Transcript:

Steve Eaves (00:09)
Welcome to the Future of Power podcast, where we explore how fault managed power is revolutionizing energy distribution and driving a smarter, safer, and more sustainable future. As the inventors of fault managed power, fault server is at the forefront of this transformation. With FMP now part of the National Electric Code, this breakthrough technology is entering the mainstream, unlocking new possibilities in power delivery.

In this podcast, we bring together industry experts, innovators, and thought leaders to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and game-changing potential of FMP. Join us as we have meaningful conversations, share insights, and explore what’s next in the future of power.

James Eaves (00:55)
So our customers typically have really hard electrification problems. And what we found over the years are that these problems are often super interesting as well as really important for the world. So we decided to create this podcast as a way of sharing what we’re learning with the community and when it’s appropriate, also explaining how digital electricity can help. In this first episode, we’re going to explore one of the most pressing electrification challenges in the country today, but it’s not related data centers or EV chargers, though we’re definitely going to discuss those use cases in future episodes.

But it’s as impactful. In fact, it’s going to affect the lives and finances of at least 80 million people in North America. It’s the challenge of replacing gas with electricity for power and heating and cooking. New York City is the epicenter of this effort. About 70 % of the nearly 4 million households in New York City still use natural gas for heating and cooking. But for regulatory and infrastructure reasons, those households now need to rapidly transition to electricity.

And what you’re going to see today is that this is an enormously difficult task using traditional electrical methods. Then during the second half of the episode, we’re going to discuss how digital electricity can radically simplify this task. Joining me today are three people that have a very deep understanding of what’s going on there. Steve Eaves is a CEO and founder of Volt Server and the inventor of digital electricity.

His invention and promotion of digital electricity led the NEC to create an entirely new class of power called fault managed power. And this is the first time they created a new class of power nearly 50 years. So it was an enormous accomplishment. And that’s why you’ll often hear people referring to digital electricity and fault managed power interchangeably. We also have two guests from Southwire, one of North America’s largest wire and cable manufacturers, including digital electricity cable. In fact, about half of all homes in North America have Southwire cable inside them. So we’re super.

honored to have them with us today. First, we have Bill Fowler, Director of Business Development for EV Infrastructure. He also has around 20 years of experience in the construction industry, so he has a very holistic understanding of how power distribution impacts the sort of retrofit we’re going to talk about today. We also have Joe Fossett, who is a Manager of Business Development in Bill’s group. And conveniently for us, he was also a Local 3 Electrician in New York City for 15 years, so he a very visceral understanding of an electrification project in New York City.

All right, so let’s dive right into it. Steve, we’ve spent a lot of time over the last year in the electric rooms of very old buildings in New York City. Can you level set us and just give the audience an overview of what exactly the challenge is in New York City, what’s going on, what’s driving it, and why so hard?

Steve Eaves (03:33)
Yeah, thanks, James. I feel like I should start with one of the really important items from that experience. These buildings are actually pretty nice inside. They’re pretty well built. I found them pretty clean, except when we go in some of the bowels of the buildings like the electrical rooms, which is a whole other story, but they do. They have a big problem there and they’re trying to upgrade buildings and also take care of folks day to day life while they’re doing it. Right. So disruption is a big part of the problem.

So you’re trying to upgrade really old electrical systems for new appliances and not try to displace the people living there at the same time.

James Eaves (04:14)
Why

do we need to upgrade them? What’s the situation? Why do these buildings need to upgrade their electrical?

Steve Eaves (04:20)
Well, you know, I think I think the top line item that people often talk about is local law 97. And that’s the decarbonization effort going on in the city. And it has a series of stages in it. And buildings will be fined for their carbon usage over a period of years coming up. It actually started in 2024. And as we approach 20, 2030, it get the fines get really steep.

But I think what we learn there is it’s actually a bigger problem than that. Some of the buildings that are there, actually many of the buildings, also suffer from very antiquated gas lines inside the building. And we found that a good chunk of them have been shut down. So the gas systems have been shut down in the buildings. And then the people have lost their gas cooking. They often still have heat because that’s centralized in the basement.

But it’s a pretty tough problem. mean, it’s a combination of environmental concerns, but also just the practical aspects of post-war era buildings that have old gas line systems. And when there’s a leak in one of those things, it’s almost impossible to find it. So when somebody reports something that smells like gas, the city comes in and there’s a series of tests they run. They run pressure tests.

The feedback that we got is it’s almost impossible to pass that test old building.

James Eaves (05:49)
Yeah, one of the stats that really shocked me when we first started looking at this market was the fact that the median age of a building, like a high rise in New York City, is 90 years old. so these buildings were simply not designed to move so much electricity through them. It’s like 70 % of the buildings are gas, are still using gas for cooking and heating. And now with local law 97 and just failing gas lines,

suddenly you have to increase the amount of energy or electricity moving these buildings by four or 500%. And that’s just what we’ll see is that’s just physically, it’s just practical in many cases.

Steve Eaves (06:32)
I remember one more that we had talked about in the past that the with local law 97 looming in the future with fines coming up and just the concept of, you know, gas systems being antiquated and those gas systems also feed steam boilers and the steam boilers are old and the pipes that go up into the apartments from the steam boilers are also very old. The owners of the buildings are stuck with this quandary of.

Okay, I maybe have, I have four or five years left in the operation of my boiler before it completely fails or becomes impractical to repair. At this point, do I just bite the bullet and upgrade everything to heat pumps?

James Eaves (07:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So OK, so imagine a bunch of these buildings, right? They have to decide it’s not worth it. They’re not going to take the chance to invest in a gas boiler for next five years, and they’re going to electrify. So Joe, you’re an electrician in New York City for a long time. I imagine a building owner calls you and basically says, listen, we have 40 amp panels.

We want to upgrade, we want to install heat pumps and induction stoves. Take us through the process of what it’s going to be like transitioning that building to a fully electrified building using traditional electrical practices.

Joe Fawcett (08:07)
All right. Yeah, thanks, James. When you think about modifying, renovating a building and upgrading the electrical service, the heating, cooling, and the cooking are really our biggest electric demand factors in the dwelling unit. in these old existing buildings, there is not space to really run new risers because I’d need to not only increase conduit, but also get

larger wires through these buildings and the added a complicated factors that they’re occupied, right? As a, as a landlord doesn’t want to take units out of rent use to upgrade them. So there’s a significant cost and time pains involved in trying to upgrade those, you know, kind of the old fashioned conventional way where we’re going to, you know, maybe change that up to a hundred amp service that are, that is, is a big.

a big detriment to trying to do this, And so that’s where the fault-managed power that shows a lot of advantages, if that makes sense to everybody.

James Eaves (09:12)
Yeah, and so what about, so you had the feeder problem, right? You don’t have enough space in the feeder. And what about, like, do these buildings have enough service typically, or does that have to be upgraded also?

Joe Fawcett (09:26)
Yeah, right. So if I’m upgrading the capacity of each unit, that’s then going to cascade into the service in a seller coming from Con Edison. Right now we need to look at does Con Edison have enough power on that local network to supply if you were going to upgrade it to actually be able to in a timely fashion. You know, might be a years long process for the utility to allocate the amount of power that you’re needing to change that building over.

using conventional methods.

James Eaves (09:57)
Yeah. Yeah. And Bill, what about like, so you have this, the electrician gets in there and you have this problem about just the feeders not having enough space in the feeders and probably have to upgrade the service. But from a GC’s perspective, like, you know, what other pains like points to, you know, do you see?

Bill Fowler (10:18)
Well, and James, have a good question, but, uh, what you’re seeing from a general contractor standpoint is again, these buildings are a hundred years old. They’re said 9,800 years old. So typically what they allocate space for bringing power up in the building back then was, is not at, you know, not adequate for today’s standards. So, you know, you see quite a bit of those buildings where people have gone back and used the elevator shafts. They’ve used, you know, other methods of getting that power up and

Yeah, I’ve dealt with situations where your riser was full. was no option to either go outside or, or inside. What do you want to do? You’ve got to get that power up through there. Just to Joe’s point, the utility may not even have the service to be able to upgrade that much. As you said, a lot of these panels are 40 amps in the day for that, you know, one light bulb, whatever. Now you’re trying to go to a hundred or so it’s, it’s times how many thousands of apartments are in there. So that’s a big undertaking, but.

Joe Fawcett (11:03)
Yeah.

Bill Fowler (11:17)
Also is your, your, your dealing with a hundred year old buildings, which you have other problems like asbestos and stuff like that. So you start getting in and tearing things out, you get into abatement issues. So again, our older buildings sometimes can be a ticking time bomb and what you, you don’t want to touch things, lead paint, you know, asbestos. So there’s all these other factors when you, know, you could take an apartment out every floor, make a new riser, but look at what you may disturb and now have to move everybody out. So.

Older buildings really have their unique challenges and not only just the way they’re built, lack of riser space, but also materials that were used back in the day. They’re not allowed today. Yeah.

James Eaves (11:58)
Yeah, just one project we were working on recently. Their plan, the issue they have is they have to build these new risers. They have hundreds of units. so it’s going to take about a week of work to build the new feeder and the branch circuits into the apartments. And so what they’re doing is they have to move these tenants out about a dozen at a time.

you know, cycle them out of their apartments into these temporary apartments that they have to build to house these people for the week while they’re, you know, while they don’t have heat and they can’t do cooking and they don’t have, you know, inside their apartments. And so the cycling, right? The cycling adds months, not only does it add months to your timeline, but now they also have to deal with all these like, just the human relation, like management of dealing with moving these people in and out of their apartments for, know.

for several months.

Bill Fowler (13:01)
It, that is a logistical nightmare. had to deal with that when I worked at a GT in the days, you’re restacking a building that we had to move people off one floor to make it, call the float floor. Right. So I have to move everybody down there to have them be able to have a space to work, know, tear the floor apart, remodel the whole floor and then move them back. you’re looking at a hundred, 200 people before, and I’m having to pay extra to do it overnight because I just can’t not have those employees working for a week while I move them.

And the same thing with the disruption of these customers is moving them at that time factor of moving that one project and 10 store building took me a year. Wow. You know, so I’m having to move them down, redo the floor, rip everything out, demo, put everything back and then move them back. then, you know, move the next floor down and repeat the process. That was a year long for 10, 10 floors. That was a year long process. So yeah, I mean, think of this at how many can you do at a time?

know, apartments and move, but it’s just the logistical. It is a logistical nightmare, you’re with people’s personal stuff.

Joe Fawcett (14:05)
Right, to Bill’s point, in addition to just the management, moving people in and out, the additional expense of covering the cost of all that, right, you’re gonna have some, you’re basically decreasing your number of units that are rentable at any given time, right? And that’s a a significant dent in the bottom line on a owner of a building.

Steve Eaves (14:25)
Yeah, one thing we heard on the contractor side a lot is that that the labor practices call for you pay everybody no matter what, whether they’re standing, waiting or whatever. And it’s really hard to coordinate all the people. Sometimes you’re you’re supposed to have the apartment for a day and they were supposed to let you in. But they’re like grandma shows up or something like that. And then they change their mind. Then you get people stacked up that you still have to pay.

Joe Fawcett (14:52)
Yes, Steve, to that point, the labor rate in New York City is not the highest in the country, but it’s, probably top two or three. You know, the prevailing wage there is breaks down to cost the contractor about $2 per minute per person. Wow. $120 bucks per hour. And we were doing a job that was a new, well, it was an old renovation, but we had converted a

a commercial building to apartment buildings to 720 units in downtown Manhattan. It was a commercial building that had sustained a lot of damage during 9-11. so the project was full demo, and then we built out the apartment. So more or less new construction, dealing with some of the old aspects. But this was at a time when a new type of circuit breaker was required to be installed.

in bedroom for bedrooms for circuits, feed in bedrooms and they were, they were defective. They turned out from the manufacturer. There had been a recall on them. So the building was now fully occupied and I had to have, you know, basically two or three guys stick back probably for about three months after the job was over to go in and change those breakers out, you know, that the manufacturer resupply us.

And on those coordination issues, well, now we have people living in easy that so I couldn’t just send my people there. need to have personnel from the building there also, you know, so the superintendent is maintenance staff. We kind of had three teams of people that just had to go to apartment to apartment. And again, you schedule it and then you show up and it’s like, oh, that person had hot yoga that day. And, know, the other person was was on a trip to Europe.

and you couldn’t get back in. So you just had to keep kind of doubling back. couldn’t work in a really smooth sequence, right? Which just drives your timeline down the drain.

James Eaves (16:43)
Yeah, I did this quick back of the envelope calculation because what we heard, the planning for this particular project was, okay, we’re going to move them out. We need to be in the building, in their apartments for about a week, about five days. But it takes two days to move the people in and out. They have to move them in there and then they move them out. They clean up the apartment and they move the next group in. So basically you have two days at the front end and the back end of the work in the unit.

that is just moving people in and out. And so you’re working the building five days, and then you’re moving people in and out four days. And so almost half the time, it’s just the logistics of moving those tenants around. And so there’s just this incredible value that these guys can create if they can do this work with the tenants in place. Steve, can you, we’ve done a ton of load calculations. That’s really helped me.

understand how tight the constraint is for these guys. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but can you kind of just kind of quickly summarize what it looks like for an average apartment with 40 amps who’s currently using gas, like trying to switch over to electric, just so we can kind of imagine what options they actually have to accomplish that.

Steve Eaves (18:05)
yeah, yeah, that’s an easy one, man, because you know, the replacement of the gas stove with an electric range right there is a 40 amp or a 50 amp circuit. the majority of the panels are 40 amps. So you’ve consumed the entire capacity of the panel box, the load center with with just that one change. And then and then your.

James Eaves (18:31)
Yeah.

Steve Eaves (18:33)
You’re also adding typically a heat pump or what they call a P-TAC heat pump. That’s a unit that fits in a sleeve that goes through the wall of the apartment. And so you have that load too, which we find actually when you run what they call MCA on it, the minimum circuit amps, it turns out that that’s about, for the modern ones, about 2000 VA for that.

So that’s another 10 to 15 amps at 208. So the apartments are usually 208 volts, single phase load centers.

James Eaves (19:17)
So what do do? Like anyone, Joe, Bill, Steve, like if I have, what are my options, you know, as electrical contractor to deal with this if I have a 40 amp panel? I know it’s a stupid question, but I just want to like level set, like what are the options for getting enough power to that unit?

Bill Fowler (19:39)
Well, like I you got to upgrade your service, but you know, it basically the person in the partner is going to become their own load sharing device. You’re going to unplug one thing to plug another one in. That’s, mean, being honest, that’s what happens quite a bit is that you’ve only got so much power and, uh, they, they become their own load sharing, uh, system, but you’re having to upgrade that. So you’ve got to look at, uh, know, rise constraints, but that’s where the digital power, I think is the thing is that you can get those.

Get what you need up there. Um, and a smaller cable. mean, you look at just the physical constraints of bringing any new service up. There’s just no room. Uh, and that’s where we saw, think we shared the story before about Europe is that, know, how did cable tray get so started in Europe as a support structure? It was the efficiency of being able to use 100 % of its fill area versus.

conduit where you’re going to use 40%. So you think about that is that if we do in New York, which they require a lot of times conduit, you can only use 40 % of its area. So by using the digital power data, we can put that in a shaft environment, a riser type cable. You’re not having to put it in something that’s already constraining even more.

James Eaves (20:57)
Sorry. I don’t mean to cut you off. This is good transition. I just want to give a lot of people listening probably don’t know what digital electricity is yet. And so maybe we should take a step back. Steve, so we’re facing this problem. guess this is like the big punch, right? Where these contractors are facing this problem where they suddenly got a, they have 40 amp panels. They really need 100 amp panels, right? And so they have to upgrade the service. They have to get a new feeder up there.

They have to upgrade the panel and there’s just no space to do that. So they either have these renovations that take years. mean, just waiting for Con Ed for a service upgrade could take years. So what we’re leading to is that digital electricity can vastly or dramatically simplify this. So could you do us a favor and

Step, you know, give us a little background about the history of digital electricity, what it is, you know, why you invented it and how it can like, how it, you know, how it could like help solve this problem.

Steve Eaves (22:06)
Yeah, OK. So you gave a pretty good intro at the beginning. know, it’s digital electricity is is what it sounds like. It’s a digitized version of electrical energy transfer. But in effect, what we do is we we send electricity in what we call a packet, which is a little burst of electrical current. And then.

After that burst, we isolate the transmission lines between a device called a transmit or another device called the receiver and perform a series of tests on those lines. And this happens very quickly, like 500 microseconds in duration. And during that time, we can tell if any type of fault has occurred, whether somebody is even touching the conductors of the line, or if there’s an arc fault or a ground fault, or there’s a resistive fault, like poor connection.

All that is part of the protocol of digital electricity. Why was it invented? It originally started trying to figure out a way to charge electric vehicles on an energized road surface, like a electrical road where voltages are exposed at 300 or 400 volts. And to do that, we had to find a ground up way to distribute electricity so that it could be both powerful and safe, which has always been

the historical compromise in electricity is that you can have really skinny wires at high voltage and sacrifice safety. Or you could be safe at low voltage and sacrifice power. You couldn’t get both. So digital electricity gives you both. It’s high voltage, but it’s also high voltage that you can touch with your hands and it won’t ignite a building surface. So that lets it run with the same practices

as ethernet cable. however you would run an ethernet cable or your USB cable going to your computer, those are the same safety class as digital electricity.

James Eaves (24:14)
I feel, Joe, imagine we’re sitting in a room, you’re hearing about this for the first time, you guys are you’re renovating, retrofitting a building, and Steve just pitched digital electricity to you. What questions do you have? I just love the questions that come up whenever we bring up digital electricity for the first time.

Joe Fawcett (24:40)
Well, I would say at first, it just sounds like witchcraft. It’s magic. But when you start to just think about how electricity works, and understanding how the safety functionality works, if I can pump a much higher voltage through there, I have less power loss through voltage drop, particularly in a situation where I might be starting off from the basement. So that’s a major advantage.

Right, so the first kind of hurdle overcome is just like, how does this work and how is it actually safe? And then once you start to dig into that, you know, and talk to the Steve’s of the world that created it, it’s like, okay, that kind of makes sense, right? But now the next thing is like, okay, is it accepted in practice, right? So you’re okay now in the latest 2023 code, we have a chunk of the code that talks about this and how to deal with it. And so, okay,

The code accepted it as a local authority that go ahead and adopt it.

Steve Eaves (25:39)
and

James Eaves (25:40)
Okay, but New York, like we’re talking about New York and New York hasn’t accepted, I’m gonna be the devil’s advocate here, play devil’s advocate. The New York hasn’t accepted a 2023 code, so why are we talking about installing this in New York? Steve, if you wanna take that.

Steve Eaves (25:56)
Well, we have to like we’ve been installing since 2014 and initially we installed under Article 725 of the electric code and the what we call our generation two products, which is what’s out in the world mostly right now, are what’s called LPS or limited power source qualified products. So they go through a test under a standard called UL 62368-1.

And it tests that they won’t shock somebody or start a fire in a building. And so that’s how we started. Article 7, I call it a grab bag of technologies. There’s all sorts of devices that are covered in Article 725 of the electric code. But it’s confusing because there’s so many things in there. the UL and NFPA.

right, the sort of let’s call it the safety community decided that it would be best to create because it’s such a unique technology class to create a whole new class of electricity that they call class four. As you pointed out, it was about 45 or 50 years ago, the last time they did that. So under that class, it’s a lot clearer, more clear how to do it.

But in areas of the country now, we still have to install under LPS while we’re waiting for the states to adopt the latest code. And right now, I believe New York is still back in 2020, so the 2020 version of the National Electric Code. So one thing is that inspectors have the ability and actually the obligation to consider

newer technologies. we could install under New York City code in as an LPS under class two, article 725. Or what we’re hoping to do is through education to allow the class four to be accepted. And inspectors have the ability to do that, but it will take some education to adopt things in code that are later than the

what the current municipality is using.

Joe Fawcett (28:19)
And anytime you have something new, newer technology coming on board, even though it’s been around for a while, right, is getting the folks educated up because most inspectors, most electricians, even most engineers know what they know when they came in, right? You’ll have code arguments with folks and they’re like, it’s in the code, it’s in the code. like, okay, let’s open up the code. They’re like, I swear it was in the code. It’s like, well, it was 25 years ago when you learned the code, right? When you first started.

But a lot of folks don’t spend a whole bunch of time in the code other than the stuff they’re specifically working on. So when something new is creeping in, the education aspect, and part of why we’re all here today, is to get this information out there and get people thinking about what can be done. And when something makes sense and it’s explained properly, people start to go, OK, that makes sense. How can we?

make this work and where does it fit in this requirement.

Bill Fowler (29:21)
Yeah, that’s, you know, that brings up really good point is code understanding. Can you do it? There’s still so many people out there that, don’t realize you can. I mean, I saw this back when the ethernet, you know, POE came over. We’re saying the same pushback. Can you do that? You know, over a data cable? I mean, it’s accepted now, but it’s back then it was taboos to say, you know, you’re on power over an ethernet cable. there’s already power going over it. It’s just a different, you know, different type. So it’s.

There’s a huge learning curve in industry that we’re so far behind. And you you see these, you talk about pushbacks is the areas and the code that they’ve adopted and what year they’ve adopted. I still have some people in 2016, 2014. It’s 10 years old. It’s, uh, but they just, they’re, uh, you deal with that in the industry is knowledge and who accepts what. And plus New York, think Joe, you’re correct me if I’m wrong, don’t they have you in their own little New York standard that they’d like to fall in under too?

Joe Fawcett (30:21)
Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot better. When I started, we didn’t even follow the National Electric Code. New York City had its own complete electrical code. And then later on, they moved on and adopted the National Code with amendments, which most jurisdictions do. They still sometimes have their own local amendments to the National Code. But it used to be a completely separate code.

James Eaves (30:45)
It’s interesting because we’re saying that it was, there was a learning curve and some hesitance turned towards power over ethernet. now digital electricity, often describe it as it’s like power or ethernet. You install it exactly the same way, but it distributes over 20 times the power over 20 times the distance. you know, in that pair. so people like that, that just can’t be like the last meeting we were in, you know, the guy was just like, just stop. He’s like, this is not star Wars.

Stop talking. Stop saying that.

Steve Eaves (31:16)
They

call it, they call it Martian shit. Martian shit, that’s it.

Bill Fowler (31:21)
It’s so funny. I was just at a conference still with some independent electrical contractors and they’re like, yeah, POE. I’m like, this is not POE. I’m trying to get them to understand it. So you’re right. It’s just that acceptance and that understanding of what it is. That’s a huge hurdle in all of this.

James Eaves (31:42)
Yeah, people can’t even get over like no matter how often you say, they just keep calling it low voltage, low voltage because of the wiring method. we’re like, we just want to constantly say, just want to clarify this is not low voltage. We’re distributing up to 350 volts, but you can install it the same way you install a low voltage cable. And that’s just, you know, after, you know, decades of people associating seven, article seven to five with low voltage DC, it’s just a

You know, it’s going to take a while for people to get out of that mindset.

Bill Fowler (32:16)
Well, it’s funny you say that I’m going to just kind of digress a little bit, but when I first came Southwire, I came from low voltage industry, meaning data. And I got here and they would say low voltage. said, oh yeah, some cat five. They’re like, no, 600 volt. like, said, no, that’s high voltage. I mean, they’re like, no, that’s low voltage. So it’s funny how you say those terms and your background is in, and when you start throwing these out there and you’re soon people saying that, you know, they’re no, that’s 600 volts. No, I’m like, no, I’m talking about data stuff, you know?

James Eaves (32:32)
yeah

Bill Fowler (32:45)
And so it’s even when you say that term, low voltage, it’s what are you referring to? Low voltage power, you know, big 600 volt stuff, or I call big 600, but 600 volt, know, or the digital power or what we call POE. It’s I think we actually, you know, in the code, they’re having to define all those terms because there is confusion. They’re having to separate all that out because of the language that we use in this industry needs to be more refined.

James Eaves (33:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve Eaves (33:13)
What

a 2026 code is trying to clean a lot of it up in a couple of steps. But yeah, the separated into limited energy sections versus lighting and power.

James Eaves (33:26)
Yeah, I don’t want to toot your horn, Steve, but that’s that reorganization of the code is being driven by your invention. I giving you too much credit?

Steve Eaves (33:38)
Yeah, that’s a good chunk of it. Yeah, when fall managed power came along, I think that just tipped the card over. OK, we got to we got to sort this stuff out because yeah, because out out in the field, right? Like it’s it’s a nightmare for licensing boards because they’re trying to figure out how how training is organized, what things are trained as, you know, what traditional wiremen or journeyman class installation versus what they call integrators, which are

typically limited energy or quote, low voltage folks.

Bill Fowler (34:13)
Yeah. And, you know, and Steve, you probably see this as I saw this early in the data days when you’re going from different types of systems. was the manufacturer kind of driving the wiring standard versus the industry. And I think you’re kind of seeing the same thing is, you know, we used to have token ring or ethernet or, know, thin neck, fit neck, you know, ethernet, all these different wiring types. Um, and it was a manufacturer that was driving. There was no really standard tool, you know,

10 base T was ratified and then quarter category cable. And I think you’re kind of going through that whole same evolution with this, even now the code is how to get more specific. Cause I can tell you even at the, at the trade level where they’re teaching us that it’s, it’s so it’s taboo. They don’t know what to really, how to refer it and they’re not teaching it. So it’s something that we got to change in the industry.

Steve Eaves (35:06)
I agree, I agree.

James Eaves (35:08)
Um, okay, Steve. So we, we have this digital electricity or fault managed power product. Um, so now you can. Install a power distribution system that’s can power, you know, an induction stove or a heat pump, um, but allows you to get the power they’re using low voltage wiring methods. So take us like through the scope of work, right. And now and of, of.

retrofitting this whatever, 200 unit building with a bunch of 40 amp panels. Like what happens now? How do they do it?

Steve Eaves (35:48)
Well, I think it starts from looking at the what they call the load letter, right? Looking at what the loads are in the building and what is coming into the building, the service for the building. And, you know, part of this technology is not just getting the power from one place to another. It’s how you manage the power. And so the.

The increase in electrical demand in buildings is way beyond what we call brute force technique. So you just can’t slam it in there with a hammer. You have to think about how you use the power in modern buildings in order to make it all work, because there just isn’t enough out there to get it done, particularly in New York City, right? Because you go out in the street and the

The vaults or where the transformers are for the building are often under the ground. And to ask for more power means they have to dig those things up and shut the road down. So you’re talking years. You know, I think James, we’ve seen that in a number of conversations. It’s a couple of years just to start talking about the utility about that.

James Eaves (37:04)
Yeah, they say if you have to talk to Con Ed, everything stops. That’s they say. If you can help us avoid having to call Con Ed, that’s a huge win because it just stops everything for two years.

Steve Eaves (37:17)
Yeah. So we look, you know, often what we find out is that the service entrance can actually do it with load management. So if you think about, if you think about the aspect of the building, the design point for the apartment is a cold Thanksgiving day. So, you know, all it’s people are running a lot of appliances and if it’s cold, then your new heat pump is going to be cranking.

So that’s kind of the design point and using what they call demand factors in the code, which is how you don’t just line up all the loads and put them on top of each other, sum them all together. They’re not all on at the same time. So applying the demand factor for the building and some load management, what you might do is if the electric induction range is drawing a lot of power, then you’ll bring down, electronically turn down the heat pump.

And nobody noted, for one thing, you’re already making heat with that range and the building doesn’t get cold right away. For the short period of time you’re bringing up, you know, the peas and the mashed potatoes and boiling water, you’re putting a little bit of heat in the apartment and you can turn it off. So that’s part of the process is to look at the incoming service entrance for the building and then see what kind of load management practices need to be done.

And then you find out whether you need to upgrade the service. So we often find out that you don’t. You don’t have to upgrade it if you use load management techniques. So once you have that, then you have your power demand that’s required. And as I mentioned, there’s transmitters and receivers. The transmitter systems look like a data center server rack. If anybody’s pictured those, 19-inch rack IT.

racks that are in the basement electrical room. And they project power often through places that you wouldn’t expect because it’s the wires are so small and using class two practices or class four practices, you can put them in things like trash chutes or laundry chutes. And that being said, you still need to follow wiring practices that are proper for that installation class, for example.

You know, riser rated cable proper fastening along the way, you know, following following code practices for that installation class. It’s not required for class four class two power. But as I mentioned, you still need to use the right cable and attachment practices. It’s also another big one is that the spacing requirements for

James Eaves (39:53)
What about conduit?

Steve Eaves (40:13)
Class two or class four are are they don’t have the same requirements as what we call chapter three power, which would be same MC cable metal clad where you have to provide separation. So you could be pretty tightly packed because it’s so efficient. The power transfer. And then one technique that is popular in the building as you’re transferring from a vertical riser to a hallway.

There’s a number of different raceway products that blend into the building architecture so you have for example cove molding that also carries cable. So using that practice they don’t have to tear up the walls and as as you know joe and bill were pointing out sometimes when you tear into a wall you find things you didn’t expect her wanna find so it avoids doing that. And you go.

from there into the apartment. And in many cases, the problem is solved just by powering one of the appliances, like offloading the electric range then provides enough with a little load management sometimes, but it applies enough power to avoid the upgrade to the panel box itself. And in extreme conditions, we can replace the whole power requirements for the apartment.

by a combination of direct DC powering and inversion in the apartment. What I mean by direct DC powering is, as many folks might know, appliances are using direct current inside. When you have like a modern heat pump or a refrigerator or an induction cooktop, they convert AC to DC as it comes through the sheet metal in the appliance.

And then inside the appliance, it’s operating on DC power. So some manufacturers have built DC compatible appliances on the heat pump side, the induction side. So we don’t have to invert. We don’t have to put inverters in that location. And so after that, it’s pretty fast and low disruption level for getting from that basement transmitter location to the appliances upstairs.

James Eaves (42:37)
Yeah, so how long, you know, using traditional methods, right, you’re going in there, you’re, you’re tearing out the panel, putting a new one in, maybe moving around, tearing out the walls, distributing the MC cable. and so they’re in there for days. They have to move the people out. and you know, how long, like, give us an idea of how long it takes to distribute the work.

that has to be done inside an apartment when you’re basically distributing 16 gauge wire through cove molding.

Steve Eaves (43:17)
When the system is set up, like if you take the example of the cooking appliance, the cooking appliance before it’s installed, it has the connections for digital electricity. And so it’s about three to five hours in the apartment. And that includes things using like surface mounting techniques, know, folks quote wire mold raceway.

on the surface of the walls and stuff like that. So it’s pretty quick in the apartment. And I think we’re looking at, including the process of getting in and getting out and all the little details, we’re looking at a three to four week project.

James Eaves (44:07)
Inside the apartment? how long at this day? the building. In the building. Yeah. But so, but one of the keys about using this is that we’re in the apartment, you know, a few hours and the tenant doesn’t have to leave, right? And so you don’t need to set up, uh, like temporary housing for these people, move them in and out. It’s someone comes, you have a, the contractor comes in the middle of the day, pulls that cable and they’re out three hours later.

Steve Eaves (44:37)
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, everything else first, right? You you install the stuff in the car in the basement. You’re not disrupting anybody when you’re doing that work. And then the hallways, it’s a little more disruptive, but you’re still not kicking people out of their own apartments. And so, you know, you get everything done, installed in the hallways and coiled before you even go into the apartments. That’s one crew. And then when you start going in the apartments, you take that coil and you make the final run.

in the apartment and try to get out of there between three and five hours.

Joe Fawcett (45:13)
Yeah, I mean, realistically, it’s not much different than if you were having somebody come in and put in your your internet router. If you’re going to them put the cables in nicely, right?

Steve Eaves (45:23)
Yeah, that’s a good example. It’s a similar IT like practice.

Bill Fowler (45:29)
That’s where it can be scheduled. Yeah, it can be a scheduled process where you’re seeing, know, sale there, like your satellite or ethernet. But yeah, you you see this used quite a bit in Europe. mean, they deal with these older buildings, right? They have buildings a lot older than a hundred years old there. So it’s, you know, we’re seeing those practices there that have been done for years, starting to migrate themselves here.

Steve Eaves (45:55)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think Joe and Bill would agree that when you’re in those buildings, if you are tearing into anything, that’s where the scary stuff happens. Because as soon as you try to tear into walls or expand risers or there’s stuff in there that you might not have wanted to find.

Joe Fawcett (46:16)
Yeah, you’re potentially open up in a whole can of worms, you know. With this, you’re drilling probably one small hole from the corridor into the apartment. And if you really need to, depending on if it’s lead-based paint, you can get drills that have HEPA vacuums as part of it. But if I’m starting to chase channels out of walls and everything else, I could potentially be setting myself up for having to be in abatement zone.

Bill Fowler (46:40)
Yeah.

James Eaves (46:40)
Yeah, that’s a point.

Bill Fowler (46:42)
Well, it’s just that is lead paint. There’s there’s just like you said, it’s just where you start going down the list of the things that have been banned that could be in those buildings.

James Eaves (46:53)
Yeah, yeah, these guys were worried about us. You know, they didn’t even want to put screws in the wall. When we were talking about putting molding, they’re like, OK, but we had to work on ways so they didn’t actually have to put a screw into the ceiling because, you know, the whole building’s hot. Yeah.

Joe Fawcett (47:08)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Eaves (47:10)
some things.

Bill Fowler (47:11)
up outside is how many graveyards you found in New Orleans or Boston or whatever. People didn’t mark graves back a hundred and so years ago. So, you know, I’ve actually had some other companies that are well known, the EV market, they’ve dealt with that right now, digging up stuff out. And that totally stops the project for years. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just finding a graveyard. mean, you’ll be surprised at how many family gravesites, know, they’re still in the city that, uh, that used to be part of the country and that’s just, uh,

Steve Eaves (47:15)
Yeah.

James Eaves (47:30)
Dead body? Yeah.

Bill Fowler (47:42)
It happens all the time.

Steve Eaves (47:43)
Hmm.

James Eaves (47:44)
So I’m going to sum it up. And so in terms of the scope of work, we’re basically installing, you go into basement, you have a building that has, using traditional methods, they would need a service upgrade to build new panels and new electrical risers. But what we’re saying is there’s this alternative world where you use digital electricity and you’re basically installing something that looks like server racks, 42-U racks in the basement.

you connect that to your service, that transforms your service energy or electricity into this thing we call fault-managed power, digital electricity, that now you can distribute using 16-gauge wire through the same raceways that you’d use for communication wire, as if you were installing internet access points. Get into the apartment, you’re using cold molding,

Quick connects to power this receiver that converts the power back to the form of energy that the stove or the heat pump uses. You’re in and out of the apartment in three hours. And on top of that, by connecting everything with digital electricity, you’ve networked all the appliances. Anything that’s powered by digital electricity is now networked by digital electricity. So you can use these sophisticated load management strategies to make sure

that the total demand for the building at any point in time doesn’t exceed the current service rating. And so no phone call to Con Ed. Did I miss anything?

Joe Fawcett (49:22)
I mean that sounds pretty complete. The thing that really makes it click for me is that load management aspect. Right? Because when this first came on and started to investigate it’s like, well, watts are watts, right? If the stove needs a certain amount of watts to heat stuff up, they’re coming from somewhere. Whatever voltage it’s at, my amps are going to correspond accordingly. So where is the gain? And really it becomes being able to do that load management, load sharing.

and managing those devices is where you can keep that capacity down.

James Eaves (49:56)
Yeah, this is just weird empirical thing we would try to figure out. It’s like people, you know, the service actually come into the building is often, there’s often plenty of it to power everything. it’s how you do the load calculation and the other limitations, just the feeder, the rating, the feeders. so if you can manage, you actually have a significant amount of energy that you can, if you budget it correctly, you can upgrade these, these.

These even these 40 amp apartments, you can fully electrify them. That’s what I find amazing.

Bill Fowler (50:33)
Yeah. James, I think you’re going to see more of that in this industry. I we talk about our infrastructure, our grid, there’s other demands besides just what you’re talking about here is EVL, all these other renewable, all this stuff that we’re seeing out there is our infrastructure sometimes just can’t get it there. So, you know, we always think when we design stuff, the a hundred percent, you know, all the time it’s designed that way that it’s going to use that 200 amp or a hundred amp service, but they’re not right there. They’re not using all that power one time.

And so now with this new, you know, like Joe says it’s, load management. That’s, that’s the new key is that using the energy that we do have efficiently. And, I think you’re going to see more of that. And this digital power is, is a part of that transition into that type of world is, you know, really managing and knowing what we’re using.

And you’re seeing more from, and all these industries, smart breakers where now they’re looking at the power usage is what they’re actually using on a circuit. Can we download or can we turn it off? Can we do those things? I think we’re just getting smarter. going from the, you know, the, the hammer to the more refined thing. You know, it’s always bigger hammer works. Well, the bigger hammer doesn’t work in this way. Let’s get more, more practical with this.

James Eaves (51:51)
Yeah, we’re more constrained. It’s like, yeah, 18 months to get, you know, switch gear.

Bill Fowler (51:53)
Darn.

Well, there’s a lot of industry factors like that. You know, it’s, love people were talking love to get EV, but they’re waiting nine months for a transformer. Uh, you know, I’ve actually seen some charges out there on a generator or a battery or solar system because it can’t get utility power yet. So it is a give and take, but, uh, you’re going to see things transition. And I think this is just part of that, but it’s just grasping in the education is, is a huge part of this grasping the concept.

James Eaves (52:07)
Yeah.

Joe Fawcett (52:25)
Yeah.

James Eaves (52:27)
Yeah, there’s, and there’s people listening to this right now. There’s like this, there’s an electrician or, know, or, you know, listening to this podcast right now. And there’s a question they want to ask is there, there, there’s something they see or they’re suspicious of that. Doesn’t work with digital electricity. So Bill, Joe, if you guys could do me a favor and just like throw out some hard questions, like if put yourself in, in that person’s shoes right now and try to imagine what question,

that these more skeptical people have right now about digital electricity.

Bill Fowler (53:02)
Joe, you wanna go first?

Joe Fawcett (53:03)
Yeah, sure. Just a couple out there, One, we broached on this before, is the building authority okay with me doing this? Am I going to get into inspection hassles down the road? Two, does this actually work? Does it make sense? Where has it been used before? What kind of examples? Because I don’t want to be the guinea pig and do all this and be on a hook for a system that has issues. So what case studies are there out there?

Another one that kind of pops up and Steve brought up on the licensing requirements is who installs it, right? Because it is kind of this weird game. You can install it like it’s low voltage, but it’s not low voltage. And a lot of jurisdictions kind of have a line at 50 volts for being an electrician versus a low voltage contractor.

James Eaves (53:55)
Okay, that’s a great. So Steve, we want to take, have three questions. He had, you know, what’s the inspector going to say when they see this? Who installs it? Where has it been installed? Are they going to be guinea pig if they use this? I mean, who installs it?

Steve Eaves (54:09)
Yeah, right now there’s we crossed a thousand large buildings for the installation base for digital electricity a little while back. So it’s installed in the majority of NFL stadiums in America, a good chunk of the major airports, some big hotels and smart building applications.

There’s some kind of cool case studies on that. our latest market, also indoor farming, And this is one of our latest markets is what we call electrification, where we’re going sort of deeper into it. Before we were powering things like lighting and controls and small appliances and things like that. And with the new FMP standard,

James Eaves (54:47)
Yeah, greenhouses. Yep.

Steve Eaves (55:05)
what we call our generation three products, now we’re at the point where we could power really big things like induction ranges. So I would say that we often educate and look at our customer base and how our customers have traditionally been folks that are very, very dependent on reliable power. You know, we started in telecom.

You the customers are the major phone carriers and moved into buildings. And those buildings have been operating like hotels have been operating for years and years now on digital electricity very well. So I think we cover that a lot of that with education. The code again, I think it was a really good point that folks, they’re not always up to date on the latest things coming out in code. So that’s sort of a joint effort.

with manufacturers and industry organizations and also the safety organizations for education. And there’s been a lot of good cooperation there. Yeah, I’ve always found out that inspectors are, if you don’t blind sight them, if you kind of give them little advanced notice, hey, there’s something going on here that’s a little different. don’t we do a little education on it rather than just cornering an inspector.

You know in fifteen minutes and trying to get a check on a box it works a lot better.

James Eaves (56:36)
Yeah, and everything’s listed, right? You can look at the nameplate of our products and. They’re listed.

Steve Eaves (56:42)
Yeah, yeah, that’s the beginning of it to make sure that we is listed equipment, right, to be put in buildings. But it’s, you know, digital electricity like we used to, you know, we heard the Martian shit comment. It’s not intuitive. It’s very different.

Bill Fowler (57:02)
Well, you know, here’s some things I think, you know, my question, habit, know, how you overcoming the habit. But, you know, a lot of people, when we introduce basket tray or a well of our tray into, you know, if it’s so good, why isn’t everybody using it? You know, to Steve, so how would you answer that question is that this is so good. Why wasn’t everybody using this? Why isn’t it a widespread use thing now?

James Eaves (57:29)
Nice question, Bill. We get that one a lot too.

Bill Fowler (57:32)
Stay

safe.

Steve Eaves (57:33)
We do. We do get that a lot. I think it’s it’s a big world out there in electrical infrastructure. You know, sometimes I say this in talks, you know, is that if you look out on the street right now, it looks pretty much the same now as it did 100 years ago. Like it’s not an industry that that changes very fast. And so.

I think the reason why it’s not out there everywhere is because just everywhere is a really big place in electrical infrastructure. You know, as I mentioned, we’re in like a thousand buildings and that’s just still a drop in the bucket. People have, you know, there are a lot of people running, running to that. haven’t heard about it before. Um, so I think that’s a big part of it is just moving a way of doing things. AC distribution has been around from the beginning. Um, and.

you know, change in the way folks do things like, you know, it’s a lot easier to to just stamp a print from a previous building than it is to look at a new way to do it. And it’s often it’s often brought in by the owners, like the owners who are the ones who in the end benefit for improved infrastructure. It’s not really the folks that are putting it in because they make they they’re actually it’s less risky for the folks if they just do it the same way they did it last time. So it’s sort of a combined effort of being

pulled through by the folks that are the ones that really benefit from the change in educating.

Bill Fowler (59:05)
Well, that’s where I saw a lot of that is it’s, it’s why I said the word habit first. You know, they’re very comfortable with what they’ve done before and they know how to do it because they’ve done it before and they know how to bid it that you introduce something new. They, they don’t know how to even bid that kind of work because it’s something they’ve never done before. One thing that I can tell you that went back to, and I think it’s education. If you know, we refer back to the cable trays, you know, I never did have a, a.

engineer who really did a building with cable trays as a structure, you know, to carry the electrical cable. And I kept digging in as at their educational level in college, they never had a use case where they had to calculate tray versus conduit. That’s why they all use conduit. The base of their education, university electrical, you know, when they’re their electrical engineering degree was calculate everything using conduit. And so, you know, even back to this, they’re calculating all their loads based on

AC power, you know, what’s used today. So even that the engineering level, it’s something new is that how do you calculate this stuff? So it’s again, it is, it’s back to the basic education and, and habits is how do we break those and get this out there.

James Eaves (1:00:16)
You like to get a bucket. Steve, you have to set up some endowments. That’s what I’m hearing.

Steve Eaves (1:00:24)
I’m sure you’d be first in line, brother.

James Eaves (1:00:27)
All right, lightning round. This just came to me. we have like, we’re starting a podcast, you know, I love podcasts and there’s always intro music, you know? So, and we’re targeting engineers and people like you. So Bill, what type of music should we use for intro music?

Bill Fowler (1:00:47)
I’m sorry.

James Eaves (1:00:51)
saved by the bell.

Joe Fawcett (1:00:52)
Joe! went ahead and phoned

Bill Fowler (1:00:57)
It’s back to the future and I don’t know. You gotta wear shades kind of thing. Maybe.

Joe Fawcett (1:01:04)
my god. Sorry about that. That pops the top of my head just because more recent is Thunder by Imagine Dragons.

James Eaves (1:01:14)
that’s my son, one of my son’s favorite songs. Steve.

Steve Eaves (1:01:19)
You guys know what a theremin is?

James Eaves (1:01:21)
No. No idea.

Steve Eaves (1:01:24)
It’s like an instrument that has two long wires sticking up vertically. You put your hands next to it, it goes, woo. Beginning of Star Trek.

Bill Fowler (1:01:32)
yeah.

James Eaves (1:01:35)
Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, okay. The right answer is electroswing. Okay.

Bill Fowler (1:01:42)
Okay.

James Eaves (1:01:44)
No idea. He’s Steve’s a CEO, so sounds like we’re going to have like antenna music or whatever he’s talking about.

Steve Eaves (1:01:53)
Intent of music. That’s Star Trek 2. Yeah.

James Eaves (1:01:58)
All right. Well, we’ll leave it there. Thanks so much, Southwire. We’re so honored to be able to do something with you guys on this. You guys have such a great reputation in the market. So thanks again. that’s the end of our first podcast. And thanks for helping us set it up.

Joe Fawcett (1:02:13)
Thanks for having us. Thank you.

Steve Eaves (1:02:16)
See you guys. See ya.