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42–Peter Kelly-Detwiler: The Future of Energy and Sustainability
24 Plays12 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum speaks with Peter Kelly-Detwiler, an expert in global energy markets and sustainability. Peter discusses the dynamic interplay between technology, economics, and policy shaping the energy sector today and into the future.
Peter addresses critical issues like the complexities of integrating renewable energy sources, the role of AI and advanced software in optimizing grid efficiency, and the geopolitical forces impacting energy markets. He also shares insights into cutting-edge developments such as modular nuclear power, advanced geothermal technology, and innovative storage solutions.
Topics Explored:
- The Evolution of Global Energy Markets
- Sustainability and Energy: Defining Practical Solutions
- The Role of Technological Innovation in Energy Transformation
- AI and Advanced Software Applications in Energy Grid Management
- Challenges and Opportunities in Renewable Energy Integration
- Geopolitical Impacts on Energy Markets and Infrastructure
- Emerging Technologies: Modular Nuclear, Geothermal, and Advanced Batteries
- Strategies for Future Energy Resilience and Adaptability
Links:
- Visit Peter’s website: http://peterkellydetwiler.com
- Connect with Peter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterkellydetwiler/
- Peter’s talk on forecasting challenges in energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dveBB-xXs0
- IPCC reports on climate and energy: https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/
For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast. My name is Eric Pradham. Today, I'm talking with Peter Kelly Detweiler, an energy expert, keynote speaker, and educator.
00:00:13
Speaker
I was lucky enough to work with Peter on a project recently and expect you will see in him exactly why I wanted him on the podcast. He's incredibly intelligent, kind, and also humble and caring.
00:00:28
Speaker
Peter has worked on energy efficiency projects in Africa and Chile and advised indigenous groups on hydropower developments in Canada, in addition to numerous other things, such as working with international nonprofits in the developing world.
00:00:47
Speaker
In our conversation, we explore how rapid technological advancements, geopolitical tensions, and continually shifting market dynamics are reshaping the global energy space.
00:01:00
Speaker
And Peter emphasizes the importance of an adaptable approach to energy solutions, highlighting emerging technologies that could significantly impact our future.
00:01:13
Speaker
And now I bring you Peter Kelly Detweiler. Peter, thank you for joining me. I'm really looking forward to having you here because while we have spoken before and we've worked together, there's actually quite a lot that I don't know about you. So I'm going to start there and say, would you mind telling me about yourself?
00:01:33
Speaker
Thank you, Eric. It's a pleasure to be here and to have worked with you in the past. Sure. um I'm in the electric energy space. I focus on sustainability in that space because electricity is one of the largest emitters globally of carbon dioxide.
00:01:49
Speaker
So I've been in electric power markets in some way, shape, or form for the last 35 years, including a couple of years in Chile working on energy efficiency projects. working for the Grand Council of the Cree Indians up in northern Quebec, even though I wasn't physically up there most of the time, on hydro projects they were opposing, Manitoba Cree, the Anishinaabe-Aski Nations, and so on, a whole bunch of aboriginal groups that needed advice. And I was not the expert at the time.
00:02:17
Speaker
I worked for a brilliant professional, and I learned at the foot of the master, and then eventually began to acquire skills and understanding around them electricity. Before that, I'd worked in places like Somalia and Ghana and had hitchhiked through Africa. And i had my original orientation had been economic development in developing countries. And then I sort of backwarded my way into the power space. And I've been there the last 35 years.
00:02:43
Speaker
and um I have built virtual power plants, which means paying people not to use power during periods of peak demand. I've worked on energy efficiency projects, worked in competitive retail, and and so have touched the electron from multiple different perspectives.
00:02:59
Speaker
And for the last 13 years, i don't I used to be an SVP at a large corporation, Constellation Energy. ah where I ran that virtual power plant. But for the last 13 years, my job, self-appointed, if you will, has been to understand the power grid in all of its complexity.
00:03:17
Speaker
And it's this fascinating beast. It's the most complex machine humanity's ever built. And it has all these nuances. And if you think about electricity, supply and demand must always be balanced in equilibrium. And if they're not, you have things like the outage we saw in Spain and Portugal that just happened.
00:03:36
Speaker
And then there's all different generating technologies and ways people use electricity. Of course, data centers coming in. So it's this incredible three-dimensional game of chess that every time I turn around and look, it seems like someone just added a new figure to the board. So it's an it's a it's just a fascinating space.
00:03:56
Speaker
Having mentioned working in Africa, I think it was Somalia, maybe, and and I think there was somewhere else hitchhiking off Africa, I think.
00:04:07
Speaker
was there Was there a bridge between whatever work you were doing there and getting into energy? Like you mentioned sustainability, you mentioned the Cree Nation.
00:04:20
Speaker
And so was there any work around power generation or utilization or extending access that somehow related, you know, bridge from your work in Africa to what you've been doing, you know, in more recent time?
00:04:35
Speaker
It was kind of a cold turkey in that sense, but i I grew up thinking that whatever I was going to do for a career, ah for me, it was going to be not just making money. I respect that people have to go and feed for the you know feed their families and provide.
00:04:51
Speaker
I felt like um at some point in in the future, I was going to be lying on a gurney with tubes in my nose and look back and ask myself, well, did you tell a good story? Was it a story people would be interested in? And and was it meaningful? And you had did you have some kind of hopefully positive impact on other people?
00:05:09
Speaker
So I got involved with with Africa because after I got out of college, I didn't have a job. And um i actually... i'm going to tell the story and we'll see whether it goes anywhere.
00:05:24
Speaker
But I was studying about the CIA and I was taking another course on Vietnam. And I wrote my paper in college on the role of the CIA in Vietnam.
00:05:35
Speaker
And Donald Gregg, who was George H.W. Bush's so national security advisor when he was vice president, came to dinner. There were eight of us because it was a small class.
00:05:46
Speaker
And he and I ended up sitting next to each other. And sure enough, he'd been chief of station in Saigon when everything I was writing about took place. So after a while, he and I just were talking to each other because he knew all the people. And I was curious as heck, like, what was it really like?
00:06:03
Speaker
So at some point he said to me, what are you going to do when you graduate college? And I said, eh, I was kind of embarrassed to say, well, my place plan is I'm going to make a bunch of money painting houses, and then I'm going to hitchhike to Rafra. I'm going to start in Egypt and go down through the Sudan and then eventually try and make it through the Sud into Kenya and then see where it takes me.
00:06:22
Speaker
And I said, that may yeah not be much of a plan. He goes, that's an excellent plan. He goes, one of my best friends at Yale went also into the CIA with me. He got shot down over China and he was 10 years in solitary confinement.
00:06:36
Speaker
And when he came back to the reunion at Yale, He'd been a prisoner for a long time, and everyone was really you know apologetic and sympathetic. And he said, no, no, no no no you got it wrong.
00:06:49
Speaker
hu I learned who I was in those 10 years. I look at you. You're in your second wife. You have beautiful cars. You have a house here and another one there. And no none of you understand why you exist.
00:07:00
Speaker
None of you. I wouldn't trade my experience with any of you. And so he looked at me and he says, go do your thing in Africa because you're going to learn so much about yourself on that trip. And for me, it was validation.
00:07:12
Speaker
Right? So then I went and I hitchhiked through Africa. I tied myself to the roof of a train on the way down through the Sudan, through the Nubian Desert, and had all kinds of amazing experiences climbing in the Ruinsori Mountains of the Moon in Uganda. And it wasn't always safe. I mean, we drove...
00:07:28
Speaker
one point I was on a bus with a guy with an AK-47 across his lap guarding the bus. You do stupid things when you're, you know, an 18-year-old, 19-year-old. But I came away enchanted with Africa. So then i went to graduate school at the Fletcher School, got a degree in Development Economics, met my wife. She'd worked in Jamaica in a home for destitute and dying.
00:07:50
Speaker
we ended up going to Ghana for a year working for Catholic Relief Services. Had a difficult pregnancy, came back. I didn't have a job. And she said, you should be looking at environmental issues. And I, because every time we got the economist and gone, there's the only thing you could read over there practically. He goes, she said, you always gravitate towards the environmental issues. You should look into that.
00:08:11
Speaker
And so I did and found a job related to energy. And then After that, found the job working for the Grand Council the Cree with a guy just starting up a consulting business. Didn't know anything about electricity and learned from him.
00:08:25
Speaker
and And that just sort of began unwinding the spool of my natural proclivities towards interest in really complex issues that had systems of systems implications, which at the which electricity does as a core, but so does the planet we live on. I mean, talk about systems of systems.
00:08:44
Speaker
The planet is the most complex system of systems we've ever encountered. And so the interaction between that planetary system of systems and the power grid and all our emissions and everything, that's what now excites me.
00:08:57
Speaker
But I've always wanted to do something that I thought was challenging, different, and meaningful because at the end of the day, I think our job on this planet is to love other people, um to be interested and interesting, and at the end of the day, tell the best story that we possibly can through the actions of our lives.
00:09:16
Speaker
Based on now your experience in electricity and and with the virtual power plants and so on, when you say things like sustainability or if we were to talk about renewables or green energy or whatever else, I'm not just asking about the word sustainability, but some of this terminology, if we can level set, what do some of these things mean when you say them?
00:09:42
Speaker
Well, I should start off by saying that I'm an extreme conservative. And when I say that, but to my mind, and being conservative means that you leave something for the next generation and the generation after that and the one after that.
00:09:58
Speaker
that the and And, you know, rampant consumption is the opposite of conservatism, right? And so then when you think about sustainability, to me, I define it as human activity that doesn't leave us as a species and all the other species out here that we cohabit this planet with worse off than when we started the process.
00:10:21
Speaker
Because if it is worse off, then inherently the system doesn't sustain itself. And so that's what I mean when I says this say sustainability. It means you could do what you're doing infinitum without depreciating the quality of your lives and the the things, the species around us, the entire ecosystem.
00:10:43
Speaker
Now, that's a tough order. If you think about it, what we're trying to do right now is to reorder the entire global energy system that has given us all the wonderful things we enjoy every single day. The conversation we're having right now, air-conditioned rooms, mobility, health, all of it, right?
00:11:03
Speaker
But we still, if we continue on the way we are going right now, four or five generations from now certainly would look different and probably not very good.
00:11:14
Speaker
And so the question is, given the technologies that we have, given our intelligence, given our natural curiosity, how can we develop new ways of doing things, both behavioral and technological, that don't disadvantage future generations?
00:11:29
Speaker
Am I assuming correctly then that
00:11:35
Speaker
you do not have a particular hammer that, you know, is everything, you're seeing everything as a nail and so you're able to pull out this one hammer of,
00:11:48
Speaker
some type of power generation, quote unquote, green energy or solar or whatever. It doesn't sound to me like you have one ideology or solution that you are wedded to as much as you have sort of an ethos, ah you know, you have a value or value system around whatever it is that we need to do to leave the next generation or the planet sort of better off.
00:12:18
Speaker
than it is right now. That's what you would advocate for? i think you're absolutely right. Almost every hammer slash nail situation has some negative externality as well.
00:12:30
Speaker
mean, look at lithium ion electric vehicles, right? Lithium, for example, lowers the water table in the Salas in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, right? So it's better than right?
00:12:43
Speaker
And diesel, but not perfect. Cobalt in those batteries, some batteries, has child labor components in it. no, you you can't. it Here's what I think you think you you have to do.
00:12:56
Speaker
you Everything should be informed by your ethos, whether you do it in your personal life or in your business life. I mean, first of all, that's a recipe for schizophrenia if we separate out and say, oh, we can treat people terribly because we're making a profit, but in our regular lives, we're going to be nice to everybody and love our children and our neighbor.
00:13:16
Speaker
Like that is a recipe for dysfunction right there. So everything needs to be informed ultimately by an ethos. Then the next recognition is that, okay,
00:13:26
Speaker
So this tool I'm holding up just happened to have it in front of me. This is an artifact. It's a stone artifact. It's probably 5,000 years old. If I had to ask this guy who made it, give me the technological forecast for the next five years, he'd go, oh, this stone.
00:13:41
Speaker
I said, okay, 100 years. Oh, stone, give me 1,000. still we have, you know, Neolithic, right? Stone. Today, i say, Eric, tell me where AI is going to be five years from now.
00:13:52
Speaker
And if you're smart, you'll say, i have no bloody idea because the technology is moving so fast. So anybody who's wedded to a hammer or a nail approach right now misses the fundamental aspect of technological change as we're the first quarter through the 21st century, which is the technology moves so fast that we have to be constantly open for what the new solutions can be and also which problems they may bring.
00:14:19
Speaker
Let's look at solar for one more moment. Okay, solar energy is awesome in the sense that the panels are relatively cheap. They're getting increasingly more efficient at converting photons into electrons.
00:14:31
Speaker
And therefore, we have a low carbon energy solution from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. And now we have places like California with so much solar that last year they curtailed, threw away thousands of megawatt hours of solar energy because they didn't know what to do with it.
00:14:51
Speaker
Now, you can take batteries and store that energy and move it into the evening, and increasingly that's happening. But the systems we're working with today are going to, as they mature, they migrate and they create new challenges to deal with.
00:15:07
Speaker
So there's there's a migration path where you can only integrate X amount of solar before you need batteries. And then you can only bring in so many batteries before you need longer batteries, for example, because let's say you're trying to do solar for your entire energy economy.
00:15:21
Speaker
What happens on the on the weeks when you have a five-day atmospheric river coming into California or, you know, overcast someplace else and the solar is cut by 50 percent? Okay, what do you do then?
00:15:33
Speaker
Well, you better have some other asset there. Right now, it's natural gas. It's transmission lines to bring power in from other places that aren't affected by the sun. It's batteries. It's a combination of things.
00:15:44
Speaker
It's a system of systems and the systems continue to evolve. So if you look in the tool chest, the hammer better look different every time you open it and you better recognize it doesn't have to be a hammer. It could be something else. Because again, what are we trying to accomplish?
00:16:00
Speaker
We're trying to accomplish a world for our children that's better than the world we have today, not worse. So you can't be wedded to the technology. You can only be wedded to the ethos and the approach. Given some of what you're saying, help me understand, you know, when I think you hear some fairly common criticisms that will go in waves, you know, about wind for a period of three to 10 years, maybe we would hear things like, oh, well, you know, there it's, these wind turbines are killing all of these birds.
00:16:39
Speaker
And In some venues, that's presented as a kind of a ah dig at environmentalists or whatever. if You want all this green energy, but now you're working against your own stated causes because, sure, you're producing energy, but it's unreliable energy, and then you're killing birds. What do you really want here?
00:17:03
Speaker
And so these things kind of um ebb and flow. Yep. A new thing will come up, whether it's about solar and it only works when the sun is shining or wind only works when the wind is blowing. And so then we can go to tidal energy and well, that's pretty consistent, right?
00:17:21
Speaker
But, you know, you hear these criticisms and I feel like if all I do is look at the headlines or if I'm not very involved in actually reading the articles or getting beyond what might be on Fox News or MSNBC, then i either just choose to not hold an opinion or I kind of have to adopt that, well, these people must be right and those people must be wrong. So as of today, I guess, and with your, as far as you're willing to go out for forecasting, you know, things are changing so quickly. So maybe it's six months or maybe you feel like, Hey, for the next three years, it's reasonable to assume this.
00:18:09
Speaker
What kind of is the state of renewable energy or even some of the more green solutions in terms of where they're working and where we might see the next most viable improvement?
00:18:27
Speaker
Sure. um So the first thing I totally agree with your um question or your critique or your positioning around, well, I hear this from here and this from here, and they come in waves.
00:18:41
Speaker
And my editorialism there is, um unfortunately, we don't have a lot of well-meaning people who are saying yes, because You're right.
00:18:52
Speaker
Wind turbines do kill a certain number of golden eagles or bats. There are now technologies, for example, there are sonic technologies that can deter birds from flying closer to the blades, those sorts of things, right?
00:19:04
Speaker
um there This conversation on many sides is not always inhabited by people who are willing to look at this entire thing and say, what is it that we all want in common?
00:19:17
Speaker
Which is... Health, wealth, again, being able to look at our children and think they're going to grow up in a world we would want to inhabit, right? So I step back to that first principles thing, but then i say, okay, let us acknowledge, instead of saying, no, those deficiencies don't exist, let us acknowledge what they are and say, okay, le wo into this let us look at this again as a system of systems.
00:19:41
Speaker
Is it better than coal emissions and sea level rise and potential crop failure and heat waves and all the other things that a large number of scientists think are headed our way.
00:19:52
Speaker
And don't give me this nonsense that CO2 is beneficial for plants. Yes, it is, but only through a certain point. Like, stop the smoke screen on that stuff, right? And then, so, let's have fair and honest conversations to the extent that we possibly can.
00:20:08
Speaker
So, on LinkedIn, I push back sometimes against these arguments, but I try and do it respectfully buttressed with a lot of knowledge because if it's a screech fest, how does that help anybody?
00:20:19
Speaker
Okay, so now let's look at this energy economy as we move forward. Step one is always do everything you possibly can as efficiently as you can. Right?
00:20:30
Speaker
So put in the the LED light bulbs. First of all, don't use... It kills me how many times people's lights are on and they're not in the room. So what happened? We burned a whole bunch of something or we put solar panels in and we illuminated a room and nobody was there.
00:20:44
Speaker
What is the point of that? And yet I see it... Not just my generation, it's younger generations, it's everybody. So first thing is, we really need to think about the implications of our consumption. And by the way, for me...
00:20:57
Speaker
The grossest word on the entire planet is not a vulgarity related to genitalia or fecal matter or anything. The ugliest word humanity has ever come up with is consumption and consumers because it turns us into these mindless worms that just rip through things and then...
00:21:16
Speaker
defecate something on the other side. It's such an ugly word. And I, you know, it's used all the time in consulting, et cetera. I think it reduces human beings to trash in some sense. It turns us into these mindless things that just, and maybe we are right. I mean, at some level of Martians would look at us and say, yes, you absolutely are consumers here.
00:21:37
Speaker
You were cutting down trees and ripping everything up and blah, blah, blah. I hate the word. But, okay, nonetheless, we live in a world where we do consume things. I consume information.
00:21:49
Speaker
That's the thing I probably do the most. But anyway, now let's step back and look at the system you asked about. Okay, so we start with the premise that we have a whole bunch of coal plants, and they're awesome in one sense.
00:22:02
Speaker
They store fuel on site, and unless it's really cold and the conveyor belts freeze up, you get the energy you need when you want it, and you can deliver it across the wires and poles and follow the fluctuation of demand by adding a little bit more, a little bit less to the coal plant.
00:22:19
Speaker
And then you bring in some hydropower, you know, pump storage where you're putting up up and down a hill, pump the water up at, you know, when there's a lot of sunshine or at night when demand is low, run up through the turbines in the daytime.
00:22:31
Speaker
Then you have your natural gas, which comes into the system. And then you have your solar and your wind and all that. That's what we're doing right now. Now, the solar... Once you get to, say, 30 or 40 percent renewable mix of wind and solar, now you have a lot of variability.
00:22:48
Speaker
You're making your gas plants work like heck because they're the things that can ramp up and ramp down the most quickly to accommodate for the variability of the renewables. Then, of course, you have your energy consumers that hopefully those consumers, right, that are could be wired to the signals of scarcity. So the time when you have to bring on a lot of batteries, which are expensive to supply power from six o'clock to nine o'clock, well, could be you send a signal out saying, if you charge an electric vehicle, then you're going to pay three times as much as you would have if you charged that vehicle at one o'clock in the afternoon when you could have absorbed a whole bunch of solar energy, which would have cost virtually nothing on the margin.
00:23:32
Speaker
So you actually integrate the demand side. And not talking rationing. I'm talking about elastic behavior. If the price goes to X, you change your behavior. Price of bread doubles on the shelf.
00:23:44
Speaker
You use less. You eat less, right? So sending signals that reflect costs is another really critical element of this thing. Now you bring in like your storage and ultimately batteries are good for three or four hours. There are other technologies that give you longer duration storage.
00:24:02
Speaker
There's one technology right now that's reverse rust. You know, the Neil Young thing, rust never sleeps. And the balls are about the size of this little blue marble that I hold up sometimes to represent represent the planet, golf ball size.
00:24:15
Speaker
And when they rust, when they oxidize, they release energy. And they have them in these washing machine-sized containers, and they recharge them by sort of de-rusting them. And these batteries can last 100 hours.
00:24:29
Speaker
They're just coming into the market now. Now, the one problem with these batteries is they lose 60% of the energy in the cycle every time you charge discharge because of the efficiencies that are inherent in the chemistry.
00:24:41
Speaker
But they will be a piece of this equation. And then you have things like enhanced and ah advanced geothermal, which didn't exist five years ago. What's that? Take fracking technology. You know, with fracking, since 2010, we've been able to go into shale that's hydrocarbon rich, drill down a mile, go sideways, hit it with 3,000 pounds per square inch of an explosion, a shockwave essentially, drive water and prop and and sand into the shale,
00:25:07
Speaker
The sand props open the pores. Gas under pressure flows out. We've become brilliant at this. We can drill a mile underground in less than a day, sideways, you know horizontal lateral drilling.
00:25:19
Speaker
So you take that same technology, which has made us the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, which we were 10 years ago, we didn't export any. Take that same technology, you drill down a little deeper into hot rock, granite, diamond tip quills, drills, go sideways.
00:25:36
Speaker
Take advantage of the fact that the heat down there is over 200 degrees centigrade. So like close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Smash up the rock with fracking. So you get lot of surface area, pump down a working fluid, often water, bring that water back up, hot enough to spin a turbine, generate electricity. The whole western half of this country has rock hot enough to do that.
00:25:56
Speaker
Or if you don't smash it up and frack it and use water, you can actually go down, drill sideways, sensors meet each other, and you put a pipe down there. And it's a closed-loop system.
00:26:08
Speaker
Then, Eric, they take this thing called supercritical CO2. It's carbon dioxide under pressure. So it's neither a gas nor a liquid, but it behaves like a liquid. And it boils at a much lower temperature.
00:26:20
Speaker
And it's the boiling that creates the pressure that creates the steam that spins the turbine. And so there's a company that just signed an agreement last week for 110 megawatts, which would be about 10% of a typical nuclear plant.
00:26:31
Speaker
with the Presidio Municipal Association in Western Texas. And they're going to start by the end of next year delivering the first, say, 10 megawatts of this advanced geothermal.
00:26:43
Speaker
So this, again, is a technology that's totally an offshoot from fracking. Didn't exist. Five years ago, six years ago, and now it's coming pretty rapidly into the mainstream. Google has a contract through the Nevada utility with one of these companies for 115 megawatts that they're going to start getting delivered soon.
00:27:03
Speaker
Southern California Edison, the utility out that serves LA near LA, LA has its own utility. They have a contract for 320 megawatts, so about a third the size of a large nuke.
00:27:14
Speaker
Also, for this geothermal, this new type of geothermal, it's not the old geothermal on the ring of fire where you drill into rock that had hot water into it by volcanoes. Now, this is radiative heat coming up from the Earth from when it was formed that essentially is trapped under the rock and we can tap So these are the kinds of technologies that exist out there around the corner. And then there's modular nuclear, little baby nukes.
00:27:40
Speaker
about the third of the size to a tenth the size of a normal nuke, maybe even a 20th the size, some of them. And they have different ways of, like, fail-safe mechanisms.
00:27:52
Speaker
So remember when Fukushima had its little close to meltdown? Tsunami comes, hits the reactor. Worse than that, hits the diesel that is meant to cool the reactor if the reactor goes offline, because the fissile material heats up over time.
00:28:07
Speaker
It's the same issue we have right now with Zaporizhia in the Ukraine, which is it's not running, it's not generating power, but it has to be kept cool. And so there have been a couple of times during the war when the Russians have been keeping diesel from getting to the plant.
00:28:24
Speaker
And we've been three or four or five days from a meltdown in the largest plant in Europe. and Okay. So that's the inherent design flaw that happened with Fukushima because the diesel didn't cool down the plant and Zaporizhia.
00:28:35
Speaker
That's what happens with lot your light water reactor designs. With these modular nukes, you can do things like, for example, you have a solid salt core, and the nuke keeps a fan running that keeps the core solid.
00:28:50
Speaker
And as soon as the nuke fails for some reason, the fan stops, the salt liquefies, and all the fissile material drops into a container and goes inert. So there are fail-safe designs in some of these new modular nuclear plants that never existed in the old ones.
00:29:09
Speaker
And so there are probably 10 companies right now working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for new designs. One of them just got approved last week. And then the question, and they they would build these in factories.
00:29:23
Speaker
So like, you know, when you build, you see you drive by a home that's being built, it's stick built, the carpenter's out there, you know, it's got rain, snow and everything, and things start to warp a little and the windows aren't quite square, your typical home.
00:29:35
Speaker
Or you get a modular home, like the one I'm sitting in here, which you'd never know it from outside. except the walls are thicker, built in a factory, so everything's plumb. And then they ship the boxes, and then a crane puts it all together. And then, of course, you bring in your teams, the Vietnamese do the floor, the Salvadorans.
00:29:53
Speaker
Was it the, there's another, it would they were latin Latinos, no, Ecuadorans. They did the shingling. It's amazing how, you know, each group, ethnic groups, do certain things in new homes. But anyway, so now you could build these modular components in a factory, do all the QC in the factory, then ship them to the site and assemble them sort of Lego style on the site. And the beauty of that is, unlike these massive nukes where any large construction project, if this thing stops, all the contractors downstream, their meters are still running. Now you start to have cost overruns, big ones.
00:30:28
Speaker
So that, for example, the bottle plant that was built, the nuclear plant that just got commissioned last year, was started at a $14 billion dollars price tag, ended up at $34 billion and bankrupted Westinghouse.
00:30:38
Speaker
Because there's things like issues with the with the welding and so on that hold everything up all the way down. Now, with these, the idea is as long as we can build them cheap in the factory, we could probably install them at cost. But, of course, then there's the question of NIMBYism, who wants a little nuke? Safety, like are we going have to have guards for all these things?
00:30:58
Speaker
But then there's even Fusion, where Commonwealth Fusion here in Massachusetts They're working on an application in Virginia for in the mid 2030s because we're close to getting Fusion figured out, looks like, for the first time. So again, look in the toolbox, hammer and nail, oh, where'd they go? Oh, here's this new thing.
00:31:15
Speaker
What gets in the way of other than just, you know, certain technologies take time to become cost effective or to prove themselves in one manner or another, you know, in basic chemistry or physics, for example, things have to be tested other than giving some things some time to become cost efficient.
00:31:37
Speaker
What gets in the way of some of these other technologies going into the market and becoming an alternative to perhaps less efficient energy production mechanisms that we already have?
00:31:53
Speaker
So the main thing is, on the path to commercialization, you have this this sort of the bracing winds of competition. And also, when you're in the power sector, you also have a lot of regulation, right? The their utilities are regulated by state-level commissioners. And then the competitive markets where people can buy and sell power, there's a whole series of rules there that also sort of set the stage, set the sandbox for that.
00:32:21
Speaker
The main thing is when you think about whether or not a technology is going to succeed or not, and boy, if you get some people enamored with their hammers, crazy enamored with the hammers, the first thing you got to do, we'll take that toolbox analogy and say, what else in that toolbox can be used to drive a nail into that piece of wood relative to what I have? And what does it cost?
00:32:41
Speaker
And how many of them are being made right now? What is the competitor technology's road to commerciality? And how does it scale?
00:32:53
Speaker
And I'll give you an example. So, for example, um if you're solar or you're wind and you're competing against gas fire generators... 15 years ago, were competing against gas fire generators where they were drilling conventional wells, where they were looking for hydrocarbon deposits under non-permeable seals, salt usually, and then the gas would accumulate underneath. You find it through seismic activity, then you punch through and you get that gas and it's all under pressure with oil as well often, right? Conventional reservoirs.
00:33:23
Speaker
Then we figure out the shale. And first it was like $5 in MMBTU for shale. Then eight now it's like three, sometimes two.
00:33:34
Speaker
Okay, so that feeds into your gas turbines. Then the question is, how efficient is that gas turbine? How much do they cost? Well, Siemens and GE and Mitsubishi are making tons of those gas turbines.
00:33:44
Speaker
So now you're basically looking at, okay, here's my avoided cost from a gas turbine, which often sets the price in the market. So then the question is, How do I differentiate whatever I'm trying to do versus that existing technology which is out there?
00:33:59
Speaker
ah give you another example. Lithium-ion batteries are now permeating the power grid in lots of different places. Now, lithium-ion batteries are light because lithium is the lightest metal in the periodic table.
00:34:12
Speaker
That has zero advantage, relatively speaking, to the power grid. It has all kinds of advantage to transportation because you don't want to carry around batteries. You don't see electric vehicles with lead-acid batteries because you'd have to build them like tanks.
00:34:26
Speaker
right, carry around all that weight. With lithium-ion batteries, you have to carry around relatively little weight in transportation, which is why now 50% of the vehicles sold in China are electric.
00:34:38
Speaker
Now, there's something called Wright's Law. In the early 1900s, an economist named Theodore Wright looked at airframe manufacturing planes and said, huh, every time there's this doubling globally of cumulative output of airframes, labor costs fall 10 to 15%.
00:34:55
Speaker
Hmm. I wonder if that is replicable in other industries. And now, turns out every time you double the global cumulative output of solar, if as long as you're not talking about tariffs and other, you know, COVID supply chain issues, costs fall by roughly 20 to 25 percent.
00:35:10
Speaker
Same thing with lithium-ion batteries. Okay, so now you take all those batteries for the transportation sector and go, huh, wonder if those at work in the grid. Not perfect for the grid. Sometimes they, not that often, but sometimes they have thermal runaway and catch on fire. You know, there's other challenges with them.
00:35:27
Speaker
But now you have this thing that's really great at responding quickly to deviation and frequency, can manage supply and demand. Okay, what if I have a better battery tech out there, that 100-hour one, for example?
00:35:40
Speaker
Okay. That lithium-ion battery that only is cost-effective for three or four hours, it does all the fast-responsive grid-balancing services where the money is. The other 97 hours are valuable for those periods when there's an atmospheric river or, you know, all kinds of when when the wind stops for four or five days and the turbines don't blow.
00:36:03
Speaker
But how often does that happen? If the lithium-ion batteries hadn't existed, maybe the flow batteries or these iron-air batteries, the reverse rust ones, could have gotten these higher revenue streams as well.
00:36:16
Speaker
But now they're relegated over here because the lithium-ion sort of ripped out the underbelly of the great value stuff. So a lot of times when you're looking at a technology, you can't look at it in itself. You have to kind of go, well, who is who in the zoo? What else is out there?
00:36:31
Speaker
How is that technology evolving? What's the juggernaut or not behind it in terms of the the the inertia, right? The economic inertia, the adoption curve, et cetera.
00:36:43
Speaker
And so actually, that's what I do. for That's why I exist professionally is to look at all these different pieces and conjecture what's going to happen if.
00:36:55
Speaker
10 years ago, what if we married solar and batteries? Oh, that's like peanut butter and jelly. That's an obvious one. Now, more than 50% of the solar that goes into the United States has batteries attached because it has to. It it doesn't make economic sense not to do it.
00:37:10
Speaker
so But I often will caution clients, if you're not looking at these other sectors, one of these could smack you up the head like with like a two by a four with a nail in it.
00:37:21
Speaker
Without you even knowing because you didn't think to look over there in terms of how it could either help your business model because there's complementarity or destroy it because they're trying to do the same thing you're trying to do and they're going to overlap your value proposition and do it faster and better than you are.
00:37:37
Speaker
So long answer to a short question, but I always caution people and I teach all these classes. on everything, you know, seven hour classes and i and do a lot of keynotes. And I always caution people, okay, you just ask that question.
00:37:51
Speaker
I can give you the one minute response and you'll get nothing from it. Or I give you the three to four minutes and contextually, you'll have a glimmering of understanding of why the heck I think this way. How do you or how might things like just better software or AI or I don't know if blockchain plays in, but things that perhaps are more about decision making, um better decision making, more efficient prediction perhaps. of where energy demand might be higher or lower. how
00:38:28
Speaker
do some of those those kinds of technology changes, how are they affecting things today? And maybe in the kind of immediate term, what do you expect are the big opportunities or where we might see some gains in sustainability or we might just get more efficiency out of existing technology just with better software, for example?
00:38:53
Speaker
You let's take two examples. So the first one is, I'm going to remind myself, interconnection queue and then DERs. Okay. So the first one, interconnection queue. Right now, there's twice as much capacity that is the ability to instantaneously generate electricity.
00:39:11
Speaker
There's twice as much that wants to get connected to the grid, to the wires and poles, as is physically connected to the grid right now. Now, the stuff physically connected to the grid operates at higher capacity factors. That is more hours, of course, across the year because it's gas plants and coal plants.
00:39:29
Speaker
And a lot of what wants to get connected is solar and wind. And like solar only operates 25% of the time. If you took all the hours the solar panels produce relative to the output, it could have, an asset could have produced over the whole year.
00:39:42
Speaker
Okay. And wind is like 40%. You with me so far? Okay. yeah So these assets want to connect to the grid and they have to have these studies because every time a new asset of any any meaningful size connects to the grid, it changes the power flow dynamics because power flows towards the path of least resistance.
00:39:59
Speaker
And so if you add this thing over here, it makes it changes the way the stream flows, if you will. And so often if you want to add new assets, you have to build new transmission infrastructure. and then the question is, who pays for it?
00:40:12
Speaker
yeah And it's usually a developer. But developer A could pay for all this infrastructure upgrade and then B and C come in and get a free ride. So what happens now is this interconnection process is taking four or five years. And we desperately need more new supply, especially with all this AI demand coming up.
00:40:30
Speaker
So this interconnection queue has been a problem because a lot of developers want to develop a project. Let's say they have a billion dollars. So they go, we don't know where we're going to get to yes fastest. So let's put five chips on the board and we'll go to this utility, this grid in Texas, the Midwestern, mid-continental grid, the mid-Atlantic grid, and um and two others.
00:40:54
Speaker
And basically, we'll request connections with all of them. And if this one wins, we'll pull the other chips off the board. Well, the modeling of the projects that are getting close to the finish line presumes that the things ahead of them are going to get built, which changes the power flow.
00:41:11
Speaker
So what if all of a sudden you rip this one out? That's a late stage withdrawal. Now, all the power flow modeling looks different. It's a heck of a problem for planners because it's very dynamic.
00:41:22
Speaker
Now you bring in Google and its subsidiary tapestry. They've already done this in in the Chilean grid. Now they're doing it with the mid-Atlantic power pool, saying, okay, let's apply artificial intelligence to that.
00:41:35
Speaker
You know when you like you go to um a train station and this train leaves the station and the whole board ripples down and you see all the new trains that are about to leave? Well, it's the same sort of thing. This gets ripped out.
00:41:46
Speaker
but didn today everything else Everything now changes with respect to the power flow modeling, right? AI can do that way faster than engineers with computers could do it otherwise.
00:41:57
Speaker
And they also, by the way, all the information that's submitted on PDFs, etc., So many times they're incomplete, inaccurate. AI can rip through that stuff and tell you immediately, is this missing?
00:42:09
Speaker
Is it correct? That sort of thing. So the interconnection queue, they found it's way faster in Chile. So that's one example, just to give you sort of a quotidian one. Let's try something that's much more fun and exciting.
00:42:21
Speaker
All right. So our power grid today is supersized for the period of peak demand on the hottest day of the year. And the planning is for one in 10 year loss of load.
00:42:32
Speaker
okay One outage every 10 years, which means we have an incredible excess of transmission and generation capacity that doesn't get used much of the time.
00:42:43
Speaker
On average, the grid gets used flat average about 40% of what it can do at its max. Okay? Super inefficient. if we I like to say if we ran airlines that way, you could show up at the counter two days before Thanksgiving, jump on a plane anywhere in the country for less than $250, and they couldn't turn you away, Eric.
00:43:04
Speaker
That's how the power grid works. Right? So the rest of the year would be awesome for you and me because we could stretch out across three seats and sleep. But we'd be paying a lot for it because we're paying to keep that fleet of airplanes, you know, in the hangers when they're not used. That's how the power grid works.
00:43:22
Speaker
So now we have this ability to bring in, for example, batteries. That battery in a home is 13, 14 kilowatt hours. That's about a third of your daily consumption. But what about the battery in my car outside? I just got a Hyundai Ioniq.
00:43:36
Speaker
Gives me 350 miles of range. I think that battery, I haven't looked, I think it's 80 kWh. maybe 90. So it's three times the size of my daily consumption. That vehicle outside is actually wired to deliver power back to the grid.
00:43:52
Speaker
It already has that capability built into the software. And we have 10% of the vehicles sold in this country last year, about 1.6% million and six million total in the U.S. now are electric.
00:44:05
Speaker
And many of them are bidirectional capable. So they could deliver power back to the grid. So now you have these massive batteries on wheels and cars only get used 5% of the time.
00:44:16
Speaker
So what if you had an artificial intelligence system that said, we know where those people park. We know when those vehicles are being used. They've given us permission to interact. Oh, by the way, we also know they want to heat their water at these times of the day with their electric heaters. So let's not do dumb things and heat the hot water at the same time everybody else is using electricity for air conditioning.
00:44:38
Speaker
So you potentially could have in a grid with 5 million customers, 20 million devices that are, you know, air conditioning switches, Nest thermostats, the whole thing, capable of interacting with the grid.
00:44:52
Speaker
And then you'd say, okay, we want to take this 40% and move it up to 41, 42. Let's charge the water heaters these times and not these times. Let's charge the vehicles these times and not these times. oh and let's start flowing power back from the vehicles into the grid so we don't have to build more stuff.
00:45:09
Speaker
And one last piece of the equation. When you see new housing developments go in or new EVs and so on, you know those little things on the poles outside your home that look like trash cans up there, little transformers?
00:45:22
Speaker
Well, a lot of those are 30 or 40 years old, and the reason they have to be replaced usually is because they hit thermal violations. On the hottest days, too many people are using electricity at the same time.
00:45:34
Speaker
So you could basically say, well, what if we change the way people use power and we didn't have to replace these trash can transformers? What would that be worth? So you can start actually coming up with localized avoided costs for 10 hours a year, 15 hours a year.
00:45:50
Speaker
Only AI could create a system that knows the what, the when, the where, the how much, the how long, at what avoided cost. It is a huge math problem. No more and no less than that at some level.
00:46:03
Speaker
And so if you informed AI and set up the rules with what it wanted to do and made permission-based and also anonymized so people don't lose, you know, data to you know, bad folks, you actually could theoretically set up a system that is way more efficient than the one today with market costs and then these really localized avoidant infrastructure costs.
00:46:26
Speaker
Like it's an economist's dream to do something like this. But if you look at AI, the concept is you have information with really low latency that flows at you. You take that raw data. You you run it through that. you know The neural network learns what's important, what isn't, and makes decisions, which then go to the grid edge and and happen automatically within it a layer of rules. And, of course, the customer's rules paramount.
00:46:51
Speaker
Don't mess with my car. At seven o'clock in the morning when I'm supposed to go to work, I need at least a hundred miles of range. Otherwise i opt out of the program or you pay me a penalty. right So these are the things that could happen in a future world. It's called transactive energy, where you could actually stack a series of costs, that trash can transformer, market prices at the same time, and a bunch of other things, and add them all up and flow them to the vehicles and all the devices that have if-then statements embedded in them.
00:47:20
Speaker
And now you could have a much more price-elastic ecosystem than we have today. that's where That's what I find very... It's scary, yes, But it's also really exciting.
00:47:32
Speaker
The energy space is highly regulated. you mentioned regulation at one point, which regulation has its benefits, in particular when, you know, you have things that affect people's lives.
00:47:50
Speaker
You know, if a hospital doesn't have power, then that affects people living or dying. And if my business is out of power, then we might not be generating revenue.
00:48:06
Speaker
People can't pay their mortgages yeah and so on. So there are many advantages to regulation. There are also plenty of disadvantages.
00:48:17
Speaker
And I suspect, though, that there are plenty of big and small businesses that chafe against regulation because my guess would be that whether I have a potential AI solution that's just somehow in the energy space,
00:48:41
Speaker
or I have a potential new technology that as a small business, as a startup, it might be quite difficult to break in. As a big business, I've seen you talk before about
00:48:57
Speaker
problems with forecasting, if I recall correctly, and how most forecasts tend to be fairly linear. And my guess would be that forecasts being fairly linear and not taking into account black swan events and so on, potential black swan events, right? Because it wouldn't be black swans. We don't know, by definition, yeah.
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah. Then my guess would be that That is, the challenges around forecasting are more common in big businesses due to many reasons.
00:49:35
Speaker
But what is the opportunity, I guess, for big businesses or even down to a startup?
00:49:46
Speaker
You know, regulations, I suspect, as I'm saying, might get in the way of a startup being able to bring in a new solution. ai or otherwise and yet big business big corporation power producer otherwise might also just be wedded to existing solutions so what opportunities exist for organizations to present new solutions or to change the current approaches
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, well, selling to the utilities directly is a hard one because, among other things, utilities are really risk-averse, and there's good reason for that because they keep the lights on, they keep us all alive. You know, and by the way, when we had that winter storm Yuri in Texas,
00:50:33
Speaker
right, ah where they had the outages for days, there was a period of time, Eric, where the the frequency, which is there's 60 hertz, there's 60 oscillations, 60 sine waves per second in our power grid.
00:50:45
Speaker
And the frequency fell to 59.4 for about four and a half minutes. Another four and a half minutes and machines, generators would have failed. And so we were, so, and and had they failed,
00:50:57
Speaker
um Texas probably would have been without power for three weeks or more and because they also have these little units called black start units. They're small generators, diesel gensets, that sit next to the larger power plants that are these designated black start plants.
00:51:11
Speaker
You crank up the little diesel one, it starts up the big one, and that one finds the frequency of the next one that's a black start unit, and you suture the grid together. Well, after that event, they found out that two-thirds of the black start units failed when they tested them.
00:51:25
Speaker
So if the grid had gone down, another form of the frequency had stayed at like 59.3, 59.4 Hertz, we would have seen the ninth largest economy in the world go black for maybe three weeks because they wouldn't have the black start capability.
00:51:41
Speaker
Now, think about that, right? Imagine the global economic calamity where there's no gas flowing out of Texas. There's no gas flowing for fertilizer, which comes into the spring and and feeds the Midwest crops and everything, right?
00:51:55
Speaker
And so you talk about the vital nature of electricity. That's a classic example of how close we skated to the edge of a very thin pond. So that's one reason regulation actually needs to be really, really critical.
00:52:09
Speaker
And what they didn't do there was they didn't regulate the interconnection between natural gas because it was gas freezing in the pipelines that didn't feed the generators that then didn't meet the load, which was increasing because of the need for heating, among other things. That was just a failure of regulation to start with as much as anything else.
00:52:27
Speaker
So regulation needs to get better. But if you're selling into it, selling to utilities is directly is hard, especially if you're selling software. The way utilities get compensated, they build stuff.
00:52:40
Speaker
And then they turn around to the regulators and say, we built this stuff and it cost a billion dollars and we want our 10% rate of return. And the Public Utilities Commission says 80% of what you built was used and useful. And we're going to give you an 8.5% rate of return and that's it.
00:52:54
Speaker
And if they can sneak in direct decorating the president's office, fine. What they don't allow them to rate base oftentimes is software. That gets expensed. So they don't make a profit on In fact, I was keynoting an event at a utility like two months ago, and somebody said we had this software solution, and the utility said, oh we can't rate-base that.
00:53:15
Speaker
So they put it in a box. And then they were able to sell it as a physical thing, and then they rate-base it. Stupid, right? But that's the logic that obtains. So if you're trying to sell into the system, you either have to have something that's really, really good that the utilities ultimately have to adopt because the regulators are pushing them to do it,
00:53:36
Speaker
But oftentimes what you do is you turn around and you sell to the end user and say, look, I can provide you with a product that cuts your power consumption or reduces your peak demand that accounts for 40% of your bill, you know, your instantaneous consumption.
00:53:50
Speaker
i can help you focus on that. So oftentimes vendors will turn around and say, okay, we understand your price environment, you, the customer, we're going to help you there. And so we'll embed our technology there. And then we may sell services to the grid.
00:54:06
Speaker
But we're not going to start there. And for example, that's how solar. Solar goes on rooftops. It gets leased or sold through power purchase agreements. And then at some point, the solar companies go, eh, so much solar, we've got to put storage in.
00:54:18
Speaker
So now they start putting batteries in. A place like California, more than 50% of new solar cells have batteries. Then the solar companies that have now become storage companies turn around and go, oh, Now we can sell these grid balancing services to maintain the frequency we just talked about and other services back to either utilities or to the grid operators that manage all the supply and flow.
00:54:38
Speaker
So oftentimes you start with the customer because you can get a foothold there. And then you turn around and figure out, well, how can leg into the larger environment? Are there geopolitical issues or tensions that help or maybe hinder the development or implementation of some of these technology existing or potential technologies?
00:55:04
Speaker
Tons of them everywhere you look. Let's start with one. Okay, so natural gas, right? um Last year in this country, on average, we consumed on a daily basis 90.3 billion cubic feet, so BCF per day, okay?
00:55:20
Speaker
um We exported about 13 BCF per day in the form of liquefied natural gas. We're now building our facilities, which are going to double that. So all things being equal, unless supply keeps up, now we basically put another straw into that drink, geopolitical exports to other places. Now, with the spat between China and the U.S., some of the liquid derivatives now have taxed tariffs on them that they didn't before.
00:55:49
Speaker
um So that could change the flow between China and the United States for LNG and other liquids. other liquids Then, of course, there's the European conflict or the Ukrainian conflict. And then what happened with you know Germany and other nations there that wanted more LNG. That popped the prices up for natural gas in this country in 2022, which in the wintertime caused electricity prices to soar as well.
00:56:14
Speaker
So just on a daily basis, what happens with gas, especially the LNGPs, can impact power prices. So that's one example. Let's take another one. The batteries that we're so fond of.
00:56:27
Speaker
Well, one company in China makes 34% of the world's lithium-ion batteries. And about, I think about 80% of the batteries now come out of China um because they've dominated the space.
00:56:39
Speaker
They're so good their manufacturing facilities. Yes, they got state-level support to build these things up. They have... While we play checkers and focus on the next quarter for our quarterly earnings, very myopically, I might add, they have a geostrategic view which says, let's play Go. you know Let us work out 10 or 15 or 20 years and figure out how we're going to dominate these industries.
00:57:03
Speaker
And in some senses, we fed into that by importing all of our materials from China. China produces, they process over 90% of the world's lithium, even though the raw material comes from the Altiplano and from...
00:57:16
Speaker
Australia, for example. Australia is the largest producer of rispotamine, or which then feeds into lithium, but comes out of China. Solar panels. So we used to import solar panels from China.
00:57:28
Speaker
Then, anti-dumping. They were producing them below cost, crushing our industry here. So we said, oh, we're going to put tariffs on China. So what did China do? They set up factories in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam and fed the inputs into those countries at below cost.
00:57:45
Speaker
And then 80% of the panels we imported came out of those four countries. So now, under the Biden administration, there was an anti-dumping, countervailing tariff hearing. And Cambodia said, forget you, we're not even going to participate.
00:57:58
Speaker
So the U.S. said, OK, you get a 3,000% tariff. Now, other ones like JNCO, which is a huge Chinese company, and some of the other ones, they have tariffs between 40% and 300%.
00:58:10
Speaker
on the tariffs import, you know, from those four countries into the U.S. So in theory, then, that would help domestic producers that got subsidized through the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and also some stuff from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
00:58:25
Speaker
But now with the Republican House saying, oh we're going to strip away a lot of these subsidies, a lot of these factories, some of which are almost fully built, may not make it too light of day because it's such a dramatic, non-differentiating approach to this. There's no nuance in what just came out of that big, beautiful bill, right?
00:58:48
Speaker
What really is needed, first of all, in my view, the tariffs should have been more subtle to start with. Take solar or batteries. You have a 30% investment tax credit. So if you spend $100, you basically can take 30% and say, okay, that can offset our tax obligation.
00:59:08
Speaker
Well, there was nothing that said after X amount of installed capacity, the tariffs go down the ITC, I'm sorry, the credits go down to 25% or 20% or 15%. subtlety there whatsoever. Okay. no subtlety there whatsoever So, of course, that invites the opposition to come in and say, see, this is a waste of taxpayer money. Or at least we're overpaying relative to what we needed to pay.
00:59:31
Speaker
And you can't, I mean, yes, you can make an argument against it, but... I try and keep an open mind on these things. If I were going to design the tariffs, they would have declined over time based on volumes and success, right? We didn't do that.
00:59:44
Speaker
So now you have a situation where we don't know what the equilibrium is going to look like with China. New stat between Xi and Trump every day seems like. And business planners don't know what to do because their shipment coming in was affected by tariffs. The next one may not. But one after that one could have 20%. Nobody knows right now.
01:00:06
Speaker
And so everybody's caught up in this geopolitical thing. there was um There was a company just the other day that said, we're going to lay off people because we don't know what equilibrium looks like right now.
01:00:18
Speaker
And we're basically, it was a smaller company in the solar space. And they said, we're just, you know, getting hit by this cudgel of the tariff uncertainty. and And, you know, the big boys are trying to turn around and put the costs on us. And we just don't know what to do.
01:00:32
Speaker
The thing businesses hate more than anything else is uncertainty. It's like, if you're going to beat me three times, just tell me that and hit me three times and let me go. Don't keep me wincing.
01:00:43
Speaker
When's the next one going to come? That is the worst thing from a business environment. And that's where we are right now, geopolitically. I remember you telling me once, and I think I may have even seen it on your website or LinkedIn, that you subscribe to a very large number of email newsletters.
01:01:05
Speaker
And I recall you saying that some number of years ago, would spend an hour a day keeping up on the latest developments. But now it's more like three hours a day.
01:01:18
Speaker
And I think I remember you saying that part of the reason is that the the biggest contributor is things are moving so fast.
01:01:29
Speaker
And I suspect that yeah you having just mentioned uncertainty, it's not just that there's a new development in this technology. And then the next day, new development in the same technology.
01:01:44
Speaker
I'm sure there are plenty of technology or software, hardware, or whatever it is, developments, but also because of geopolitical tensions or tariffs or business deals yeah there are just constant changes going on and so you keynote you teach and it's important for you to stay up to date I suppose I will throw in here I do watch your i think it's weekly and generally if I can do it yeah yeah
01:02:14
Speaker
the Your videos are really good. I really like them because for somebody who doesn't keep up in this space, I feel like in what, about five minutes or so, you do a great job for me at the very least of encapsulating Kind of the headlines, but just a little bit of analysis as well of what's going on in the space. So if anybody listening to this, I definitely recommend you check them out. I'll link to them in the show notes.
01:02:41
Speaker
But okay, so you consume a lot of information. ah lot is changing. And you get that information out through YouTube videos, through keynoting, through teaching.
01:02:54
Speaker
Are there places that you recommend people go or ways that they recommend that you recommend that people take advantage of the fact that you're doing all of this synthesis and analysis in your head? You know, do you have your own email newsletter?
01:03:11
Speaker
Do should people follow you on TikTok? What where is it that you would tell people, hey, if you want you want to keep up to date, come connect with me here.
01:03:23
Speaker
um Yes, I do read a lot. I read 43 newsletters now, and I had to add the whole data center thing in because all of a sudden, data centers represent this enormous amount of new demand.
01:03:34
Speaker
you know For 20 years, we were sort of, I like to say, flat, dumb, and happy. the The demand growth was like zero or close to. And now it's potentially a couple percent a year with some data centers larger than a city.
01:03:47
Speaker
And so I now have to understand things like parameters and tokens and inference and large language models and multimodel in multimodal models and all these things that I didn't have to because ah can't talk about power if I don't understand that.
01:04:01
Speaker
So I actually did a six-part video series on data centers because I had thought, okay, what's the best way to understand this? is I said, okay, I'll force myself to teach this to other people. And if I do that, then maybe I'll do it.
01:04:14
Speaker
So The newsletters, if you want my newsletter, I i should say the newsletters that I read, i keep them all in a spreadsheet and they're organized by subject and then I rank them and then then I have the URLs for the signups.
01:04:26
Speaker
If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, Peter Kelly Detweiler, there's only one of me in the world, so I don't commit crimes anymore. Um, because it's too easily discoverable. But anyway, just reached out to me on, on LinkedIn and say, Hey, can you send me your a spreadsheet? I'll happily do that.
01:04:42
Speaker
If you want the, the weekly video, if you just go to Peter Kelly, debt, weiler.com, there's no hyphen in that. Then you can just basically scroll down to the right and sign up for it.
01:04:54
Speaker
And it's all free. So Peter, I will have links to those things in the show notes. Yes, you're welcome. As we,
01:05:05
Speaker
you know, sort of come to a close. We still have just a little bit of time. So I do want to ask short, long, or otherwise, are there other things that are on your mind or for any type of listener, things that you feel like, you know, the average person really needs to be aware of x y or Z, or go look a up A, B, or C, anything, whether it's words of wisdom or things that people should check out, ah any last things that you would leave people with?
01:05:36
Speaker
You know, so we've talked about energy, but we haven't talked about climate per se. And I found the dialogue a lot of times is pretty uninformed. And among other things that I find somewhat tragic is the Trump administration has now laid off all the scientists responsible for the national climate assessment.
01:05:53
Speaker
But the last one, which came out a number of years ago, and I read it, and I met the guy responsible for putting it together, was pretty good. And I think understanding energy How carbon dioxide works, why 400 parts per million versus 300 parts per million, which is what it was, 310 the international geophysical year in 1958, why that matters, how methane affects the atmosphere, how, in fact, these these gases keep the heat radiating from radiating back into space. like Understanding the basic concepts and the theory behind climate change
01:06:27
Speaker
and And maybe even looking at this, I Googled, you know, what did I Google? Something like ah responses to climate doubters, you know, because you're going to hear all these arguments and they're going to affect our lives and they're going to affect our kids' lives. And we're having, to my mind, a very uninformed political conversation right now.
01:06:46
Speaker
And to me, whenever I run into a situation where I feel that's the case, My job, as best I can, is to educate people. In fact, I'm no longer a doer, Eric. I used to run the largest virtual power, second largest virtual power plant in the world. And then when I left Constellation, I thought my highest and best use is to cross-pollinate information as fast as I can, as effectively as I can to other people so they can make better decisions.
01:07:12
Speaker
And I think living on this little blue marble, you know, this thing I was holding up before with a super thin troposphere and atmosphere, understanding the basics of what's going on up there and why we want to avoid getting past, you know, 1.5 degrees centigrade and what that potentially means when we go to two or three,
01:07:30
Speaker
I don't know how people live on this planet anymore without understanding the basics of that because it's so critically important to our future economy, ability to ensure houses can't do that in Florida anymore. Why?
01:07:44
Speaker
Climate, right? Like this is going to impact all of us. You can't just hide under ah chair and make pretend it doesn't exist. Right. You may disagree with the theory, but at least know what the heck the thing is and why you disagree with it and be able to have a cogent argument as to why you think it's not the case.
01:08:01
Speaker
But don't just watch something that some talking head told you because this is too critically important for people to be stupid about it. How do you recommend that the average person goes about informing themselves?
01:08:16
Speaker
Well, the National Climate Assessment Summary is not long. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPBY, that's not that long either.
01:08:28
Speaker
And then, of course, you know there are some pretty good books that explain the basics of climate change. And then you know after you've read some of those, then, yes, I would say, by all means, pick up some of the books by the doubters.
01:08:40
Speaker
And see what they're saying. And then figure out why the logic doesn't hold or does from your perspective. I read those and I go, that doesn't make sense. Nope, that's that's counterfactual, blah, blah, you know.
01:08:52
Speaker
But, um and and then I think, you know, Google google search from nowhere, you know, some reputable sources is is a good place to start. There's no Bible per se.
01:09:02
Speaker
And you can go way down a rabbit hole. I know because I put together 50 page proposal for a book that I ultimately wasn't able to sell because publishers weren't any more interested in carbon.
01:09:14
Speaker
Go figure. But, you know, but once you start on the journey, you'll find, i think, reliable resources out there. Just be aware. There's a whole lot of other information out there as well that it's worth knowing about.
01:09:27
Speaker
But keep an open mind. Thank you. And you mentioning a book proposal, you reminded me, i read a ton of books, but I have yet to read your book. And you do have a book.
01:09:40
Speaker
It's called The Energy Switch. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's four years old. And I told my publisher that my first sentence was going to be, by the time you read this book, half the facts are going to be obsolete. And she said, oh, please, God, don't do that.
01:09:55
Speaker
But the interesting thing is I had more than two dozen subject matter experts help redline all the chapters and the thesis still holds together. Even within this relatively rapid pace of change effect, I'm actually going to do a workshop with someone.
01:10:08
Speaker
What did I get wrong? Or, you know, what has moved since I put down that 15 chapter interlocking argument that I was making.
01:10:18
Speaker
And, uh, and it is fascinating to see what, what things have moved, what haven't, which things I was more right about than others. But, um, I just, uh, there's companies that have all their employees read it.
01:10:30
Speaker
when they get onboarded. So they all have a common framework of understanding. um And i I have a number of companies that do that. In fact, and also just this week, two people on LinkedIn said, oh, I'm reading your book right now, which is huge for me. it was like five or 6,000 copies got sold. It was never going to be a Thomas Friedman bestseller.
01:10:49
Speaker
But especially when young people coming into the industry go, oh, this really helped me understand how this whole thing works. I go, yeah, touche. That was why I wrote it. That's very gratifying to me.
01:11:02
Speaker
Well, Peter, i appreciate you being here. i was really excited when you agreed to talk to me because having worked together, you've gotten in depth in some of our conversations on a few things, but we haven't had you know, the chance to speak at length about some of what you specialize in. So i appreciate you being here and I'll have links to everything in the show notes. And I hope that everybody who listens to this gets as much value and sort of enjoyment out of this as I have gotten. So thank you.
01:11:38
Speaker
Oh, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Eric. I much appreciate it Thank you. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe, and please share it with someone you know who'd appreciate this kind of information.
01:11:58
Speaker
If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com. We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
01:12:17
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.