The World Changing Podcast

00:00
Greg Robinson
There's this idea of decentralized doesn't necessarily mean that the central grid goes away. An optimized build of a decentralized grid is that you still rely on a lot of that infrastructure. But as you said, the decisions go out to the end. Welcome to the World changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much. But let's keep it. We'll keep it anyway. How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, then we can take that out. Welcome to the World changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon free future. We'll talk to skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company.

01:00
Greg Robinson
And on the other side of the camera here, we have Flo Lumson, our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.

01:13
Flo Lumsden
Welcome to the world changing podcast. Yes, this is a Flo a sode, the first Flo isode. And I'm going to be taking us through a journey of our amazing conversations we've had in season one and now season two. I'm talking about Bill Nessie from the Freeing energy project, Mark Jacobsen of Stanford University and the Solutions Project, and Gary Ratcliffe, who worked at ABB, which was Westinghouse Electric. He's a power grid OG. And those are just three of the guests that I'll be pulling from today. I want to take us back through our past episodes and ask the basic questions again and pull out clips from what their answers were to those problems and how there is a lot of overlap between what these various experts had to say.

01:57
Flo Lumsden
It starts to weave a larger narrative around why we care about modernizing the power grid, how it impacts our daily lives and our future, and also thinking big and innovatively about what's possible with all types of new technologies and solutions and designs for making the power grid more reliable, more sustainable. So let's get into it. I'm going to start off with the first question, which is, what's the problem? And we're going to hear from Gary Ratcliffe, one of our first guests we had on season one, who has worked at Hitachi Energy, which was ABb, which was Westinghouse Electric, for almost 30 years.

02:41
Gary Rackliffe
When people ask me what my job title is, market development and innovation, but what I do is I work on the energy transition. And we've talked about that decarbonization of generation and decarbonization of energy induced consumption. But the other part is, I focused a lot previously on smart grid technology, which has evolved into grid modernization. One key part of that is resiliency, because climate change, even though we're trying to mitigate it's here. It's here, and it's impacting utilities. More storms, more severe storms.

03:15
Flo Lumsden
Okay, so Gary is saying, look, climate change is a reality. It's a scientific fact. We in the power grid industry are already dealing with it and preparing for it. In this next clip, Gary answers, what parts of our society are causing climate change? What parts of our society consume the most energy?

03:37
Gary Rackliffe
If you're going to do anything to reduce carbon emissions? The two elephants in the room are power generation, which is slightly less than 30%, and I think transportation, which is right around 30%. So between the two, about 60% of our carbon emissions are related to those two components. Now, what's interesting with electrification, and I said it's going to approximately double between now and 2050. Recognize that's doubling consumption.

04:06
Flo Lumsden
Okay, so the aspects of our society that are consuming most energy are the power grid and transportation. And traditionally, we've gotten our energy from oil and gas, which are carbon intensive. Basically, they are fossils. That's why they're fossil fuels. And they are emitting carbon dioxide and other potent greenhouse gases like methane, at unnatural levels into the atmosphere, causing some issues. So what do world renowned climate scientists have to say about this? Next, we're going to have a clip from episode eleven with the amazing Marc Jacobson, just to give a few accolades. He received the Judy Friedman Lifetime Achievement Award, has been selected as one of the most influential people in climate policy by apolitical.

04:56
Flo Lumsden
He's published over 185 peer reviewed journal articles, has testified four times for Congress, received awards from the American Meteorological Society for significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and understanding the role of other carbon particles on climate. He is the person to go to, so let's hear what he has to say.

05:20
Mark Jacobson
I mean, we know that fossil fuels and biofuels and other types of bioenergy cause 7.4 million air pollution deaths per year worldwide and billions more illnesses. And that cost the world, in terms of statistical cost of life and morbidity on the order of $30 trillion per year. And these are avoidable deaths and morbidities. We need to eliminate these, not only the deaths and morbidities right away, but also global warming. We have six years to solve 80% of the problem and about eleven years plus. To solve 100% of the problem by 2050 at the latest, we need to solve 100% of the problem, but 80% by 2030. So we do not have time to waste.

06:08
Flo Lumsden
So we don't have a lot of time. Marc Jacobson's main issue with the power grid and his main concern is climate change. And he wrote a book called no miracles needed, where he outlined his wind water solar solution to replacing dirty fossil fuels with renewable energy. So we're going to hear about that, and then we're also going to hear about how he envisions this new world could interact with the existing power grids.

06:36
Mark Jacobson
We have today in a complete wind water solar world. Just to give you an idea of how efficient it is, let's say we have 100 units of energy today for everything. That's electricity, transportation, buildings and industry. Today, 20% of those units or 20 units is for electricity and the rest is for transportation, buildings and industry. If we electrify all energy and provide the electricity with this wind, water, solar, there's a 56% reduction of the energy requirements. But all that remaining 44 units is electricity. So instead of 20 units of electricity, we go to 44. So we little more than double the electricity requirements, but we reduce overall energy requirements 56%. So we will need more electricity over two times. We will need some new lines, but we eliminate all the need for pipelines and we can get rid of all existing pipelines.

07:27
Mark Jacobson
And so there's no new pipelines going forward. Even in your home, why do you have two sources of energy in your home? Why do you have electricity and gas? Some people might have three. You just need electricity. It's just much more efficient. It's cleaner. You don't have pollution in your home, and you can provide that electricity with solar on your roof, or most of it for most people. Or even if you can't, it's still less expensive. You don't have to rely on mining of fuels and the cost of transport of fuel, but it's definitely cleaner in your own home. And it can be made more reliable on a large scale with grid backed up with batteries. And biggest source of backup right now, as I mentioned, is hydropower.

08:08
Mark Jacobson
But there are also other ways to keep the grid stable that, including demand response utilities, give people incentives not to use electricity at certain times of the day. And that helps and saves you money as well. The key is that we want to electrify everything. We will need some more transmission, but we're going to have fewer pipelines and then also more local sources of energy will reduce the need for transmission. So more rooftop solar. So if you have the more people that put solar on their own roofs, that means they don't need to transmit anything for that electricity. You can use your own rooftop solar. When you have excess rooftop, then you can send the excess to the grid.

08:45
Mark Jacobson
So there are efforts in many states where a lot of rooftop solar is growing by utilities to prevent the growth of rooftop solar, because that takes away from the business of the utilities.

08:57
Flo Lumsden
He talks about the utilities creating incentives for people to use energy at different times of the day, allow the demand to be reached. And then he also talks about utilities allowing homeowners with solar to sell excess energy back to the grid. And of course, for those things to happen, the utilities have to allow for it. And in some states right now that's happening. In other states, it's not. There's been a big debate nationally about community solar versus residential solar. I'm thinking about doing another episode about that in the future. But the utilities typically are pretty anti rooftop solar, and a lot of people are curious about that. And it really comes down to incentives. And the incentives the utility companies have comes back to how the utilities were started in the first place.

09:47
Flo Lumsden
And Greg and I did an episode nine, where we, quote, unquote, took on the utilities, and Greg broke down some of the history of how the utilities became the huge, monolithic businesses slash government organizations that they are. And here's a clip.

10:05
Greg Robinson
So, Gretchen, Becky, I'm not even sure if I pronounce her name right, but in this book, talks about how we got here. What's the human story of how we got here? Free energy kind of reiterates that basically a long time ago, this guy named Samuel insullethere is credited with coming up with this concept where utilities should, there should just be one set of wires going down the road, and there shouldn't be multiple utility companies delivering electricity to you. That started a really, really long time ago, and pretty much nobody argued that, like, for a very long time. And our situation looks a lot like that today. You have some company there, they deliver you electricity, you pay them. The incentives of how they get there are very different, right. Depending on if they're investor owned or they're municipal or they're a co op.

10:56
Greg Robinson
It's really hard in the power bill world to innovate that much for the reasons you're saying. It's like the end of the day, I just have to pay the thing. I think setting up this idea that it's like, okay, let's go back to the top. So we've got. We now have these four entities, right? We've got this vest around utility. We've got this municipal power company. It's a rural electric co op. And then we have these retail electricity providers that really are just like, there are so many analogies to these and actually other industries, like in cellular, you might have, like boost mobile or something like that, where it's like they're a carrier, but they're not like a cell tower company, right? They run on other people's networks. They all run on other people's infrastructure. And so that had to get opened up.

11:41
Greg Robinson
That had to be allowed. Right? We could very well still be in that world where one company owns your telephone plan, but we're not anymore. They opened that infrastructure up where it's like you could now own infrastructure and provide an end service to somebody, but you could also resell, or you could sell wholesale services to somebody, and then they could package it for an end customer.

12:07
Flo Lumsden
Right?

12:07
Greg Robinson
Pretty much every industry does this except for electricity.

12:10
Flo Lumsden
Yeah. Literally the only thing, mobile phones is a really good analogy because this gets.

12:15
Greg Robinson
In all sorts of philosophical questions of like, well, you don't really care about innovating if you don't have any competitors.

12:23
Flo Lumsden
Yeah.

12:24
Greg Robinson
Like, what's the point, right? So there's one argument for why the poles and wires should just be like the roads, right? It's like, if the poles and wires were like the roads, it's not like our roads are completely deregulated. There's ways of having this public infrastructure that doesn't have to also include all of the commerce that runs on that public infrastructure, if that makes sense.

12:46
Flo Lumsden
Right. From beginning to end, it's one company, right?

12:50
Greg Robinson
In a lot of places, right?

12:52
Flo Lumsden
Yes, in a lot of places.

12:53
Greg Robinson
Texas is actually this. So let's just focus on kind of the market. Texas is an open market. It's like an unregulated market. What it means is, in most places in Texas, you have to call a retail electricity company to buy electricity from them, and you can buy from many of them. They're the opposite of most of the other retail electricity providers in the country in that you get a bill from that company. What a concept. Most of the other places, in 49 other states, the company that owns the poles and wires, whether you like them or not, they send you a bill. Even if you sign up for a retail electricity provider in most of the other states, you're still going to get a bill from that poles and wires company.

13:39
Flo Lumsden
It's not a choice.

13:41
Greg Robinson
Right. Right. You can choose who you want to get your power from, but you can't choose who you're going to get your power bill from.

13:49
Flo Lumsden
Okay. That conversation with Greg and I, it's just a snippet. It's a really long conversation. And Greg has a deep knowledge of all the different types of utility companies there are and how there has been some evolution, however, not as much evolution or opening of the market as there has been in other infrastructure related businesses like cell phones. Touching on what Marc Jacobson said in the previous clip, he spoke about how utilities are not in favor of home solar or rooftop solar. And to connect the dots here, Greg just broke down how the power utilities started as monopolies that were sanctioned by the governments that they were presiding in. And therefore, they don't have any competition in most parts of the country, in 95% of the country, except for Texas.

14:47
Flo Lumsden
And so there's basically no incentivization for those companies to be competitive to think about what their customers want, if that's rooftop solar or resources for electric car charging infrastructure, whatever it may be. This next clip is from episode twelve, featuring Bill Nussie of the Freeing energy Project. Bill started off with a TED talk which led him into a top ten podcast about renewable energy and a book called Freeing Energy. He did years and years of interviews and research for the book. In our conversation with Bill, we got into the nuts and bolts of how and why the power grid started off the way it did and how things are changing. And you guessed it has to do with technology.

15:36
Greg Robinson
So you really think about the business model. I really always appreciated that in talking with you because you have that experience of becoming a tech entrepreneur and really sort of working outside of electricity for, I believe I read it was about three decades. Is that correct that you were.

15:53
Bill Nussey
We don't like to counter three decades. Yeah, it's been a long time. You know, here's the crazy thing that if you build. I thought about this the other day, Greg. The, if you look at all the energy systems that power civilizations, fossil fuels, electricity, they're all, they all have two characteristics in common. That really kind of blew my mind when I thought about it. First of all, the only way to build those systems is to do massive infrastructure. You need to build hydro dams and transmission lines, and you need to build pipelines for fuel and gas, and you need to build oil rigs that cost $25 billion.

16:25
Bill Nussey
And so what ended up happening in the entire history of energy has been required large government intervention for you couldnt have those energy systems without a complex society and government where it could aggregate the capital necessary or create the laws for capital to be aggregated in a protected way. Which is why monopoly, why utilities are monopolies. At least back in the time, the government did an amazing job. Bye. By allowing society to build these massive energy infrastructures, which by doing so create economies of scale. And everyone in the western world enjoys affordable energy, oil, gas, electricity, it certainly could be cheaper.

17:06
Bill Nussey
And I think that because anytime you build giant infrastructure projects, whether it's a city or a bridge or a stadium or a military complex or a power plant, and you aggregate large bits of capital to do it, there's a lot of people that get wealthy from that. And what I think happened was that, and this is not some conspiracy theory at all, but the fact is that oil and gas and electric companies are some of the most powerful, wealthy, profitable organizations in the world, perhaps deservedly so, because they have done something for civilization that's easy to overlook and take for granted. But they now can, they more or less now have a system that works relatively well with things like climate change aside of, and it's this local energy stuff like that small light that family ended up getting in Africa.

17:50
Bill Nussey
It completely breaks that model. You no longer need billion dollar infrastructure. You no longer need enormous government support to carve out the capital allocation. And I think this is, I think this move to small local energy systems is actually far more profound from a history point of view than I'd even realized when I wrote the book. We're shifting not just the way in which the technology is deployed, but the entire allocation of largest capital projects in human history and the way that the governments have been supportive of energy systems. We couldn't have energy systems without the government, and I think that's no longer the case.

18:22
Flo Lumsden
Okay, so Bill Nussie has just broken down. Why? Initially, we really need the government involved in getting the grid up and scaling that infrastructure would never have happened otherwise and how amazing that is. But in this next clip, we are going to discuss how technology is changing that, and while we still will benefit from being connected, things are going to be different.

18:47
Greg Robinson
Yeah, it sounds like you still are a believer in the local energy more than ever, and that is the revolution. Is there anything that you, when you were doing, when you kind of went into the book, is there anything that you changed your mind on? Was there anything that you just held as a strong belief going into it, but then got your mind changed on?

19:08
Bill Nussey
I think most people go into this industry wherever theyre coming from, whether theyre doing big scale energy or carbon capture or small scale energy, whatever it is theyre doing. And I think they come in seeing utilities as the foe. And I had met some really enlightened people and they said, hey, this doesnt work unless we work with the utilities. I dismissed it as people that had maybe once worked to utilities and they had drunk the Kool aid. But the more I looked at the system from a mechanical and economic engine point of view, the more I realized that the electric utilities, for a long list of reasons, are an essential part of this energy transition. Now could they move more quickly? Absolutely. Are some of them dragging their feet? Perhaps.

19:54
Bill Nussey
But generally the legal aspects of how their monopolies are carved out, the infrastructure that theyve built, like transmission and things like that, are an essential part of the future of clean energy as we go through this transition. As an example, and probably very specific to your question, Greg, I just assumed that it would better for everybody to do a local battery, local solar on their house and we would never need a grid. And when you do the math, and the maths on my website, it's in my book, it's actually incredibly obvious that like the computing industry, when you connect to these devices, they're far more valuable than if they are isolated. There's a lot of reasons for that capacity and peak and a lot of other things. It's really basic math.

20:43
Bill Nussey
So it's the exact same underlying thesis that makes your computer more valuable when it's part of the Internet. Its the same thesis that makes your solar battery in your house or your electric vehicle more valuable when its part of electric grid, or as I call in the book, the energy Internet.

20:58
Flo Lumsden
The energy Internet. I love that. As I understand its basically the idea that while well have much more distributed energy production capacity, pollution free, renewable, we will need to connect these energy producing centers somehow to create the most efficiency and the most value and also redundancy or reliability because we all need stable power, some of us more than others, like hospitals below that may be data centers or servers for major platforms like Google or Gmail, are things that we all use on a regular basis that are important to our daily functions. Reliability is something that comes up when people talk about moving to renewable energy and the fact that there are typically some issues with it because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. So how do you manage that?

21:56
Flo Lumsden
Here's another clip from the conversation we had with Gary Rakliss. In episode eight, where Greg and Gary get into the details of how to create a hundred percent renewable energy powered microgrid. What that takes, you could run a.

22:13
Greg Robinson
Data center or something that has this economic value in the economy that has nothing to do with electricity. It's computing storage, or maybe it's industrial warehouses, and then you can power all of that on site. But then when I start getting into the technical weeds, 100% uptime is really hard to achieve. 100% versus 99.999 is a huge difference in terms of how much more power do we need to build in order to get that last little bit of reliability? And so I'm just curious, from your perspective, with zero carbon emissions, no diesel backup, anything, given the technology we have today, can you run a small power grid?

23:03
Gary Rackliffe
Sure. It's all possible and feasible. It's how much would it cost? Your comments. There's a number of things that you touched on, so you're correct. The grid actually did start as a micro grid in today's terminology. And then we saw the expansion of multiple microgrids. If a microgrid only has a sole source of generation, then reliability becomes a concern. Because if that generator goes, the whole grid associated with that microgrid basically is down. In theory, two microgrids tied them together, and so now you had two microgrids with a link. In the case the generation at one failed, they could rely on the generation of the other. And that was the start of what is today's grid. It really addresses the reliability piece because, as you point out, we have to match generation to load.

23:53
Gary Rackliffe
You can address that reliability through the grid that we have today, the interconnected grid. The other way you can protect yourself is with storage, but storage has a cost associated with it, particularly if you have a diesel generator and you need a part and you can't get the part for two weeks, that's really inconvenient. If you want to watch the football game on Sunday afternoon. Or even more important, if you have a mission critical business, what do you put on site in terms of backup storage? You mentioned data centers. Data centers typically have backup on site power to serve all critical loads that can actually maintain the data center for days, if not weeks. But in addition to that, the real critical data centers have a backup for the backup. So dual redundancy.

24:44
Gary Rackliffe
And then they also may rely on not just one feed from the utility, but they may take a second circuit and a second feed. So they have redundant feeds, all pursuing a level of reliability, whether that's six nines or whatever the case may be that they determine they need for their facility. But redundant feeds costs extra money. Putting in a backup on site system and maintaining that system, maintaining the fuel, and then putting a backup to that all have expenses. And so can you build a site that has onsite power generation?

25:19
Greg Robinson
Sure.

25:19
Gary Rackliffe
But you need to make sure that you have some diversity of generation. You need to make sure that some of that generation is dispatchable, that it's not weather and time dependent. If you're trying to achieve those high nines where we first met each other, that particular site is looking at different types of resources, but it also has access to the grid, so it can use a grid connection as backup. And there's always the possibility of putting in storage to complement the renewable generation that's on site. And ultimately, all of those combined can achieve the six nines of reliability that a large data center would require with mission critical load.

25:58
Greg Robinson
Yeah.

25:59
Flo Lumsden
Okay, so that's pretty exciting. Gary does think we have what it takes to build a microgrid with purely renewable power, but we have to find a way to make dispatchable power or backup power in a renewable way. So here are some examples of companies we've spoken to who are doing just that. Our first clip is from our conversation with Matt Lozak of alloatomics. And we are going to jump into the conversation where I am asking Matt about how his new small scale reactor could help fill in the need for dispatchable power and create more redundancy for the grid. Does it help with grid reliability, stability, redundancy? Could that be another aspect of the sale to a utility company?

26:52
Matt Loszak
Yeah, in that case, for example, with the initial markets we'd be going after, their alternative would be trying to plug into the grid and cause problems for the utility. So it would be helpful because with a lot of these new microgrids that are going up, it's very lumpy, large demand, and it's hard for utility to deal with that. It's not just like a few new small homes going up. We could definitely help utilities from that perspective, indirectly. And maybe there's some interesting business model that kind of facilitates an agreement between all the parties involved.

27:26
Matt Loszak
But I think it is a major way that you can enable a ton of growth in new data centers, new desalination plants, new industrial facilities building, and not worrying about causing problems with the grid by just selling to them these microreactors and saying, hey, initially this will cost a bit of a premium, but it's worth it for the reliability, for the fact that it's clean. And if we can make them as safe as a university research reactor, then it's something that you would want in your backyard because it's just there.

27:55
Flo Lumsden
Yeah, it's because we've talked about the unreliability of other renewable clean energy sources. So we need a carbon free baseload for the grid. To learn more about the Marvel microreactor and alloatomics, head to our 13th episode of the world changing podcast. Now I'm going to be sharing a clip from our most recent episode featuring Claudio Spottaccini, the inventor and CEO of Energy Dome, an italian startup which created the world's first CO2 battery.

28:30
Greg Robinson
I would tell people about Aston and how were working to deploy these micro grids, or private grids that ran on 100% clean energy. And depending on who I was talking to, somebody would say, well, that's not going to work with clean energy because clean energy isn't going to work around the clock. So we're going to have to use gas no matter what. Then I would meet with other people who would say, we just need storage. When I talk about what you're working on at Energy Dome, the light bulb goes off and people are like, oh, yeah, that's what's been missing. So, can you give a high level description of energy Dome?

29:11
Claudio Spadacini
Thank you for the question. Thank you for having me here. Energy Dome has developed a system and a technology which is proprietary, which makes it possible to deliver around the clock electricity. Renewable is a thermodynamic cycle, is a thermodynamic process. We charge the CO2 just at the beginning that is able to store very efficiently and in a clean way all the electricity which is abundant when they light sunshine and which we need to inject back to the grid when sunset. It is a fully closed cycle. We don't leak any CO2 to the atmosphere. The beauty is that it use only half the shelf component which are already used in other industries like oil and gas.

30:08
Claudio Spadacini
And that make the technology very attractive because on top of being 75% round trip efficiency and very cost competitive, the capex are 30 40% less than lithium ion batteries. It is also available today.

30:29
Flo Lumsden
That is so cool. When I finally understood how energy Dome worked, I thought it was brilliant. And I just love that people like Claudio exist out there who are thinking out of the box and then making it happen, bringing this new type of eco friendly another way to put it carbon free, way to store and release dispatchable power. So in this final clip, we are actually going all the way back to the very first episode of the podcast, which is between Greg and his co founder, Ed. Greg and Ed started their company together called Drift, which was a retail power company. That episode is really cool. It's very philosophical because Ed is a programmer and has really studied the evolution of computing, and Greg has really studied the evolution of the power grid.

31:23
Flo Lumsden
There is a very clear tie between the evolution of these two technologies. They break it down to Power 1.0, Power 2.0, and Power 3.0, and how that started off as very centralized and how it's become more and more decentralized. We are jumping into a section where Greg and Ed are talking about cryptocurrency and how the decentralized nature of crypto is what makes it what it is.

31:54
Greg Robinson
I hate to use too much of analogy, but it was like when Facebook tried to create its own crypto token and people were like, nah, good. It's just like, we don't, the whole.

32:04
Ed McKenzie
Ethos, it's not credible.

32:05
Greg Robinson
Yeah. The whole ethos of this is not to go get some massive centralized entity to give you the thing that you want. The whole point is like, it's better if it's decentralized, it's more resilient, more reliable. Over time it's going to scale better. It'll have more utility, like just more use in the world. If it's not, if it's not owned by somebody who is maybe aligned with you, but also maybe not aligned with.

32:31
Ed McKenzie
You, that's, you've got to have a lot of trust. It's not that different than the electric utility and your billion and a half dollars of solar and basically your initial features in the utilities hands, because they decide how much they're going to pay for the power that comes off of those panels. And it centralized that. You have no say. You either agree to their deal or you build somewhere else.

32:54
Greg Robinson
Right. It's almost like we had Power 1.0, which was like, here everyone take whatever we give to you. And in some ways that's right, because Power 1.0 was like, you need lamps. We got your stuff to power some lamps. And then people are like, oh, you know what, really use a refrigerator. Okay. We think those are like lamps. We'll do that too. Does everybody want one? Yeah, probably everybody wants them. Oh, we want a tv.

33:26
Ed McKenzie
Okay.

33:27
Greg Robinson
Does everybody want one? Everybody wants one. And then we get to this, we'll call it 2.0, power 2.0, which is like users, the buyers, the people who were just like sitting here taking power from me. It was a one way street forever. We'll let you put a little bit of power back on the grid. You want some solar panels on your roof, they send a little user generated content, let's call it back into the.

33:48
Ed McKenzie
Grid and we're going to control how much of that happens by basically making that solar nearly worthless, useless.

33:56
Greg Robinson
Only what you need can you put up. And so thats power 2.0. Its funny how this tracks with web one, web two, it was like web one was I send to you what I would like to send to you. Web two is oh, you can send some back into the network, but then these centralized platforms gate how much you can because theyll charge you for sending too much content into the network. And I think the same thing happened with powers. You send a little bit back into network and now we're at this precipice of, I'll call it power 3.0, which is where it's not to say you're not cooperating with the central groups and power 3.0 as the utilities, but there are some utility districts that are cool with the idea of you having the little community that's powered on your own.

34:43
Greg Robinson
And that takes vision from the developers, the actual people who put it up.

34:48
Ed McKenzie
But something magical happens when battery technology is good enough that you can now have not separate grids, but grids are almost self sufficient and might need power from the central grid from time to time. But the smarts live at the edge and that only works if the central utility is not setting the value of that power.

35:12
Greg Robinson
Yeah, and I have to wade us into this dangerous place. It's the last thing. So this idea of decentralized power, we'll call it power 3.0. In some ways we need this to be the next movement because there's so many new applications. We're talking about lamps and refrigerators and tvs and just basic stuff that probably everybody's going to want. But now we're in a world where everybody doesn't want everything that's being put on the grid. So everybody doesn't want right now an electric vehicle, everybody doesnt want bitcoin mining, everybody doesnt want any kind of on site computing in their home. So how do you design a network or whatever that is, whatever that entity is? And that was our hypothesis, there should be an entity that supports this movement. And that was the spirit of starting as in labs.

36:04
Greg Robinson
How do you support this decentralized web which is becoming our economy, is feeding into every single facet of our economy, and everyone's exposed to it, even if they feel like they're not. You can't sit outside of this and be like, nah, I'm not really interested in participating. It's like if you're in any way connected to the economy, which pretty much everybody is, if you sit outside of it, there's a chance that everything you've trusted and all these centralized groups you've trusted can be wiped out by this movement. This has always been the argument of the centralized grid is who is going to bear the cost of the centralized grid if people start leaving the grid?

36:46
Ed McKenzie
As people leave the grid to do their own thing, thats beneficial to them. It leaves behind everybody whos stuck on the centralized grid and their power becomes more expensive, less reliable because theres a shared cost that were all paying to be part of the current world. And as people leave to do their own thing, the commons become crappier and crappier everybody whos still on it.

37:09
Greg Robinson
Preston so that goes back to this idea of decentralized doesnt necessarily mean that the central grid goes away. An optimized build of a decentralized grid is that you still rely on that. A lot of that infrastructure was there, but as you said, the decisions go out to the end. The main power we're going to use is in our neighborhoods, and at the end of the network, the backup power is the middle of the network. And so the question is, how valuable is that backup for you and how long does that need to last?

37:45
Flo Lumsden
What a question to end on. How valuable is that backup to you? Here are my top level takeaways from all of these incredible interviews on the World Changing podcast. We're reminded by Gary Ratcliffe how important modernizing the grid is as we face increasing frequency and strength of weather events, as our lives increasingly rely on electricity. We need the power grid to be up and running, and it desperately needs to be modernized. And while we're doing that, we might as well go ahead and transition the power grid away from fossil fuels. And we're informed by both Gary Ratcliffe and Mark Jacobson that we need to transition away from fossil fuels ASAP because the power grid and transportation are our biggest energy sucks in our society. So if we can transform those two, we will be doing a lot to address climate change.

38:43
Flo Lumsden
It was inspired by Marc Jacobson that we have all the technology and resources we need to transition to 100% renewable energy with wind, water and solar alone. But to transition the energy grid, we have to face the facts about how our power grid companies work. So we spoke with Greg, who has experience running a retail power company and Bill Nussie, who wrote a book about how and why the power grid operates the way it does, why it doesn't like rooftop solar. And putting this all together, we really have two big challenges to address the monolithic and stockholder focused nature of the business of the power grid. Then there's the challenge of filling in those renewable energy gaps of variability with some kind of dispatchable power that's renewable and clean.

39:30
Flo Lumsden
We had the pleasure of speaking with two entrepreneurs working to innovate on dispatchable clean power. We spoke with Claudio Spadachinief of energy dome inventor and CEO, and Matt Lozak of Atomic Energy, who's working with the Marvel microreactor, a breakthrough microreactor from Idaho National Lab. It feels like 100% clean energy is right around the corner for the power grid. I'm just hopeful to see utilities start transitioning away from fossil fuels as soon as possible. However, as utilities take their time to transition, as Bill told us, technology is revolutionizing power. We don't need the large, huge, interconnected grid that we've had from the past. The business of power is decentralizing.

40:16
Flo Lumsden
Greg and Ed really put that final philosophical puzzle piece together for us, which, ironically was from our very first episode where they discussed how power is similar to computing and testify to the unstoppable nature of technology or Moore's law. Thanks so much for coming on this journey with me through my mind of how I connect everything. We'd love to hear how you feel all of these conversations connect, or any insights you have that weren't mentioned. You can comment on our YouTube channel or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok. You can let us know and help us get the word out by rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram. Our handle for both is WC podcast.

41:07
Greg Robinson
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the world changing podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube to hear the latest episodes.