E126: How Budderfly Turns Wasted Energy into a Win-Win-Win

American businesses waste 25-35% of the energy they use. So why aren’t more business owners doing something about it? For most, the problem is too complex and too expensive — there’s no single fix, there are 30 or 40, and calculating the ROI on all of them is no easy task.

That’s where Budderfly comes in. Budderfly is an energy-as-a-service company with a beautifully simple premise: they take over a business’s energy bill entirely — funding all the upgrades at their own risk, and pocketing a margin on the savings. It’s a win-win-win situation for the company, the grid, and the planet.

On this episode of Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Budderfly’s founder and CEO Al Subbloie to get a behind-the-scenes look into this unique business model.

We talk about:

• Why Budderfly targets franchise businesses, and how their "copy-paste" model unlocks financing and scale
• The four pillars of commercial energy waste: HVAC, lighting, refrigeration, and intelligent energy management
• How Budderfly can lower a companies’ utility bill and upgrade their equipment with zero upfront cost to the customer
• Why Al intentionally aligned cost savings with carbon reduction — so customers get climate impact whether it's their priority or not
• What a virtual power plant actually is, and why focusing on small “behind-the-meter” energy adjustments actually matters for the grid
• How Budderfly is building one of the largest distributed demand-response networks in the US — and why that's increasingly valuable in an era of AI data center demand
• Their vision for working directly with hyperscalers and utilities as grid pressure intensifies

Links:

• Budderfly: https://www.budderfly.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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