Kylie Davis: (00:01)

Welcome to the PropTech Podcast. It's Kylie Davis here and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide, I passionately believe that we need to create and grow a sense of community between the innovators and real estate agents and sharing our stories is a great way to do that. The aim of each episode is to introduce businesses to a prop tech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and to explore the issues and challenges raised by their tech and how they can create amazing property experiences. Now, this is one of the most exciting interviews I've done for a long time in my career. My guest in this episode is Richard Romanowski, CEO of Planet Ark Power, a proptech startup that in all seriousness, could save the planet and make Australia alone carbon neutral by 2035 and they can do that just by enabling our existing industrial and commercial properties to feature solar panels on their rooftops.

Kylie Davis: (01:02)

Now, why don't commercial and industrial buildings do that already? Or there's a deeply technical answer to that involving electricity waves that Richard explains to us in this episode and Planet Ark Power solves that through some clever use of AI and a well thought through business proposal that is utterly compelling to landlords. As an agent, you really want to make sure that you get your brain around this because the value this will add to properties is enormous but not to mention that it could spell the end to coal fired power. Richard Romanowski, I'm so excited. Welcome to the show.

Richard Romanowski: (01:37)

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

Kylie Davis: (01:39)

Yeah. Look, I know a little bit about what you guys do, but for our audience, what's your elevator pitch? What does a Planet Ark Power do?

Richard Romanowski: (01:48)

You got me on the spot, right?

Kylie Davis: (01:50)

Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (01:52)

Basically, we have a technology that lets you fill every single rooftop with solar, which is something you can't do now, that lets us produce almost all the energy we need. We can produce by filling our roofs with solar and then adding batteries so we can speed up the de-carbonization of the world with our technology.

Kylie Davis: (02:14)

Wow, and that's from using the existing roof space that we already have.

Richard Romanowski: (02:18)

Absolutely. That's one of the big problems we have and people forget how complex the electricity industry is. Everybody thinks it's easy, just stick solar on the roof and we can use the sun.

Kylie Davis: (02:32)

Yeah. Look, let's wind back a little bit, let's talk about power supply in Australia because I think you guys are a fantastic example of how proptech is going to save the planet, but just so that we can help people get their brains around the idea. How big is the power supply market in Australia? What does it look and behave like?

Richard Romanowski: (02:54)

Well, it's huge. If you think of the electricity grid from the poles and wires that send electricity from the coal power station into the city, it's the largest man made machine in the world. It's huge, biggest thing we've ever built. Billions of dollars and billions and billions of dollars in terms of size, in terms of the assets that are under ownership and the amount of energy but the key, and this is part of where we're coming from is, the electricity is always been one way flow of energy. It’s like a big water pipe going one way down to your house and down to your business and that's the problem.

Kylie Davis: (03:44)

Right. Why is that a problem? How does that relate to the problem of solar power on the roof?

Richard Romanowski: (03:52)

Solar power is like… if you think of its huge massive water pipe going one way, which is all this electricity and you're shooting a little sprinkler of energy from your solar on your roof [crosstalk 00:04:07].

Kylie Davis: (04:07)

Panel, yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (04:09)

Like a little tiny sprinkler. The big water pipe can handle it but when the sprinkler gets too big, it starts to create problems almost for the grid and balances to blackouts, brownouts, voltage problems that will, for example, block your microwave or if you're a commercial business could have impact on your very expensive equipment. That's what we're at now here in Australia.

Kylie Davis: (04:33)

Right. I just want to make sure I understand it properly. I've got a source of electricity like a power plant regardless of at the moment that is creating the energy and that's pushing all the power out down the pipe through the poles and wires, but to our properties. And then, when I put a solar panel on my house roof, it's trying to push a bit of power either into that network or back towards, back into the pipe.

Richard Romanowski: (05:01)

They call it backwards, you're basically saying it backwards, right?

Kylie Davis: (05:04)

Right.

Richard Romanowski: (05:05)

You're never designed to do that, you can handle a little bit of backwards energy, but not very much. When you want to fill all the roof space with electricity, that becomes a huge amount of energy going backwards and that's not possible without breaking the system.

Kylie Davis: (05:27)

Right, okay.

Richard Romanowski: (05:29)

They call that an electricity engineering an unfixable problem. For 100 years, they've never figured out how to fix it and we figured out how to fix it.

Kylie Davis: (05:40)

That's fantastic. Tell us, how do you fix it, the million dollar question?

Richard Romanowski: (05:47)

We've built internet of things digital device that goes behind the metre in your house or in your building. It with a very sophisticated software manages and watches what's happening on the grid in that building and harmonises the electricity so it can actually flow both ways. The word I've used is harmonised and it uses artificial intelligence, very sophisticated artificial intelligence to keep everything in check in real time.

Kylie Davis: (06:26)

Right. It's monitoring the flow and pushing the electricity from your battery source on your roof into the grid when the flow is most able to take it or how does that?

Richard Romanowski: (06:39)

Because electricity is a wave, when you're sending one big wave is coming from the one way and then you're sending away backwards, it creates a disjointed complex circumstance. We harmonise that so the wave can go both ways. We can actually get energy, 100% energy flowing both ways from the coal power station and that can send a 100% energy backwards technology.

Kylie Davis: (07:07)

Wow. Wow, effectively your business turns every building in Australia into a solar battery pack.

Richard Romanowski: (07:18)

Absolutely, the way we call it. We've actually moved the solar farm, we can move the solar farm from way out in woodwork all the way into our city. We focus on commercial buildings because residential's doing well, you fly into Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne, you look down, you've got acres of empty roof space. The reason people aren't filling them up is because there's this, the grid can handle it. It's actually, technically it's called a voltage problem, it's technically reverse power flow is what they call it, the engineers. At the end of the day, we fix it, now we can fill that big huge warehouse with roofs, with solar. Some of the energy on that roof is used, unlike your house by that business but the rest of the energy, 80%, 60% is able to then get sent into the grid. Or two is, we can then add a huge massive battery that not only looks after the building but then helps support the grid. We provide all that grid benefits and stability with the battery as well as being able to send energy backwards.

Kylie Davis: (08:34)

Wow. I'm so excited by this. If I'm a landlord of a commercial or an industrial building, and what you're telling me is that the moment I might have some additional revenue streams from my building if I could maybe sell some advertising space on the front of it or some airspace on the front of it. Now actually, I'm able to monetize my rooftop to both offset my electricity use and costs or sell that back to my tenants or I can start to get another revenue stream coming from the power that I can sell back to the grid. Is that right?

Richard Romanowski: (09:16)

Exactly correct. I'll add to that and say, I'm a landlord, now I can sell, we can actually, bring investors in. It can be the landlord where the landlord wants to do it himself or herself, or now you have the big banks, the big pension funds are willing to invest in this. Remember, it's a fund, sometimes a $5 million or $10 million investment of solar and batteries.

Kylie Davis: (09:47)

Right, okay.

Richard Romanowski: (09:49)

They get in rent for their roof space, if they want all to themselves, they can, but they get rent for the roof space. Urban rooftop solar farm sells energy, cheap, clean energy to the tenant. They say the property guys sells, they get a green sticky tenant because I'm not going to leave. I've got this cheaper energy here, I'm happy I'm going to stay. The property price goes up because someone's basically put $5 million or $10 million worth of solar and batteries in your building without you having paid for it. The owner of the solar power plant and battery, they get a return on investment. It's like a mini business, but quite a big mini business. It’s a complete sprinkle, we solved the investor's problem, the landlord's problem, the tenant's problem, and then the grid's problem.

Kylie Davis: (10:46)

What you're saying is that as a landlord, I don't need to worry? Anything to do with electricity and infrastructure is often quite an expensive capex or capitalization costs that you've got to spend. What you're saying is that as a landlord, I don't actually need to outlay a huge amount to put this on because there's a whole business package that sits behind it that makes this available to me.

Richard Romanowski: (11:09)

Correct, in fact, they don't have to outlay anything, not a [inaudible 00:11:12]. If they want to invest and own this power plant and it'll earn a real good return on investment for say 20 years. We have the super funds, the pension funds are lining up to invest money to basically put power plants on the landlord's rooftops and run it as a business but the landlord gets a green sticky tenant and they get a rent for the rooftop.

Kylie Davis: (11:44)

Fantastic. How could this revolutionise power generation in Australia? How many acres of rooftop or hectares of rooftop is out there and how much power could that generate if we went down that path?

Richard Romanowski: (12:03)

It is, we can do all of our energy plus 20% if we filled all the rooftops with.

Kylie Davis: (12:09)

Wow, that's exciting, that is so exciting. Who said tick was boring?

Richard Romanowski: (12:22)

That’s a study done by the Australian PV Institute and by the University of Sydney and UTS. It's actually an independent study, they actually said we can generate 120% of our total energy needs if we filled every roof.

Kylie Davis: (12:39)

No more coal fired power plants required whatsoever.

Richard Romanowski: (12:43)

No more coal power plants, exactly. The key is, you can't do that if there's this voltage backwards energy problem and because we fix it now you can actually do it. Then we can even add, in a commercial building, we can add a solar car parks, we can add small ground Mount, we can probably get in a solar would probably get to 150% to 200% of our energy generated from within our suburbs.

Kylie Davis: (13:16)

Right, because it's not like we don't have much sun. It's not-

Richard Romanowski: (13:19)

Got [problems 00:13:19].

Kylie Davis: (13:19)

Got more than enough sun.

Richard Romanowski: (13:23)

It’s the same, I'll just jump worldly, around the world. Effectively in the Sunbelt, we think this is the same for the whole world around the sun belt, but roughly 80%, 70%, 80% of the population live in that Sunbelt, and the same thing will apply that most cities can generate 70%, 80%, 90%, 100% of their energy from rooftop solar.

Kylie Davis: (13:46)

Wow, okay. That's so fantastic. Let's just pause there for a moment and hear a quick word from our sponsors.

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Kylie Davis: (14:47)

What’s the role that a real estate agent here in Australia could play in this conversation and in getting this technology out and what's in it for them?

Richard Romanowski: (14:59)

The way you've asked the question is a great one. For the real estate agent, now in the mix of things is improving the value of the building depends on whether they have this rooftop solar and battery system in place because it will obviously add capital value to the building, but more importantly add lessor-lessee value because you got to get along with your tenant, less vacancies.

Kylie Davis: (15:27)

We get more rent too, hopefully.

Richard Romanowski: (15:29)

Rent. In fact, you need to charge more rent. There’s a whole range of things that can be done. It really adds real additional string to the bow of our commercial real estate agent in terms of her recommending and facilitating this to happen.

Kylie Davis: (15:47)

Yeah. To help us understand that, Richard, talk us through some of the case studies or a couple of case studies that I know you guys have had which help us put some real dollar value behind where you went from.

Richard Romanowski: (16:05)

Toyota dealership in Ipswich which is the Welland Motors. We started that as our first case study where we had 320 kilowatts of solar which is a big system, that's 500, 600, 700 houses worth of solar on the roof.

Kylie Davis: (16:24)

Wow.

Richard Romanowski: (16:26)

And 20% of it was wasted because we can't send energy backwards into the grid when you're that big. Basically, the 20% of the energy was wasted not being able to be used by the building or not being able to send into the grid.

Kylie Davis: (16:42)

Can you give me an idea of how big that building was in terms of square metres so that we can visualise it?

Richard Romanowski: (16:49)

It’s a full city block, 300 kilowatts. We would then instal our technology. That 20% of energy that was wasted now becomes an income stream. There’s another $25,000 in your income or income to the owner to reduce their energy bill.

Kylie Davis: (17:07)

Wow.

Richard Romanowski: (17:08)

Then step two is now that we've actually allowed the energy to go backwards into the grid. We can add another couple of 100 kilowatts of solar on the roof. We could add more, but that's the only space left. They had no more roof space. We filled the rest of the roof space with solar. It saves a dealership a lot more on their energy bill. Then we add a battery. We are adding a big huge battery and even further reducing their energy bill. Remember energy bill has demand charges and consumption charges. Is that something you guys are familiar with? The battery helps reduce demand charges, it’s a huge benefit. That case study is our flagship. It’s our first site here in Brisbane.

Kylie Davis: (17:53)

Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (17:54)

Our second site, by the time this goes live, our technology which we've branded eleXsys, we actually call her our little digital device and software, eleXsys.

Kylie Davis: (18:06)

Right. Not Alexa, eleXsys. Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (18:14)

It stands for Electricity Export System. That’s why it’s eleXsys. We’ll be announcing the IKEA site in Adelaide. It will be our big flagship site. IKEA has come to the party with being our first really big site. It'll be 1.2 megawatts. It’s about-

Kylie Davis: (18:38)

Wow, by say Adelaide.

Richard Romanowski: (18:38)

Adelaide is at four or five football fields of rooftop solar.

Kylie Davis: (18:46)

Wow.

Richard Romanowski: (18:47)

Then about 240 foot containers of batteries, so three megawatt hours of batteries. It's about a $7 million project and the IKEA will be buying the clean energy. It'll be owned by one of the super funds in Australia. They’re actually putting the money up because all they care about is getting their return on investment, right?

Kylie Davis: (19:15)

Yup, yup.

Richard Romanowski: (19:16)

Landlord’s getting a rooftop rental and the grid is getting the benefits of the battery. That project will be announced, I hope by the time this goes live.

Kylie Davis: (19:28)

Yeah, cool. Very cool. You had another case study that Steve was talking about at the API Conference about a local high school up in Brisbane or the Gold Coast.

Richard Romanowski: (19:40)

Yes, there's one high school. We’re still trying to get that approved to instal, but the feasibility is that it can handle today roughly about 250 kilowatts of solar if you were to instal solar now. That would only feel about one 10th of the roof. Remember if you can't send energy backwards, then it’s not worth putting more solar on. With our technology, we can put about 1.5 megawatts of solar on the roof and a battery that takes the energy bill from roughly a $20,000 a month energy bill and we can turn it into probably a $30,000 a month income stream.

Kylie Davis: (20:26)

Wow. That’s 50K turnaround, really, isn't it?

Richard Romanowski: (20:33)

[Inaudible 00:20:33].

Kylie Davis: (20:33)

As a school, if you had 30K coming into the coffers rather than 20K going out every month, that would pretty much change how you educate all those kids.

Richard Romanowski: (20:43)

Again, it's just a bit of patience. For something new, it takes a long time for people to say, “Yes, let's give it a go.” That's something we hope to have up and running in probably six to nine months.

Kylie Davis: (20:58)

Wow, fantastic.

Richard Romanowski: (21:00)

Again, it's a radical shift in terms of how we think. Energy can be actually an income stream now instead of a cost.

Kylie Davis: (21:08)

Wow. Richard, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into this? How long has Planet Ark Power been going for?

Richard Romanowski: (21:19)

Planet Ark Power, the whole group of companies has been going for seven years. It's taken us seven years of development to get this far. We invested roughly $20 million of our own money to build this technology. It’s not been cheap. It's been very challenging. We have 50 staff and 30 electrical engineers on staff, it’s a big part of it. What really started things, last April, we got a phone call from Berlin. The World Energy Council and we think that, well, they're all over the world, but they're mainly European based. They phoned us up and said, “Hey, we heard a little bit about what you're doing.” They sent us two plane tickets and said, “Come to Berlin. We want to see you.” We jumped on a plane and basically it was part of the World Energy Council Startup Energy Transition Awards. We had put our application in what, 500, 600 other startups around the world. They flew us to Berlin. We got on stage and we won.

Kylie Davis: (22:29)

Wow. Congratulations. Fantastic.

Richard Romanowski: (22:34)

It really helped us understand. We always thought we had something fancy here, a good result, but until we actually got up there and presented it and we had 20 of the best energy venture capitalists in the world put us through a shark tank. It was an hour of drilling me with Q&As and then I thought I made a mistake and moved it all up, but we won.

Kylie Davis: (23:04)

Fantastic.

Richard Romanowski: (23:08)

Yeah. They really encouraged us. The World Energy Council has really encouraged us to think bigger. We were planning to be the usual quiet Australians.

Kylie Davis: (23:20)

Yeah, let us fix Brisbane. No.

Richard Romanowski: (23:25)

No, we want you to do this big.

Kylie Davis: (23:27)

I can't tell you how excited I am that there Queensland is out there, not getting by looking for alternatives to call with. It’s great. When we go down this path, Richard, what kind of effect is it going to have on CO2 and emission levels, even just here in Australia? What could we do if we changed our rooftops into solar panels or when we change our rooftops into solar panels?

Richard Romanowski: (23:53)

I would love to challenge the property industry. You guys can change the world by filling the rooftops. For example, I mentioned the IKEA project. If we get a thousand IKEA sites, we can shut down one coal power station.

Kylie Davis: (24:14)

Wow. Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (24:14)

That's doable because you probably know better than I. How many big large commercial buildings are there, five million in Australia, as a guess?

Kylie Davis: (24:24)

Do you know what? I don't know that off the top of my head, but I'm going to look it up and I'll put it in the show notes.

Richard Romanowski: (24:31)

All we need and that is, there's 21 power stations.

Kylie Davis: (24:34)

Yes.

Richard Romanowski: (24:35)

All we need is 21,000 large commercial buildings.

Kylie Davis: (24:39)

Right, yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (24:41)

The landlord doesn't have to invest a penny. The pension funds and super funds will come in, build an urban solar farm on their roof. Stick a battery and clean, cheap energy for the tenant. They get rent and we can get rid of all the power stations in Australia, probably take us about 10 or 15 years, but we can completely be a green economy.

Kylie Davis: (25:13)

Wow. If we did all of that, there's a lot of talk in that, especially post the bush fires here in… well, they happened every way, didn’t they? Queensland, New South Wales and also down in Victoria and South Australia, there's a whole new focus on climate and carbon emissions and all of this is worry. We’re being told by government that we can't commit to zero emissions. That's just silly because it's completely not doable, even by 2050. What are you saying? You're saying we could do that by 2035 probably.

Richard Romanowski: (25:57)

Right. Every coal power station.

Kylie Davis: (25:59)

Wow. That's so exciting. That's amazing. Look, it almost sounds too good to be true. What are the downsides? There must be a downside. What are they?

Richard Romanowski: (26:08)

Part of our whole business model is we don't have to ask permission from the Federal Government or the States, we can just do it.

Kylie Davis: (26:13)

Oh, I love that even more.

Richard Romanowski: (26:19)

The government is too slow, really. That’s basically what Greg has been saying over and over again is,“Stop talking. Just do it.” You have the two leading companies around the world, are just doing it. They’re all commuting to net zero. They're all committing to basically getting on with it and ignoring the politicians. Let's just do it.

Kylie Davis: (26:46)

Yeah. Okay.

Richard Romanowski: (26:48)

I don't need to, the commercial world, it’s just too commercial in terms of I can save money. I can make it all work.

Kylie Davis: (26:59)

Yeah, absolutely. No, and that's extraordinarily empowering. What do we need to do to make it roll out more? We need real estate agents effectively to be looking at the properties that are in their portfolio in terms of in... if they're commercial or industrial agents with a big rent roll of properties that they're looking after on behalf of their owners, then they should be looking at them and having conversations with their landlords about, “Let's look at how we do this. Let's look at how we’d create another revenue stream for you.”

Richard Romanowski: (27:35)

Yes.

Kylie Davis: (27:35)

Yeah, and then I guess we also need some additional skills in real estate in that way to help them understand how to create their business case for it and how to then sell that or are you guys helping out with that?

Richard Romanowski: (27:49)

We do all that. We take that problem away from them because that's part of why we have 50 staff. It's not easy and there're electrical engineers because you get into the magic of electricity. That's part of coming back to the real estate agents and the landlords with the answers instead of them having to do any of the work other than being willing to look in and think about it.

Kylie Davis: (28:20)

Yeah. Richard, it's safe to have that battery pack on my property. There's no emissions or things like that that I need to worry about. Everyone’s anxious about mobile phone towers when they all started going in.

Richard Romanowski: (28:33)

Yes we make sure that the batteries are located outside, they're not put into the building. There’s lots of concerns now for fires, for batteries. We were very conscious of that. Batteries are still too young of our technology to put inside the building. We put them outside the building, we find a place that's suitable to the landlords' and tenants' agreement. They go into fire retarding safe enclosures with smoke detectors and fire detectors and all that stuff is all built into the whole safety process. We're engineers, we're conservative.

Kylie Davis: (29:18)

Yeah, Well that's true. I've worked with engineers before in the past life and I was at the Australian newspaper.

Richard Romanowski: (29:25)

Is that a good enough answer to say, no it is?

Kylie Davis: (29:28)

No, no, I think that's great. Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (29:30)

The key is making sure that it's safe. That’s built into what we're doing.

Kylie Davis: (29:34)

Yeah, fantastic. Let's just pause there for a moment and hear a quick word from our sponsors.

Kylie Davis: (29:40)

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Kylie Davis: (30:48)

What’s your company structure? You said that you've invested 20 million, that's an awful lot of money to invest. How are you guys structured?

Richard Romanowski: (30:56)

Structured, we're a publicly unlisted company. The parent company is called eleXsys Holdings and we're actually undertaking now a series a capital raise, raising 20 million more dollars to allow us to speed up commercialization. Again, remember when we won in Berlin, the World Energy Council said-

Kylie Davis: (31:23)

Think bigger. Yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (31:25)

Bigger, do this faster that's why we've said a $20 million raise, which lets us speed up in Australia. We’ve also talked with the World Energy Council. They’ve helped us create an office and connections in London and Nice France and Singapore and California. We have projects starting demonstration projects of our technology all over the world. Again, it wasn't what we thought, maybe we thought we were just going to just do Queensland. They said, “Look, we have to do this. It’s too good a thing to do to go slow and speed it up.” That’s what the $20 million is for us to speed up commercialization and begin our international footprint.

Kylie Davis: (32:11)

Fantastic. That's so exciting. The future seems so extraordinarily bright. What do you see the next five years being like both for you and in this space?

Richard Romanowski: (32:27)

Oh, I get nervously scared, excited when you-

Kylie Davis: (32:32)

Yeah, totally. Excitedly terrified.

Richard Romanowski: (32:37)

What we're doing, to be able to scale globally, we will licence our technology to everybody in the industry. We're like the Intel inside of the computer industry. That little chip inside of everything. Our little technology goes into every rooftop to the export. That’s the concept of putting eleXsys into every single building. We don't want to be the installer down the track. We're basically licencing every solar company, we're licencing all the pension funds or super funds around the world to use our technology. This would roll out or speed up or scaled globally as they call it. Basically, we're trying to decarbonize. We think we're very significant part of decarbonizing the world and helping electrification of everything. One of the key things is, if you think of the future when we have the building owners are also going to have electric vehicles. Everybody’s going to show up and then they're going to be pulling more energy out of the electricity grid. We help that, we facilitate that to happen and in a green way.

Kylie Davis: (33:50)

Wow. I guess if every buildings around the countries, or even if a much greater proportion of buildings around the country, which is I guess what will happen first have solar grids on their rooftops, then the need to go out and build special battery charges for electric cars starts to diminish because suddenly, you've already got it there and it just needs to be plugged in or the extra step needs to be gone, right?

Richard Romanowski: (34:18)

It's all there-

Kylie Davis: (34:19)

It doesn't become an infrastructure project because you guys have got that nailed.

Richard Romanowski: (34:24)

With the IKEA project, they're moving to all their delivery vehicles will be electric. They'll have onsite electric charging, they'll charge off their own salt rooftop solar. We don't need more rooftop solar. We’re going to be doing is adding probably a couple of megawatts of solar car park to that site. Plus EB charging systems, they'll be able to run their whole delivery fleet off their own energy on that site.

Kylie Davis: (34:55)

Wow, that's so exciting.

Richard Romanowski: (34:58)

I'm going to interrupt then go back for a second. The other thing is, you mentioned before, and I'll go back to it, is this the bush fires one of the things that what people are saying is we need resiliency, that means when the bush fire comes, or remember when the bush fires happened way out in the country, that shuts down or destroys the transmission lines between us and the coal power station or even the solar farm. The commercial building with rooftop solar in batteries is its own little micro grid. When the power goes off, it'll keep running,

Kylie Davis: (35:38)

Right. Fantastic

Richard Romanowski: (35:40)

A lot of times the guys with the fruit refrigeration have diesel backups, the battery actually helps as a backup. It’s a big part of creating a resiliency in the community where you have many buildings that can actually keep operating-

Kylie Davis: (36:00)

And keep feeding the... yeah.

Richard Romanowski: (36:00)

It becomes our emergency location where the lights, the solar and batteries keeps the lights on.

Kylie Davis: (36:05)

That's fantastic because we have a property down the South coast of New South Wales and we were bushfire affected and the house is fine luckily, but every time we got evacuated the biggest issue for us is that if we lost power, we had no water to our pump. There was no way to defend the property at all because you had no power. Is there residential impact for eleXsys?

Richard Romanowski: (36:35)

Yes, there is absolutely residential [version 00:36:37]. We’ve started with commercial and then we'll be developing a residential version in 2021 so that your farm, your property can have solar and batteries and basically go off grid and be a lot safer and cheaper.

Kylie Davis: (36:56)

Fantastic. I can't wait, Richard. This is so exciting. This is like the best news I've heard all summer after a very dark and depressing summer around with conversations around carbon and what you can or can't do. Now to me, the excitement of it too for, from the real estate industry is that new ideas always take time to take seed. The agents that really get their brains around this and start to look at the opportunities in their portfolios and start to work with you guys and work with their landlords and tenants to introduce it are going to be able to... I can say make quite an extraordinary amount of money just from being able to articulate the value proposition of this software and of your AI to the value of their property. It's extraordinarily exciting.

Richard Romanowski: (37:50)

Thank you. I’m nervous about the 500 phone calls that we're going to get out of it.

Kylie Davis: (37:56)

I think we might need to. Maddie sent me a whole pile of fabulous information. I'm going to put that into the show notes. Richard, just to go back a little bit too, can you just give me a little bit of background about you. You’re obviously an engineer tell us about your history.

Richard Romanowski: (38:12)

Surprisingly no, I'm not.

Kylie Davis: (38:16)

Oh, okay.

Richard Romanowski: (38:16)

I’m actually the money guy [inaudible 00:38:19]. I've been in business for many years and then about 15 years ago, I started investing in clean energy startups. Just get off and you're investing and ended up by circumstance meeting my co founder who is the engineer, Bevan Holcombe has the PhD in Electrical Engineering and he was at at Energex for quite a while and we were running there smart grid programmes and understood the problem that the world was going to have. Between him and I, we invested our money and our time for the last seven years to build this business up.

Kylie Davis: (39:06)

Fantastic. Richard, it has been absolutely a pleasure to talk to you. I am so excited about your technology. I'm super excited about the fact that we don't need to wait for government and that we can just... that the real estate industry can get behind helping you guys grow this and I'm growing the value of the assets that we're in charge of so thank you so much for being on the show.

Richard Romanowski: (39:29)

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you.

Kylie Davis: (39:51)

Are you as blown away as I am right now? How freaking clever is that as a technology and the problem that it solves. This summer in Australia, we experienced firsthand the reality of climate change and I don't know about you, but I have been thoroughly depressed about the conversation that has followed such undeniable evidence that the planet is getting hotter and more dangerous. The total lack of leadership from our politicians who still to this very day insist that we need to open more coal plants is not just block headed, it's thoroughly depressing because in a country like Australia with so much sun that has been in drought for so long, how can we not make solar viable? I love Planet Ark Power's technology because it solves all those obstacles to going solar. I love that it doesn't require governments to spend on expensive infrastructure and that it uses the existing poles and wires and electricity grid.

Kylie Davis: (40:46)

I love that it doesn't require any changes in legislation, we can just do it. Most of all, I love the fact that if we as a real estate industry get behind this and encourage our landlords to increase the value of their property assets by making electricity cheaper for their tenants and add a valuable revenue stream to their investments by selling power back to the grid. Oh, holy molly, we could lead the revolution and make Australia carbon neutral, not by 2050 which our politicians tell us is far too early to commit to but by 2035 just by doing what we're doing now, selling and renting real estate and helping our landlords get better returns, wouldn't that be amazing?

Kylie Davis: (41:30)

Look, we've included all the information on how to find out more about Planet Ark Power in the show notes including how to contact Richard and his team. Now, if you have enjoyed this episode of the PropTech Podcast as much as I have, please tell your friends and drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you via email, LinkedIn, or on our Facebook page. You can follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple iTunes and Google podcasts. I'd like to thank my audio support Charlie Hollands and the very fabulous Jewel Escudero and our sponsors Beepo making outsourcing easy and HomePrezzo, turning your data into amazing marketing content. Thanks everyone. Until next week, keep on propteching because remember, PropTech will save the planet. See you.