Podcast transcript EY Change Happens Podcast Jemma Green

Jenelle McMaster: Hey, Jemma. Welcome.

Jemma Green: Hey, Janelle. Thanks for having me.

Jenelle McMaster: A lot of people do have, you know, their epiphanies or their awakenings when hiking the Camino Trail in Spain. Take me through yours. What was it about the moment on the hike that got you thinking about what would eventually become Powerledger?

Jemma Green: Well, I had left London and was moving back to Perth, where I am from. And then when I was on the hike, I just started to get this idea in my head that I wanted to build an ecovillage. I related to it, like, it was a bit random and audacious and although I worked in banking in London, I worked in sustainability in my last part of my career. So I think that's partly where the kind of idea had come from in working in sustainability. And then eventually I shared it with a friend of mine and she had suggested that I speak to Professor Peter Newman at Curtin University in Perth. And I just wrote him an email and said, oh, hi, I'm a returning Western Australian. This is my background. I would be keen to build an ecovillage in Perth. I knew it was a very audacious thing to just write in an email, but I just wrote it, I think, because I was on a holiday and I felt more void. And then he wrote back almost like immediately, overnight, and he said, oh, that's a great idea. And he copied in the Mayor of Fremantle.

Jemma Green: And within a week of my getting back, I had, like, coffee with the mayor. We had found this site just in Fremantle, in the suburb of White Gum Valley that was already doing, contemplating quite a lot of stuff. And the piece that I added to it was the energy system, like a shared solar and battery system within that ecovillage.

Jenelle McMaster: What did the ecovillage mean to you? Like, are you a citizen? I want to build an ecovillage. Why? What was the idea in your head and why did you think that was something you wanted to do? And importantly, why did you think it was something you could do?

Jemma Green: I think it was a random thought. (Jenelle: Okay). I listened to another podcast that you had done with Kirsten Ferguson and she explained how she just got this idea in her head to interview her mum and it was a bit random and I would put it in that bucket. It was like really out of nowhere idea that kind of just popped into my head. But it wasn't random in the sense of, I'd been working in sustainability and I was very interested in that and I just completed a Master's. It was just random is the best way to describe it.

Jenelle McMaster: There's something nice about when you are free from the constraints of your normal day-to-day activities that something gets unlocked in you, right? Your sort of more creative in thinking separate thoughts, kind of follow the paths that they do. And maybe that's the beauty of taking breaks and allowing that creative thinking to kick in. And then add to that a sight of audacity or audaciousness, I don't know which one works in that sentence, but then you have it there, you have the genesis of your ideas, but then what about thinking that you could do something about it? That's the element of, yeah, I've got this idea, but I reckon I can make this happen. Where does that come from?

Jemma Green: Well, how you just described that I think is perfect. Like something about taking yourself out of the matrix. And also hiking for me is like meditating. Like, when I now have thoughts I need to figure out, I go for a walk and that helps me clear my head. I mean, it's no surprise there. But this was like a bigger thought, I guess, from like, a bigger walk. And then in terms of like taking action on it, I think when the idea started to have a life of its own, in a sense, when I pitched it, that was kind of like some more momentum around it. And then he said, we can get you a PhD scholarship. I said yes to that and then probably halfway through the PhD, I got really stuck.

Jenelle McMaster: You got stuck?

Jemma Green: Yeah.

Jenelle McMaster: Where did you get stuck? What happened?

Jemma Green: Well, I wanted this shared solar and battery system for the ccovillage and I'd settled back into life in Perth and I actually met my husband, like, a week after I got back to Perth. That's another story. Like, I met his parents in Italy in a restaurant and they set us up on a blind date. But anyway, I got married and then I had a baby. Thought I'm having a bit of maternity leave and I was also stuck in my PhD. And the stuckness was about I wanted to create the ability to share energy and trade energy within the Ecovillage, and I could not find any software that did that. So I wanted, like, say you and I lived in the Ecovillage together and I worked FIFO. I got allocated some of the electricity from the solar panels and some of the electricity from the batteries, but then I'm not home to consume it and I wanted to be able to trade that with you and then you pay me some money and that offsets my electricity bill. I was searching for software that could do that and I couldn't find anything that could do that.

Jemma Green: And about seven weeks after having Emily, my first child, I got an email from like, a former JPMorgan colleague of mine introducing me to John Bullitch, my now business partner. And he had developed some applications using blockchain technology in other sectors and he wanted some introductions to my network. And I kind of read the email and went, I'm on maternity leave. And I just shut the email down, I'm just going to ignore that. And then I just thought, oh, no, I should reply. I met him and he was telling me about this technology called Blockchain and he was so enthusiastic about it. This is February 2016. At that time, not many people had even heard about Blockchain and my awareness of it was very limited, really. I'd heard of Bitcoin, I said, what could it do for my PhD research project? This is my problem that I'm stuck on. And we started to look together. We saw so many possibilities and a lot of the problems that exist with centralized record-keeping systems in the context of energy, and also the problems that exist with centralized energy systems, they could be solved by this technology.

Jemma Green: And so we got very excited and we just decided spontaneously to set up a company. And I put that also in the random bucket I didn't expect.

Jenelle McMaster: Jemma, you've been talking around the elements of this in a little bit there for Energy and Blockchain solutions, but in reasonably simple words. So more than a slogan, but less than a PhD dissertation. What is the change that you're trying to drive?

Jemma Green: Yeah, so energy markets have been centralized for a century. So that's like coal-fired power station or gas fired power station, bringing electricity one direction to people's homes and businesses. And then in the past 20 years, we've started to see a two-directional system, a bi-directional system caused by people installing solar panels on their roofs and wind farms and things like that, that are not at the transmission end of the grid, but are sitting in the distribution part of the grid. So it's not just electricity flowing one way, it's two ways. And the way that that was facilitated was through what's called a feed-in tariff, which is basically saying if you export your electricity, you get an amount of money. And it was very successful, but also very expensive. As we know in Australia, a third of the houses have rooftop solar now, but what it didn't do is it didn't make sure that the electricity got put where there's actually demand. And electricity, you have to balance supply and demand in all parts of the grid, otherwise the grid fails and you have brownouts and blackouts. And when you've got a one-directional system, the whole system was geared up to balance supply and demand using the One Direction.

Jemma Green: And when you start using the Two Direction, it starts to not cope with this. So you've got too much energy in one suburb and not enough in another. And how do you solve that? Well, you solve that by upgrading a substation or a transformer or millions of millions and tens of millions of dollars to do that. And so what has started to happen is we've had to change the grid infrastructure, the poles and wires, and it's become really expensive. So the feed-in tariff model became almost a victim of its own success. And now what's being seen around the world as companies and countries set net zero targets or renewable energy targets, they realize that that model is broken and they need a different way to encourage more renewables on the grid without it pushing up the price of electricity. Because in all countries that have a lot of variable renewable energy, so that's solar and wind, they have the highest electricity costs in the world. So the concept of a distributed energy market is that there are price signals for you. And I say you and I live on the same street to trade energy with each other.

Jemma Green: Or say I have solar panels and you have a battery. You can store my solar, excess solar in your battery during the day and then I'll buy it off you at night. And that helps balance supply and demand on the grid. I hope I didn't get too technical.

Jenelle McMaster: No, I feel like what I'm hearing is it's about aligning supply and demand in a two-way distributed energy market in a cost-effective way.

Jemma Green: Perfect. Yeah, exactly. And so how do you do that? How do you actually make that trade happen between you and me or the shopping center and me, it's not just necessarily households, but it's other businesses as well. So you can do that with a centralized system. But what we've seen in centralized record-keeping systems is they can be very costly to maintain and they're fraught with issues. So most people don't know how many problems exist in these kind of centralized systems. But just for example, Dole Food, the Pineapple Company, they had issued 30% more shares than existed. And this got discovered, I think around 2017, 2018, because they weren't managing their shareholder registry correctly. And in the case of energy, there are so many issues with incorrect bills, the record-keeping systems from centralized databases of fraud. And sometimes, like, there's a case in India, sadly, recently, where somebody's bill was like, you know, thousands of dollars when it would otherwise be just, you know, under 100, and they couldn't get anywhere with the utility and they committed suicide. Yeah. And so the system isn't necessarily geared up to deal with addressing these issues particularly well.

Jemma Green: And there are also cases like that in the UK and Australia, actually, all around the world. So I could see there's a problem with centralized energy systems and the centralized record-keeping systems. And there's also this problem that exists in electricity grids as we put more distributed energy in. And what the blockchain provides in that scenario is an ability to track each kilowatt hour with a really rock solid audit trail that's very trustworthy, but allows that trade of energy and also the payment of money between you and I to happen very seamlessly and efficiently. And so I think that if you have a decentralized energy market, if you have a distributed energy market without a decentralized record-keeping system, I think it's going to be fraught and that you won't get as many people participating in it or there'll be lots of issues. And in terms of the blockchain, okay, I think there's probably just to say about blockchains, they're not all created equal. So everyone's heard of the bitcoin, and that is a particular type of blockchain that just, you know, has a bitcoin on it and you transfer it from one person to the next and it can only process seven transactions per second.

Jemma Green: It's very slow and it doesn't have any functionality in it. And then the kind of next era or generation of blockchains has what's called smart contracts. So that's like programmable tokens that can perform a function. So for example, if I said if the weather is 47 degrees, pay Janelle $500, you can put that functionality inside the token. And that's called a smart contract. And that was like a big innovation from the bitcoin, which we'd call a gen one blockchain, to Ethereum, which is like a gen two blockchain. But the problem with Ethereum is it's also slow. It can only process ten to twelve transactions per second. And so it has been great for experimenting with new things and I'll give you a couple of examples in a second, but it suffered from this speed issue. And then the third generation of blockchains, which is where we're kind of seeing right now, is around smart contracts that have this programmable aspect to it, but that also have a lot of throughput. So they can process 50,000 transactions per second. So it's a big shift. And why am I saying that what it provides is transformative. I'll give you some examples.

Jemma Green: So on gen three blockchains, which is Salana as an example, and the difference between the reason they can process 50,000 transactions a second versus ten to twelve is they process all the blocks at the same time in parallel, whereas Ethereum processes one block and then another block. Don't want to get too technical, but just to explain why it's been able to do that is really interesting, for me at least. But what it makes possible is huge. So if you think about how did Uber get invented? Uber got invented because there was GPS and then there were maps, and then lots of people had phones, and then because of all those ingredients existed, uber could be invented. And lots of people talk about blockchain, about it's just another record-keeping system, but that's just the base layer that it needs to exist for the innovation really to be unlocked. And some of the I'll just give you three quick examples. So there's a map solution built on Salana, which actually everyone who's got a dash cam can send information to the map and they get paid in tokens, which they can redeem for money. And so the map is constantly updated, whereas the Google Maps only gets updated, say, every 18 months.

Jemma Green: So this map is super fine-grained, and it's engaged citizens in an ecosystem using a token economy. To do that, and to do that map, keep it updated, you need 50,000 transactions per second. You need a lot of throughput. Yeah, or another one, cloud computing. Not everyone's using all their cloud services, and they want to have a secondary market for trading surplus cloud allocation. So using tokens, they can give access to their cloud and receive payment for that. And so they're basically utilizing surplus cloud that is very expensive. And then third parties can access cloud from lots of different providers at a cheaper rate without having a contract in place. The same goes for and that has a lot of transactions per second. So you could never do that on Ethereum, but you can do that on a gen three blockchain like Salana. And then a third and final example would be for WiFi. So I've got a great connection. I'm not using it all. I can just set up and basically sell my excess WiFi and monetize that and it's securely giving access to a third party. And through the token system, I get paid, and then I could redeem those tokens for cash.

Jemma Green: So that whole thing, it's analogous to that Uber example that I gave. But you can't necessarily envisage a lot of this stuff in advance. You didn't know that Uber was going to invent itself because you had GPS and maps and wide adoption of smartphones. And I think in the case of electricity, you've got basically a secondary market for surplus energy. It's the same analogy. And what we're seeing now is the changing of regulation to enable these new innovations to kind of pop up. So, yeah, I think the blockchain is really known about the record-keeping system, but I think that's the first step. The second step is what can that record-keeping system plus high throughput on a chain actually provide in inventing new commercial models and new business models?

Jenelle McMaster: Amazing and complex stuff. And I can hear the passion coming right through you, Jemma, when you speak about this. What I'm interested in is - not everybody that you speak to gets this.

Jenelle McMaster: I might put myself in that bucket or they'll be having different lenses on it, right? So they might be a technologist who literally gets blockchain, or they might be an energy regulator who gets that space, or they might understand more about business models in this space and whatever, but they don't get that whole picture. Or they might not be anything to do with any of those things, but they need to be convinced of this because they're going to unlock capital or whatever the thing is. So what's it been like over these years? And I can imagine that your own learnings have come thick and fast around. How do you distill the messages and how do you explain and verbalize this idea to people? What did you learn about communicating in a space. As you've just said, a lot of this stuff couldn't even be envisaged at the time, or there wasn't even the technology capabilities at a certain time, or they weren't applied to this. So you had to paint a picture about possibilities at times when people either didn't understand it or it wasn't even quite there yet. Tell me about your learnings on the communication on a journey like this.

Jemma Green: Yeah, well, it's crucial to acknowledge that there's a lot of viewpoints and criticisms regarding Blockchain technology, and then there's lots of people that hold critical opinions on it on Blockchain deeming it like ineffective or overhyped or lacking problem-solving capabilities. So you have to recognize those sentiments. Like, for example, like Nurial RabinI, who's like an economist and professor at New York University. He says Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. And there's an author of David Gerhard, he wrote this book called Attack of 50-foot Blockchain of the 50-foot Blockchain. And he said Blockchain is the most overhyped technology ever. It's no better than a Glorified database. I could go on. There's lots of them and I actually respect those opinions. And I think if you don't actually accept them and respect them, you don't actually engage with them and realize that there's a communication job to be done there. That is the sentiment, because perhaps they don't understand the problems that exist in centralized databases. So, like, you know, those examples that I gave you are about Dole or the billing systems. Most people wouldn't know that those things exist or that there's resistance to deal with issues when they get brought up, or they think that Blockchain is a record-keeping system, but they don't realize that it can unlock that.

Jemma Green: So it is all about my job, I think, is more about explaining those things and trying to find a way to connect to people in terms of what is relevant and important to them. And yeah, my success at that is varied. I would say sometimes I'm more succinct and sometimes I go. But you can see when you get a better reaction to something. Like, for example, I talk about Blockchain as being a bit like barcodes. In supermarkets sometimes Jenelle doesn't go to the supermarket because of the barcode. She doesn't go, I'm going to Kohl's because it's got barcodes. But the fact that it's got barcodes means that the stock control is better. Or when you go through the till, it's fast or there's less mistakes, but the equally legitimate is the corner store that doesn't use barcodes. So it's not like you can't have a supermarket experience without barcodes. And it's the same with Blockchain. You can do a lot of this stuff without it. But what it provides in having it is a more efficient system that builds trust and that can unlock innovation, I would say. I think you've got to recognize that there are these alternative views, and you've got to take people on a journey that they can relate to.

Jemma Green: And yeah, I have varying success with that.

Jenelle McMaster: If you think about those varied experiences of success, tell me about a time when you really felt, oh, my God, we are totally on the same page, and it was one of those breakthrough moments. Does one come to mind for you? Anything that's made you go, wow, this really hit, this landed, and now we're going to be able to do something as a result of having unlocked that understanding or ignited a desire to participate?

Jemma Green: Yeah, well, just a couple of months ago in India, Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest and most popular state in India, changed its regulations and wrote into the regulation the ability to trade energy peer to peer using blockchain. And I didn't envisage that happening. We weren't working on that, as in, let's try and make the regulations change there.

Jemma Green: That just happened out of it. But I interviewed, actually, the chairman for the regulator for a report. Like, he's writing the foreword for the report, and I asked him, Why did you do this? And I realized that the things that we'd been saying actually landed and gelled with him as well.

Jenelle McMaster: How did that feel for you, Jemma, when you had that realization? What did that feel like?

Jemma Green: I was so relieved because taking on a project like Bowel Ledger, let's change an energy paradigm. There's a lot of stuff you do and you don't know what impact it's going to have at all, and if at all when. And so to get, you know, that feedback was, you know, like, one the regulation changed was, like, amazing. But then to hear from him, actually, the sentiment shared around, oh, this can grow renewables without it becoming too costly. This can engage citizens in getting renewable energy even if they can't afford solar panels, this can make it happen more efficiently than if we used a traditional database. I was like, wow, these things actually make sense to other people. I was so relieved. But also, I was very proud. I was definitely proud that that had happened.

Jenelle McMaster: I love hearing those words because it sounds really purposeful like. You felt that there would be positive community impact as a result of that, the access it gets released, et cetera. Is that what you were ultimately seeking? Was it a purpose around that from the get go? Or has purpose found its way in there as a result of just sort of tripping into this path?

Jemma Green: I would say the democratization of power for a sustainable future is our vision from the get go. But you've got lots of incumbent players that have a system that isn't about democratization, it's about centralization. That's been first and foremost in our minds. And lots of people would say, well, you can't do the uber fication of electricity because it's different. And for me, it was like, well, it's not like you can't, but it takes something more. And maybe we're really naive in anticipating actually what it would take, but it actually can happen. Yeah, it was very encouraging and motivating. And now Delhi, the neighboring state, has draft regulation doing exactly the same. And there's six other states that are also in a conversation around this in India. So you can see now how that idea could take hold in a much bigger sense in India. And other places will be looking in fact, they already are looking at what's happening there. I didn't foresee any of this and I think when we set up the company, we thought we were just making some technology, putting it out there. I think that was very naive. I realized that it's so much more about explaining things because if people don't understand it, then they don't trust it.

Jemma Green: If you want them to do something new, incrementally new, that's a different explaining job. If you wanted them to contemplate something completely different, which is what we're doing. I think I completely underestimated how much work that was and what that involved. But now I can see at least we're making good headway in that it's very motivating.

Jenelle McMaster: It sounds like you've really sort of been on a journey of trying to strike that balance between communicating in a way that people understand and want to change, but not oversimplifying it, so that they wouldn't underestimate the complexity of what has to happen in order to affect that change. Do you feel like that's been a constant, I guess, a seesaw of considerations when you communicate?

Jemma Green: Yeah, it is a very good way to describe it because different places in the world have different concerns and so you can't just rinse and repeat. You've got to understand what's going on in a particular place to know exactly what the message is that's going to resonate there. So in India, they want to hit 500 gigawatts of renewables by 2030 and 50 gigawatts of batteries. That's huge. And they are lagging behind on the targets and it's just out of the question that they're going to not do something to get it. They've got a much bigger appetite to hit the renewables targets and so they saw this as a way to get there. And interestingly, they don't have a lot of renewable target sorry, renewable tariffs. So you can't sign up and get a green tariff until recently in India. But as soon as they started to offer them, people said, how do I know it's really green? And so the need for a blockchain to be able to say it's all recorded on the blockchain, that has become quite important there. And I didn't anticipate that, but that understanding that situation meant that we can be more on the front foot here around the blockchain and what it provides.

Jemma Green: Whereas in other places, say, for in Europe, they don't really care in many cases. And so why would you over talk about that. What they do care about there is these energy communities, and they already had created the regulation to do that in 2018. So it's just around can you make are you a solution provider that can do that efficiently? That's what they care about there. So, yeah, the communication job is very different in different places based on the circumstances.

Jenelle McMaster: So when you're talking about that, Jemma, it seems almost matter of fact. It seems almost like, okay, so this isn't as relevant to you in your country or your region or whatever this is. I'll change my narrative to this, or I'll focus on that. But how does it actually feel for you as the CEO and co-chair of this co-founder of this business? How does it feel for you as somebody who's committed to the cause? When you get a no, or you get a series of no's, or you get a constant no, we can't what's that feel like for you?

Jemma Green: Well, it depends on the day. But there's a great graph which says a day in the life of an entrepreneur. Have you seen it?

Jenelle McMaster: I think I might have.

Jemma Green: It's like a zigzag that goes up and down like this. And it goes it's amazing. It's terrible. It's awesome. It's horrific. And it goes like this. It can be very raw, but I think the better and more correct way of looking at it is, am I making more good decisions than bad ones? Am I getting more yeses than nos? So overall, when you add it all up, what does the ledger say? I'm actually making progress here. And so you've got to take the nos in the see the context. How many nos? How many yeses? Am I moving backwards or forwards, ultimately? And if when I do that, then I can be very accepting of the nose and go, well, I need to do a better job explaining next time, or maybe that's planting a seed that will germinate later. And we see a lot of that like, happening. A lot, actually. So I think that as an entrepreneur, it's actually more of a job of managing your own internal state. Because this idea that entrepreneurs and businesses just scale in like two years is highly unusual. It's normally a decade-long project. It's a marathon, and you've got to sustain yourself throughout that.

Jemma Green: And one part of it is your vision, like what you want to create. And the other part of it is actually just putting nos and failures in the right context, I would say, to maintain momentum and your mood, because if you don't do that, you're not going to keep working on that project.

Jenelle McMaster: Absolutely love that. And it reminds me of actually one of an insight from another Change Happens podcast alumni. I can call people who have joined me, which you will be now, which is Holly Ransom, who she said which she said that the greatest lever of driving change is momentum. And I think that's placed to what you're saying there the ledger of yeses and nos. If you're still moving forward, if the yeses are more than the nos, and then you've got momentum and that is an impetus for change.

Jemma Green: Yeah, I think that is a great way to describe it. I would also add that movement isn't necessarily progress. So you do have to take a cold, hard look at things sometimes and curb your enthusiasm.

Jenelle McMaster: I hear a show in that. So, Jemma, when is the job done for you with this?

Jemma Green: This is probably not the right answer, but I don't know.

Jenelle McMaster: There's no wrong answer here.

Jemma Green: I think for me, the sense of satisfaction is from seeing what we've done with scale attached to it. Like, for me, that's where then I can see the democratization of power has happened and it has contributed towards a sustainable future at large. Yeah, when we started the company, we're a startup, and so we had to prove that technology worked and that we could deliver. And people wanted to see a project in their part of the world, like a Malaysian client didn't want to see a French project. So we had to do a lot of lighthouse projects to demonstrate that we could deliver. And that projects and models that people could relate to. We're in a different era now, which is we've done that and now we've identified where's the biggest opportunities for scale and we're focusing our efforts there. And that would be Europe and India for renewable energy certificate trading, the US. So I'd say it's really focusing on those things and getting scale in those places. That for me would be like what I would say a point for punctuating, accomplishment and satisfaction.

Jenelle McMaster: Fantastic. So, final question for me. Jenna, what do you jenna, Gemma, Bruce, what else do you think needs to change to make this work bigger and better in the future?

Jemma Green: I think awareness of distributed to centralized energy markets, that is a big piece, and in some cases regulation, but it's not necessarily like regulation works in some parts in a particular place, but not in others. So it's not like a ubiquitous regulation in this particular area. But I'd say that the regulations around energy are as companies and countries set targets, they're starting to set a regulation for targets. So those things are focusing people's minds on the target and then understanding how do they get there. So that's the awareness piece. Some people wouldn't like that they have other competitors in their market. But because the project is so big, I actually really value the work that our competitors are doing because they're helping to explain things such a big. Exactly. Yeah.

Jenelle McMaster: That is fantastic. Jemma, I really want to thank you for your time today. And I know lots of people take away lots of different things, but for me, some of the great pearls that you've shared that stand out for me are break the routine. And like I said, I'm on holidays tomorrow. So breaking the routine allows you to unlock yourself from the matrix, as you put it, remind ourselves of the power of a meditative state, if only to foster the random ideas. Couple random ideas with a bit of audaciousness and a side of naivety and you have yourself something quite special there. I also learnt that getting stuck can be an incredibly powerful way to stumble on solutions. If you hadn't got stuck, you wouldn't have stumbled upon the blockchain solution which underpins what you do. I have learned that engaging and respecting and engaging differing opinions can be incredibly well. It is very important, but also instructive to how you might need to change your communications to have impact. And you're working in an area where it's not easy and sometimes possible to envisage things in advance. There may well be solutions that you need that aren't yet developed or invented.

Jenelle McMaster: But to stay the course, what you need is an overall ledger that guides you, that says, am I making more good decisions than bad? Are we moving forward? And puts the nos and the failures in perspective. And finally, I think, the guiding light of purpose yours is the democratization of power for a sustainable future, is an amazing beacon to have in front of you. And I want to thank you for working in this space and please continue to keep doing the amazing things you do. It feels like we are on the verge of a tipping point here and I think you've been instrumental in that. Thanks so much, Jemma.

Jemma Green: Well summed up and thank you so much. That was great.