Paces What A Year! - E128

In this relaunch episode, James McWalter interviews Charles Bai, CTO & Co-Founder of Paces, to explore what’s changed over the past year in both the energy industry and at Paces.
The conversation covers:

• Continued growth in renewable energy projects.
• New advancements in solar, EV charging infrastructure, and battery storage.
• Increasing competition for prime sites among developers.
• Rising competition between data centers and advanced manufacturing for the same sites.
• AI’s rapid rise driving demand and reshaping energy infrastructure.
• Paces secured Series A funding, doubled the team size in six months, and expanded product features to better meet customer needs and adapt to a fast-changing industry.

Looking ahead, the podcast will release new episodes every other week. James and Charles invite listeners to provide feedback and suggest future guests, reinforcing Paces' commitment to staying connected with the clean energy community.

Paces helps developers find and evaluate the sites most suitable for renewable development. Interested in a call with James, CEO @ Paces?

Transcript

00:03.42
carbtonic_admin
ah Charles, it's great to be back on the podcast with you. It's been I think a year or year or so since we last had the last episode.

00:11.93
Charles
Yeah, I mean, doing great. It's been fantastic in the past year. and A lot of things changed, obviously, the company, the industry. Yeah.

00:24.37
carbtonic_admin
Yeah, I guess like on those changes, you know, this is, uh, for those who are kind of listening in, you know, we're, we're actually good, but this is part of us relaunching the podcast. And so we just kind of want to have a quick check-in, um, on how things have gone, but across, you know, both the core industry we're in as well as other related industries like AI, and then give you guys a bit of a quick update on paces and then from here on we're going to be back in the regular podcast mode interviewing some great folks. But I guess with that in mind, you know, where have you seen, you know, how's the industry changed over the last year, Charles?

00:56.72
Charles
Yeah. um You know, on the generation side, we see continued growth on renewable energy, solar, EV charging stations, battery storage.

01:08.63
Charles
storage We definitely see a lot of new sides being built and we're building ever faster, but at the same time, competition is also driving up.

01:20.94
carbtonic_admin
Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, like the generation side, absolutely, you know, we've had a lot of folks like solar and so on using us, um but I think probably the biggest kind of new change that we've seen is this very, very large load growth and like the competition around load growth over the last, especially the last six to nine months.

01:20.93
Charles
How do you see the industry change, James?

01:42.71
carbtonic_admin
I think everybody's talking about the data center side, but it's not just that, right? We're also seeing all of a sudden folks are, are on the data center side or competing with the event folks in the advanced manufacturing side for the exact same sites. And this is like driving a lot of kind of you know really interesting challenges to the overall industry on both the generation and load side. um And so I guess one of the kind of exciting and difficult things that we're kind of thinking through is like how do you best enable these new development types? Could you do co-location? These have become very complicated projects very, very rapidly. But I think there's like a huge amount of opportunity as

02:19.22
carbtonic_admin
you know any situation where a lot of industry changed There's a lot of opportunity. But I guess like a lot of the data center is being driven by this kind of rise of AI. And I know you've been you know working on a lot of AI things, both in the product and and in general. And I guess how are you finding all that, Charles? so

02:35.91
Charles
Yeah, I mean. Definitely seeing a lot of AI advancement. It's just very exciting you know to to see these new models coming up that can do ever more things. I think on sort of the product and the engineering side of things, we just see a lot more things that could be automated internally.

03:00.78
Charles
it won't be you know It wasn't available like a year ago. It wasn't possible a year ago. And now we can actually you know utilize a lot of these new AI models to help us build things faster and automate more. So it's definitely been super exciting and super helpful.

03:18.43
carbtonic_admin
Yeah. I think, you know, when we started kind of like talking to some other peer companies and startups who are not working in the industry we're in, but like in other industries, I think like a year ago, like a lot of the AI use cases were like kind of, you know, add a chat box to some random piece of text. And like, that was kind of as as good much as, you know, products were moving. And honestly, we were also guilty of that. That's at one point where we had chat NTP.

03:43.31
carbtonic_admin
as ah as a particular thing. But what we ended up seeing is that like the real power of a lot of this technology is taking it to like a very specific business process. And so like one really classic example is how we use large range models for permitting workflows and like all those kinds of things. And things that basically we have to use, you know, this this in this very, very manual way. Like we've got been able to like automate a lot more based on some of these models. um But yeah, I guess, you know, that's kind of like, I guess how the we've seen some of the industry change over the last year.

04:13.15
carbtonic_admin
You know, we've also had some ah big changes for the company. Yeah. Have you find that, you know, what are your thoughts on those girls?

04:19.88
Charles
Yeah, definitely a super big change on you know on the company itself. you know we We announced our series A a few months ago. That's super excited. We raised $11 million, led by Navitas Capital. super Super excited for the ah partnership. And they've been super helpful um for us. And we've been also skilling out the team a lot.

04:47.03
Charles
You know, a half a year ago, we were 11 people on the team. Now we're more than double the team. It's all coming together. We're moving a lot faster than before and super excited to ship ever more products and features.

05:03.69
carbtonic_admin
Yeah. And I guess like, you know, but as part of that kind of building up the team, you know, we were like 11 people, now we're like more than 11 people just on the kind of sales, marketing and customer success side. I think one of the kind of really interesting things is, you know, adding like proper developers to the team. We actually have somebody who just joined from a customer of ours, which is really, really exciting. And, you know, seeing the kind of perspective that those folks and a lot of the other folks we brought into the company have, um you know, the way we solve problems at paces for our end users um has been know really exciting

05:36.34
carbtonic_admin
and i guess like also the customer change, right? So we're seeing all these data centers and all these kind of different use cases. And a lot of those folks have become customers outpaces. And you know we've had to learn their challenges and like how we can best service them ah within our core product, as well as these new product features that we've shipped over the last few months. um And yeah, so like that's kind of where we're at. you know We just wanted to have a quick check in with you. I think this is our first episode of the full podcast that's coming out this week.

06:04.16
carbtonic_admin
um we're going to be on a biweekly cadence going forward and you know the reason we brought out podcast is we were getting a lot of emails from customers and different folks who had listened to the podcast and very, very excited by what we've been talking about. And then you know we basically just were 11 people. We were very constrained in terms of resources. We just didn't really have yet the bandwidth for it. But now we have a bit more. And we're really excited to get in some conversations going. And so with the first four or five podcasts recorded you know as part of this kind of relaunch. um And so yeah, so really excited to kind of have some great conversations with folks across the development landscape and you know We always love feedback. If there's a secure speaker or person you want us to talk to, shoot us an email. You can always email me at James at paces.com and Charles at paces.com as well. um Thank you so much. and and great to you know It's great great to talk. yeahre You're literally in the room next to me, Charles, but great to talk to you on podcasts as well.

06:58.17
Charles
Yes, exactly. Very excited and yeah looking forward to have more ah great episodes coming out.

07:05.45
carbtonic_admin
perfect Thanks, Charles. Bye.