How to Add 300 Gigawatts to the Grid Without Building a Single Power Plant

I feel like Ahmed, it's like you're kind of like looking in the couch cushions and finding a million bucks. That's what it feels like. 25 million dollars per megawatt. It's so weird. It's so weird right here. It's like it's like the change that you find in your drawer when you open. Yeah. Except that here it's like trillions of dollars and it is also a natural competitiveness issue which can literally define the course of humanity for the next hundred years. So the stakes are much bigger. Energy isn't just an industry. It's how the world works. I'm Jigger Shaw, a clean energy entrepreneur. And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications executive. Welcome to Energy Empire. Wow. We just like had one of these crazy experiences where I just dropped my kids off at Lego Land. And I have one. But then we have cousins who joined them. And then it had to like rush over to the recording studio to record the podcast. And so Lego Land I think is pretty decent. I have to say. Oh really? Well, I mean, I appreciate your level of commitment. I see that you are joining us wearing what is on your shirt. It's all Americana. Look at this. Rosie the river. Americana. Looking new with your patriotism and your commitment to the pod that you are even recording from vacation. Well, I couldn't. I mean, she's not happy. But at the end of the day, you know, I found that like there was only so many reschedulings we could do. And so I was like, let's get this done. All right. Well, please make it clear to her that it was not my idea. Okay. I hope she knows. Every time that you're working overtime, it was definitely your idea. I am always happy to be like, oh, it's an off week. No, I know. But it's pretty good. Like I have a 10 year old and he's fine. He's doing great. He was excited. He was like, you're giving me the freedom to just roam around the park. I was like, yes, he's like, this is amazing. Great. Amazing. He was saying that. I agree with you. The conversation we're having with Amit Narayan from Grid Care is a really interesting one for me. It's, you know, these kinds of topics can be so boring because it's really about this esoteric thing within the grid, right? Which is that we operate a grid in the way in which you would think about worst possible outcomes, right? So you say, if these five things occur, we need to make sure that there's extra capacity such that, you know, we can continue to ride through even if all five things occur and then everyone keeps having power. But what that means is there's 100,000 megawatts of extra capacity in the grid that could be unlocked right away with the right software. And it's the craziest things because this stuff sounds so boring. But I think he went to Portland, general and found 450 megawatts of capacity. They didn't know was there, right? And as a result, rates are going down by 5% for everybody who lives in Portland, general, right? He found 650 megawatts of capacity in National Grid, New York's territory. And as a result, their rates are going to go down 5% for everyone who lives in that territory. Like it has real world consequences on affordability. I mean, those numbers speak for themselves. If you're seeing that data and you're a utility executive, I don't know how you aren't calling them. I mean, I'm, I'm really excited to talk to him because I swear grid utilization is the topic of the year. Like you cannot turn around without hearing about how we can get more value out of the grid that we've already paid for. And here is a company that actually has a solution and has very, very clear ROI on the investment in their solution to improve the efficiency of what we have already paid for on the grid and get more out of it. Totally. And I think that it really follows on from the fantastic episode we had with Secretary Grant, which is what governors can do, right? In this moment, governors need to become PhDs in how electric utility systems work. And they need to know that solutions like this exist. And if they don't know, well, then it's pretty hard to mandate it onto your utility to force them to get more out of the grid we've already paid for. Absolutely. I mean, they either need to get the PhDs or they need to hire the PhDs or the equivalent of it, right? Because there's a lot of subject matter expertise out there. And a lot of these solutions have just been waiting in the wings for their moment to shine. And so I'm excited that we're finally at a moment where they're getting their due and we're seeing the real world benefits of them. And so, you know, I mean, it has like the best example of what this looks like and how it's applied and what it means for everyday people in terms of money back on their utility bills. Energy Empire is powered by octopus energy. Natasha, I'll give you a number. Three million electric vehicles in American driveways parked 22 hours a day. Why does that keep you up at night? Because we paid for it. Billions of dollars on batteries on wheels and the grid treats them like they don't exist. That's not a fleet. That's a stranded asset. Plenty of assets, sit idle. My lawn mower is stranded too. Yes, but your lawn mower can't power your house. Those cars charge at the worst hours because nobody's coordinating them. Fix a coordination and their capacity already built, already connected and already in the garage. No new plants, no new wires. Right. The power plants already built. Someone just has to turn it on. That's what we do. Thanks. Natasha Crowe, vice president of Marketing and Combs at octopus energy North America. Link is in the show notes. I'm it. Everyone is acting as if the grid is maxed out. Inner connection cues are years long at this point and we need to build massive new infrastructure. You're arguing something different, which is that a big chunk of the problem is that we just can't see what's already sitting there on the grid. So make that case for us. Well, first of all, just want to say I'm so excited to be here with both of you and Jigger. You have been such a personal inspiration for me over the years. All the work that you have done across startups and then in the government and public service a big part of what I'm doing today is just trying to follow your footsteps and inspired by you. Well, you can expand that answer further on it. I appreciate it. No, but we love what you're doing now. I mean, you obviously had all these success stories in terms of companies you started, auto-grade, e-soltation, and electric. We're excited that you're back in the game. Like having the best entrepreneurs in the country back in the game is critical. Yeah, and look, I mean, I've been on both sides of this AI infrastructure build-out story. First, I was doing software to design these semiconductor chips to drive the demand for compute. And now for the last several years, I've been working on the supply side, making sure that the energy supply can keep up with that demand. So when the two movements collided, I just felt it was too big to sit out. Even though when I sold my previous company, the only thing that I'd explicitly ruled out for my career was to become a CEO of another startup. But I think with the AI race going on, the next three to five years is going to decide actually the shape of humanity for probably 100 plus years. And right now we have this challenge. I call it the time to energize challenge in the US, which is what we are addressing. And I feel that we have a pretty unique insight into how this can be addressed. So that inspired me to come back into the game. So your case is that a big part of our problem with the grid is that we just can't see what's already there. Make that case for us. And how does grid care help to address that? Yeah, I mean, our fundamental thesis is that America doesn't have a power shortage. We have lack of visibility in what already exists. And I think the one thing I want to clarify is that I'm not against infrastructure build out. If our power demand is going to grow and double or triple in the next decade, we absolutely have to build more transmission lines. We absolutely have to build more generation. We have to build more substations, all of that. But here is the challenge. The pace at which infrastructure can be deployed with pouring concrete, getting the permits, new technologies, that pace is simply not keeping up with the speed at which AI needs to get deployed. And so when we started looking at it, we realized that maybe the solution is hiding in plain sight. If we can optimize what we already have in the ground, that is the fastest and the cheapest and the cleanest way in which we can power this AI revolution. And so our team started looking at this in a lot more detail. And we published a study to show that if you look at the grid in full granularity, it's only about a third utilized. That doesn't mean it's lying idle all the time. It doesn't mean that the reliability constraints go away. But it also means that if you're able to shine a light on it, we understand it better. We can create more visibility and we are smarter about this infrastructure. We can and squeeze a lot more out of it. And if you can do it in code, not copper and concrete, we can do it in six to 12 months, not six to 12 years. And that's really what inspired us to go and address this challenge. - Yeah, I think they call it speed to power, right? So I think you guys are right in the middle of it. I mean, and then you just got validation, right? You raised $64 million in your latest round. And you know, you've had some early wins with Portland General and National Grid in New York. So talk about the investment environment and what are these investors really investing into? What is the revenue model that they believe, you know, actually gets them the returns that they want? - First of all, let's talk about the value of a megawatt. Right now, if you look at the revenue of what AI is generating, it's somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 million dollars per year per megawatt of capacity that can be unlocked. And so if you look at 100 megawatt data center, that's billions of dollars of value per year. The urgency of the problem is so high that the hyper scalers and AI infrastructure companies are willing to spend money on almost anything that gives them hope, which includes sending six chips to space because the thing they have run out of all the capacity on earth, it means you, they want to invest in all kinds of technologies from nuclear fusion to fusion. And look, I have a technologist and I believe in all of these things and I do think that many of these things are going to happen. But the timeline in which some of these technologies can be deployed, even in the best case, even in the most optimistic scenarios are 5, 10 years out. And as I mentioned earlier, the AI race is happening right now. We need to find a solution today. And there is simply nothing else that can be done at this speed and the scale than making use of the infrastructure that is already in the ground. So that's really where the business case comes in. A lot of our investors were some of the earliest investors in the AI revolution, actually, potentially in every wave of technologies. Our lead investor in this round is a firm called Sutter Hill Ventures, who incubated and video way back and then many other companies. And John Doar, who was the original investor in Amazon and Google and many other companies. So they really see where AI is going. They have realized power has become the defining constraint for this AI revolution to happen. And we are providing a solution which is not speculative, which is already there. It can be deployed at scale. And if we can capture even a small part of the value that we are creating, it will create tremendous upside for us, our investors, and all our stakeholders. So let's dig into the analogy, because you had said that the grid is only used about a third of the time. And it's obviously used more than that during peak, but less than that in other times. And I saw that Drew Maloney from Madison Electric Institute had used a bus analogy, I think, in the podcast recently. I'd love to see how Drew's using grid utilization at the AI. And then the other analogy, if you will, use a restaurant, like you have a kitchen, you have a certain staff, you have the ability to cook food, you have the ability to sell seats. And if those seats aren't sold, well, then that's low utilization, right? So paint a picture for how those-- that utilization is only at a third or a half, depending on the market that you're in. Yeah, I think the restaurant analogy is actually quite apt in this scenario. I use airplanes on a Thanksgiving day, but it's the same idea. Look, the grid does get constrained. But the precise scenarios under which the grid gets constrained are fairly rare. And even when these scenarios happen, they happen for only very few hours. Historically, the challenge was that to get the full visibility and granularity on when these rare events are happening was just not feasible using the technologies that existed. If you look, go back 20, 30 years, you just had limited compute power. So that led to planning assumptions and planning methodologies that kept the system reliable and safe. But it also meant that we had designed very conservative practices, and we were leaving a lot of room on the table. So what we are able to do now with modern AI technologies is look across time and look across multiple locations instead of one location at a time. And we are able to find precise conditions under which the grid can get constrained. And just to do some quick math, if you let's say have 10,000 things on your grid, the NERC standard requires that you study all possibilities of two simultaneous outages, which means that one thing can blow up in 10,000 ways, and the second thing can blow up in another 10,000 ways. So you write of the bad have 100 million scenarios that you have to calculate. That's shocking. I mean, honestly, crazy. And people used to do that analysis by hand with general electric or Siemens engineers, right? Yeah, it's brute force. I mean, of course, there's a lot of technology where they will run these simulations. And you cannot run 100 million simulations. So you will make some worst case assumptions. And you will say, well, my Lord might be one in 10 year maximum. And if the two worst outages happen at the same time, what is the capacity of the grid? But they would not look at the probability. They would not look at all the hours across all the 10 years that they are analyzing because that computation didn't exist. Now, the other thing which is very interesting that has happened over the last 10, 15 years, thanks in large part to the work that you have done, Jiver, is that there is a lot of new technology that has been deployed on the grid. I mean, you funded batteries, you funded virtual power plans. We have a lot more dynamism on the grid on the operation side. And these are not unproven technologies. These are getting deployed at scale. The utilities are used to dispatching these things. But these technologies are not properly accounted for in the part of the utility, which is calculating how much capacity is available in the future. And so this is a big part of what we are trying to do, create a visibility across the utilities and the customers. Because the planning processes are worst case. They're looking 10 years ahead. Operators are looking seconds, minutes, day ahead. But they don't look across 10 years. And now, because of the computation, we can do that granular second by second analysis. But look at what brilliance of scenarios that might happen over the next 10 years and figure out exactly what can go wrong. And then once we know that, we can also figure out what are the best ways in which we can mitigate these rare events and rare scenarios. And that would mean maybe making the load a little bit flexible, maybe adding a battery somewhere using the virtual power plants that are already in place and dispatching them more intelligently. So this is not rocket science, but it was also not possible with the tools that the utilities had at their disposal until very recently. So Amit, let's dig in further. Because I think part of what you're saying is that there are these multiple silos within the utility that each one of them has different data. But I think also what you're saying is that they have different responsibilities, right? And so none of the three of them actually truly understands how to fit a data center into their grid, right? And so why don't you take a step-by-step as to why you guys need to exist? Why do folks need to use you? Yeah, so as Jigger was mentioning earlier, this is something which is not just planning. It is not just operations. You have to bring many different parts of the utilities who have historically existed in silos and they don't have the same view and visibility together. But it is actually a lot more than just the internals of the utilities themselves. The way we unlock capacity is not by saying utilities need to become more efficient. We also expect the customers to behave in different ways and become better citizens of the grid. And one of the challenges that we see is the communication gap that exists between the customers of the utilities and how the utilities work across all the different functions. And so part of our value proposition is that we come in with a fresh pair of eyes and we act as a neutral third party and we are trying to figure out how we can build the bridges between the utilities and their customers and we can provide visibility to all the stakeholders which includes the regulators which includes the ISOs, of course, different silos within the utility. And then once we are able to create that common picture, we can overcome the objections that each one of these stakeholders might have and give them the visibility and what it means for them. So for example, for the planners, they want to make sure that the reliability of the system is not going to be compromised if they added a particular new load into the system and we quantify that for them. We go to the operators, they want to know this new type of flexibility, is it qualified, is it going to show up, what happens if it doesn't show up who's going to take the risk from an operations perspective and we are able to quantify that precisely in terms of how that works. The customers want to know what kind of flexibility do they have to bring? Are they going to get curtailed? How many times are they going to get curtailed? Is their compute going to get impacted? And we can provide that visibility to the customers so that they can figure out what is the impact on their business operations. The regulators want to know what is the impact to rates for the ability is a big issue right now. And the current narrative in the market is that data centers are coming in and they are taking away all the power and it's driving up rates for everybody else. And so that is one big part of our value proposition is that by using the infrastructure that we already have more effectively, we can help with the affordability question. We can actually help reduce the rates for everybody. So when you're talking about customers, are you talking about hyperscalers? Are you talking about all like other types of large load? Are you talking about homeowners? Yeah, when I talk about rates and customers, that is anybody who is getting electricity from the network because this network is a fixed cost that we all pay for as consumers of electricity based on the usage. And if you can get more usage out of this asset, if you can increase the utilization from 30% to 40% that helps bring the cost down for all the consumers of the electricity. In fact, we published a white paper recently which shows that every new gigawatt of capacity added on an existing network using the approach of grid care brings the rates down by roughly 5% for a typical and rich size utility, which is very substantial. Wow, that's really impressive. If utilities run the airline business, they get paid for having enough planes on the busiest travel day of the year and charging everyone more all year to keep that capacity. Of course, that's just how the business works. The incentive is to build more infrastructure and not to get more out of what they already have. So how do you sell a product that helps utilities use their grid better when their business model rewards them for building new grid infrastructure? Yeah, I think that is another one of these myths or legacy assumptions that are due for a challenge. So you're absolutely right that in an economy where there is no growth happening for the utilities, the only way they could make money historically was by building more infrastructure and the only justification that often existed was to build this infrastructure in the name of reliability and that by definition means that we end up over building. But what has changed in the last one to two years is that we are seeing this unprecedented growth in demand for AI. And now the utilities are realizing that they are in a competitive environment, even though they still want to deploy capital and they want to build more things. The timelines of deploying capital is several years out. The earliest that they can build a new transmission line might be five years out. If they can get more revenue on their existing infrastructure, then their earnings can go up higher today. So that's one big change which is happening, especially for investor owned utilities. They realize that they are in a competitive environment and if they don't attract this growth now, some other utility might attract the data centers. But I think that's going to be great. We're going to call that your hat take of the episode. Okay, that's great. But I think that the second big driver which I think is maybe even more important and that is more universal. It's not just for investor owned utilities. It works for public utilities as well is the crisis of affordability in electricity rates, which has become a bipartisan issue. So even if the utilities want to deploy more capital, they are not getting these rates approved because the historical way of deploying capital was to rate base it, which increases the rates for everybody. And the theory is that eventually the benefits will outweigh and the rates will come down. But I mean that doesn't happen most of the times. So now the legitimate upgrades that the utilities have are getting pushed out because there is just a lot of community backlash around affordability. We are making it possible to not have data centers be viewed as a trade off between growth and affordability. We are saying that if we can use the asset more effectively and we can bring these large loads sooner, that is beneficial for everyone. Of course, the data centers benefit. The utilities get their earnings sooner. But because we are now immortalizing the cost of a fixed infrastructure over more electrons, we are able to reduce the rates for everybody. And this is where our white paper shows that every new gigawatt of data centers that come online or for that matter, any new critical infrastructure doesn't have to be data centered. But if they come online on the existing infrastructure, that can reduce rates by about 5% for all consumers, all ratepayers, all residential as well as commercial customers of the year 30. One thing I thought about on that was it sounds like you're in some ways a mediator, right? Like the value of a mediator is that the data center trusts that you'll do a better job speaking utility. And that the utility trusts that you'll do a better job speaking data center. Is that right? Yeah, I think mediator is a pretty good analogy, except that I don't like the assumption that the two sides are necessarily fighting each other that might be the case sometimes. I think we are in a moment of time where actually both sides are trying to work with each other. They just don't know how to work with each other. So I like to think of ourselves more as a bridge where we say we'll create the bridge. Both sides will have to do a few things differently. And if they both are willing to make those changes, then they can meet in the middle, which is good for utilities as well as the data centers. OK, so there's definitely a major irony here that we're sitting with. AI is creating the biggest surge in electricity demands in a generation. We talk about that all the time on the show. And the solution to finding the power for AI it turns out might actually be AI. And you're using generative AI to solve AI's own infrastructure bottleneck. So is that as circular as it sounds? Like do you personally believe that AI is going to save us from some of these very problems that it has created? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we can call it irony. I like to think of it as a virtuous cycle. That is really the promise of AI. The more we become intelligent and the more we can squeeze out from the existing infrastructure, the more abundance it creates. And that's true for I think many areas, but I do think that the solution of getting out of the current situation is to just become smarter about what we have and get more out of the system that we have already deployed. And then of course, as we grow, it will also make possible to deploy more and more things because it will allow us to deploy that capital in this more efficient manner. And where does this end up going, Amit? Like, so when you think about what you're doing for one client, right, let's call it a data center, are you in the end mapping out the utility grid for your clients? And then are you giving them a map in the end saying, well, you could put a five megawatt EV charging system here. And you could probably fit another 185 kilowatts worth of manufacturing load growth here. And you know, all this other stuff. I mean, does this become like a real time map for them on load growth? Yeah. And not just load growth, by the way. I think you have the other side of the equation as well, where you have, I don't know what is the current number, but 2.6 10 awards of generation, which is also stuck waiting to get connected to the grid. And like right now, all these processes are run in a very siloed manner. When you study generation, you don't look at the load and vice versa. So this is really an MRI for the grid in many ways. If you know where the constraints are and when they're happening, you have opportunities to add load in conjunction with the data centers. You can have power that can be used for other critical infrastructure for your hospitals, for your manufacturing plans, for electrification of transportation and other things. So really, we need to look at the grid as a system that it was designed to be. And once we understand it, we can double the capacity of this grid. And even if we double the capacity of the grid, we are only talking about going from 30% utilization to 60% utilization. So it's not like climbing Mount Everest in terms of efficiency of the system. But that would mean more than 300 gigawatts of capacity unlocked on the existing infrastructure, which we can do in the next three to five years. Literally, there is no new technology that needs to be deployed or developed for that. It's completely massive. No, I totally agree with you. I mean, but I guess what I'm trying to understand though, is this really a software problem, right? Or is it, you know, sort of a contract and risk question, right? Is it really just that the utility company sort of need to change their posture, right, to how they unlock this 300 gigawatts in your mind? I am conservative and I say 100 gigawatts, but I'll take your number. You know, like, but is it really a risk posture that there's a bunch of people in the bowels of the utility and the building who are like, oh, we could never run the grid that way. Like, the grid would break if we did that. You know, we need all this stuff that my grandfather taught me how to do. Well, it's definitely a technology issue in the sense that technology is what enables the unknown. lock and we did not have this compute power in the past to analyze the grid in this well detail. But it's not necessarily stops a technology. Ultimately, it's a trust challenge and all the different stakeholders who are part of this grid ecosystem need to feel comfortable that what we are doing is fair for them. And I think technology allows us to create that trust and the contracts that are needed between all the different parties so that if a data center is getting power, they are not unfairly taking that power away from some other customer in return. They are bringing in the flexibility that is needed to keep the system running reliably and potentially reducing the rates for everybody else. So I think technology enables the contracts and the trust. But we do need to make sure all the different pieces of this ecosystem is brought together. And that includes the various silos within the utilities, but it goes beyond utilities. The data centers themselves have to trust that this is something that is going to work for them and they are able to get the capacity if they were flexible. The rate pairs and their advocates have to believe that this is going to bring the rates down and we are not allocating really nearly the capacity to one particular part of the society. And then regulators have to feel confident that this is done in a transparent neutral manner. So I think this is the journey that we have been going through and every part of US and every part of the world, they have differences in how the energy markets are structured, how they're regulated, and so on. And that's why I think we have to just go and prove it one at a time in every specific situation. But the thing which gives me hope is that at the end of the day, most of these utilities, if not all, are facing the same challenge. They want to solve affordability. They want to continue to grow. They want to enable economic growth in their regions. The physics of the grid, thankfully, it works the same way. I've deployed grid technologies in 20 plus countries and it's the same physics. So if it works in Portland, it works everywhere else. And at least in the North America, the reliability rules like NARC, rules are pretty much consistent. So everything that we do are under the current federal NARC work regulation. So that is very transferable in various jurisdictions. But some of the other stakeholders have to be brought along to make it truly scalable. Yeah. So I mean, VPPs are not new. We have been talking about Jiggrin I have been banging the drum on VPPs for years now. So it seems like this is the moment. And we're really starting to feel the scale and momentum. Why do you think that this is the time? And it's finally VPPs moment to shine. Just like both of you, I've been in the VPP business for the last 10 plus years. So I think over this time, VPPs were a solution that were looking for a problem. And we have always promoted VPPs as a mechanism for adding more renewable to the grid when the renewable is intermittent or as a mechanism for hedging prices for the participants, because we didn't want to create a scenario where supply is constrained and the demand is not flexible. Now, these were good use cases and we got quite far with this, but the economic value that you can get out of these VPPs was never high enough for these data centers to really care about it or to take the operational burden or perceived risk that comes with it. So as we deployed, I don't know, we had about eight gigawatts of VPPs in 20 countries. The only times you were able to get data centers to participate in these VPPs were with Bitcoin mines when the Bitcoin prices were in the toilet because that was the way for them to make money. But now it all comes down to Bitcoin, I mean, didn't Chris. So start off as like a Bitcoin miner and then, you know, now they're big data center company. Right. And which is great by the way, I love that because these Bitcoin companies are already very forward thinking about energy and flexibility and they were doing it. So they are like some of the most innovative companies out there who are realizing that by being flexible, they can get another leg up. And the real value now is that every megawatt that you bring online, three years, 25 to 30 million of new economic outcomes for these data centers. So that price is big and is worthwhile. And every data center, when they are given a choice of waiting for eight years and spending hundreds of millions of upgrade cost versus getting connected right now, but they just need to add some more flexibility on their data centers are choosing the latter option because it's just a no brainer. Like in Portland, we offered a flexible way of getting connected to six data centers. All six took that took it. They are all energized now and they all want to get more. So I don't think that any debate in my mind, at least whether data centers want to be flexible or not. No, I think that's right. I mean, the one thing that you talked about earlier, though, is about trust. And I'm curious whether you're seeing in all the engagements that you have that the broader population views your work as a way for the data center companies to cut the line and get capacity faster. Or whether they view this as a way to reduce rates and ultimately make the grid more affordable. I mean, I get your white paper, but are people believing it on the ground? I think there is definitely more work that needs to be done in terms of educating the public. And data centers can be done in the right way and they can be done in the wrong way. I think we have a lot more examples of situations where data centers have come online and they have increased the rates for everybody. There are far fewer examples of the kind of things that we are trying to do. And this is clearly an education and awareness issue, but the science is on our side. And it's not even that difficult. It's like a numerator versus denominator. If you increase the denominator and you keep the numerator the same, then the number goes down. So I think that's exactly right. I mean, you want to limit investment in the numerator and you want to sell more or kill what hours in the denominator. You know, we've spent a lot of time in the last few months talking about grid utilization. And so it's and I know that there's this, there's this data disconnect and the utilities claim to not have the distribution level data that they need to optimize grid utilization. So it's so refreshing to speak to someone who's like, hi, we're over here and we've got that for you. Feel free to give us a call, you know, because we keep hearing like the grid is so, so poorly utilized in so many places in this country. So I'm excited to see what happens with the growth of your company. I mean, I know that you, you won one of the most innovative companies of 2026 from Fast Company magazine, amazing, amazing congratulations. But innovation and energy so often means piloting something for years and never scaling it, which is like jiggers, personal mission and life defects. And we talk about this all the time. So what makes grid care different from every other promising grid tech company that got stuck in pilot mode because you guys are just up, up, up and away. Well, so we don't do pilots and my challenge to the utilities is that bring your toughest, most visible, most valuable problem. And we will find you an answer in less than 90 days. And we have done more than a gigawatt in the last six months. These were places which were considered hopeless when we walked in. And we found more capacity than even we thought would be possible. And even in these locations, we are finding more. At this point, we are in more than a dozen markets. We have more than 10 gigawatts of projects that we are actively analyzing. And part of the reason why we have been, being received so well is that we do offer a fairly risk free value proposition to everybody who is engaging with us. Our message to the utility is that look, give us a chance. All we need is some data that you already have because you have to run these studies anyway. And in 90 days, we are going to find an answer for you. And if we find more power, then you all are going to be heroes. You will increase your revenue internally. You will reduce the rates. Your governors will love you. And if you can't find the power, then you will have the satisfaction that you tried everything. And your stakeholders will know that you tried everything. So what do you have to lose? And our bet is that because the grid is being used for 30% of its capacity, we are almost always going to find power. And so far, that has been true. And the same thing with data centers, they can stay in the queue that they have and wait for space data centers to happen, or they can give us a chance. And it's a net new voluntary option that they have, which if they get the power, they figure out how to pay us for the value that we have created. But otherwise, nobody is worse off. I feel like I'm at they wanted a space for other reasons. I feel like on it, it's like, you're you're kind of like looking in the couch cushions and finding a million bucks. - $25 million per megawatt. - It's so rare and somewhere right here. - It's like, it's like the chain that you find in your drawer when you open, except that here it's like trillions of dollars and it's also an actual competitive mess issue which can literally define the course of humanity for the next hundred years. - The coin to made a rare. - Metals. (laughing) - So, you know, we talk a lot about the United States, which I love, but you know, is this really a Western grid opportunity, right, like Europe and the United States and things like that? Or, you know, like even if you went to China where it seems like you could just build, you know, grids easily, would they find a similar grid utilization and find a similar opportunity? - Yeah, look, I think the fact that grid is getting sub optimally used, that is a fairly universal problem. Now places where building is easier, you can live with that inefficiency for a long period of time and just continue to build, but places in US, even a big part of Asia, I mean, we are getting a lot of inbound from Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Australia, most of Europe, Eastern, Western Europe. These are places where the grid is constrained and building new stuff is not that easy and it takes time, whether it's supply chain, whether it's permits, whether it's some other regulation that is out there. In those places, what you can do with the existing grid becomes extremely valuable because that is something which is already there and all you need to do is become intelligent and unlock it. - So my final question slash statement here is that get you to explain to us, if you're a governor, you're one of the 36 governors races across the country, right, they just listen to this podcast because they obviously all listen to this podcast. And they just realize that you can unlock 300,000 megawatts of capacity, right? Why should they continue to work on expanding the grid broadly? Why should they continue to like figure out a way to put more generation in? Like, I mean, I'm curious like why you think that they should continue to like do all of the measures at the same time when they've got such a silver bullet, in grid care. - Yeah, my message to them is that it's not one or the other. I think you want to optimize what you have. - I mean, it kind of is one or the other, right? They want like affordability. They'd like to put all of the way to the world on your shoulders on it, then you've got nice broad shoulders, you can handle the weight, but I'm just saying like, you know, in some ways, like I think the big pressure that I see is that people are constantly arguing with us about unlocking grid utilization because they're like, oh, but you're not keeping the pressure up on new transmission lines and we're gonna regret it one day. - Well, I don't think that is the question. I think the question that people should ask is utilization. I think if there is a demand that you are seeing and it's a real demand and building a transmission line brings that demand sooner, but in a way where the utilization of the system is going up, then I'm fine with that and I think that's the right decision. But if you're building something and the utilization goes from 30% to 25%, then by definition, all the other rate pairs are paying for it in some form or the other, like no matter how, it comes back to the numerator versus denominator question. So I think the right question to ask is that any project, whether it's a new data center that is coming in a new transmission line that you are trying to build, is that effective utilization of the grid, is it going up or is it going down? If it's going up, then it's good. If it is going down, then it's some cross-subcity that is being afforded to some people in the system. A man after my own heart. Well, you are the inspiration. So I hope we can make this the default. Well, it's so wonderful to have you on it. And thank you for jumping back into the CEO Frey. You have such an excellent track record of delivery. I think your previous companies were so successful. And you figured out how to get electric utilities to sign big contracts, which I think is what we need today. This trust gap that you talk about is so real. And so thanks for getting back in the Frey. Well, thank you so much for all the support and good wishes and all your vision and inspiration. Been a privilege to be on this show with you. Energy Empire is supported by S2G investments. If you haven't checked out their podcast, I highly recommend it. They have a great recent episode on the long-term effects of the Iran War and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In the episode, Sunjeev Krishnan, Frankl Sullivan, and Bala Nagarajan make a compelling case that this disruption could be the most powerful accelerate for renewable energy in a generation. And in future episodes, they'll be exploring how those forces are reshaping our food systems and ocean intelligence. Sound interesting? Go find the S2G podcast and start with the global energy order has changed. Now what? (humming) Wow, he has so many numbers. Like it is crazy. I mean, I always thought we were sort of managing to 50% utilization of the grid. I think he used 30%. Like, I mean, he was basically glass F empty in terms of how much of our existing grid that we're already using. But in some ways, it's even better because it means there's so much more capacity to unlock. One thing that I've learned in working on grid utilization this year is that a lot of these utilities and the system operators and the utility service areas that we have across the United States, they don't know how much of their grid they're using. Like, they truly do not have the data and they don't have the tools internally to actually understand how much of their system they're using. It's crazy when you actually think about it. And so here we have a company that has a solution that can come in and basically map that local grid and is literally, it's like finding, as I was saying in the episode, finding a million dollars in your couch cushions, it's just wild. Like, it's there the whole time and it's just being underutilized. Oh yeah, at 650 megawatts, I think that's a billion. Or even more, I think it's $50 billion now to build a 1,000 megawatt data center. So if you reduce that to 650 megawatts, I think that's something in the order of like $35 billion of value. I mean, it's crazy. It's wild. I mean, I'm so happy that finally, these technologies are getting their due and we're, and they're getting these big contracts and they're finally getting these relationships with utility companies where they can actually provide value to both utility, the customer, the end customer, whether that be a data center, a manufacturing, plants, et cetera, as well as the benefits flowing directly to everyday people in terms of reductions in their utility rates or downward pressure. So those utility rates are going to increase more slowly as a result of increased and improved grid utilization. So the thing I don't understand is why it's not just mandatory for all 160 plus investment utilities to hire somebody like this by the end of the year. I mean, maybe because their regulators just don't know that solutions like this are out there, but there are so many. I mean, I think about the work that the utilized coalition is doing and they're kind of a group of service providers that also have different solutions that can help to meet this moment in terms of like better utilizing the grid that we already have. We're seeing some states take action, Virginia recently passed a law that they are going to, actually, even just try and analyze how much capacity is available on their grid. As I was mentioning, like a lot of these utilities, they don't even know, they don't know what their current grid utilization is. So putting them into a posture where they have to prove that they need the polls and the wires before they actually construct them, it seems like common sense to me. Oh, totally, totally. I mean, it does feel like a big unlock and I'm glad to see folks are going to use it. Absolutely. Well, it was absolutely wonderful talking to Ameth and learning about his solution and all the hard data he has about the value. So yeah, let's hope that more utilities get wise to this. (singing) Welcome to Ask Jigger, our weekly segment where Jigger answers your questions about energy and honestly, anything else you're wondering about. Huge thanks to our sponsor, Octopus Energy for making this segment possible. And a quick reminder, anyone who sends in a question that Jigger answers on the show gets an energy empire hat from our brand new merch store. So send them in. Okay, let's get into it. Our first question comes from Tommy Burbis and he asks, "Jigger, what's your read on Freedom Forever's recent bankruptcy? They were one of the largest residential installers in the country. So what does it signal for the retrofit residential market which you may need to define for people, Jigger? And why is it so hard for retrofit residential companies to survive in the first place?" Yeah, it's a great question. And one that I think is, you know, come to the floor in the last year just 'cause we've had so many bankruptcies, not just Freedom Forever, but also Sonova and Sun Power and I think over $100. Basically, the market that they serve is existing residential homes, right? So you have a home that already has a home. exists. Someone knocks on your door and says, "Would you like to put solar panels on the roof and a battery in the garage?" And if you say, "Yes," then they put it in motion, file permits, do all the things, and a lot of them get financed, right, from people like Sonova or Sunpower in the past, and today it'd be Sunron or Palmetto. And what you find is that over time, what happened is we had low interest rates, and you had a lot of competition between good leap and Sunron and Sonova and others. And so they would give people credit, for instance, they would say, "Hey, we'll give you milestone payments while you're installing the solar project." And so every time you hit a milestone, we'll wire more money into your account. And so folks started being a lot leaner with how much money they had in the bank account. And then as things got worse for folks like Sonova, they started paying people late. They started paying that 30 days. They started paying that 60 days. They started paying that 90 days. And for people like Freedom Forever, they're like, "Wait, I'm running pretty tight here. I don't have all this extra money to pay salaries and do all the stuff while you're paying me late." And my balance sheet isn't strong enough to be able to go get a $100 million loan from the local credit union to be able to cover these losses. And so one of the big problems is that we basically run everything too hot. And when things went south, like in this case higher interest rates, weaker solar financing companies, then there was this domino fact that really took down Freedom Forever. All right. Our next question comes from Nikhil Vinod. And Nikhil says, "Jigger, here's a what if?" Say AI infrastructure turns out to be overbuilt. And the energy it actually needs comes in well below the predictions, which is certainly something that people are speculating about. In that world, what becomes the main use for all of the extra generation that we've built? Yeah, it's a good question. And one that I think we're not quite at that stage yet. So there's, you know, let's call it 35, 1 plus gigawatt data centers that have announced that they're under construction. When you look at the actual data, most of them are way delayed, right? They were supposed to start construction in 2026. Now most of them are delayed into 2027, 2028. I think the bigger risk is not that the load doesn't show up from AI data centers. My sense is that lots of people are using AI. And I think there's going to be a lot of AI load. I think the real disruption is going to be local versus central, right? So there's training for data centers, right? So that's training a new model. And right now that's maybe 500 megawatts of load to train a new model. That number is predicted to go to 4,000 megawatts by the end of the decade to train a new model. And then there's inference, right? Which is you playing with the cloud app or the ChacheebT app or creating an agent or doing whatever it is that you do with AI. And a lot of those tasks can be a 5 megawatt data center near your home or a 500 kilowatt data center that's in an abandoned office building or 100 kilowatt data center that's in the back of a telecom tower or even a 50 kilowatt data center like our friend Ardrow is experimenting with with span IO in his partnership with Nvidia and Pulty Homes. And so if that happens and we move to inference closer to the edge and we don't need these one gigawatt data centers, then that capacity could be excess capacity. Right now we're not there because we're so far behind in building a lot of that capacity that we haven't built a lot of excess capacity. And I would suggest to you that we're going to figure out whether we can move data centers to the edge by the end of this year. And I think I think we are going to successfully do that. And I think a lot of these one gigawatt data centers are going away. Next, Lousha Smith says, "Jigger, I work in hydro power and I've always wondered why it never gets the attention that wind, solar, nuclear, and storage do. Is it the price? The assumption that the good hydro resources are already tapped, which Canadian advocates say isn't true? Why doesn't hydro generate the same excitement as its peers? And is it doomed to follow coal towards obsolescence?" Oh, well, I know that when we worked at LPO, we maybe heard from the hydro industry that we weren't investing a lot in the development of that technology. So I think that that relates to this question. What do you think about this, Jigger? Yeah, so I spent a lot of time on hydro while we were serving. And there's a couple of big problems with hydro. One is that most of the best sites in the United States have been used. I mean, that's not true for Canada, but it is true for the US. The sites that are available now are much smaller sites and they're largely owned by the Army Corps of Engineers. And so you need permission from them to use some of their non-powered dams, they're called, to add power infrastructure to the dams. And then if you remember, we couldn't actually finance those on the loan programs office because of the federal nexus. We couldn't lend money to something that the Army Corps of Engineers was a part of. And so there's some of that. The other problem that you have is that we have a lot of old hydro dams. And if you just upgraded them with new software and new equipment, etc, you could double triple the amount of energy that they produce. But it takes like five years to get through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to get approval to do that. And so I know that the Trump administration is trying to make all of that more streamlined, but I think they're working more nuclear than they are in hydro. And then the last piece of it is that the people who own hydro assets are sticks in the mud. So they're like electric utilities or they're like old people who are 80 years old and love the money that comes off of them. So when you go to them to try to buy the hydro assets off of them and say, you're not doing anything with these, we'd love to buy them and upgrade them. They make your life a living hell to try to buy these assets from them. And so you're just like, screw it. I'm going to work on geothermal and nuclear because like I'd rather do that than, you know, like work on hydro. And so hydro needs a refresh. And we never did a hydro lift off report, but we need to. And that's all for Ask Jigger this week. Remember you can send in your own questions. And like I said, if yours gets picked, there's an energy empire hat in it for you. The link is in the show notes for our merch store. Please check out our merch store. Thanks for listening as always. You can find us at energyempire.fm and wherever you get your podcasts as well as YouTube. If you've got a second, please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcast because it makes a huge difference in helps other people find the pod. Thanks so much.