Dell: US grid holds 300 to 400 gigawatts of latent capacity
Zach Dell · No Priors Ep. 136 | Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell · Oct 15, 2025 · at 10:46
Base Power CEO Zach Dell explains to Elad Gil that meeting surging power demand is an asset utilization challenge rather than an absolute generation shortage.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The U S grid kind of max peak is somewhere on the order of 700 gigawatts, but average demand across the country is closer to like, 300 gigawatts, right? So we've got another three, 400 gigawatts you know, just up to 700 gigawatts if you believe that, you know, that peak is going to grow to a terawatt of latent capacity.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Zach Dell
Dell: Cheap solar and storage will make nuclear economics unviable
“My opinion is that the rate of solar deployment will go up so fast as the costs continue to go down that it might just not matter. That we'll have so, it'll be so easy and low cost to deploy solar and storage that the economics of building nuclear reactors jus…”
Dell: AI workloads will concentrate heavily in Texas and the Gulf
“I think the highly energy intense workloads will converge around the low cost electricity places. You'll see a lot of that go to the Gulf. You'll see a lot of that go to Texas. And you're seeing that now, right, with Stargate and Abilene and all the big produc…”
Dell: Base Power Employees Work a 996 Schedule or More
“It's like, yeah, we do nine nine six. We probably do more than nine nine six, but we don't really talk about it in that way.”
Dell: A $1B fundraise is table stakes in energy technology
“In the game that we're playing, which is to build a global energy technology market leader, a billion dollars is the ante to sit at the poker table, right? We're competing against the biggest and most well capitalized companies on the planet.”
Dell: Solar and storage will define the next 50 years of energy
“And it seems pretty clear now that based on where the cost curves are going, the next five decades of energy are going to be defined by solar and storage.”
Dell: China has lowest global power costs via massive grid buildout
“It's supply and demand. It's because they built out a massive amount of supply, and it's all of the above, right? They built nuclear reactors. They built solar farms. They built wind farms. They built a ton of battery storage. They have, you know, tons of high…”