BUDDERFLY
“ It’ s a fairly obvious business problem, and I love obvious business problems because most people relate to them very easily. But it seemed like in 2017, when we [ launched ] Budderfly – and even today, everybody agrees – one big problem is that we waste approximately 30 % of all energy that we use,” says Al.
“ I found that to be really dumb, especially when you looked at solar and batteries and the investments in energy production. People were writing cheques to spend money on capital to power energy they didn’ t need to use. And I found that really ridiculous.
“ You would think by this time in our technology journey as humans, we would have figured that problem out a little bit.” He explains that Budderfly goes beyond simply upfronting the costs for lowcarbon energy alternatives. To resolve the fragmentation inherent in traditional energy management models, Budderfly assumes responsibility for the primary billing and infrastructure operations.
“ When there’ s a pretty good guaranteed return, money will show up. There’ s no problem getting money. But more importantly, when you start to add up all the different components that you need to capture that 30 %, you stop counting at 30, 40 or 50 [ components ].
“ It’ s very daunting for a business that’ s not in the business of managing energy to go attack a problem with 40 different slivers of a solution, which means you have to contact how many different vendors? The reason they don’ t want to spend the money is the discomfort with the complexity of attacking the problem.
Budderfly installation crews use cranes to install rooftop HVACs( RTUs) at a McDonalds
“ The energy space is driven by a very fragmented mentality. The vendor community usually sells 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of those 30, 40, 50 slivers. Therefore, there’ s no total solution mentality that exists.
“ Someone needs to take it over and solve the problem for them, including the money. So, the money is one of three important things, but more important is the way we manage it in an integrated fashion and we deliver a total solution, which nobody does in the energy space.”
6 budderfly. com