A letter from our co-founder and CEO
Today we announced a funding round led by Cathay Innovation, enabling us to expand our commercial and residential businesses across the Northeast US and Texas. But this capital is just the beginning. To share our vision for the next decade, I’m excited to publicly release our internal company strategy for the first time – the north star guiding us towards a grid powered by 100% clean energy 24/7/365.
Why now? The idea of 24/7 clean energy isn’t new, but its meaning has been lost. Coming up in the industry nearly a decade ago, I remember all the big companies were talking about their 24/7 strategies. While well-intentioned then, many of them are now quietly abandoning these commitments as they focus on hyper-scaling or seem content stopping at greenwashy offsets.
Our strategy instead is defined by delivering on this commitment, powering grids across the country every day with 100% clean energy – through the sunniest days and the century defining storms. And not just for large corporations with expertise and endless capital, but for any customer on the grid.
Our model as an electricity retailer means we choose how to supply our own book of customers. If we can run our book on 100% clean energy, we can validate it’s possible and create a path for the rest of the grid to follow.
David Energy's Company Strategy
Mission
Run the grid 24/7/365 on clean energy
Vision
David Energy will be the operating system of the clean energy grid, running a complex, distributed network of connected devices that respond to the fluctuations of clean energy generation in real-time, 24/7. Doing so means we will have decarbonized the largest contributor to climate change–the energy sector.
Not only that, customers will benefit from an energy system that is cheaper and more resilient than it is today. Power outages will be a thing of the past and people will not think about their consumption or bills in the same way they do not think about how clean water flows freely and cheaply. Population centers will be quieter and have cleaner air due to the retiring of noisy and dirty engines in favor of battery storage driven processes. Products like electric vehicles and battery-enabled induction stoves will dramatically increase performance of our day-to-day tools.
Our Strategy
Running our customer book on renewable energy, even at a small scale, will demonstrate an unbeatable competitive advantage and a clear path to achieving our vision of running the grid on clean energy 24/7. Renewables like solar and wind are now the cheapest electrons we can create; they are essentially free when available because there is no fuel cost.
As a result, consistently taking advantage of the times when they are available leads to a structurally cheaper model for supplying power than the current fossil-fuel based model. Being structurally cheaper unlocks growth and will allow us to dislodge market share from incumbents, who will not be able to replicate our strategy because doing so would cannibalize their existing assets.
The inherent challenge of running our book reliably on clean energy is that it is impossible to control when solar and wind generation are available and existing risk management techniques cannot account for this. To reliably run our book 24/7 on clean energy, we need to match customer demand to when renewable supply is available in real-time. Because renewables are intermittent, we can acquire customers that naturally align with when renewables are producing, then use controllable physical capacity to cover any remaining mismatches.
This means, in order to run our book 24/7 on clean energy, David Energy must:
- Grow a customer demand base
- Develop a renewable generation base
- Leverage controllable physical capacity1 to manage mismatches between the two
1Any form of controllable generation, shiftable demand, or storage–can exist on demand-side or supply-side of the market
