Utilities

“We're now seeing the first, like, announcements from utilities of going to regulators and requesting rate decreases as a result of large loads in their territory. We've seen a few of those now.”

“Two-thirds of the expenditures they're making today across utilities are non-negotiable, and it's, Has nothing to do with growth, right? All that stuff would be happening even if the data center, boom, were not happening. And so, all that stuff is getting more…”

“But I will admit a little bit of frustration with a particular crowd That is constantly referencing the, quote, broken grid, unquote, that needs fixing, knowing full well that most of these people have absolutely no idea how utilities actually work.”

“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.”

“Currently, there is no closed-loop feedback until you have a post-mortem. You have a, an event that drives an investigation that needs to be reported back up to FERC.”

“And so, in some ways, I would say the utilities are actually adapting their people and processes around the limitations of the analytics, intelligence, and decision-making frameworks that they have.”

“In some jurisdictions where, ah, utilities are compensating, ah, resources for providing peak shaving in the 200 to 300 kW, ah, per season, ah, range. You know, for a 10 k, kW bidirectional charging system, you could potentially earn, you know, 3000 dollars pe…”

“As soon as utilities turn the page and start to really hedge or buy gas in 28, and we start to see all these natural gas generating companies start to think about securing supply, you're gonna see, you're gonna start to see a knife fight to secure natural gas …”

“Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. He also talked about water companies and electricity companies, which are like completely the opposite. They're regulated utilities with crappy margins selling …”

“Utilities now are asking multi-billion dollar commitments for gigawatts gigawatts of power. Turbines and so on and so forth is the same thing. So yes, pretty massive disadvantage.”

“Utilities and oil and gas and life insurance and auto parts and auto OEMs, which are all not good businesses.”

“In March, we actually hit a significant milestone in agreements with utilities for a gigawatt of demand response across our fleet.”

“We like behind the meter if it means that we get the capacity up most quickly, but we're always going to look to invest with the utilities to bring the transmission. Maybe it's a year after. Maybe it's two years after, right?”

“So when you look at financial services, or you look at utilities, or you look at airlines so many of those contact centers are like, they're still not even migrated to the cloud, right? I think the incentive to innovate is, is much less in these sort of oligop…”

“Now it's a resource because of that repeatability that you can use operationally, and you can be confident that if you need to use it, you know, today I think maybe dozens of times per year, but moving toward hundreds of times per year, that repeatability just…”

“They basically said, just to catch the audience up, we guarantee you our usage of energy will not increase the cost of your utilities.”

“The cost to make the electron has gone down really significantly over the last 20 years, largely driven by the build-out of solar. But the cost to move the electron has gone up very significantly because our infrastructure is aging, and utilities have this kin…”

“There's a second business, which is we are a technology provider to the utilities, and, you know, two-thirds of the country, as you know, is a regulated market where there are incumbent utilities that have kind of service territories and monopolies, and we are…”

“I don't think there is a lot of new merchant gas being developed. Mostly what's happening is it's other utilities saying we need it for, cause we need more capacity or it's data centers and there'll be the longterm offtake on the project.”

“By the time you get all your data in one warehouse, for example, on a Snowflake or Azure, that's an 18 month deployment.”

“You know, what I hear from utilities now is what I heard from utilities back in the past, right, is that, you know, they fundamentally can't take development risk. And, you know, that's a, having done fossil plant development, I did that for 15 years of coal a…”

“There's only so much connection capacity in the system and the ability to sort of expand connection capacity is reliant on utilities who are then in turn reliant on the regulatory commissions to give them authority to build new things. And the timescales at wh…”

“Existing grid operators and companies that own the grid, AKA utilities, Really, we don't believe have this sort of technology approach to solving the problem and frankly have operational and financial challenges as well. And there's a bit of a sort of like old…”

“The incentive structure is, is, is interesting actually for these companies in that they are typically, typically financially incentivized to spend money, not to save money. So in defense, this is called cost plus in the utility world, it's called it's called …”

“Increasingly the one that we see Most often is around load growth when there's potentially new commercial load growth happening in their service territory. The last thing they want to do is to say, you know, we don't have that capacity. We're essentially turni…”

“And one of the things that's nice about how utilities think is while they Do tend to move slowly initially. They're also not in competition with one another, which means that when they do find something that works and is repeatable, they talk to one another an…”

“One thing that we've recognized is that at the end of the day, utilities are not going to adopt something because a pilot was successful in and of itself, nor are they going to adopt it because the technology is interesting or cool.”

“As we get to more of the phase that we're maybe entering in now in the life cycle of our company, where we have a number of proof points and we know that the category is well understood, we don't necessarily have to engage with innovation departments in order …”

“So utilities show some resistance. Often one of the difficulties we have is that our customers want to be fast followers. And in order to be fast followers, you need to follow someone. So someone has to go first. That's definitely an issue in this sector in pa…”

“And certainly, so we're seeing that more and more, I think, as awareness of data centers and AIs growing, and there, people are starting to hear that that requires a lot of electricity. They become more interested in utilities.”

“Most utilities have some sort of net zero or close to net zero goal, but that goal is in 2030, 2040, 20 50, out sometime, and so thinking about what that demand flexibility is needed to meet that new supply stack is still being figured out, and we're in very m…”

“Smart meters have been around for 15 years, so in my business, I guess we get a little anxious to, or eager to see utilities change quickly, but in truth, a lot of even large utilities today, particularly, say, in the Northeast, are just now getting their smar…”

“So utilities cause about 11% of ignitions, but those ignitions cause 50% of the damage.”

“And so there's sort of this, I think, ill-informed narrative that the utilities don't want to spend the money. They actually love to spend the money and they would die to spend that money. The issue is the regulators and the ratepayer advocates that basically …”

“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 …”

“What we've seen work in the first procurements that we've, as Sparkfund, have helped the utilities deploy is a hosting agreement where you go to a customer and say, can we put this asset on your building? And we will pay you. We will rent the space from you an…”

“In most cases, what we're seeing is utilities giving either first priority to backup to a customer in an outage event, or some sort of residual charge, like say, you know, the customer gets a guaranteed access to 20% or 50% of the battery or the fuel.”

“Being in real conversations with real utilities and regulators right now about, okay, which feeder? It is amazing in some ways how they're just starting to do some of that thinking and modeling.”

“Many utilities are dealing with legacy systems that weren't designed for modern cybersecurity in mind. You know, so to follow a standard that was built in, you know, 1015 years ago where cloud technologies were not being leveraged and trying to shoehorn that i…”

“If you're saying you're going to build a gigawatt data center, Or you're holding on to a gigawatt of power in a queue position. At some point, you need to be able to point to billions of dollars of capital that you have access to build out that infrastructure.…”

“If the hyperscalers become part of the customer set for the nuclear startups, that may be like 10 X better than selling just to utilities alone. Like you may have brought innovators to the table. On the purchasing side that may be more open-minded, that may be…”

“Taking carbon out of the supply of energy will only work if grid operators have the flexibility with respect to demand to meet this new supply stack that, that utilities are building.”

“We have seen a lot of interesting attempts to innovate rates over the last two decades, and a lot of them unfortunately fall in the category of doing a checklist. Oh, we're going to offer a time of use rate, but we don't know how to design it properly so custo…”

“Why, why lead with the higher price? Lead with the lower price. I mean, that's like marketing one A, right? But we somehow, because of the cost of service mindset, can't seem to understand it. But all of us, our customers who go to Macy's, Nordstrom's, and Saf…”

“When you think about the normal course of business for most utilities is to build more natural gas plants, Build more transmission and build more distribution. Today, that formula results in 10% rate increases every year. That is not workable.”

“And there's still decisions being made for a previous generations of meters.”

“Look, frankly, not a lot of people use those portals. I think there's pretty well defined metrics that these haven't got a lot of use.”

“And if they don't change those utilities that don't change them, they'll go bankrupt.”

“So I think there is Some reason to believe that the timing of the kind of panic conversation around load growth in addition to the proposed new combined cycle plants could, you know, have something to do with those proposed EPA rules.”

“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.”

“Since restructuring in the mid nineties R&D expenditure fell by about 75%.”

“What's going to end up happening is you're going to have a bunch of companies say, here's my one piece of hardware, here's a hundred million piece of software attached to that piece of hardware, buy my hardware, and get a hundred million dollars of software th…”

“If you are Going to continue to operate in the sort of traditional paradigm of the grid side looks at the grid, and the customer side looks at customers. We're never going to make the kind of progress and scale the way that we want to.”

“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”

“Utilities are starting to see that, yes, it's very difficult to get, you know, a gigawatt of multi-day storage today, but in a few years, and certainly by the early twenty-thirties, they're going to want gigawatts of multi-day storage as a compliment to their …”

“What I've seen is that often it can take three months or six months or nine months to get access to all the right data, such as smart meter data for your customer, and then only a couple of weeks or a couple of months to actually build and deploy a predictive …”

“I think the amount of utilities that have fully productionized use cases for AI live is relatively small.”

“So something specific I've seen work very well is to embed teams of data scientists and software engineers with the lines of business. So to make sure that somebody who is a data scientist is actually sitting with a trader for a week, or sitting with the grid …”

“I've seen some utilities in their integrated resource plans mention Growth of two X, five X, even 10 X in the next decade, driven primarily by more data center build out.”

“Anything that helps vegetation management, which utilities spend billions a year on collectively is interesting.”