Grid

“In most utility service territories, it's not the case that there's a lot of headroom left on the grid. There's no more headroom left in the grid. There's no more spare capacity in most places, which means that oftentimes you will have to build new power gener…”

“The grid is a system by which the transmission distribution happens, and it's built for the peak, so it's massively oversized, which means that you have a bunch of inefficiency, and that it's not being used all the time. It's not being highly utilized, and whe…”

“Electricity prices did not go up for a hundred years as we massively expanded the grid.”

“Do they really want a data center plus a power plant next door? That also seems like not the right solution. Like, I think that's, Worse than a data center connected to the grid.”

“The grid is getting so congested that if we do worst case scenario all the time we are, the utilities are beginning to struggle to find time to take the grid into contingency for planned work.”

“Because usually what's happening is that if the data center is operating off grid, it's temporary. It's a bridge power situation. Eventually they're going to get connected to the grid.”

“In fact, if anything, it's bringing down prices because long-term there's going to be a better grid. There is going to be more energy.”

“We grew our grid for a long time. And then starting around the nineties, essentially no growth until today”

“And you look at some of these curves and it looks like data centers can consume if they were allowed to the entire grid by 20, 30 at this growth rate.”

“The grid is utilized at roughly 50% or less during most of the year, and therefore, we have all of this hundred plus gigawatts of stranded power capacity that could power AI factories connecting to the grid today if during those rare peak moments AI factories …”

“The goal right now, I think for a lot of people, it's like sub-fifty millisecond response, and so you want to reduce latency everywhere, so you start doing your inferencing and decision making, like, locally, very locally, on the ground, like, at the site leve…”

“You and I know that the way the long-term evolution is that basically everything that is plugged in is gonna become a resource eventually. Like, the notion of DERs as a kind of distinct category, I think, is just gonna kind of fade away, because eventually, li…”

“When we look at the grid that we have, we utilize it at, on the order of a 50% capacity factor.”

“I'm pretty bad at making predictions, but I would be surprised if by 20 32 we haven't seen Real new advanced reactor electrons on the grid. There may not be many, and it'll probably be just one reactor but it'll shortly thereafter be followed by, you know, a s…”

“The 120 volts or the 240 volt outlet is a pre-existing bi-directional interconnection point on the grid that you can actually push power into, and it's safe to do so at the circuit level.”

“That, you know, with this increasing demand, it's gonna create a ton of opportunity for businesses that solve the grid optimization problem that create software, and again, AI. So this data center and AI growth can actually contribute to improving delivery on …”

“Now, if the grid were to build excess capacity purely to meet this huge demand and expects the taxpayer to pay for it so the hyperscaler can benefit, That politics is never going to fly.”

“Anytime a customer can connect to a grid, they would want to, and we would recommend that they connect to the grid, because that's insurance for almost nothing.”

“In many ways, that's the strength of the portfolio. You can take things that maybe have operating parameters and constraints and pair them with other things, or other customers that have similar but different constraints, and now you can respond to what the gr…”

“Surprise, surprise, it didn't happen, and I don't actually even think that is really worth talking about now, because it's definitely not happening these days, but the backdrop to that line of thinking was the concept that we were going to see this wave of dis…”

“Because utility planners, they are inherently always going to prefer a 100% solution. That's how we've built the grid in the past, and Nobody gets fired for putting in place a 100% solution that is going to work every day for all of the hours of the day, all t…”

“And so for the last like 20 years effectively the grid has sort of ossified. We forgot how to build new sort of power plants. We forgot how to build new power projects new loads, sort of large data centers, large factories, large mega projects.”

“As you attach more of these sort of renewable resources or sort of these non-reliable resources, while they're incredibly cheap and works most of the time, sort of this long tail risk, you know, once you get to like, 50 to 75% of the grid is gonna become very,…”

“Yes, I think we'll see a lot of batteries at data centers. I think we'll see a lot of batteries on the grid next to data centers. I think we'll see a lot of batteries That are on the grid far away from data centers. I think we're just going to see a lot of bat…”

“Like if you think about the idea that maybe as each individual having kind of an AI co-pilot, that's the equivalent of like having hundreds of millions of new HVAC systems all of a sudden being put onto the grid.”

“For cyber, I don't think AIs are that relevant for Being able to pull off a devastating cyber attack on the grid by a malicious actor currently.”

“What you mentioned about the Ford F one 50, basically what they're doing is they're discharging their battery on their house, right? But they're not coordinating that with the grid. They're not actively participating on those markets.”

“Even if you haircut the forecast growth in data centers and manufacturing by 80 or 90%, you still double the grid. And something I think we need to say more as an industry is doubling the grid is not the high-end reference case here. It's not the sort of what …”

“The first layer of a distributed capacity procurement is just asking a utility to be a utility, which is plan how much it needs to generate and move electricity where it needs it and what type of assets would do that and then go Buy them and put them into the …”

“And it goes back to actually when I was working on the Facebook platform, we had a project back then that we called the grid and we were actually going to, we actually did for a hot minute right after we launched the platform provide server Resources to startu…”

“I think sodium ion makes a ton of sense for the grid. I don't think it makes any sense for EVs.”

“Low-resolution data sent up to the service provider, made available later on, and look, there's some things you can do with that, but you just can't have a real-time, consumer-facing app, and then you can't see the grid in real-time from the edge either.”

“What we've learned since then is that same high-resolution data lets us see, ah, the grid from the edge, lets us see transformers arcing, lets us see vegetation hanging power lines in real-time. That only happens through high-resolution data.”

“I think people have this sense of the cloud as really being this sort of ethereal thing, and applications can just move around, and if one data center goes down, then, well, you can just move everything to another data center. That's not really how it works. W…”

“For many of us, because our distribution circuits have been upgraded so substantially, you're down to 20% asset utilization, right? So, like, so 20% of the total capacity of that circuit is being utilized, right?”

“There's plenty of power most of the time. There's, you know, a number of hours a year where we don't have enough power, and so that's really what we're trying to solve for.”

“I think we can. I think there is a lot of levers that we have at our disposal, you know, and I have, I've had empathy for my friends in the southeast. I know that they're under a lot of pressure, and I know that, you know, they, they're at the tip of the spear…”

“They're not solving any problems this decade, right? That is a 20 thirties and probably a late 20 thirties. Opportunity.”

“I think, ah, utilities have been remarkable at the ability to integrate clean resources. I think you know, we just gotta be able to get more online, and there are some fundamental constraints to that within our existing grid.”

“These are mobile, flexible energy resources, and so their mobility comes first and foremost. It is a device not built for energy purposes. Please deal with the automakers. They will tell you how much they do not care about the energy parts. First and foremost,…”

“I think one of the big theses we have is that there's going to be a decentralization of the grid.”

“And so if we're going to increase the amounts of solar and wind on the grid, we also need to proportionally increase the amount of storage. And this is going to be very significant challenge.”

“People misunderstand the word virtual to mean, you know, not real. When these are hard assets on the grid, it's not phone calls anymore. It's software integrations, and it's large aggregations of small resources that really add up to something very valuable.”

“In the case of lithium ion, Let's say that's roughly a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour. You're adding a hundred dollars for every hour you want to discharge. And the industry normalizes around dollar per kilowatt in terms of comparative resources. So everythin…”

“The nuclear industry grid-connected About four gigawatts of nuclear to the grid this year.”

“A first level, which is unmanaged, which is really bad for the grid. We just get load happening at peak times, and that, that is going to be really, really bad for the grid. Some estimates say that that's going to be, like, an increase of peak load by, like, 5…”

“If you look at what we need, the grid needs to grow by about 60% by 2030, right, according to some studies for us to meet our climate goals. It needs to triple in size by 20 50.”

“Potentially A way to move storage from one place to another and provide emergency demand response. That concept I'm not totally bought in on, but who knows? Maybe we'll be moving batteries on trains and using it for the grid.”

“A catastrophic grid failure is going to happen, and when that catastrophic grid failure happens, the question's going to be, why didn't we think about resilience more?”

“Malta helps not only time shift that power, as we were talking about moving solar that's available during the day to being available at night, but we're also replacing the inertia, which helps maintain the reliability of the grid.”

“So in my district, it takes about 70 weeks, which is hard to believe, like seven, no, seven 70 weeks to get things connected, to get new charging infrastructure, for example connected to the grid.”

“If you have a million thermostats and you've done it 20 times, then actually it's more dispatchable than a discrete peaking resource. And I think you're gonna find that with vehicles as well. It's gonna be very fungible, it's gonna be very predictable, we're g…”

“It's whether you can get interconnection and get onto the grid. That is the, that is going to be really the limiting factor going forward. So all these other things are really cool, but like, you can add them, you can stack them, you can get a lot of benefit, …”

“45% of the copper in the world is used in the grid or in electricity or any application that it's either in the production or the transmission of electrons, or the use of those electrons.”

“You don't need to overhaul the home entirely. You can take devices people actually have already and make some use out of them for the grid. It's a more modest goal, and I think more realistic than swapping out the entirety of the built environment for somethin…”

“I think they have worked in a number of cases, but in some ways they're this hybrid where they have All of the challenges of an off-grid system and all of the challenges of a grid. And so figuring out the financing model, the operational model, like how you ac…”

“I do not think we'll ever see vehicles discharging into the grid at scale.”

“Today, today cars are 10 or 20 times more.”

“Today we're talking about one and a half US cent per KWH of solar, two cents maybe, and still the grid cost of energy is between eight to 12 cents.”

“It was very obvious that the biggest consumer on the grid is cooling systems.”