Why you should join Fuse 2.0

In 1 year and 2 months since launching we have got a lot done. We have built a renewable developer with a 300 MW pipeline of solar, wind, and hydrogen. We have built a prototype alkaline electrolyser with in-house engineering design (TRL 4), we have built an in house trading desk with demand & production forecasting (achieving 3% errors as opposed industry-leading 6%) just using advanced statistical methods (we think using deep learning will drive errors down even more). We have built an industry first real time billing engine (as far as we know, no one else in the industry has built this), in house home electrification (optimised by latest operational research algos to maximise utilisation on electricians).

What is next?

Productionise Hydrogen Blending. 

We get additional edge by co-locating gas grid-connected electrolysers with our utility scale solar sites (we can oversize our solar sites e.g. if grid allows us to export X MW, we can oversize our solar to say 2X MW, X MW goes to electrical grid, the other XMW can be used to electrolysis via a private wire. Benefits include A) No grid costs compared to importing electricity to electrolyse B) No transformer/inverters needed to step up/convert to AC power (which is a requirement to export power to grid) C) all solar power can goto making Hydrogen when the solar sites gets curtailed (when all solar sites are exporting due to high irradiance, network operators sometimes tell solar sites to shut down to maintain grid stability). During these hours, you can consider solar power to be “free”. Furthermore, a lot of hydrogen companies are using off the shelf industry-grade electrolysers, which tend to produce hydrogen at purities and pressures that just aren’t required for grid uses. This means we can achieve a significant cost advantage through building our own electrolyser from the ground up. 

Turnkey solution for AI Data centres. 

AI data centres consume A LOT of power. In the boardrooms of many big tech companies, they are already talking about building GWs of data centres (equivalent to millions of homes’ worth of power consumption). The electrical grid is extremely congested, everywhere (the bigger import/export connection, the longer the queue times). There is obviously a race to build GPU clusters, fast. This means long waiting times is not an option, and co-locating power generation & consumption is a much faster option. Most data centres need to be “always on” with backup power. This is more easily achieved with traditional gas/coal power as you can easily “rev up or down the engine based on power needs”,  however a lot of tech companies (rightfully so) are mindful of their carbon impact, this means the ability to use renewable power is part of the design requirement. Due to renewable intermittency, it is extremely difficult to have always on power, balancing between on site renewable power and importing the delta from the grid. We want to build turn key solutions for Big tech to solve all their power needs, from renewable development (getting land, planning, grid connections), EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) of private wire renewable power to electricity supply. 

EVs

We think the EV charging experience for a lot of EV drivers kinda sucks. For example, If you are doing a long distance trip on your EV, you almost always have to charge using public chargers. Which ones do I goto? Do I have enough charge to get to the next one? Which ones are fast charge? How do I know the chargers aren't broken? How do I pay? We have felt the pain of this problem ourselves; looked at existing solutions, and found 0 that meet our customer experience bar. We must do better, if no one else will, we will. 

Project Zero

Developing centralised renewable power is slow, real slow. A lot of our grid connections take 2-5 years just to get connected (even though the actual construction could only take 3 months). Moreover, although renewable power is the cheapest source of energy, it is intermittent. Storage is a solution, but it is expensive (unit cost of Solar + unit cost storage is more expensive than unit cost gas derived power). Renewable is important, but most people are not willing to pay a premium for it (nor should they). The alternative is demand response. The basic principle is incentivising energy consumers to use more when sun is shining, wind is blowing, and use less when it is not. In one of their Future Energy Scenarios, the National Grid  (Transmission operator for both UK & US), forecasts up to 40% of the carbon reduction impact by 2050 could come from demand response (not nothing). Households represent ~27% of the electricity economy (just 2nd to industry). Collectively, households can make a difference. Wholesale Energy prices today already have financial incentives to do this (renewable hours are very cheap, sometimes you even see negative prices, energy companies get paid to buy more power during those hours), but this is not being passed on to consumers. Why? Let's explore:

Reason I think why this doesn’t happen today: a) utilities suck. The best software engineers do not want to work there (they typically end up in traditional finance or big tech). They are also stuck with legacy software. b) customer experience sucks (they don’t seem to give a fck about customers). 

How could we fix this? a) we built a real time billing engine which is a pre requisite of demand response b) we deeeeeeply care about the customer. So, why crypto? I get this question a lot. We have spent a lot of time asking ourselves the same question too. Let’s evaluate all options.

Cash - cash is nice, users like cash back in general, this works just fine:

Points - people also like points (like airline miles), this can work too.

However all of the above are an extremely transactional relationship between the energy company & the customer. There are tons of things I dislike about the crypto industry, but one thing that is extremely powerful is the formation of hardcore communities and contributors. There is an almost cult-like following/contribution to projects people believe in. The renewable energy problem requires collective action, and this is why we believe crypto is the best form of incentivisation for decentralised renewable energy. Moreover, due to its permissionless nature, we hope other energy companies will look at our success and copy us. We are really inspired by Tesla open-sourcing their patents to help other automakers electrify, we think this is net good for the world, and we think making this network permissionless supports this ideology. If we can demonstrate this is an effective tool to increase engagement, increase margins for ourselves, this can convince other energy companies to join. We want to build tools such that other energy companies can adopt, easily.

So what now? 

So why am I spending so much time writing this post? We need more great engineers. Whether you are a top software engineer at a big tech/hedge fund or process engineer at an oil & gas company, we want to speak to you! I often tell the team, even if we have $1bn more, or even $10bn, we will not go any faster. We have investors knocking on our door every week to give us more capital, but it will make no difference to our speed of execution, because we are constrained by our engineering capacity. 

If this is you, ask yourself, does your current job really matter? What difference are you making? If you left your job tomorrow, how would the world be different? At Fuse, you will do impactful work, tons of autonomy (we have No PMs, you are the PM), no BS middle management. If this speaks to you, please reach out. 

What’s our culture at fuse? 

Let’s start with me:

As you can probably tell already, I am direct, no BS. I am no longer motivated by money (but don’t get me wrong, more money is nice, just no longer my primary motivator). I believe in true meritocracy, best ideas win the environment (if your idea is better than mine, we do your idea), and I expect every leader at Fuse to operate the same way.

Alan