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

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“Just add on to a quick point on the grid side of batteries. If the rest of the country, which is presumably watching what's going on in ERCOT, which is the grid operator in Texas, if Texas can prove that you can deploy these sort of decentralized distributed energy resources into sort of flats in these peaks, provide more resiliency, and ultimately lower price of electricity, then every state should go and do this. There's a very complex web of deregulated and regulated entities when it comes to the grid. Of course, there are a lot of different policy and workforce and political reasons why not everywhere is this decentralized world. And it'll probably be more complex than just these deregulated energy-only markets that Texas works with. But I think this is going to be very obvious if it isn't obvious already. And I think the United States needs to move incredibly fast to make this happen and hook up batteries, solar panels, make it easier and cheaper to do it. Even co-location for large loads is still a very politically fraught issue. Utilities are pushing against this.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, if China decides that whatever your company is doing that's using batteries doesn't align with what they like or they want to punish you, being cut off from being able to buy batteries from China is incredibly punitive to a company. And we've certainly seen that happen with some of our startups. And then you find out quickly that the ability to procure and source batteries from places that are not in China is very difficult If you extrapolate that out to what would happen to our whole country if we just were unable to buy batteries from China, it could be catastrophic in a very short period 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
“Like, this shouldn't be a controversial topic. We invented the lithium ion battery, and yet today, if you want to buy a battery, whether it's for a drone or for the grid or for your car or for whatever it is, like you're either buying a battery made in a lights-out factory in China, or you're buying a battery produced in Vietnam by a Chinese company. And like there's no meaningful effort in the US to change that. And I think that this is a really critical problem, not just to manage power load on the grid, but for power for all of the things that we need to power the next generation of innovation in the United States. I think we'd be hard pressed on the American dynamism team to think of a company that we've met with an interesting technology in the last two years that doesn't have a battery in it somewhere.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Texas grid versus the performance of the New York and surrounding area grid during this heat wave, I must have seen 10 news articles this morning about how well Texas Grid has done. The elasticity and ability to react to very quick changes in demand without having to change kind of baseload power, like you can't build a new natural gas plant or a new nuclear reactor overnight. But solar is just so insanely cheap. Like it's basically having a giant massive, huge nuclear reactor in the sky that will go forever. And Texas isn't a green state. This isn't a political issue, but it's like, why aren't we deploying the world's cheapest form of power literally everywhere we possibly can? And then just putting batteries everywhere. Like there just should be batteries everywhere. It's bananas to me that batteries is a topic has like recently gotten caught in this sort of political crosshairs. We really as a society need to be good at power storage and batteries.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building on that, I think Texas literally today were recording this during a massive heat wave that's affecting most of the eastern and southern United States. And if you compare the grids of Texas with New York, Texas famously historically had massive grid failures several years ago when big heat wave came through, the grid couldn't keep up with all the air conditioners that were going on. And people saw massive power outages. Everyone was really mad. People were like, oh, ERCOT doesn't work. D-REG doesn't work. And what has Texas done in the couple of years since that happened? They have absolutely flooded the grid with solar capacity. Texas has doubled their solar capacity in the last approximately three years. And with that, they've just deployed thousands of batteries. One of our portfolio companies base power is one of the players here, but there's many battery power companies deploying all across Texas to provide storage for that solar power. And if you look at the performance of”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robust the grid is or how capable the grid operators are. And I think that's a dimension that was never important to people before, but it's important today. And you can certainly imagine if you're the military, you certainly care about having reliable access to power at all, your forward operating bases and even at home military bases. You just cannot lose your ability to have electricity. And so I think all these things are just coming together at once. It's really exciting moment in time. And I think it's buoyed by the fact that we're also at this sort of technology inflection point where AI can help some of these things, not just be a consumption driver, but even be an enabler in facilitating more efficient use of electricity, better monitoring of the grid, better ways to even go through the regulatory and permitting process, which is onerous for many cases.”
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 know what Aaron brings up to me is a piece that we hardly ever talk about, which is resiliency and not having people be as dependent on the interconnectedness of the grid. People that you deploy solar, you know, we talk about distributed compute for those of us that are in the tech world and like how important it is to have distributed compute and have networks be able to suffer and survive through segmentation of things. But the grid is very interdependent, even in the US there's really only a few major regions that can segment themselves off. But when you deploy solar, you deploy batteries or you deploy an SMR reactor or your own power generation on site for your own data center. You don't have to worry about how brittle the grid is because you're fairly resilient from it. And I think that's a component is that the energy grid and electrical grid of the future, it's not just going to be the dichotomy of generation, transmission, and storage, but as Aaron brought up, you might do all three of those things in the same place and not have to worry about how.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about that more, I think, in a minute, but we had to go out and hire and train and tire specialized crews, specialized people that work with cement and concrete, specialized people that work with steel to go build the large Vogel reactors in Georgia. We put them on Vogel Reactors three and four. We turn them on. Huge win. And then those people that went back to building highways or like bridges or something else. And instead of just going and put them on Vogel, like five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and building just like this massive crescendo of nuclear power, we just put these people back into the general workforce. And so we're not learning our lesson there on the workforce. And at the same time, we have this insatiable thirst for energy, whether it's EVs, whether it's data center compute, for AI, or just generally a shift toward more and more consumption of electricity or even just like the reshoring and manufacturing, all these things that are just very, very electron heavy. At the same time that we're seeing.”
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 reason we're having this conversation is we're touching on a bunch of these topical themes, which is that we're at a moment in time where exactly like Ryan said, the grid is aging now and brittle. The workforce is aged out.”
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 massive delays of being able to study every single possibility. So there's a lot of policy approaches here as well. And there's a bunch of these technologies called grid enhancing technologies, which are effectively like an average power line might be used at 50% capacity, but it needs to be designed for the peak capacity for the summer when everyone has their AC on. And so there's a lot of sensors or other technology that could be placed there. So you have a much more dynamic view of what our infrastructure actually was looking like. And so when we have these new technologies, then we can much more efficiently use the infrastructure we have. Do you?”
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 an interesting point to add on to that is that there's very little visibility into the grid itself. So, the understanding power plants are operating or not, but especially at sort of the distribution level, the things, the power lines you might see outside your home, there's very little understanding of what's actually going on there. And so there's like a reluctance, especially when you have things like net metering where I'm sending from my home a battery back to the grid, things get incredibly complicated. And so the grid operators don't have a very good understanding of when can they allow new projects to go online, how much power, when to actually cut people off. And so there's a lot of these policies, interconnections, sort of the general term, but like states like Texas have much more lenient policy of you can build wherever you want if we need to cut it off from the grid, we're going to do so. And so it's sort of this connect and manage approach. Whereas other states, like they will do these incredibly long feasibility studies in like a variety of sort of scenarios with like the entire grid is at peak capacity, but they want to make sure this specific project can stay online 24-7. So that ends up creating”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you get power gen and power storage essentially as close to demand as possible? And that's a problem for new tech to really help solve because we're talking about instead of these like mega projects that we're used to building, well, not used to building anymore, like massive nuclear plants, massive new natural gas plants, et cetera. We're talking about much smaller and more distributed sources of power bypassing interconnection altogether in many cases. We're seeing that as a pretty big trend with data centers, as data centers are just building power directly on site and co-locating power with the data center because they're like, I can't wait Microsoft's like, I can't afford to wait 10 years to get an interconnection with the grid. I need this power now today. So how do you get power more tightly coupled with the load that it's actually going to serve? And that's a really interesting problem for tech also from a software perspective because if you get generation storage and usage all co-located very closely together, like that's a very good problem for AI to solve, like reinforcement learning, stick that in there and suddenly you get massively efficient systems that you could.”
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, if you think about what our grid is, I mean, it's a piece of technology that was designed about a hundred years ago and very little technology on the grid has changed in those hundred years. And you look at why our delivery costs such a big problem, grid is our capacity, getting a new project onto the grid today, you know, you sign up for interconnection. It could take a decade. There's a backlog of 20 plus years to get a new transformer. The transformer technology we're using today is kind of bananas if you actually look at what makes a transformer. First of all, there's one company that makes these and there's one plant in the US that produces the right type of steel that you need in order to make these transformers. And it's a hundred year old tech. And it's like the waitlist for transformers is insane. So I think we're getting to the point in demand starting to rise again and the calcification of grid technology, whereas like, should we just leapfrog the grid? Like, do we really need to wait in line and wait for this to catch up? I think there's like two versions of how you do that. One is how”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think a lot of it's like a workforce issue. I think a lot of it's a policy issue. I think the United States historically was a bunch of regulated utilities sort of as a top-down big thermal power plant, big transmission lines connected to substations, then distribution lines going to individual factories, homes, things like that. And I think some of the newer technologies don't necessarily benefit from scale in the same ways that these large thermal plants typically did. And so this sort of next generation of what the grid looks like is going to be in a much more decentralized way. So there's also an element of relearning of what is a grid actually? Is the grid these large sort of power systems and large infrastructure projects? Or does it look like a lot more decentralized way where we can eliminate a lot of the wires in between things like delivery costs, which have increased exponentially? And can we do it in a more dynamic and flexible way? So things like solar and batteries, they don't need to be massive. You can put them anywhere. You can put them next to load. And so this is also sort of an element that grid operators are thinking through.”
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 were allowed to, but we lost the skill set. And I think you can see in more extreme examples with nuclear power plants, although that sort of transition happened decades before. But basically, the grid itself, the grid operators forgot how to plan, how to move quickly, how to do it cheaply. And so now we're at this point in time where we are reshoring, we are bringing back manufacturing, we are bringing back data centers. And there's this highly concentrated demand. And it's now, now, now, now, now, now, now at sort of any price, but they cannot move fast enough. And so that's what we're seeing today. We talk about data centers and the grid being inflexible to this. It's playing catch up. We need to do a lot of the growth that happened in China and bring this here and do it 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
“History of the grid of the United States was build big power plant industry formed around it. The grid grew incredibly fast through the 20th century. Then around the 80s and 90s, things started slowing down. And then through the early 2000s, the grid effectively froze in the United States. A big piece of that was a lot of the energy generation, a lot of the manufacturing, a lot of sort of heavy industry moved to Asia. And so for the last 20 years, effectively, the grid has ossified. We forgot how to build new power plants. We forgot how to build new power projects, new loads, sort of large data centers, large factories, large mega projects.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. energy usage per capita peaked in 1973. Since then, it's been flat. Meanwhile, China's per capita energy use has grown ninefold. Today, with AI, EVs, manufacturing, and data centers demanding more power than ever, America's electrical grid is buckling. We haven't just under built it, we've forgotten how to build it. In this episode, I'm joined by A16D General Partners David Ulovich and Aaron Price Wright, an investing partner Ryan McIntosh from the American Dynamism Team. We talk about how the U.S. energy system broke, why fixing it is about more than megawatts, and what it's going to take from new tech and talent to faster permitting and smarter software. Let's get 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
“The United States needs to get better at mega projects, things that are billion dollars, things that are at scale. There is no safety. There is no national defense. There is no national security without a reliable rate.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The energy grid and electrical grid of the future, it's not just going to be the dichotomy of generation, transmission, and storage. This sort of next generation of what the grid looks like is going to be in a much more decentralized way.”
2025-07-16 · a16z Podcast · America's Energy Problem: The Grid That Built America Can’t Power Its Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source