SPARK Episode 30: Emily Tench and Camila Nicollier

Speaker A: And I think the answer to that is always yes. You know as much as anyone else does. And if you have a vision for how you can really transform a sector and help them solve a really big and painful problem, then you are the right people to do it. And the gaps that you have in your team can be filled with advisors, with mentors.

Speaker B: Our generation has the power to play a defining role in shaping the future of energy.

Speaker C: Energy Terminal's Spark series shares stories and successes of Gen Z trailblazers as we learn how we can all play a part in building a sustainable energy future.

Speaker B: I'm Aaron Siegel.

Speaker C: And I'm, um, Jonathan Land.

Speaker B: Join us as we ignite conversation and spark the change we need to power a better world.

Speaker C: This is Spark, brought to you by Energy Terminal. Before we begin, I want to give a shout out to our, uh, sponsor, Energy Dialogues, and their mission to bring together thought leaders and accelerate positive outcomes in the energy transition.

Speaker B: Hey, Emily and Camilla, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hi Aaron. Hi, Jonathan. Great to see you.

Speaker D: Hey, it's great to be here.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, let's hop right into it. Give us a one liner about what you're building at Permit, pal.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So we are building the AI operating system for infrastructure investors and asset developers. What that means in practice is if you're building solar projects, if you're building data center projects and you need to navigate land search permitting, interconnection, et cetera, we build the AI agents that help make that happen faster.

Speaker C: Amazing. Now, uh, Emily, you studied at Oxford, Harvard and Stanford and worked at Dahlberg. And for our listeners, that's a consulting firm with a focus on energy and climate in Global South. What's one aspect of your background that's not on your resume?

Speaker A: It's a good question. I think that one thing that doesn't necessarily come through from my resume is the reason why I do the work that I do today. When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of my time rowing. So I was a national level rower, competed around the country in the uk, which is where I'm originally from. And during that time period I really saw the direct effects of what climate change was doing in my community. And so when I started age 11, we could row almost every weekend. We were able to train over the summer, over the winter, over the fall and the spring. But over the course of the decade that I was involved with the sport, that really started to change and uh, increasingly we wouldn't be able to row for three, four, five months because there was extreme flooding, because the water levels were Too high. And that's just a really small example of how weather patterns are, uh, changing people's day to day lives. And it's definitely among the less serious of the consequences of climate change. But I think throughout my career I've just seen that over and over again around the world, how people are having to adapt the things that they love and they care about because of what's happening due to the climate crisis. And so that's really become a big motivator for me throughout my life as to what can we do to help mitigate the effects of climate change around the world. It's what took me to Dahlberg, it was what took me to the universities that I've later studied at. And now it's what I'm focused on at Permit Pal in how we can help the energy system really do better in navigating local politics and in getting projects through to ntp.

Speaker B: Awesome. And Camilla, you received a degree in industrial engineering before studying statistics and data science at Stanford. How did these experiences expose you to, uh, energy and climate, if at all?

Speaker D: Yeah, so in my case it was actually at Stanford where I officially started to find my way into the energy and climate space. Space. And in practice, what that looked like was first I started taking energy classes, which were kind of outside the focus of my master's degree. I also started getting involved in climate spaces on campus and making sure that I was not missing any relevant, um, event or any relevant speaker series and trying to talk to as many experts and people in the industry as I could. And one thing that actually helped with this was that Emily and I took a couple of, I would say, yeah, it's like incubator or accelerator style, uh, classes at Stanford that push you to do a couple, I don't know, use different frameworks like the lean launchpad framework or stuff like that, and they push you to do crazy things. And one of those was basically doing 100 expert interviews in 10 weeks. And when you are in the process of going through that, it really pushes you to be talking to the right people, expanding your network and trying to find who are the people that you need to be in front of. And basically all of this translates into becoming an expert in a really short period of time. So that was what my introduction to energy ecosystem looked like. And it was really amazing the amount of things that we could learn through going through this process. And especially not coming from a, uh, climate background or an energy background.

Speaker C: Incredible. Now, shifting gears just a little bit, Permitting is a growing challenge for all infrastructure projects. And especially for utility scale, wind and solar developers. When did you first become aware of this roadblock to clean energy deployment? Was it in one of these incubator style classes or somewhere else?

Speaker D: Yes. So for us the permitting was kind of already on the radar and mainly because of Emily's background, as ah, she was saying in a previous life, she worked as a consultant and she was doing basically helping developers navigate complex permitting processes across the globe. So we knew that it was a, um, complex process and a painful one. But it was actually in one of these incubator classes where we were doing these hundred interviews in ten weeks and where permitting kept showing up again and again and developers were telling us that this was one of the top problems that they were facing. And um, it became hard to ignore first when we were seeing these being repeated over and over again. And also when developers were telling us, yeah, it is a painful process. It's really hard to understand what are the risks associated with a project. And also 30 to 50% of our projects are getting canceled or delayed due to permitting risk. And each project of those can cost from 2 to 5 million in signed cost. So after seeing this over and over again through these interviews, it was really hard to ignore for us. And it was a moment where we realized that it was a problem worth pursuing a solution for.

Speaker B: That's a great story. And uh, through these learnings, through all these informational interviews that you did, how do you move from understanding that permitting was a huge problem to clean energy, to realizing that both of you had the skills and connections to solve this problem?

Speaker A: So I think it was a couple of things that kind of came together perfectly at the uh, at the same time, I think one thing was my professional background, having spent a lot of time working in energy, working in the climate space and knowing that local politics and permitting, and we kind of, we keep those two concepts together because permitting is about how do you kind of follow the letter of the law, apply for the right conditional use permits to build your projects, apply for the right exceptions, etc. But you can't separate it from politics where, you know, right now we're living in a world where local authorities do have a lot of ability to kind of change their zoning codes or change the restrictions that they put on projects in order to build them. So for example, like one classic example of this is often a zoning code will say that there have to be a certain kind of level of feet or meters from the property boundaries before you can start building. Now what a, uh, local authority might be able to do is change that setback distance such that the amount of land that you're actually able to build your solar project on is so small that the project becomes economical. And so I'd seen kind of examples of this happening over and over again throughout my career. I understood the mindset of the developers who were trying to build these projects and what they needed to see in a good product in order to help speed up the process. And then Camilla from her side had the perfect technical background to actually bring that vision of how do we build a platform that can really do something meaningful, to decode what is happening at a hyperlocal level by using AI, by using machine learning techniques to analyze millions of local regulatory documents. And so I think for us it almost felt kind of weirdly obvious in a way that I had the domain expertise of the space, Camilla had the technical expertise to actually build the product that needed to exist. And so it was almost a natural fit. I think the other thing that kind of was, is always important in starting an early stage company is realizing that probably no one ever feels like they have the perfect skills or the perfect knowledge to really jump into entrepreneurship. And I think that's something that I certainly certainly felt from day one. Has been a lot of are we the right people? Do we know enough? And I think the answer to that is always yes. You know as much as anyone else does. And if you have a vision for how you can really transform a sector and help them solve a really big and painful problem, then you are the right people to do it. And the gaps that you have in your team can be filled with advisors, with mentors and with the right folks where maybe there are areas that you feel like you know less or you need more support.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally. I think first that distinction between permitting risk and political risk was really important. And also thanks for jumping towards our next question and covering a lot of the bases there just to poke a little deeper. I'm really curious what these early conversations between you and Camilla looked like when you were first getting started and how did you guys meet? What's the story there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we got introduced at, ah, Stanford. So we were both studying there at the same time and we had a mutual friend who knew that we would potentially be a good fit as a co founder duo. And so she made the introduction. So it was very fortuitous in a way that that happened and it was kind of right, right person and at the right time. And I think, you know what those early days look like there was the obvious discussion around like, do we have the skills to do this? And is there a match? And I think that very quickly became apparent that it was, that it was a good fit. But I also think that something that is really important in a co founder relationship is around values. Like, I have seen many, many co founder breakups from my time both working as an investor in startups, as well as being surrounded by a community of entrepreneurs throughout my professional life. And I think one of the most frequent reasons for, uh, co founder breakups is that people come together because they're like, oh, this is great, we've got a CEO figure and we've got a CTO figure. The technical skills overlap in a perfect way, so it's a good match. But they don't have the deeper conversations about, do we actually care about the same things? What does it mean to each of us to build a good company? What are our red lines around the things that are really important to us? What does it look like? What kind of culture do we want to build? What does a perfect team look like for us? And so I think Camilla and I had a lot of those conversations from essentially day one. And that gave us a lot of conviction that there was both the skill overlap, but also the values overlap. And I think one example for me that really exemplifies that is very, very early on in our co founder relationship, maybe three weeks, uh, into knowing each other, there was a big grant application that we were considering applying for. It was $110,000 grant from Stanford. But instead of the grant being awarded to the company, it would be awarded to an individual. So only one of us could put forward for this grant application. And again, this was really, really early in our relationship. And Camilla said, look, I think you, Emily, should go for it. I think that your story will resonate better with the judging panel for this specific opportunity. So I think you should put your name forward. And to me, that was such a huge symbol of trust, of kind of essentially being able to put one's own. I don't know, maybe ego is the right word to the side and say, this is what we think is best for the company. And it was such a big leap of faith as well, because we didn't know each other that well at that moment in time. And I think that really has set the tone for our relationship moving forward. Where we operate with egos are left at the door and we work together doing the things that are right for the company at, uh, every moment in time. And that's been just a joy to build alongside Someone who feels that way.

Speaker B: That's super insightful and definitely advice that anyone starting a new company should take to heart. So let's double click into the technology that you're actually building Clara, your AI agent that analyzes key permitting risks for these infrastructure projects. How does Clara actually filter through the billions of documents so efficiently to deliver actual insights to developers?

Speaker D: So the way that we built Clara was after once again talking to more than 300 people, going through all this process and becoming experts and basically shadowing the best teams that do this job on a day to day basis. So we built Clara to mimic what the best permitting analysts at the best companies are doing their job. And the only difference is that Clara has the ability to read through 700 pages, PDFs and a lot of them in a very short period of time compared to an analyst. Which, yes, if you are doing the job, you can read a couple of PDFs, but then that's only limited to your capacity and to the time that you have. So that's the main, like the foundational part of how we trained our agent to not only be able to get access to all these documents, and when I say documents, I'm talking about zoning ordinances, public records, meeting minutes, all of the information that is relevant to understand how a particular project could fit within a community or within a certain regulatory framework. And then from there, once we have access to all these documents and Clara can read through all of those, she's also trained on how to make sense of all of that information for a particular proposed project. Because it's not only about just reading PDFs and understanding where the important part of the regulation is, but it's about understanding and making sense of this information from, for your particular project. So there are three key things that Clara is really good at. The first one is getting access to these documents and information. Because if you have ever been to a county website, this information is buried into very old, old websites coded in languages that nobody uses anymore. So traditional models are not able to access this information. That's the first technical challenge that we were able to figure out with Clara. The second one is once again like trying to what are the key parts of those, all these millions of documents that you need to be looking at and what are the gaps that are not in the documents and how do you flag those? And the third thing is that all of the outputs of Clara, which is a, uh, permitting report for a specific project, all of those are reviewed by human experts before they're deliver to the customer. And this translates in two things. One is that the customer receives high quality output in a very short period of time where they can confidently make decisions on whether to move forward or not with these million dollar projects. And the second thing is that we have a really tight feedback loop understanding and refining Clara and her performance. So we know when we are looking at a new jurisdiction, we know if like something did not perform as well and then we make the tweaks necessary and continuously improving how this agent is able to flag every time more information and the right information to flag for developers.

Speaker C: Just a quick follow up on this. I'm curious. You mentioned at the very last bit the piece on new jurisdiction. I feel like we're maybe entering uh, an era in which a lot of the political risk is sort of uncertain. Permitting can sort of come and go very spontaneously and it might not be based on past precedents on jurisdiction. What have you done to sort of mitigate that sort of shifting national ecosystem?

Speaker D: Yeah, so the way that we handle that is once again like doing the same thing that developers are uh, doing and the way that they solve for this. Like when first of its kind project is proposed in a community that has never seen a project like that, it's also looking at the whole context. It's not only about past projects that were built or proposed in a community, but it's looking at how they're talking about these topics in their meetings, how are people showing up and how people react to past projects that were maybe in adjacent fields. If we're talking about a data center co located with renewables, maybe that's the first project of that type that the community is looking at. But if there has been proposed like a big industrial facility or a big solar project before and it faced a lot of opposition, those are the things that developers use as a proxy to understand and get a sense of how the community might react. Of course there is a ah, factor of yeah, every project is its own thing and it will be evaluated in different contexts and it might be very dependent on the neighbors and how it's framed and the community benefits. But having a real sense of a very detailed picture of what's happening in this community, which includes Facebook groups where people talking in social media, what are they saying in these meetings. All of that helps understand the risk in much more detail before committing to a community. And there was always going to be risk and the risk appetite for different developers is also different. Our reports are intended to help them make that decision informed and help them quantify the risk. But then uh, A project that could be a red flag for one developer can be a very good opportunity for another one. And they just have different appetite. So it's about painting a very detailed picture what we do with this.

Speaker A: I think it often feels like opposition emerges overnight, that a county or a town will go from being fairly neutral on a solar project or on batteries to then suddenly introducing a moratorium within a couple of weeks. But that's rarely the full picture. Usually there are some kinds of signals that will suggest that this is going to be a, uh, county that might move in the direction of potentially banning solar or introducing very restrictive height setback restrictions that stop projects being built. And those kinds of signals it might be that, okay, there was an election last year, and there's one county commissioner who just got elected who is very vocal about solar projects. And so in this context, you know, even though they only represent one vote, they're a sufficiently loud voice that they are then influencing the rest of the county to think about projects in a specific way. It might be the three counties kind of neighboring that jurisdiction have started to talk about solar ordinances or moratoriums or battery ordinances or moratoriums. And so then that becomes a little bit of pressure on a particular county because they don't want to be the jurisdiction that doesn't take proactive steps and then enables a project to get built that ultimately isn't a good fit with the local community. So I think that there are all of these signals that are available in the public record to help developers figure out what the risks are. The problem is that analysis is really hard. Getting that data is difficult. And so that's really where Clara and this first permitting product comes in, because it surfaces, uh, that kind of granular data that gives more of an early risk signal than perhaps would be obvious if you were to just Google solar, uh, in county A or in county

Speaker C: B, and quick follow up to that is what's maybe a risk factor that's a little less obvious. What's something that's come up that no one would ever think of when it comes to permitting risk?

Speaker A: So one that is definitely underappreciated is how much the counties and the townships kind of talk to each other and use each other's ordinances and policy approaches to make their own decisions. So it's very typical that if a county is thinking about a solar ordinance, they will review the solar ordinances of maybe five or six or seven other counties in the state. And so if there's a couple of counties nearby that have been very restrictive, then that becomes a big factor in informing how an ordinance might be developed. I think there are also kind of other maybe hidden factors around the local context in a given jurisdiction. So, for example, one very common thing that you might see is that a County maybe 15 years ago had a really negative interaction with a solar developer. And maybe that project kind of never really became very publicly known. Like, there might not be news articles about it because it was still so early stage, but it was documented in the planning commission records because they were taking meetings with developers to discuss the project. And so I think that's, you know, if that became contentious, it's again, something that it's really hard to figure out that that happened. But you need to know about it because as a new developer coming into the county, you need to make sure that you can acknowledge all the issues that came up with that previous project and all the reasons that that first one didn't work out. You need to be able to kind of proactively come into this community and say, look, we actually do understand and we know that this didn't work out last time, and we're different, we're not the same as what was proposed. And so I think that there's definitely that part to it as well. And I think that's something that is just generally true for how developers should be thinking about working with communities and working with local authorities is, instead of seeing it as a, uh, we've just got to get this through permitting, they really do need to be understanding the local context in a lot of detail and making sure that they really are informed and understand that a lot of the risks that previous projects encountered probably came from pretty valid places. And so being able to have that humility and say again, we recognize that things have gone wrong in the past and this is how we want to be better. And these are the ways that we want to actually genuinely benefit this community rather than being extractive.

Speaker B: That's great advice and something that I think a lot of developers would be wise to heed. So, moving on. A lot of students and, uh, you guys were students not too long ago, a lot of students want to follow in your footsteps and make a positive impact on the energy industry, but don't know where to start. What advice would you give to them?

Speaker D: I think what really worked for me and relates to what I was telling at the beginning, I think first is, I think it's underappreciated the impact that getting close to the people doing the work can have on you when you're like trying to get a first step, like a first feet through the door. For me, what that looked like was yeah, I started doing some research on my own. I had this feeling that I wanted to go get into the energy and climate space and then started taking classes and then ask your professors to open their network for you. If you don't have anything like anywhere close to energy, just do cold messages on LinkedIn. If you don't have anyone, you can start with us. Like there's always a path to start, like getting that motion of like getting to know a space which is also really exciting because you're learning a lot. And for us it worked really well. We were surprised about how many professionals and experts in the field replied to our LinkedIn messages where we were like, hey, we're students, we want to learn from you. We want to learn what's really painful for you, we want to understand what's your day to day work like. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing that worked really well for us is that understanding that in particular the um, energy space is one where it's very relationship space and a lot of things happen in the industry, events, be it like conferences, panels.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker D: So being there where in these places where people are really willing to, they're there to talk to other people, to learn from the best practices in the industry, those are really high value events where you can get, talk to uh, a lot of people, learn a bunch from them. And then I think by the end of like after doing this for a couple weeks, you can get a list of like 10 problems that you would probably think are worth pursuing. And then once you have that, if you think that your path is like through creating a solution or creating a company, I think it's just pick one, start testing like pick one hypothesis of a problem. Do uh, a prototype, spend like a couple hours on Vercel or in Cloud, Cowork, whatever your tool of choice is, and then put that prototype in front of people and that's the thread that you start following. And then maybe it's not that, but then you talk to 10 other people by showing them that prototype and then they are like, this is not helpful, but what I would really love to have is this other thing. And then that's how you start following the thread. And yeah, I think after a couple of months for us it was like we realized we had built our network, we had a lot of people that we had trust to prototype things and validate things with and then that's super Valuable when you're trying to get some traction in this space.

Speaker A: I think I would add just one thing to that, which is building a company is not an academic exercise. And I think I've definitely fallen into that trap before. I've spent way too much time in universities, which has been great and a wonderful thing. But I think I always thought that in order to build a great company I needed to have the perfect idea before I put it in front of anyone. That I needed to have kind of a ready made solution that was ready to go and that I had a lot of conviction in. And actually that's completely wrong. Building a company is a really, really messy process and you need to be okay with putting things that uh, are kind of half finished in front of people to get feedback on them because that's how you learn. You learn by actually doing the work. Rather than trying to do all the work in advance, put it in front of a, uh, Real Energy developer and say, this is now the finished product. And they'll immediately come back and say, no, These are the 10 ways in which this ah, product actually doesn't work for me. So you learn by just getting real things in front of real people. And that requires a level of almost acceptance of not being able to be perfect and not being able to do the equivalent of scoring 10 out of 10 on the test. One of my favorite entrepreneurial mentors once said to me, being an entrepreneur feels like getting a 3 out of 10 on the test every single day. And what nobody tells you is that 3 out of 10 is the average score across everybody else. And I think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it, is you've got to be okay with making mistakes and putting yourself out there.

Speaker C: Totally incredible, incredible advice for students and listeners in the audience that I think will really take that to heart. Final question of the day is just what's next for Permit Pal?

Speaker A: So we've got big plans. Um, so as I said at the start, we have now launched so our permitting product, Clara is out in the market. And so we're now working with as many developers as possible to try and help them better navigate permitting and political risk. And we're now moving on to building, uh, our next set of agents to automate more of the early stage diligence and development process so that we can get, you know, over the next five years our ambition is to get 10 gigawatts of clean energy added to the grid in partnership with Permit Pal. And so for us it's really about how many good projects. Can we get advanced to NTP and make sure that we're playing a really big role in enabling the clean energy transition both in the US and then looking towards Europe and other markets too.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well, we can't wait to follow your journey. Emily and Camilla, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending time today and best of luck.

Speaker D: Building Permit Pal thank you for having us.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Energy Terminal. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and our socials linked in the description below and leave us a review.

Speaker D: We always love to hear from our listeners, so shoot us an email email at, uh team at uh, Energy Terminal. Com with any feedback or suggestions for future episodes.

Speaker B: Thanks again and see you next time.