Zach Dell, co-founder of Base Power, explains electricity market structures across Texas to David Senra.
Opinion
Dell: Elon Musk's greatest contribution is training engineers to build companies
“It's the most incredible contribution I think anyone has ever made to humanity. It's not just the company that he's built, but the engineers that he's trained that have gone on to build other great companies. It's like I said, he's the greatest technologist of…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2031
Dell: US electricity demand CAGR will jump 5x to 10%
“Over the last 20 years, electricity demand has gone at roughly a two percent compounded annual growth grade, and, you know, we think it'll go to, you know, somewhere on the order of 10%, which is obviously a five hex, which on a base as large as energy is real…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dell: Next 50 years of energy defined by solar, batteries, and software
“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”
Prediction Partly held up
Dell: AI will soon be the world's largest consumer of electricity
“And it's now the fastest growing and soon going to be the largest consumer of electricity in the world. And its name is AI.”
Insight
Dell: Utility-scale batteries face fundamental interconnection and transmission constraints
“They're fundamentally constrained really by two things. One is interconnection capacity, so there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers, and the second is transmission congestion.”
Opinion
Dell: Residential battery companies are focused on the wrong business model
“The distributed architecture is the answer. And all the companies that are around that problem, they're focused on the wrong business model. They're focused on high margin upfront sales.”