A solar company founder got the idea for a tunneling machine from a former Navy SEAL's story about using a 20,000-degree plasma torch to cut through ship hulls. When conventional boring quotes cost a third of his solar farm's budget, he spent years secretly building a prototype with his own money. The company now has its first commercial tunneling machine.
This I got to know, like, where did it all start from you in terms of
going underground. So the origin story goes all the way back to 2016. At the time I was running my seventh company, Pristine sun, it was the leading developer of community solar farms in California and about a dozen other states. Anyway, we had a project in Northern California where The downsized by 75% lost out on, you know, three fourths of the potential revenue and value of the project because the transmission line that we're connecting to didn't have enough capacity. We looked at another line and it was about 3km away under protected creeks and wetlands. And we're like, okay, let's get a permit to do an overhead line. And that was going to take almost 18 months minimum, probably two or three years. So we would have lost our contract. And we got a quotes for going underneath the 3km. And the cost was so insane, it was like a third of the cost of the solar farm. So kill that idea. Anyway, so we're disappointed. We're drowning our tears over beers. San Francisco bar and one of my solar engineers, Dominic, he's bragging to his girlfriend about how when he was a Navy seal, he used to go underwater and cut through the side of enemy ships with a plasma cutting torch to take over the ship. You know, plate falls in, water rushes in, pow, pow, pow. Were like, dude, you're such a badass. But that night I woke up in the middle of the night, I was like, huh? He said it was 20,000 degrees. Could take his arm off if he wasn't careful. That's hot. That could probably go through rock. Up all night researching, couldn't stop thinking about the idea. Eventually built a little prototype as a secret side project with my own capital. Funded everything for the first few years. Fast forward to today. We now have our first machine that's fully commercialized. It's.
