The Wisdom Wall

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“green hydrogen is not really an energy resource. It's a storage resource in a way. It's a way of taking renewable energy and later on at some point running it through a natural gas power plant, which you're not going to want to do very often. It's a low capacity factor resource.”

“higher efficiency, particularly at cold temperatures, is really the key if you can do it without significantly adding to the cost of the unit.”

“So the, the absolute first thing you have to do, which is basically a no regrets option, um, because it's actually ends up being relatively low cost is. Become a methane emissions hawk and go after those upstream emissions as aggressively as humanly possible.”

“in the case of, uh, blue hydrogen processes, you then also have to, uh, build a whole new, uh, set of infrastructure to transport and permanently dispose of that gaseous carbon dioxide that you've captured before you, before you take the hydrogen away. Um, and that's a significant challenge. Uh, for most facilities,…”

“if you produce really high quality, high grade solid carbon, it has a real value today in a lot of end markets. Those markets aren't huge today, but they're big enough to soak up, you know, a significant amount of the, you know, the early projects one could roll out that are producing hydrogen through this process.…”

“if you are building a robot, it is still substituting CapEx for OpEx effectively, right? You're, you're taking OpEx, which is human labor costs out of the equation for some number of years, and you're investing a big chunk of CapEx up front to, Uh, in order to do so in, in terms of, you know, building the robot. Um,…”