The Ledger, every show

“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”

“All the stuff we thought we were going to build in this country, or thought we could build, a lot of that's not going to get built, because of all the things we've just been talking about. Like, I think that, and this problem is going to persist for the forese…”

“I still believe that the vast majority of the computation is going to be done in large data centers. Large being defined as hundred megawatts or more in my world.”

“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”

“And those companies that, that filled the gap in the last era are really not particularly well equipped, equipped to fill it in this era because the depth of energy talent at those companies is actually quite thin.”

“It's possible, though I suspect that given the, my fundamental belief is that the demand for compute, let's just say through twenty-thirty, will exceed the available power in the market. And therefore, the marginal value of the next watt or gigawatt, frankly, …”

“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”

“So I think it's a little bit overblown to say, and I think this is also true of Something like the conversation around crypto, but that these are highly curtailable loads that you could just, you know, attach a training model to a wind farm and only run it, yo…”

“You're not going to put solar in storage to supply a 500 to gigawatt, 500 megawatt to gigawatt scale data center. I mean, it's just not feasible.”

“The focus that these companies have right now is getting data centers online in the next, Two, three, four years, and nuclear is not going to solve that problem.”

“And so there is, I think at this point, a point of coming to grips with the fact that those targets are probably not achievable in the time horizons that they had all set.”

“You know, if you go back a few years, you know, zero carbon energy day one was really becoming a non-negotiable that, you know, we wanted energy, wanted to be zero carbon. We wanted to have it Done, ready to go when we plug in the data center. I think the, pro…”

“If let's say Meta, for instance, finds a piece of land or a point on the grid where they can pull three gigawatts, Of power on one location. And then the next day, NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient. Is Meta going to build a 1.5 gigawatt da…”

“What was happening is you had a lot of businesses shutting down their own very inefficient data centers that were using multiples of the amount of electricity that a hyperscale data center would use. And the hyperscale data center could absorb that with signif…”

“And, you know, I had someone ask me the other day, well, what happens if, you know, if NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient? And my response to that is, well, then Meta or Microsoft or Google will plug in twice as many chips. If they have the…”

“Absolutely power. Absolutely. I think, you know, six to 12 months ago, I think a lot of the companies were concerned about chip availability, but I think everyone has come around to realize that that is not going to be the biggest constraint.”

“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…”

“Both the things can be true that a company could be a hundred percent zero carbon by one measure, and a utility is building gas plants to support their load, so, and that's the problem, right? The carbon accounting rules don't necessarily connect the dots in a…”

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

“We'll find a way to make more chips. There's a lot of capital in that space. I, I'm more concerned about can the electrons keep up with the growth.”

“I'm skeptical that we're actually going to achieve that growth rate without some significant movement in terms of how fast we're investing in grid infrastructure.”

“And if you look at the actual facts, like, data centers do not use that much water relative to, you know, fill in the blank, almonds, avocados, golf courses, you know, so.”

“So I do think the, you know, the tech companies have, you A real issue around how AI has been presented, you know, and that is causing a lot of this backlash as well.”

“In fact, I was talking to Someone from GE Vernova yesterday, and he was talking about for this gigawatt data center, they're having to build 2.6 gigawatts of capacity across generation and batteries and everything else.”

“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.”

“It's fine micro, but I would even say, I mean, if you believe that a larger denominator is actually good for lowering electricity rates over time, it's actually negative in that you're taking that denominator off the grid.”

“If you look at it in a place like Texas, for instance, where the average price for electricity on any given day is actually pretty low. Like the real time price may be sitting around 20 dollars a megawatt hour. So you go off grid in Texas and you're paying som…”

“The transmission line itself is a substitution for baseload power, because if you can move more power over more space, you are Reducing the need to have to generate that power on the other end of that congestion. So in that sense, transmission and generation a…”

“So it does take some work to get it, and you're right, no one's done it at a, at any real scale yet but I think we're gonna see it pretty soon.”

“That's still going to be a relatively small percentage of the overall market because we can't put everything in West Texas, right? We still are going to have The tendency to want to be closer to major metros where that sort of land availability is going to be …”

“But if all, if too many people try to do that all at once, you're going to create a labor problem and you're going to have significant delays in getting a lot of this infrastructure stood up.”

“And so not to mention the fact that the ability to acquire and collect those electrons then in some ways creates a moat against other folks that would want to try to do the same thing. So the more electrons That you can get a hold of, especially in the AI worl…”

“The cost of the base infrastructure for my end product is actually really low. And when I say base infrastructure, I talk about land, you know, power a data center shell, you know, those things are relatively inexpensive. In the grand scheme of operating, you …”

“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.”

“The cost of a data center today in terms of the full stack CapEx deployment all the way through GPUs is about 25 twenty-five million a megawatt or twenty-five billion a gigawatt”

“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.…”

“The problem we were going to have was going to be whether we would have enough power to support this technology that was moving at a pace that, as you know, moves way faster than the electric utility industry.”

“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…”

“If you go even back to January of this year, PJM had Roughly four gigawatts of anticipated data center demand for AEP by 2030, and by May, AEP revised that up to closer to 15, in just five months, right?”

“I will say that backup is probably a bit of a relic because when we first started building these data centers, 15 years ago, most of them were relatively small. They were five or 10 megawatts. They were connected at distribution voltage. So the standard was pu…”

“So now every new data center in Dublin is getting a natural gas generator behind the meter so it can be flexible and, you know, avoid that contribution to system peak.”

“Most people that work at a utility today have never worked at a utility during an era of growth.”

“The tranche sizes each year that you're having to go out and procure are now being measured in the gigawatt scale. So you're no longer immaterial to utilities load forecast. In fact, in many cases, you are the utilities load forecast.”

“I definitely think that we over-index on counting on, quote, energy miracles, because, again, going back to what we were talking about before, it takes a long time to build this stuff. So we are not going to have significant contribution of, say, nuclear energ…”

“The only time that efficiency is going to Reduce the input needed for any process is when you're starting to exhaust the demand for that resource, right? And when you think about something like data, we're nowhere close to satiating human demand for data, whic…”

“There was a great RMI study that just came out very recently that looked at the PJM system and determined that you could unlock in excess of six gigawatts of extra capacity, and this is, I mean, PJM's a 90 gigawatt system, so six gigawatts is not nothing. That…”

“We're going to have a huge deficit of powered land in this country to serve, again, not just data centers, but also all the domestic manufacturing that's looking for the same thing and hydrogen and other things that are also going to be looking for clean energ…”

“There was a fantastic story just in the last week about Quincy Washington building a fifteen million dollar aquatic center and they have a hundred and fifty million dollar state of the art school and their unemployment rate has gone from like 29% to six percen…”