YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Heard

lines on the record: 69
first: 2025-07-16
most recent: 2025-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Reiterate on that people want reliable, cheap, and clean power in that order. And I think that's largely how we should think about our energy policy. And I think that's sort of the direction we're going. And I think we need to make sure we stay aligned with that.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the last thing I would say is that people underestimate how critical and important a resilient, reliable, dispatchable electrical grid is to our national security, you cannot have national defense and national security without reliable electricity. It's just not possible. So all these things we're talking about are about the upside, about capitalizing on AI compute, the switch to electric vehicles and our insatiable thirst for electricity. But at a fundamental level, there is no safety, there is no national defense, there is no national security without a reliable electrical grid.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one more comment on this, and it's more of an industrial policy question we're talking about specific things, but like oftentimes that just moves the bottleneck. We could solve a lot of sort of the grid connection hookup. We could build a lot of like transmission lines, but then we need more transformers. And to build more transformers, you need more electric steel. You can do the same sort of equation for much of the supply chain. Battery is another good example. Is then, okay, cool, we're building cells, but then we also need active materials and we need to mine and things like that. And so it's sort of a whole effort of examining sort of our infrastructure and our supply chains. And you need to do all of it. And I think that's a complicated question. That's an expensive question.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are very high paying jobs where you don't have to check your email on your phone at 9 p.m. at night after you go home from work. They're high paying, it's good exercise jobs, and they're relatively low stress. These are good jobs for people.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Labor broadly, like this is a little tangential, but when Microsoft was building their new data center in Georgia last year, at one point, they had on staff at Microsoft or on contract more than a third of the electricians in the state of Georgia. And they basically maxed out. They hired every single electrician that they possibly could. So I don't think it applies to just electricians. Do you, to your point, like the cement mixers, it's the mechanical engineers, it's the nuclear engineers. Like how do we actually train the next generation energy workforce that we're going to need to modernize the grid is a big, big challenge.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made this joke, I think, once to Ryan, or maybe I made it the American Dynamism Summit that we survived the greatest nuclear disaster in U.S. history just recently when we finished the Vogel 3 and 4 reactors and let all those employees go back to other jobs. So I think if we were writing a billion dollar check into power, what we would do is we would just give jobs to those people and not let them go back to whatever it was they were doing before they were building nuclear reactors. And we would just really work to streamline the process to make sure that we go build VOGO 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and all these different states around the country and just put these people to work for the next decade plus building reactors. And that to me was the greatest miss and probably the greatest opportunity. I don't think it's particularly our opportunity, but I do think it's an opportunity for somebody to do.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me another answer to your question or a different answer to your question is I think the energy industry is probably medium to long term like one of the most prime spots to deploy physical autonomy. So when you think about applications of robotics, whether it's humanoids or more kind of task specific robotics, we're talking about dangerous jobs often. We're talking about manufacturing jobs to build up, whether it's small-scale reactors or batteries or whatever. So I don't know what the shape of the company is here and how reliant it would be on some of the robot learning work that's happening. But I do think that as we scale our energy capacity, there's going to be a pretty massive application of industrial robotics to the energy sector.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time on looking at, but I think how is ERCOC going to be connected to the rest of the grid? Or how are we going to move this power around? If it's really sunny in the southwest and solar is going to be really cheap, is there an efficient way to move that to New York or something like that? China's done this effectively. And I think if you had hundreds of billions of dollars spent or trillions of dollars, what does the grid look like? Like it's going to be a lot more interconnected”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need even more than just billions. It's tens of billions, hundreds of billions. It's such a tough question. I think there's tons of policy around this as well. I hesitate to say we should look to how China has built up their grid, but I think the elephant in the room is like in the early 2000s, they were experiencing blackouts. This was a very common thing. This was horrific. But now think of like Forex through grid in the last couple of decades. And so the way they've done this is by basically deploying generation capacity, building hydro, building massive storage facilities. Of course, BYD, CATL, like tons of battery production. They built HVDCs, these large sort of high voltage transmission lines. I would do all of that. I mean, I would look to all of it. And whether or not it's a good investment or not is, you know, look at a number of factors, but like it is much more of the infrastructure projects, the glue that connects this stuff together. I think Arlene today is looking at these technologies that enable a lot of this more flexible grid. But I think there's also going to be these large infrastructure, the webbing in between it. I think software is a big piece of it that we're spending a lot of time.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throw another one out there as I'm just thinking about this. One thing that I've been noodling around this idea that all the regulation and permitting and policy frameworks that we have in this country, you could think of those as part of the infrastructure that we all have to live and work with and interact with. So companies that really facilitate, and I would say applying AI to navigating the permitting process. So nuclear is a good example. Again, a nuclear reactor application or a fuel transport license or a fuel manufacturing license. These things have”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And overall, as a grid gets more heterogeneous, all of the seams and intersections between things like there's just so much more opportunity for technology than when you had a single utility managing a single source of power centrally distributed out broadly.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in a more general sense, like anything that can bring generation capacity or storage capacity closer to load, I think is going to be very compelling. And a lot of the times it's less maybe the technology, novel technology, but as a system integration or it's an innovative business model. I think something like radicalizing that I experienced is, and I implore everybody to go home and check their power bill, they'll now often separate the delivery costs from the actual generation costs. So what we've seen, and we've mentioned it, but like the costs of generate electricity, the cost of power has dropped immensely, gas, solar, things like that, but the cost to actually deliver that electricity has increased a ton. And so in net, it's sort of not changed. And I think that's terrible. And I think we all agree that's bad. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity of bringing that generation capacity. In some ways, this is sort of like this more liberalizing force. It's like, we all should have our own backup. We all should have our own technology. I think there's a lot of really interesting ways to do that and scale it.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think around sort of project planning and development, how do you make it faster and easier to build projects within the current regulatory framework? How do you do site selection? How do you navigate permitting? How do you navigate project management? How do you navigate your sort of construction supply chain? We're starting to see companies pick off pieces of that. But I think broadly speaking, there's room for tech and software in that kind of project development space as well.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One area where there's probably a venture scale software company to be built is really around grid management monitoring. I think we see this in the IT landscape. We see it in the OT landscape, but we don't really see it in the grid where there's just full, very, very large. Like there is no Splunk for the electrical grid. There's no Powell altar networks for the electrical grid yet. There's a whole bunch of things that mirror the IT and OT landscape, whether it's around cyber and monitoring and logging and analytics. There's no looker for the electrical grid yet. There's just none of these companies exist. I'm not sure if it's three separate companies. I'm not sure if it's one company. There is a big company to be built and really managing and monitoring the grid and helping to orchestrate and even deal with some of the things Ryan spoke around around demand response, coordinating that, creating those marketplaces, tracking all those incentives. So I think when we see a company that we think can really do the breakout company there, we would lean into it.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To hear more about our request for startups or things that we want to exist that we haven't yet discussed, or maybe put differently. I'm curious where we think there's most bang for the buck in terms of the issues that we've been talking about, in terms of there was like a regulatory intervention or some sort of technological unlock what comes to mind.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so everyone cares now. There's a lot more money who cares about what the grid is actually going to think and where can I build, where is their excess capacity. Maybe I'm connected to the grid, but I also need some battery and solar backup or like a radiant microreactor or something like that to be used in certain situations. It's a lot more complex, these sort of microgrid setup, but it's the way we're headed. And software is going to be a big piece of that.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've seen a lot of companies that maybe five years ago were primarily trying to sell to utilities and grid operators, which is incredibly painful, incredibly difficult, perhaps rightfully so. Like they have poles in the ground that are 50 years old. Why would they trust a two-year-old company to sell them software? Are they going to be around in 20 years? And this is a fair question to ask, especially for something as critical as the grid. But now they're developing this software and there's such demand of understanding how grid operators might think and potentially get there faster or have different conclusions. And so now you can go to data centers or people who want to build solar farms or people who want to build massive battery farms. And you can sell a very similar individual.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to train from San Francisco to LA. It takes an hour and a half. We debate a lot internally like where does it make sense for VCs and VC capital to plug in and arguably like we're not going to move the needle on, you know, these multi-billion dollar megaprojects in the US. Like we're probably not the best people to figure out how to capitalize and build a multi-billion dollar project in California to generate the power for the grid. But I do think that there is a role for technology at kind of like every single layer and every single phase of how megaprojects get built. It's like, how do you use AI to navigate kind of site selection? How do you use tools to like move through the various permitting processes faster? Like how do you use AI to help you do extremely complex and interdependent project management better and more effectively? So that's something that you have a project with 4,000 people working on it and everyone engaging with different suppliers and timelines that are dependent on each other. Like, how do you get all those things to align better so that you don't get these 10 years?”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very similar nuclear regulation, like in terms of frameworks. And obviously, their regulatory bodies might move faster and things like that, but they're not completely ignorant of some of the concerns. And maybe this is a much more broad question. The United States needs to get better at mega projects. Things that are billion dollars, things that are at scale. And I would argue NRC is a big component of why it's expensive, but I think it's also the same reason that it takes a billion dollars to build a bike lane in San Francisco is why we are not able to build.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I'll add to your nuclear comment is I think the advantage of nuclear, and I think that Radiant has done very well of really leaning in on is the power density factor. If you want a reactor that is reliable and power dense, you want it to operate at very high temperatures. You want as highly enriched fuel as you possibly can where it makes sense commercially. So you want halo fuel and you want to serve customers that will pay the premium for that. They'll buy this reactor thing know is going to work. And if you're doing that, you want to have these economies of scale on the manufacturing side. You want it to be done out the door and don't need to like assemble it on site. You don't want to have to like have constant maintenance. I think the other sort of reactors that we see, maybe on the civilian side, if you build a reactor in a factory or you build modular components in a factory, but you still need to do construction work on site, you're still a construction company. Even if the technology is there. And I would argue a lot of the existing AP1000 technology is quite good. And other countries can do it quite cheaply. China is using a very similar design. The UAE just built one for incredibly cheap.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And especially as we start to look at the kind of electrification of our weapon systems, our military vehicles, our drones, et cetera, like those all need to get charged up somewhere and how better to charge them than a nuclear reactor.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the right time. And so you can just imagine that having a nuclear reactor you can put on the back of a C130 and fly around the world to wherever you need power, drop it in the middle of the desert, turn it on. You have power for five years. It's just an incredibly compelling value prop. There's no question that nuclear needs to be part of the equation. Not only is that baseload power, but on the SMR and micro reactor side, it gives us”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reactor. It's a one megawatt reactor. It can be put on the back of an 18 wheeler and shipped around. You can move it to where you need power if there's been a natural disaster, like a hurricane and you need to bring in power overnight. You could bring in a few trucks with four or eight of these reactors and power up a whole city after a disaster. And so that kind of flexibility and power is really compelling. I think there's a lot of tailwinds, a lot of good things happening. One thing to understand is that the DoD spends an incredible amount of money dealing with the cost and frankly the risk to human lives, not just the cost, but like the real risk to human lives, transporting fuel around the world to forward operating bases, anytime we do a military exercise, anytime we're engaged in a conflict, the movement of fuel factors in as a primary concern and consideration of what we deal with. And so, you know, we've read reports that they spend well over $200 a gallon of time, sometimes after $400 a gallon for diesel, effectively, to get diesel into the right place.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big one. We largely only see really big power plants in this country, like the AP 1000s that we turned on in Georgia. And those again came in. I think they were 10 years late and multiple billions over budget. But we only do that because if you're going to put in the effort and time, you want to get the most bang for your buck and generate the most power. We are now starting to see movement from the government in the DOD, in the Department of Energy, and from the National Labs to really try to create a more fast-track process for these small modular reactors or even micro reactors that use a much safer form of fuel, use much less nuclear fuel, use a different kind of nuclear fuel that's not nearly as risk-prone as the kind of nuclear material you'd use in like a weapon, but it's not nearly as enriched to the same degree. It's not even the same material. And so that process is now getting a lot of steam. We have an investment, a company called Radiant Nuclear. They are building a factory that creates what effectively is an SMR. They would probably call it a micro.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can there's a huge regulatory and permitting, I would say, morass that has to be swam through that is incredibly expensive requires an army of consultants, many tens of millions of dollars, many, many thousands of pages of applications and documentation and process review. And again, this has to do with like building the power plant, getting the fuel, transporting the fuel, storing the fuel each step along the way is extremely laden with regulation and policy. And some of that's for good reason, but finding ways to better navigate that to make it more efficient is really a step and area that a lot of companies and people are focused on now. And actually, I think the government now is also focused on how do we streamline the approval process for a new reactor? How do we start approving new reactor designs? And then I think the last thing I guess I would say is that right now, if you're going to put a lot of energy and work into building a nuclear power plant, you want to build a really”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This party ran on a commitment to turn off the reactor before they realized how stupid it was. It's just like colossally stupid. By the way, turning off a reactor, like a real full-scale reactor, it's not like an SMR where you can just flip it on like a few days later or a month later with these large reactors. It can take years to turn them back on. That was just terrible. But broadly, I think the tailwinds for nuclear are just getting stronger where people recognize that it is clean energy. I think there's still messaging work to be done. We should stop calling the spent fuel nuclear waste because it's really not waste. Almost all of it can be recycled and reused. People do need to recognize that like those tailwinds are shifting. So that's happening. I think that people understand that it's baseload power, right? So it's not dependent on it only working during daytime. It's not like hydro where you have to be around and appropriately configured water source. And then I think that one of the largest inhibitors to creating new power plants in this country, it's not that we can't do it.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the biggest thing that's shifted in the last two or three or three or four years in nuclear is that everybody now acknowledges the nuclear energy is clean energy. I think that's been one major shift in public sentiment and perception. Nonetheless, there's still major headwinds politically with nuclear that need to be overcome. Taiwan, for instance, turned off their last nuclear react It's unbelievable. This is an island country that is seven days away from a total energy black it out if they get an oil and gas blockade from China so that they can't bring in ships to deliver oil and fuel. So at any given time, they're like seven days away from a total blackout and they turned off their last nuclear reactors.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why you see when stuff that goes on in Texas, like heat waves and things like that, if they even get a wrong by a couple of degrees where it's like they think it's going to be hot, but it gets actually really hot, that's when you get these crises that end up causing a lot of strain on the grid and you have to turn off all these very expensive plants and then you get the headlines.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you look at energy desks for the big hedge funds or energy trading companies, their weather guy is usually the highest paid person on the desk outside the portfolio manager. Those climate and weather PhDs that are working on a training desks are just absolutely raking it in because they're like God right now because there's very little other data.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interesting that I learned is a lot of the load forecasting, which is basically like the tasking of wind plants need to go online. And so there's usually a 24 hour ahead sort of market day ahead market that'll basically say you need to run your plan at this time and then this sort of supply and demand match to a price. And there's like a merit order. It's complex, but that's how it's done. But most of this load forecast is done by just looking at the weather. They look at basically one of the best indexes, they look at where the homes are, how many people are there, and then what the temperature is going to be. That often is sort of the largest factor that goes into this modeling. But if we have all these sort of connected resources, if we have solar, we have EV chargers, all of this stuff is spinning off data, telemetry, and things like that, we're going to get a much better look of how load is actually being forecasted real time, which is going to help a lot of understanding, where do we actually need to build? Like, what is the actual price of power? And then you can start making these markets, I think, a lot more efficient.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A PGE or similar and have a reasonably speedy top down implementation where you actually get good signal and metrics and can actually do interesting things with that data. Me, I find a little bit unbelievable.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's wild how much of a mystery what's happening on the grid is at any given time. Like, we really have very little visibility, and it's very hard for, I think, centralized utilities to deploy meaningful software to understand that. So when we think about as VCs, like what types of things do we look at and what do we get excited about, I think companies that kind of are going at this monitoring from the opposite direction, like how do you get software almost insidiously on the grid? Like, how do you start learning more about demand demand in generation as close to the source as possible, and then try to feed that information back from each other, like the idea that you're going to go sell a software tool.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can move past wind. Yeah, I agree. So, no wind. But I do think the demand response just went to the point that Ryan brought up the monitoring the grid is really important and being able to send signaling on the grid is really important. And you have to remember, like, we're all used to the internet, which has bidirectional communication and messaging and has data layer and control layers. And there's like a full control plane and things like that for the internet. Electrogrid doesn't really have that, and so to be able to send messaging and things is very, very difficult, and now a lot of people just do it out of band using the internet to actually send messaging and do monitoring of the grid itself without an overlay network is very hard. And that's one of the challenges that people are now, I think, starting to address.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's worse than that. I think I read that globally, one third of all wind turbines are out of service at any given time. The other thing is I think wind is the only power generation mechanism where when you get too much of the input, the blades of a wind turbine feather and turn off, whereas there's no such thing as too much sun for solar, too much water and hydro. Like that's not a problem. But like too much wind and the wind generator turns off. Well, who wants a system where you get more of the input you want and then it stops working?”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think wind is incredibly cheap when it's working. You kind of know solar is going to work and like sort of this reliable schedule. The sun's going to be out. It's going to be working. Spare some cloudy days, but there's still always something coming through, but the wind might not blow for a week.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit of a non sequitur, but I like that we keep talking about oil and gas. We're talking about natural gas, we're talking about batteries, we're talking about solar, we're talking about nuclear. Ryan even mentioned hydro, which of course is totally viable in some places. The thing that nobody ever brings up anymore, except for, I think, a very fringe group is wind power. And I'm very happy to hear that nobody here is stumping for wind.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the US, my guess is that this already is reflected in the fact that you have peak load pricing. Like for me, my power is 10x more expensive between the hours of 4 and 9 p.m. So we don't run the washing machine. And so leave it to organizations or individuals to figure out how to manage that, but just like charge people for more power.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important for the grid is like you can build these assets and you have the demand for power here. Like, they're going to soak up that demand. But if it gets far too expensive, they will also shed that demand.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea you're in like the 40th floor of a Japanese building wearing a suit, by the way, because you have to wear a suit and it's swelteringly hot. Everyone knows walking around like they're not miserable, but they are miserable. And you want to jump out a window, but the window won't open. It is one of the worst.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, like, those things are going to be much more responsive than do I want to go Have my room be 74 degrees instead of 71 degrees? Well, let me tell you anyone that's done business in Tokyo in the summer knows as a nation, by the way, Japan has done this, it is absolutely terrible. It's horrible.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a non critical job. It's not a mission job. It's a back office job. And you're just going to run it at night instead of during the day. And you're going to pay less electricity for that. I don't know if I agree with Aaron that AI is not going to suck up all the compute. I think that Constellation just turned up a neonuclear reactor or is reactivating a reactor. I think Meta immediately sucked up all of the power that they're going to generate or nine-tenths of it or something from the new constellation reactor that Meta the contract extension for. And so I think we actually probably are underestimating the amount of compute that we're going to soak up with electricity over the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, the amount of data we're going to start storing. Just look at video, the amount of video we create per minute has just ballooned way beyond anyone's expectations. I'm sure the same will be true for AI compute.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a more likely outcome is that you can do it on the comput, these three racks of the data center are just going to go offline during the peak summer heat when you're running your AC. This is not a”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, instead of doing this $10,000 sort of a megawatt hour plant, I can just make it so everyone's thermostat in this area turns down a couple degrees. And so then an aggregate means that I don't need to build that large asset or pay that expensive premium.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think just to put this in more intangible terms, the peak summer load in places like California might be half of what it is in winter or something like that. And it depends on what climate you're in. And so the concept of baseload is like, do you build all the plants you'd need for the 100 gigawatts of power you're going to need when it's wintertime or in the summer, you know, half the year, you're only going to need 50. So what would be baseload? What you need to do in sort of modern civilization is every time you turn on the switch, like the power is working. And so how you actually match supply with that very, very fluctuating load, both daily and seasonally, is very complex. And so like today, you might have to build a natural gas, what's called like a peaker plant that might only operate like a week a year. And so that's an incredibly expensive asset that is going to only be delivering very expensive power, but is only needed when all the other resources are tapped. And it's like that last couple megawatts of power. The alternative now you could do is what's called like demand response or with batteries on the grid is say, okay.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at the changing nature of load over the next decade, some of that is going to come from data centers, some fraction. I would say it's probably overstated how much data centers contribute to the growing load in the United States over the next decade. Data centers generally are baseload. If you're training a model, you're largely using a dedicated amount of power for the long term. Maybe there's some fluctuations if you're doing more inference. But I would generally say like data centers represent baseload. But then you also have things like electric vehicles. You have things like heat pumps and air conditioners. You have industrial autonomy, which may or may not be running 24-7. So you're going to have some increase in the base level of power we as a society need, but continuing to increase the size of the peaks and troughs of how we use energy on a day-to-day basis. And we should be thinking about designing our grid and designing our energy mix and power sources around what those loads look like and not oversolving.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that already is a way, but I think that will continue. But I think to be very clear is that you need all different types of energy. You're needing to sort of baseload dispatchable power. It's going to be gas. It's going to be nuclear. It's going to be geothermal. There's going to be a lot of hydro as well. And I think as you attach more of these sort of renewable resources or these non-reliable resources, while incredibly cheap and works most of the time, this long tail risk, once you get to like 50 to 75% of the grid, is going to become very, very expensive. You need a lot more battery backup, things like that. And so I think it's going to be very complex and it's going to be different for many different regions. But certainly it's not all of any given resource.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking like energy mix of where we're at today and where do we think we're headed, if I were to make like a personal bet, solar batteries are just the ability to be incredibly cheap and deploy incredibly fast.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Palindir working in oil and gas, my husband worked in oil and gas. Like the first check I wrote at A16Z isn't an oil and gas company. So this isn't me coming with a particular agenda around carbon. This is me coming and realizing that like we basically need every tool in our toolkit and we should be using technology to deploy whatever makes most sense wherever it makes most sense at scale.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think broadly speaking, our approach to energy in the US just needs to be yes and. You look at the sort of atrophy of our power buildout over the last 30, 50, whatever you name your time frame years compared to, let's say, China. And if we want to accomplish the goals that we've set out as a society to accomplish over the next decade, like we need more power. And it's a matter of, yes. And I think solar and batteries extremely important and DU should talk more about the exciting things that are happening around nuclear.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard to hook up solar and batteries to your home. I think it's actually cheaper to put residential solar on your home in Germany than the United States. And that's largely a permitting, largely an installation issue. That's crazy. That should not be the case.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source