Rebecca Puck Stair Interview

Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to another New Mexico rock star, Rebecca Puckstair.

And our topic is how New Mexico is supporting clean tech startups. For four decades, Rebecca Puckstair has built teams to tackle complex, high to tackle complex, high profile, and high dollar projects. In 2023, she came to New Mexico State Energy Office after two decades in the New Mexico film industry, where she worked as a producer and location manager on over a hundred films, television shows, commercials, and other media projects, including podcasts and conferences for the Franciscan monk, father Richard Rohr. And in our show notes, I'm gonna put an interview of the executive director way back in, like, episode 28 of Michael, who's the executive director of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Big shout out to the great work that's happening over there. In 2020, Puck ran for New Mexico senate and subsequently served as a policy analysis for House of Representatives, Consumer and Public Affairs Committee. For two years, Stair served as president of New Mexico's largest film crew union, which is ATSE local four eighty. Stair graduated cum laude from Amherst College with a BA in English literature and completed some graduate study in linguistics at Georgetown University.

Between championing clean energy projects for the state, she rides horses, skis, races triathlons, and other questionable activities that require helmets. Me and my trail running buddy like to say, who wants to do something stupid? It's a puck. Sometimes you raise your hand when you wanna do something stupid. Is that what you're telling us?

Every time. I have a t shirt in the other room that says, that's a terrible idea. What time?

Yeah. So welcome to Aware for Nerve. We're so grateful to have you here.

So glad to be here. Let's kick start some good stuff for New Mexico, Paul.

Yeah. So you've done some awesome things in your long career. And tell us a little bit about given this wide variety of things you've done from movies to working with the center and action contemplation. Let's zero in on this part of your career. How did you get into the state energy office and being a leader in that sector?

Well, the short answer is I have no idea. No. It came out of, I think, being not excellent at anything, but slightly okay at a lot of things. And as you know, anytime a a culture or society is going through broad systemic change like we are, generalists find themselves sought after. And so I think, you know, knowing a little bit about archaeology and a little bit about, I don't know, water management and a little bit about law and a little bit about art and graphics and how small New Mexico is. Shout out to Michael Poffenberger. I think word got around that I was interested in doing big projects. I've always had a green bent in everything that I've done.

I've sort of brought an environmental or sustainable angle to it. And long story short, one one coffee conversation led to another, and I was appointed by the governor to take over as the director of the state energy office. And I am just thrilled.

Great. And that was in 2023, it sounds like.

Yes. Yes. So it's been about a year and a half so far.

Great. And listeners, if you haven't heard the episode, one thing to understand that New Mexico is in an incredibly poignant moment partially because of great leadership for many, many years, like ninety seven years to get to our sovereign wealth fund. And if you wanna get some backup on why we have some very unique opportunities here, I did an interview with another New Mexico rock star representative, Andrea Romero, and we covered the New Mexico permanent fund. I will put a link in the show notes, but that permanent fund is now $58,000,000,000, and that's allowing us as a state to have some opportunities to lean into clean tech in a way that is fairly uncommon. Is that fair to say, Puck?

Yes. Do you want me to expound on that, please?

Please tell

us tell

us about some of that uncommonness.

That's a great segue. So, yeah, the the permanent fund sort of worth this there's this hinge moment between a kind of then and a now, and the state is teed up to be an amazing leader if we play our hand right. We have all the right ingredients at the table. And what I mean by that is you mentioned the permanent fund, which has come from almost a century of royalties out of being an energy leader in the oil and gas world. And now that we're transitioning to renewables, we find ourselves yet again potentially holding a royal flush in terms of the green energy revolution, meaning we're in the top 10 for wind potential. We're ranked number six in geothermal potential. We are number one in solar potential. Side note, Arizona will say they're number one in irradiance, which is true.

They get more sunshine, but our we're higher, so our panels are cooler, so we can produce more solar electricity. So, anyway, we're number one in solar. So we have the potential to shift from being an energy leader in the oil and gas in the fossil world to continuing to be an energy leader in the clean revolution. And not only that, geographically, we lie at the intersection of the three national grids, the Eastern Connect, the Western Connect, and Texas' ERCOT, which are not yet connected. But if they get connected, it could happen and should happen here, In which case, New Mexico is not only positioned to generate more than enough cheap, renewable, abundant electricity to drive our own economic development, but also to kinda kick start the rest of the country and get a little money in our pocket along the way as we did so with the fossil fuels.

Very cool. And you're, like, literally the director of that office. Is that fair to say?

Yes. I mean, it's a team effort that, you know, we don't oversee all of that, but we are the the hub of all those folks. That's for sure. So it's a really busy exciting time as we sort of pivot from one whole way of doing energy to another whole way of doing energy in human history.

That's very exciting time, and thank you for your good work in that. So give us, like, a lay of the land. Here we are. We're recording this in February 2025. When we're talking about clean tech startups in New Mexico, as somebody who's in the energy space, like, and been thinking about green for a long time, Paik. Where where would you say the clean tech ecosystem is right now in 2025? And then I'm gonna say, well, dream a little bit with us. You're in on some conversation that not everybody is see. What's what's the coming attractions?

That's a giant question, Paul. I'm trying to gather my thoughts. So in terms of green tech, there's a whole spectrum. Right? There's there's everything from kind of utility scale, you know, know, things that are deployed right now, from utility scale all the way down to what's happening at the residential level. And some of these are national trends and some of them are rooted right here in New Mexico. So, you know, starting at the large utility scale projects, as I mentioned earlier, most of the grids in The United States are old and brittle and unfortunately sagging and may be causing wildfires. So even if we were gonna continue with fossil fuels, we have to upgrade our grids. And there's a ton of new technologies happening, and some of them are happening here in New Mexico because I mentioned earlier, we're at the intersection of these grids, so we can be a connector.

Then there's smart grid technologies coming online to give visibility into, you know, where are the electrons actually being used. What is temperature of your actual line that's running through the forest? How much is it sagging because it's getting warm? All of that. There's also New Mexico, as you know, is is a leader in generating renewable electricity for ourselves. So with the governor's passage and the legislature's passage of the Energy Transition Act, we have goals to make our grid a % green in 2020 02/1940 and 02/1945 depending. And we're already 40% green, our grid right now.

I didn't know was that

a new spot. A little bit ahead to schedule. It depends on how you measure it, but that's basically where we're at. So we've already made huge progress. We have giant solar installations on utility scale. Some of the utilities are now turning into batteries, which can, you know, soak up excess sun during the day and then release it in the evening. So that's already starting to happen. In terms of wind, the North America's largest wind farm is here in New Mexico over in the kinda eastern Central Eastern part of the state over by Corona.

It's fantastic. If any of your listeners want to just take a Sunday drive, you can just drive around and see the scale of the thing and the beautiful happy turning wind turbines. That also is sparking the the building right now of giant new trans transmission lines with Sanzia and Rio Del Sol. So there's jobs at foot, green jobs happening right now. And now I'm I'm trying to kinda come down from utility scale. Then we also have pioneered community level projects in New Mexico. So community solar was passed a few years ago by the legislature, and last Thursday was the groundbreaking of the first community solar project. And for listeners who aren't following or, you know, aren't in the weeds like I'm in the weeds, community solar means if you want to power your house with solar power, but for some reason you can't put panels on your property, maybe you're a renter or maybe your roof is shady or shaded by a tree, not shady like, you know, stuff like that.

Character. Right? Yeah. Shady character roof. You can jump in with your neighbors and sort of effectively pool your money and basically buy a share of a solar field that's built somewhere else, but connected to the grid. And then that's the electricity that through the miracle of wires is what powers your house. So that's community solar, and that's off and running. And then down to the the individual residential level in New Mexico, we're we've got great rooftop solar. We've got a lot of folks doing batteries.

We've got folks looking at distributed wind, which I love because it's like the good old fashioned windmill from a hundred years ago, but now it's come full circle, you know, at a ranch. And instead of pumping water, it's now making electrons for a distant, you know, ranch at the end of the line. And we have a ton of tax credits and funds to support that whole spectrum of what's happening right now today.

So that's a lot already happening right now as we're recording this. And again, you have a front row seat. You're in some conversations about maybe to be more informed than many of our listeners about where are we going? So if you look ahead, let's say three years, what are some of the things that are in conversation in New Mexico right now as it relates to clean tech that you think three years from now are very likely to be up and running and pretty exciting to an audience like ours?

Yeah. I think there's three things that come to mind at first. And then if you let me sit for a minute, there's just more. There's so much every day. So number one is I mentioned batteries, and I'll broaden that into just storage in general. And what that means is a way to store the excess electricity because we've got great wind, we've got great solar, and sometimes they actually make more than what we're using at that moment in time. And so rather than what's called curtail that, you know, just sort of waste let that the electricity go to waste, let's soak it up. So let's build some sort of sponge that can soak up the excess electricity, hold it until the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, and then release it at that time.

So many of your listeners have heard about, you know, batteries, like lithium solar ion batteries. That's what's happening now on the ground. But here in New Mexico with our two national labs and all of our entrepreneurs, there's probably a dozen other types of storage being experimented with and delivered or experimented with. One, for example, is what's called thermal storage where you just take a a giant, like, silo, like a farm silo, fill it full of sand, point solar panels at it, and just simply heat them up and let the sand get really, really hot, like boiling water kind of hot. It's called thermal storage, and then you wait until you can wait a week or a month or even a season because it stays hot. It's very insulated. And then you can let that boil water and run a turbine later. So that's a technology being tested right now in New Mexico, thermal storage.

There's also what's called gravity storage, where you take you hook your solar panels or your wind turbine up to a winch, essentially. And when the sun is shining, it winches like a heavy concrete block up a hill on sliders, kind of like a giant version of a grandfather clock. And then when you need the electricity, you let the concrete block or whatever sort of slide slowly back down the hill, and it turns again. It turns some gears to make electricity. So that's being pioneered. And the really fun thing in New Mexico is cool opportunities start to surface. So what I just described with gravity storage requires lots of land and lots of steep hills in an area where you can lay down these kind of railroad track things. Gosh.

That sounds like a lot of our abandoned mines, which is a problem right now. Right? They're just sitting there. They're dangerous. They're steep. There's no vegetation. Perfect. So that's something that's sort of being looked at in New Mexico. And the third thing I'll mention oh, I'm getting excited.

That was only number one. Number two is geothermal electricity, which I mentioned. So as you know, the Earth has magma way down there. If you drill down, the further you drill, the hotter the rocks get, hot enough to start to boil water. And if you bring that water up to the surface, you can use the steam to run a turbine. Well, it just so happens that New Mexico with our volcanic Rift Valley running right through the middle, the Rift Valley, the Rio Grande Rift Valley, which by the way is the second largest fault in North America after the San Andreas Fault, but it's a friendly fault. We get, like, a thousand small earthquakes a day rather than one giant one every seven years. But what means we have a lot of magma close to the surface, which means we have a lot of hot rocks relatively close to the surface.

Guess what else we're also good at in New Mexico? Drilling because of our oil and gas expertise and vendors who are here and specifically what's called directional drilling or stressing the rock to make it kind of crack open and create places where you can put water in there. So we are we have all that expertise already here. We have vendors already here. We have the new New Mexico tech, which already knows a lot about the subsurface. So, again, we hope all these amazing ingredients to kick off geothermal electricity in New Mexico, if we play our cards. Right? And the amazing thing about geothermal electricity is, to be nerdy for a minute, it's what's called clean, firm electricity, meaning it's clean, it's renewable, doesn't create carbon emissions. And firm, meaning it's always there. It's not intermittent like sun and wind.

Right. So you take sun and add wind and add geothermal, and you could basically get to a % clean energy overnight. So geothermal is the second thing I'm really excited about, and we have a lot of, you know, grants, funds, loans, tax credits available to kick start that industry here. The third thing I'm really interested in is making the grid smart, and there are some pilot projects afoot right now in New Mexico to do that. So going back to our problem of excess solar electricity, right, and storage, If you put that together, you can create or you can use batteries, especially batteries, for example, in your car, like your electric car is basically giant battery on wheels. And if it can either absorb excess electricity at certain times or discharge back into the grid at times when the grid needs it, you have you're solving a lot of problems for the grid. And these are called that is one version of what's called a virtual power plant or a VPP. Some people call them distributed power plants because you sort of take a thousand electric cars and they can add up to one coal plant.

And we're doing some pilots in New Mexico to experiment with all of that. Oh, and by the way, if you own that EV, you get to make a little money when you sell your electricity back to the grid.

So some of this I'm hearing about for the first time, I'm getting I'm already really excited, but now I'm even more excited.

There's just so much. We need all the skill types. We need if you whatever skill you've got, bring it because it will get put to use here.

Yes. Yes. So so let's do this. Normally, let I wanna take a break and tell people about an event that's coming up in New Mexico. And then when we come back, I wanna hear about some of the programs that you were just hinting at to fund and tax breaks and things like that. Because not only do we have great things happening here, but part of the reason we have such a high concentration is because there are some resources here. And I have some other questions for you in a second, Puck. But before we do, I just wanna take a break.

Normally, what we do here is put in a commercial for services or one of our sponsors, but I'm actually gonna plug an event here that's coming up in New Mexico. It's like our South by Southwest. If you've never heard of it, it's called Atomic sixty six. So we're expecting 700 to a thousand people three day events. And one of the reasons it's so just perfect for this episode is there is a full day climate and advanced energy track. I'm one of the co leads who are actually programming it, and it's free. It's open to anybody. And I will put a link, in the show notes for the whole atomic sixty six event.

But this is gonna be an opportunity to be on the ground. It's June 11 through the thirteenth climate and advanced energy track is on the thirteenth. Big shout out to Vicky Apodaca and the Techarilla community who got the atomic sixty six event rolling. If you are excited and you're like, I want to know more. This is an entire day deep dive with a whole venue just dedicated to climate and clean tech in New Mexico. So come join us. Again, the event itself is free and the website will be in the show notes. So before we took our break, Puck, I was, hinting at, like, some of the reasons some of the reasons that there's such a confluence things here is just the natural assets that New Mexico has.

We're, you know, very high. I live in Albuquerque. People like to say, well, Denver is a mile high city. Well, we're also a mile high. Some of our listeners live in Santa Fe. That's over 7,000 feet. Right? It's one of the highest state capitals in the country. And we're also very dry.

So that means that the sun is particularly intense here. That combination of factors. Some of it is geothermal. Right? Some of it is the incredible brain power we have from two national labs and a lot of other entities. You know, highest concentrations of PhDs per capita in New Mexico because of entities like Sandia Labs and Los Alamos Labs and Space Force and all kinds of stuff like that. Right? But some of it is that we have really prioritized using this historic pool of capital to incentivize these kinds of programs. Is that fair to say?

Yes.

Tell us about some of those incentives.

How much time do you got?

Oh, well, twenty eight minutes and twenty seven seconds according to my timer.

Okay. I've got kind of six broad categories. Trying to make sure I don't miss anything, and it's changing every day. And, you know, we're in legislative session as we're recording this, and there are even more potential opportunities that our legislators are voting on sort of as we speak. So this list might grow. So if your listeners take away just one thing from this podcast, it's this website. Our one stop shop website is clean energy dot n m dot gov. So everything I'm saying today on February 26 might change.

It might grow. It might improve. Always check back at cleanenergy.nm.gov. And that'll be Again, that'll be in

the show notes for sure. We'll put that at top. Yeah.

Fabulous. Okay. So first, I'll just name and then I won't spend much time with is that there's money available for sort of anything you wanna do with the residential level. So if you want to put solar on your own house or make your own property more efficient or what's called seal the envelope. We've got about six or seven different tax credits for that. And I'll leave it at that because that's we're not we're talking about entrepreneurs today. There's also, moving sort of towards entrepreneurs, we also have not one but three different grants. Well, depending on the depending on the Trump administration.

One, two, or three workforce development grants to help train New Mexicans into the green jobs for the energy transition. Information about those will be on cleanenergy.nm.gov. Then you've got sort of entrepreneurial options. So we have one revolving loan program that we're just about to set up for energy efficiency. All of these have the same words. The names are so confusing. This is the Energy Efficiency Revolving Loan Fund, not to be confused with the Green Energy Revolving Loan Fund. Anyway, go to the site.

We'll help you sort through it all. But that's mostly for municipalities to then turn around and distribute that money to whoever they see fit. So it's money that we would give to, for example, city of Alamogordo, who would then turn around and pick specific buildings in the city of Alamogordo to make those buildings more energy efficient. Then we have so that's sort of number two. Number three is we have an ongoing program called an ESCO program. This is also for buildings if you want to retrofit your buildings or even build one from the ground up and make it green. ESCO stands for energy service company. And the big problem or the big challenge that a lot of this green energy tech has is in order to implement it, there's an initial big upfront capital investment, which costs a lot of money.

You know, if you want to put solar panels and battery on your roof and make your building islandable and really tight and do whatever you wanna do with it. And then afterwards, your costs are much less or even zero. But how do you get over that capital hump? This is where an escrow product program comes into pays. This is a company that can take a look at your your building, your property, your project, and say, here's the things you need to do. They'll pay for all of that upfront and then bill you on the back end for, like, thirty years. So it's like a mortgage. And they'll adjust those payments so that it's less than what you were paying in electricity bills or utility bills. So you're still making some savings also.

And then when it's paid off, you pay nothing or whatever you're building, which generates. This also, if you're looking into making your building smart and sort of powering itself when electricity rates are low and then islanding itself when electricity rates are high. So you can call that's called arbitrage. You can do that with an ESCO project. Number three or number four, whatever I'm on. We are and I'm jumping around. There's I mentioned the tax notice. Now I'm gonna go to kind of federal stuff that come that funnels through my office, and there's three.

One is the loan programs office at the DOE offers big loans. When I say big, I mean, starting at a hundred million and up for technology that's at technology readiness level that's in the valley of death, essentially, that's in, like, six, seven, eight. When you've done a pilot, you're starting to scale up, and so your capital costs are going up, but you're not quite commercial. So they call it a bridge to bankability. And what happens is the state of New Mexico, through a program called a SEFI program, a state energy financing institution, through the SEFI program, the state will partner with the feds, with you on your fabulous program, whatever it is, and we will put in money to help you get a very cheap below market loan from the LPL for a hundred million and up depending on what your project is. So that program is up and running in my office. Details, cleanenergy.nm.gov. Come talk to us.

The second big federal program is I I call it the miracle. It's something called elective pay. So a lot of folks are aware of tax credits, but if you don't pay taxes, if you're a nonprofit, if you're a union, if you're a church, if you're a tribe, and you don't pay taxes, you can't play in the tax credit market. With the passage of the IRA, you can through a new provision called elective pay, which basically means if you do any kind of green energy project, you what you spend on it, you can get back as a tax refund anywhere between 10% to 70% of what you paid on the project.

Wow.

Enormous amount of money. So and what's a green energy project? If you are a Navajo chapter house and you're putting in solar plus storage, if you are a police department and you're buying electric vehicles, if you are a union hall and you're installing a ground source heat pump or something like that, you can be eligible for these tax credits. It's new. It's a little complicated. It requires some expertise from lawyers and accountants, and so we can offer the we can take you by the hand and walk you through that process, and help you get closer to the 70% back. And then the last thing I'll mention is the Green Bank money that's flowing around Of the 20,000,000,000 allocated by the EPA to the two agencies, you're gonna get lost in abbreviations here, but the CCIA and the NCIF, there are some of them that already have branches here in New Mexico that have some piece of the 20,000,000,000, and they are looking to lend it to you. And we can help connect you and your project to those lenders. And then the very last thing I'll say is you can start everything I've said, you can start combining what's called stacking and braiding this.

So one example, and then I'll be quiet because I'm sure there's questions. If you want if you are a Navajo chapter house and you wanna put solar on your storage and your roof and you're gonna use elective pay to cover 50% of the cost, the other 50%, the state, we can come in and help you with a green loan or possibly even one of our grant programs to help cover it. So you could potentially wind up with solar plus storage on your chapter house, and you're paying 5%, ten % of the total cost total cost at the end of the day. Wow. K. That was a lot.

No. That's awesome. And, again, all of that is at cleanenergy.nm.gov. And if you have questions, feel free to reach out to me, and I'll try to track down some more useful information and start at the website. So give us an example on the entrepreneur side. Who do you think what are the two, three examples of folks in New Mexico who are leveraging these assets and are doing, getting a lot of value in a really moving the needle in a way you're excited about you and your team are excited about. Got any entrepreneurial examples?

Yeah. I mean, well, for example, there's eight different geothermal companies that we're in some version of talks with, or each taking advantage of one of the different menu choices that I just offered depending on their own financing and their own situation. One of them, for example, is partnering with a Pueblo or in talks to partner with a Pueblo. And so we're looking at that opens the door to us bringing in grant money that they're gonna combine with the geothermal tax credit, and then maybe there's a CEPI loan in there. And so we're working on it like a financing package. Oh, and then the workforce training part, we can help with some of the funding to train up the green folks. So that's just one example of geothermal can start pulling into four or five of these buckets and really making their projects much cheaper than they need

to be. That's very cool. So you get a sense, listeners, why there's particularly I get inbound. I don't know if you're getting inbound, Puck. I'm getting inbound on LinkedIn from people I've never even heard of saying, what is going on in New Mexico? Are are you getting that kind of inbound?

It's fantastic.

It's awesome. Right?

Don't talk to anyone. Yeah.

Especially Yeah.

And I will say it's it's it's happening against the background of you know, we have the labs, we have the text trans transfer, we have a supportive governor and a supportive legislature, we've got various buckets of money available. But then I think the other sort of intangible ingredient that really brings it all together in New Mexico is our New Mexican values of neighborliness where we we don't really compete with each other. We just wanna help each other out. We of, sort of resilience and being creative, you know, being handed a problem and flipping it around and making an opportunity out of it. Yeah. And our real community spirit plus our intermixing of cultures, you know, we live in this sort of bath of all different kinds of ideas and perspectives that float around all the time. And this is why it's really fun to be a generalist right now and to be working at this transition of, you know, human energy transition once in a, I don't know, millennia because it's all it all comes together in New Mexico and it makes it work really well.

Yeah. And and I'd I'd build a little bit on what you're saying. One of the terms you'll hear if you live here is we are the first majority minority state.

Mhmm.

Which means if you largely because we have a very large Latinx population, second largest, I think only Alaska has a higher proportion of native population. Just people from all over the world have come here because of the labs and other things. Right? You just put that all together and the proportion of people of color is higher than any other state. We look like where The US is going even though some folks are really mad that that's where we're going. That's a podcast for another day. It's

gonna be fine.

I love living here. I feel super grateful to live here, and I I I enjoy swimming in that those waters you described.

That's great.

And the climate tech world historically, at least in The US, is got a real diversity, equity, and inclusion problem. We did an episode with Christy Dropman. Her social media accounts have absolutely blown up. Her main Instagram account is called brown girl green. And it's about specifically looking at diversity and sustainable and part of it is blowing up is because it's such an issue. In New Mexico, it feels more on people's radar because of who lives here and it's not so monoculture. And even our leadership is more diverse than in many places. And that combination of just incredible amounts of capital, incredible amounts of scrappiness because we've been so under resourced historically, which again, I think is part of our strength.

We you give us a dollar and we go further with it than most places because we've had to build those muscles historically. Who lives here and the values and also the brain power of who's here and this historic amount of capital due to the permanent bond. You put all that together and it's just like not common recipe. It's a very unique recipe that people are hearing about. And all of it's coming online pretty like much live real time as we're recording this. I think we hit the magic number with the permanent fund. Was it late in '23 or early in '24 and some disbursements started happening in last year? Right? But this is all, like, after a hundred years of investment and leadership, we finally had the capital to do some of these more interesting things only in the past year. Is that sound about right?

%. It's just as wonderful, delicious, creative buzz. The other part I'll I'll add to that mix is we have a a really healthy population of artists and visionaries and thinkers and painters and writers. And and and when you sort of add that spice of creativity into the mix, that's exactly what what you need. You know, you put an artist and an engineer in the room together and, you know, figure out how we're gonna do electricity in a hundred years from now, which I did, by the way, as a staff retreat a couple weeks ago. And it just explodes into this creative vision where you're mixing science and art and the imagination. It's intoxicating.

I I just pulled it up. So you heard me plug atomic 66, but I'm gonna read just a little bit of the copy because it's exactly what you're talking about, Pac. Right? So the the big headline at the top of atomic sixty six, it says misfits, dreamers, and boundary breakers. Right? Atomic sixty six is calling, where tech rebels meet space pioneers and art lovers. The first of its kind festival ignites three extraordinary days and blah blah blah blah blah. But that combination of these incredibly intelligent, geeky science folks dreaming up the and, you know, Georgia O'Keeffe was from here. Right? Like like, you know, and and so many historical native artists that are world class and and, you know, the Flamenco Festival and and all the different creatives. Netflix moved their base of operations here partially because the tax incentives and but also partially because as you all know as somebody who did movies forever, the the the muscles of creativity and innovation is just alive here.

So as you were talking, I thought of Atomic sixty six. This is gonna be our South by Southwest, but way cooler, way, way cooler.

Yeah. Wait. It's like South by Southwest but within in years.

Yeah. Way cooler than that.

Yeah. Just one example of that since you did mention Netflix. You know, they came here. They built this the studio, but they didn't just build a regular studio. I think they got inspired by everything we've been talking about during this whole podcast so far. And that studio that everyone can drive by in the Southern part of Albuquerque is basically a net zero. There's solar panels everywhere. There's a ground source

know that.

They have more EV chargers on the lot than I think any other studio lot built in from the beginning. So, you know, they come here bringing who they are, and they can't help but kind of get infected by that New Mexico kind of, you know, scrappy, you know, imagineering, and they create something new and great.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So given all this Puck, I'd love to get your guidance for two particular buckets. There's a lot of people who listen to the show, but the main two, one is the early stage entrepreneur who who particularly a clean tech or climate entrepreneur, and they're trying to make sense of this. They're not ready for a hundred million dollar blah blah blah. Right? They're very early, but they're excited. They're seeing what's happening in the world. They wanna make a difference, but too early for a lot of VCs, maybe even angels are like, come back to me when you're, you know, six months or a year for like, somebody who's very early, but is so passionate and is trying to find their way into the clean tech economy.

What suggestions would you have somebody in that situation?

Stop by our office or ring us up. And here's what we can offer. So two things that we can offer you. One is I have sitting on staff all these experts that can help you kind of stress test your idea, kick it around. You know, I have a green lawyer. I have an economist. I have a grid expert. We have a battery expert.

We have a buildings expert. I have an EV expert, and on and on and on. There's 44 of us who are experts, and our job is to serve you and to kick start the economy. So come bring us your seed of an idea. We'll workshop it with you. We'll give you resources. We'll connect, you know, and we'll we'll kind of stress test and help and help you develop where you're going. And then second and related to that, we can point you to resources.

So the second thing we offer is we have we're we're kind of a clearing house, a convener. So we're up in everybody's business. And if you walk in the door and you've got some sort of smart thermostat idea, we know of someone else who needs your idea, and we will connect you. Right? Or we will connect you with a resource or, like, oh, this study just came out this past week. You need to read it. Or we here's a here's a a VC who's actually interested in specifically that thing. So one, we can help stress test your ideas and provide you free consultation with industry experts. And two, we can connect you to people, ideas, resources.

And I should have said this earlier in in that's we're so lucky to have you here that we're we're we're so blessed.

And Other other way around. So lucky to be here.

We we actually met speaking of convening and connecting, we actually met at a a new entity in New Mexico called NM Climate. I mean, same kind of idea of connecting and it's meet ups and there's programming and etcetera etcetera. But a monthly meet up the third Wednesday, somewhere in New Mexico. Right now, we've been mostly in Albuquerque, but we're talking to folks all over the state. So we're looking to expand that. And that's just another place to kind of say hi, and it's free. And it's usually at a cool place like a brewery or wherever. And there's an opportunity.

Last one, we did it at Vara Winery in Downtown Nob Hill area. In Albuquerque, we had 30 people. The one you were at, Puck, was 38 people. Right? So we're bringing in everything from VCs to yourself to very early stage entrepreneurs to talent who's looking for, like, I want to come into this space. I am a very accomplished professional, but I'm not currently working in clean tech. And given the world is burning, I wanna find my way into clean tech. So check out I'll put a link to folks to sign up for the NM Climate newsletter, and then you can find out a little bit about what's going on in another place. So just literally walk in a door and shake some hands with a bunch of other folks who are super super passionate.

So I forgot to say that earlier.

I just wanna underscore that. And the only reason I wasn't at the last one, Paul, is that I was literally under anesthesia for having a surgery. Oh, it could've kept me away. I'm good. My knee got cleaned up, and now I can hopefully run again.

But that was the only questionable activities that require helmets again. Yes. Well Might be a little bit of recovery time. Yes. So, second scenario, somebody is a little further along, right? So, you know, have their ideas been validated, maybe they have some strong science, maybe they've got a cup, you know, seed, you know, pre seed, seed round, maybe even series A, like they're making some progress. And it's not a question of what am I gonna build, but I know what I'm gonna build, and now I'm working on scaling it. What would you suggest for somebody in that phase?

Same thing, which is stop by and talk to us. And in that case, again, two things. One is, we may have some more funding we can add in, or we can point you in a direction of, hey. Do you know you're eligible for this? So this tax credit will work for you. Or if you tweak this one thing, we can get you free apprentices. You know, let us know. And the other is if you're looking to sort of pilot something, we can really help you figure out where and when and how is the best to do that. Again, we're a connector.

We know for what everyone's up to, and we could say, oh, you know, I know that this particular Pueblo is looking to pilot something like that. Here's their phone number. Let's connect. Y'all wanting to do the same thing, and they have a site ready for you, that sort of thing.

I can hang out with you all day, Puck. You're doing such awesome things, and you're really busy. Our listeners are busy. As we start to wind on, couple of questions. First question is, like, dream we we had people in New Mexico literally a hundred years ago that did something really bold, and you and I are both, like, got big smiles on our face. Even though the, you know, the world is suffering from us, not paying attention to clean tech and climate as much as possible, we're in this, like, unprecedented situation because of leadership a hundred years ago. Right? When you look ahead, you're sitting in circles with leaders, and there's things that are being dreamed up right now. Like like, look ahead if you wanted to point towards some of the conversations of that kind of New Mexico spirit of visionary leadership that a generation from now, you'll say, wow.

Like, let I don't know if you feel it. When I think of those people a hundred years ago that said, we need a permanent bond, and it's not gonna do anything significant in my lifetime, but we need this, and we're gonna do it. I just feel so much gratitude and awe at their that quality of leadership. And it's happening right now. We have that kind of leadership that didn't stop when the permanent bond came online. Right? You and I both know some of those leaders. A generation from now, what do you think will be coming online that people will say, wow. Back in the mid twenty, you know, '25, '20 '6, they were they were doing that? Wow.

How cool is that?

No pressure.

I can ask you what color your blazer is if you'd rather something easy.

No. No. Let's do it. So because we did just do that. We had a retreat with my staff. I called it the grid of the future, and we we spent a whole day sort of imagining, okay, a hundred years in the future. And there's so much to say, but I will just say the biggest possibility that is coming towards us, if we play our cards right, is free electricity, which is not something humanity has ever had in its history. Energy has always come at a cost, whether it was horsepower, you know, feeding the horse with hay and you can only get so many, you know, acres plowed in a day because the horse would get tired or manpower or steam power.

There was always a cost to energy. If we play our cards right, we're at a turning point where because fuel is free, once you've set up the wind turbine or the or the the solar panel, which is almost nothing maintenance after that, free electricity. And what is that gonna do to our markets? What's that gonna do to our in inventionability, you know, our our spirit? What does that do to humanity when all of a sudden we have virtually unlimited, essentially free energy? And I think that's where it's good to spend some time imagining. What would you do if you didn't have to pay for electricity? What could you do and it was unlimited? What would you do with it?

That's a fun question. I'd I'm sitting here just thinking, wow. Yeah. That is a fun time.

Constraint for all of human civilization, and it's about to not

be. Wow.

Sorta. And I think the parallel is information. So information used to be very constrained. You know, if you think of the Middle Ages in Europe and, you know, books and knowledge was locked away in in the the monasteries available to only a precious few. And look what happened when the Gutenberg Bible was invented, and all of a sudden, all of humanity was literate and had and now with the Internet, we have access to sort of all the information that humanity has ever and look what's happening. We're living it.

Yeah. I

think we're gonna have the parallel, some version of beautiful explosion

Wow.

When the same thing happens with power, with energy.

Wow. Okay. Blew my mind a little bit. Alright. Trying to step back into the interviewer and let my brain

stay there.

I'm like, okay. You could do this and we could do it. Alright. But wait. Hold on. Hold on. Yes. Okay.

I'll be thinking about that later today. That's awesome. So as we wind down, if there was something, Puck, you were hoping we were gonna get to and we haven't gotten to it yet, or there's something you wanna leave our social entrepreneur, climate tech founder listeners with as we start to say goodbye, what would that

be? That's a great question. I would say the challenges we're facing right now as humanity on the planet at this time are so big and so complex that they're sort of they expand beyond the perspective of any one of us, you know, their breadth, their depth, that, you know for example, the problem of nuclear waste extends forward two hundred fifty thousand years. Two hundred fifty thousand years ago, we weren't even doing cave paintings. Right? So we have a problem that just extends beyond what our little brains can can grasp. But if you can work together with others and listen to another perspective and a third perspective and a fourth perspective, And when we put all of our perspectives together in a room together, we can start to sort of rough out, okay, what is the problem we're up against? And once you understand the problem we're up against, you can flip it over and figure out what the solution is. So my advice would be find someone who disagrees with you, find someone who confuses you, and ask them a question and get curious about why they see things the way they do and listen to it because they're probably looking at the same problem as you from the other side of the room. And so they're gonna see it differently from how you see it. Does it make it right or wrong? And allow and try to integrate that point of view in alongside yours as well.

But if somebody wants to get a hold of you, cleanenergy.nm.gov, is that the way to do it?

I got it. I succeeded.

Okay, listeners. That'll be the first in the link in the show notes. I'll just thank you so much for your time. And more than that, just I know how hard you're working, and I'm just so grateful to you and all of our visionary leaders, but not all of them are here. You're here today. So just thank you. Your hard work is seen and appreciated.

Thank you, Paul. I appreciate that. And back at you. Thank you for holding the space and for being a convener and a collector.

So listeners, go check out the show notes. There's gonna be a lot of them. Check out the links. Even if you're not in New Mexico, I would encourage you to check out, especially, the cleanenergy.nm.gov site, the atomic sixty six event, which is gonna be a very cool convening. Check out what we're doing with NM Climate just to get a flavor of what's happening here. And, again, I'm getting a lot of inbound from especially young people and climate tech founders all over the world. There is a particular thing happening here, but my spirit is not to keep it for New Mexico, but to help, like, how does this show up or at least get modified where you live? And I always say to my clients, let's learn from what's already happening. Let's make new and different mistakes instead of the same one over and over again.

And not that everything is perfect here, but there are some things that I can literally say I do not know happening anywhere else on the planet, and I we need to move some pretty big needles pretty quickly. So anything I can do to help you kinda get a sense of what's on the ground here, we are seeing innovation and just an activation of our talent and our resources. Like, I've never seen anywhere, and these would be some good places. That cleanenergy.nm.gov site, the atomic sixty six event, and n m climate as sort of a connecting and convening opportunity. So anything I can do to help you make sense of any of that, feel free to be in touch. Go to the Aware Printers website. I wanna say we love listeners suggested topics and guests. So if you have an idea for a show, please go to the AwarePreneur's website.

And on our contact page, we have our simple guidelines to kinda give you a sense of what we're looking for and send in your ideas. And lastly, I wanna say thank you so much for the work you do to make our world a better place. Please take really good care in these intense times, and thanks for all the positive impact that you're working for in

our world.