The Wisdom Wall

“There's no real incentive structure for an EPC to want better software. It's the same reason your law firm doesn't necessarily want like AI software to help them accelerate, you know, and reduce their billables.”

“the idea of integrating onto a site hundreds and hundreds of very small containerized electrolyzers, it turns out to be quite expensive. And in no small part, it's expensive because it's very hard to drive the cost out of those units, but also because the footprint of the entire plant ends up being quite large, and…”

“first of all, to the extent that regenerative or organic or basically more natural Kinder and gentler forms of agriculture make less food per acre. They're gonna need more acres to make food. You know, land, uh, agriculture that is less intensive needs to be more extensive, and that's a disaster for biodiversity,…”

“because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this money we've been spending over the last 10 years was a waste.…”

“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, you know, you can't really claim that your effect is a…”

“The only reason that we don't have 10 times as much nuclear As we do today, both installed, but also being built, is simply because the way that we have decided to build them is terrible. Uh, just overly complex construction, like, awful financial incentives, usually the backing by governments, which the industry…”

“The first biggest use if you're going to do CCU is actually enhanced oil recovery in place of other higher emitting oil sources as we climb down from a hundred million barrels a day down to zero sometime mid-century. But, you know, obviously that's a contentious thing to say.”

“there's a demand shock and supply chains, like basically every step in the supply chain for equipment, For the electricity system to deploying that equipment and getting it online and hooking everything up, um, uh, is bottlenecked and cannot keep up with demand. Um, and because of that, we're seeing, I think, systemic…”

“we're adding a bunch new costs to the system, um, Um, at a global level that there's very little that, basically nothing that your friendly local utility or data center developer can do about, no matter what kind of, you know, special tariff or agreement they negotiate for that individual facility.”

“If you're taking a definitive stand on power policy, and you don't understand something as basic as the power purchase agreements that drive it, then you're not qualified to have that discussion, respectfully.”

“grid operators are benefiting from storage assets. That's just definitively true, uh, in all markets where storage has been deployed at scale, right? This stuff is working and it's helping to solve a lot of the problems that we have on the grid. And at the same time, That hasn't necessarily been a good investment to…”

“the Chinese are starved for profits, and when I talk to the Chinese manufacturers, they're far less interested in solving America's affordability program and far more interested in saying, how can we attack the larger SUV and pickup truck segments?”

“you don't strictly need, uh, a gigawatt of capacity, uh, to be able to do useful work. You probably don't even need a hundred megawatts of capacity. It gets a little bit more interesting than that because, uh, of, let's say, co-located compute and storage and networking and everything else. In other words, it's not…”

“no, it is not intrinsic and we should be thinking about lower reliability, uh, power delivery, uh, overall.”

“when delivering the end-to-end, we unfortunately don't have the luxury of, uh, focusing on a single limiter. I would say very sincerely and honestly, um, at, uh, uh, uh, 10 a.m. it's labor, at noon it's power, and at two p.m. it's, uh, chips every single day.”

“Fossil fuels or conventional fuels are a hedge on reliability, ultimately, that they provide reliability benefits to a system that has become more reliant on, ah, intermittent sources of electricity, but clean energy systems or renewables are a hedge on geopolitics because they provide a source of electrons that are…”

“microreactors in particular do not make sense economically until you're building them in a factory with a plan for shipping those reactors fueled and receiving those reactors, defueling them, those sorts of things.”

“Permissionless can effectively Put that to zero. Um, because two of the big components there are three of the big components are permitting labor and CAC. And so think about a buy online motion where a consumer is just going to Amazon and buying one of these and plugging them in themselves. That totally removes CAC and…”

“why I love commodities is because It offsets the technical risk we're taking with less market risk, because I know if I'm selling a commodity, i.e., my product is molecularly identical to the competitors, but I have a cost advantage, I know you can sell that.”

“So if you think about that from a power standpoint, my incentive in that scenario would be to talk up power constraints, right? Saying that there's not nearly enough of it. We need to build so much. Like this is the greatest cycle because that will incent speculators, developers, other companies like NeoCloud and stuff…”

“I think it's still true that it would be difficult to just reason your way into a much better superconductor. Um, I, I actually would guess that there's a law out there that we haven't discovered yet that says that you can't just look at your training set that's different than what you're trying to discover and just…”

“Like, there was probably a time when a physicist could contribute and be one of the best in the world on many fields of physics, but it's definitely not true today, and this is one of the reasons I think we are very excited about LLMs, because when you talk to them, they seem like they have a pretty good understanding…”

“When I think about the growth of our residential portfolio and what's, I think you used the term rate limiting there, uh, it's, it's the lack of access to, and I'm going to air quotes here for the listeners, smart meters, right? So we deployed all these smart meters, we rate-based them, and then it's like, well, can we…”

“When you start moving away from a mobile piece of equipment into a fixed facility, You do get some economies of the construction, but you actually take on a lot more risk in every facility that you build. You have all the balance of plant, you have permitting, you have, uh, just more risk because you're going to build…”

“What's interesting about it is that relative to almost everything else, it's very carbon rich. And so the use cases that rely either on the chemical availability of carbon or on, ah, the sort of physical availability of carbon, those, or like in the case of carbon removal, like literally on the amount of carbon in…”

“It's gonna cost, like, 2000 dollars a ton for me to go, like, tear down a building and rebuild it with, like, a proper HVAC system that does, like, heat pumps, you know, it's like, and have clean concrete, like, you know, at some point you get down to this, like, baseload of, like, amortized embodied emissions and…”

“it's actually hard to get to a big market size for it, ultimately, because it is so cheap. Like, I don't remember exactly the number, but, um, we did an episode on this, like, I don't know, a couple years ago, and it was something like a couple billion dollars might get you, like, half a degree Celsius of global…”

“the big lesson of the current state of affairs in climate tech is that, um, in a lot of the subcategories of the market, Being clean, being green, whatever, is insufficient. Being ex but clean, um, particularly if it's ex but clean and more expensive. Is just not enough. And you don't have the durability of…”

“The life of the second life battery on the grid is, it's certainly long enough to be economically valuable, and that, in order to make economic sense, it's really one or two years, hundreds of cycles, low hundreds of cycles.”

“We can certainly play in the two hour, four hour markets with repurposed, uh, EV packs, second life packs. Where we see them really starting to shine, though, is in the longer duration. Markets. So, uh, four hour, eight hour, maybe longer, maybe 20 hour. And that's because when you are using these packs at much lower…”

“Like, if you want, if you're really trying to encourage domestic production, ah, in the US, you would put in tariffs, um, to increase the cost overseas, and you'd, you'd incentivize local production. The problem with that is that your cost would end up going up higher, and your EV cost, your EV prices would end up…”

“waste heat is a waste of time. It's actually limited this industry for some time, because people are chasing after a small increase in COP to be able to justify and minimize OPEX, but what they've inadvertently done is, It's essentially driven a massive increase in capex by trying to capture waste heat.”

“As you see bimodal, some of these more advanced reasoning models where a token isn't just generated against a prompt, and then you consume it, and it's done. A token may be generated inside of an AI world and go through multiple models to ensure that, you know, it's not hallucinating or that it has a mixture of experts…”

“it's going to be easier to permit and get a nuclear plant built than it is to get new transmission lines, and that's just historically how it's been, you know, everywhere I've been, whether it's in the US, the UK, Australia. Uh, over in Taiwan, uh, Philippines, people think that somehow transmission is a uniquely…”

“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.”

“I would actually say it even slightly stronger, which is we use this word climate tech like it's an actual good definition of a market segment. When we, we just talked about like, I sell products to consumers that save the money. I'll sell products to consumers that make their life better in the kitchen, you know,…”

“AI for material science, great for discovering new materials. The manufacturing scale-up is usually the hard part. So great, I've got this new MOF. I've got to make a lot of it very cheaply. The AI doesn't really help me very much with that. Like, in theory, maybe I make something that's slightly easier to manufacture,…”

“Yes, the car's a little bit cheaper, and yes, people drive a little bit more, but generally, these effects tend to be kind of small. They tend to be kind of 10 to 20%.”

“If we actually think about a world where food is grown from cells, we need a really robust, diverse kind of economy behind it with many different players and so on. Um, we can't just come out of the gate vertically integrated like the meat industry today.”

“it's a lot easier to be a private company raising VC money to do research, which is ultimately should just be basic research, because the stuff that's going to be competitive and on the market probably can't happen until that first research happens.”

“It's not about scale. It's not about just taking the chemistries and sodium mine today and then scaling the hell out of it... What drives the cost at the end is the materials intensity... just focusing on scale won't get us there.”

“Every smaller distilled LLM that is power efficient doing inference is going to launch thousands of queries to bigger, more capable models that can actually reason their way through buying something on Amazon and reason. So it's almost like increasing the world's population by billions of people who all will want to…”

“ESG is a set of issues, but it's not the same thing as a set of drivers. You know, they're issues to be aware of, screens and filters on making institutional investment, which is different than, uh, A, you know, an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something.”

“What we found looking at over 300 projects, 350 projects in the past couple of years, is the fact that the companies that actually deploy their own technology and follow that path Are the ones that get to success. There are companies that have spent two or three years in the licensing route, where at the end, the…”

“my, our contention is that capital is an issue, but the biggest issue is the skill set that is required to be able to help the companies see a risk and really assess the risk of that big construction operation of first of a kind.”

“If you're going to be in climate tech, you want to be green, and so you're almost certainly tethering yourself to a renewable source, which means your capacity factor isn't going to be a hundred percent. So it's kind of like having your cake and eating it, too. You want two cent electricity at a hundred percent…”

“So I think that the numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can, if you can see a path, a pretty clear path to those numbers, with your system, then you probably have a pretty good shot of, of being competitive with…”

“In material science, I think one of the issues is the experimental data is actually quite noisy. So, you know, this is something that you might hear often that simulations and DFT isn't very accurate, and that's true, but maybe one thing that People don't notice it, is the experimental uncertainty is actually usually…”

“If you're, if you're building something that you think is a better mousetrap, like, it's 20% better, Than whatever the incumbent technology is. In all likelihood, your reaction, my reaction, when we see a company that's doing that is like, 20% better is not better enough. Because in five or 10 years, the industry is…”

“it's kind of amazing now for over a decade, there's almost a continuous stream of companies I feel like I've seen across a wide range of different approaches to building a, a mousetrap to store energy, um, that have always been in the 20 to 50% theoretically better than lithium ion camp, and have just gotten repeatedly…”

“if I were the, uh, omnipotent, uh, energy czar of the country or the world, I would pick One, two, maybe up to three designs, and deploy them serially, uh, and, you know, say we're gonna do 10 of these, and we're gonna see how it works out, maybe 10 of each, um, and we're gonna space them a year or 18 months apart from…”

“One thing to remember is, you know, people aren't going to buy EVs just because they're cheaper than gas cars. People are going to buy EVs faster if they're just better cars. And this is one of those things that EVs can offer that your combustion car just could never offer.”

“In fact, getting it very efficient may actually drive more use of it to where it'll increase and not decrease. And so I think there's a much broader view you have to take when someone says something's more efficient, it's, and they say it's going to solve all your problems and we're not going to have this power…”

“if let's say Meta, for instance, finds a piece of, 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 data center? No. They're going to build a three gigawatt…”

“magnet materials, for example, are incredibly substitutable. And if you, if you think of the design space as not just the magnet, but the magnet plus the, you know, electromagnetic system it's inside of with the steel And the geometry of the, of the, of the rotor and the stator and the whole motor, and actually maybe…”

“And so I think, I think most people who've taken a serious look at aviation and, and even considering major step changes in battery density, let's say a three times improvement in density, From where we are today, there's just a vanishingly small share of total flight miles that can be cost effectively electrified.”

“the more I think if you take decarbonization really seriously, then most likely that is the biggest constraint, upgrading those, those really expensive heavy duty vehicles, long lived vehicles and long lived hub infrastructure. And probably it does make sense to find even a very expensive fuel to avoid going through…”

“I think we've always known that net metering has declining value beyond sort of five percent penetration, and, but when you get to five percent penetration, the solar industry has so much political power that they're able to keep things going.”

“And so if you make a, a simplifying assumption, which is that no one is backfeeding anything into the grid. Right? Right? That the batteries, uh, you know, basically, uh, use case here is to make your home go off grid. Right? Sort of an energy efficiency play. So your home now has zero load because you're getting it…”

“So critical minerals are an input to a manufactured good that can produce energy or store energy. It is not energy. We don't burn critical minerals for energy, and so if we had a disruption in some types of critical minerals, you might see delays and, and, and much higher costs for batteries. You might have to wait six…”

“So for any electric utility, for any load serving entity, grid operator who has to meet rising demand in the next, let's call it two to three years, even up to five years, the easiest, most straightforward thing to do at this point is to build new gas fire generation capacity.”

“waste wood is not really, especially if we think about that twenty-fifty scenario, waste wood is not really a thing. Um, there's always going to be a use for waste wood.”

“I think that if, if you're, if you're working on biomass CDR, and you're not thinking about counterfactuals every day, you're probably fooling yourself, or you have a really easy case that's going to get harder in the next couple decades.”

“specific to climate tech, it might not make sense to define success as an absolute dollar in venture investment, because at the end of the day, when we think about all this hardware and, you know, hard tech that needs to develop into projects, you want these companies to graduate out of having to raise a 105 hundred…”

“what we find in the modeling is that there's a lot of value for sort of up to 10 or 12 hours, let's say. Um, there is less value. I'm not going to put a specific number, but there's, there is less value that we see very markedly in the system, um, until you get back up to about 75 coming in on a hundred hours. And…”

“By having cost-effective multi-day storage, you can incorporate More renewable energy without sacrificing reliability at basically half, half the land cost, and that, by that I mean you only have to put solar on half as many acres to get the same benefit, um, and that's because you're essentially solving the…”

“what's really been missing with nuclear in terms of policy to help bring down the cost is that demand pull policy. And so this is why you see that nuclear is cheaper and gets cheaper over time in places that have a lot of growth in demand for electricity because the plants are really needed. So there's demand for them.…”

“But with, you know, Beyond Meat, for example, launching Beyond Burger version, two point oh, three point oh, four point oh, um, it's not an iPhone. You know, this is not a situation where you hook somebody on basic functionality, and they stick with you one, two, three years down the road, because now, you know, you've…”

“we know that if today, if tomorrow morning there were no more anthropogenic emission of anything at all in the world, The main impact that we would see in the first decade, it would be a warming, because this aerosol effect that is masking part of the warming would be the first one to go away.”

“this example of the, of the shipping regulation should really be, uh, Can really tell us a lot about this, right? So, because we're, we, we are claiming that this effect is maybe there, but it's small, and a lot of climate scientists are sort of saying already, in a way, before having done the, the research, because…”

“With CDR in particular, I think we would do well to really recognize this as essentially a depletable resource in some ways. You know, there's an amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that means we're not going to run out anytime, you know, in the foreseeable future. Yeah, exactly. But because it's energy intensive, land…”

“From an economic point of view, many developing countries want to benefit the maximum from hydrogen, and hydrogen is not a rent business. It's not like oil or gas. It's a conversion industry, so you are never going to get as much revenues and benefits as you were with oil and gas.”

“It's not like we can somehow use mycorrhizae To additionally now draw down more CO two than they are already.”

“Where there's an incentive for the number to be high and there's no legal, uh, no legal, um, consequence for you putting an extra zero on the end. People tend to put an extra zero on the end, um, which is just like human nature and like, you know, people want their, they believe in their projects and they want them to…”

“But really, the way to view this is, this was a generation that was sitting there that they were otherwise consuming. They are just refraining from consuming it at these, during these periods. So you can't credit them for, Again, for a good, you can only credit them for, let's say, avoidance of a, of a harm or of a…”

“Our utilities love their capital in the rate base. They don't love quite so much cheap things that can solve problems without a lot of capital in the rate base. So that's the problem with, uh, grid enhancing technologies.”

“The experts who are researching this stuff are, are well-meaning and, and well-intentioned and are, are attempting to be very careful, but even with those, uh, safeguards that they're trying to impose on themselves, they are not going to have control over how this technology actually operates in the real world.”

“when the rubber meets the road, they need someone like me to actually, that's it. The scientists that create the, the Saturn B rocket didn't go into space. It was some, some monkey first, right? We're the monkey, we're not an astronaut.”

“Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago, a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and, and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from Doing this kind of thing from, in that case, it was, um, doing some atmosphere, some outdoor…”

“one of the things that we, we do know as pretty likely is that it's possible you could do solar radiation management Um, that would deliver substantial reduction in warming for a very, very, very low cost relative to all the other approaches that we're seeing out there, particularly this emergent world of Carbon…”

“the rest of these, I think, not that I'm like a Pure Chicago-style economists, but I think the market ultimately solves most of them. Transmission and permitting don't fall into a category that the market ultimately solves, necessarily, because, as you said, they're socially constructed.”

“We see a lot of startups who are doing something where their sort of fundamental assumption is marginal cost of energy is going towards zero, and maybe that, that could be true over a longer time horizon, but show me how you can deliver positive unit economics with electricity costs as they are today. Uh, otherwise, I…”

“if we, if you try and make it a larger percentage of a supply chain from these enormous buyers early on in 2030, you'll fail. Because, um, the technology simply cannot scale that quickly to meet extraordinary demand.”

“And that says that we don't see a business reason for very, for storage beyond about 20 hours of storage. That if you have about 20 hours of storage, You know, there's going to be about 10 or 12% of annual energy that you're going to get from something else.”

“90% of the cost of cement being labor, and only five percent being materials costs, even, even as these new technologies for making cement, um, you know, until they get to scale, they're going to have some sort of green premium associated with them, but that green premium ends up being budget dust at the end of the day…”

“Well, that's gone. That is gone. It is now the era of great power competition, and that's the U.S. versus China.”

“Well, I think, um, the lessons of those price controls were that they were completely counterproductive. They did not send any message about demand, and they hindered the development of supply”

“We should not be waiting for five years of operational data. The reason he needs that is because he, you know, he needs to get funding for a second project, and that's why we need to fund five outright. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Stamp them out one after the other. Iterate, iterate, learning curve, and have some sort of…”

“if you're in a market and, um, everything looks like a ton, so I could take any of these approaches and get tons that I can sell, and they look the same in the market, um, you really result in a race to the bottom. It's way easier to not sample anything and get some tons. It's cheaper. You can Sell your tons for…”

“Whether you're talking about nine, 19, or a hundred seat aircraft, you require at least a doubling of current battery technology, and that's really a significant increase, especially when you're thinking about just lithium ion batteries. That is close to sort of the theoretical limit of what is possible when you start…”

“when you have an underdeveloped market, the capital markets are unlikely to be the catalyst for that market to develop. You really need to see customer demand first and foremost that is solid. You need to have products that have product market fit, as you well know. You need to have human beings who are able to…”

“The actual challenge is, uh, A very limited supply of high quality carbon credits or carbon removals, uh, and a huge supply of really low quality, really bad carbon credits or offsets. That is the actual problem, and Web three is not really a solution to that.”

“biomass is pretty crappy energy, but pretty good carbon. So, At almost any reasonable carbon price, it is more valuable to remove the CO₂ than turn it into energy. That carbon removal is actually more valuable than most energy products.”

“What we have found is that on-time payment history can be a better indicator of future payment history than something like a credit score or FICO score”

“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit, um, especially in, you know, say the Amazon, uh, that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual, um, because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and leakage means, in this case, as you know,…”

“There's not another element out there that happens to be the lightest metal and the electropositive, most electropositive metal, which also happens to complex very effectively with transition metals. Instable layered oxide crystal structures. Like, there isn't one. We know this. Uh, we understand the periodic table…”

“even relying on US LNG to displace Russian pipeline gas may lead to a small net decrease in emissions because the greenhouse gas intensity of, Russian gas is so high that even LNG, which is worse normally than pipelines, because you consume energy to liquefy the gas and regasify it, uh, may actually be, you know, about…”

“the challenge is that it is definitionally a cost. Like, it is definitionally a cost to remove carbon. Um, and therefore, like, creating a market around that is a challenge, which is what, you know, the EU ETS did away with that by regulating it.”

“They might have intellectual property that prevents someone from directly copying what they're doing, but they can't stop all of these other people who could generate nominally the same performance from pursuing what they're pursuing.”

“A lot of people point to this as, like, the most important CO₂ utilization that is already commercialized in our economy, but that's actually a really problematic way of thinking about it, because the way you make urea, you start with a pure concentrated point source of CO₂ at your factory. You attach all that CO₂ to…”

“the vast majority of companies like Monolith that come into the loan programs office are experts at equity and not really well staffed on debt. Um, and they don't really think debt, they think equity. And as a result, they think, The grass is always greener, and the next quarter is going to be better than last quarter,…”

“And what that's manifesting in partially right now is like threats to natural gas where, you know, there's a lot of attention being paid to displacing natural gas... and then, you know, most importantly, it means that natural gas infrastructure owners with declining volume of sales need to end up raising their unit…”

“what you find in almost every use case, and I would say in particular, um, Again, in the distributed use cases like building heating is that, you know, maybe the first, you know, the first 50% of gas demand that you soak up with electrification is relatively easy. And then maybe the next 25% is a little bit harder. And…”

“So the big categories of where the money pits in cleantech one.o were thin film solar. Like you said, alternatives to silicon for PV, biofuels, and then one big money pit, which was, you said battery swapping, it was Better Place... If you subtract those three things out, it's a very different picture.”

“it's no longer the case that we have to wait all the way until we have a product commercially on sale or at scale for this to produce an exit.”

“We used to believe that, or companies like, again, I'll say Uber or WeWork, we thought, oh, they have natural network effects, they're gonna have a gigantic moat, uh, but it turns out switching costs for consumers are actually pretty low, and maybe lower, And some of those purely software, primarily software app-based…”

“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 expensive, too, because of the impact that data center…”

“It's, 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.”

“You need to recognize that we are in a transition. And this bullshit of, it's gotta be green, and drill, baby, drill, is the problem. Both have a place.”

“It, it's, it, a large language model and its training and inference phases are, are completely opaque. You can't say, why did you give me this solution versus this one? And if I just change a variable slightly, what will be the outcome? Non-reproducible results, non-explainability. You need a human in the loop to say,…”

“I believe that having a safe option essentially lowers the risk That people will go the wrong way because there is an alternative. Or, or to say it otherwise, if we didn't have options, I would say that the likelihood that someone would go the wrong way would be much higher.”

“I would argue that, you know, Having no option is not a good balance for this. You need to have options. You want to make sure that you are not stuck in a position that in 10 years from now, people are saying, why no one worked on, on giving us option?”

“We are actually in a resource that gives us free, extremely good convective cooling, and, and that's huge, because it, it essentially lets you eliminate the entire cost structure of the data center. Um, and our object is actually replacing both power plant and data center, and that's the cost structure to be comparing…”

“The interesting thing about inertial technologies, and our technology in particular, is that you can improve the performance and reduce the effective cost of existing facilities just by adding new improved fusion targets. So those fusion targets are going to continue to improve over time, and as a result, be able to…”

“I think the, there are two things that kind of have to be true for a structure like this to make sense. I think one of them is that you have to have Very high conviction in how the market will value this big end thing. Or not end thing, but like this big intermediate milestone that you're resourcing a business toward.…”

“when, in San Francisco, when a passenger car stops, you know, people go around and they honk, they call, they call, uh, they call annoyed their, their local politicians, whatever, but mostly it's, it's a safe situation. You don't have that advantage on a highway. So, so, so stopping a truck on the highway Is actually…”

“the challenge in that is, today, you don't have those depots, and somebody has to build those depots, and those depots are friction. Like, who is moving the freight to that depot And why do they want to move into that depot, as opposed to just what they do today, which is just take it from their warehouse to the other…”

“I think we look at our business much more akin to manufacturing than we look at it as construction, right? You think about, we are, we're trying to do this, a, the same activity a million times, and how do we do that just Slightly more efficient.”

“The amount of trucks that we have to move becomes the gating activity, not the amount of people, right?”

“Triso, again, is a wonderful waste form for all the reasons that people love it as a fuel form, right? The radioactive material is not getting out when it's reacting in the reactor, and it's not getting out when it's Sitting on the side of the building. However, if you're dealing with something that's fuel dissolved in…”

“The drilling by far outweighs the fracturing. The fracturing does happen in nature. We see this in nature every time a hydrothermal vent or a mine forms. This is the process by which it does so. So there's evidence in the geological record that The fracture in part has precedent.”

“Uh, a couple of years ago, we transitioned Intercut from a market that relies heavily on ancillary services to support batteries, and that was very robust. We built into that. That market was overwhelmed with supply, and then when you move out of the sort of smaller ancillary service market, you need to look at the…”

“The, the main reason that startups are, uh, time limited is because you raise serially in, like, you know, whatever, you raise 18, 24 months of runway, and so, let's say you raise 24 months of runway, you need to start fundraising, let's say, six months before you run out of money, so you have 18 months to do whatever…”

“one of the things I didn't see there is that the learning curve matters. And once you start doing a thing, you tend to get better at it. And if you're commercializing something at small scale, you're kind of working out all the kinks that if you're, if you're, you know, sitting in your lab, making your technology…”

“Every single time we've invested in a capable team or watched a, a, a capable team go after an industry with a lot of inertia, um, there are a thousand little things that can be improved upon that if you're not, Taking that on, and you're just selling into the industry, you're not going to help innovate those areas.”

“In a traditional model, the way it simulates that is it, in very fine detail, it kind of figures out, like, what's the pressure, and the temperature, and the wind, and the moisture, and what are those things? What's going to happen next is determined strictly locally. AI models, because they can look at a much larger…”

“I, I think as you shrink the system down, you will get, you will lose an efficiency. You will be trying to build these 20 megawatt data centers and maybe footprints or facilities that weren't designed initially for those workloads. So yes, I, I think total energy costs may go up, uh, as a result.”

“because again, such a high marginal cost to engineering, what you end up doing is you only really design something one pass through. There's no sort of iteration. There's no optimization of design. And, um, that leads you to a spot where, uh, you kind of make early decisions. You freeze those design decisions. You kind…”

“Because since we are power constrained and that constraint is expected to get worse and power prices rise, the NVIDIA chip holders actually, like the TCO advantage that they have versus less efficient chips actually goes up in that scenario, right? So they actually continue to do better as power remains constrained…”

“I actually think to some extent, the timing and the pace of geothermal deployment might also depend on the alternative for that skilled workforce. So like high oil and gas prices, really rich, rich oil and gas market, harder to convince drillers to To go to work in your geothermal field that's riskier, takes longer to…”

“while things start In a very centralized fashion far away, ultimately the value is only created and the growth comes when that technology comes to the edge, closer to where people are, closer to where machines are, closer to where people are, and that is the predominant use.”

“You can break apart the insulation. You can have a truck driver show up, do the racking, stacking, and mounting, uh, mount a box to the wall where the hot work happens, and then an electrician shows up the next day and does the hot work in, you know, 30 minutes. And then, you know, you can have that electrician hitting…”

“this notion of, like, on-site versus off-site can be a little bit more flexible if you're willing to take into account the fact that as long as you're co-locating at the constraint, that's solving the problem, and now you have more tools in your toolkit, inclusive of VPPs, inclusive of deploying more storage in that…”

“if you look at a sort of chart of, like, profitability per ton or EBITDA per ton, like, it's, it's the companies that have a lot of EBITDA per ton that are going to lead the way on helping things down.”

“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 are sort of substitutionary.”

“I don't think that really anyone has got the muscle for this because it's not been in anybody's lived experience really. And so we're having to think about it pretty fresh.”

“If you jack the price of electricity, 30% for somebody that makes steel using an electric arc furnace, it will materially impact the cost of the steel that is being made. If you do the same for people that are doing data center operations, uh, especially for training where the premium is on being fast, it's just not…”

“LFP's been around now, For 20 odd years, it's been commercialized. They've come down that cost curve, uh, over time, and so there's not a whole lot of improvements that you can make with LFP. You've got to jump to a new chemistry.”

“back in the 2000, there was not really any demand growth. Um, now we're seeing phenomenal demand growth, which was strong to begin with, but just, I mean, really taken off with, with artificial intelligence, uh, driving it. And, you know, those trillion dollar balance sheet from those hyperscaler companies that can…”

“And when you have multiples at a site and multiples in a, in a deployment, you You can get down those cost curves both in the factory and in the field more readily than you could with a large reactor.”

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

“when you give individuals control, large, long system, and you have hundreds of thousands of customers or a million customers, you know, stochastically we can predict, you know, how these things will perform in aggregate. And so actually having control the entire time leads towards less of these kind of asymmetric…”

“If you think about it in terms of dollars per ton, natural gas is the most expensive. If you think about it in terms of dollars per megawatt hour, it's actually the least in the power sector.”

“you might think that installing just a small gas generator, diesel generator might be the solution, but it's actually kind of stranded investment. Because, I mean, after, let's say the utility comes online and gives you the power of three or four years, you have now this investment sitting there, which you're not using…”

“if you, if you're, if you're focusing on costs and carbon emissions, you will always see a combination between renewable technologies and In some gas fart engines for backup reasons or for resiliency reasons, right? It's, it's pretty bad idea from an economic perspective to have a very large battery PV system…”

“If the training data is all private and walled, you got to be able to use your customer's data to train. They're not going to like that, and you got to figure out how to get over that hump, and if you can't get over that hump, there's kind of no way you end up building a product that scales or gets better.”

“The limitation of electrochemistry is that it's a chemical reaction that takes place at an interface, right? In a way, you could say that it's a two-dimensional process, right? You know, you always need an electrode, and you need electrons being transferred out of an electrode. And, uh, that makes it a two-dimensional…”

“The world of Bits moves really fast. They have all the money in the world. The world of atoms is slower. So it's like a year for the world of bits, 10 years or 20 years for the world of atoms, and so it's like a mismatch.”

“biopharma has set this precedent that this is what the price of things should be, and they have no incentive to bring the prices down. Cellular agriculture does have an incentive to bring the price down, and it must bring the price down.”

“Um, but I also think if we're willing to have that same disruptive paradigm shifting mentality, that maybe the manufacturer of this looks more like vitamin or food processing or those kind of other still factories, still produce stuff that you consume, but isn't to the level of biopharma that we really can Bring those…”

“The way we propose to do this is, you know, that company has to follow a path towards that de-risking, and that path in our, ah, experience is you go from a pilot to a five to 20 x demonstration project, and then you go to another 10, 10, 20 times, ah, first of a kind project.”

“What we know is at the end of the day, the investors that come in at the Series C, Series D, you know, most of the time funding or partially funding, um, first of a kind projects, they really want to see six months or more, or performance, uh, because things degrade if you continuously operate something in a way that…”

“we find that many times off-takes are priced in a way before engineering, you know, failed one, failed two, engineering have been done, and it's based on optimistic CapEx assumptions. Now, when the companies go through the engineering process and they actually get to a feed, they find out that CapEx is twice as much.…”

“there's no, construction finance is a thing if you're building a utility-scale solar project, but if you're building a first-of-a-kind thing, there's also not really, we've been talking about, like, financing the long-term operation, there's also not really a construction financing solution, so you end up having to do…”

“DLE is not a magic bullet. Just because somebody cracks the code somewhere does not necessarily mean that it's going to work elsewhere, because each brine is different.”

“Uh, and so not to mention the fact that the ability to acquire, uh, 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 world, uh, the more value you can create, because you…”

“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, um, a data center shell, you know, those things are relatively inexpensive. In the grand scheme of operating, you know, my business. So I would be willing to pay a…”

“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.”

“today, the primary Driver for a lot of the venting is economic. It, the technician or the contractor's time is worth, uh, worth more than actually collecting the refrigerant and selling it into the, into the reclamation market.”

“And you, and you know that, you know, for a fuel, if you want, if you want to get anywhere close to economically competitive, you know, subsidies decide you have to have hydrogen that's going to be on the order of a dollar per kilogram, and you have to have CO two that's in that 100 to 200 dollar per ton range, and…”

“these performance-based standards, the ASTM, the ACI, all of these things are necessary, but not sufficient in the eyes of the concrete subcontractor, because they have to make sure it finishes in a way where it doesn't hurt that man's elbow, because if you get a group of, like, 20 contractors complaining because this…”

“So a lot of countries around the world have the same price nationally, no matter where you are, which means people are incentivized then to locate in the place where they can get land or they can get a grid connection, which isn't necessarily the place where you want them to Generate electricity because it's not near…”

“The more training data you put into LLMs, the better results you get, and how much better your results are actually predictable. It's kind of like a power law. This comes back from, you know, a paper from Baidu Research from back in 2016, I think, and it seems to apply to all kinds of deep learning, including quantum…”

“there are some areas, though, where I do think that the mousetraps we have are, are good enough, and actually are likely to get better incrementally on their own, such that funneling a lot of capital into trying to build a differently better mousetrap is probably a bad use of capital at this point. And in fact, I think…”

“I've, I've, you know, watched and talked to dozens of companies and founders, and I think Oftentimes making the same mistake as they were trying to commercialize some kind of better mousetrap for energy storage, which is they underestimated the pace at which the cost could come down and the technology could improve,…”

“if you want to produce liquid hydrogen, you got to be producing 10,000 tons per year, give or take. If you want to be, you know, producing ammonia, you know, you're probably in the neighborhood of like, 50,000 tons per year is a good, a good amount of hydrogen. So I would think if you could prove out reserves that…”

“I do believe once it's, um, once it's obligated, once we get through all of the, um, All of the, um, T's and C's with EPA. It becomes much more legally and, and politically, um, much more difficult to plow back, um, capital that's already been obligated and deployed, or at least beginning to be deployed.”

“The most, so my view, the most important metric for EVs is energy density, defined as watt-hours per liter, volumetric energy density.”

“So now what you see is AI coming along and that's like a completely new application and it's a massive application. So now that's just stacking on top of this other transition of, as things move from enterprise Into the cloud. And, and now your stack on top of that, the AI growth, which was not part of that original…”

“I think, and again, this is probably beyond my scope, but I think it really has to do with the size of the models and the latency, right? It takes too much time for, uh, light to travel larger distances, as hard as that is to believe. Um, and so they tend to concentrate it.”

“In the case of a drilled hole, the surface area of the hole is quite small, and therefore you depend a lot on conduction of energy, thermal energy through the rock. And rocks actually are not very good thermal conductors. Rocks are kind of insulators actually, and therefore the effect is that you are cooling down a…”

“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 you can't have a training model that exists across multiple…”

“with the current known technology costs for different types of storage, um, and different types of generation, what the model does is it, it, it really Largely overbuilds renewables to solve the winter scenario, right? And now you have this large overbuilt renewable base. Well, what does that mean? That means that in…”

“one of the biggest bottlenecks for everything that's going on with AI is actually the interfaces, the, the memory interfaces, the, the data interfaces from chip to chip, all those things. And those have not seen as much innovation, actually.”

“a heat pump, which is both an air conditioner in the summer and a heat source in the winter, will be running precisely when there is a peak situation in the summer or a peak situation in the winter. Actually, it will create a peak demand in the winter that currently doesn't exist. So a heat pump and time of use rates…”

“Let's try to actually move to actual implementation, and my advice is you don't really need to do a pilot because we already have 400 pilots across the globe.”

“I think we're just at a point now where people recognize that what's really of value to the electric utility company is dispatchability. Right? It's not the generation of power on rooftops. It's the battery that's actually in the home.”

“I think the, the brutal truth is, is that it's a cost center, and that inputs, recycled inputs, are ultimately a tolling operation unless Redwood can pull off owning the supply. Because if Redwood can pull off owning the supply, then it owns the mine of the future, which are these terawatt hours of, of spent batteries.”

“So, in terms of their unit economics, it doesn't make any sense For a mining company to involve itself in recycling in a big way in twenty-twenty-four, both because all of the recycling material coming in, or most of it is, is scrap, and, ah, what's not scrap is a product owned by somebody else.”

“So, so, in a perfectly efficient market, recycling is just a tolling operation, where it is, will exist to an extent that it can keep its costs neutral, and every time there's an advance that lowers the cost of recycling, there will be a year or two where that provider Gets to benefit from that extra profit, but then…”

“the primary reason why, you know, we're not on a path Towards, you know, full automation, and, and there's, you know, been a spade of use cases launched is just modeling grid physics accurately is incredibly difficult, right, for an algorithm. So, you know, solutions on power flow obviously need to take into account,…”

“that's what we're seeing play out is, you know, it is about three years before you can get those deliveries, because when we're making those purchase decisions, often we don't have full visibility, and neither does the company.”

“it's, it's also, I think, in the long run, maybe a pyrrhic victory to sort of obfuscate your data by not putting it into a table, because for one thing, people will get it, and they may be less sympathetic to your position if they, if they had to, Do a lot of extra work to get there, but also you leave more to the…”

“You know, we think about markets being willed into being by a new subsidy coming into place, or a new support mechanism, but they're also willed into being by other, by other mechanisms going away.”

“all these facilities are predicated on carbon neutrality that if you harvest biomass and burn it, you have no net climate impact, um, which is probably a simplification that we should stop making. Um, oftentimes you can get close to that, but it's not, it's not always going to be the case.”

“if you are leaving straw residue on a field, um, and letting it decompose, it actually, a lot of that carbon ends up stored in the soil, up to a certain threshold. Um, so if you start taking it off, you can actually get decreasing soil carbon, um, and that's usually not reflected in the carbon accounting of those kind…”

“what we came to in this report is that you should be looking at sort of a regional, like, ecosystem-defined scale, where you have, um, you know, maybe it's the size of, like, a small U.S. state, where you have a kind of ecologically continuous forest, um, and you have, like, pockets of harvesting throughout that, but…”

“So there's two things that change. One is that the buyer pays the registry to evaluate deliveries and And two, the credits are issued after they've been delivered, not preemptively before.”

“Like, loudest, most conservative scientist in the room-based governance doesn't work for this. You actually do need to make something off-takeable and contractable, and the way you do that is for these emerging more uncertain approaches, or the approaches that have had less-scale deployment, is you have an actual…”

“In order to do first of its kind, to be an investor that's an anchor or a catalytic investor, you have to be long-term greedy. And I think that's understanding that the first of its kind project you're doing is not the only project you're doing. You're doing the first of its kind, so you can then do the second,…”

“So they're trying to scale 30 X, a hundred X. That is very hard to be seen as bankable in the project finance and infrastructure markets.”

“though going from lab scale to full commercial scale almost never makes sense, I do think that some entrepreneurs that I've seen take as gospel this notion of the, uh, order of magnitude to scale up that isn't necessarily true to their technology, right? The real question should be, what is the next scale that I need…”

“for many of these mainstream project financiers and infrastructure investors, they may not look at this stuff until it's project three. But then at Project Three, they can lean in, and these firms can write five hundred million dollar, billion dollar commitments to go build your fourth, fifth, and sixth plant.”

“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, and, and the industry normalizes around dollar per kilowatt in terms of comparative resources. So, uh, everything comes, comes back to that figure in the…”

“having a hundred hour duration resource is a physical hedge against price spikes in a way that you can only really financially hedge right now, um, unless you have, again, thermal resources. So it, it sort of opens up a new, uh, A new frontier for market participation in a way that short duration storage does not.”

“I think it is an advantage because what you do is you create clear line of sight all the way through to the value that's created. So if you are running a managed charging program, say in New York, we work with Con Edison. In New York's service territory, we can create value for the distribution company. We can also…”

“The next level is, like, maybe you provide a time of use rate, and obviously, in markets like California, we've provided time of use rates. The big con to that is, what you get is, you get this massive secondary peak. You get what's called a timer peak. So you get this massive peak that comes on at 11 p.m., because…”

“really what, you know, what makes nuclear cheap and where nuclear is cheapest, whether you're looking at history or where it's cheap currently, it's where, you Countries and utilities are building a lot of reactors in series of a standardized design. And the, not just you're learning with the technology, but the…”

“The reason for that is, the way that I Think about CDR is that you're looking, your, your mythical unicorn solution for removing CO two from the atmosphere has four characteristics. It is cheap, which is, you know, let's just call it sub a hundred dollars a ton, but like ideally sub 50 dollars a ton, who knows, but…”

“I just want people to see nuclear, not as some sort of special, unique kind of power, but simply one of the options on the table for balancing, uh, longer term Renewable energy. One among others, there are other options. There's, there's geothermal, there's longer term storage, there's e-fuels, whatever, and there are,…”

“most clean energy technologies , the thing about them is that they are high capex, low opex... And because they're high capex, low opex, that makes them particularly sensitive to the cost of financing.”

“Hard to decarbonize sectors are going to be easier to decarbonize than I think is expected, technologically speaking. And I think that's been a theme in the clean energy transition now for, for decades is that the technological challenges turn out to be a lot more solvable than we think in advance.”

“There, elected officials from those states that have national ambitions will, if there's, if there's rewards to them politically at a national level, for taking a more partisan view on climate or clean energy, Uh, then they'll probably do it, but at this, at the, uh, uh, state level, the, uh, there's pretty strong…”

“the numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can, if you can see a path, I mean, a pretty clear path to those numbers with your system, then you probably have a pretty good shot of, of being competitive with future…”

“You know, in some respects, I would argue that maybe it's even an easier mental move for folks than it is consuming soybean or wheat products that Taste like beef.”

“when it comes to the kind of discussion that we need to be having right now, I am a bit skeptical about how much small-scale experiments could move the needle. Whereas, I think that once we're going to go to the point where we've sort of gotten enough people on board that this is something that is really worth…”

“If you think about V one G value, it's only, it's only a negawatt capacity if the vehicle is not charged. And a lot of times what happens, people bring their vehicle someplace, they plug it in, and it's charged, and so you've got, you've got basically negawatt capacity for as long as it's sitting there either charging…”

“These data centers, um, generally speaking are somewhat price insensitive, but time sensitive. And when you have that dynamic, uh, it, it creates a different kind of an opportunity to say like, well, okay, we got to deliver power sooner, even if it is a little more expensive than the grid, uh, because otherwise we're…”

“And I think that utilities, like, their natural inclination is to be the railroad because that's the safe and it's the consistent thing that they've always done, and it's explainable to, to regulators, it's explainable to shareholders, to Wall Street, like, that, that's the, that's the easy route.”

“all of these coal-fired power plants that are on track to be retired in the next five to 10 years, maybe a little more than that in some cases. And as they're retired, they're sitting there, and they've got, you know, everything you need, basically, to repower those, those assets into thermal storage systems. They've…”

“the way in which we're going to increase capacity is, we firmly believe, A shift that moves away from just building megaprojects, and instead looks at building projects that are more distributed in nature, and, which means smaller, um, by moving to smaller projects, and we're still talking projects that are tens and…”

“Um, that again, as we've dug into this more, is that there, it does, it, it seems very clear as you dig into the science around the fact that there are small dams, um, that have major negative impacts. It's not a size thing. You could have big dams, you could have small dams. Um, it really comes down to the ways in…”

“I actually am totally fine with moving gas to a utility at a lower price, because they're usually willing to sign terms, so 10 or 20 years, and so that just makes lots of logical sense versus a highly volatile LCFS and RIN market.”

“The problem here, and this is a problem to ESG and why it was so vulnerable to this, is it was not well-defined.”

“We think that engagement and pressure is incredibly important, but that focusing on supply makes no sense at all. Right now, ExxonMobil is like a business with a line out the door and around the block. It really doesn't make sense to go to the guy behind the counter and say, like, you should really consider changing…”

“You know, the, the determining step for so many of these things is not fundamentally, you know, acts, access or availability within the earth's crust, but where it is that it gets processed.”

“you have a hard time getting to scale, because the whole point is that this technology is going to graduate from the type of thing you would do to the type of thing that, that JP Morgan would do. Uh, and so you, if you're the one focused on just the sort of first few of a kind, then you have to continually cycle…”

“Net zero by 20 50 for CO two is critically important for managing long-term warming, but we cannot forget about the other pieces primarily around short-lived client pollutants that are going to be even stronger levers towards managing that near-term warming, that peak temperature, that overshoot.”

“So when you cut CO₂, you stop warming it, stop warming the atmosphere even more than it already is. When you cut methane, you eventually, over about a decadal time span, start actually bringing that warming down. It's a fundamentally different dynamic.”

“whenever we compare things on a GWP 100 basis between methane and CO₂, what we are fundamentally doing is actually making a trade-off, one that we're not always conscious of, between near-term warming and long-term warming.”

“But the history of solar shows that it, there's always more solar than you think there will be.”

“So you can only blend about 30% in before you start reducing, you know, diluting the performance.”

“for any one player, any one company to single-handedly bend the curve on heat pump adoption, it sort of has to be a vertically integrated solution of some kind or another”

“I think they, 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 actually do it scalably. Grid's going to happen. It's…”

“I think anyone who thinks, you know, very, very low-income people are not aspirational is, uh, not talking to anyone who's living in those situations. Um, absolutely people want cool stuff. People want, like, cell phones that are the latest and greatest, and, uh, that actually work and have, have, like, all the, the…”

“Uh, turbines is a large company game, right? And so when we look at the, um, interesting areas for innovation in offshore wind, we're really looking around the edges, right? So we're looking at how does one monitor and protect cables under the water? How does one think about the, um, assisting and supporting…”

“organic carbon is not necessarily a long-lived sink for atmospheric CO₂, and at some level, I think that's the central thing to keep in mind, is that microbes like to break down organic matter. It's how they make a living, um, and so any one of these practices might succeed in building up some carbon, but the amount of…”

“usually when you do major reforms of something as fundamental as your electric power system, and you do it in the middle of a crisis, um, you're going to make You're going to build in mistakes, so they need to deal with the short-term crisis and then rethink their overall markets.”

“And that's, you know, in, in, in the new map, the way I phrased it, is you go from big oil to big shovels, because you're going to need so much more mining, and the volume of mining, I think, is just, just not really recognized.”

“The correction to that might be, if you lower the cost of energy, you might end up pursuing more energy-intensive forms of water-like desalination, so it might end up settling out at about the same price. And in fact, that's what we see in many places, is that cheaper energy means you can access less traditional…”

“part of that is one of the deep ironies of the energy-water nexus is that the energy system helps create climate change through the radiative forcing of the emissions from the fuels we use, and the way climate change manifests itself is through changes to the water systems through acceleration or intensification of the…”

“if we want to go fast, and we want to do this at scale, we're going to have to leverage that entire industry.”

“really this comes down in my view, um, To a human resources problem, not a technology problem.”

“consensus is you really need to sample your soil in the place that you're trying to quantify outcomes if you want to have a robust quantification that you can use for an offset.”

“On the downside, you probably lose the market. You lose a big, big chunk of the market, right, who is in the carbon market, not in the business of, uh, of subsidizing practices they like from farmers somewhere else.”

“And that's what we've learned in the, in the last 10 years of the development of the, of the electric vehicle, is that the car is the battery. And it's not just the battery pack. The car is the battery cell. The car is the battery chemistry. And for the car company to, um, to just slough off the responsibility of…”

“The, the, the real prize with solid state is getting to a lithium metal batteries... you, you get the, the most energy dense possible anode you could possibly get, um, With a lithium metal anode.”

“fast charging is something that a, a, a new is going to appeal to a new buyer that's never owned an electric vehicle before, but once they get used to it, they realize this is, this is a, a, a nice to have, not a requirement.”

“We still lack the human capacity necessary to mobilize the 9.2 trillion dollars a year that McKinsey says is necessary for the net zero transition.”

“if you're going to be making crypto, do it cleanly. And if you do it cleanly, that actually starts to become sort of interesting as a grid resource because there's a way to shift load into making crypto and you can make money when there's really high amounts of renewables available.”

“Once we were to do it for long, once we were to keep it up for, um, a couple of years or more, and so we actually have that cooling, then yes, of course, interrupting the injection immediately would just bring us back to whatever temperatures we would have without it.”

“By cooling with these methods or with any methods, we would not be just turning back the dial of time to a time where there was less CO₂, because the sulfates do cool differently than the CO₂ warps. And even if maybe we can try and get it as close as possible, there will still be differences. So we wouldn't have the…”

“Even though biomass is broadly distributed, bio-wastes are actually more concentrated, and so that creates an opportunity for us.”

“Uh, I, I think that's where things like nuclear fission have struggled in the past. It's not really a manufactured technology. It's an engineered project. Uh, and it's tougher to get the kind of learning rates with stuff like that.”

“if you have 10 cent per kilowatt hour power, no direct air capture system is going to be anywhere near in the money, no matter what you define in the money as. If you have one cent per kilowatt hour power, then it looks really, really promising.”

“One thing that I found a little more useful is to kind of just think about like, what's the actual trapping mechanism for the CO two? Like where does, where does the carbon actually end up? Um, and there you can sort of think like, okay, well, it's leaving the air and another goes into biomass, whether it's algae or…”

“carbon removal is never intended to be a substitute for emissions reduction, and, like, to that point is going to be dramatically more expensive than the vast majority of reductions, right? Like, that's just how this works. Like, not burning something is going to be cheaper than Like, collecting the dilute remnants of…”

“an emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not proportional to the emission unless it's similarly permanent.”

“some of the more expensive methods, like direct air capture, are gonna probably be easier to verify. And some of the potentially cheaper methods, especially those using biomass, are probably gonna be harder to verify.”

“So I just think that people are so myopic in the way that they think about traditional, uh, solar and wind models, that they think that the price of this stuff is going to zero. But in fact, the option value has now just gone up substantially.”

“So, within an order of magnitude or so, that voluntary carbon removal market needs to scale up something like 20,000 times. By twenty-fifty in order to reach those IPCC goals, or it needs to no longer be voluntary.”

“The question we need to ask ourselves, is this, um, tech solving carbon markets problems, or are these carbon markets solving tech problems? You know, uh, are, are we seeing people attracted to fundamentally, I want to solve the issues of the carbon market and web three and crypto, uh, and refi are the regenerative…”

“And so I always kind of cringe when I hear people say things like lithium mine can't do long duration or can't do durations more than four hours. Everyone who has a cell phone knows That lithium ion can do 24 hours, because we've all forgotten to plug one in for a day, and found that the thing wasn't dead yet. So…”

“And it's, it's really not that they cost so much, right? It's that you don't get value out of the 23rd hour of storage that you have installed if you don't use it every day.”

“there were a lot of seminal papers out of Harvard talking about this and making the argument that the more productive you can make your space, it totally pays for itself if you could somehow measure that productivity. It's much, um, it's much more impactful on the cost per square foot of your building To make your…”

“I don't think storage, you know, in my experience, is something that, again, it is about, oh, what's my payback? Um, yes, I mean, do customers always love that if you get a payback on top of it? Like, yay, wahoo, but it's, it is, it is, it is, you know, something at its core that is so much about emotional security,…”

“If we could use, um, membranes or non-thermal processes to separate out different chemicals, um, we could potentially cut the total energy demand of those separation processes by 80 to 90%.”

“What we actually do is we mix the plastic in with, uh, Uh, organic waste and put that in the landfill, and because there's all this plastic mixed in with the organic waste, the organic waste doesn't have any access to oxygen, and so it decomposes anaerobically and emits all of its carbon as methane instead of as CO₂,…”

“Like if you can build a company just by pouring, you know, capital on it in one or two years, I mean, you don't have a real moat. Maybe there's, you know, network effects and different things in software, but in climate tech, I mean, your moat comes from fundamental technical capacity and, you know, knowing secrets…”

“even though you can optimize your fusion core and get to high gain, honestly, at the end of the day, those things are a smaller driver of the ultimate total cost.”

“natural gas is used in just so many end uses for energy today, uh, and it's used in some of the end uses that end up being the hardest to decarbonize on any kind of, You know, 10, 20, even 30 year time frame purely through the prospect of decarbonizing the power supply and then electrifying all of those end uses.”

“what I've really come to believe in is that electrification, yes, hypothetically could get us all the way there. That strategy could get us all the way there, but it's, it's a risky strategy from the standpoint of total costs, um, particularly, uh, total costs to consumers who can't move as quickly on Electrification…”

“Oftentimes, if you pay a premium for the most carbon intensive parts of the thing that you are making, you can pay a fairly hefty premium for those things, but the cost of the end product isn't affected nearly as much because the cost of those things aren't that big a share of the end product.”

“I think the industry has tried to attack this with facts. And really miss the emotional resonance of, like, people just aren't happy about this stuff right now.”

“There's a pretty decent chance at a correlated risk that your gas pipeline is also at risk, and so that external dependency means that you have this common mode failure, which means that your natural gas systems can never Be as provably reliable as truly having fuel on site.”

“honestly, CapEx is the most important cost metric when it comes to backup systems, because they're not used very often. You don't care that the fuel is more expensive. It's really about how cheap is your generator, and diesel is by far the cheapest solution out there.”

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

“let's remember why we have a grid in the first place, which is so that we don't become individual islands. And individual islands are always more expensive. Than sharing the resources that we have.”

“It's different in that it's very difficult to create sustaining coalitions. Now everything's transactional.”

“My advice to the folks up here, don't let this place trick you into thinking what you do is who you are, because if you are, you will invariably make decisions that could be only here to preserve your identity, because this is who you think you are, and don't forget where you got elected, don't forget what your…”

“And so by doing offsite manufacturing, putting together large components of our data centers offsite, it allows for a safer, more diverse, and more reliable product, right? Safer for the employees, more diverse, because giving somebody, hey, you can be here from eight to five. You don't have to live in a different…”

“if you can reduce the customer's, uh, net electricity spend by five percent, uh, it's worth having a conversation. If you can exceed 10%, you probably have a really, really good project, and, and people are really interested.”

“when you think about using an EV battery for traction in a vehicle, you know, you've got a 150, 125 kW, whereas if you're using it for grid services, you know, you're, you're using maybe 10 kW through the bi-directional charger. So the, the rate of discharge and the impact on, uh, the, the battery is, is less when…”

“what caused the Inflection for residential solar in the late 2000, which is really when the market started to take off was financing. It was when solar city and sun run and sungevity and all these companies introduced the like PPA and lease model.”

“the key to quantum is incredible performance gains on a narrow class of applications, but some of those applications are really critical to a lot of industrial sectors, commercial sectors, and governments, and, and, and just about everybody, so it's, uh, it's, it's more of an accelerator. It brings computational…”

“Optimization doesn't have to be perfect to be good. The traveling salesman problem would be a great example. If I can reduce how far that traveling salesman has to go by a little bit, On a quantum system. It may not be the best answer. It may not be the absolute, oh my God, I can't believe we got this, this amazing…”

“Quantum is much more science-based in some sense. It doesn't require a huge corpus of information to reach its conclusions. It's based more on the physics and, and the science of what it means, uh, to, to, to how a material interacts. So without data, AI is basically just Kind of, we, we have no idea what's going on,…”

“electric vehicles, which I, I really think are the, sort of the keystone species of this ecosystem, mainly because there's just so much, so many unit sales of electric vehicles, so as that market ramped up, it, it created a lot more Mass manufacturing demand and capacity for all of this stuff.”

“You need to get about five X more out of the machine than was stored in the system to have a practical basis for a power plant.”

“Fertilizer just does not store that well. Um, it breaks down very quickly. And there's always a question like, well, where does it go to? If you ever need to call on it, who gets it at what price and how does it get there? And so it's just not something that really makes sense.”

“Well, if our price doesn't do anything, well, that export opportunity pops up, an arbitrage opportunity pops up, and we start losing supply that we can't lose. And so that's why you see our market go with the rest of the world”

“If you were going to have fully hands-off freight, you would want it to be electric to charge, to handle the charging in an automated way. It's really hard to do that with diesel.”

“if you remove a cab, you've taken out some significant costs from the vehicle. You've also taken out significant weight from the vehicle. And that allows us to kind of rethink the unit economics a little bit.”

“there is no just-in-time delivery on these projects. If you do just-in-time delivery, like, that was the whole mantra of our, the commercial, my commercial life when I was building commercial construction, is that you are on small constrained sites, and you would deliver just-in-time, because you couldn't move material…”

“If compute is not the dominant portion of your cost, you actually want to have flexibility and fungibility. When compute becomes a more dominant portion of your cost, you now actually are thinking, okay, what am I going to do for this year, next year, and the year after to make, to make sure that I optimize it super…”

“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 level, and then once it's done, it's inferencing and…”

“when you have a manufacturing basis, you have political power. You have Lots and lots of durable, really good jobs that you want to support, and that's one of the reasons I think China went from, you know, installing two times as much solar as the U.S. to 10 times, is because they had a big domestic industry to…”

“the off-grid option in some ways maybe shortcuts the actual supply chain bottlenecks on the generation equipment side, at least to some extent relative to the other options. But I agree with you, there's still a bunch of other pieces of equipment, transformers, et cetera, that you're stuck waiting for.”

“I think scale is the other thing, right? I mean, I think Stacy talks about there being a threshold like somewhere around 50 megawatts where, you know, you, you, you are actually at the scale of a, of a, an individual beaker plant, and that's kind of the, um, that's kind of the hurdle to clear to get the, the, the…”

“as long as it's repeatable and reliable forecasting of how long, how much notice do I have to give it, because everything has notice, how long can I run it, And then, what do I need to know about it afterwards, and when can I run it again? That's what they need to know.”

“I've talked to, um, our energy control center director around, like, what would it take for us to be integrated into the energy management system? Where, you know, is that what this looks like when you actually have parity with power plants? And the answer is yes. As long as our resources are sitting outside of that,…”

“oil and gas systems are not depth limited. They are temperature limited. You will find people drilling with mechanical drilling systems all the way down to eight miles, nine miles, pushing really out there, but not hot, right? So the, the gap is not depth. The gap is heat, is how hot you can drill”

“A lot of people overemphasize instantaneous speed, like, oh, we can drill a hundred meters per hour instantaneously, but that matters less than your consistency. So non-productive time in drilling is what starts to take over your drilling economics. Um, You start spending a lot of time not drilling, but replacing the…”

“there are actually 16 rare earth elements, uh, that are grouped together. We really only use four of them, actually. Like, we only care about four of them out of the 16. If you're doing mining, virgin mining, you get this, like, basket of all of them, and you have to do this, like, complicated separations process to…”

“And our planning horizons when it comes to large-scale gas-fire generation aren't measured in months. Today, I would say they're really measured over the course of four to five years between the realization that there's a need and all of the activities that are required to go from realization of the need to fulfilling…”

“Actually, what we have seen, and there is some interesting statistics on, is the amount of environmental review time that also happens in parallel, because in terms of that site application, you are sort of really highly Focused on NEPA, and so the environmental impact assessment process can be a long pole in that…”

“Folks who are buying home batteries now, right, they're generally doing it for one of two Reasons. One reason is if they're in like California and you have a net meter, if you have solar and you have net metering rules that make it like super uneconomic to have solar unless you can discharge it into the house or…”

“I do think that permitting probably is as important, if not more important than, you know, tax credits and, and, uh, and some other incentives. You know, the incentives you can model without and with, right? So you can at least figure out what the answer is. When you don't have certainty around permitting, you don't…”

“Aero derivatives are traditionally used for very specific applications, and they're not being used necessarily to power things all the time, constantly for a decade straight. They can, but that's just not typically within the design spec.”

“the only point of a startup or a business in general is to create profit margins above and beyond its cost of capital. And technology can be a very interesting means to that end, But it is only a means to that end. And just because your technology is mind-blowing and, you know, is cited in a bunch of papers or…”

“What is interesting with generative AI is that we are being reconditioned to tolerate much longer delays. So if you use something like GPT or you use something like Claude or your favorite chatbot, oftentimes it's just sitting there thinking for seconds and seconds, maybe tens of seconds before it gets you the first…”

“And some of the people in the energy space may know that there are massive energy fluctuations or power fluctuations we will see in data center usage when the GPUs go from this computational intensive phase where you're learning the model weights to this communication intensive phase where they're comparing notes and…”

“when you send a prompt to, uh, for processing by a large language model, that prompt is probably handled by one GPU or maybe Eight GPUs inside a single machine. So, and, and the reason that is, is because the model sits in that machine, the data sits in that machine, and all of your prior conversations with that bot…”

“when we move into projects world, everything's a snowflake. It's like, you know, everything's end of one. Even a project that we're building, you know, we built lots of refineries. That next refinery that we build is still an end of one project. And because it's approached in that way, you don't really get any sort of…”

“Every tweak or change that you make effectively reintroduces the entire redesign of the process. And so, yes, there's some stuff that gets lifted, but the overall amount of work that happens is not the kind of delta of the change. It is like a significant rehaul of work.”

“The, you know, magnitude and duration of the cycle is of the debate, but it introduces a duration mismatch where technology is often done on cycles that are, you know, one to two years, whereas energy is typically multi-year, even multi-decadal, depending on the type of asset.”

“Their, their incentive is to talk up the constraints as well, because it increases the value of the asset they're owning, which is the real estate or the powered land bank.”

“if they're in that intense competition, like, company to company, then it's of much less interest, just much less incentive, um, For, you know, them to go work on the, the network that all of their competitors get to use just as much as they do. So that's classic public good, tragedy of the commons.”

“machine learning works best on the training set distribution. But in science and technology, we almost only care about auto-domain generalization, right?”

“To discover a exciting superconductor, we probably have to develop so many capabilities on the way there that's By themselves very useful. For example, automated synthesis, automated characterization, being able to model or predict high temperature superconductivity because we don't have a theory for it yet.”

“another one could be a really high critical magnetic field, which turns out might even be more important for fusion applications than TC itself.”

“for real life experimental measurement of TC, it's much harder to reward hack, which we love.”

“what's interesting about scientific data is it's not just a few bits or numbers, right? Like, for example, there are certain experiments you can run where the result you get from it is just, say, three floating point numbers. But the implications of those could be tremendous, right? It's not just going to be, like, a…”

“the other nice thing about not getting specific, that specific about technologies is that it'll, it'll, it'll, it's legitimate under the Federal Power Act, which is FERC's guiding principle, right? And so to the extent that there are attempts to, um, do things like take away the opportunity for bring your own virtual…”

“It's way easier to imagine building lots of new fiber, um, to a concentrated region of the country where you have really good solar resources than it is to imagine building, you know, massive amounts of new inter-regional transmission lines for electric power.”

“If you're going to change that stretch of transmission line, uh, and expect to get higher throughput, you also need to upgrade the substations at both ends. For example, you know, sometimes that might require you to, you know, make other upgrades on the system at the same time. And so my sense is that the adoption…”

“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, that's insurance for almost nothing.”

“First and foremost, you know, are you Protecting landowner property rights, right? So making sure that state and local governmental processes are not kind of impeding local property rights. And so that, again, a very conservative principle, and so I think you're able to attract, um, allies from across the political…”

“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 grid needs by Tetris-ing these things all together.”

“That's one of the advantages of many classes of distributed energy resources, you know, whether it's a natural gas genset, um, or whether it's a residential battery, you know, you can, you can go out there and put a bunch of them out there very rapidly, and that can scale up to hundreds of megawatts very quickly,…”

“Because utility planners, they, 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, uh, is going to work every day for all of the hours of the day, all the time.”

“the problem we're trying to solve here is not that I need a 24 seven generation to match a 24 seven load. It's that I need to solve for The summer peaks and the winter system peaks, uh, in order to connect alone. That's what a utility does, and I think it's a, I, I think there's a misunderstanding that when you go to…”

“a data center will not do a single thing for its lifetime, right? A massive data center, for example, may initially be configured and specified to train a large language model, and then you'll finish training the large language model, and then you'll do other things with those GPUs. Those same NVIDIA GPUs can then be…”

“Yes, this is an incredibly interest rate sensitive product. Interests go up. That is the principal driver of raising prices.”

“Look, in theory, if it was less of a competitive space, you would say interest rates go up, the cost of solar goes up to homeowners, and ergo, it just effectively passed along, right? We talk a lot about inflation in the current environment, and we talk a lot about saying, hey, well, consumers are just going to take…”

“The timeline, the capital intensity, the requirements of the vehicle OEMs, who are your ultimate customers if you're trying to build one of these businesses, they all present this nigh impossible gauntlet to cross for a startup.”

“Second though, to a first order, virtually all of these battery technology pitches kind of sound the same. At least on their surface. They promise better performance at lower or equivalent costs. Lots of upside, no downside. And so it becomes a little bit of a blur.”

“The expense to stand this infrastructure up is, these chips are not cheap, right? And so, being able to utilize that over a longer horizon of workload and driving that utilization is also a form factor of, if I have it installed for training, and training can be very, a spiky workload, that I can embed inference in…”

“if you're liquid cooled, the thermal doesn't just displace itself, so you have to continually run liquid through that so you don't damage the chips”

“most of the large oil and gas players have long-term thinking in mind. So they're, they're making five, 10, seven, and ten-year strategy developments for strategy. Now, well, in any one year, they might Reduce their order activity because the oil and gas prices are down? Absolutely, that's correct. But in the long run,…”

“That said, what's interesting is it takes us, call it, 18 months to 24 months to find a site, get it entitled, permitted, constructed, and then operational. Um, most vehicles make vehicle purchasing decisions at the most a year in advance, sometimes six months in advance, so they may decide that they want to buy a few…”

“The amount of power we have per charger allows it to charge, you know, a vehicle to charge much faster than most behind-the-fence chargers, and so having that capability can sometimes allow for a double shift of a vehicle, where if it was a slower charge, they could use it for one run, has to come back to the yard,…”

“these sites are designed for every vehicle to come in at the exact same time. It'd be the top of the charge curve pulling the full power of the charger at the same time, and that just doesn't happen.”

“You just got to be able to, as an owner, admit that if I have to pay a person five dollars extra an hour to keep them working on my project as opposed to going down to the data center project down the road, then you pay that because if you don't, The cost for delay is not five dollars an hour, it ends up being five…”

“when we first launched rush hour awards, 12 years ago, a lot of the intent there was to say, Hey, if we could prove out that customers with more control, the idea that they can always change the thermostat, adjust, always get to a different comfort set point in their homes. Um, with more control, you'd have a much…”

“Unless we're talking, you know, in the 25 to 50 plus megawatts in terms of actual resource, it's harder for, um, energy partners to see it as meaningful”

“we've learned the top five things that the hyperscalers and people building data centers want is, in this order, speed, speed, speed, cost, and carbon. All of those are important, but speed is the thing that is driving a lot of this.”

“If there is no CO₂ transportation in storage, there is no project. Period. Plop. You can't make it work.”

“and in fact, if you have a natural gas plant that's running uncontrolled, carbon capture reduces the pollutant load.”

“We've, um, I think, and it's also not so much Any individual exceptional event, it's the rate at which the exceptional events are coming, right? We're having a lot of them, uh, things that used to be complete outliers are happening with greater and greater frequency, and those are adding up, um, to really stress…”

“One question that you might ask if you're an insurance company is, well, reinsurance is expensive and difficult to buy. Why should I care if I, as a company can't pay my claims in a, in a given year, then I'm going to go bankrupt and that's terrible for my policyholders. But, you know, my losses are basically limited…”

“parametrics solve a lot of the contracting problems that, that exist in any insurance market, be it climate or not climate.”

“The challenge is it introduces what's called basis risk. So, uh, what if a hurricane of, with wind speed, you know, X minus epsilon strikes? That's probably still not great for me as a homeowner, but the parametric policy is going to give me no coverage because we didn't actually hit the trigger. So the, the challenge,…”

“Bulk power systems don't scale well, which is why you're talking about these seven to 15 year timelines. Microgrids scale very well, so they can really, um, help that path occur in a very reliable, efficient, and I would say, um, financially sound way that minimizes risk both from an execution risk technically And also…”

“in talking to, you know, founders who are actually building, it seems like prompt engineering can get you quite far, right? So like, it's widely variable, but let's say you can get to like, 70, 90% of where you need to be from a performance perspective.”

“if you're able to price the service at roughly the equivalent cost that the human labor alternative would have cost, Because the cost of the robots is so low now, the payback periods on these things are like remarkably fast, assuming you get high enough utilization, right?”

“I, I think the question you have to ask if you're considering a robotic solution is just, like, how long is the tail of weird stuff that might come up, that it might have to deal with, and, and in, Autonomy, the autonomous vehicle case, that tail is extremely long, right? Like, you're gonna, you're gonna encounter some…”

“So, this idea of using low-cost electricity in an electrolyzer to produce acid and base allows you to produce acid and base for chemical reactions that then follow. And those chemical reactions can be done on a volume basis, and in fact, you can decouple in terms of time when you carry out the chemical reaction. So,…”

“Well, so, um, SAFs, sustainable aviation fuels would be an example, and in particular, you know, CO₂ to fuels. Uh, that is a case where, you know, CO₂, you know, decomposing molecules is highly energetic, and that's where electrochemistry has that advantage that I referred to earlier. Dial in with voltage, a high…”

“the ability to, you know, run processes continuously downstream of that, that is where having some form of storage, I think, is, is important. That's what you have to think about doing from, from day one.”

“Well, a biological process, even if it has an electrochemical component to it, it's hard to get to high current density. Why is that? It's just that the molecules are large and bulky, right? And, you know, inorganic molecules tend to be compact by comparison, right?”

“So utilities show some resistance. Often one of the difficulties we have is that our customers want to be, uh, 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 particular.”

“what's happening now is the companies are all building their own separate facilities. There's no standardization. If one works, great. If one doesn't work, like, no one would know why it doesn't work, and then it doesn't prevent the next person from spending their Fifty million dollars better on their facility.”

“There's a big scientific process, like food science transformation that happens when you cook something. And cultivated meat, you don't know exactly how it might perform in a pan. You hope it's going to be exactly the same as the cells from an animal, but you don't exactly know. And so what's clever about having the…”

“I think we need to do a big reset in terms of what we consider to be a plug-in hybrid. I think people's, people's versions in the United States is a Prius with a plug, as opposed to a vehicle with 200 plus kilometers of battery range. On its own, plus a small, highly efficient internal combustion engine.”

“many customers who might say they don't, uh, they're opposed to time of use rates may have no issues at all with signing up for an EV rate, even though an EV rate typically is a time of use rate.”

“The challenge is the fact that these companies reach a point where the technology has been proven, but it has not been the risk in the eyes of large scale infrastructure capital, right? Whether that is Infra funds or project finance banks, right? So you need to find a way to get these technologies over that, over the,…”

“You need to be developing your first of a kind project well before your demo is operating, and certainly before your demo has six months of operational data, because you don't have time basically to wait around.”

“many times though, people think they're going to make money off the demo, right? When, in that, in our experience, we found that's not the case. The case is that most, in most cases, the demo is a very large R&D exercise. So money losing, unprofitable R&D exercise on every aspect, including the commercial aspect of how…”

“The second you have a customer who's expecting the product, your incentives are misaligned a little bit because what you really need from an existential company perspective from the demo is to prove the technology and optimize it. What the customer needs is to get their products as they expected to get it, and you…”

“what we've seen is most of these infrastructure investors really play for the platform, right? I'm putting X hundred million dollars in the first project. What I really want to do is put a billion dollars into your next two or three projects, and a lot of them are getting options for those projects, but because what…”

“You can generally build this stuff pretty fast, because you're building in smaller increments, and you don't have as long a timeline around permitting and interconnection, all this kind of stuff.”

“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 world and run the grid. Um, so at its simplest, it's really…”

“the real reason that a distributed capacity procurement focuses more on customer cited assets Than just size format is actually a pretty pragmatic reason, which is in a lot of the places of the grid where you need the capacity, there just isn't space to put that many assets unless you use customer. Addresses, right?…”

“We see the distributed capacity procurement concept as a part of the virtual power plant. Moment. Um, I think a DCP is just one way to achieve that outcome. And the assets would be installed on customer locations. They're paid for by a utility as part of their infrastructure to run the grid. They are operated and…”

“One other distinction I'd draw is that when we talk about distributed capacity procurements, it's, the conversation is starting with, but not limited to, batteries and solar. The kind of hard assets, right? Stuff you install that's net new capacity, either in storage As a distribution asset primarily, or an, and or…”

“I think Republicans and Democrats, um, look at the critical minerals issue, um, with the same end goal in mind, but they sort of take two different paths to get there. Um, Republicans tend to look at this issue from a national security lens. Democrats tend to try to look at it through a climate change lens.”

“I think increasingly what Washington does or doesn't do is going to have a huge effect on this industry, um, in a way that the oil industry or the natural gas industry Um, is not necessarily affected by industrial policy.”

“So very much the case that booking claim allows for a specific targeted ownership that is otherwise unavailable with a mass balance system.”

“With steel and concrete, uh, and, uh, chemicals, you have environmental product declarations, EPDs, and those often, uh, well, they always have the, the climate claims on them, and so if the EPDs are delivered, now we almost need a modified EPD that says you're getting all these environmental characteristics, save…”

“The, the equipment suppliers are embedded in that factory for between one and two years, and the factory owner is married to those people. They become the most critical people in the, in the success of the company. And if you're not paying a hundred, just like in marriage, if you're not paying a hundred percent of your…”

“we have to move away from traditional perimeter defenses to adopting a zero trust mindset, you know, assuming every device is a potential risk.”

“You know, the number one focus for these hackers are to, are for them to blend in, for them to be camouflaged, uh, to avoid them being identified before they get entry into systems.”

“the value of a megawatt in twenty-twenty-seven is worth more than a value of a megawatt in twenty-thirty-two, because there's an assumption that by twenty-thirty-two, power will probably be more abundant, that will have sort of run through this cycle.”

“This isn't kind of the old demand response where you just push a button and then, like, you know, whatever you got, you got. We're able to really kind of plan what load profile we want to provide, and we can schedule that accordingly. We can schedule those devices accordingly, and so we're able to really match what the…”

“we've been so good at energy efficiency over the last two or three decades that a lot of planning teams have not been focused on planning for load growth, and so you're sort of, like, reestablishing a skill that was there And kind of was foundational for a hundred years before, but has been sort of underused for the…”

“So, so at the end of the day, if you're, if you're trying to scale down a Greenhaber Bosch plant, maybe, um, maybe you'll be able to do okay on the core parts of, of the electrolysis, uh, uh, side of the equation here, the cells and stuff and so forth. But the ammonia synthesis loop and, and the other kind of more…”

“if you said what's like one big miracle, one thing I was thinking about was if you could have a air as your input as opposed to actually eliminating the nitrogen generation completely, uh, that coupled with I, the, uh, cheap electrons and also the cheap capex for the hydrogen electrolyzer, could be game changer for…”

“If you want to make a synthetic Fuel. If it's going to be a hydrocarbon, you do need a source of carbon, and the source of that CO₂, carbon CO₂, matters from a carbon economic perspective. Um, but from a cost perspective, The thing that matters is number one, the hydrogen, number two, the hydrogen, and number three,…”

“What I'd say is we move to these ultra low GWP refrigerants, the primary issue is flammability, and so they are slightly flammable, and so those issues have to be addressed. You know, what some of the best natural refrigerants are, are, uh, R two 90, which is propane, and R 600, which is isobutane. Excellent…”

“So try to isolate your magical thinking to the technology leap that you need to take in the first place, because that is within your control much more so than the inputs that you're gonna get.”

“I think we saw this a lot in the, the modular ammonia space where, you know, the secret sauce is on this low pressure, low temperature, relatively reactor. And that's a really nice to have, but what, you know, we found, you know, doing our own internal work is that, you know, upstream of your ammonia reactor, there's…”

“if you get A better conversion of CO two and hydrogen to methanol on a single pass. It just really doesn't move the overall economics in a huge way because again, back to a previous point, CO two and hydrogen are the big cost drivers in that system.”

“it's better or, or, or it can be helpful just to put error bars and understand the sensitivities on things earlier on and, and go down the, the deeper, more detailed design rabbit holes when, when the higher level stuff is fixed.”

“If you're using it to get to a ridiculous level of precision on the cost structure that you expect to achieve in, in five years, you've probably wasted some time.”

“So removing the methane is going to be much, much harder, or at least much, much more expensive if we're doing it the same way.”

“With methane, there is one key difference, which is that you can oxidize it. You can turn it into CO₂ rather than just capturing the gas and finding a place to sequester it, which is a big advantage relative to what you need to do to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.”

“because that methane would have gone away eventually over time, to maintain that temperature impact over time, you actually need to continue to remove the methane, not at the original scale, But there's this concept of effective methane removal, so you have your initial large removal, and you have to continue to remove…”

“You have to be really careful that you're not, um, going to tip the system to increase, for example, nitrous oxide, uh, production.”

“training a large language model is a far better manifestation of that trade where, you know, you can move data across subsea cables to get to a data center based in Iceland. Um, you can run your back propagation and, and, and large scale pre-training on significant amounts of data to, you know, train your LLM. Um, and…”

“The cluster itself is like moving in, in, in sync with, with one another. So, you know, you're sort of, ah, all of the data is sort of being broadcast, um, out across this high performance network, you know, to the GPUs. They're running their compute workloads and then, and then publishing the results to everything. So…”

“They occupy some of the most central and desired plots of real estate in the hearts of cities so that they can get concrete through traffic to where it needs to be poured. So they're very space constrained, and every square foot of land is important to them. So if they have to dedicate a 50,000 dollar silo to a new…”

“when prices crash like that, it's the stationary storage sector. It's like grid energy storage that actually sees the benefit from that From a cost perspective fastest. And that's one interesting dynamic. Whereas EV is what you think of, which is still EVs are still the majority of demand for, uh, for lithium ion…”

“we are of the fundamental opinion that it doesn't really work to, uh, you know, deploy in the lab or at very small scale at pilot scale, and then go from that straight to the size that is required for the plant to be profitable, because that's a huge technological risk.”

“if you do direct air capture, that's the other nature is you have to deal with the weather, how it is, because, uh, it's quickly becoming completely uneconomical if you have to pre-treat, um, any of your Uh, incoming feedstock, so to say, right? The air that comes in.”

“the sensitivity of the sequestration on the purity, um, of the CO two and your ability to deliver that purity, 24, seven, um, with all the things that happen in this type of production environment, you have to deliver really, really pure CO two doesn't really matter on the sequestration method, but it needs to be super…”

“The way that certifications work today is you deduct all of the life cycle emissions that exist for the construction of the plant, um, as well as for the operation of the plant, the energy that you use, et cetera. And we could predict some of these, but others required really deep due diligence with our suppliers, um,…”

“I think the biggest constraint is probably how risk averse they are because they're running a system. So they can't necessarily take the risks that retailers might take or asset owners or traders might take in the market.”

“The better you know a system, The more you can continue optimizing the system, but it doesn't necessarily mean that knowledge will help you discover something different. And I think this is probably why a lot of important discoveries are serendipitous, because, like, let's say you're in a company, and your company is…”