them you know there's the standard challenges of any entrepreneur right of any new business right but uh being specific to our work was there's a lack of comfort right in change around what has already been done right so a lot of our work has been convincing folks that we're not trying to replace energy Engineers um there's still a need for them a critical need for them what we're trying to do is reach the folks that energy Engineers were not serving previously there's also been a lack of belief in the value right um of small businesses of nonprofits of faith-based buildings and there everyone acknowledges there's a need there and we all talk about it but from a business perspective no one wants to support that work everyone says oh that's not not going to bring the most profit Etc so we have this um kind of tension between what is good business and what is good for the community what is good for the country what is good for reaching our climate goals and so what we've been doing to address that I guess let me bring it all home uh is is really going with our success disproving this work right disproving the idea that you can't make money by working with these groups you can't make money with by working with a black church or you can't make money with working with a small restaurant or a nonprofit it's like that's not the case you can you just have to think about it in a different way you can't you can't go about it in with the same approach with the same mindset you have um and one of the things about us is how can technology change those Dynamics allowing us to lower the price points um streamline efforts and create more value where in places where it was perceived to be quite frankly not valuable enough and can you share a success story so two I I'll share one about energy audit and one around what we've also been developing with a what we call clean energy Hub which I'll talk more about one success story is uh family-owned restaurant Pizzeria in Northern California but in what we call a South Bay they were really struggling with their bills right they had this old really old equipment and they were actually leasing the space so they weren't they didn't own the building and so we did an energy audit for them of their site and then with that we worked with them with their building owner to replace the HVAC units of their of the building and the owner saw as beneficial because one there was um some Financial incentives from the state of California but two he recognized that if he didn't do it now and they failed it's G to be a lot more costly to do an emergency fix than it was to do a planned um retrofit and so two years after we did this upgrade and helped and and introduced them to the contractors to do all the work I ran into to him at a restaurant and he was with some friends and he stopped me he's like hey oh my gosh um our bills are so much lower we were able to Electrify the rest of our equipment with this it's been going great thank you so much so that was like a really great moment to see kind of like two years later he remembered me and was just like still very excited about the work that we did for them the other great example is what we're doing with clean energy hubs which is conserve actually automates um and creates a feasibility report for a revenue generating microG grid that is Energy Efficiency solar battery storage and EV charging stations so that now the community anchor that we work with can generate revenue and put it back into their Community our first um full demonstration of this is with Glad Tidings Church of God in Christ in Hayward California and they are been a great partner over the years in developing this and we're actually going to be breaking ground this summer uh so by September we should H have everything completed the charging stations solar Etc and it's really exciting because we're estimating that oh roughly $300,000 a year is going to be coming into the community to help accelerate clean energy adoption in this community that has historically not been served with Energy Efficiency with solar and there's been no charging stations in their in their community so they're going to be the first to provide charging stations which we hope will also accelerate people's adoption of electric vehicles because who wants to purchase an electric vehicle if there's no place to charge where they live these are all things that we're really excited um have happened or are happening um that we think are going to be a great example for others to learn from replicate and hopefully we can see some significant change in this way in this movement throughout the country thank you for watching New Perspective Spotlight series if you like our content please consider subscribing to our social media channel and follow our podcast on your favorite streaming platform thanks