Podcasts about soluna computing

John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna Computing, the world's first utility-scale company developing power plants and combining them with high-performance computing facilities. As a serial entrepreneur, John has successfully founded and scaled multiple industry-leading technology startups that have achieved market leadership and double-digit growth, including FirstBest, an insurance software company acquired by Guidewire, and The Theory Center, a software company acquired by BEA Systems. Before becoming an entrepreneur, John was the lead architect for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. Soluna Computing builds modular, batchable computing centers for intensive applications like cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. Soluna's scalable data centers provide a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines. Soluna Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLNH) is the leading developer of green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna Holdings was formed when Mechanical Technology, Inc. (MTI) acquired Soluna Computing in 2021.https://www.solunacomputing.com/https://www.nexuspmg.com/

I am so excited to once again welcome the wonderful John Belizaire onto this week's episode. John is the CEO of Soluna Computing, which involves crypto currency, AI, and machine learning powered by renewable energy. John has an impressive background as a successful CEO, architect, and author.John's mission at Soluna is “to make renewable energy a primary source of energy in the world”. Soluna goes to great lengths to make sure renewable energy is used to its fullest capacity,  building specialized data centers to ensure all of the energy is put to use. In John's first episode, he detailed his hopes for this process at Soluna and we are proud to join him in admiring how far he has come! John Belezaire is doing commendable work to ensure a brighter future for us all through use of renewable energy and embracing the versatility of technology. To purchase John's new book: Keep Pushin': CEO Insights to Guide Your Journey to Mastery Read John's CEO Playbook BlogVisit Soluna's website Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Today is the Day Live It. You can also stream this episode on all streaming sites. 

This week host Alex Kehaya joins serial entrepreneur John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing the leading developer of green data centers for batchable computing, Join us for a great conversation on renewable energy and powering the future.

To celebrate 200 episodes of the podcast, we created the EX Takes Mixtape - 12 top employee experience moments from episodes 101-199. Hear EX-themed highlights with these guests of The Customer Experience Podcast:Stacy Sherman, VP of Agent and Customer Experience at LiveopsBrittany Hodak, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Superfan StrategistElizabeth Dixon, Speaker on Strategy, Innovation, and CX; Principal Lead of Strategy, Hospitality, & Service Design at Chick-fil-AMark Schaefer, Speaker and Author of Marketing RebellionSue Woodard, Speaker and Mortgage and FinTech EvangelistShep Hyken, Customer Service and Customer Experience ExpertLisa Earle McLeod, Speaker and Author of Selling with Noble PurposeAndrea Morter, VP of Sales Ops at Get BeyondJohn Belizaire, CEO at Soluna Computing; Founder and Managing Editor at CEO PlaybookKristie Ornelas, VP of Customer Experience Marketing and Communications at CiscoErnest Owusu, Senior Director of Sales Development at 6senseJacco van der Kooij, Founder at Winning by DesignSubscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Today's conversation is a wide-ranging look at how to provide reliable power using renewables while mitigating intermittency and helping Independent Power Producers (IPPs) deal with the annoying curtailment problem through novel software and hardware solutions. Been wondering when I'd do an episode on Bitcoin mining + Renewables? Buckle up and let's roll."Curtailment" occurs when a clean energy electric generating system is prevented from exporting to the grid or is temporarily shut down by the grid operator (usually because of a glut of electricity in the market), effectively wasting energy.Many people have talked about this issue, but few have delivered on it like John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna.Soluna Holdings develops green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna builds modular, scalable data centers for computing-intensive, batchable applications such as cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. John said Soluna provides a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines by using technology and intentional design to solve complex, real-world challenges. It's addressing significant changes in the electric grid — away from power plants fired by coal, oil and gas that contribute to climate change — to more sustainable green electricity generation. But even the staunchest supporters of clean electricity acknowledge the industry is dealing with growing pains, including curtailment. John said up to 30% of renewable energy goes to waste. To address it, Soluna is building data centers that enable clean electricity asset owners to 'Sell. Every. Megawatt.' In today's podcast, John breaks down Soluna's mission and how its solutions address curtailment. Join us for insights on an increasingly critical renewables issue.If you want to connect with today's guest, you'll find links to his contact info in the show notes on the blog.SunCast is presented by Sungrow, the world's most bankable inverter brand.You can learn more about all the sponsors who help make this show free for you here: www.mysuncast.com/sponsorsRemember you can always find the resources and learn more about today's guest, recommendations, book links, and more than 550 other founder stories and startup advice at www.mysuncast.com.You can connect with me, Nico Johnson, on Twitter, LinkedIn or email.

FTX, a large cryptocurrency exchange, recently went bankrupt, leading to calls for government regulation of cryptocurrencies. But you might be wondering, what are cryptocurrencies? In part one of this two-part series, listen to expert testimony provided over a four-year period informing Congress about the cryptocurrency industry, the promise of blockchain, problems - both real and overblown - with this new technology, and how best to regulate this complicated industry. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Support Congressional Dish via Patreon (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536. Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! View the shownotes on our website at https://congressionaldish.com/cd264-cryptocurrencies-and-blockchain Background Sources Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes CD235: The Safe Haven of Sanctions Evaders CD262: Inside C-SPAN with Howard Mortman Proof of Work Jake Frankenfield. May 2, 2022. "What Is Proof of Work (PoW) in Blockchain?" Investopedia. Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Jake Frankenfield. Aug 18, 2022. “Initial Coin Offering (ICO): Coin Launch Defined, with Examples.” Investopedia. Sherwin Dowlat. Jul 11, 2018. “Cryptoasset Market Coverage Initiation: Network Creation.” Satis Group. Madison Cawthorn The Associated Press. Dec 7, 2022. "Rep. Madison Cawthorn broke rules over a 'meme' crypto, a House panel finds." NPR. Regulations Cheyenne Ligon. Dec 5, 2022. “The ‘Good Cop and Bad Cop' of US Crypto Regulations.” CoinDesk. Bills S.4760 - Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022 Sponsor: Sen. Debbie Stabenow Audio Sources Cleaning Up Cryptocurrency: The Energy Impacts of Blockchains January 20, 2022 House Committee on Energy & Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Watch on YouTube Witnesses: Ari Juels, Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech John Belizaire, Chief Executive Officer, Soluna Computing, Inc. Brian Brooks, Chief Executive Officer, BitFury Steve Wright, Former Chief Executive Officer, Chelan County Public Utility District and Bonneville Power Administration Gregory Zerzan, Shareholder Jordan Ramis P.C. Schemes and Subversion: How Bad Actors and Foreign Governments Undermine and Evade Sanctions Regimes June 16, 2021 House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy Watch on YouTube Witnesses: Jesse Spiro, Global Head of Policy & Regulatory Affairs, Chainalysis Eric B. Lorber, Senior Director, Center on Economic and Financial Power, Foundation for Defense of Democracies Dollars Against Democracy: Domestic Terrorist Financing in the Aftermath of Insurrection February 25, 2021 House Financial Services Committee, Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy Witness Daniel Glaser, Former Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, U.S. Department of the Treasury Examining Regulatory Frameworks for Digital Currencies and Blockchain July 30, 2019 Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Watch on C-SPAN Committee concluded a hearing to examine regulatory frameworks for digital currencies and blockchain, including S. 2243, to amend the Expedited Funds Availability Act to require that funds deposited be available for withdrawal in real-time. Witnesses: Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Circle, on behalf of The Blockchain Association Dr. Rebecca M. Nelson, Specialist in International Trade and Finance, Congressional Research Service Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law Exploring the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Ecosystem October 11, 2018 Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Watch on C-SPAN Committee concluded a hearing to examine the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem, including S. 3179, to require the Comptroller General of the United States to carry out a study on how virtual currencies and online marketplaces are used to buy, sell, or facilitate the financing of goods or services associated with sex trafficking or drug trafficking. Witnesses: Dr. Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics and International Business, New York University Stern School of Business Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research, Coin Center Cover Art Design by Only Child Imaginations Music Presented in This Episode Intro & Exit: Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito (found on Music Alley by mevio)

When a grid gets congested, the excess energy generated at renewable plants is wasted.  But what if there was something we could do to mitigate that curtailment and monetize our excess wind, solar or hydroelectric power? John Belizaire is Founder and CEO at Soluna Computing, the leading developer of green data centers for batchable computing, powered by wasted renewable energy. With 25 years of experience as an enterprise software entrepreneur, John is passionate about using flexible computing to unleash the potential of renewable energy. On this episode of Clean Power Hour, John joins Tim to discuss the curtailment assessment Soluna uses to determine how much power is wasted at a plant and simulate the revenue recovery potential of building an on-site data center. John walks us through examples of batchable computing applications that Soluna can run through its facilities and describes how crypto adoption is likely to increase our need for computing power. Listen in for John's insight on viewing data centers as a service to the grid and learn how Soluna can help you sell every megawatt of renewable energy your power plant generates.Key TakeawaysJohn's 25 years of experience as an enterprise software entrepreneurHow helping a stranded power plant in Morocco monetize power until the grid arrived led to the creation of Soluna ComputingSoluna's work with wind, solar and hydroelectric power plantsHow Soluna's flexible computing facilities monetize excess power generated at renewable power plantsHow Soluna's curtailment assessment determines how much power is wasted and simulates the revenue recovery associated with building an on-site data centerSoluna's presence in Texas, the Midwest and Northeast US as well as Canada and EuropeExamples of batchable computing applications that Soluna can run through its facilities (e.g.: the Netflix recommendation engine)What differentiates batchable from real-time computing processesHow Soluna's data centers might accelerate renewable energy developmentWhy the promise of crypto adoption increases our need for computing powerJohn's aim to educate the energy industry around data centers as a service to the grid (not a load)John's concerns around driving mass adoption of the Soluna solutionConnect with JohnSoluna ComputingSoluna on TwitterSoluna on LinkedInConnect with Tim   Clean Power Hour  Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tgmontague@gmail.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsResourcesERCOTSPPSponsor  Clean Power Consulting GroupCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/ Twice a week we highlight the tools, technologies and innovators that are making the clean energy transition a reality - on Apple,

In this episode, we talk to John Belizaire. He is the CEO of Soluna Computing, Inc. John is on a mission to reimagine the renewable energy grid and to make renewable energy more efficient and environmentally friendly. Soluna is currently focused on some of the biggest unsolved problems for the economics of renewable energy: sustainable computing, sustainable data center spaces and wasted energy.  During this episode we take a look at how we can use all the resources from sustainable energy. What we could use those resources for as well as take a deep dive into some of the energy hungry computing that can benefit from Soluna Computing.  Links from the episodes: https://mamaearthtalk.com/episodes/162/ (Mama Earth Talk podcast episode with John Cooley) https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/ (Who is Gary Vaynerchuck?) https://www.solunacomputing.com/projects/project-dorothy/ (Dorothy Project) https://www.solunacomputing.com/careers/ (Soluna Career Page) https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits (Atomic Habits by James Clear) Where can people find John? https://www.linkedin.com/company/solunaholdings/ (LinkedIn - Soluna) https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbelizaire/ (LinkedIn - John ) https://medium.com/clean-integration (Medium) https://twitter.com/SolunaHoldings (Twitter - Soluna) https://twitter.com/jbelizaireCEO (Twitter - John) https://www.youtube.com/c/SolunaComputing (YouTube) https://www.solunacomputing.com/ (Website) https://clean-integration.simplecast.com/ (Clean Integration Podcast) KEY TAKE AWAY“The price of solar equipment has dropped by 99.6%”

Our guest this week on the pod is John Belizaire.  John is the CEO of Soluna Computing, a company that is unleashing the potential of renewable energy and helping power plants sell every megawatt. And a special thanks to members of the Awarepreneurs Community for sponsoring this episode! Resources mentioned in this episode include: Soluna Computing site Clean Integration blog Announcement of $35M of funding Clean Integration podcast Awarepreneurs Community Paul's social entrepreneur coaching

I had a very interesting conversation with John Belizaire. John is very passionate about saving the world, to make the world a better place to live. John is the CEO of Soluna Computing, Inc. John is on a mission to reimagine the renewable energy grid and to make renewable energy more efficient and environmentally friendly. Soluna is currently focused on some of the biggest unsolved problems for the economics of renewable energy: sustainable computing, sustainable data center spaces and wasted energy. Since the age of 14 selling floppy discs in high school, John has had an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in technology. He was a recipient of the Intel Scholarship Program and he went on to receive a computer science and engineering degree from Cornell University. When he was 28 years old, he sold his first start-up company for $150 million. He has gone on to become a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled several more multi-million dollar technology companies. Today, John believes that his company Soluna will be helping to shape the future of renewable energy development. His expertise as both a highly effective business leader and technology strategist has enabled his new venture and operational success steering complex initiatives from concept to funding, launch and growth. John conversation was amazing and super interesting. We spoke about the floppy disk and which that was fun to talk about. We also spoke on some interesting topics such as (a) Renewable Energy Transition & Its Biggest Challenge (b) Wasted Energy (c) Computing Is A Better Battery (d) Why Sustainable Computing Is Ready For Scale Now Can Be The Best Catalyst For Making Renewable Energy A Superpower (e) Cryptocurrency Mining, Blockchain & Why They Are Important Technologies That Can Fuel Future Energy (f) The Future Of The Grid: How It Can Provide Efficient Energy That Reduces Energy Poverty & Enhance Economic Equality Globally (g) The Evolving Role Of The CEO And Entrepreneur. I believe John is going to do remarkable things and I can't wait to see in the near future. If you want to know more please go to John's website at www.johnbelizaire.com or his social media pages John Belizaire. Thank you all for listening and for the support. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/caramel-lucas/message

We've launched a new show! Clean Integration.(The best of The Kingdom has been remastered for Clean Integration Season 1!)This season, we're focused on exploring the nexus of computing and clean energy.John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing, had some great conversations with top experts about the grid transition, policy implications, new computing technologies, the utility's perspective on crypto mining, and more.In the meantime, here are some of our favorite moments from Season 1.00:27 The Future of Renewable Energy with the Soluna Team, Dip Patel CTO of Soluna00:58 The Future of Renewable Energy with Sanjeev Kumar01:13 What It Will Take To Be 100% Renewable with Rob Gramlich, Phillip Ng, VP of Corporate Development at Soluna01:36 Renewable Energy in Bitcoin Mining with Jesse PeltanNow that The Kingdom Podcast has come to an end, be sure to subscribe to Clean Integration wherever you stream podcasts.Connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter @SolunaHoldingsSubscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know when our next episode drops.To learn more about Soluna, please visit soluancomputing.com

PODCAST GUEST BIO: Soluna Computing is a NASDAQ-listed public company that builds smarter, small-footprint data centers to buy and use excess renewable power. John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna Computing and a serial entrepreneur who sold his first company at age 28 for $150 million. ------- QUESTIONS THAT WE COVERED: Business What does your company do? What makes you unique versus the competition? What is one mistake that you see many CEOs making? What are 1-2 lessons you've learned about funding your growth with outside investors? Personal If you had to start over, what are 1-2 tips you'd give yourself in order to be faster, more effective, and higher impact? What are some habits and routines that keep you focused, healthy, and sane — e.g., meditations, exercise, productivity hacks? What recommendations do you have for our audience — books, podcasts, quotes, tools? ------- PODCAST HOST: Entrepreneurs for Impact is on a mission to help climate innovators grow faster with new investment capital, share best practices among peers, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our three offerings include: Climate CEO Mastermind Peer Groups — Our invite-only cohorts of 12 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Today's highly curated Mastermind members represent over $8B in market cap or assets under management. Online course on "Funding Your Climate Tech Startup" — Two-week boot camp offering 500+ climate investor list (with emails), a 5-step process for raising capital, the top 10 startup funding mistakes, and much more. Newsletter — A 3-minute weekly summary of climate tech, startups, better habits, and deep work. Programs are led by Dr. Chris Wedding — 3x founder, $1B of investment experience, and Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill professor, with 60,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/entrepreneurs-for-impact/message

John Belizaire, CEO Soluna Computing; Disrupting Crypto Mining with Clean Energy Power! John and the Soluna team are creating green data centers that enable crypto currency's energy consumption to be a feature and NOT a bug! John recently spoke on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to try to help legislators understand just how disruptive & important their clean energy, small footprint data centers can be. John had this to say; "The reality is that if we execute well, computing can be a catalyst for growth in clean energy — a crucial component to meeting our goals of pollution reduction AND rural job creation. And you in this room have the ability to shape policies that can encourage more sustainable cryptocurrency, deter bad actors and redefine our thinking regarding what grid infrastructure should look like." In our podcast, John explains his varied and profitable entrepreneurial background, how he has worked with a core team throughout much of his career and the very compelling economics behind creating "additionality" for the clean energy operators by putting these data centers on sight! Reducing curtailment, the lost clean energy that the grid cannot absorb, is a total game changer.   $144 billion Private Equity and Venture Capital dollars has gone into the renewable energy sector in the first 5 months of 2022.  That is up from $48 billion in the same period of 2021.   Savvy Shot Caller listeners will understand how this will have a serious impact on the investment landscape for investors. It is my goal to scale global financial equality by giving you insight into the mega investment trends of the future.  Despite the volatile stock and cryptocurrency markets, there is tremendous long term opportunity in both economies for patient and well diversified investors. Bonus: Soluna Computing is a wholly owned subsidiary of Soluna Holdings.  Soluna is traded on the NASDAW under the symbol SLNH.   *************************** The Wealth Alchemist, me, has just launched a stunning new 3-session Wealth Road Map Coaching program to help you REVIEW, REVITALIZE & REIMAGINE  your wealth and future!  Full energy, full impact, full empowerment! Check it out... You can find Expat Ladies Zürich on: LinkedIn Soluna Computing  .  .  . 

Renewable energy is still considered a new concept to many. in this episode I welcome CEO of Soluna, John Belizairen, as we dive into the world of renewable energy. From entrepreneurship to crypto currency mining, this episode covers a lot!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-shades-of-entrepreneurship/donations

It's episode 200 — and we're celebrating the milestone with The EX Takes Mixtape - 12 top employee experience moments from episodes 101-199.  Hear EX-themed highlights with these guests of The Customer Experience Podcast: Stacy Sherman, VP of Agent and Customer Experience at Liveops Brittany Hodak, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Superfan Strategist Elizabeth Dixon, Speaker on Strategy, Innovation, and CX; Principal Lead of Strategy, Hospitality, & Service Design at Chick-fil-A Mark Schaefer, Speaker and Author of Marketing Rebellion Sue Woodard, Speaker and Mortgage and FinTech Evangelist Shep Hyken, Customer Service and Customer Experience Expert Lisa Earle McLeod, Speaker and Author of Selling with Noble Purpose Andrea Morter, VP of Sales Ops at Get Beyond John Belizaire, CEO at Soluna Computing; Founder and Managing Editor at CEO Playbook Kristie Ornelas, VP of Customer Experience Marketing and Communications at Cisco Ernest Owusu, Senior Dir ector of Sales Development at 6sense Jacco van der Kooij, Founder at Winning by Design  Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

John Belizaire's parents escaped Haitian dictatorship and potential death before reuniting and coming to the United States. Since the age of 14 selling floppy discs in high school, John has had an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in technology. He was a recipient of the Intel Scholarship Program and he went on to receive a computer science and engineering degree from Cornell University. When he was 28 years old, he sold his first start-up company for $150 million. He has gone on to become a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled several multi-million dollar technology and fintech companies. He is currently the CEO of Soluna, a computing company helping to shape the future of renewable energy development. His expertise as both a highly effective business leader and technology strategist has enabled his new venture and operational success steering complex initiatives from concept to funding to launch to growth. Soluna Computing builds modular, scalable data centers that convert wasted renewable energy into computing power for intensive, batchable applications such as cryptocurrency mining, AI, and machine learning.

Host Ron Haik speaks with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing, a company helping shape the future of renewable energy development. John is a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled multiple technology companies over a 20-year career. They discuss John's professional journey, the inefficiencies he witnessed in the renewable energy space, and how Soluna is on a mission to reimagine the future of the grid by providing efficient energy that reduces energy poverty and enhances economic equality across the globe.

Today on the podcast, Michael Stausholm joins us. Michael is the founder and CEO of Sprout World, the company behind the world's only plantable pencil, with over 30 million pencils sold in over 80 countries. Michael has also advised the likes of Nike and Walmart on how to implement more sustainable production practices, and in addition to running Sprout World, he mentors green start-ups as a board member of Greencubator. Here is my discussion with Michael. Show Notes:Be sure to visit: Sprout World Visit Coolperx® home page: Coolperx® Reach out to Coolperx®: Phone: 1 (855) 429-0455 email: hello@coolperx.com Plus, don't forget to follow or sign up for my newsletter here: PODCAST WEBSITE Show Transcript: Seth Cysewski: Welcome John, thank you so much for for being here today.     John Belizaire: Thanks for having me Seth. It's a pleasure looking forward to this conversation.     Seth Cysewski: Absolutely. So I'm very fascinated about what you're doing. But, why don't we start just with the basics. Maybe if you could tell me more about John the person and and how and then maybe eventually how you ended up working around clean energy challenges.     John Belizaire: I like to say I'm not an energy guy I'm actually a software guy I yeah studied computer science undergrad started my career at Intel really helping bring software to the personal computer and for the next. Twenty plus years I was ah following my passion really creating new companies I've been an entrepreneur. I hate to say serial entrepreneur because it's so cliche. But, it's true I started my career in the e-commerce space and primarily focus on selling technology to large enterprises I used to carry around lego blocks to big financial services companies and and and explain to them the future of software will be built like this you know and they're like well how much are those lego blocks these these are five bucks but the ones I'm gonna sell you. They're like a million dollars and so enterprise software has really been my focus and and most recently I was in the insurance software space did some work helping insurance the insurance industry sort of transition into the digital realm using data and analytics to make better decisions and then about four years ago I had just finished that experience and I was taking a bit of a break doing some writing I pen a blog where I sort of write down all my learnings and a close friend of mine and mentor who had been an investor in a number of my companies suggested that I look at this business that he was working on. And I said what business would you be doing that I would be focused on because you always do industrial companies. I'm a software guy and he explained well you've got to look at this one. It's the intersection between renewable energy and blockchain. And the only thing I heard in that sentence was blockchain I heard of that and that might be interesting and that started a 4 year journey until today where I am the CEO of Soluna Computing, a company focused on unlocking the potential of renewable energy. And by using computing as a catalyst so that's a quick tour. I'm from New York originally father of 2 two girls, extra extra data there.     Seth Cysewski: It's awesome. I'm a father of one daughter and daughters the are amazing. They the best for sure. So you got a you got a good computing background and so they're bringing you in to Soluna.     John Belizaire: Exactly.       Seth Cysewski: Tell me more about Soluna Computing and I mean obviously the intersection of blockchain and renewable energy sounds very fascinating. So tell me about the problem. Maybe that Soluna is setting out to solve and and a little bit more about that.     John Belizaire: Exactly, you know I get that a lot. You know we don't really have lots of cocktail parties these days given when we're recording this this podcast, but the the questions I get when people sort of asking me what are you doing now is like "What are you up to?" and "What does the Soluna do?" "What's the problem you solve?" and what I explained to them is that we solve a little unknown problem which happens to be a huge problem for renewable energy and the renewable energy transition. And that is that most renewable power plants, up to 30% of their power production never actually make it to the grid. Let me say that again over $700 to $ 750 billion dollars has been spent in the last two years alone clean tech clean energy infrastructure and a host of technology to bring more green electrons to the grid. But when you zoom in on the power plants that are actually producing those electrons big wind farms big solar farms spread around the country and around the world, up to about 30% of their power never makes it to the grid and the reason is because the grid was designed based on this concept that energy the energy that's produced must be synchronized with the energy that's used this concept of sort of direct synchronization. So it that grid infrastructure which is which is very brittle and inflexible. At this point really was focused on ah power plants that can be dispatched by the grid operator and controlled and and fired on literally you know fired on right? And as you begin to replace those old legacy fuels, coal plants etc, with green power plants, well the grid is no longer in charge of dispatching those power plants mother nature sets that schedule if the wind is blowing really heavily in in Oklahoma, there'll be lots of energy produced by the big wind farms out in the field there and there may not be any users of that because people might be asleep at night in Oklahoma and they're not. Many large pipes or transmission lines to take that power perhaps to down south where people might be ready at a party and use that energy. So that's the problem. There is lots of wasted energy which reduces the amount of renewable energy that you can actually bring on grid. That's the problem.     How do we solve it the way we solve it is we bring ah another interesting user of energy that happens to be quite flexible right? What their grid needs is a user of power that can ramp up and ramp down if they can control that part of the equation. Then they can bring more power to the grid. So what we're bringing is these specially built onsite scalable data centers that absorb that wasted energy. We actually will use that energy instead of spilling it and we convert it to global, clean low cost computing and what type of computing are we focused on? Well we're not going to run your email. We're not going to run your e-commerce applications, your mission-critical applications. What we run are what we call batchable applications, anything that can be paused and restarted, put to sleep, that sort of thing because power might not be available. The types of applications that do that or any or anything that are highly compute intensive, okay, and have this ability to sort of pause themselves and examples of that are bitcoin mining. And kind of crypto mining application, AI, and machine Learning. So I you know write my Peloton in the morning as lots of data collected on me and then the next day it's a better. It's a better ride that's happening in the background in a model or or AI system that we never see but it's become a big part of just about every application out there. Scientific computing, for example, is a host of different applications that represent a a sizable slice of computing these days that is perfect for this type of data center and that's what we put inside of our facilities. And then we build these facilities around these green, these green power plants all around the world and that adds retroactively to flexibility that the grid needs.     Seth Cysewski: Thank you, I have some follow up so that's really great. So just so I understand this, when I think about traditional legacy power generation, and we were just in Tennessee and they have peaker plants there using natural gas, right? They're just designed to to fire up when they're needed and so traditionally what you're saying is the energy energy generation was the one that was flexible but with renewables it's not as flexible. So in turn you're making the usage flexible and we're not quite there with.     John Belizaire: Exactly.     Seth Cysewski: Batteries which would be another another solution with this wasted or stranded energy which we could store and so essentially we're just repurposing computing. That's already going to be done and just moving it in to that 30% that that normally they wouldn't hit the grid typically.     John Belizaire: Exactly, you got it Seth, basically computing is a capability something that you can do anywhere in the world. It is flexible in the sense that you can run a a computing process just about anywhere. Not every computing application is resilient enough to be put in an environment where it's not running in a 24 by 7 facility, but there are now a host of applications that are perfect for that environment. And what we're doing is basically taking the insatiable demand for energy created by computing because we all walk around with computers in our in our pockets, we talk to magic assistants at home that use computing somewhere in the cloud, and it just so happens that with a little lateral thinking, that opportunity or that technology can be applied here where a solution is needed today. It needs to be scalable and it needs to solve this wasted energy problem in the near term not in the long term. You're right Seth, batteries are also a solution. They're perfect. You can store the energy deploy it but there are some problems there because batteries are companies too. They have to at some point pull the power down when the power is cheap and that's usually when all that congestion and mismatches and then they need to put the power back on the grid at some point. The power is high so they work on an arbitrage model. Most people don't know that and so if you're in a situation where there's lots of renewables in a particular area, well the power is not going to be high very often and so it becomes very hard for the battery to actually be profitable and they're not scalable from a cost perspective yet. So we're not saying we're a replacement for batteries and transmission. What we're saying is, flexible computing is another somewhat counterintuitive solution to the problem.     Seth Cysewski: Now that's very fascinating. So then who would your, it seems like to me that maybe you would have customers on both ends right? So you're either, you're probably working either and you can correct me, either with with the owners of these power generations or maybe even the people that sign these PPAs. I don't know if you work with them at all on the one end and then on the on the other end, you're you're working with computing companies or people that can then utilize your computing you you call it, batchable? Maybe you can tell me more about your customers on both ends and and how that works from their perspective.     John Belizaire: That's right. Yeah sure on the power side. We work with what we call power partners they're exactly as you described, they're independent power producers,  they're large utilities that have big, you know, assets that are renewable around the country, and big funds, infrastructure funds who deploy capital to build out projects. They may not be the development company. So sometimes they buy a site from a developer and then they build it out. Finance it and operate it. Those are the are the folks that are our power counter parties if you will on the on the other side. We focus on large enterprises enterprises that have a big data science arm or a growing one. And, they are really concerned about 2 things. Number 1: the rising cost of the computing as a percentage of their total revenue. Those Amazon bills start to add up after a while and the second is since what they're doing, this computing is so intense, is very compute intense. It's big. You know the data corps they're dealing with are quite large constantly processing them. The data scientists are now within their communities talking about whether you know are we destroying the world I mean pretty much every application has a data element to it. And are we essentially subsidizing the continuation of legacy fuels because we live inside of these not so flexible data centers that have to be on 24 7, 5 to 9. etc. But what if I told you I can take that slice of compute load, or that slice of computing processes? We like to call them jobs and maybe they represent single digits 2% to 3% of your total computing within an enterprise and move them over to these data centers that are catalyzers for renewable energy, that could be pretty compelling for a company that helps them with their ESG goals. They can point to their applications being directly powered by green electrons and, you know from a data scientist perspective, they just want to have lower cost access to computing that is good for the planet.     Seth Cysewski: That makes sense. This reminds me, so this I probably is a good segue to talk about, you mentioned Blockchain and I think when most people think of, or maybe I don't know about most people, think a lot of people that hear blockchain think of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. You know some people are really into it and others are, you know, a little further out and so and they're just hearing about it, but I'm wondering, I was listening to your your recent financial call, and whatnot, so you guys are scaling pretty quickly which is really awesome, and I believe that bitcoin mining or cryptocurrency mining probably makes up a majority ah of your business right now.      John Belizaire: Yes.     Seth Cysewski: We're talking about like the intersection of how these come together and you're mentioning some of these companies are are a little concerned about their data usage. I think you know bitcoin so I'm just going to point out critics point out I guess that bitcoin can be really detrimental towards climate progress. Not that anyone anyone's going to stop it necessarily, but a recent Columbia paper noted that but bitcoin's currently using over 20 Million metric tons of CO2 each year, and China alone could be up to 130 Million metric tons by itself in 2024. So these are like super big numbers and I'm wondering about. It makes sense what you're doing and and why that would be a really good for that. So that's awesome. But maybe you could talk to me more about like from your perspective what is bitcoin or cryptocurrencies role in in a clean energy future.     John Belizaire: Fantastic! So there are 2 narratives Seth around bitcoin 1 narrative is that it's an incredibly novel technology that could reshape the future of financial services but it's got this terrible side effect. And you've alluded to a number of examples of that. The other narrative is that it is an incredible catalyzer for the future of financial services that are not tied to authoritarian governments and gives people financial freedom money and wealth preservation is now democratized on a global basis and that's made possible by an incredible technology. And, the energy use is a feature, it is not a bug. It's a feature and so I want to talk about the second narrative because it's very easy to get access to information about the first narrative. It's sexy. It sells papers and online clicks and so forth and unfortunately it's a snapshot of the truth. The truth is that the young bitcoin industry was not very focused on its effect on climate and. Probably wasn't really aware of the eventual effect on climate and the reason was because it was a very small network really driven by a vision of really you know, bringing back the control of financial services and money to the people. And it was also driven by cracking some pretty challenging problems to create a decentralized form of money and you've got to solve some real real challenges, right? So as a result you started to see essentially two bitcoins. In fact, there are really 2 bitcoins. One is Bitcoin the capital B the other is bitcoin the lowercase b. Bitcoin capital B is the protocol that powers the global Bitcoin network which is now approaching over close to $1 Trillion in total value. It is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world and the underlying capabilities for providing security is what the crypto mining aspect or bitcoin mining aspect of the platform is, the platform is designed or the protocol, is designed to use mining as a mechanism to protect the blockchain. Transactions that occur on it and thereby protecting the assets that people are trusting the platform to deliver and so mining has as the value of the of the currency. The the lower case b has has increased mining has become a larger and larger enterprise if you will around the platform, and as a result it's matured significantly over the last decade. Number one, you're starting to see a re-shift. There's a movement underway, literally, of companies leaving China. Mostly driven by China kicking them out. They're, you know, domiciling themselves, repatriating themselves around the world in all sorts of different places. They're primarily first driven by where can I find cheap power. But now there's a sentiment around a really want to find the cheapest green power there is. Over $100 Million approaching over $1 Billion invested in very mature companies run by professionals. You know, some of the early versions of the company were run by young folks who didn't have a sort of, you know, business acumen, and they were not backed by institutional capital that asked really tough questions about what you're doing, and so as a result you now have companies much like ourselves out there that are taking a completely different approach to reshaping the next chapter in the Bitcoin landscape. And so the positive narrative is that the bitcoin mining is now seeing its role as a dual purpose one is protecting the Bitcoin network and the second is finding a way to become more sustainable. And catalyzed to renewable energy ah transform transition and bitcoin small b, by the way, is gone from, you know, being really so you know this speculative asset, actually playing a very important role in the global economy in asset allocations for some of the largest asset management companies in the world. It's now made its way into pension pension plans people are getting paid in it. It's maturing. It's a young thirteen year old technology.     And it reminds me of another technology. That's a little older. It started when I started my entrepreneurship career, it had this sort of similar concept of you know capital letter lowercase letter, and it was focused on bringing the world's information to 1 digital place, and it eventually evolved to e-commerce, and then it evolved to connecting people, and it evolved to pretty much everything, and by now you you can guess who the character is I'm describing, and that's the internet. It has the same characteristics as Bitcoin. It evolved over a 20 year period and most of that development happened in the the last decade or so, and we now take for granted the role. The internet has played, and so I often say you should never underestimate the potential technology and the fact that it can really advance way beyond your current expectations, and it can happen very quickly and Bitcoin is gaining momentum and we're proud to be helping to make that happen.     Seth Cysewski: That's fascinating. I thought I was there, I used to dial into my local BBS and I remember Prodigy. I remember when we got my first Encarta CD, it changed all my school projects. Yeah, it's interesting and I hear what you're saying about as it becomes, I almost say more legitimate, but maybe more mature, as a process and as a currency that the stakeholders are more mature too and the things that they're looking for and their external pressures are are different.     John Belizaire: Exactly. That's exactly right. You know the public companies that are doing this for example, their shareholders put tremendous pressure on them, like we need to know where your powers are sources. And you now need to be carbon zero or negative right? And so there's a lot of pressure.     And as more of the industry moves to countries that have rule of law that have access to these renewable resources and this pressure to put to to leverage those over others that industry you know has no choice but to mature and sort of accept those those things. So it's interesting to see the transition over to in the short four years that I've been involved.     Seth Cysewski: Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense. We were just out in in rural America, and we have some direct solar investments for for our company, and I remember talking to some of the economic development officials out there and they were saying that it's not even a competitive advantage. It's a requirement now. So their communities need to have green power. Otherwise you're not going to recruit in any sort of job creating companies, because that's a requirement from them, and so I see that parallel as just being really a requirement moving forward, and that's everywhere. So it's a very exciting I think trajectory that that we're starting to to see. Maybe tell me a little bit more. This is all really fascinating, can you tell me more about maybe your company and the challenges you guys face right now like as you as you guys are scaling?     John Belizaire: Indeed.     Seth Cysewski: And, what are you guys running into and and what are you doing about it.     John Belizaire: Yeah, good. Good, great question. Once a year Seth, I write what I like to call sort of the kickoff letter, and it's usually right after the holidays we we we have this shutdown period where we we really encourage everyone to sort of take a real break. You know, stay off of email and whatnot and I try to be an example, but usually I fail, but recently, I guess I would say but before when there was travel, I'd force myself to go someplace where there's only but just rocks and sand around and you know there's nothing to connect to. But after that, after that break, I feel that it's really important to give the team sort of 1 focusing message around what's going to be important in this coming year as we execute and and build out the next phase of our business and in my note this year, the the overarching word if you will and it's usually 1 word that I sort of sort zoom around, and is called scale. How do you scale the business that we're in, and I used a question that Peter Thiel asks a lot too. Set up what I wanted to ask the team to do and the question is if let's say you have a 10 year vision you know everybody sort of sees a picture of themselves a few years out if you have a 10 year vision to do something. Why can't you do it in six months another way, to ask the question is what's the 1 thing you can do in the next six months to get you closer or to ensure that you'll reach that 10 year vision? Everything we're doing right now as an organization going from 50 Megawatts, you know, about 3 data centers around the country, to building an entire fleet of hundreds to if not Gigawatts of facilities around the world is going to be focused on finding new and clever ways to scale our operations the way we operate our facilities the way we manage inventory. We have thousands of pieces of equipment in our data centers. The way we recruit employees, the way we communicate as a very large distributed organization, the way we raise capital at scale, you know, going from tens of millions dollars of financing to hundreds of millions of dollars of of financing, this is a very capital intensive business to build data centers and operate them., these are all things that we need to figure out. How do you create a iconic brand around renewable energy and catalyzing renewables using the blockchain and crypto without ah without that brand being associated with hubris right? We have to be a humble participant in the new community that we're part of to help to drive the future of this industry. These are the questions that we pose ourselves here at Soluna, that I asked the team to think about, and on a regular basis. We generate ideas on how to tackle those gnarly problems around scale. And that's what we've been working on. Yeah, it's hard to tell how long it's been in '22, but I feel like a year has passed already in the in the short two weeks that we've been back to the office but, there's a lot to do Seth, and you know, our big challenges are are really around scaling the operation in a way that is repeatable, we learn from quickly, and continue to grow.     Seth Cysewski: Is the grid and the way it's structured one of them for you?     John Belizaire: Yeah, so the grid is a is a very rigid thing in many ways right? So it's technically architected for a legacy approach to grid a lot of the laws that govern grid operations in just about every region around the country are also legacy and they actually create barriers to innovation and they also ah slow down. Very much the rate with which you can deploy new and interesting approaches to actually bring the very thing that the grid needs which is the flexibility and so, there is a lot of challenge related to that we ah spent a lot of our time as a company. Educating, and this isn't new to me, when you're when you're a new technologist. You're constantly a missionary. You've got to train folks and and explain to them why they should do something different that they that they've always done. You know all that. All that smells is risk for them and when you're in the business of providing reliable always on power to the country, one of the greatest countries in the world, risk is not something that's in your vocabulary and so, what we've done in addition to the technology that we use for our data centers, the way we, you know, manage the facilities the way we deal with jobs and everything we've actually built a ah set of principles structures both financial and technical in nature. To mitigate a lot of the risk associated with placing our. Next to the power plants, tying it into the grid, we spend a lot of time, you know, talking to the grid operators and, you know, government officials associated with the regions that we're in to make sure we're not doing anything that threatens the service that they are mandated to deliver, but only enhancing it right? That's improving it and making it more flexible and actually allowing them to to deliver I like to say that you know what's our mission, our mission is to help deliver clean green low-cost power locally, and deliver clean, sustainable computing on a global basis and so that does require lots of education especially when you have words like blockchain and crypto and anything, any of your marketing materials. Forget about it. You better be ready to do a lot of education.      Seth Cysewski: I hear you, so I guess maybe, if you could, you have a very unique perspective and a lot of experience here, especially with what you're doing looking into your crystal ball. You're talking about a tenure like exercise. But maybe you could tell me what you think for you, the the next five and 10 years looks like, either for the grid or you could even add in or talk about maybe the future of of how computing is either executed or powered?     John Belizaire: Yeah, you know I think that there are 2 perspectives we have on the future over here. Number one is that the transition to green power is inevitable at this point. We're basically all sitting in a fast-moving Tesla heading toward the renewable energy transition, and by the way, we're probably nobody's probably driving the car. We're just hanging out there talking about how, you know, can you believe we used to power the world by burning old pieces of, you know, households, and now it's completely powered by electrons that are are powered by Mother Nature essentially because that is the case you're going to see massive amounts of change. You know who are in the back of that who are in the back of that that vehicle? They're not energy experts, they're like, you know, dumb guys like me who don't know anything about energy but have brought sort of experience from other places to really help fight the the the good climate fight. So their technologists PHDs, data scientists, software engineers, all sorts of people who usually don't have anything to do with power power will become about computing. And that's because you're going to see more ah science and technology inserted into the grid to improve its flexibility. Its ability to sort of evolve almost future-proofing, if you will, the grid and I see that in a short period of time. All utilities are now sort of waking up. You're also seeing a change of the guard, Seth, at these places. Even legacy people need to be moved out, I hate to say, and new open minded people around technology and sort of finding ways to to address things. For example, I met an amazing young entrepreneur who built this drone system powered by AI that flies over the power lines to evaluate maintenance and things that can be done to reduce forest fires and potential issues that could significantly impact grid stability. But never thought about that right? You're just used to guys drive around trucks. They're on a maintenance and they'll eventually get to no. But if you had these systems that are constantly checking, you could you could prevent a lot of things happening so we're seeing that you know that that fast moving Tesla sort of evolving on the on the energy side. On the compute side I think you're going to see a step change in what we describe as data centers today. Data centers are these you know Ferraris, fast-moving cars, super resilient. And we're building a truck. We're building a facility that is specifically designed to be in the rugged environments far away from ah metro places super flexible and and and and resilient and agile in these environments. And it's going to be powering what will be and I believe today is probably 1 of the fastest growing segments in computing today and that's all of these batchable and AI-based environments. I read something that described it as somewhere around 20% is where it is today but it's growing at 40 to 50%. I don't think I know a single software company that doesn't have some sort of data science behind their business. Actually it sort of you got to ask the question if they don't right? Compass Real Estate, one of the most amazing real estate companies I was reading about a fact, the founder found it has a Masterclass, you know, the Masterclass app, and a very good friend friend of mine heads up data science for him ,and he explained to me how that whole thing works. And it's more of a data science company than it is a real estate company. To be honest, and it's just fascinating to me, that that is really touching just about everything in the world at this point. And so in 10 years, that's going to be an immutable truth and it will spawn these different types of platforms where you can run those things in a way that is good for the planet. So that's our perspective on it and I really hope you know that the young folks, anybody who was young, you know, technologist or if you're in school listening to this, I think there's a lot of opportunity to jump into this industry. You know I talk a lot about the need for some sort of climate Peace Corps or something like that, you know, where before you go work for Google or go work for Google for a year but then come back and just like jump in and see if you can bring a fresh look at, the energy systems of the world and see if you can help to make that. Part of helping us survive all of these climate issues.     Seth Cysewski: I love how youth is just so open. They just they haven't been taught. They haven't learned what what's what they can and cannot do yet. Yeah, the sky's the limit.     John Belizaire: Exactly. Nobody's pounded into them. They know we don't do it like that, we do not do that. So don't even think about it. You know and learn behavior is what I like to call it. You know they they haven't exposed a lot of learned behavior yet they're just they're just raw and that's what you need when you're looking at hard problems like this.     Seth Cysewski: Well I think that leads me into to my last question then, and maybe it's along these lines maybe not. What advice would you have for you know any business leaders or people that want to make a difference entering maybe emerging markets, either in the sustainability space, you know, in the future space.     John Belizaire: Yeah. So the way I got into the Soluna business, I didn't share at at the beginning, but that project my friend asked me to go run it. It was actually in in Southern Morocco and it was in a place otherwise known as the kite surfing capital of the world. Amazing wind, really high speed. I don't really keep my hair very long. So it's hard to to show you film of how fast but when you go to the airport. There are really 2 types of...     Seth Cysewski: You look aerodynamic.     John Belizaire: There are only 2 types of people at the airport. Renewable energy people and kite surfers. I'm talking about Olympic-class kite surfers in Dahkla, Morocco, and what was fascinating to me spending time trying to develop a wind farm there, and develop, you know, and get the idea for shifting our our whole focus during the pandemic to this computing company, was that there is so much energy poverty on that continent, really caused by 2 important things. Number 1, you don't have an economy to support the energy so you have this sort of chicken and egg problem like why are you building power, there's not enough use for the power. And 2, bringing in financial constructs. You know, attracting capital to build out resources is very challenging. And, by the way, it's not like there aren't resources to be developed. There's and there's an incredible abundance of natural resources hydro wind solar that can be turned into. Ah, economic growth. You know by building power plants and the solution we've developed helps to drive that. That's really what got me super passionate about that. This could be a new way to build renewable energy and so I think the message for folks out there is spend some time over there. If you really want to understand what it's like to not experience what you enjoy here, which is you know, clean, eventually green power that is consistent and persistent that helps to drive our our economy, go to a place where a young child doesn't have access to to medical services because there's no power to provide it and see if there's there's a way for you to help there. I would encourage everyone to do that to get a real sense of the opportunities for changing the world in a major way by solving problems at home that can be brought elsewhere. And that's the message I would leave with folks out there.     Seth Cysewski: Thank you for sharing that. That's great. Well John it has been really lovely. I just want to tell you I don't think I was aware of the solution, and not really so much. The problem outside of batteries before kind of looking into what what you were doing and I just think it's it's a very clever and a needed solution. So I'm glad you're doing it and and I and I appreciate you coming on and and and sharing.   John Belizaire: Thank you. Thanks Seth I really enjoyed the time great questions and thank you so much for the opportunity. Support Coolperx®'s podcast by subscribing and reviewing! Music is considered “royalty-free” and discovered on Audio Blocks. Technical Podcast Support by: Jon Keur at Wayfare Recording Co. © 2022 Coolperx®. All Rights Reserved.

John Belizaire, the founder and CEO of Soluna Computing, joins the show to do a deep dive on how cryptocurrency mining and blockchain platforms impact the grid. You've probably seen the headlines and the narrative is that the computing power required to run these technologies places a huge strain on the grid. Well, John recently testified before Congress on the topic of cleaning up crypto mining and the energy impact of blockchains …  and his opinion might surprise you. In fact, his viewpoint turns that narrative on its head. John also discusses how sustainable computing is becoming yet another tool renewables developers and utilities can use to enhance grid resiliency and improve the financial performance of power generation projects. In short, John believes computing can become part of the grid … rather than just something that demands power from the grid. Highlights:(2:02) - Why the narrative around cryptocurrency mining is wrong.(6:22) - The debate around 'proof of work' versus 'proof of stake'(10:47) - On testifying before the US Congress.(16:00) - How renewables and cryptocurrency mining can help power each other.(20:40) - How computing can become part of the grid.(23:21) - The intersection of sustainable computing and battery storage.(27:24) - John's bold predictions.

Welcome to the Energy Transition Solutions podcast — brought to you on the Oil and Gas Global Network by AWS Energy. This week our host Joe Batir talks with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing. Joe and John discuss Soluna Computing's modular data centers and how they are paired with renewable energy to utilize wasted energy through batchable computing. Topics covered include the infinite need for computing power, how computing can be combined with renewable power generation to increase renewable energy penetration into the grid, and a quick crypto mining 101 primer. John's book recommendations: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins You can find John's entire 2021 booklist >> HERE.  Additional links from the show that were discussed can be found here: (1) Bitcoin Primer -- all about the Magic Machine is HERE. (2) Episode with Dr. Andrew Chien on grid resiliency and renewable grid penetration can be found HERE. It's episode 26. Learn more about AWS Energy here. More from OGGN ... Podcasts LinkedIn Group LinkedIn Company Page Get notified about industry events

We explore the potential for computing to serve as effective "energy sinks" for renewable energy with Soluna Computing CEO John Belizaire. For pictures and more info, visit http://www.energy-cast.com/136-soluna.html

John's parents escaped Haitian dictatorship and potential death before reuniting and coming to the United States. Since the age of 14 selling floppy discs in high school, John has had an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in technology. He was a recipient of the Intel Scholarship Program and he went on to receive a computer science and engineering degree from Cornell University.    When he was 28 years old, he sold his first start-up company for $150 million. He has gone on to become a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled several multi-million dollar technology and fintech companies. He is currently the CEO of Soluna, a computing company helping to shape the future of renewable energy development. His expertise as both a highly effective business leader and technology strategist has enabled his new venture and operational success steering complex initiatives from concept to funding to launch to growth.   I speak with John about cryptocurrency mining, stranded renewable energy, the future of the grid, and their very clever solution to utilize batchable computing to accelerate the renewable energy transition. Here is our interview.    Show Notes:   Be sure to visit:   SolunaComputing.com Personal Blog: ceoplaybook.co   Social Media:  LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/company/solunaholdings/ Twitter: @solunaholdings     Visit Coolperx® home page: Coolperx®   Reach out to Coolperx®: Phone: 1 (855) 429-0455 email: hello@coolperx.com     Plus, don't forget to follow or sign up for my newsletter here: PODCAST WEBSITE     Show Transcript:   Seth Cysewski: Welcome John, thank you so much for for being here today.     John Belizaire: Thanks for having me Seth. It's a pleasure looking forward to this conversation.     Seth Cysewski: Absolutely. So I'm very fascinated about what you're doing. But, why don't we start just with the basics. Maybe if you could tell me more about John the person and and how and then maybe eventually how you ended up working around clean energy challenges.     John Belizaire: I like to say I'm not an energy guy I'm actually a software guy I yeah studied computer science undergrad started my career at Intel really helping bring software to the personal computer and for the next. Twenty plus years I was ah following my passion really creating new companies I've been an entrepreneur. I hate to say serial entrepreneur because it's so cliche. But, it's true I started my career in the e-commerce space and primarily focus on selling technology to large enterprises I used to carry around lego blocks to big financial services companies and and explain to them the future of software will be built like this you know and they're like well how much are those lego blocks these these are five bucks but the ones I'm gonna sell you. They're like a million dollars and so enterprise software has really been my focus and and most recently I was in the insurance software space did some work helping insurance the insurance industry sort of transition into the digital realm using data and analytics to make better decisions and then about four years ago I had just finished that experience and I was taking a bit of a break doing some writing I pen a blog where I sort of write down all my learnings and a close friend of mine and mentor who had been an investor in a number of my companies suggested that I look at this business that he was working on. And I said what business would you be doing that I would be focused on because you always do industrial companies. I'm a software guy and he explained well you've got to look at this one. It's the intersection between renewable energy and blockchain. And the only thing I heard in that sentence was blockchain I heard of that and that might be interesting and that started a 4 year journey until today where I am the CEO of Soluna Computing, a company focused on unlocking the potential of renewable energy. And by using computing as a catalyst so that's a quick tour. I'm from New York originally father of 2 two girls, extra data there.     Seth Cysewski: It's awesome. I'm a father of one daughter and daughters are amazing. They are the best for sure. So you got a good computing background and so they're bringing you into Soluna.     John Belizaire: Exactly.       Seth Cysewski: Tell me more about Soluna Computing and I mean obviously the intersection of blockchain and renewable energy sounds very fascinating. So tell me about the problem. Maybe that Soluna is setting out to solve and a little bit more about that.     John Belizaire: Exactly, you know I get that a lot. You know we don't really have lots of cocktail parties these days given when we're recording this this podcast, but the questions I get when people sort of asking me what are you doing now is like "What are you up to?" and "What does the Soluna do?" "What's the problem you solve?" and what I explained to them is that we solve a little unknown problem which happens to be a huge problem for renewable energy and the renewable energy transition. And that is that most renewable power plants, up to 30% of their power production never actually make it to the grid. Let me say that again over $700 to $ 750 billion dollars has been spent in the last two years alone clean tech clean energy infrastructure and a host of technology to bring more green electrons to the grid. But when you zoom in on the power plants that are actually producing those electrons big wind farms big solar farms spread around the country and around the world, up to about 30% of their power never makes it to the grid and the reason is because the grid was designed based on this concept that energy the energy that's produced must be synchronized with the energy that's used this concept of sort of direct synchronization. So it that grid infrastructure which is which is very brittle and inflexible. At this point really was focused on ah power plants that can be dispatched by the grid operator and controlled and fired on literally you know fired on right? And as you begin to replace those old legacy fuels, coal plants etc, with green power plants, well the grid is no longer in charge of dispatching those power plants mother nature sets that schedule if the wind is blowing really heavily in Oklahoma, there'll be lots of energy produced by the big wind farms out in the field there and there may not be any users of that because people might be asleep at night in Oklahoma and they're not. Many large pipes or transmission lines to take that power perhaps to down south where people might be ready at a party and use that energy. So that's the problem. There is lots of wasted energy which reduces the amount of renewable energy that you can actually bring on grid. That's the problem.     How do we solve it the way we solve it is we bring ah another interesting user of energy that happens to be quite flexible right? What their grid needs is a user of power that can ramp up and ramp down if they can control that part of the equation. Then they can bring more power to the grid. So what we're bringing is these specially built onsite scalable data centers that absorb that wasted energy. We actually will use that energy instead of spilling it and we convert it to global, clean low-cost computing and what type of computing are we focused on? Well, we're not going to run your email. We're not going to run your e-commerce applications, your mission-critical applications. What we run are what we call batchable applications, anything that can be paused and restarted, put to sleep, that sort of thing because power might not be available. The types of applications that do that or any or anything that are highly compute-intensive, okay, and have this ability to sort of pause themselves and examples of that are bitcoin mining. And kind of crypto mining application, AI, and machine learning. So I you know ride my Peloton in the morning as lots of data collected on me and then the next day it's better. It's a better ride that's happening in the background in a model or AI system that we never see but it's become a big part of just about every application out there. Scientific computing, for example, is a host of different applications that represent a sizable slice of computing these days that is perfect for this type of data center and that's what we put inside of our facilities. And then we build these facilities around these green, these green power plants all around the world and that adds retroactively to flexibility that the grid needs.     Seth Cysewski: Thank you, I have some follow up so that's really great. So just so I understand this, when I think about traditional legacy power generation, and we were just in Tennessee and they have peaker plants there using natural gas, right? They're just designed to fire up when they're needed and so traditionally what you're saying is the energy generation was the one that was flexible but with renewables, it's not as flexible. So in turn you're making the usage flexible and we're not quite there with.     John Belizaire: Exactly.     Seth Cysewski: Batteries which would be another solution with this wasted or stranded energy which we could store and so essentially we're just repurposing computing. That's already going to be done and just moving it into that 30% that normally they wouldn't hit the grid typically.     John Belizaire: Exactly, you got it Seth, basically, computing is a capability something that you can do anywhere in the world. It is flexible in the sense that you can run a computing process just about anywhere. Not every computing application is resilient enough to be put in an environment where it's not running in a 24 by 7 facility, but there are now a host of applications that are perfect for that environment. And what we're doing is basically taking the insatiable demand for energy created by computing because we all walk around with computers in our in our pockets, we talk to magic assistants at home that use computing somewhere in the cloud, and it just so happens that with a little lateral thinking, that opportunity or that technology can be applied here where a solution is needed today. It needs to be scalable and it needs to solve this wasted energy problem in the near term not in the long term. You're right Seth, batteries are also a solution. They're perfect. You can store the energy deploy it but there are some problems there because batteries are companies too. They have to at some point pull the power down when the power is cheap and that's usually when all that congestion and mismatches and then they need to put the power back on the grid at some point. The power is high so they work on an arbitrage model. Most people don't know that and so if you're in a situation where there's lots of renewables in a particular area, well the power is not going to be high very often and so it becomes very hard for the battery to actually be profitable and they're not scalable from a cost perspective yet. So we're not saying we're a replacement for batteries and transmission. What we're saying is, flexible computing is another somewhat counterintuitive solution to the problem.     Seth Cysewski: Now that's very fascinating. So then who would your, it seems like to me that maybe you would have customers on both ends right? So you're either, you're probably working either and you can correct me, either with the owners of these power generations or maybe even the people that sign these PPAs. I don't know if you work with them at all on the one end and then on the other end, you're working with computing companies or people that can then utilize your computing you call it, batchable? Maybe you can tell me more about your customers on both ends and how that works from their perspective.     John Belizaire: That's right. Yeah sure on the power side. We work with what we call power partners they're exactly as you described, they're independent power producers,  they're large utilities that have big, you know, assets that are renewable around the country, and big funds, infrastructure funds who deploy capital to build out projects. They may not be the development company. So sometimes they buy a site from a developer and then they build it out. Finance it and operate it. Those are the folks that are our power counterparties if you will on the other side. We focus on large enterprises that have a big data science arm or a growing one. And, they are really concerned about 2 things. Number 1: the rising cost of the computing as a percentage of their total revenue. Those Amazon bills start to add up after a while and the second is since what they're doing, this computing is so intense, is very compute intense. It's big. You know the data corps they're dealing with are quite large constantly processing them. The data scientists are now within their communities talking about whether you know are we destroying the world I mean pretty much every application has a data element to it. And are we essentially subsidizing the continuation of legacy fuels because we live inside of these not so flexible data centers that have to be on 24 7, 5 to 9. etc. But what if I told you I can take that slice of compute load, or that slice of computing processes? We like to call them jobs and maybe they represent single digits 2% to 3% of your total computing within an enterprise and move them over to these data centers that are catalyzers for renewable energy, that could be pretty compelling for a company that helps them with their ESG goals. They can point to their applications being directly powered by green electrons and, you know from a data scientist perspective, they just want to have lower-cost access to computing that is good for the planet.     Seth Cysewski: That makes sense. This reminds me, so this I probably is a good segue to talk about, you mentioned Blockchain and I think when most people think of, or maybe I don't know about most people, think a lot of people that hear blockchain think of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. You know some people are really into it and others are, you know, a little further out and so and they're just hearing about it, but I'm wondering, I was listening to your recent financial call, and whatnot, so you guys are scaling pretty quickly which is really awesome, and I believe that bitcoin mining or cryptocurrency mining probably makes up a majority ah of your business right now.      John Belizaire: Yes.     Seth Cysewski: We're talking about like the intersection of how these come together and you're mentioning some of these companies are a little concerned about their data usage. I think you know bitcoin so I'm just going to point out critics point out I guess that bitcoin can be really detrimental towards climate progress. Not that anyone's going to stop it necessarily, but a recent Columbia paper noted that but bitcoin's currently using over 20 million metric tons of CO2 each year, and China alone could be up to 130 million metric tons by itself in 2024. So these are like super big numbers and I'm wondering about. It makes sense what you're doing and why that would be a really good for that. So that's awesome. But maybe you could talk to me more about like from your perspective what is bitcoin or cryptocurrencies' role in a clean energy future.     John Belizaire: Fantastic! So there are 2 narratives Seth around bitcoin 1 narrative is that it's an incredibly novel technology that could reshape the future of financial services but it's got this terrible side effect. And you've alluded to a number of examples of that. The other narrative is that it is an incredible catalyzer for the future of financial services that are not tied to authoritarian governments and gives people financial freedom money and wealth preservation is now democratized on a global basis and that's made possible by an incredible technology. And, the energy use is a feature, it is not a bug. It's a feature and so I want to talk about the second narrative because it's very easy to get access to information about the first narrative. It's sexy. It sells papers and online clicks and so forth and unfortunately it's a snapshot of the truth. The truth is that the young bitcoin industry was not very focused on its effect on climate and. Probably wasn't really aware of the eventual effect on climate and the reason was because it was a very small network really driven by a vision of really you know, bringing back the control of financial services and money to the people. And it was also driven by cracking some pretty challenging problems to create a decentralized form of money and you've got to solve some real challenges, right? So as a result you started to see essentially two bitcoins. In fact, there are really 2 bitcoins. One is Bitcoin the capital B the other is bitcoin the lowercase b. Bitcoin capital B is the protocol that powers the global Bitcoin network which is now approaching over close to $1 Trillion in total value. It is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world and the underlying capabilities for providing security is what the crypto mining aspect or bitcoin mining aspect of the platform is, the platform is designed or the protocol, is designed to use mining as a mechanism to protect the blockchain. Transactions that occur on it and thereby protecting the assets that people are trusting the platform to deliver and so mining has as the value of the of the currency. The lower case b has increased mining has become a larger and larger enterprise if you will around the platform, and as a result it's matured significantly over the last decade. Number one, you're starting to see a re-shift. There's a movement underway, literally, of companies leaving China. Mostly driven by China kicking them out. They're, you know, domiciling themselves, repatriating themselves around the world in all sorts of different places. They're primarily first driven by where can I find cheap power. But now there's a sentiment around a really want to find the cheapest green power there is. Over $100 Million approaching over $1 Billion invested in very mature companies run by professionals. You know, some of the early versions of the company were run by young folks who didn't have a sort of, you know, business acumen, and they were not backed by institutional capital that asked really tough questions about what you're doing, and so as a result you now have companies much like ourselves out there that are taking a completely different approach to reshaping the next chapter in the Bitcoin landscape. And so the positive narrative is that the bitcoin mining is now seeing its role as a dual purpose one is protecting the Bitcoin network and the second is finding a way to become more sustainable. And catalyzed to renewable energy ah transform transition and bitcoin small b, by the way, is gone from, you know, being really so you know this speculative asset, actually playing a very important role in the global economy in asset allocations for some of the largest asset management companies in the world. It's now made its way into pension plans people are getting paid in it. It's maturing. It's a young thirteen-year-old technology.     And it reminds me of another technology. That's a little older. It started when I started my entrepreneurship career, it had this sort of similar concept of you know capital letter lowercase letter, and it was focused on bringing the world's information to 1 digital place, and it eventually evolved to e-commerce, and then it evolved to connecting people, and it evolved to pretty much everything, and by now you can guess who the character is I'm describing, and that's the internet. It has the same characteristics as Bitcoin. It evolved over a 20 year period and most of that development happened in the last decade or so, and we now take for granted the role. The internet has played, and so I often say you should never underestimate the potential technology and the fact that it can really advance way beyond your current expectations, and it can happen very quickly and Bitcoin is gaining momentum and we're proud to be helping to make that happen.     Seth Cysewski: That's fascinating. I thought I was there, I used to dial into my local BBS and I remember Prodigy. I remember when we got my first Encarta CD, it changed all my school projects. Yeah, it's interesting and I hear what you're saying about as it becomes, I almost say more legitimate, but maybe more mature, as a process and as a currency that the stakeholders are more mature too and the things that they're looking for and their external pressures are are different.     John Belizaire: Exactly. That's exactly right. You know the public companies that are doing this for example, their shareholders put tremendous pressure on them, like we need to know where your powers are sources. And you now need to be carbon zero or negative right? And so there's a lot of pressure.     And as more of the industry moves to countries that have rule of law that have access to these renewable resources and this pressure to put to leverage those over others that industry you know has no choice but to mature and sort of accept those things. So it's interesting to see the transition over to in the short four years that I've been involved.     Seth Cysewski: Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense. We were just out in rural America, and we have some direct solar investments for our company, and I remember talking to some of the economic development officials out there and they were saying that it's not even a competitive advantage. It's a requirement now. So their communities need to have green power. Otherwise, you're not going to recruit in any sort of job-creating companies, because that's a requirement from them, and so I see that parallel as just being really a requirement moving forward, and that's everywhere. So it's a very exciting I think trajectory that we're starting to see. Maybe tell me a little bit more. This is all really fascinating, can you tell me more about maybe your company and the challenges you guys face right now like as you as you guys are scaling?     John Belizaire: Indeed.     Seth Cysewski: And, what are you guys running into and what are you doing about it.     John Belizaire: Yeah, good. Good, great question. Once a year Seth, I write what I like to call sort of the kickoff letter, and it's usually right after the holidays we have this shutdown period where we really encourage everyone to sort of take a real break. You know, stay off of email and whatnot and I try to be an example, but usually, I fail, but recently, I guess I would say but before when there was travel, I'd force myself to go someplace where there's only but just rocks and sand around and you know there's nothing to connect to. But after that, after that break, I feel that it's really important to give the team sort of 1 focusing message around what's going to be important in this coming year as we execute and build out the next phase of our business and in my note this year, the overarching word if you will and it's usually 1 word that I sort of sort zoom around, and is called scale. How do you scale the business that we're in, and I used a question that Peter Thiel asks a lot too. Set up what I wanted to ask the team to do and the question is if let's say you have a 10-year vision you know everybody sort of sees a picture of themselves a few years out if you have a 10-year vision to do something. Why can't you do it in six months another way, to ask the question is what's the 1 thing you can do in the next six months to get you closer or to ensure that you'll reach that 10-year vision? Everything we're doing right now as an organization going from 50 Megawatts, you know, about 3 data centers around the country, to building an entire fleet of hundreds to if not Gigawatts of facilities around the world is going to be focused on finding new and clever ways to scale our operations the way we operate our facilities the way we manage inventory. We have thousands of pieces of equipment in our data centers. The way we recruit employees, the way we communicate as a very large distributed organization, the way we raise capital at scale, you know, going from tens of millions of dollars of financing to hundreds of millions of dollars of of financing, this is a very capital intensive business to build data centers and operate them., these are all things that we need to figure out. How do you create an iconic brand around renewable energy and catalyzing renewables using the blockchain and crypto without that brand being associated with hubris right? We have to be a humble participant in the new community that we're part of to help to drive the future of this industry. These are the questions that we pose ourselves here at Soluna, that I asked the team to think about, and on a regular basis. We generate ideas on how to tackle those gnarly problems around scale. And that's what we've been working on. Yeah, it's hard to tell how long it's been in '22, but I feel like a year has passed already in the in the short two weeks that we've been back to the office but, there's a lot to do Seth, and you know, our big challenges are really around scaling the operation in a way that is repeatable, we learn from quickly, and continue to grow.     Seth Cysewski: Is the grid and the way it's structured one of them for you?     John Belizaire: Yeah, so the grid is a is a very rigid thing in many ways right? So it's technically architected for a legacy approach to grid a lot of the laws that govern grid operations in just about every region around the country are also legacy and they actually create barriers to innovation and they also ah slow down. Very much the rate with which you can deploy new and interesting approaches to actually bring the very thing that the grid needs which is the flexibility and so, there is a lot of challenge related to that we ah spent a lot of our time as a company. Educating, and this isn't new to me, when you're when you're a new technologist. You're constantly a missionary. You've got to train folks and explain to them why they should do something different than they that they've always done. You know all that. All that smells is risk for them and when you're in the business of providing reliable always-on power to the country, one of the greatest countries in the world, risk is not something that's in your vocabulary and so, what we've done in addition to the technology that we use for our data centers, the way we, you know, manage the facilities the way we deal with jobs and everything we've actually built a set of principles structures both financial and technical in nature. To mitigate a lot of the risk associated with placing ours next to the power plants, tying it into the grid, we spend a lot of time, you know, talking to the grid operators and, you know, government officials associated with the regions that we're in to make sure we're not doing anything that threatens the service that they are mandated to deliver, but only enhancing it right? That's improving it and making it more flexible and actually allowing them to deliver I like to say that you know what's our mission, our mission is to help deliver clean green low-cost power locally, and deliver clean, sustainable computing on a global basis and so that does require lots of education especially when you have words like blockchain and crypto and anything, any of your marketing materials. Forget about it. You better be ready to do a lot of education.      Seth Cysewski: I hear you, so I guess maybe, if you could, you have a very unique perspective and a lot of experience here, especially with what you're doing looking into your crystal ball. You're talking about a tenure-like exercise. But maybe you could tell me what you think for you, the next five and 10 years looks like, either for the grid or you could even add in or talk about maybe the future of how computing is either executed or powered?     John Belizaire: Yeah, you know I think that there are 2 perspectives we have on the future over here. Number one is that the transition to green power is inevitable at this point. We're basically all sitting in a fast-moving Tesla heading toward the renewable energy transition, and by the way, we're probably nobody's probably driving the car. We're just hanging out there talking about how, you know, can you believe we used to power the world by burning old pieces of, you know, households, and now it's completely powered by electrons that are powered by Mother Nature essentially because that is the case you're going to see massive amounts of change. You know who are in the back of that who are in the back of that vehicle? They're not energy experts, they're like, you know, dumb guys like me who don't know anything about energy but have brought sort of experience from other places to really help fight the the the good climate fight. So their technologists PHDs, data scientists, software engineers, all sorts of people who usually don't have anything to do with power will become about computing. And that's because you're going to see more ah science and technology inserted into the grid to improve its flexibility. Its ability to sort of evolve almost future-proofing, if you will, the grid and I see that in a short period of time. All utilities are now sort of waking up. You're also seeing a change of the guard, Seth, at these places. Even legacy people need to be moved out, I hate to say, and new open-minded people around technology and sort of finding ways to address things. For example, I met an amazing young entrepreneur who built this drone system powered by AI that flies over the power lines to evaluate maintenance and things that can be done to reduce forest fires and potential issues that could significantly impact grid stability. But never thought about that right? You're just used to guys drive around trucks. They're on a maintenance and they'll eventually get to no. But if you had these systems that are constantly checking, you could you could prevent a lot of things happening so we're seeing that you know that that fast-moving Tesla sort of evolving on the on the energy side. On the compute side I think you're going to see a step change in what we describe as data centers today. Data centers are these you know Ferraris, fast-moving cars, super resilient. And we're building a truck. We're building a facility that is specifically designed to be in the rugged environments far away from ah metro places super flexible and and and and resilient and agile in these environments. And it's going to be powering what will be and I believe today is probably 1 of the fastest-growing segments in computing today and that's all of these batchable and AI-based environments. I read something that described it as somewhere around 20% is where it is today but it's growing at 40 to 50%. I don't think I know a single software company that doesn't have some sort of data science behind their business. Actually, it sort of you got to ask the question if they don't right? Compass Real Estate, one of the most amazing real estate companies I was reading about a fact, the founder found it has a Masterclass, you know, the Masterclass app, and a very good friend of mine heads up data science for him, and he explained to me how that whole thing works. And it's more of a data science company than it is a real estate company. To be honest, and it's just fascinating to me, that that is really touching just about everything in the world at this point. And so in 10 years, that's going to be an immutable truth and it will spawn these different types of platforms where you can run those things in a way that is good for the planet. So that's our perspective on it and I really hope you know that the young folks, anybody who was young, you know, technologist or if you're in school listening to this, I think there's a lot of opportunity to jump into this industry. You know I talk a lot about the need for some sort of climate Peace Corps or something like that, you know, where before you go work for Google or go work for Google for a year but then come back and just like jump in and see if you can bring a fresh look at, the energy systems of the world and see if you can help to make that. Part of helping us survive all of these climate issues.     Seth Cysewski: I love how youth is just so open. They just haven't been taught. They haven't learned what's what they can and cannot do yet. Yeah, the sky's the limit.     John Belizaire: Exactly. Nobody's pounded into them. They know we don't do it like that, we do not do that. So don't even think about it. You know and learn behavior is what I like to call it. You know they haven't exposed a lot of learned behavior yet they're just raw and that's what you need when you're looking at hard problems like this.     Seth Cysewski: Well, I think that leads me into my last question then, and maybe it's along these lines maybe not. What advice would you have for you know any business leaders or people that want to make a difference entering maybe emerging markets, either in the sustainability space, you know, in the future space?     John Belizaire: Yeah. So the way I got into the Soluna business, I didn't share at the beginning, but that project my friend asked me to go run it. It was actually in Southern Morocco and it was in a place otherwise known as the kite surfing capital of the world. Amazing wind, really high speed. I don't really keep my hair very long. So it's hard to show you film of how fast but when you go to the airport. There are really 2 types of...     Seth Cysewski: You look aerodynamic.     John Belizaire: There are only 2 types of people at the airport. Renewable energy people and kite surfers. I'm talking about Olympic-class kite surfers in Dakhla, Morocco, and what was fascinating to me spending time trying to develop a wind farm there, and develop, you know, and get the idea for shifting our whole focus during the pandemic to this computing company, was that there is so much energy poverty on that continent, really caused by 2 important things. Number 1, you don't have an economy to support the energy so you have this sort of chicken and egg problem like why are you building power, there's not enough use for the power. And 2, bringing in financial constructs. You know, attracting capital to build out resources is very challenging. And, by the way, it's not like there aren't resources to be developed. There's and there's an incredible abundance of natural resources hydro, wind, solar that can be turned into. Ah, economic growth. You know by building power plants and the solution we've developed helps to drive that. That's really what got me super passionate about that. This could be a new way to build renewable energy and so I think the message for folks out there is spend some time over there. If you really want to understand what it's like to not experience what you enjoy here, which is you know, clean, eventually green power that is consistent and persistent that helps to drive our economy, go to a place where a young child doesn't have access to medical services because there's no power to provide it and see if there's a way for you to help there. I would encourage everyone to do that to get a real sense of the opportunities for changing the world in a major way by solving problems at home that can be brought elsewhere. And that's the message I would leave with folks out there.     Seth Cysewski: Thank you for sharing that. That's great. Well John it has been really lovely. I just want to tell you I don't think I was aware of the solution, and not really so much. The problem outside of batteries before kind of looking into what you were doing and I just think it's it's a very clever and a needed solution. So I'm glad you're doing it and I and I appreciate you coming on and and and sharing.   John Belizaire: Thank you. Thanks, Seth I really enjoyed the time great questions and thank you so much for the opportunity.     Support Coolperx®'s podcast by subscribing and reviewing!   Music is considered “royalty-free” and discovered on Audio Blocks.   Technical Podcast Support by: Jon Keur at Wayfare Recording Co.   © 2022 Coolperx®. All Rights Reserved.

John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna Computing, the world's first utility-scale company developing power plants and combining them with high-performance computing facilities. As a serial entrepreneur, John has successfully founded and scaled multiple industry-leading technology startups that have achieved market leadership and double-digit growth, including FirstBest, an insurance software company acquired by Guidewire, and The Theory Center, a software company acquired by BEA Systems. Before becoming an entrepreneur, John was the lead architect for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. About Soluna Soluna Computing builds modular, batchable computing centers for intensive applications like cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. Soluna's scalable data centers provide a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines. Soluna Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLNH) is the leading developer of green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna Holdings was formed when Mechanical Technology, Inc. (MTI) acquired Soluna Computing in 2021. https://www.solunacomputing.com/ https://nexuspmg.com/

This week Chris and Johan are joined by the CEO of Soluna Computing inc. John Belizaire. With on-site data centers John and his team utilise to be curtailed electricity to power machine learning computing, crypto-mining and other cloud-based applications. The three discuss how the architecture of their data centers differs from others and how power purchase agreement play into their business model. Listen in to find out how they went from sourcing the first project to getting inbounds and how John ended up dreaming of Jeff Bezos.Soluna's Homepage:https://www.solunacomputing.com/

Kazakhstan shuts down its Internet as civil unrest continues (and one consequence is a disruption of alt-coin mining in that country). The UK's NHS warns of unknown threat actors exploiting Log4j bugs in unpatched VMware Horizon servers. In the US, CISA continues to assist Federal agencies with Log4j remediation, and observers call for more Government support of open-source software security. A major provider of school websites is hit with ransomware. Our guest is John Belizaire of Soluna Computing with a new approach to data center efficiency. Thomas Etheridge from CrowdStrike on supply chain risks. And the US extends the deadline to apply for grants in support of rip-and-replace. For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing: https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/11/5

Welcome to episode 50 of the Today is the Day Changemakers Podcast. This week my guest is John Belizaire. John is the CEO of Soluna Computing.John Belizaire's parents escaped Haitian dictatorship and potential death before reuniting and coming to the United States. Since the age of 14 selling floppy discs in high school, John has had an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in technology. He was a recipient of the Intel Scholarship Program and he went on to receive a computer science and engineering degree from Cornell University. During our conversation, John talks about a Professor that truly believed in a business idea that he shared. This is truly an example of when someone believes in you and inspires you, to stay on track because anything is possible! At the young age of 28 years old, John sold his first start-up company for $150 million. John has gone on to become a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled several multi-million dollar technology and fintech companies. He is currently the CEO of Soluna, a computing company helping to shape the future of renewable energy development.Do you understand renewable energy? John takes a few minutes to really explain how to save energy and use stored energy in a productive way. Although, John has a great success story to tell that may not be typical, he is so very inspiring and makes you think that you can do whatever it is you are passionate about. Listen in to hear his answer to, 'if I knew then, what I know now'.Follow join and Soluna on Twitter: @solunapower; @jbelizaireCEO Please share this episode with others who may benefit from listening to John share his story. Next week, I welcome Vince Warnock. Vince is Award-winning Business & Marketing Strategist, Coach, Author & Host of the Chasing the Insights Podcast. Vince has founded multiple companies including the Chasing the Insights Academy, where he empowers entrepreneurs and business owners to make sense of marketing and grow the business they have always dreamed of. We talk imposter syndrome, ADHD, and how Vince thrives when the audience is LIVE! To learn more about Vince, the programs he provides, and to listen to his podcast go to https://chasingtheinsights.com/.Please subscribe to the Today is the Day Changemakers YouTube Channel or stream this podcast on all streaming sites. Like us on Facebook and Instagram at Today is the Day Live it. I am the CEO and Co-founder of the Zzak G. Applaud Our Kids Foundation. Connecting children and young adults ages 7-22 who meet the financial needs requirements with ongoing lessons in dance, acting, instrumental music, and vocal instruction. For more information visit applaudourkids.org. For more information visit Today is the Day. Have a great week everyone!