“Storage is the Holy Grail of the energy business… you figure out the storage problem, you win the trillion dollar prize.”
Louis Evans is the president and CEO of Commonwealth Energy Group. Ed Fortunato is the chief economist at Exelon Corporation.
For many years, renewable energy could be seen simply as a subsidized inferior product compared to fossil fuels. As the technology has improved, renewable energy is now not only independently viable, but superior in many ways. Energy storage represents the most important next step in the evolution of renewables. The proliferation of personal renewable energy like home solar panels can go a long way in avoiding that challenge because energy does not have to travel far or be stored as long. “About 60% of energy is used to transport energy from the power plant to your home.”
The growth of renewable energy will have major effects on the geo-political stage. By establishing energy independence through renewables, the United States will be less and less dependent on the Middle East and Russia for oil.
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SPEAKERS
Louis Evans
President & Chief Executive Officer
Commonwealth Energy Group
Ed Fortunato
Chief Economist
Exelon Corporation
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we started in 2020 and look forward to continuing indefinitely because we've really enjoyed these conversations with a variety of different guests and we've loved the engagement from our community as well. But SALT Talks are a series of digital interviews with leading investors, creators, and thinkers, and what we're trying to do on these talks is the same thing we try to do at our conferences, which is provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Lou Evans and Ed Fortunato to SALT Talks.
John Darsie: (00:59)
Lou Evans is the president and CEO of Commonwealth Energy Group, a graduate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, Pennsylvania Apprenticeship and Training Council, Louis is a highly skilled and licensed master electrician. In 2008, Louis founded CEG in an effort to assist companies in lowering their operating costs by lowering their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Louis is also an active member of the United States Green Building Council, Green Business Certification, Inc., and the Lead Green Associate. Lou serves on the committee for a local U.S. Congressman's military candidate selection board as well.
John Darsie: (01:40)
Ed Fortunato is the chief economist of Exelon Corporation, where he tracks global and domestic economic forces, forecasts future economic trends, and analyzes how these patterns and events impact the company. Over the last 17 years at Exelon, Ed has managed the proprietary trading book and the short-term analytics group, led the implementation of trading strategies in both the proprietary and hedging books, and has run the fundamental analysis group as well. Prior to working at Exelon, Ed served as the vice-president of natural gas trading at Merrill Lynch Global Commodities, and was a senior energy trader at Edison Mission Energy. He also serves on the board of directors for Partners in Excellent Scholarship Program and Marian House, and is the chair of the Loyola University of Maryland's Data Science and Science Board of Directors.
John Darsie: (02:35)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT, and without further ado, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:50)
Okay, guys, I just want you to know, I'm going to start this interview with great disgust. Okay, I learned that John Darsie is getting fan mail for these SALT Talks. I haven't gotten one lick of fan mail yet, and it's just infuriating me, so I just wanted to mention that to you because you're both cheaper than my therapist, but let's get into the discussion about the two of you before we go into your business. And so Lou, Ed, tell us something about yourselves we couldn't find on the internet, Wikipedia. How did you get started? Why don't we start with you, Ed, and then we'll go to Lou.
Ed Fortunato: (03:23)
Well, it's funny. I was listening to your discussion with Andrew Cuomo a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed like you had a lot of similarities. You talking about wooden spoons, I couldn't stop laughing. I spent my life, my younger part of my life avoiding wooden spoons and laughing at my mom when she'd break them on us.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:41)
Okay, so for the non-Italians listening in to the SALT Talks, what Ed's referring to is the grandmother, the nona, would come at you with a wooden spoon. She was stirring a pot of sauce. She cleaned it off with a dish towel and she started whacking you with it. And I like to tell people, some people say they got one strike in their family. Yet other people say they got three strikes. I got no strikes. I mean, she was starting to whack it before the pitch was thrown. You couldn't call it a ball or strike.
Ed Fortunato: (04:09)
We got a little bit bigger and you know, we break the wooden spoon and she threatened our father when he got home. And it was a disaster, but more than that, it was the faith, the family, the discipline that you guys talked about. And it just kind of struck a bell to me. It was really interesting. I just think we have a lot of similarities as far as that background goes. We were a little bit more working-class. I grew up in a Trump apartment, so I have a natural anti-Trump bias from a young age. So no offense to anybody on that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:37)
So that was in Jamaica? That was in Queens, Brooklyn?
Ed Fortunato: (04:41)
In Brooklyn.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:42)
In Brooklyn. Yeah.
Ed Fortunato: (04:43)
Yeah. In fact, I cut out of seventh grade to go watch some film, Saturday Night Fever. And you know, I went to studio 54 for my high school prom. I got a scholarship to Brew College. I figured I'd give that a shot. My father would always say, "Go to college, go push a pencil when you get older." And I took a lot of odd manual labor jobs to motivate me to go push a pencil. So I graduated, I started on Wall Street after college. I studied finance. I fell in love with commodities and trading and a few companies later and 18 years at Exelon, and here I am.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:12)
Well, Louis, go ahead. It's an amazing story. And this is one of the things that always gives me hope for our amazing country. Each of us have had these sort of backgrounds and upbringings, and we've got to keep that going, Ed. We've got to keep it going. Lou, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Lou Evans: (05:32)
I too have fell victim to the wooden spoon. I have a grandfather right off the boat from Perugia. So you know how my upbringing was. Graduated high school and I'm in the Northeastern Pennsylvania area. And in that summer, post high school, we had a terrible flood. And I got a part-time job which turned into a 60, 80 hour a week job.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:12)
So let me interrupt you. That's Northeast Pennsylvania, is that Wilksberry, Scranton? Where was it exactly?
Lou Evans: (06:16)
It is. Yes, Scranton area.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:18)
On the Susquehanna River, right?
Lou Evans: (06:18)
Yes.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:19)
So my dad grew up in Plains, PA. And so his family immigrated there from Italy. They were obviously in those coal mines. Then as my grandfather got older, he started a small butcher shop. So I know the area very well, and you're referencing the Susquehanna river floods, which there were some very big ones in the mid seventies.
Lou Evans: (06:42)
'72, Agnes was worst on record up this way. I was 85 and it was interesting. My first paycheck was in the thousand plus dollar range. And I thought, at 18 years old, I fell in love.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:03)
Amen.
Lou Evans: (07:03)
So I pursued a career. I got into an apprenticeship, went to school at night. Worked all day. And I was voted the most likely to not pursue a career, and very much so go in business. And everyone would kind of joke with me and say, "You're here to learn the business. We all know that you're going to go in business." And quite frankly, that's what I did a few years later around 22, 23 years old. Started out small and have started my own company, back then. And we did some commercial industrial work. And then I became a senior VP of another company doing major commercial industrial work. And then prior to the real estate bust in '08, the commercial markets for construction, they had dried up long before the bust and we couldn't buy a job. We couldn't buy a project back then. And I kept getting these magazines into my office on my desk, and they all had green covers. And you know, it was basically despair. And I opened up one of the magazines one day and started reading about green life, whatever you want to call it, the sustainability.
Lou Evans: (08:52)
And I took a chance with it, Pennsylvania had just deregulated, which means that you could now buy your electricity, kind of like the old mob bell deregulation. You could buy your electricity on the open market. And there were so many lawsuits that there were a lot of grant programs in play.
Lou Evans: (09:16)
So I put together a grant program. Used one of my close friends who still today owns a major call center, used him as my first customer. Once his grant money came through, he at that point set up a meeting for me with 11 investors. It was the day before Thanksgiving, 15 years ago. And I had hoped that one of the guys would write a check and I walked out of that room with 11 checks.
Lou Evans: (09:51)
So over the past 15 years through buy sell agreements, about four years ago, I've been able to take the company over 100%. And sustainability is a very broad word. Energy efficiency is more what we do, and we do it on a commercial, industrial, and municipal scale. I don't know if I can get into talking about my business model at this point, or save it for later.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:29)
No, we want to talk about the business model. Let's talk about the business model, where you see it today in COVID. Where you see it post COVID. Tell people that don't know about Commonwealth Energy Group, what you guys do.
Lou Evans: (10:44)
So back in '08, we were a startup, and we had a great run for a good three, four years there because the incentives coming back from the utilities because of the lawsuits that I spoke of, they were very, very lucrative. A typical office light above your head would have a rebate in the same dollar amount that we would charge to put it in. So there was certainly no such thing as free, but we were getting a $50 rebate to put in a $50 fixture, labor and material.
Lou Evans: (11:26)
And that was a great run for a good five years. And as the incentive programs dried up, we dried up as well. And we knew that we had to make a pivot because we could show amazing return on investments. We could get projects to a two year return or less, and back in '08-'09, people would say, that's a beautiful thing, but we're not going to stroke a check.
Lou Evans: (12:03)
So we came up with a self-funding model because it was our biggest obstacle. At that point, we started very small, and we started to fund people and finance people. And we've grown with that model. So as of today, every project that we do, whether it's a sustainability plan or a retrofit as beautifully our new administration is talking about retrofitting many, many buildings throughout the country. We actually fund that project ourselves. So we put up the capital, we do the work, and we also guarantee the savings. It's pretty well a win-win win. It would be very hard for you to say no with us, giving you the capital, putting a guarantee on it, and doing the work for you. So it's very much a good model.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:13)
So how do you guys connect? How do you guys partner up, Ed?
Ed Fortunato: (13:19)
So we have a little bit of everything in our company. We have a big umbrella. We have five utilities that serve parts of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Maryland, the Eastern shore of Maryland, New Jersey, Atlantic City electric, Washington, DC. And then we have a generation company. We're biggest carbon-free generator in the country. And we have a big retail arm. It's the biggest in the country. We sell more electric, more natural gas that anyone in the country.
Ed Fortunato: (13:46)
And Lou's company really just kind of comes in, and it's just another aspect of our retail business. It's not just, but it's a big part of our retail business. So we can use that as a marketing tool to get in the door and say, "Hey, we can come save you money." We can kind of make it more efficient. We can make your business run better. And not only can we do that, we'll sell you gas and power. And it's worked really, really well. I think it's been very lucrative for both Lou's company and our company too. So we continue that.
Ed Fortunato: (14:15)
And just to quantify how efficient lighting has gotten, and just using the lighting as an example, there's a measurement of BTUs per lumen. Lumen is the amount of light out there. And if you're burning a candle, you're burning some wood, it's like 0.2 lumens per BTU. A conventional light bulbs about 15 lumens per BTU. An LED bulb is in the tens of thousands of lumens per BTU. So it's gotten so much more efficient.
Ed Fortunato: (14:41)
And when I started in this business, you were talking about lighting demand would be about 20% of total demand overall. And you're down to 10 now, or eight or 10% now, and it's heading lower. So a lot of the low-hanging fruits been extracted, but there's still way more to go as far as just lighting alone goes as far as efficiency.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:01)
When you look at the new administration and obviously Louis knows this, Joe Biden is from that area, Scranton, PA. He's thinking about things like the green new deal. He's thinking about things like addressing fracking and potentially curbing fracking. The Paris Accords, the reintroduction of the Paris Accords. Tell us about the impact that this would have on your business, if any, and how are you prepared and set up for the future? Given these things that are out there.
Ed Fortunato: (15:37)
Lou, me? Who are we talking?
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:38)
It doesn't matter. It's a free flowing conversation.
Ed Fortunato: (15:42)
Okay, good. I just didn't want to cut anybody off. The future is bright for energy. And I think there's a lot of reasons for it. I think one of the things that I was reading about over the course of the holidays, which is kind of new energy and renewables. And for the longest time, I always viewed them where they always seemed to be kind of subsidized inferior products compared to the fossil fuel business we have. And you look at GE, which is a major corporation. They're having trouble now, but they're a major corporation. The major acts as the capital. They're developing wind turbines with 13 megawatts. The average wind turbine in this country is about two megawatts. So you can drastically increase the amount of electricity coming from the wind.
Ed Fortunato: (16:23)
We have 60,000 wind turbines in this country. And if you start retrofitting some of those things, it'd be a vast difference. Hydrogen has been the darling of this whole pandemic, as far as energy goes. They've done a lot of work on that. And they're using that for energy storage purposes. You can take the wind, use it as electricity in off-peak hours, which is when wind blows, nighttime and spring and fall. And save it for a more peak day. And you can use hydrogen as that vehicle. And it's starting to make sense as far as pricing and as far as technology goes.
Ed Fortunato: (16:55)
And then you get a company like Quantum Scape, which went public back in November. That had a $5 billion market cap, went up to 40 billion and is somewhere around 20 billion now. But that's dues and solid state batteries in automobile applications. And that can kind of really change the game and challenge the Tesla and give an opportunity to places like Volkswagen and GM, to really kind of mass produce electric vehicles. And if they charge as quickly as they state they can, and they give you a range as large as they can, that would really kind of challenge the energy business. And I think that's important going forward.
Ed Fortunato: (17:27)
As far as Biden's work, we have a very balanced Senate right now. We have a really tight House of Representatives, and it is going to be hard for some of his more aggressive plans to get through. A guy like Joe Mansion or a senator like Murowski in Alaska can really kind of have an impact. Just moving one to the other because the Senate is so tight. And so it's going to keep very aggressive ideas more neutralized.
Ed Fortunato: (17:54)
Fracking on public lands is probably the most vulnerable, it's only 8% of our total output. And there's tons and tons of natural gas out there. In private lanes too. So it's not going to be a problem. Guess is going to be a transition fuel to the future. And yeah, I'll stop there.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:12)
No, listen, it's fascinating. It's the reason why I wanted to have you guys on. Let's talk about the next 20 years in your business with everything that you just said, and I'll turn this over to Louis. What is the backdrop? How are you adjusting? How are you adapting to the landscape and the macro factors that Ed is laying out?
Lou Evans: (18:40)
That's a very interesting question because where we sit in the energy sector, whether it be commercial, industrial, or municipal, we will always always be the second largest expense next to people in an organization. So hydrogen is definitely the key to the future. Long-term battery and inexpensive battery is definitely just as good. If you look at the demographics on who's driving electric vehicles, it's mid thirties, over a hundred thousand dollar income, and that demographic has never changed. So something has to change, and lower price batteries, and maybe cars with a lot less bells and whistles that people will be able to afford them.
Lou Evans: (19:46)
You can look at a saturation point, whether it be new air conditioning, LED lighting, whatever that may be, but there's always something more. We're running, looking in our marketing, we came up with a bit of a plan where through COVID, I would drive weekly through Philadelphia and I would very much see all of these buildings lit up a 100% at dusk or at nighttime, but yet I knew there was no one in there.
Lou Evans: (20:27)
So if you take an LED and you've saved 70%, there is nothing cheaper than off. So lighting control now becomes the next thing. Why do you want to have a light on, even if it is 70 per cent cheaper, why do you want to have a light on if no one's there?
Lou Evans: (20:48)
Conditioning air, it is going to be massive. It's going to come out of this administration just because of COVID. There is going to be a great run on HVAC equipment. Everybody wants their air conditioned to be able to take COVID out of the air. They want that warm and comfortable feeling. So what we do, until there becomes a replacement for electricity, lighting and gas, we just need to get more efficient every day.
Lou Evans: (21:27)
And when it comes to sustainability, we do not approach sustainability the same way that let's say a Greenpeace tree hugger would. We look at it for the actual definition. We're here to help you sustain your company. And if it's financial, we'll bring in a financial person for you. We can certainly help you get your energy bills down, but we want that company to sustain themselves for many, many years to come.
Lou Evans: (22:02)
So I believe that the energy sector is in a great position because it is changing every day. We've got Steve Wozniak playing in the energy efficiency game now. So that's a great punch in the arm, a shot in the arm for the energy efficiency game. And we're what's called an energy services company, and now Woz is calling out ESCOs as the great new companies of the future. Everybody needs to be using ESCOs. So I believe that energy savings will never go away because HR looking to slash their costs will never go away. So we're number two.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:59)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let me Ed, because you've done a lot of work on this over the years. The relationship with China that the US is going to have, and the energy draw that China has on the world in terms of its fossil fuel consumption, et cetera. Where do you think things are going to go in the Biden administration with that relationship? And [crosstalk 00:23:24].
Ed Fortunato: (23:25)
I'll give Trump credit for one thing, he's made our relationship with China a bipartisan issue. And he's brought it to the forefront and they seem to be a threat. And as long as that's the case, it's going to be fairly contentious and a little more than competitive. Before the tariffs were imposed, there was a lot of talk and a lot of work on LNG exports to China directly. And that's kind of gone by the wayside. That stopped right now.
Ed Fortunato: (23:51)
But even without us exporting gas to China, it's still an energy hungry world. And it's still a very energy hungry country. And energy globally is a logistics problem. So if China was going to buy LNG from us and they're not buying it from us, we'll sell it to Europe and Europe will ricochet it over to China. So there's still demand for it.
Ed Fortunato: (24:16)
I think the Biden administration is going to take some of the rhetoric out of the equation as far as China goes. It's going to be a little bit less in the headlines and possibly a little bit more kind of clandestine or behind the scenes. I think Biden's going to work hard with Europe and other allies to kind of formulate a strategy to kind of isolate China. Whether that's a reenactment of the transpacific partnership, whether that's an alliance for trade with Europe, whatever it is. I think that they're going to kind of try and counteract China's influence in the world that way.
Ed Fortunato: (24:54)
The Paris Accords, as you mentioned before, we're going to rejoin those. It's more of a ceremonial type of a pattern. The cheap gas that we have in this country has done more than hurt coal and carbon emissions than anything else. So the combination of things is going to hopefully our alliances, hopefully our growing LNG exports around the world will kind of offset China. And also Russia's kind of influence with China as far as gas sales with them go to.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:22)
But it's interesting. And I think it dovetails from what Lewis is saying about energy conservation and timing of the lighting, timing of the energy, making it more efficient. It puts America in a power seat geopolitically, right? Because ultimately we're going to be able to have some level of energy independence going forward, which will help the countries footprint from a foreign policy perspective.
Ed Fortunato: (25:47)
It sure seems that way. For the last 10 years, everyone's expecting the US dollar to collapse as far as world currencies. And one of the biggest supports of that is we're not shipping a trillion or a trillion and a half dollars out every year to countries for oil anymore. It's a balance of trade and the energy is fairly flat now. And that combined with the rich resource now, has kind of taken us from going to countries who are basically our enemies on our knees to begging for energy to kind of be an independent.
Ed Fortunato: (26:15)
And it's really kind of changed the politics of the middle East. It's changed our relationship with Russia. And one of my fears initially was, with lithium ion, China controls most of the cobalt in the world, they control most of the lithium in the world. And as a result, we're kind of going from dealing with the Russians and Iranians for energy, to dealing with Chinese.
Ed Fortunato: (26:36)
And now if we do develop solid state batteries, they are much more just common materials like zinc and nickel and things like that, which China doesn't control. So we'll have more control of our independence energy-wise and go from there. I'll throw out a quick trivia stat for you. About 60% of the electricity produced in this country is produced to move the electricity from the power plant to your home. And just a change in that would just completely make things infinitely more efficient.
Ed Fortunato: (27:08)
And if we can get kind of scale on solar, scale on wind, where you can use it in your house or put it on your roof, that transportation fee goes away. And it makes the whole system, demand would plunge for that. So there's just a lot of opportunities out there. Financing, it has been there for about five or 10 years now, and we need to kind of push forward and kind of have these new developments kind of take hold, which is what we're starting to see.
Anthony Scaramucci: (27:34)
Well, I'm going to turn it over to the earth's wild millennial who's getting the fan mail, because this is the way we get our ratings up. Louis, what can I tell you? It's embarrassing to me, but go ahead, Darsie. I know you've got a ton of questions for these guys, so fire away.
John Darsie: (27:52)
I don't have a million Twitter followers like you showering praise on me every day. So I got to latch on to just the single piece of fan mail that I get to try to boost my ego and boost my confidence.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:02)
Well, you didn't have to bring it up though. You didn't have to bring it up and hurt my feelings in front of my friends, but go ahead.
John Darsie: (28:09)
So I'm going to start with Lou on this one. So the vaccine is getting rolled out. We're starting to see travel pickup a little bit, and we're starting to see sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Dr. Fauci said that by April, he thinks at least within April, he thinks the majority of Americans who want the vaccine will be able to get the vaccine. So when in your view, are we going to see energy demand pick up back to normal levels? And what will be sort of the path to getting back to the normal levels?
Lou Evans: (28:41)
You say energy demand. I would say that you're talking about commercial industrial. I would say 12 to 18 months. It seems like a lot of large companies are going to stay with this work at home model for quite some time. So that is going to be, it's almost a real estate question at this point for a REIT. That seems to change every day. Are you going to work from home for the next two years? Are you going to get back in the office?
Lou Evans: (29:28)
I was actually, Ed hosted a call yesterday and the downfalls of not being in the office. So from our standpoint, it almost doesn't matter because we're poised to help whether you're in the building or not. So energy demand kicking back up in the commercial, industrial space. I would say gradually over the next 12 to 18 months.
John Darsie: (30:04)
What are the biggest drivers in commodities markets in general as we head sort of into 2021? And into a more normalized environment. Ed, you want to take that one?
Ed Fortunato: (30:14)
Yeah, let me just pile one for the energy demand question for a second. Lou did the commercial industrial, but you look at the transportation side and until air travel improves, jet fuel is going to be depressed. And you're going to have a lot of people driving around. You've seen gasoline demand rebound.
Ed Fortunato: (30:33)
We average about nine to 10 million barrels a day of demand. We went down to 3 million barrels in April, we're back to seven or eight now. That'll increase as things get better, but jet fuel is a couple million barrels a day. And we're a fraction of that. And so until we get back to that travel, and whether it's leisure or business, and business is going to take a while. Zoom calls are pretty efficient. You don't need to stay for two nights for a two hour meeting anymore.
John Darsie: (30:57)
Right.
Ed Fortunato: (30:57)
I think that's going to change a lot and take a while to rebound.
Ed Fortunato: (31:03)
But as far as commodity markets, liquidity in the markets and fed stimulus and things like that have had a big help. You can see money flowing into different commodities pretty aggressively. You take a look at gold. Gold's price has been very strong, as money's kind of flowed there.
Ed Fortunato: (31:21)
You've seen commodities like oil be depressed because of lack of demand, but lumber demand has been through the roof just based on all the building demand for people. People in the houses are tired of being in their small cramped house. They're going to expand it. They want to do a little bit of work in their house to improve it.
Ed Fortunato: (31:35)
Businesses have been very ingenious in kind of expanding outdoor restaurant space and seating. So you'll see an increase in demand for that.
Ed Fortunato: (31:48)
As far as commodity prices going forward, I think it's more lack of capital going to the market than anything else. If you look at oil, or capital spending in oil has been cut 30% in 2020 and 2021 also. And as a result, you just know, when this demand does come in '22 or '23, you won't have as many projects online to kind of have capacity. And without that capacity, you're going to see prices surge and that'll be the market signal to go out and kind of go drill for more.
John Darsie: (32:17)
Right. Who do you think will be the biggest winners and losers in the energy space this year? And Lou, we'll start with you on that one.
Lou Evans: (32:26)
In the energy space, as far as customer goes?
John Darsie: (32:31)
Yeah, broadly.
Lou Evans: (32:34)
I'm seeing a very big jump in data centers. Data centers are expanding hand over foot. And they are huge energy users, which obviously comes with our time, right? We're in Zoom, we're in Netflix. We need more cloud storage. So data centers are expanding. They will definitely be winners.
Lou Evans: (33:02)
I think the at homes will definitely be winners. And I think strong REITs will be winners. They're adjusting and they're being proactive and they're taking this COVID time, with half empty or empty buildings to make the modifications to make everyone comfortable. So that when the day comes, people will feel comfortable coming back.
John Darsie: (33:37)
Ed, what do you think?
Ed Fortunato: (33:38)
You know, as far as winners, we've seen hydrogen be the biggest winner. Any equity that's invested in hydrogen or is doing research in hydrogen, has kind of jumped up. We've seen some realizations on hydrogen limitations. We've seen some progress on it. We've seen a big progress, renewables. Like I mentioned with the wind turbines. We've seen solar panels improve, we've seen storage technology just really kind of improve at different levels. Whether that's batteries or that's wheels, things like that.
Ed Fortunato: (34:09)
I'll just diverge for a second. Storage is the holy grail of the energy business. And whether that's a battery to kind of threaten Exxon Mobil or the house of Saud on the gasoline side, or flatten out prices on power. You figure out the storage problem, you win the trillion dollar prize.
Ed Fortunato: (34:30)
And there's a lot of work being done on that. There's been some progress and I think there's going to continue to be more progress going forward. And that's going to be the most exciting part of the whole business. And we've seen trends accelerate, and this is all really kind of come to the forefront over the last year or so. And like I said, you can almost imagine a world now with renewables. Where a year ago, you just weren't seeing it.
John Darsie: (34:51)
Right. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much, Ed and Lou for joining us on SALT talks today. We have a lot of members of our community who are investors in the energy space. Obviously it was a challenging year in 2020 with the pandemic and other factors that help drive energy costs, energy prices down. So it'll be a fascinating thing to watch. And hopefully we'll have you back either back on SALT talks later in the year or at one of our in-person conferences. We're bringing the SALT conference back in 2021. We'll have an announcement on that in the next couple of weeks, but we look forward to keeping up with you guys and hopefully talking to you soon.
John Darsie: (35:27)
Anthony, do you have any final words before we let Lou and Ed go?
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:31)
Well Dorsey, you may be getting fan mail, but now that I know where Lou is from, him and I, we know where the best pizza is in the world. It happens to be in that area. Am I wrong Lou?
John Darsie: (35:42)
Brooklyn.
Lou Evans: (35:43)
Old Forge, Pennsylvania, pizza capital of the world.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:46)
[inaudible 00:35:46] talking about Brooklyn, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Ed Fortunato: (35:47)
We can take you guys for a pizza tour [inaudible 00:35:50].
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:50)
You remember Brutacos in Old Forge, Louis?
Lou Evans: (35:53)
Absolutely.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:54)
See these guys don't know.
Lou Evans: (35:56)
Best [inaudible 00:35:56] in the world, Anthony.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:57)
These guys don't know white pizza, Louis. They don't know white pizza again. They don't even know what they're missing. Look at how naive and uneducated they are on where the best pizza is.
Ed Fortunato: (36:05)
You need [inaudible 00:36:05] gardens in your life. We'll get you there after this pandemic.
Anthony Scaramucci: (36:10)
All right.
Lou Evans: (36:11)
Anthony, tripe and safrita.
Anthony Scaramucci: (36:13)
Amen. Amen, Lou. All right, well guys, thank you for coming on. And we'd love to get you at one of our live events and we'll see you guys soon right after the pandemic.
Ed Fortunato: (36:24)
Okay, happy new year.
Lou Evans: (36:25)
Thanks very much.
John Darsie: (36:26)
Thank you to everybody who tuned into today's SALT talk with Ed Fortunato and Lou Evans to discuss the energy markets and the future of the energy space heading into 2021. Just a reminder, you can access all of our talks on demand on our website at salt.org/talks/archive, and you can sign up for all of our future talks at salt.org/talks.
John Darsie: (36:49)
Please follow us on social media. SALT is on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. And please tell your friends about SALT talks and about SALT. We love growing our community. We grew it tremendously in 2020 using these digital tools that we were sort of forced to use, with doing SALT talks rather than doing our conference series, but it turned out to be a blessing. And we're very excited to have all these new members of our community who are aware of SALT and everything that we're trying to do here. So very gratified by that. And please spread the word about SALT. This is John Darsie, on behalf of everyone at SALT, signing off for today. We'll see you back here again tomorrow on SALT talks.