Electrical Grid

“They're fundamentally constrained really by two things. One is interconnection capacity, so there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers, and the second is transmission congestion.”

“So let me just make a statement here, which is, I believe the grid has enough existing latent capacity to connect the majority, if not all of the data centers today.”

“So if you look at other competitive battery products that are like sold mostly to wealthy people at very high costs, they're like small, typically wall mounted, take a long time to install and aren't really focused on supporting the grid.”

“In a world where we're so constrained, on the grid side, it seems inevitable to be that that is going to happen to some degree, and that the engineering challenge is going to get at least partially solved.”

“I think because they're a top down economy, they were able to Make decisions like we're going to bring a huge amount of power onto our grid. We're going to modernize our grid. So they were able to bring on huge amounts of power, and that's something that we're…”

“But I have a feeling that there's a lot of headroom, a lot more to be gained in how we, you know, plan our, you know, how to operate our electrical grids, how we predict what the electrical demand is going to be.”

“If we could just shed 40 hours a year of peak load from the grid to, like, backup generators to diesel, things like that, you could free up an additional 80 gigawatts of power”

“Realistically, over a five, six, seven year period, it cannot catch up with the demand base that exists out there.”

“If you want to put a hundred megawatts of batteries on the grid today, depending on the state, it's going to take you anywhere from two to five years.”

“But if you're not dispatchable, you're not adding to the peak capacity of a grid, you're just a parasite. Parasites are expensive.”

“The electricity, the electric utilities are going through huge amounts of change, and especially with the waves of AI and crypto and so on, the needs that the grid has to be put through have fundamentally changed over the last five years, and will continue to …”

“There is no safety, there is no national defense, there is no national security without a reliable electrical grid.”

“The energy grid and electrical grid of the future, it's not just going to be the dichotomy of generation, transmission, and storage, but as Aaron brought up, like, you might do all three of those things in the same place and not have to worry about how... How …”

“We're also at this sort of technology inflection point where AI can help some of these things not just be a consumption driver, but even be an enabler and facilitating more efficient use of electricity, better monitoring of the grid better, better ways to even…”

“The electrical grid doesn't really have that, and so to be able to send messaging and things is very, very difficult, and now a lot of people just do it out of band using the internet.”

“There is going to continue to be, you know, more and more of a challenge that our system tries to struggle to grow to meet that demand, not just on the aggregate basis, But really on the distribution and locational basis, and I think that's also what's very un…”

“And the analysis is that we did for these two cases actually suggested you can run 100% grid independent, right? And then it just becomes a redundancy challenge for the generators.”

“When we ran the numbers, so like at that, that 0.25% load curtailment rate on average, we found that the number of hours in which Curtailment would be required. Some amount of curtailment would be 85 hours, but in 73 of those 85 hours, at least 50% of the new …”

“Electricity is not getting cheaper though, because transmission ends up getting more and more and more expensive over time. So like getting it from point A to point B, there's like long delays on the interconnect queue. It takes forever to build transmission. …”

“The reason that wildfires really reached a crescendo in the last 10 years, in my opinion, is not because of climate change, it's because of things like forest management, it's because of the way we've constructed our electrical grid, sort of more acute, self-i…”

“We believe that a consciousness that if a material science and more specifically a physics or chemistry approach to solving the heat problem is not used today, that the needs of AI data centers around the world is based on projections today will crash the grid…”

“If you distributed like over 10 kilowatt hours per home in the U S like. You can ride out pretty major like outages. And the big story with like a heat wave is heat waves are really bad for the grid because essentially everyone's turning their AC on full blast…”

“Technical capabilities, so high resolution data, edge computing, real-time networking that we use to interact with consumers on what's happening in their home, we can look the other direction and we can see what the grid is doing in real time from the edge.”

“Because those training models are in and of themselves a big machine, and so you can't, and this is not my forte and my area of expertise around the actual architecture inside of a training model, but my understanding of sort of the constraints there is that y…”

“But these sort of, you know, superconducting carbon structures are a thing you could do, If not now, maybe in 15 years, maybe in 20 years.”

“Increasingly as batteries enter the grid, which as you've noted from the chart, it's not that significant penetration yet. It will start to be able to cycle over sort of a daily timeframe. So, as I mentioned earlier, taking energy from the middle of the day an…”

“There are a lot of countries that were once had great grids, South Africa, great example. They have nuclear power, but much of the day in South Africa, the grid is actually completely down.”

“I'm planning for industrial load growth of the sort that grids haven't known since maybe they were building greenfield smelting capacities or things like that.”

“In twenty-thirty-five and twenty-forty, we're probably going to see some there in that range. We might see a first commercial reactor producing electrons onto the grid, but I think before that, it's all going to be, if we do well, it's going to be pilots and d…”

“And about half of our projects today are backflowing power from our fleet of batteries to the grid when the grid needs the power the most.”

“The reality is that The total number, the total amount of load on the system has grown, and therefore all you've done is displaced other customers who would be served by that renewable generation. So it's, and so your number of pigeons has grown, and so you kn…”

“The grid is no longer the biggest source of carbon emissions in America. It's transportation.”

“And so what this might do in cold climate environments is, is Basically shift peak demand from the summer to the winter and increase the peak by about three X.”

“In Nigeria, more people get power from a diesel generator than they do from the grid.”

“I don't think there's any really good argument that we aren't going to need some form of managed charging for at least some meaningful portion of EV chargers. Otherwise it's going to be a huge problem from the grid perspective.”

“Being somebody who's in lithium ion, I actually think the scale of automotive will also lead lithium ion to dominate most of the grid.”

“I don't know if ice solves the electricity consumption and CO two emissions part of the problem, but it certainly solves a really important problem about air conditioning, which is that air conditioners are the number one cause of blackouts on the electrical g…”