What's next? At Moss Adams, that question inspires us to help people and their businesses strategically define and claim their future. As one of America's leading accounting, consulting, and wealth management firms, our collaborative approach creates solutions for your unique business needs. We leverage industry-focused insights with the collective technical resources of our firm to elevate your performance. Uncover opportunity and move upward at Mossatoms.com. Every day, we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. It's a calling. Agents answer the call, working together to keep our country and communities safe. If you are ready for a new mission, join U.S. Border Patrol and go beyond. Learn more at cpp.gov/careers. All right, so we're talking today with the co-founders of a company called KiteX. Jesse and I, as you're seeing right here on the screen, have actually put together one of their win-catchers. We're going to talk all about this really cool machine and how the company got started. Thank you so much, guys, for joining us. Thanks for having us. Okay, so you guys are in Denmark. We were in Denmark in 2018, 2019, a very windy island place. It seems like this is a really perfect design for that place. I remember I saw a lot of wind turbines, and one night we slept in a windmill. Wow. So wind is definitely a part of your culture. Yeah, definitely is. Yeah. So is that where you got the idea for this, that you happened to be living in a place where this is a great way to catch energy? Yeah, I mean, I guess definitely when you are at university, for instance, and you work with aerodynamics, everything is focused on wind turbines. Also both of us, we are kite surfers, so we are used to using the wind for, yeah, sport activities, right? And I think that was actually where you could say the initial idea came from is to see if we could make kites there and turn them into wind turbines. That's also where the name come from, why we call kite eggs. So what was that idea all about? Yeah, so I mean, in essence, we wanted to, you could say, if we could say extract the energy from a kite, and we actually built some rather advanced, you could say, drone. It's like a combination between a kite and a drone and a sail plane, and it's like flying around in the sky, like the wing of a wind turbine, and then you use the propellers from the drone to capture the energy and send it down to the ground. And we actually spent around three and a half years, you could say, working on that technology. But in the end, it turned out to be, you could say, too difficult and not really enough advantages compared to, you could say, the disadvantages. You can say every time we did something wrong, the plane would crash into the ground and we had to go home and rebuild the whole thing again. And it took forever, and there's a lot of trial and error in what we do. I love that, though, because that's first principle thinking, right? I mean, you guys had an idea, and then you went out and tested it to see if it would work or not work. That's awesome. Yeah. We are very much working like that. Iterations, go home, fix what breaks, and make it better the next time, and it's all about speed for us in that sense. All right, so talk to me about your next iteration here, the wind catcher that we set up. It's not your typical wind generator that you find on Amazon or something, right? So can you explain what what it is and how you guys came up with it? So the main thing is that you could say it's actually inspired by the kites, but we sort of took like a step towards the conventional wind turbines. So we still have the blades, they are suspended by lines, just like you have on the kite, and all the forces in the structure is transferred through these lines down to the ground. But then we added, you could say, some static structure, such that when there is no wind, we don't have to land the thing, right? So it's much more simple in that sense than from a flying wind turbine, but it's still light as the flying wind turbine. So this is sort of what wind catcher is, and in many ways, as you could say, the light is turbine for the different given size that you could sort of imagine, right? Can you give us some statistics, some numbers? We're numbers guys here. We love, you know, when we talk about EVs and solar, we love to talk about kilowatts and stuff like that. It's like, what it can generate, how much it weighs, stuff like that. So we waste around 12 kilos, which is 26 pounds, I think. So 12 kilos, and we can make 200, a little bit more than 200 watts on it. So that's roughly 16 watts per kilogram of materials. So I mean, that's the 16 of the number you have here, and if you take a big turbine like a vistas one, the big one, then they are around maybe two watts per kilogram of material. And that's because they're using a lot of steel and concrete in the foundation and everything. So we have made with the lines, we have made a structure that only uses 10% of the materials compared to a normal wind turbine. So make it super light. Yeah, that's what we're going for. And how big, what's the diameter? Yeah, the diameter of the rotor is four meters, I guess that's 12 feet. Even this really, really large area, swept area, is that we, that's sort of the most important part when you're like designing a wind turbine is getting the swept area. And that's also what allows us to, you could say, generate almost the max power in most wind conditions. So you can actually expect to get around two kilowatt hours per day, I would say, on like an average location, which is similar to, you could say, many batteries of an RV or these portable power stations or something like this, it's about two kilowatt hours. Which is really cool, I thought about the design, I mean, there's many things. But one of the things that really caught me is that these aren't static blades. These blades are continually being updated as to the wind conditions. Can you talk about how that whole thing works? Yeah, so we have this, we are quite proud of our, we call it a pitch system where you can turn the blades around. So they will sort of track depending on how fast the rotor is spinning, it will change the angle on the blades. And that also allows us to, if it's really windy, we can just let the air flow through the rotor disk. And then it's not so prone to breaking in high winds. It's similar to what you do on large wind turbines, I mean, the mega turbines, they can also turn their blades to do it. But we are sort of, we have made the smallest version that we can on it. You could say details for the nerds is that we actually have our pitch system. It has also a cyclic component or we can activate that such as a little bit like a helicopter that we can change how much air it's letting through in the top section and in the bottom section of the turbine. And that's pretty useful because the structure is so light, so we actually could say balancing the forces between the top and the bottom part of the turbine. And that's completely unique. So Zach and I have a little bit of experience making wind turbines. We made one out of trash, we made one out of absolute trash. We took a hoverboard, we were looking at a broken hoverboard I found on the side of the road one day and I was like, there's two motors on this thing. And so we tried to make a wind turbine and we built it and we set it up and it should work and we set it up in our yard and nothing happened because the swept area was too small. The blade design was, I think it was PVC pipe. We took PVC pipe and like cut it at an angle to make a thing. And so we thought, oh, this will just start producing power and of course it didn't spin. So then we had to go mounted onto Sparky, our Model X. We made like a special hitch adapter for it and then drove it down the road like some kind of perpetual motion machine. That was the only way we could get it to spin. What was really interesting in your guys' design is that it works it at much lower wind speeds. Yeah. How did you accomplish that? It's basically by design. We sat down and made this turbine. We sort of said, when will people use this turbine? What situations will they use it in? And they're not going to camp in situations where it's super windy and it's blowing a hurricane. You want to find a bit of shelter. So the challenge was really to sort of make it the swept area large enough and the inertia of the rotor is glass enough and bring down the friction in the whole system to a point where it can just start up in super slow winds. And that's the whole constant behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, I mean, one more, you could say, advantages that our turbine, since it actually can pitch the blades, is that actually you can generate more starting torque. So it would also automatically pitch to about 45 degrees when there's no wind. And then we like have pre-programmed sequence. So once it starts spinning, it knows its optimal angle and it will like change the blade doing this startup face. We didn't have that. No, and the second part is also the belt drive, right? So I mean, we have these very long blades. And then the gearbox, so we actually, you could say, increasing the torque about 20 times through our gearbox. So this like static torque is, you could say, much less from the gearbox itself. Yeah. Because I mean, then the other thing that we realized was that our wind turbine was at about a little bit overhead height. And yours is obviously much higher. How did you achieve, because I mean, I know that you could pour, you know, dig a hole, pour a concrete fitting, stick a big steel pipe in it or something like that and make some kind of tower to mount your wind turbine to. And that's not the design that you went for. Can you talk a little bit about your tower design? Yeah, sure. So it's very much inspired by the mast on a sailboat. The mast on a sailboat is also a pretty slender structure and it has to be lightweight to work on a sail. And then you have these lines, you call them, stay onto the sides and you also have, you know, the one going to the front of the, on the stern of the boat. And it's basically a little bit the same where what we went for. We have these arms that bring, that brings tension into the structure. And again, we are using the lines in the tower design. We always coming back to these lines, that's the whole magic behind our invention. I mean, coming from this kite surfing background, you know, we can jump 10 meters up into the air, getting carried by the kite by these ultra thin lines. They are so strong, they're eight times stronger than steel, these lines. And we sort of said, let's utilize these lines in, and then we just take them up, bring them out to the side, bring stiffness to the structure while maintaining the lightness of it. So it's glass fiber and the lines that basically make it possible. We as wind turbine engineers also realize that, I mean, there's a potential in, you could say, adding lines up to the tower. But I think for conventional wind turbines, one of the big issues is that the rotor blades are close to the tower. So you cannot really add these lines that goes all the way up to the top of the tower. But because our rotor is also so light, I mean, partly because we use carbon fiber, we use foam, but we also use these lines. So the rotor is much lighter than a conventional rotor and that's why it makes sense to hang it out to the side, basically, and we can also have the fully supported tower. So I'm really interested. You started this one idea of kites, you put a lot of time and effort into it that keep crashing. You figure out that it's not going to work for you guys as a company. What did that feel like after all those years of working on that to realize that, like, oh, God, do we keep going forward with this? It's not working. Was that like a depressing moment? Was that exhilarating? I think a mixture, but I mean, I think for me personally, I can say, I mean, I think I saw it coming over many months or maybe half a year or years time. And I was like, already, I think in my mind, a hit on like, I mean, this is not working out, like thinking about new designs. And so like when we really realized, I mean, there's almost no more funds left and we have to, you could say, reduce the team size and all these kinds of things, then, I mean, I already had a plan or like, I think this is really interesting. And I think I was actually just more excited about having found something that's even more interesting than these flying wind turbines, because, I mean, we were not the only ones building flying wind turbines, there's a lot of other startups around the world trying to do it and people in academia, but I actually like having this inside and finding something even more interesting. I think for me was pretty cool at least, maybe a little bit different for Christopher. Of course, of course, it's a blow, you have something you have been working on for so long. But then again, everything is a process you learn, you learn so much from, I mean, we learn so much from it, we, from, from designing the flying turbines and bringing all the learnings from that over to the next design, basically, that's just valuable, I would say, you, of course, you get hit by, now we need to close this down. But there was also, I mean, Andreas found a way to sort of bring it on to the next thing. When he first pitched the idea, sort of to me, it was like, we could do this flimsy structure and I was like, no way, this is going to work, but then we started building it and putting up some small prototypes and just iterating from then on and you sort of saw that, okay, this might actually be a good solution. And then we have just been pushing on it for, I mean, since. So talk to us about that stage. So you've got a new direction that you're going in. You pivot, which is really smart, right, as a company. And now you've got the beginnings of the wind catcher. And then it seems like you went to Kickstarter as a place to get funding for it. Talk to me about that. Yeah. So we sort of sat down when we were closing, when we were closing the whole thing down side, we cannot do the app on wind power anymore. We brought the team in and said, what can we, what can we make with this technology? Can we make a design that we can bring to market quickly? And can we do all of this? And then we, we sat down and identified a lot of options. We looked at a different kind of camps, or should it be some military usage? So what can we do with this, right? And then we identified it's probably going to be the camping segments because it can be quick to market. They will want to spend a little bit of money on this novel device, basically for their adventure. And then it was a road to see can be, I mean, just basically bring it to market the fastest and the smallest size also where it makes sense actually. Because no, I mean, we also want to make these turbines larger. That's also in the pipeline. But we started where it makes, made the most sense and where we could, where we could bring it to fruition without, without, without needing a lot of, I mean, huge funding. We could basically do it on a Kickstarter and a little bit of a reserve money. We had lying around. Yeah. So, so talk to me about that. So people saw it on Kickstarter. They obviously a lot of, I was looking at your Kickstarter and your reviews. A lot of people like it and they were like, this is perfect for my camping and stuff like that. So have you had a lot of customers? And so, yeah. So, I mean, for around, for the Kickstarter campaign, we had about AD customers that bought the pre-ordered the turbine. And I think we delivered all but a few, like that's been hard to get to. And yeah, I mean, I think a lot of them, at least, they started using them and they used them, you could say, if they have a small house or a hot off grid, or they might have be just very curious, they could also have like a home and just put it up in their garden outside their home and make some of their own power through wind. Yeah. And then I guess we also have a few in the U.S. that would, obviously, that are traveling around and set it up at a campsite. And so, it sounds like this is the first minimum viable product, right? And it sounds like you want to go bigger. So talk to me about the next version if you can talk about it. Yeah. I mean, so what we can say is that we also want to, you could say, basically use the technology to build like a really big household or farm-sized turbine, at least from the perspective of the wind catcher, it's going to be huge. From the perspective of a really large wind turbine, it's going to be very small, right? But from where we are coming from, then it's going to be, you could say, three times bigger and about like weighing half a ton or a thousand pounds, something like this. So it's going to be a different market, but the same technology, basically. And I think with the wind catcher now, you can see here we have some running in the background at our test site. We have those out at customers. We're sort of reasonably confident that the technology now works, right? So now it's more a matter of scaling it up. And I think that's, I mean, it seems very viable. Yeah. And it's just a huge potential going for this market. Everybody, I mean, you are very much into EVs and how are you going to charge this with your solar, because you are at your job at the daytime. And when you get back, maybe you can have a wind turbine lagoon, so you can charge up your EV overnight. And that's sort of what we are aiming at also with regards to the rated power. So we want to hit a sweet spot where you can charge up your EV overnight and also maybe run a heat pump for your house heating. And that just makes a lot of sense in the market. The big turbines, they have sort of left, left and niche for smaller turbines, for people who just want their own. They are completely left, I mean, left behind in the market because these Siemens are not making small turbines anymore and you've got some small companies, but they are very expensive. They are expensive to put up because they're wasting a lot of concrete in the foundations. They're not that green. You need a big truck to crane it out. And I mean, with our technology and the lightness of the structure and using these grounding, as I said, just screw into the ground with a small mini digger, then we think we can set it up in a day with the two guys on the side. And we are hoping at cost that are one quarter of competitors, basically. Just because we only need 10% of the material and the cost of putting it up is so much lower because it's lighter to handle and you don't need all the special two equipment. And so I'm trying to think of wind turbines because I think that most people don't have that much experience with them. I think that it goes from a little pinwheel that you might have in your garden, which is powering nothing other than a shiny piece of plastic. And then obviously you see the big wind turbines, the ones that obviously you probably can't put on your property unless you have a big property. And then there isn't really much in the middle. I know that you can buy some on Amazon. Zach and I have bought some and put them together. But again, the other thing that we've learned about wind turbines is that location really matters. And so our house is completely surrounded by trees and also height is also very important. And so even when we went to Home Depot and bought a two by four and stuck it in our yard and put the wind turbine on top, it still didn't work even on a windy day because you really need like constant like good wind, not just kind of gusty wind. I think that a lot of people when they walk outside and they go like, "Oh, it's windy today." It's like, "No, it's that's gusty and that's not really what's going to power a wind turbine. You know, when the wind kind of whips your hat off your head, that wind wasn't necessarily the wind that was going to carry the wind turbine." I think that the only wind turbines that I can imagine besides the ones that you can buy on Amazon would be kind of like the old fashioned farm ones that have like a hundred blades on them, very Americana, like you know, you see them spinning and they're to power water pumps. But other than that, most people don't have any experience with them. And I think it's to do a lot with the fact of kind of the things that Zach and I ran into when we got into wind and we're like, "Oh, let's do a wind turbine," is like your house has to be pretty well located. And if you aren't pretty well located, you better get really, really high up. And we thought about it. We're like, "We could get some pipes and then we could weld them together into a big structure." And then pretty soon you're going like, "And what are we putting at the top of this? And what is it going to be generating? And when the town comes to sue us, what are we going to do?" So it's interesting that you've kind of found this little niche where you found this one of the smallest and lightest versions, and I would say one of the most cleverest ways. There's so many different cleverer aspects to the wind catcher that make it viable for the size and shape that it is. You know, being able to get it up as high as you were with such light materials where you're not pouring concrete footing and having large pieces of steel, which obviously is not so great for camping, I think is really interesting. I think that it feels a little bit like a science project. It feels a lot like, you know, this is because you're cheating, right? Like again, between a pinwheel and the wind turbines that you see, a pinwheel is great for gusty wind. It's great for crappy wind that you get at ground level, but the big boys, the giant wind turbines that you see, they're getting like this constant wind that we just do not feel because we live on the ground, we're ground creatures. I don't know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how you're going to kind of bridge that gap between the pinwheel and the megaterbine for somebody's house for your next product. First of all, I agree that, I mean, there's a huge difference between what people feel and like feels windy, then it typically is gusty. And I mean, we also have a lot of people that you could say want us to say, can I have this in my residential neighborhood or, I mean, this kind of turbine ride? I mean, I live in, you could say, kind of a villa outside, I mean, in the suburbs, right? But it just doesn't really make any sense in the suburbs. If you just have, yeah, as you say, any trees around almost, or I mean, these villas or these kind of things, I mean, then it's definitely not the right place for a turbine. You basically need to be looking at wide open fields before it makes sense, or you would need to have a massive tower, which just economically doesn't make any sense. But still, there is, you could say, I mean, quite a lot of places where this is the case where you have fields around, right? I mean, I guess 70% of the globe is agricultural land, right? So I mean, fields are there, it's just not where everybody's living. But I mean, still, I guess 10, 15% of the population live on these agricultural land, right? This is the people that we are targeting with, you could say, the next kind of turbine. What about the military, by the way? Because you said early on, you thought about the military. My first thoughts when I saw this and setting it up was like, if I was a secret mission, this would be perfect. It's quiet. I don't need the sun because I'm probably attacking at night or something. So like, this seems like it would be perfect for that. Yeah, I mean, it's lightweight and you can carry it in. I mean, we have definitely discussed it. We are not that, I mean, military ourselves. And it's also, you need contracts, you need all of this, it would be an interesting thing, I would say. But pursuing it, I mean, it's difficult to getting the contracts and getting it through all the things. And also for the big one, I mean, there is also potential for that one, for the next size, for just a military camp, but you also have refugee camps, or you have a temporary mining sites or something like this, that's also going to require a lot of power. And without a design, we can actually, I mean, we're using these ground screws, you don't have to pull a massive foundation, you just put the screw in, you just take it out again and take the turbine on to the next side. What's next? At Moss Adams, that question inspires us to help people and their businesses strategically define and claim their future. As one of America's leading accounting, consulting and wealth management firms, our collaborative approach creates solutions for your unique business needs. We leverage industry focus insights with the collective technical resources of our firm to elevate your performance, uncover opportunity and move upward at Mossatoms.com. 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There's another piece here, which I think many people watching who haven't really done much with solar or wind don't know much about, but it's not as easy as plugging this into a battery. You have a very special piece of hardware that you send with it, which is a controller, and basically what's happening right is that the wind isn't constant, so you're not getting constant voltage. You're not getting constant amps, and so your controller has to kind of be smart and tell the battery and keep feeding the battery basically what it wants. And I feel like that's a huge part of this because we found that out the hard way. We're like, "Oh, how do we get this spinny thing to make electricity we can use?" And that was a big part of our learning curve. You guys figured that out. And you can talk about that control. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's our, you can sort of say, model, unshining diamond, you can sort of say, and make secret source that we have. We spend a lot of time making this one. We call it actually a solar emulator, where we have a small super capacitor bank in it that can store one second's worth of energy, and then it can deliver that to your battery system in a smooth way. And then it's actually, to our knowledge, it's the only product on the market that you can plug into these portable power stations, you know, from Gold Zero or Jackery or whatever these ones. It can emulate a solar panel so we can sort of cheat the algorithm in these portable units to thinking that the turbine is a solar panel. That is huge. I just want to translate that for people for a second because it took me a while of playing with these before I got it. So yeah, with solar, you need an MPPT or some kind of emulator because the sun keeps changing and so the voltage keeps changing. So in a lot of these batteries that we're talking about here, they've already built that, right? And so you're taking advantage of the fact that they've built that to like give them faux solar, which is really smart. What would somebody have to do if they didn't have your controller? Let's say I went out and I bought, you know, the $99 Amazon wind turbine, and I somehow get it high enough or in good enough wind and I wanted it to charge a Jackery kind of battery. Can I just plug it in or is it going to blow the thing up? I would say it's going to blow the thing up. I mean, so the thing is like if you just say for the Jackery kind of thing, right, initially when the turbine starts spinning up, there's no load on the, because the MPPT hasn't started yet. So there is no load. Turn up at a very high RPM and once it reaches very high RPM, then the voltage is going to be very high and you're going to blow the MPPT. So that's what's going to happen if you connect it directly to an MPPT unit. If you connect it to a battery, then it's a little bit easy because then once you get to the battery voltage, then the torque is just going to increase dramatically. So basically you created a turbine that has an almost constant RPM, which will work for the most cases. Then the next problem is just that once your battery is fully charged, then you need to get rid of this XX power. So then you need a dump load in order for it not to spin out of control. Right. We saw a lot of these systems where they just have like heaters and they're just dumping the seat. A big resistor. And I remember asking Jesse the first day, I'm like, why is this guy have a lot of heaters and he was like, yeah, you've got to get rid of the energy. I'm like, yeah. Why do we want to get rid of it? I'm like, because if we disconnect it, it's going to spin itself apart. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, there's so much and that's another good reason to have your pitch system. No, it's really, it's such a, it's such a more difficult problem than I think a lot of people would, I normally give it credit for. Well, and I think this is why we don't see these systems popping up all over because just like you and I, you kind of get into it a little bit and you do some research and then you go, this is way over my head like I have to be an electrical engineer to figure this out. If you're to solar, solar is pretty, you can be pretty dumb and do solar because I've done it. And you know, you just, you plug in all the panels, you make sure they're all facing the same direction. They all have the same wires. Right. It's, it's like, it's like baby's first power station level. Yeah. I want to talk about your design again. So it looks like there's a lot of 3D printed parts, which I'm sure you, you had to use it because you're designing stuff from scratch. It didn't look like there was much off the shelf. Like Jesse and I love off the shelf because then we don't have to do anything, but you guys designed like pretty much every single part it looks like and down to the carbon fiber tubes and, um, talk to me about that. That sounds like a lot of engineering work. Ah, yeah. It was. I mean, we have this philosophy here at Kydex that I often joke with it and saying only the cheapest is good enough, right? And the cheapest manufacturing process that you can have is extrusion. Basically, and I mean, you pull, pull something and you know, these clay thing you had as a kid who pressed it down and, and a star shape come out of it, right? And that's the same thing is happening in a 3D printer you put in the film and then it shrinks down and then you can cleverly move it around. And it's the same with the truth that we're using the carbon tubes, the glass fiber tubes, everything that we are using are, are using these extrusion profiles. And then we can merge that together with the 3D prints. So actually the tubes and everything is off the shelf. Something that we can, we can just buy from a supplier. And then we have of course some electronics, I mean, this is our own design, but we get it made outside and the generators and bolts and screws and nuts and all that. But, but the philosophy is, I mean, you can also see it on the, on the blades themselves. They don't have this where they taper and get slender towards the edge of the tip of the blade, which is aerodynamically more efficient. You would get a better, more efficient turbine by doing that. But we want to keep the prices low. So we took this uniform one. So in the future, we can just extrude the whole blade to get the price down because it's the, actually the only thing that matters, you are competing against solar, right? So we want to bring the price down as low as we can. So that, that requires some certain compromises, you can say. And then we can build in the complexity into the 3D prints. And the 3D prints was, when we started out, it was sort of to say, let's, let's open source the whole mechanical design. And it's actually, it's available on, on, on shape. People can go download the, the files and print them out themselves, if, if they want to. So they can print out spares. It was thought of to say, can we, can we make something that people can actually print at home using normal conventional printers as the whole philosophy behind it. And it's also pretty neat because if we have, if we have a problem with a part, then we can just change it from turbine number 130, so 131, ah, let's do a little design change here and just rolling in the farm, you don't need expensive molds for injection molding and iterating on that. So it keeps the cost downforce, ah, and the iteration, again, it comes back to the speed at which we, we operate in, right? So we want to keep the speed high. Yeah. The other, the other challenge is just, I mean, I mean, the turbine is so complex. I mean, we have so many different small parts, right? And I mean, the, I mean, I guess we would need two or three million dollars if we wanted to injection molded, right? I mean, that's not really viable. And again, even if we had the funds, I mean, it would still, you would say reduce our flexibility, right? And iteration speed. So you could say in some sense, some of the 3D prints, they are a little bit more heavy than if it would be injection molded, but it's still light enough for, for most people. And I mean, you can even print a spare if it's, is where to break, um, or you can get us to print it and send it to you, of course. So so far, the company has been kind of crowd funded with a, with a Kickstarter. What's the next stage? Um, we, we're talking to a lot of investors now who are watching this who might be excited about this. Um, is crowdfunding in your future? Do you think you're going to go venture capital, what, you know, how are you going to get to the next stage? Yeah. I think, I think, uh, we are definitely, I mean, looking at, uh, you could say both those options. So both venture capital, we also have a little bit of, uh, you could say business angels that are involved already. Um, we also got some grants from the Danish government. They are sort of, you could say, sponsoring, uh, these green developments. Uh, but we also looking at venture capital in particular, you could say for the next turbine, when we want to build it bigger, hardware costs becomes, uh, yeah, you could say more expensive, um, and the amount of engineering required to build a turbine that can, can last them interface with the grid and get certification. So forth, uh, it starts to add up. So I want to talk a little bit about market size, because I think that it, at least in my opinion, I think it's something that you're kind of running into. Um, when you talk about market size, it's usually, um, people like to say, oh, you take all the people who drink coffee and everyone could buy my coffee cup, you know, like that's normally how business is done. And you're like, the total addressable market, if you multiply that out by six billion people is a quadrillion dollars and we just get 1% of that. That's normally the idea with your, uh, with your wind turbine, you, you need to have somebody who wants to go camping, but they can't go camping in the woods because there's not enough wind and there's not enough space to set up their wind turbine. They could camp in the desert, I suppose, uh, and they could go camping somewhere in a field or like you're saying, kind of having a, uh, a small cabin somewhere, uh, with a lot of open space. Is that, I mean, to me, that's not very common where we live. We live, we live in New England. We just have trees. They just have freaking everywhere. We have coastline. We do have coastline, which, you know, and people do cut down the trees right next to the coastline near their houses. But, um, I feel like in terms of market size, you've been kind of limited, um, just because of, you know, you need somebody who wants to camp and it's not everybody who camps because you're not selling, you know, a hatchet or a, you know, a tent. You're, you're trying to, you're trying to do a very specific thing. Um, so I feel like that's really, you know, talk about niche. It is a very niche, um, market that you're talking about. When you talk about residential, I see it getting a lot bigger. Do you also see that being the case and, you know, who do you think your customers are going to be? Is it going to be, you know, Midwestern Americans? Is it going to be, um, heavily Danish and, and, you know, places, you know, windy places on coastline and very flat sort of areas? I agree. Um, in particular with the, you could say for the first, with the wind catcher, I think we have the, the same observations, um, that it, it is a much smaller segment than, I mean, sunglasses or something like like this, right? I mean, anybody living in a city that doesn't go out camping in open areas, they're basically not a customer. Um, so I mean, of course, it's a much more slim market, but I mean, we don't need to be selling hundreds of thousands of these in any case. I mean, so if we can sell a few thousand per year, we, I think at least for now we would be happy, right? Um, and I think there's enough people, uh, to, to, you would say meet that demand or like reach that, uh, go. Um, regarding the, the larger ones, uh, again, I mean, I think we looked in, in Denmark, they've done a lot of surveys, right? And I mean, even in Denmark, I think there's like 80,000-ish households in the middle of, I'll call it middle of nowhere, but I mean, I guess in the, out in the countryside, right? Um, and compared to the two million households in total, it's a reasonable market. Um, and I think if you didn't just go from Denmark to, to EU to the US market, I mean, it's, the number is going to be big enough for this to be very interesting, right? Um, and I think at the US, we are probably going to have more success in the northern states because I think they will have, you would say be more challenged during the winter. If they want to power their, their home or their, their truck, um, in the summer, it depends really on how cheap can we get it. Can it become like really competitive with solar? I think that's the biggest question, uh, depending on your, because they, how south can we go? So talk to me a little bit about, um, the commercial one. So, uh, so right now the, the camping, uh, wind catcher is, uh, 200 watts or a little bit over 200 watts of power. And for people who think about solar panels, like a panel, like this one, a nice, you know, three by five could be anywhere from 250 up to 400 watts, but of course that's peak. People tend to forget that it's when this sun is, like, you know, the perfect, uh, you know, planer geometry to it. And then it's also when the sun is up that you're going to be generating any electricity at all. So, um, like you were saying, you can generate two kilowatt hours with, um, the wind catcher. For the residential one, what, uh, like, what's the wattage and then how many kilowatt hours a day? Yeah. Um, so I mean, the wattage, the rated power, which is, I could just say the peak or peak equivalent is about five kilowatts, um, and then actually kilowatt hours per day. I don't know. I just know it's about 18 megawatts per megawatt hours per year, but, uh, I guess, um, the capacity factor is about 40%. So I guess I could almost, I guess, calculate in my head 48 kilowatt hours per day. Yeah. Cause I just want to point out, even though you might be watching and going like five kilowatts, that's a small solar system, but if you're in a windy place and that's running pretty much all day, like you just said, that's more than a five kilowatt solar system would put out in a day. That's closer to like a 15, you know, so I mean, you're getting because the fact that if you are in the right windy spot and, you know, you don't have to worry about the sun going down, um, that's really viable. And so what's kind of you, how do you imagine that working? So obviously it's going to have a similar ish controller to the wind catcher where it's going to be able to change the pitch. And then it's going to feed, um, some power, probably DC into your house. And then you'd either need, uh, you're going to need batteries, you're going to need a battery. I'm assuming. So this would be part of a larger system. Yeah. I mean, I think technically you don't need a battery. You can actually have a direct, you could say, inverter from DC to, uh, to AC, um, but I think the, uh, the first version that we will use or it will probably be like what's called a hybrid inverter where it, um, it also can go down to, you could say 48 volt batteries so you can store it there. And probably, um, this inverter might even be, you could say a high, even more hybrid in sense that it can both take solar and wind and then have a battery and an AC connection on the other side. Uh, so all these things are in play. I feel like because they've addressed this key issue of, um, being able to be smart and how it feeds, um, I think this opens up a lot of people. I think there's a lot of people out there who went solar because that's already been figured out. Mm hmm. But like you said, there's a lot of people that solar doesn't even make sense. They've got too many trees or it's too, you know, northern a climate or whatever. And so yours is going to fit in kind of where solar doesn't work for a lot of places or we'll supplement it really nicely. Yeah. So I mean, this is really exciting because I think a lot of people also don't understand how expensive electricity is. I feel like many people don't even look at their electric bill, um, but since I've gotten solar 10 years ago, the price of electricity is doubled. And I remember when I was told by Tesla back in 2013 that this would happen. I was like, you know, there's no way it's going to go up like 2% a year. I didn't understand like compound interest. And then I look at it now and I'm like, oh wow, they're right. It went from 12 cents to 24 cents kilowatt hour in our area, um, which now makes anything like wind or solar look even more attractive. Right. You know, when you're just turning on lights and stuff, like I think back in back in the old days when you'd have, you know, one light bulb in the room, you turn it on, click, you know, uh, I think that the electric bill was going to be relatively low. Now that we have, you know, air conditioners and heating that's going to be completely electric and electric vehicles, I think that that is where you start to go like, if I can get it cheaper, I mean, people will drive miles and miles miles to go to the gas station that has, you know, slightly less expensive gas. It's just human nature to want a cheaper thing. And I think that, uh, when people start to realize that they can do that either with solar or with wind, um, they're going to want to do that. I think there's also a neighbor effect. A lot of people would get solar and then the whole neighborhood would go solar a few months later as they talk to Joe and we're like, Oh my God, you get free energy every day? As soon as I feel like you see a wind turbine go up and you're like, what the hell is that? And then you go, Oh, free energy every day. You go, where do I get one? Right? So it's also for the big turbines. You have this whole nimby, not in my backyard concept of wind turbines, right? And that's, that's usually also because it's not your turbine that is being put up in your backyard, right? If it is your own turbine, let us make free electricity for your own, own, uh, EV vehicle, right? Then you would want to have that one. So would you just plug it into that one that spins and, and you go, go in, right? So, so you, you're not making nimby's, you're making imby's in my backyard. I want that in my backyard. Yeah. Well, and that's the funny thing. We've never been able to have certain things in our backyards, right? It's always been like, Oh, they're building a chemical plant. Well, you can't have a chemical plant in your backyard. It wouldn't, you know, like what are you going to be producing there? So it's a whip, a whip in me. I want that in my backyard. I, I do think that it's, it is really an interesting concept because yeah, we've, we've hardly ever had it before, at least in America, but I've got a gotcha for them. There's these vertical wind turbines that are becoming very popular. And I think a lot of people think that this is the answer, the swept area is smaller. It looks cuter. So why not just go vertical? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's because, because physics, I mean, it's just, I mean, exactly as you said, I mean, first of all, you need swept area to produce electricity, right? And then the second part is if you have, it also depends on the vertical turbine, right? But you also need a way to depower just like the pit system, right? At least ideally. And then the second thing I think the main problem with small vertical access turbine is that the loads, they always change direction. So I mean, I mean, the loads on the air force change all the time. So the fatigue loads are extremely high. So basically it's gonna, it needs to be very, very heavy in order to make the same power as a normal conventional wind turbine and have the song same longevity. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. And also, I mean, you can just see how it scales, right? I mean, you make our turbine when we had the circle, the swept area from a circle, you just make the tip of the base slightly longer, you get a huge area, right? When you do that for vertical turbine, you just make it a little bit longer. Oh, it's only the column. Sometimes I'll get a little bit off it, right? So it scales not as nicely, they get heavier, they are just a little bit less inefficient. But of course, they look pretty cool, a lot of people fall into the trap. And that's also why it's so important for us to, I mean, to bring out the numbers and have the economy in the turbine. It's our most important metric and I mean, we can back to this again and again, but if we can make it just cheap enough and we can prove that to the people, then it's got just going to be a no-brainer for the people. And that's what we are doing. We often get, you could say asked about, you could say, what's the difference between this turbine, the wind catcher and one of these small ones or cheap ones that you can get on LA Express or on Amazon. And I mean, the main thing is just that, I mean, maybe ours is 10 times more expensive, but it also has 10 times more swept area. So basically, it's going to be producing 10 times more power. So in that sense, it's equal. But then on the same time, we get, deliver you this whole infrastructure that allows you to charge you a portable power station and you get the tower that can be stalled quickly as well. So I mean, I still think it's a fair deal that you get when you get to buy our turbine, basically. No, that is really interesting because I mean, there's all these things you don't think you have to buy once you buy. You have to get an MPPT controller. Right. You have to get a tower. Right. You know, I mean, they look really shiny on Amazon and it's, oh, and it's got three blades in the, ooh, and then you get it and you'll win it and stuff in on the back. And then you get it and there's three wires coming off of it and you're like, what do I do? One of these ground and you're like, no, they're all power. And it's not. And you're like, so it's like AC and you're like, yes, it's wild AC and you're like, what fluctuating. Can I plug it in? No, you need to get a rectifier. What's a rectifier? Now you got to do wiring. Oh my God. Yeah. I totally hear what you're saying because that would not make for a fun camping trip. Right. I remember, you know, yeah, taking the, the go, the, you know, our thing apart and then going like, why are there three wires? We should have just hook it up directly to a blender and do it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, no, I hear what you're saying because it does, you'd buy this $100 wind turbine and then you'd go like, oh, I need a rectifier and I need an MPPT controller. And I need a battery. And then I need an inverter and then I need to wire it all together and then old hairdryers to get rid of the extra and then I need a house to put it in. And then I also need, you know, and then if I don't want it to destroy itself in high winds, then I'd either need a break. And then I also need to put a giant resistor that will slow it down when it gets spinning too fast. And then you, and then I have to figure out how to do all of that. So, no, it is a really, it's a good point because it's sort of like saying, you know, you guys sell this car, but I could just go buy a Hemi engine. It's like, right. Exactly. But then you'd also need gearbox and a transmission and to wheels, you know, like, you have to build the whole thing yourself. And just because, you know, this engine is really cheap or this particular thing is really cheap doesn't necessarily mean, yeah, no, I totally get that. Thank you so much for talking to us, guys. Today, I really love that you guys are engineers and can actually answer the questions, not just marketing crap that we get from a lot of companies, but you guys have actually built these things. So really, thank you so much. It's been really fun setting up our windcatcher. I can't wait to bring it to the shore where we're going to get some nice clean wind and run some more things off it maybe on our next camping trip. So thank you again. I'd love to check back in with you guys down the road and see what you're working on. So if people want to reach out, if they want to find out about the windcatcher or about your next projects, where should they go? As you go to our website, which is kydex.tech/tch and you can also reach us at the email, which is info@kydex.tech and yeah, that would be the place to follow along. And thanks for having us. Great. It's great. Thank you. What's next? At Moss Adams, that question inspires us to help people and their businesses strategically define and claim their future. As one of America's leading accounting, consulting and wealth management firms, our collaborative approach creates solutions for your unique business needs. We leverage industry-focused insights with the collective technical resources of our firm to elevate your performance, uncover opportunity and move upward at MossAtoms.com. Every day, we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. It's a calling. Agents answer the call, working together to keep our country and community safe. If you're ready for a new mission, join U.S. Border Patrol and go beyond. 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