Cutting through the climate tech hype and looking for profit
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Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com/amxbusiness. Welcome to Xero. I am Akshat Rati. This week, climate tech hype or not? Breakthrough Energy Ventures is one of the biggest funders of early stage climate technologies, spending billions of dollars so far with investments in more than 120 startups.

Since Xero launched two years ago, we've featured a number of companies that Breakthrough Energy has invested in. You can find some of those episodes in the show notes.

But there's a brain trust behind Breakthrough Energy Ventures that makes the decisions of what kinds of technologies they invest in. One of those people is Eric Thune. In his former life, he was a professor of chemistry, which, as someone who has studied chemistry, is something that always gets my attention. Over the years, I've talked to him plenty of times, trying to understand where exactly he sees the technology landscape going.

So for this episode, I wanted to bring you into some of our chats to get his take on what set of climate technologies he's hyped about and what technologies he thinks the world shouldn't be hyped about and why he thinks his set of technologies will not just work but also make money. Because no longer is he just a professor. He doesn't just assess the feasibility of a technology but also the company's potential profitability.

We touched on carbon removal, grid technologies, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. We also talked about some of the companies he's most excited about. Eric, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Now, you were a tenured professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Deakin University. A tenured position is a ticket for life to do what you want. But you gave it up to join Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and you joined as the science lead.

So Breakthrough Energy Ventures has been investing for seven years. It has 120 companies that it has invested in so far. A few of them have gone public, but you are still very much at the frontier of trying to seed ideas that are there in labs that need to be commercialized. How has your thinking changed as a result of doing this for the past seven years?

So I think that I knew sort of intellectually how different this space was than tech investing, how difficult it was to scale things. Things in this space don't scale the way that apps or computers scale, right? This is steel in the ground stuff. And it's in industries where margins are razor thin and

where there are existing interests that are enormous. I knew all of those sorts of things intellectually, but I understand them in a much more visceral way now. You take an idea that you think could have legs and you spend seven or eight or ten years and invest 300 million, 400 million dollars and get it to the point where it really looks like this could scale.

And now I have to turn around and raise a billion dollars to do a first of a kind plant. And the marketplace, of course, since these are commodities, right? Electrons are the most undifferentiated commodities on the face of the earth. And so the reaction is not, oh, that's unbelievably cool. The reaction is, we'll see if you can make it 5% cheaper than the way we make it now, give me a call. I knew those things intellectually, but to be in the middle of it and to really feel it viscerally, that changes you.

Now, over the years, we've talked about a number of scientific areas for trying to invest in climate solutions. I wanted to pick five areas and I wanted to play a game with you this time. Let's call it hype or not. And I'll define it because I think hype or not can be very broadly assumed, whether it's in conversation or dollars or in sheer number of startups that exist. So

Let's be specific about whether you think in these five areas of technologies, which we will take sequentially, there is either too much investment or too little investment going. So let's start with carbon removal. Now, the scientific case for carbon removal is strong. And it's strong because we've really not acted on climate change. And that means if we want to keep to our

climate goals as agreed in the Paris Agreement or not have a planet as hot as it already is, we're going to have to draw down some of the greenhouse gas emissions that are already sitting in the atmosphere. But we don't need to do it now. We just need to have the technologies ready to be able to do it over the next few decades.

This industry has been unlike any other industry. Most climate technologies start in labs, they get government support, then they are commercialized through government regulations that create a market for that technology, and then they produce something that people want. Solar panels are a good example. Electric cars are another good example. Carbon removal

was not really supported as much by government. It was private industry, mostly the tech industry, that was interested in pursuing carbon removal as a path to try and meet its climate goals. And yes, now it has government support. But at the end of the day, what it's producing is not a commodity that people want. It's a commodity that the world needs. And we are at this moment where there are, by one count, 800 carbon removal startups in the world.

And again, if you look at hype cycles, there can be hype cycles where lots and lots of companies exist, hundreds of them, many of them will fail. At the end of the day, some will survive and scale up the solution. But do you think at this moment we're investing too much in carbon removal? I think that we need to be a lot smarter about how we invest in carbon removal.

The first thing that I would do is to bifurcate the market. And the way I would bifurcate the market is there is certainly going to be a significant amount of carbon capture for just sequestration, for simple removal, however you end up doing that.

But there's also going to be a large market for carbon as a reagent, as a resource, as we start to make liquid fuels that are zero carbon, as we start to think about making plastics and materials that are zero carbon. So I think that the first thing you need to do is to kind of bifurcate this market into a market for sequestration and a market for carbon as a reagent. And I think there's very different requirements on the material there. And I think that there's very different price points.

So that is the first thing that I would do. If we think about the carbon market for sequestration, and you know this is an area that we've invested in, the challenge that I have here is there are fundamental questions about what you're doing that are questions that society needs to answer. And society hasn't really thought about those questions. So let me be a little bit, you know, clear. People pay for certainties.

If you pay me $100 to capture a ton of carbon, and after I do that, you come back and say, prove to me that you captured a ton of carbon. I paid you for a ton of carbon. Prove to me that you actually captured a ton of carbon.

Well, if I'm running Climeworks or if I'm running carbon engineering, I can show you all the log data. I can show you the machine worked. I can show you how those machines were qualified. I can show you all those things and I can convince you to a very high degree of certainty that I captured a ton of carbon that you paid me for. And if you come back to me in five years time and you say, I paid you to keep that carbon. Can you tell me where that carbon is?

Well, I can show you where that carbon is. Perhaps I've done underground storage. I can tell you what the volume that I've stored it in is. I can show you the pressures and I can say that it's there. Or perhaps I mineralized it and I can show you exactly where I did and I can show you the well logs. I can do all of those things. I can convince you to a very high degree of certainty. But that costs a lot of money. Right now that costs somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a ton. We hope someday we can get it down below that. But that's where we are today.

On the other hand, I can put olivine on beaches and I can watch it disappear. And now if you come to me and say, "I paid you for a ton of carbon. Can you show me that you actually captured a ton of carbon?"

Well, I can show you the certificate of analysis of the olivine that I put on the beach so you know what the calcium and magnesium concentration was. And I can say, you know, it's gone. It's in the ocean. It reacted. So that's my proof is I, you know, I can tell you how much calcium and magnesium there was and it's gone. Maybe you're good with that. Maybe you're not. And when you come back to me in five years time and you say, well, tell me where that ton of carbon that I paid for is.

You can say, well, the solubility product of calcium carbonate is, you know, and so Alicia Tellier's principle says it must be at the bottom of the ocean. And you can decide for yourself whether or not you think that that's proof. But that costs $10 a ton. And now I can do ocean fertilization. I can go dump iron in the ocean.

And now when you come back to me and you say, prove to me you captured a ton of carbon, I can say, I have no idea. But it must have been a lot because you could see the ultra bloom from space, right? So it must have been a lot, but I don't really know how much. And if you come back to me in five years time and say, well, where's that ton of carbon that I paid you for? You sort of say, I don't really have any idea. But that costs pennies a ton, right?

And so society has to make decisions, not about whether or not we have to do carbon capture. I don't think there's any real discussion about that. But what do you actually mean by carbon capture? What constitutes certainty with regards to what I was able to capture and with regards to where it is? And does society want to pay $500 a ton to Climeworks to be absolutely certain I captured

And to know exactly where it is? Or does society want to pay 10 cents a ton and hope for the best? And we'll check again in 30 years and see where we are. So I think the problem is, without an understanding of what that market looks like, there is no evidence anywhere at all that society is willing to pay anywhere close to even $100 a ton.

So there are two dimensions here. One is certainty, but the other is demand. And on both, there is uncertainty. Tremendous uncertainty. So how do I invest in a company if I don't know what the relevant cost point is, right? You know, I'm pretty sure that if you can do carbon capture at $100 a ton and it is pure, approximately CO2, there is going to be a market for that. And the CO2 is a reagent game to make electrofuels and things like that. So I feel confident about that.

But, you know, carbon capture from the perspective of sequestration and just taking it out of the atmosphere, I don't know if the price point's $100 a ton or 10 cents a ton. So how do I build a company? How do I invest in a

It is literally a race to the bottom. I mean, if you've got a technology that works at $80 a ton, if I look at the supply and demand curves and where they cross, there's some market at $80 a ton. But if somebody comes up with something at $50 a ton, and so I think you're just necessarily running down that cost curve. This is such a big area. The need is so enormous that the idea that there is going to be a single monolithic technology that will rule them all is almost certainly not the case. Now, let's turn to the grid.

We know that one of the ways in which we are going to decarbonize is to electrify as much as possible and make that electricity from zero carbon sources. And that's going to require a bigger grid. Investments around the world on the grid, just to build it, have not quite got to the place where they need to, to be on trajectory for net zero. But within the grid, there are technologies that could make that job easier. So within the grid, where do you think

the technologies are hyped and where do you think they are underhyped, that there is potential for more investments? I think there's two areas that at least we at Breakthrough are especially interested in. And I think one is fairly widely recognized and the other perhaps not so much. The first is reconductoring existing right-of-ways.

You mentioned that we're going to have to electrify everything implies massively expanding the grid. Just so your listeners understand what that means, that means something like 4x the existing grid. It's extraordinary.

And that energy has to be moved. And, you know, in the United States today, it takes on the order of 16 years to permit a new transmission right away. And so that really means that reconducting existing right-of-ways is going to be a big, big deal, right? That will allow them to carry more power on those existing right-of-ways. So new technologies that allow you to move much more power down existing right-of-ways are very interesting.

DC transmission and lines that can be placed along other public right-of-ways, rail lines and things like that. That's also an area of interest, although, as you know, there's challenges to AC-DC interconversion and things like that. But I think there's fairly broad recognition that as we electrify everything and the grid grows, that we're going to have to find better ways of moving more energy down existing right-of-ways.

The one that I think there's perhaps less recognition of are the challenges of operating the grid. If you think about how we operate the grid today, we model the grid.

supply and demand typically a day in advance. And in the old way that we did things, that was relatively straightforward, right? Supply was mostly dispatchable and it could be scheduled. There's not very much storage in the grid. I could model the distribution grid just as a load. There's no two-way flows of energy. Variation in demand from day to day is pretty

relatively modest and it's related to things that are easy to model the weather the season things like that as you simultaneously grow and decarbonize the grid all of that stuff goes out the window as you start using more intermittent wind and solar and not using rotating machinery for the generation of electricity inertia and the grid goes down it makes it hard to keep it stable

Generation resources are placed where the resource is, not necessarily where the load is. And transmission pathways change from day to day depending on the weather. There's a lot more storage. There's people doing distributed generation. So there's two-way flows of electricity. I can't think about the distribution grid just as all of that stuff goes out the window. And, you know, we saw in the LA-100 study, the study where NREL partnered with,

the city of Los Angeles to think about how we could decarbonize the Los Angeles grid, just how hard that is to do. People, I think, sometimes think about the grid as an afterthought. It's wires hung on poles. And so, yeah, sure, we got to build that. But it's really more appropriate to think of the grid as a machine. It's the largest and most complex machine that humankind has ever built.

And so before we can expand the grid, really at the outset, we have to think about not only how are we going to build a grid, but how are we going to operate the grid?

And so this is a new area of interest and emphasis for us. A significant part of that is going to be done on the philanthropic side, a pretty significant grid modeling effort that we're standing up now. But this is an area that I think has received not nearly enough investment, not nearly enough attention. And it's really treated more as an afterthought. So that's an area of the grid that I think needs an enormous amount of attention and effort. The biggest machine that humans have ever built?

but also the oldest machine in that sense. The grid has been continuously being built since the late 19th century and many of the things that it uses even today are things that were set up back then. Of course there have been changes but fundamentally it's doing the same thing that it was doing 400 years ago. So now trying to power the grid with clean energy. We don't want to talk about renewables, they're sort of on their own doing their thing but

because of their variability, there is desire to have more dispatchable clean energy on the grid. You could do that in a few ways. You could have hydropower, but there are physical limitations on how much hydropower there will be. You can do geothermal, and previously it was thought there are limits to geothermal because of the geography of where geothermal is found, but newer technologies are opening up more areas.

But there's an old technology that keeps coming back up into the conversation and that's nuclear. And let's split that conversation into two. One that exists, which is nuclear fission, and one that could exist, which is nuclear fusion. So let's start with splitting the atoms.

Within nuclear fission, we've gone from having first generation, second generation and third generation nuclear reactors that all use water as a coolant, that all became safer and safer as a result of accidents, but also public desire for more safety around nuclear fission. But as a result, they became more and more expensive and they are no longer able to compete

with the way the grid prices electricity. And thus, outside of China, no country is really building nuclear fission reactors at scale anymore. And yet there are a number of ideas being floated. Do you think those ideas have any legs? I really do. First of all, I think you have to compare apples to apples. You're 100% right.

Electrons are the most undifferentiated product on the face of the earth. People are not going to pay extra for them. As we think about the developing and emerging world, and that is absolutely the most important part of this thing. You know, I'm sure your listeners know, but it's always worth remembering. Per dollar of GDP, energy consumption in the West is going down, you know, through efficiency. If you just left the Western world, if that was all we were talking about, this isn't that big a problem where this really blows up.

is when the non-OECD world seeks OECD prosperity and the demand for energy that comes with it. People are just not going to pay a green premium.

So you do have to offer whatever zero carbon technology you want to use without a green premium. But it's important to compare apples to apples. Intermittent wind and solar and even hydro, which is also just, you know, remember, hydro is just solar energy with some storage. That's all it is. And if you look at the challenges that Brazil is having with hydro today, even Canada, even Canada, for God's sake, is rethinking its commitment to hydro because so much of the country is in drought.

So you can't compare intermittent resources to baseload power. So if you're going to say, what is the cost that I have to offer nuclear at? You really need to compare it to things like coal. Coal is sort of the ultimate baseload source.

electricity. Coal is broadly distributed around the world. It's easy to move around. And coal is about $100 a megawatt hour. So that's definitely got to be your cost target if you're going to do that. After Three Mile Island in 1979, the cost of nuclear rose roughly fivefold. And that has to do with concerns

around safety broadly, which is waste, safety, and proliferation. There are certainly third and now fourth generation reactors that address many of those issues, but those haven't been built at scale and enough of them to really understand what their ultimate cost entitlement is. And

And so one thing that we need to do is to drive those costs down, get those things on a learning curve and figure out what their ultimate cost entitlement is. The other very real issue that we have is we stopped building nuclear reactors in this country. And so we've lost that muscle memory. We don't know how to do it now.

If you look at the Votal plant in Georgia and the number of problems that there were with that, so many of those problems were just because we forgot how to build reactors. They were mistakes that were made in the planning and construction. And so we need to learn how to make reactors again. And we need to build these new generation reactors again.

that needs to get built out so that we can understand what the ultimate cost entitlement is. If I'm going to say, okay, coal's our baseline, $100 a megawatt, where can we get to? Can we get to $130? Like we need to understand that. And so I think that's something that absolutely has to be done. There's about 60 reactors, nuclear reactors globally under construction now, largely in China, but not only in China, right? And so there are about 60 and then about another hundred that are in various stages of planning. But

But I think that the number of sources that we have for baseload power are so small that it's really hard to see how we do this without at least some amount of fission. So there's an enormous demand for new electricity here in the United States. And it would be great to see some of that met with new nuclear. Would there be a point at which you would say that other countries

clean electricity, dispatchable electricity technologies have come to a place where we don't really need to pursue nuclear fission? It's a very, very, very interesting question.

So you mentioned geothermal. Historically, to do geothermal, you've needed three things. You need heat, permeability, and water. And so that's why places like Iceland look so good. And in the western United States around geysers, new technologies like that developed by Vervo, one of our portfolio companies, have relieved the limitation for permeability and water, taking advantage of

of advances in drilling technology that came from the conventional oil and gas business, there have been tremendous opportunities to expand geothermal. So there is definitely new technology, new learning that needs to happen. But there's nothing inherent that limits the scalability of geothermal. And I think with new technologies, it can be very widely distributed. You know, another one that's very, very interesting, and you have to promise not to laugh at me here now, Akshay, is space-based solar.

I don't look, I just said, no laugh at me and you're laughing at me. Uh, look, uh,

It is not to say it is a laughable idea in that it couldn't work. And I'm sure there are ways to make it work. But do we need to make it work is the laughable question. It's not so much the feasibility of it. Space-based solar, you're absolutely right. Even 20 or 30 years ago, space-based solar was tinfoil hat level lunacy. But what has changed and what's changed a lot of things is the incredibly rapidly dropping cost of space launch.

If we go back to the mid-1980s and the space shuttle days, it cost $50,000 to put a kilogram of something in space. That number now is 500, down two orders of magnitude, and it's headed towards $100 a kilogram.

When it costs you $100 a kilogram to put something into space, then all sorts of stuff that was crazy is not crazy anymore. And both the European Space Agency and NASA are working on space-based solar. There's a large effort at Caltech to do power beaming. So, you know, yeah, it's no longer tinfoil hat lunacy.

Well, talking of tinfoil hat lunacy, the next one is nuclear fusion, which, you know, is not tinfoil hat in the sense that we know it works because we've been able to turn fusion reactions and create energy, even though small amounts from it.

However, it's one thing to know you can do it and another to commercialize it. And nuclear fusion for the longest time has been a government supported enterprise, rightly so because of the risk in actually commercializing it. That's changed over the past 10 years. BEV is invested in five nuclear fusion companies. There are something like 20 fusion companies out there.

Why do you think investors are interested at this moment in time for fusion? There's been a lot of advances in fusion and a lot of advances in the technologies that are necessary to enable fusion that I think makes this a different moment in time.

If we think about just magnetic confinement fusion and plasma-based fusions, the big change there has been in the development of high-temperature superconducting materials, REBCO and others. That's really what changed everything, right? And so now, all of a sudden, you don't need tokamaks the size of ITER. Now you can build tokamaks that are even smaller than what a commercial nuclear reactor would look like. So there have been technical advances that enable fusion.

Fundamentally, always, the attraction of fusion has been, you know, we talked a little bit ago about the fundamental challenges of waste safety and proliferation with nuclear fission. None of those things are true with nuclear fusion. The products of the reaction are radioactive for decades rather than millennia. They're not fissile and can't be weaponized, and it's not a chain reaction. So runaway reactions, they are, you know, so-called walk-away safe. That doesn't mean fusion will be cheap.

but it does mean you're not stuck in a box where there's no way to get away from those fundamental safety constraints. And so I think that's always been the sort of carrot that was hanging out there with the fusion. And I think that coupled with recent advances in things like high-TC superconducting magnetic materials make this perhaps a very interesting time for fusion.

More from my conversation with Eric Toon after the break. And if you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, and I feel like nuclear fusion is a technology, if you were to give it to a civilization to advance quickly, you would want to give them nuclear fusion. And so as much as we care about the climate problem and we need to address it, it's nice to be able to dream big and think about not just the century, but the centuries to come. But we also have to come back to Earth and talk about

technologies that do exist but have certainly got too much hype and one of them is hydrogen now hydrogen as a molecule is very useful we know we use it today we use it for refining oil making fuel actually usable in a car but despite there being so much support from governments in the us in europe to try and build an industry to produce green hydrogen which is splitting water

using renewable power, there still has not been enough actual commercialization of green hydrogen production. Why is that the case? So look, hydrogen is the Swiss army knife of energy, right? Hydrogen is pure reactive chemical energy. If you have enough hydrogen and it's cheap enough, you can do anything.

And that's literally anything. You can make materials. You can make steel. You can make liquid fuels. You can make food. You could make starch, starting with hydrogen and CO2. And you could make it cost competitive, you know, if the hydrogen is cheap enough. Okay, so as you come down the cost curve and what hydrogen is going to cost, you enter a new sort of realm of what you can do with it. If we talk about electrolytic hydrogen,

What has really changed is the availability of very large quantities of very low cost electricity. Remember, it takes on the order of 50 kilowatt hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen. Depends a little bit on exactly how you make it. If you're paying 10 cents a kilowatt hour for your electricity...

then it costs you $5 a kilogram for hydrogen just in the cost of electricity, which means inevitably you're using it for specialty applications, super high value. And so there's no real motivation to do things like beat the capex out of the electrolyzer because you don't really care if your hydrogen is $10 a kilogram or $15 a kilogram because it's a specialty application or

What changed the game was all of a sudden I can have purpose-built solar energy for less than two cents a kilowatt hour, for probably less than one and a half cent a kilowatt hour. If I can have electricity for a penny a kilowatt hour, well, now all of a sudden I'm at 50 cents a kilogram for my hydrogen.

And now all of a sudden I say, okay, well, the long pole in the tent is the thousand or $1,500 a kilowatt I'm paying for my electrolyzer. If I could get that number down to 200 or $250 a kilowatt, that would allow me to make hydrogen at $2.50 a kilogram or $3 a kilogram or something like that.

Now, that's still too expensive to do a lot of different things, but now it's cheap enough to do a lot of things. And so all of a sudden there was a very powerful motivation to work on electrolyzers and all manner of electrolyzers.

And so that I think is where that big push came from. So dropping hydrogen from $10 or $15 a kilogram down to $3 a kilogram, that opens a whole new array of things that I can do with it. It's still too expensive to make fuels and do things like that.

And so there's where we come to the next big opportunity. There is hydrogen coming out of the ground at the bottom of the ocean. There's millions of tons of hydrogen that are released, especially along the mid-Atlantic rift in the ocean and in lots of places on dry land too, Mount Olympus in Turkey, in Las Fuegos Eternos in the Philippines. But what really started the current sort of excitement, I think, around natural hydrogen happened in Mali in southwestern Africa,

There, people drilling for water in 1983 drilled a well that was about 100 meters deep. The well exploded. They assumed they drilled into natural gas. They plugged the well and went back in 2014, opened the well and discovered that it was in fact pure hydrogen. Pure hydrogen. Since that time... At 100 meters depth. At 100 meters depth. At 110 meters. That well blew up at 110 meters.

And so they have drilled now about 25 additional wells in the region, and a number of them are producing hydrogen, and they're actually generating electricity.

And so, you know, we have known for a long time that there is a lot of hydrogen that comes out of the ground naturally. But it was this event in Mali that really spurred the current excitement. And so now, as you know, Coloma is one of our companies and we believe that they're the leader in the field. But there are a very large number of companies that are now starting to work in this space.

But in both cases, even if we say figure out really cheap electricity and really cheap electrolyzers, or we discover all this natural hydrogen and we can easily tap it, there still is a big, big problem around transport and storage. And at that level,

Hydrogen is just a fundamentally different gas than any other gas that large gas companies know how to handle. It's so small that it enters the seams of the cracks of steel pipes and embrittles them. That is not to say technologically you can't find a storage and transport solution, but it's just going to be inherently a lot more expensive than we transport gas today, right? No, I don't think so. What it does probably mean is building out a new infrastructure.

So you're 100% right. So there's about 1,700 miles of hydrogen pipeline in the United States right now. That is just steel pipe the way that other oil and gas pipe is. They just don't operate it at high pressure.

So you can put hydrogen through steel pipe, but not at high pressure. You can transport hydrogen at high pressure through fiber reinforced polymer and things like that. And fiber reinforced polymer is actually cheaper to lay than steel, but there's two and a half million miles of oil and gas pipeline in the United States, right? And so either somebody is going to have to come up with some very clever approach to coating existing pipelines to make them resistant to embrittlement and failure. And there are companies that are absolutely working on that.

that. But I think the opportunity is so huge, right? Remember Jeff Ellis and the people at the United States Geological Survey have estimated that the extractable resource may be as large as a trillion tons. And that is enough to power all of humanity for thousands of years. I tell people all the time, this will be the most important discovery in energy in our lifetimes and maybe in our children's lifetime. This is a complete and total game changer. This was such a fun chat, Eric. Thank you. Yeah, no, I've enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening to Xero. And now for the sound of the week. That's the sound of hydrogen powering a rocket. One place where hydrogen continues to be an important fuel. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with a rocket enthusiast.

You can get in touch at zeropod at bloomberg.net. Zero's producer is Maithili Rao. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Sage Bauman and head of talk is Brendan Newnham. Our theme music is composed by Wunderli. Special thanks to Breakthrough Energy Ventures for the space to record this episode and to Siobhan Wagner, Ethan Steinberg, Blake Maples and Jessica Beck. I am Akshat Rati, back soon.