Electric Grid

“What popped out of that analysis was very clearly, if you can make a battery for a hundred, for 20 dollars a kilowatt hour, you get the hundred hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated. It enhances the …”

“In order, if you study, like, the history of grids, the most enduring ones were those that never owned their own assets. They were ones that had, ah, already often started with long-term anchors who are uncorrelated sources of demand”

“I like the idea of a federal highway trust fund for the grid. It never has existed.”

“We have a labor shortage in the Netherlands, but also our grid is congested due to the sudden uptake of electric vehicles, solar, energy. So it's difficult for new companies to get access to the grid.”

“Those were really targeted towards, you know, peak hours of the year, right? You know, maybe 40 to 60 hours a year where we were really just dealing with a really, you know, a heat wave. Now, obviously, we're seeing one, you know, more variable weather through…”

“One of the problems with solar is you're really peaky in the middle of the day, but when you add trackers, you're almost flat over the course of the day. And this is a huge deal for building a new kind of grid based on solar.”

“Yes, I think that high load customers like manufacturing and data center operators can and will be a really big part of this moment in grid history. They will pay in Much of the incremental cost because of how they value time to power and total availability of…”

“Having more data centers on the grid is good because they use power 8007 60 hours a year. So there's more cost recovery for more infrastructure in more hours if you have more data centers.”

“We think there's too much capital chasing renewables, and renewables are actually disrupting our grid system. They're causing intraday price volatility. They're causing electricity to be less reliable.”

“Once we sell these to a bunch of people, we've then basically backdoored ourselves as like the key storage power broker on the electric grid, because we'll have batteries in everyone's house.”

“But an autonomous super brain for the electric grid is a long way off if it ever fully materializes.”

“So, so I think the most important idea is that the electric grid is not some sort of monolithic entity that, that is, is, you know, the same across the United States. It's actually made up of three sort of major interconnections.”

“And there's a separate group called the NERC, which is a semi sort of government associated. But they run these sort of these risk reports. And they have highlighted that one of the key risks for the grid over the next decade is actually policy.”

“Displacing lithium ion is going to be really hard. I mean, the grid markets are sort of the tail on the dog of the automotive markets right now driving the production of lithium ion at scale. And so, so the industry that we're in, the electric industry gets to…”

“It's trending that we would double this, we would need a grid, which is twice the size that it is today, by about 20, 45, twenty-fifty, roughly, given the growth rates.”

“And that's not even really digesting the impacts for whatever they may be on, on the you know, large language model compute side of things, which is driving Demand bonkers right now.”

“You can do that a lot more cheaply, it turns out, when you're tapping into stuff that people are buying anyway.”

“There are multiple days of interminencies associated with any of the types of those kinds of generation wind, water, or solar, and so solving those becomes a key challenge for getting to a very deeply decarbonized electric system.”

“We've retired roughly 200 gigawatts of coal in the last twenty-ish years or so. Most of that has been replaced by natural gas, but that is not growing as fast as it probably needs to sort of maintain the reliability levels of the grid overall.”

“So we need to now take the next step in investing, and that's not 10% more data capture processing power. That is orders of magnitude more data and processing power.”

“And with technologies like generative AI, there's a lot of, you know, flashiness and sort of jumping on the hype train, but I do sincerely worry that this will lead to an AI winter if a lot of those, you know, if we see a lot of, you know, hype and unscrupulou…”

“And if you look at all of those assets, so all of these small scale assets, Those are really going to be the future of how we balance the grid in the next 10 years. They're going to account for anywhere between, like, 30 and 50% of total system capacity.”

“And then the last thing I would say, it is very obvious to everyone that electric vehicles will break the current grid. It is not possible to do what we're currently doing, letting people just charge whenever they want, do whatever they want, whenever they wan…”

“And even if it's true that right now, if you look at the national grid, the gas stoves are slightly, slightly better. As the grid gets greener, which is happening every day that's not going to be true for very long.”

“And then when we ultimately get to higher penetrations, that's where I would think we would start really seeing the V to G from a grid perspective, which I see as different from a vehicle to home perspective.”

“But with our current battery technology, it would just be way too expensive To back up the entire electric grid. Plus, it would require more materials like lithium and cobalt than we have sitting around right now.”

“Opportunities then for these charging stations to essentially participate as, you know, wholesale power plants, right? Providing storage services to the grid, that sort of thing.”

“And so it's really normal for distribution utilities today to have a view of their grid that's at least two hours old and often You know, more than a day old at least as regards to what's happening at the individual customer level.”

“What with distributed Technologies utilized well in a way where you're like this, the conductor of the symphony orchestra of devices, right? You can create the kind of resilience that you could only really dream of and reliability of from a, like, grid perspec…”

“One area that we're seeing is a lot of folks that focused on EVs and EV charging, which I think is certainly an area to look at. It's a market that's going down in terms of cost and pricing as more players come in. So I think what's more interesting in that ar…”