I feel like, Amit, it's like you're kind of like looking in
the couch cushions and finding 1,000,000 bucks.
That's what it feels. Like $25 million per MW.
It's, it's like, it's like the change that you find in your
drawer when you open, 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 100 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, you
know, I just dropped my kids off at Legoland and I have one.
But then, you know, we have cousins who joined him and then
had to like, rush over to the recording studio to like, you
know, record the podcast. And so Legoland I think is like
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.
Are you? What are those crabs?
Americana, look at this, Rosie. Americana, look at you with your
patriotism and your commitment to the pod that you are even
recording from vacation. How's your?
Wife feel about that? 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, OK? 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 my, I have a 10 year old and he he, 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 day.
So I agree. You.
The conversation we're having with Ahmed 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 that
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
Granholm, which is right, what governors can do, right?
A lot in this moment. Governors need to become pH DS
and 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 on to 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 we're seeing the real
world benefits of them. And so, you know, Amit has like
the best example of 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 #3
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 lawnmower is stranded too.
Yes, but your lawnmower can't power your house.
Those cars charge at the worst hours because nobody's
coordinating them. Fix the 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 comms
at Octopus Energy North America. Link is in the show notes.
Amit, everyone is acting as if the grid is maxed out.
Interconnection queues 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 Jagger, 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. So thank.
You for you know, like you can, you can expand that answer
further, Amit, like you know, all all kind words are
appreciated. No, but no, we, we love what
you're doing now. I mean, you obviously had all
these success stories in terms of, you know, companies you
started auto grid, you sold to Schneider Electric.
So we're excited that you're back in the game.
Like, I mean, you know, 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 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 ACEO of another startup. But I think with the 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 1/3 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
are 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 squeeze a lot more out of
it. And if you can do it in code,
not copper and concrete, we can do it in 6 to 12 months, not 6
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 $64,000,000 in your latest round and you know you've
had some early wins with Portland General and National
Grid 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 MW right now.
If you look at the revenue of what AI is generating, it's
somewhere in the range of 10 to $20 million per year per MW of
capacity that can be unlocked. And so if you look at 100 MW
data centre, 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 chips to
space because they think they've run out of all the capacity on
Earth. It means they want to invest in
all kinds of technologies, from nuclear fission to fusion.
And look, I'm 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 510 years out.
And as I mentioned earlier, the 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 NVIDIA
way back and then many other companies and John Doerr 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 1/3 of
the time and it's, you know, obviously used more than that
during peak, but less than that at other times, right?
And you know, 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 EEI and then you know the other rest, the
other analogy people use is a restaurant, right?
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 1/3 or 1/2 right, depending on the
market that you're in? Yeah, I think the restaurant
analogy is actually quite apartment in this scenario.
I use the airplanes on a Thanksgiving Day, but it's the
same 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. So 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, So what we are able to do now with modern AI technologies
is look across time and look across multiple locations
instead of 1 location at a time. And we are able to find precise
conditions under which the grid get can get constrained.
And just just to do some quick math, if you let's say, have
10,000 things on your grid, the NARC 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 right off the bat half 100 million scenarios that you
have to calculate. That's shocking.
Like, 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, but they will run
these simulations and you cannot run 100 million simulation.
So you will make some worst case assumptions and you will say,
well, my load 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
Jaguar, 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 plants. 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 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 ten 10s of years.
And now because of the computation, we can do that
granular second by second analysis, but look at
quadrillions 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 intelligent.
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, like, let's dig in
further because I think part of what you're saying is, 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 like none of the three of
them actually truly understands how to fit a data center into
their grid, right? And so like, 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 I mean, as Jigar 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 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 ISO's 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 customer 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. Affordability is a big issue
right now. And the current narrative in the
market is that data centers are coming in and they're taking
away all the power and it's driving up rates for everybody
else. And so that is 1 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 home owners?
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 GW of capacity added on an existing network using the
approach of grid care brings the rates down by roughly 5% for a
typical mid 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 are 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
5 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 the we're going to call.
That your hot take of the episode I think.
That's great. But I think that the 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 but 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 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
be 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.
The of course the data centers benefit, the utilities get their
earnings sooner. But because we are now
amortizing the cost of a fixed infrastructure or more
electrons, we are able to reduce the rates for everybody.
And this is where our white paper shows that every new GW 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
utility. One thing I thought about, Amit,
was it sounds like you're in some ways a mediator, right?
Like the value of a mediator is that the data centre trusts that
you'll do a better job speaking utility, and that the utility
trusts that you'll do a better job speaking data centre.
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
datacenters. 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 is 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 in this more efficient manner.
And where does this end up going, Ahmed?
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
can put A5 MW 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 group, 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
terawatts 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 plants, 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 the capacity of
this grid. And and even 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 basically.
Oh, it's completely massive. No, I totally agree with you.
I mean, but I guess what I'm trying to understand though, is
this this really a software problem, right, right.
Or is it, you know, sort of a contract and risk question,
right? Like is it really just that the
utility companies 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 in 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, it's definitely a technology issue in the sense
that technology is what enables the unlock and we did not have
this compute power in the past to analyze the great in this
detail. But it's not necessarily stops
at technology. Ultimately it's a trust
challenge and all the different stakeholders who are part of
this great 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 ratepayers and their advocates have to believe that
this is going to bring the rates down and we are not allocating
willingly 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, and that's why I think we have to just go and prove it one
at a time in every, 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 the reliability rules like Nurk
rules are pretty much consistent.
So everything that we do are under the current federal Nurk
fork regulation. So that is very transferable in
various jurisdictions, but some of the other stakeholders have
to be brought along to to make it truly scalable.
Yeah. So Amit, VPPS are not new.
We have been talking about Jigger and 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 that this is the time and it's 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'm, I think over this time VPPS were a solution that we're
looking for a problem. And we had 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 8 giga watts 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, Amit.
I mean, didn't Criso start off as like a Bitcoin miner and
then, you know, now they're a 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 the real value now is that every MW that you bring
online creates 25 to 30 million of new economic outcomes for
these data centers. So that price is big and is
worthwhile. And every data centre 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 there's 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 and 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, you know, reduce rates and and, you
know, 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 you know, data centres 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 centres 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 no. I think that's exactly right.
I mean you want to limit investment in the numerator and
you want to sell more kilowatt hours than a denominator.
You know, we, 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.
But 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, 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 in life to fix. 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 GW
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
analysing. 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 we 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 Amit, they want to go to space for other reasons.
I feel like, Amit, it's like you're kind of like looking in
the couch cushions and finding 1,000,000 bucks.
That's what it feels. Like $25 million per MW.
It's, it's like, it's like the change that you find in your
drawer when you open, 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 100 years. The coins are made of rare
metals. 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 suboptimally 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 and 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 to get you to
explain to us if you're a governor, right, you're one of
the 36 governors races across the country, right?
They just listened to this podcast because they obviously
all listen to this podcast and they just realized that you can
unlock 300,000 megawatts of capacity, right?
Why should they continue to work on expanding the grid broadly,
right? Why should they continue to like
figure out a way to put more generation and like, I mean, you
know, like, 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 great care?
Yeah, my message to them is that it's not one or the other.
I think you want to optimize. What you have kind of is one or
the other, right? They want like affordability.
They'd like to put all of the weight of 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 gradualization because they're
like, oh, but you're not keeping the pressure up on new
transmission lines. And we're going to 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 ratepayers 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're 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 subsidy 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 fray. You know, you have such an
excellent track record of delivery.
You know, 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 fray.
Well, thank you so much for all the support and good wishes and
all your vision and inspiration. It's 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
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start with the global energy order has changed now what?
Wow, he has so many numbers. Like it is crazy.
I mean, I always thought we were sort of managing the 50%
utilization of the grid. I think he used 30%.
Like, I mean, he was basically glass half 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. You know, 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 like 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
they 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 $1,000,000 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, or even more.
I think it's $50 billion now to build a 1000 MW data center.
So if you like reduce that to 650 megawatts, I think that's,
you know, something in the order of like $35 billion of value.
I mean, it's crazy. It's wild.
I mean, I, I'm so happy that finally these technologies are
getting their due and we're and they're getting these big
contracts and you know, they're finally getting these, you know,
relationships with utility companies where they can
actually provide value to both utility, the customer, the end
customer, whether that be a data center and manufacturing plants,
etcetera, 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 rate 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 investor owned 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 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 poles 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
starting to use it. Absolutely.
Well, it was absolutely wonderful talking to Amit 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. 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. OK, 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 fore in the last
year just because we've had so many bankruptcies, not just
Freedom Forever, but also Synova and Sun Power and I think over
100 installers. Basically the market that they
serve is existing residential homes, right?
So you have a home that already 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 Synova or
Sun Power in the past. And today it'd be Sunrun or
Palmetto. And what you find is, is that
over time, what happened is we had low interest rates and you
had a lot of competition between, you know, Good Leap and
Sunrun and Sonova and others. And so they would give people
credit. For instance, they would say,
hey, you know, 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 Synova, 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, you know, I'm running pretty tight
here. I don't have all this extra
money to pay salaries and do all this stuff while you're paying
me late, right? And my balance sheet isn't
strong enough to be able to go get $100 million loan from the
local credit union to be able to cover these losses, right?
And so one of the big problems is, is that we've basically run
everything too hot. And when things, you know, went
S like in this case, higher interest rates, weaker solar
financing companies, then, you know, there was this domino
effect that, you know, 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 have 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 one plus GW 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 have been delayed into 20272028.
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 4000 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 ChatGPT app
or creating an agent or doing whatever it is that you do with
AI. And a lot of those tasks can be
A5 MW 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 A50
kilowatt data center like our friend Archer was experimenting
with with Span IO and his partnership with NVIDIA and
Pulte Homes. And so if that happens and we
move to inference closer to the edge and we don't need these one
GW data centers, then that capacity could be excess
capacity. Right now we're not there
because we're so far behind and 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
GW data centers are going away. Next Uluche Smith, says Jigger.
I work in hydropower, 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 like 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, 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
power dams. They're called to add power
infrastructure to the dams. And then if you remember, we
couldn't actually finance those other loan programs office
because of the federal Nexus, like 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, etcetera, you could double, triple the amount of
energy that they produce. But it takes like 5 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 on nuclear than they are in
hydro. And then the last piece of it is
it 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 liftoff
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
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Thanks so much.