A five-alarm fire for the grid? (Live)

Latitude media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. From Latitude media, this is open circuit. It's been a year since a national energy emergency was declared with big promises on prices and reliability. So we're asking a simple question, how's that all going? Outages are up, prices are up, markets are stressed, and grid reliability experts are warning of a five-alarmed fire. We're going to take stock at the moment and what it means for grid resilience. Then we'll look at resilience through a different lens. With so much of our national security now dependent on the civilian power grid, what happens when that system is under sustained stress? Finally, we're going to end with a quiz to see how much my co-hosts have been paying attention. That's all coming live from the power resilience forum. AI became the center of gravity for the energy industry in 2025. The solutions to address AI load growth are getting more sophisticated, but there is still no uniform blueprint for building at gigawatt scale. On April 13th and 14th in San Francisco at Transition AI 2026, latitude media is bringing together the stakeholders who are successfully getting projects cited, financed, and built. Head to latitudemedia.com/abents or click the link in the show notes to see the full agenda and register for Transition AI 2026. And as a bonus for our listeners, use the code pods 10 for a 10% discount. Hello, Houston, Texas. We are here at PRF 26. I'm Steven Lacey. I'm the executive editor at latitudemedia. And I am here with my regular co-host, Jigger Shaw and Caroline Golan. Jigger is the former director of the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office. He is the co-managing partner at Multiplier and Jigger. I know how much you love utilities. There are so many utilities in the room. Are we going to hold you back from all your fonding? I love utilities. I love them so much that I want more for them. Caroline Golan is the CEO of Envision Energy Advisors. She is the former Global Head of Energy Development Innovation at Google. And she's been at the center of many of the urgent challenges in the power sector. Caroline, how are you? I'm great. I'm loving Houston, actually. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday. It's phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. How does it feel now that you are a regular co-host on this show without a public relations person over your shoulder? Well, I don't get places on time. But other than that, I think it's actually really freeing. It's been really enjoyable to just mingle and meet people. And not have to have pre-rehearsed talking points on everything I have to say. Yeah, it's been great. We have a special guest coming up. He's going to be joining us a little bit on the stage to talk about the nexus between resilience and national security. But first, I just want to take stock of the power world. It's been a pretty wild year. And to kind of reflect on where things stand. I just want to take a minute to listen to what has happened over the last year. I will direct all members of my cabinet to Marshall, the best powers that they're disposal, to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. We are following the latest developments tonight as the Trump administration pauses leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects along the East Coast. Dominion says, "Stop being the project for any length of time will quote threaten grid reliability for some of the nation's most important war-fighting AI and civilian assets. It will also lead to energy inflation and threaten thousands of jobs." There is a national policy driven by the President of the United States to create a shortage of electrons. Power grid operator PJM is under fire over significant electricity rate hikes across its 13 states. That's led to local electricity bills soaring and calls from Governor John Shapiro to potentially leave the grid. Now grid officials say the expected heat wave could possibly make us reach a tipping point. Extreme weather events are costly and so far this year they've been more costly than ever. 14 extreme weather disasters, including the most costly of them, the California wildfires occurred from January to June. Vice tag more than $100 billion in damages. After years of study progress, America's carbon pollution is moving in the wrong direction. New data shows US emissions rose in 2025. A reversal experts say is tied to weather, energy demand, and power costs. Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We're seeing an increasing number of small scale events in near misses that continue to reinforce what we can't call anything but a 501 fire when it comes to reliability. So there you have it. That is a recap of this wild year, a snapshot of some of the big storylines. Low growth, markets under strain, increasing extreme weather, politics now infused in everything. So the last quote you heard was from Jim Robb, the president of NERC, who warned that we are facing a five alarm fire for the grid. So if you take all this together, let's talk about where the grid stands today. What level of risk do you think we are at right now on the power grid? Caroline? Oh, and first, great. I think it is not a five alarm everywhere, but I think we're at a five alarm in certain parts of the country. I think California is certainly in a five alarm state. I mean, when you have companies facing bankruptcy and sort of clearly going through the same mechanisms over and over and over again. I think Texas is, you know, I guess we're going to find out this weekend to some degree if we learned our lesson. I'm not sure we did learn our lesson. I'm not sure we invested in weatherizing the full system to get to the point where we're past sort of the lessons of a few years ago. People were feeling pretty optimistic earlier this morning. Well, good. I mean, that's what you want. I mean, I never want to be right in that particular position. But no, I do think we're in a micro five alarm fire in terms of resilience, which is different from reliability. And I do think extreme weather is something that we've fought with the same tools that we were fighting 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and we need to change the way we fight those things. But I also would caveat that by saying that a five alarm fire is sometimes the only way that you change, right? And we have a history in this country of letting things break before we build the new and better system. So while I don't want to see that happen all over the country, it is a forcing function politically. And if you couple that with rising rates and rising costs, yeah, you're going to get the sustained motivation, I think, for change. Jigger, what level are we at? What alarm level? I have never understood the five alarm fire. I mean, are there two alarm fires? Like, basically, like, you know, is it just like two trucks show up instead of five trucks? Is that what they're referring to? It's taken for granted. I actually don't know. It's the bells in a fire station. Five alarms. No, I think it's. No, I just made that up and they send to the fire. In any case, like, there are a lot of trucks mobilized this week for thunderstorm fern. And I hope and pray that all those folks stay safe and and get everyone back up and running quickly. Look, I think my introduction to all of this was Hurricane Sandy and the work that happened there. I think the, you know, investment that PSE and G made after Sandy around hardening their grid and all those things. I think it's pretty obvious that the investments that were made since Sandy were, you know, crude. There were things that people did because they needed to do them, but they weren't necessarily as well thought out as all of the booths that I'm staring at here at the power resilience form. I think, you know, what do you think about the next generation of AI, the next generation of sensors, the next generation of tools and how they can be fully integrated, integrate operations and de-energize power lines and all those things. I do think we've come along ways around what will work, right? What will actually materially reduce the risk? And for that, I think, you know, I'm grateful. Now the question becomes, if we all collectively agree that that will work, then, you know, how fast can we roll it out? And, you know, I think I'm heartened by how many people have come to this event, right? Because I think they're here because they do want to roll it out. And I think it's one of the few times I've seen the venture capital community's timeline and the utilities timeline actually converge to a single timeline, right? Which is great, right? I mean, so I don't know what that means for a five alarm fire, but I'm hopeful. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. The technological landscape has changed dramatically in the last five to seven years. If you think about the period from Sandy to 2017 and then the period from 2017 to now, I think you've seen some pretty extraordinarily extraordinary leaps and deployments and technological change. Let's kind of break down the nerq risks because I think this is kind of important. When Jim Robb says five alarm fire, he's talking about load growth. That's like a new piece in the nerq report, tighter reserve margins, delays in resource interconnection and transmission. Obviously, the increase in extreme weather events. That's a huge piece of this event here. And then the growing interdependencies in gas and fuel supply and communication systems. So which of those stand out to you as sort of the biggest threat right now? So actually, I want to like focus in on something that's not in in in that list, which is that and that's the classic answer. And this is more of course, Jigger and I agree, which is that I think we both recognize that to solve a lot of the problems that are facing the economy right now is requires that we empower commercial and residential customers to be more flexible on the grid. We empower the use of distributed resources, storage on the distribution system. We alleviate the pressure and the need to build on the transmission system and really ring fence that to the large load and collocation model that we need to see. And Jigger, I know you agree with me on all of this, but I also think that the problem in doing or the benefits of doing all of that is reliability resilience right and a distributed model is going to breed more reliability and resilience and alleviate a lot of these issues. But we don't have a grid that was built with the IT structure or the software or the interoperability to do any of that. So all of those problems come down to a root cause, which is that we don't have a smart enough grid to even on load all of the technologies that Jigger is talking about that have come up the last five, seven years. And do so in a way, which makes demonstrative impact into all those issues. And so like what's ironic is that we are home to the five largest IT companies in the world whose make or break in their economic transition and dominance is also dependent our ability for the grid to start working. And yet that integration hasn't been there, so I would say they're all equally important, but their root cause among all of them is we don't have this interoperable grid that can do all these things. Yeah, I mean, certainly that is like a conversation that has come up here in some of my discussions with people. I think it comes down to the fact that like many utilities don't even know where some of their equipment is on the grid. And I know company like tapestry that was spun out of X inside Google is working on exactly this type of system where you can really map out the entire system, create a true digital twin and then be able to identify like every single piece of equipment and its history. Jigger, what do you make of Caroline's point about software, IT tools being like a fundamental layer of risk here? I learned a long time ago to just say yes. When you're sitting in the same room. She's obviously right. I think the thing that bothers me in this moment, which I think should bother everybody, is that there doesn't seem to be a unified way of thinking about it. So when you think about what's happening here in Texas, part of the way that Texas has really gotten to where it is right now is by deploying a huge amount of solar and battery storage, just an enormous amount of solar battery storage last two years. And when you think about who's fighting the huge amount of solar and battery storage from being deployed, it's basically my so in PGM, right? Like, you know, as much as you want to blame solar and wind for whatever it is that, you know, there are all the ills of the utility grid, there is no solar and wind in PGM. Right, I think it's probably like 8% of the total grid, right? It's all coal and natural gas up there, right? And so the reason why the PGM is in so much trouble is that they don't have battery storage, right? And then they're not integrating it from a technical point of view as, you know, like as Caroline suggested, like and so we're in this weird spot, right? Where we have all these technologies and those people, whoever those people are, whether it's the PGM or the governors or the utilities within the PGM or, you know, MISO is a little better but like, you know, but MISO, they don't have a unified thought process of, okay, we have this NERC report, here's how we're all going to work together to solve it, right? They're still fighting around which ways they want to solve that problem. And so right now the PGM is like, well, we're going to accelerate all the natural gas projects in the grid and we're going to like, you know, take them out of the queue and just approve them. That's not helping, right? Because now the natural gas system is saying, by the way, we can't provide you for gas to any of those sites. We're going to build new pipelines for that, right? So you're going to have non-firm service, you know, you're welcome. And, you know, and then, like, Carrie Zowalski, like, wrote this fantastic paper on, you know, and she used to be a regulator in Illinois and now she's at ACP, but she wrote a fantastic after action report on what happened during winter storm Elliott, where, you know, it really was a scheduling problem between the natural gas industry and the electric industry. The natural gas industry works like the stock market 24/7, 365. And the natural gas industry works like, I don't know, like, you know, street betting where like you're just doing numbers and they write stuff down on a piece of paper, and then they shift it to like four different people. And then that person fills the order like seven hours later, right? And so there are people trying to schedule gas on Saturday and they're like, sorry, we don't work on Saturday and Sunday. We only, like, just was to schedule that gas on Friday, right? And so, so when you think about all of that, right? And we're already at 43% natural gas in our country. So what are some of those people suggesting that we should be at 60% gas, and that's how we're going to solve the problem? Like, I just think that, like, that's the problem I have is we don't have a unified approach that everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's where we're going to do the fixes from. One more question on this before we move into the next theme. One of the points that was brought up earlier this morning was that there could be a conflict between meeting load growth, investing in resiliency, and decarbonization, right? And like, can utilities walk into gum at the same time as the way it was put? Do you think that these three competing priorities mean that A, we slow down decarbonization, or B, we sort of focus on load growth, and then which undermines resiliency investments? Like, how do you see those priorities potentially competing with one another? I mean, I feel like batteries solve all three. And so, like, I mean, I don't, I don't see it being, you know, like, and when I say batteries, the reason I say batteries is for those people who are, you know, a little bit geeky. You know, you think about virtual power plants, and you think about, you know, level zero to level four in the hewls test that like, you know, like, energy hub is trying to push forward, et cetera. Right, batteries are already there, right? Like, batteries have telemetry built into them that can fully integrate into a utilities grid operation system. So they really do run like a power plant, right? And so then once you've got batteries and the utilities agree that batteries are how you're going to do it like they haven't Texas, well, now you can like integrate in, you know, like thermostats or smart water heaters or other stuff, as long as it's a small amount at first. And then as their software catches up and the IT catches up as Caroline suggested, then they can make it bigger and the ADR pilot, I think, was successful here in center pointed a big, you know, big role in that. And so, so I think we're like headed in that direction. But I think all three of those things get solved, I think, by batteries. Caroline, any parting thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be a little bit more than batteries, but I do think that we're potentially not killing your dream. I'm just adding to it. I do, I think that there is a conflict. And I think we have to be very sober about that conflict. And I think we cannot excuse away whose responsibilities collectively it is to solve that problem. So I do think that we as an industry relied heavily on the entities that were driving load growth to be the solvers of all the ailments of the grid. And that is no longer their agenda, right? And I think that what we see happening today is that the markets and utilities and suppliers are limited, either by choice or by investment structure. Or by offtake availability and what solutions they can provide largely by choice. I think load that is growing in this country is is is not limited by choice. I don't I think they are agnostic. I think if you if you are able to provide a solution that improves resiliency and reliability on the grid for the communities that they operate in and meet their load in a timely way, you rise to the top of the picking, right? That is not been the approach that we've we've set out and that's actually not been and it is it is not legally the responsibility of most utilities, right? And so I think you have a huge construct issue that is hitting load growth against the empowerment in the resiliency of the rest of the customers on the grid and without severe severe change to market rules, the products that we offer in the system, the regulatory structures that guide this, but more importantly the innovation around structuring and contract and procurement that includes battery storage. At all levels it it yes, you are you are you are unnecessarily running cars head on to each other. On April 13th and 14th, latitude media is offering the chance to hear from the experts on the front lines of the AI energy infrastructure build out transition AI 2026 is a two day in person conference in San Francisco. Addressing the challenges of building at gigawatt scale in the face of AI load growth, the lineup of speakers includes met as former director of energy strategy, Peter Fried, regulatory expert, Arushi Sharma Frank, Tim Hughes of stock infrastructure, and Google's former head of energy development, Caroline Golan, and our podcast listeners get a 10% discount. Use the code pods 10 when you check out see the full agenda and register today for transition AI 2026 at latitude media dot com slash events or click the link in the show notes. The president of in co founder of converge strategies Wilson welcome. Wilson, do I understand that you are on jeopardy once. Oh man. Yeah, it was. How did that go? You know, I've got to say not well. I prepared for I tried with stand and then did not recover from my. I found a clip on YouTube of you losing all your money on jeopardy and leaving the show and it has almost 23,000 views. Did you know that? It has that many views. I mean, can we turn that into something is there like. Yeah, you know, I got to the daily double. And I just heard you got to bet it all just lay on your chips on the table and go. And yeah, I lost. And it was the last question of of double jeopardy. So I didn't even make it to the final. There's just that blank podium. Well, it's too bad they didn't ask you about national security or energy security because Wilson is one of the top experts on that intersection. His work focuses on a question of that is, you know, it's only getting more urgent, which is how we safeguard energy systems that underpin our economy and our security. At a time in those risks to both are multiplying. So I want to start by just talking about the overlap between electricity systems and defense and military operations. And I think it's interesting to talk about what just happened recently in Venezuela. So the US military captured President Nicholas Maduro by exploiting among other things a power outage. What does this tell us about the role electricity is playing in modern military operations? Thanks for starting with the softballs. You know, I think there's going to be a lot of commentary. There has been a lot of commentary and there will be continued to be about that particular operation. And I will not try to talk about it from the military side except I guess with my power sector hat on, the grid is no longer just infrastructure. It's the front line. That's one sort of key takeaway from my perspective. And it has been in past conflicts, but this was sort of the first time that it was cyber attack as a military tactic on the battlefield. It took down command and control, which is pretty new. And I don't think I've been wondering about and talking to some folks in this room to hear. It's like, you know, when something works, there may be a bit of a delay, but then maybe it's part of the playbook. And especially if you are just not in a specific country, but the power sector writ large. You know, what does that mean for the power sector if it starts coming back? What bell has been wrong that can't be unwrong? You know, what have we normalized? Like what monkey have we let out of the lab? And I think we're, you know, I don't want to find out anytime soon, but I have concerns. Well, I think there's a really interesting conversation about the overlap between the grid and defense operations, which is they're becoming more and more integrated. And it actually brings us into a really interesting conversation about how we integrate more distributed energy, how we restructure markets. And I so I want to use the defense piece as a lens to get us there. Can you just talk about the history of how the military has used the grid and how that has gotten more closer than ever? Sure. And, you know, I'm not a historian. I'm a tourist. It's the history major, but it is something that we wanted to pause and look at in terms that there have been a number of recent conversations about grid resilience they've talked about like, well, this how used to be done back in the day. And we realized we didn't really know much about how, what had happened in the last century in some of the greatest tests of power sector resilience, which were sort of the great conflicts of the 20th century. World War One, World War Two, you know, to a lesser extent, Korea. So like any good consulting shop, we wrote a paper on it, Stephen. It's a really good paper. It's quite good. It's a little scary, but it's really good. Yeah, it's called powering the fight, lessons from the grid at war. And I think, you know, one of the, we didn't know what we were going to find. One of the first key takeaways was that in each of those major conflicts, the grid has buckled under the surge of defense production in ways that folks weren't really ready for. And that was true, even when we took a look at, as we as a country, took a look at, like, well, maybe World War One wasn't so great when we ran into energy shortages. Let's try to get a bit ahead of the game this time around. Still saw the same thing in World War Two and also in Korea. So, in that, to that degree, the past is a bit of a guide to the present. You know, here we are, you know, we're talking about the five alarm, fire, whatever that may be. In peacetime, you know, so if we were called upon to fight a major war again today, I think the grid would face immediate strain already. You know, and so to layer that on top of the grid as it is, you know, I think it's, it feels like something that should be a more rich topic of conversation. It doesn't have to dominate power sector resilience conversations, but at least where does that fit into what the things we're already dealing with. So that was sort of history lesson one. The other history lesson was sort of not more of the same, you know, different decades, same lesson. There's going to be a lot of defense production and it's going to strain the grid. It was more that in last century, the energy for the war effort was over there, you know, where the fight was. And these days, our global missions tie back to our domestic installations. And those installations are largely dependent on the grid. Right. So it's a very different story. It's our energy resilience of our grid is ultimately the energy resilience of our sort of force projection. Absolutely. Jigger, I saw you pulling up a tweet thread that I think that you had done after you read Wilson's report. And he was so excited about the white paper. He went on LinkedIn and wrote a big post about it and went on Twitter and talked about it. What stood out to you, Jigger, about this framing? Well, I mean, I think it's fantastic. But the one thing that I, you know, think about today, right, when you think about AI, loan growth, et cetera, I mean, I think that many people actually do believe it's a defense posture, right? I mean, you know, winning against our adversaries around the world to control the models that, you know, control AI in the future, but then also, you know, the inference and all the other pieces. You know, I'm struck by the paper was very clear that the electric utility industry in all three scenarios, you know, we're putting their best effort in. But ultimately the federal government had to come in over top of them and force them to coordinate in ways that they wouldn't have naturally gotten to on their own to be able to unlock the capacity necessary to meet the defense moment. Right? And so in some ways, you know, I sort of see the, I mean, I love your take on it. I mean, I sort of see the White House meeting with 13 governors of exactly that start of that process within the administration. And I'm curious whether you see it the same way, which is that this White House is now thinking about coming in over the top of the normal mechanizations of the electric utility industry to say you will coordinate far better than you naturally would have to be able to accommodate this strategic load growth. That's a pretty good question. You know, and for a little bit of context, you know, I won't dwell too long history, but in World War One, we were kind of disconnected grids that ran out of power trying to win defense production ramped up and a big part of the war effort was connecting those grids. Same thing in World War II, the grid is much bigger, but the surge like aluminum manufacturing up in the Northwest or box site mining in, you know, in what is now SPP caused the creation of SPP in the formation of the Northwest Power Pool. And we also saw a lot of emergency orders come down 20 happened in World War II that were sort of like, okay, we got to do this faster. So we got we need more transmission. We're going to connect our way out of this problem. I mean, those emergency order laws are still on the books. They're starting to be used for different things. And I think I'm pretty curious how that does play out like what are we really ultimately asking for? Do we really understand the connection between sort of defense requirements and, you know, the our national energy transmission or distribution or generation system enough to know sort of, you know, where to place those bets and where to really build infrastructure. You're getting to a really important coordination question, which I want to unpack a little bit more about Caroline, what stood out to you as particularly relevant to this moment now? Well, particular with your report, which was really phenomenal in anyone who's ever wondered how did we get the markets that we got what were the additional political pressures. I think it's a really, really good read. So I'd recommend it. But one of the things that stood out to me, you know, germane to what you were saying. And I think where we are with load growth. And we talked about this a little bit this morning is that there's a cyber security angle here as our economy continues to digitize. And as you see those digital assets becoming centralized in sort of large cloud based data centers, which require certain amount of reliability, which require certain amount of load growth, which require certain amount of transmission being built. And then there's this counter piece to it, which is a geopolitical question, which is saying hypothetically in a war gaming situation. If we were to go into a conflict with another country, is there grid built better than ours? And is that a strategic advantage? And how so? And I think when you layer the two on and then you layer on the question of climate change and extreme weather, which is somewhat agnostic to national boundaries. I think you you end up coming to the same conclusion, which actually came to in your report, which is that one, yes, the grid is a geopolitical tool, but the same problems that are facing our ability to gain geopolitical power in the economy, which is through, you know, digitization a and everything. And it would be the same reasons why we gain in like a war gaming situation, right? So the solutions are the same, which I thought was really fascinating, because I wouldn't naturally think that what's going to strengthen our economy moving forward is also going to, you know, be the tool we needed to fight China or Russia or whoever it is that you think we're going to fight. Totally. And the solutions you outline in the report, flexibility, transmission expansion, bigger regional markets, better coordination, these are all things that we talk about as part of the clean energy, resilient power. And they're also the things we need for climate change, right? So it's very, when you have such macro issues, all stack up with the same micro technology and policy solutions, your question is, so why can't we do this? Yeah, I think the word you were looking for was batteries. Carolyn, I don't, I don't think I'm going to pick who we're going to fight. Or anything like that. But also, you know, one thing we picked up on is thinking through the wartime lens is this not all doom and gloom or even necessarily about conflict. You know, it can be a clarifying thing to think about even in peace time. And to your point about industrialization or comparative advantage, that ultimately comes down to potentially deterrence. You know, we think about nuclear deterrence who's got the most warheads or the best nuclear triad. But really, you know, there's also like, hey, how can we build our way out of the next conflict? And if it seems like, or whatever, your sort of non nuclear deterrent may be, and I think framing things that way, let's say you're stuck in a, a, a converse, a pretty wonky conversation of how our sector resilience, being able to step back and say like, if we were actually going to try to take another swing at this question, but think about it through like what investments would make it less likely for someone else to pick a fight for us. And believe me, our adversaries are watching a lot of what we do very closely, especially on the power sector resilience side that does or shake up what may sometimes be like myopic conversations. So you raised a point in a previous conversation about this growing conflict between defense installations and new large loads for example utilities are, you know, frantically trying to meet these new large industrial loads. Data centers, for example, and the defense industry has typically come in and, you know, kind of gotten what they want from utilities, if that's a correct characterization. And now you sort of have this problem where in certain regions of the grid, they may not have the capacity to meet what the defense industry needs, talk about that conflict and what the implications are. And it gets to this coordination effort like I don't it sounds like people aren't really thinking about this yet. Yeah, and to be clear, this is sort of an emerging understanding for me as well, and the pod has been very helpful long time listener first time caller. But yeah, you know, when we start when I started my resilience journey about 10 years ago, the talking point seemed to be, hey, DOD, Department of War, whoever, the artist formerly known as is the largest, it's the big dog. It's the largest energy consumer in the world, and it's going to get what it wants. And that's suddenly no longer necessarily the case. And I think that's caught a lot of people by surprise like how do we even have that conversation and what even is that conversation and when do we have it and where I mean in the con when you all were talking with Jean Clemens, a couple episodes ago. There was this moment where you all saying, you know, even if you go through the interconnection process, which used to be the gold standard and get through the final gate, like as a load. You might not have any capacity, very scarcity waiting for you on the other side. And if that's like, I don't think the defense enterprise is tracking that issue, like that we are walking our critical defense loads, new missions, new major pieces of infrastructure through the large load interconnection process with maybe it's not going to happen on the back end. It's also sort of an eye opener for me. And then Carolyn, you're sort of opening my eyes to the sophistication of sort of the data centers ability to sort of converse and engage with the energy sector, the electricity industry and shape it. I mean, that capability and capacity, I don't think exists in the DOD and the defense enterprise. So if those things are true, then what do those productive conversations look like? So where are we in competition and where are we just sort of like missing the boat? Well, do you think, and this isn't in the popped into my head, this administration and I think literally the world sees owning and training AI on US solar as an economic deterrence policy. At the same time, what you're saying is access to capacity for the military is also a deterrence policy. And are those two potentially at odds with each other? And then which one wins out if we don't fix or do all the things you say for us to do. And the report. I mean, I think that's a very live question that I would love to have with the good people here at the power sector forum, either now in 2026 or 2027. But it's a complicated, you know, it is a complicated question because yes, AI, the race for AI is a national security race and it's characterized that that way specifically. And there are military data centers that are for AI. We are citing data centers on military installations or at least we hope to that sort of a major push at the moment. But at the same time, large loads that we aren't we don't fully understand may box out some critical defense plans that we, you know, that we haven't fully communicated fully understand yet. So I think we're, yeah, I look forward to navigating that together with you guys. And the other side here, like CTC, right, and TS conductor, right, CTC's got a deal with Google, you know, where Google will pay for the re-conductoring of transmission lines so the thing get more capacity for their data centers and, you know, it's really hard to give away, right? The utilities are like, no, we want to rate base it. We don't want free stuff from you. And we don't want to give you that capacity. So go away. But we're in this weird spot right now where, you know, I think that the utility companies are saying we used to know how to do 4% low growth a year. We don't anymore. And this is super scary for us. And, you know, like we'd like to do it the old way where we just build new generation upgraded transmission, upgrade distribution. So the supply chain is not helping them do that. And even if they are, if it is helping them do that, it's leading to 5, 6, 7, 8, 9% rate increases. And so now you've got a governor that's announced an emergency on her first day in New Jersey, right, you've got legislation going through Virginia today, right, to try to figure this out. And you know, largely it's around technologies that everyone knows will work, right? It's around like getting more out of the transmission grid that we've already paid for using vendors that are out there with the table, right? Deploying grid enhancing technologies, unlocking VPPs, right? Like when you think about what a VPP is, right? In previous wartime efforts, folks like had their own community gardens, they had all sorts of stuff, right? People were asked to like sort of sacrifice. In this case, a VPP is basically a strategic reserve, right? And you basically say instead of blacking out entire communities, right? You say, no, we're actually just going to leave all of this stuff in reserve so that if the defense department needs it or AI needs it, well then we're going to unlock this reserve, right? What is required for that reserve to be unlocked? The utilities have to deploy Durham's platforms, right? The utilities have to create specifications and cybersecurity standards, right? And you've got this new product from IBM, which is basically unhackable, right, called sanctum that they've rolled out last week. And so you can imagine all the utilities saying all the VPP stuff has to go through sanctum, right? And so like, it's not like we don't have the solutions to the problem, right? What we have is this coordination issue where people are like, but dammit, I don't want to change my culture. And I was like, I appreciate the value of your culture, but I kind of appreciate economic and military deterrence a little bit more. I think I totally agree with you there in terms of like, it's not a technology problem, it's a communication problem, you know, we've worked with 100 military installations around the country trying to figure out like, hey, how do we move forward with energy resilience? How do we hit the department's six, nine's reliability requirement? I mean, that's really hard. And the answer is that, well, in this case, it's microreactors. You get a microreactor, and you get a microreactor. Look under your chairs. Everybody goes, dear God, micro, you're welcome. Yeah, but I mean, ultimately it came down to the need for conversation, like the military installations, the energy manager at an installation has a lot of jobs. Speaking utility or speaking bulk power system resilience is probably not necessarily one of them. And meanwhile on the utility side, and there are some great examples of utilities engaging with the military. NREC and the collapse are doing a wonderful job with a series of regional summits at the moment. But like, there's not necessarily someone at the RTO or utility level whose job is to say like, hey, tell me about what you need as a military base. So there is this sort of need for conversation. I think the good news, a bright spot amongst a lot of doom and gloom, is that we are starting to get better at having those conversations. I mean, the first grid X, the grid X eight, I guess this year really started to talk about defense issues for one of the first times that I'm aware of. So it's starting, but it can get a lot better. So if you were sitting in the shoes of someone that a decision maker or an executive at a utility, and you're listening to this conversation, what's like one risk that you would want them to be planning for right now? Do I have to pick just one? I'm not sure it's the specific risk. I think it might be the risk of not fully understanding the defense requirements in your region. And I mean that in a couple of different ways. I mean, number one, the military installations that may be in your service territory, which I think many utilities know. The second though, is it military installations also rely on the water, wastewater, natural gas, communications, fuel delivery, which are largely community owned. So if you're talking about helping with defense risks, specifically Steven, then you're sort of opening the aperture on resilience beyond the fence line of military installation to like a whole community. That's tens of megawatts to maybe a gig a lot plus. And that just is different planning, different conversation, a whole mess in these stakeholders having maybe the first time they get together around the table to talk. All right. So we got, we know you all can dish takes, but can you handle the cold hard facts? And I'm going to think of this last segment as a bit of a redemption round for Wilson. Let's play the feud. Oh, no. Bless you and curse you Stephen Lacey. I'm breaking out Nicole sweat. Are you getting sweaty? That's so sweaty. Yeah. All right. So think of this as resilience, jeopardy. I'm going to test each of you with jeopardy style questions. And if you get it wrong, the others can take a whack. We're not playing for money here. Just pride and take the daily bubble. You know, I don't have buzzers here. So we're just going to go round robin. This is not like you did purely jeopardy style, but you have to answer as if you are on jeopardy. Can it be like and a white or something and just a turn? That's a different game show. When do I bet everything? I will bet $1. Are you ready, Jigger? You get to go first. In 2024, the US experienced this many billion dollar climate disasters roughly triple the long term annual average. Is this like prices, right? We can go higher or lower. Give it a shot. Just take a whack. What is 85? What is 35? Wilson's closest. It's what is 27. Redemption attained. We're very negative. Caroline, this was the average number of hours US customers were without power in 2024 nearly double the decade long average. You said nearly double. Yeah. Seven. What? What is seven? What? No. What? What is four hours, Alex? What is 14 hours? Jigger's closest. What is 11 hours? Not by much. We can split the difference. Wilson over to you. It's right. I guess you're pretty close. I would have won. Residential sales of home stand by important generators rose by this percentage from 2023 to 2024. Wilson. What is 30%? No. What is 90%? What is 21%? Alex. What is 18%? So I guess like taking these questions together. What do you think this tells us about like how resilience is shifting on to customers and type in terms of the kinds of distributed solutions they're investing in? Jigger, I know that you've really focused on this when it comes to batteries and sort of comparing them to home generators. Can we look at this against how much rates have gone up for increased resilience for residential customers? Sure. What do you mean? I mean, like you said that 14 hours. So it's less than one day where they don't have access to electricity. And how much more are they paying for those extra seven hours? I do not have that. I think we're now up to 15% of all US homes with backup power. Right. And so that is clearly a decision that people have made to spend money out of their pockets to get backup power. Now some of those are cheap. They're like $1,800 at a home depot for gas generator that just sits out there and they just plug stuff into it. And others are expensive like a general unit that's like fully integrated into their your whole home. Right. And then they've got backup fuel and all that stuff. And then you got to pay for it to get tested every year and all those things. And then there's some people who've decided to put in batteries as backup power. I think what we are today is that some of those solutions are EPA compliant to actually be used in this strategic reserve. And some of them are not right. So if you have a diesel backup that is not allowed to be used as a reserve or a grid resource. If you have a natural gas backup generator, it's only allowed to be used if it's EPA compliant, which some are and some are not. If you have a battery as is a backup generator, well, then it can actually be paid by the grid on a regular basis to actually help you know with other services. And so over time, I don't know that you get a rate of return on that battery, but you could practically get it for free. Right. Over time, right. And so I think it's important to note that people have already decided that this is important to them right that they're going to go out and do stuff. And so I think it's incumbent upon whether it's utilities or the CCAs in California, right. Or whoever it is, it's prosumer to sort of say, hey, if you go this way with your purchases, like you can be helpful to your neighbor, if you go this way to your purchases, you're being selfish just for your family. For consumers and resilience, again, back in the day, I think resilience, the definition people would say, well, you know, it's the thing that we don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be really bad when it does. And I think now a lot of that has lived experience and people are seeing it and people are voting with their wallets in terms of like, well, I know actually how bad it can get these days. It's no longer just a theoretical black swan. It was like Tuesday. So I think that's been a big sea change. We're running a vehicle to everything pilot in Massachusetts, the moment co-running the vehicle to everything pilot for the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts basically drive up dozens of vehicles for backup power vehicle to grid. And there's a lot of excitement across the board. Yes, the utilities have been great, but also a lot of residents and school districts and those are putting up their hands and saying, yes, I would like whatever that is to keep the lights on. Let's shift to the opportunity now. So Jigger will start with you again. By 2030 demand for climate resilience and adaptation technologies could create this much opportunity for private capital. What's the dollar amount? All right. What is $7.2 billion, Alex? Caroline, you want to take a whack at it? I'm going to guide her. He's way low. 19.4. 7.1 and 99 billion. One trillion dollars. Mentions of climate resilience related terms in major company announcements and investor calls increased by this percentage between 2021 and 2021 and 2025. Caroline. 22%. What is you have to. What is 22% Steven? No. Anybody else want to take a whack? This has been humbling enough. I'm good. Jigger over to you. Okay, 55%. I win. I win. I win. I win. I'm the only one I get the medal for participation. I'm sure I'm the last one. Historically, this sector has funded more than 85% of all climate resilience investment, but that is starting to shift. Wilson. What is the utility sector? No. It is the public and philanthropic sector. Just trying to give a shout out. Well, I guess this just brings me to one, you know, one of our last questions, which is, what do you think will unlock more capital for resilience technologies? I guess in the power sector, what is the pathway for unlocking more money for this set of technologies? Well, I mean, in large part, I think the money is already there, right? The electric utility industry is pledged to spend $1.1 trillion between 2025 and 2029 on whole range of revitalization. And so I think where we are today is that those investments are largely going to follow investments that are in the comfort zone of utilities over the last 10 years, right? I think what governors are saying across the board today is that things have to change, right? That like we can't keep doing things that are comfortable that raise rates by double the rate of inflation and, you know, and people fall further and further behind, right? And so there's what we, what I guess what we call five alarm fire these days, yeah. Happening such that, you know, like Trump, like hosted 13 governors, most whom I think were Democrats, at the White House to say, what are we going to do about it, right? And the PGM wasn't even invited that I could tell to this gathering, right? And so we're in the early days, like it feels a little, you know, scattershot, a little chaotic, which, you know, it's probably part of the course. And, you know, and now, like we need to start having more structured conversations. And the reason we're having them is because the governors had largely outsourced this to other experts for a long time. And now that it's a number two political issue, they're saying, no, no, I actually want it like be involved and be in the room for these conversations, right? And so, you know, like it is very obvious that that a lot of additional capacity could be taken out of the existing assets we've already paid for, right? Whether it's your grid-enhancing technologies, or advanced conductors, or, you know, batteries, or virtual power plants, or all these other things, right? But that requires us to actually do things differently, regulate the utilities differently, actually have an entirely different approach to demand, right? Which we currently only have with supply. Caroline, I know you're working with different funds and thinking about, you know, innovative deal structures to serve this moment. I know you're thinking a lot about data centers. What are some of the most interesting things happening in this space? I think that there is a simultaneous effort going on around trying to figure out how to co-locate, load in a way that it absolves itself from becoming a prosumer on the grid, right? And essentially, absolves itself from being able to, or having a negative impact on rates. You know, I think that the political conversation is real and heated, and there isn't a single fund or a single tech company right now that isn't deeply thinking about the implications, political implications, if we don't figure out affordability. Like everyone is thinking about that affordability more so than resilience. I will say that. That is, resilience is not at the top of the conversation in these. There's a simultaneous effort to think about how do you site and co-locate, you know, the limited turbines that we have in this company, without our company and country, without having to build new pipelines. And at the same time, invest in what needs to be aggregated in the future and create capacity solutions in the future. And I think there is a lot of further, and we talked about this last week on the pod, like I think there is a lot of further around big assets, whether that be nuclear, or geothermal, or natural gas. But there is a very strong and disciplined investment community around what is the future of aggregated distributed technologies and what is going to be the key to unlock consumer behavior in that. Because anyone who looks at power dynamics knows it has to be a both-and. It's not going to be an either-or it's going to be a both-and. What I think is missing, and Jigger alluded to this, is that we actually don't have the market structures that allow for capital to treat that transition as a long-term asset class. And until we create those market structures and simultaneously create the commercial structures that force those market structures to stay, that's going to be hard. And I would go back to my initial point, which is that, so we had for 2020, right? So go and distribute energy and aggregate it and treat it like capacity. Many of the artios in this country do not have the technology backbone to even do that. 2222. What did I say? 2020. Oh, damn. We knew what you were talking about. At least I have something to write in my list in post next week. But anyways, so my point being is that I think sometimes the markets get ahead of what is commercially viable and what you can contract on. But then often times the markets are held back by the technology opportunity that's being able to be integrated. So you see that clock, Wilson? It just started blinking red. So you get to close your thought as you got 30 seconds to part your wisdom on us. What's the biggest unlock for resiliency? In our company, we sort of joked it. Resonance is held back by a lot of not very good conversations being held very slowly over time. And we just have to have better conversations faster and looking out over the sea of 500 people in the room, having good conversations. It's sort of, I'm excited to meet my 500 new best friends. I think it's a really promising start to a supercharged with conversation is already happening with that needs to happen. So good to see you all. And thanks to this wonderful crew up here on the dius for inviting me on to the show. It's been a real pleasure. Wilson, Rickerson, Caroline, Goal and Jigger Shaw. I am Stephen Lacey. Thanks everyone. [Applause] I am Stephen Lacey, your co-host and executive editor. The show is edited by me, Sean Markwan and Ann Bailey. Of course, go to YouTube and subscribe to our channel for fresh episodes of Open Circuit. And of course, you can find the audio version anywhere you get your podcast plus transcripts and every episode are available at latitudemedia.com. And there you can subscribe to our newsletters, including our AI Energy Nexus newsletter, which runs through a lot of stuff that we are talking about today. Thanks a lot for being here. We'll catch you next week. [Music]