In this episode of Full Throttle Leaders, host Michael Falato interviews longtime friend Curtis Thompson, a leader at Apex Power Electrical Supply and Solutions, a subsidiary of the Felsberg holding company. Thompson explains that Apex Power designs, manages, and maintains electrical infrastructure across five verticals, serving electrical and renewable contractors, a small OEM segment, and industrial end‑users, with a focus on "advanced manufacturers" such as Tesla, SpaceX, biotech firms, and hyperscale data‑center developers. He details how AI‑driven data centers require orders‑of‑magnitude more power and water for cooling, prompting a surge in U.S. electrical‑infrastructure investment not seen in a century. The conversation covers grid reliability issues in Texas and California, the rise of on‑site renewable and alternative generation (gas/diesel turbines, hydrogen, nuclear re‑activation) to meet the growing demand, and the pressures on utilities and regulators. Thompson highlights Apex Power’s role in value‑engineering projects, getting involved early in design to accelerate time‑to‑market and reduce costs for large‑scale manufacturers. He shares a concrete example of a retrofit for a major chip maker and discusses the challenges of integrating renewable panels into existing structures, illustrated by a personal anecdote about a school’s solar installation affecting his backyard view. The episode concludes with Thompson providing his direct contact email (cthompson@apxpower.com) for potential clients.
Chapters
All right, everybody. Michael Falato here again for Full Throttle Leaders, and I'm the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Falato Leads, which is a lead gen automation company. And I'm producing this podcast on probably a weekly basis. And my guest is a friend of mine for 25 years, Curtis Thompson from Feltzberg. Curtis, nice to see you again, buddy.
Good to see you, Michael. Yeah, it's been a little while. Good to catch up.
So tell me a little bit about what you're doing now. I know that you've went from a little bit of the SaaS space, mobile space, and now you're in energy. Tell us a little bit about your company and why you're doing this now.
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for the invite. First of all, really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. So Felsberg is a holding company. Our core brand is Apex Power Electrical Supply and Solutions. So we design, manage, and maintain power systems for end users. We have 5 core verticals. We work with electrical contractors. We work with renewable energy contractors, so contractors who focus on building electric, on building renewable energy infrastructure. We have a relatively small OEM business and we do business with industrial end users and a subset of that that we call advanced manufacturers. So those are companies that focus on building infrastructure around battery technology. So the likes of Tesla, space and defense companies like SpaceX, you know, biotech and hyperscale data center developers as well.
And what do you do for those types of companies?
So we help build the infrastructure for them. Think of the plants or the, you know, in the case of the hyperscale data center guys, you know, the racking, the busing, all of the electrical infrastructure that it takes, you know, the switchgear to move power into those buildings to power AI, you know, cloud computing, the reshoring of manufacturing. You know, in the case of industrial companies, there's been a lot of that since we exited COVID and realized that it didn't make a lot of sense to have everything built overseas and reimport it back into the country. Yeah. And so, you know, what we're seeing right now is probably the largest growth in investment in electrical infrastructure in the United States in a very long time, probably over 100 years.
So the mentions that I've seen about AI and the power usage, the CPU usage, just some of these chip companies that are going crazy. How— tell me a little bit about the power usage of these data centers compared to what we've been used to and why it's actually a real thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's orders of magnitude higher. You know what you'll hear if you, if you listen to I don't know, the CNBCs of the world, let's say, talking about the growth of the industry, it's all about compute, right? So these AI, foundational AI model builders, the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, you know, Google's Gemini. The reason why NVIDIA became the most valuable company on the planet is they produce the best chip in the world for powering the infrastructure necessary to train these models. And these chips and these data centers are incredibly power intensive today. They're also incredibly water intensive. And so, you know, this is where you see some controversy and some potentially, you know, the beginnings of some pushing back against the development of all of this infrastructure because we are coming to a point probably where there is gonna be some contention between the existing consumption energy in the country from consumers like you and I, and the industrial consumption, the kind of hockey stick growth of industrial consumption, you know, aligned with the development of this infrastructure. So, you know, all of these companies in the space are working on making more power-efficient products and infrastructure. But there is, you know, if you ask me to look over the horizon of what we're seeing in our business, I do not see any end in sight to the demand of humanity and our economy specifically for energy infrastructure and the need to move, you know, neutrons and electrons from point A to point B to make stuff go in the US economy.
You mentioned water. So what— how is water being used at these data centers?
So water is used to keep, you know, the racks and the servers and everything cool. A lot of these things are water-cooled. There are some solutions that are increasingly becoming air-cooled, but in order to put air through a data center, you need power for that as well. Recently, there's been more talk about building energy infrastructure either on-site or really close to the development of a lot of this infrastructure. So all of this requires different, unique, innovative ways to look at, you know, at creating the energy that we need. You know, you and I were talking a little bit just before, you know, we started the conversation here about some of the things happening in West Texas. West Texas and the Permian Basin has become the largest oil field, largest producing oil field on the planet. The United States over the last, I don't know, I'll say 10 to maybe 20 years has become the biggest producer of energy in the world, which is an incredible turnaround. And Texas had a, had an issue 3, 4 years ago during winter where their whole electric grid really failed for about 10 days in the middle of a deep freeze, negatively impacted a lot of the population. So what a lot of those oil and gas producers in West Texas did is they developed backup energy infrastructure using renewables as one example. There are other unique, innovative ways that these companies are looking to do it. You know, there are gas and diesel turbines being put on site, you know, with data centers as one example. There are hydrogen solutions being developed right now. There is a lot of redevelopment of nuclear. Recently, Microsoft announced that they were firing Three Mile Island back up as a source for a lot of their hyperscale data infrastructure as well. I believe that they're the only company that's involved in that project. And that was a nuclear facility that's been mothballed for a long time. Don't ask me exactly how long. I don't have that data point off the top of my head. But it's interesting that these these companies, because of the energy draw that this infrastructure has, they're having to look for every possible way to keep the growth going.
Are the solar companies and renewable energy companies big customers of yours? Because obviously they still have to take that energy and transmit it somewhere.
Yeah. So we do business with a lot of electrical contractors. We are based here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we do a lot of business locally. And a segment of that electrical contractor base is known as an EPC. So those EPCs are companies focused on different— on building different types of infrastructure, and certain EPCs build renewables. So we've done a lot of work here in the Central Valley that produces a lot of the output for the United States agricultural economy. There's been a big move to renewables and things like, you know, huge dairies and other producers of, you know, if you're a big producer of poultry, let's say, you know, folks like that, farmers like that at certain scale have invested a lot in renewables. And California has just been a global leader, honestly, in trying to encourage the development of renewable infrastructure. I'll give you a quick example very close to home. My house backs up to an elementary school. The schools in California were given until April 1st to bring online a certain amount of renewable infrastructure. So they had to retrofit either their buildings or they had to put panels and other renewable infrastructure somewhere on either the field or the playground of their school. How about the—
why would the Rook be one of them?
Some of those buildings are really old, Michael, and some of that panel infrastructure is heavy. And so those buildings are not— necessarily strong enough to manage the weight of that sort of thing. So they're having to build net new steel infrastructure to put some of this stuff on top of. Okay. So there are moves. Look, the grid infrastructure in the United States is really overall— some states are in better situations than others. But, you know, talking a little bit about Florida earlier, Texas's grid has a bunch of issues. California's grid, where I live, certainly has a lot of issues. There's way more demand on the grid than the grid is ready to supply. And with the, you know, with the hockey stick growth that we're seeing, the things that we've just been talking about, there's a lot of motivation to bring on new sources of energy. So from the county, state, federal level, there's been moves less on the federal level now with the current administration, but certainly at the state level, there has been a lot of momentum towards bringing on renewables infrastructure. I was out of town on a business trip My wife sent me a photo literally overnight behind my backyard. This massive, you know, renewables set of panels on a steel structure is now sitting over the top of my backyard from nowhere. There was no discussion. Nobody called me and asked me if that was okay. And so I had to call the school district and say, hey guys, you've just completely screwed up the view from my backyard putting this up there. So we had a nice discussion. We're working stuff out right now, but it's just an example of the pressure that organizations like that are under by the state of California in this case to build other sources of power so that the grid doesn't get overwhelmed as we continue to grow.
So what is the status? So they're going to have to move it. They're not going to move it, right?
They're not going to move it. So I have no rights. I did a quick bit of, you know, as the AI attorney that I am now, we're all AI attorneys, right, Michael? I did a quick bit of research. I, you know, I don't have a leg to stand on. I mean, this is something that the state of California decided it was going to do. And you actually have no rights to a protected view, I found out. So that was interesting. So yeah, they're going to put up a big trellis and grow some fast-growing vine up there so that I don't have to look at this thing. But it's always going to be there, you know, on the 4th of July, some kids are going to be firing fireworks at it and trying to set it on fire like they've done, you know, every year for the last 5 years. It's going to be great. I'm sure it's going to be amazing.
Jeez. So tell me, Who is, who is the best client to reach out to you? And you said that there's 3 companies, but you're focusing on one in our earlier discussion. What does that one company that you're focusing on do more than the rest of the ones that you were working on?
Yeah. So, um, our biggest customers are advanced manufacturers. Um, we've got a lot of expertise, uh, both on our team. And in the work that we've done in building manufacturing capacity, we hired an engineer actually as a sales guy about a year and a half ago who was one of the leaders in building 4 million square feet of manufacturing for Lucid out in Arizona. Oh yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's a kind of a classic advanced manufacturer. We've done a lot of work over the years with Tesla. We're doing a lot of services work right now with SpaceX. You know, these are the types of companies that are investing large amounts of money to build infrastructure, to build the products that they're looking to bring to market over the next several years, if not decades. So companies like that have very deep pockets, and power is one of the first— access to power, access to energy is one of the first problems that they have to solve. And there is a real— there's a huge amount of friction between supply and demand. There are certain manufacturers of these types of products in the world, and they literally can't keep up with the production, with the demand for their stuff. And, you know, you could be God's gift to procurement, Michael, but, you know, if you're trying to procure $100 million worth of electrical to put into some you know, big manufacturing facility that you're trying to bring online, you know, if you get that 85% right, you've done an incredible job, right? So in a scenario like that, there's $10 to $15 million worth of stuff that you need quickly that the manufacturers can't build quickly, right? So they've got to come to people to help them design things differently. We help people value engineer stuff, design it so that it can be built more rapidly in the real world. and we can steer them in different directions based on, you know, whatever the outcomes they're looking for. We have access to multiple different manufacturing lines, and our team is very, very good at getting involved early at the engineering stage where engineers are sitting down and kind of imagining what the result of this would look like. And if we can get involved kind of, um, pre the probably 20 to 25% stage of a project, we can help them avoid a lot of downsides in the future where the supply chain gets kind of tricky. And the goal is really for all of these folks, all of our core customers, they're trying to get infrastructure online more quickly. So cost is always a factor, but it's time to market because if you can get something online 90 days before you thought you would, be able to, the ROI of that additional manufacturing time is massive, massive. So that's the area where we really shine. So industrial and advanced manufacturing are two areas. We do really, really well with the contractors as well. You know, we help those guys. We have a big project right now, you know, with one of the preeminent chip makers here in our local market with one of our big contracting customers. They are just trying to expand their existing facility, not build net new, but just retrofit something that they have because their business just continues to blossom. So there's just, there's just all sorts of interesting projects like that around right now.
How do people get a hold of you?
You can reach out to me. Best way to get a hold of me is cthompson@apxpower.com. cthompson@apxpower.com.
Thanks for being on today, Curtis. Good seeing you.
