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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. All right, this is a story about the concepts of heat and power, which is also work. This was about a job I had it at a company called Capstone turbine, which sold these micro turbines, which are small jet engines that are used to produce electricity, and heat, and also can be used for to produce cooling type of machine called an absorption chiller. I got this job. When I was living in San Francisco after many years of working in IT consulting, I ended up in San Francisco, trying to chase the.com bubble. And I just missed it, I got there, like a year too late. And this was around 2000. I had this job where I was an engineer for this company that sold these micro turbines and I was a field engineer, which meant I went out to installations. Similar to the kind of job I had at the power company where I would, I would look at equipment, do energy calculations, and try to figure out the optimal use of the equipment and see if it was a good use case. And if it was then that I helped the installers specify the equipment and work with the installation team to get the stuff installed. And sometimes I would test things. And there was a period of time in California, that's called a spark spread, which is the value of producing your own electricity, given the cost of natural gas, which was the fuel for these things. If you could reuse the waste heat for some kind of industrial process, it was cost effective to produce your own electricity and your own heat. Using these machines, you came out ahead, then if you were to buy the electricity from the grid and have other machines that made heat, so there was a window of time where this like made economical sense. And I had heard about these, the Capstone turbine like five years before, like Popular Science Magazine, I thought it was cool to have little jet engines make it heat and power. It was just amazing machine. They also had these air bearings. So there was no friction when I was cooking, we won't fast. So that was cool, too. Like I just liked it, I don't know I wanted to I just thought they were neat. So I was like, I've got a job there. So I did. And this job taught me about optimizations about really thinking through systems holistically from the perspective of not just like the cost of a machine, in this case, but what are all the uses of the BTUs that are coming in the heat, the energy that was in the sun, for the energy coming into this machine. And all the ways that could be used, that would be advantageous. And you can use heat to heat up other things. And you can also use the heat to create cooling through a different machine. And so there were industrial processes, where these machines made sense, where like making plastic, for example, where you would need some heat, you would need electricity, and you would need cooling. So if you needed all three of those things, you could like, put this machine together with some other components and have all of them at a lower cost than having them all individually. And this was like kind of like a rare use case. Like there weren't a lot of places on the planet where that made sense. But these machines also confirmed waste methane gas, they came off of digester plants that were that were for water treatment plants, which I thought was a great application of wasted energy, human energy basically, or like energy from the sun that got processed by a human and is now available as methane to either be vented into the air, which is bad from greenhouse gas perspective, or it could be burned in a flare, which is what they were primarily doing. We just burn it because it reduces the amount of methane but it's it doesn't do any useful work. And then the third option was to burn it in one of these machines or a different kind of machine. And you could also do this process on landfills. So basically, if you if you bury junk in the ground, and you sink wells into the mound below the dirt, you can vent off the gas that's come from decomposition of stuff and burn it. And that's better than letting in that it's like wasted it's wasted energy. I don't like wasted energy. I don't like wasting energy. So I thought, Okay, I'll go into this space and capture as much of this as I can. I learned a lot about integrated combined heat and power systems. learn a lot about optimizations. learn a lot about how projects work in the real world. You know, it's hard it's hard to build stuff. Now you Factoring is hard. Quality control is hard shipping is hard. Installation is hard. And errors are expensive. And so that was a really good lesson in terms of planning and diligence to plans and testing for contingencies and trying to figure out what don't I know what could go wrong? What could I learn? Can I learn faster? Can I break sooner? These kinds of things. It was a great learning experience. And you know, I guess I observed life can be messy. But there's always energy