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Hi, welcome to Power of the Network. I'm your host, Tim Locker, Vice President of Broadband here at CBM. You know, one of the biggest things we see in the news now is uh data centers, uh you know, all the power requirements that they're needing, you know, questions if the grid's going to hold up, can we supply power to all these data centers, et cetera. So today we've got a guest, Mr. Mike Daffrin from EnerSys, and he spends his whole life calling on data centers.
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selling backup power systems in these areas. So we're going to see what we can learn from him and talk all about data centers. Stay with us.
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Mike, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate you coming in. I know you've been traveling, so thanks for taking the time for us. Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Let's get this right off the bat. Let's take care of this. What do you think the Chiefs are going to do this year? I'm more of a college guy, but I love my Chiefs. I love the referees even more, John Kim. uh Him being an Eagles fan, but...
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I'm optimistic. I think our running game is solid and I know they made some pickups on defense too. So I'm excited about that, but more of a collegiate fan to be honest. Who's your school? The Tigers. I'm a Mizzou guy. Mizzou, is that where you went? Born and raised. Yep. Yeah, I sure did. So tell me a little bit. I just learned this morning you've got your own barbecue sauce. Yeah. Yeah, I do. I enjoy making that. That was kind of a summer hobby a few years ago. Yeah. And so I, uh
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Basically have a base that I stick with and I made a little Carolina spin on it this year for my customers in Carolina. I hand it out just kind of like, you know, cookies and Christmas. I do barbecue sauce in the summer. Nice. What's it called? It's called All Det. All Det? A-L-D-E-T. A little different every time. OK. Nice. So again, I have a base and I tweak it from there with different...
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spins on it, whether it's hot or sweets or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we've had, you know, we had one episode here where we had Michael Keene on the show and he's an old sales guy. to be with Power & Tell and, and then he went to work for a Huntel engineering, but his calling card was Twizzlers. And so he would, everywhere he went in, would hand, you know, the front desk, you know, a bag of Twizzlers. Okay. And his replacement,
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He does salsa. So he's known as Salsa Mike. And uh maybe it's a Mike thing, because all three of them. That's funny. But yeah, so he gives out salsa. And uh it's a great way to set yourself apart from everybody else, because people are going to remember you. Oh, you're the barbecue By the goofy stuff. Yeah. But it's such a great move that something you like to do and then incorporate it into work, too. Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, it's awesome.
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Well, let's get into it a little bit today. I wanted to talk about data centers. uh I mean, it's been data centers are all over the news. uh It's interesting to me because obviously us in the industry, and these are targets for us, sales and so on, but it's even just national news now what these data centers are doing and the power consumption and all of the different effects and what's going on.
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Let's kind of dive into that situation a little bit. First, let's talk about the power requirements. Where are we at? Can we even handle everything that's going on in terms of powering this new technology? We have until now. whether we want to refer to it as high-power computing, HPC, a lot of people want to throw around the terms artificial intelligence, AI.
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um We are at a crossroads with being able to deliver the amount of power that uh they really need for all these higher loads, these spiky loads that are intermittent high loads. It's funny you brought it up. It's true because um I was just in Atlanta yesterday and I was on the phone with my boss and the TV's in the background in Atlanta, which is going to be in the next hot market.
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Yeah. If not already. And the news reporter was talking about the data center market coming to Fulton County and outskirts of Atlanta there. it's no joke. mean, we are literally seeing if this means anything to you at the rack, at the server rack, the loads have been 20 kW, 30, maybe even 40 as of late. They're anticipating loads to hit 100 kW per rack.
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per server rack and over, maybe double in the next two years. So it's exponential. Yeah. And so what does that mean? What does that mean for us as end users or consumers even to that level? uh It's kind of a double edged sword because obviously we're interested in it from a sales perspective and our livelihood. But then I kind of look at it too. It's like, okay.
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How much is all of this worth it? what's the cost, right? Right. So let's go back to the power delivery, the power plants. So we're talking nuclear because coal is just not enough. So a lot of people are maybe a little anxious about the word nuclear from our past. Scary word, Yeah. uh And while a lot of it can be legitimate,
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from if we want to talk about the Chernobyl word, but technology has come a long way as I understand it, even to the acronym now SMR. You know, they're talking about bringing literally miniature nuclear plants, pods, SMRs onto the data center on-prem, on-premise.
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for them to generate their own power because utility can't give them enough. Do you think that'll create a situation where these data centers, I mean, let's face it, they're obviously huge corporations already, but if they start producing their own power, does that give them some odd level of control, you know, deeper than what we're even thinking about just with the technology, you know, and now they're a power provider as well? Yeah, I'm sure there's some... mean, want to go all like...
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deep state or anything like that. I mean, that's a power concern, obviously. Right. don't suspect it would be a thing to where they could, because a lot of people see the utilities maybe as monopoly as consumers. Where else are you going to get power to them for your house? You can't. You got to get pretty creative, yeah, if you're going to live off the grid. If you truly are. So um it will be interesting to see where the SMR technology
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takes off. know, there are companies without mentioning names that are all in the progressive companies that you might be able to guess with SMR technology. So I think if there are any roadblocks at all, whether it's government regulation or safety or however you want to look at it, I don't think it's not going to not happen. I think it is going to happen because there's just, there's not enough. So let's talk about
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charging our EV cars out there. Do we have enough to do that alone, let alone all these? That topic seems to have slowed down a little bit. And I think the data center topic's probably taken over that. where is the, since you brought it up, the EV charging? ah I mean, I don't see the current push. Maybe it's just the current administration. But I don't see that push for the EVs like we did.
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a few years ago. right. So as I understand it, the EV technology, the lithium batteries, if we want to start talking about batteries, we can, uh is definitely uh formidable, but uh there has been some resistance to that lately. So whether it be the cobalt that is a component of the lithium battery in those NMC technology.
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chemistry, lithium batteries, that can't be a debate. yeah, so when I first got into the industry, when it comes to data centers, the number that was out there was 2 to 3 % that data centers consumed of the electrical grid. They're projecting over possibly double digits in the next 36 months that data centers will consume.
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10 to 12 % of the grid, if I'm not mistaken. Those are the latest number of projections. So that's one-tenth. And it seems like we're just kind of at the peak of the snowball or the tip of it, where it's just growing faster and faster and faster now so much. I I just read an article yesterday about Kansas City getting more data centers. I think it was a $12 billion investment coming in data centers here.
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And I think you're just going to see that everywhere. Obviously, they've got to be spread out across the country so the information can flow properly. what draws a data center company to a particular area? That's a great question. You've got to have power, of course, power availability. So if we take a step back and we look at 15, 20 years ago,
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The largest market in the nation is Ashburn, and Loudoun County, Northern Virginia, outside of DC. I was just there this week. uh Dominion Power is the provider there. And they're kind of saying, we can't give you anymore. We're getting capped out. Right. They really are. And then you got aligning Prince William County right outside of Loudoun County. uh Some big, big cloud and colo companies there too.
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Everybody asked me when, if I'm at a party or whatever at a family function, what do you do, Mike? And you know what a data center is? I sell batteries. I kind of leave it at that. And a lot of people don't know what a data center is. But a lot of people ask me, why, when you travel, where do you go? Usually in Northern Virginia or Atlanta or markets like Columbus, Ohio that's picking up. And they're like, why? Why there?
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There is an undersea cable, a series of many, many cables actually, but one of the first ones came through Richmond, Virginia, and then Loudoun County. And so that data from across the pond, if you will, has to physically get here. And there's an undersea cable, big fiber network, many subsea cable networks. So, Loudoun County was one of the first counties in the nation that got the undersea pipe. And the Dominion Power stepped up.
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in Lowndes County and said, yeah, we'll build you substations. We'll give you the distribution and generation. And they kind of made it happen and it just kind of snowballed from there 20 years ago. Now we're seeing other markets pop up too that can get the power. So they kind of developed that model. They really did. It's been copied around. Yeah. And I think that whether it's Phoenix or Atlanta or the Pacific Northwest growing and Texas, Dallas.
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uh If they can get the power there and the cost per KW is competitive, uh they'll build a data center there for sure. So what about the water requirements? mean, power is one thing, but you also got to have a bunch of water for cooling, correct? Right. Yeah. So. And I guess forgive me for my ignorance, but when you go from one data center to the next, do you see things?
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very common and consistent, or are different companies doing different things? I have, until about maybe two years ago. So traditionally, cooling you would see come through a chiller plant, large pipes of water that go over condensers, and our large industrial air conditioning unit systems, if you will. uh And so they would...
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run this very cold water over these systems to generate this cold air for the servers to stay consistent. That's not enough. So if we had 10, 20 kW on a rack, those servers generate heat, right? So they got to get that heat out and they've got to get the colder air in so those servers don't get damaged and operate properly per their specifications. Well, if that was 20 kW,
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just as soon as, let's say two, three years ago, that was kind of the max, let's say. And now we're at 90 kW, three times as much. more power, more heat. Right. Yeah. So a typical complex. I've been into a few. ah Being in Iowa, we had some Facebook data centers that were built there on the uh east side of Des Moines. uh
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Yep, in Altoona. uh So I was involved in some things there when they were putting their first building in. ah That was all new and exciting. But now, obviously, they've got several buildings. It seems like once they kind of have that model, just, you you could walk into building seven and it's the same, you know. But what kind of things do you see common? And then I guess what things do you see different between different?
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companies, if you will, without being specific to anything. Without being specific, yeah. I'll use the acronym FANG. Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google. These FANG type companies on the market, these very progressive companies that are able to be nimble like that can afford to do these very, what am I looking for, progressive ideas. oh
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um So now we're starting to see what I call the tier two data centers adopt those progressive ideas. It's kind of like anything, know, when, for example, if we want to relate it to batteries, when the lithium battery first came out for consumer products, the prices were higher than they are today. you know, kind of related to that, these ideas or these new ways to engineer and get the servers on the cooler like they need are coming.
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to those smaller data centers across the nation, they're starting to deploy those ideas. uh lithium, that word kind of had a negative tone to kind of like uh nuclear. When lithium was brand new, there were some issues and some people were worried about fire and those things. Talk about the difference, the changes that have been made in that product and why it's
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so much better, so much safer, et cetera. uh Right, right. So lithium technology has certainly come a long ways. And for me, one of the key X factors, if you will, is that the BMS system, and when we say BMS, in my opinion, there's a difference. You have a battery monitoring system.
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which is BMS, or you have a battery management system, which is a BMS. Which is controlling it differently than mine. there's a big difference. So lead acid battery systems, we know what we know, right? We know it's failure mode. We know how to predict when it's going to happen with the battery monitoring systems. There's not a...
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necessity for a battery management system per se on the lead acid system. But for a lithium system, you really want a battery management system. uh It's the electrolyte. There's a reason why a lithium battery is smaller and sexier, lightweight, can produce more power.
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What is a typical system then, so you're selling batteries for backup power for these data centers. How does it look? How does it fit? ah How much power are you putting in reserve, I guess? How often do they get used? What does the whole thing look like? So we have a few different product options when it comes to, let's say, chemistries of our...
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valve regulated in our vented lead acid, or some people refer to as flooded batteries, wet cell batteries. So we have many options for our customers, but uh more times than not, these large data centers are going to have an uninterruptible power system supply, or AKA UPS, where each system is at least a megawatt.
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1000 kW and they could have multiple megawatt UPS systems. So let's just keep the math simple. If the UPS is one megawatt or a thousand kW, we might have five strings or banks of batteries. you know. What's the voltage on them?
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Yeah, right. So these UPS systems, the overall voltage is typically 480 volts nominally. So if you divide 480 by a 12-volt battery, you have 40 batteries in every string. And you could have five strings to provide five minutes of runtime at end of life of that battery. So.
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So five minutes, it's interesting because in that world, UPS world, you're talking minutes versus a telecom, they might want eight hours. I call telecom, I refer to it like my barbecue, low and slow. Yeah. We talk about watts or watts per cell in the data center industry, where you all talk about amps. Yeah, amp hour and et cetera. So what's the cost for it if a
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data center, one of these large data centers was out for that five seconds. mean, what's the cost? You know, it's funny you bring that up. I'm sure the number has gone up, especially with uh all the advertising and things that go through the internet these days. jeez, back when I got into the industry 18, 19 years ago, a large financial institution put out
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metrics of every minute if they were down not taking deposits or doing their transfers, their wire transfers. It was like a million plus dollars a minute or something absurd. So I have no idea what that number is now. It's not a million dollars It's tremendous, I'm sure. Yeah. But there are metrics out there for sure. So how do you get so deep into the network of the people and the sales? Because for us,
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ah being a rep and we've all got our territories and let's use the Altoona for example. So they come in and build this data center complex in Altoona and the decision makers are far outside of our territory. uh For a lot of folks, it's very difficult to penetrate that market and get to those decision makers where you can effectively...
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help design and sell your products and all that stuff. So how did you ever get yourself into that position? If I'm going to tell you, I'm glad to kill you. No, no, uh it's an interesting navigation with these relationships for sure. um Whether it's the design engineers uh specifying uh independent companies that they hire to do their design.
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And sometimes those are all internal now where they're wanting to build, own, operate, maintain their own data center all inside their company and work that whole process that way. So uh it varies from company to company for sure. As you well know, I'm sure on the telecom side. And so it makes every day interesting trying to certainly influence those decisions.
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I don't have a secret recipe documented for every company that I have relationships with, but I love it. Yeah. Just time building a network and- Time and patience and yeah, you got to get at it for sure. Yeah. like I said, it's been 18 years of just knowing people and-
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I'm always learning something every day because, wow, the data center market is definitely changing rapidly. Yeah, you got to stay on top of it. Right, right. And some people may think, oh, a battery is just a battery. And while that can be the case, um these loads, if we want to bring up the AI, what we call spiky intermittent loads, debatably, those are going to change.
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downstream all of the gear. I mean, if you have a piece of equipment that's going to demand something in rush, know, bam, all of a sudden that's 10 times different than it was before. What's that mean for the UPS, the switch gear all the way down back to the utility grid? um Yeah, it trickles down for sure. know, and that, so are we seeing
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You know effects on the grid Brown House and those things already near these You know big complexes I haven't heard about it yet uh I'm assuming you know most the time it seems like yeah, there's a new substation built for the you know for the complex It seems to be the model right and even more crazy is that? out in Northern, Virginia They build a own and operate their own substations on-premise
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Or lease lease. So they're generating their own power. They're definitely accepting it through the switch gear you already have. Yeah. That's interesting. For themselves only. So when you see your substation for your neighborhood, mine's right down the street from mine. I know it's feeding my neighborhood most probably, but these ones that I'm talking about are on the data center site, behind their security.
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Yeah. Yeah, that's what I've seen in a few places as well. Talk about, let's get into a little bit of product detail, but talk about some of the products that you're uh promoting into these data centers uh and, you know, Entersys is big on the pure lead products. uh Talk about the pure lead benefits of it, why you should use it, and then, you know, go into what products we're using at these locations. Right, right. So,
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Intersys has had valve regulated VRLA products for many, years for the data center market. first launched the, and the family for them is called Data Safe, the trade name. So we launched the HX brand. It's a lead calcium based alloyed plate ah for that valve regulated line. It has been a rock solid,
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stable product. still sell a boatload of them. It's kind of our Kleenex product, if you will, for the data center market. And we warranty it for four years, full replacement. But we kind of upped the ante. Back in 2015, 2016, we launched a pure lead product of that.
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What I mean by pure lead is that it's really all about the grid and the plate. That's the big difference. Because we all use, and when I say all, mean our friends in our competition, we all use virgin pure lead for that lead oxide paste that gets pressed into the grid. But when we talk about TPPL, thin plate pure lead products, this data save XE line that I'm talking about,
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that we launched back in 2016, the value of the difference is in that grid, in that thin plate. It is a pure lead plate that has no calcium alloys. We're able to slow down and mitigate the corrosion of that plate. if we want to talk about how a battery fails, it's in the plate or it's in this dry out process with a valve regulated battery. But we could slow it down.
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with this actual pure lead plates that nobody else has. And for people that don't understand, so manufacturers will add calcium to the plate because it makes it stiffer. That's one problem. very flimsy product. So when you're making these little flat grids, it's very tough to manage that. So that calcium then also makes the grid deteriorate faster. Yes, corrode. It increases the rate of
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of corrosion, et cetera. Do you sell batteries? Would you like to? I've sold some, yeah. You did a good job. Go ahead. So in the communication world, it's our SBS battery. uh in my bass boat, it's our Odyssey Marine. So yeah, I'm very familiar That's a good point. Thanks for saying the Odyssey word with your bass boat. I think it's very important that our customers know that
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We've got, so in a data center, they've got a fleet of diesel generators that are the last line of the fence. So if those generators don't start in a, let's say an event, so the UPS battery is the You five minutes. You got five minutes. that generator doesn't start in that five minutes, they got some issues, right?
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So we launched the Odyssey 8D battery. The 8D is the form factor, the BCI form factor for generator start applications. Thin plate, pure lead. Yep. Yep. I didn't mean to sidetrack you there, but. No, I'm glad you did. Because I may have forgotten. OK. So back to the XE. Right. You've got a.
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promotion coming up. So like I said, since we launched that battery in 2015, uh we've got a lot of case histories out there. So we're kind of banging our chest that this stuff is pretty incredible for the end user to not only extend their total cost of ownership, but uh increase the reliability and sustainability of their systems at their data centers. So we're excited about it.
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And we're continuing strong on promoting it. But I really feel like that it's very important for the customers to understand what pure lead batteries really are. it goes back to that plate and us being able to truly extend the life of their battery systems almost twice as long. So the lead calcium batteries are fine.
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But just for 20 % more in product cost upfront, we can extend that. We can double that life expectancy for sure. And we've had some, through our history, we've had some good examples of those pure lead batteries. thing, I had a company that was replacing, the guy was replacing batteries in a handful of remote cabinets. Okay. And I think it was an SBS 60 that he bought. And so...
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Let's see, he bought, I think it was 32 batteries that he had. ah And he got half of them put in uh and something, and the guy left, like he took another job, whatever. So 16 of these batteries were sitting on the shelf. And uh 25 months later, I got a call from the new manager. He said, yeah, I've got these 16 batteries on the shelf and uh two of them, the voltage is low.
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I'm like, okay. So I looked back into it, know, and pulled it up. so, yeah, was 25 months after the manufacturing date and 14 of those 16 batteries are still perfectly fine. Just literally sitting on the shelf, you know, not being maintained or anything. And uh to Entersys credit, you know, we've warrantied the other two batteries. What? uh
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I get it. mean, I'm glad you brought that up too, because back to part of our, let's say, relaunch of the DataCenter XE is something that I am very adamant about because I get calls from customers in that exact instance when it comes to the construction of a data center. So what happens is they procure all these products. I don't want to go back to the pandemic, but let's face it.
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there were supply chain issues. So people would procure product, including batteries and fear of missing out. A little bit of the FOMO going on. And uh so these batteries can't even today, generally or normally speaking, sit around for 18, 24 months, which we can't do that. uh But with the thin plate pure lead, we can. And that's huge.
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I mean, now we have certain specifications and temperatures that we need to be within on that 18 to 24 months of shelf life, but we have that with TPPL technology. We don't with other valve regulated technology. We simply don't. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like in a fiber to the home world, which I spend a lot of time, know, the same thing happens like
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the battery backups for the ONTs are like the first thing to show up and the last thing they use. Right. And they've got like little MP712 in them and you know, so they'll sit in the warehouse for two years before it's even, you know, installed and half the time the batteries are dead before they even get used. So it is a big deal. Pure lead though, you know, we obviously, you know, Intersys was on the leading edge of developing that, but there's some competition out there now.
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uh with some other manufacturers promoting pure lead. uh Is it the same? Is there differences? I guess my question is pure lead, pure lead. Do get the same benefits? That still goes back to the grid or the plate. So I would have to ask my friends, is that plate, what's in it? We don't have those extra alloys, whether it's...
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calcium or other fortifications of other minerals that they may be using. Like you mentioned, I need a stiffer property in that plate to handle it during the manufacturing process. If any of our customers want to, and they can, anybody can come through our factory and see this process, they would be truly amazed of the thin plate process, of how we get it. It's very malleable.
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And there's also all robotic. Yeah. That the plant in Warrensburg is incredible. And I would, yeah, if anybody wants to go see it, I would recommend it. It's pretty awesome. Do have any mentors that you've, uh, that have kind of brought you along your way? Anybody you want to mention or anything you've learned specifically from somebody? Oh, geez. I certainly absolutely do. Um, I kind of, uh, ingest refer to them as the ads.
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The Eds? The Eds, yeah. Here in Kansas City, uh I started with a company before I worked for Intersys. Intersys eventually acquired us, uh Ed Rogers and Ed Rafter. Okay. Yeah. Ed Rafter uh is, we commonly refer to him as a uh battery disciple for sure. uh Whether it be him sitting on the IEEE,
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Battery Standards Committees. He's been a very good mentor for sure. And Ed Rogers hired me into the industry. Took a leap of faith from a guy that was doing corporate marketing in the paint world. That's me. I was in the coatings industry before. But ah yeah, he took a leap of faith on me back in 2007. And uh there's several others in the battery world for sure. ah
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Our director now, Mary Jo Mercer, who is director of UPS sales, has been very instrumental in helping me inside of Intersys at the very least. Yeah. Good. That's awesome. And there's so many others. 18, 19 years, you rely and lean on so many different people from the knowledge that they have. I mean, I could go on and on, especially inside of Intersys too.
36:36
Well, that's great. Well, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. It's been great catching up with you. And it's going to be exciting to see how these data centers play out. um Buckle up. Yeah, it's going to be a crazy world. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me.
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Just wanted to say thanks again to Mike for joining us. uh We really appreciate our relationship with EnterSys and uh it was great to have Mike on the show and get to know a little bit more about what he does and how it relates to data centers. Remember, if you need help on a project or looking for representation for a quality product, look no further than CBM. We're right here in the Midwest. You can find us at cbmrep.com.
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Take a minute, give us a comment, like, share, subscribe. Thanks again for joining us on Power of the Network and until next time, we'll see you next time.
