You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Rob Gramlich on the program, and Rob has got an extensive background, has done a lot of things over the years. He is founder and president of grid strategies, which specialize in clean energy and market design, former econ advisor to the FERC Chairman Pat wood and senior economist at PGM interconnection, as well as lots of other things that Rob has done, which I’ll let Rob tell you about more, because he certainly knows his resume better than I do.

Great to have you on the program, Rob and thank you for taking the time. Thanks, Matt. Great to be here. Well, tell us a little bit about your background as to how you came to this field and, and what drew you in and, and what has kind of had your career go in the direction that it has gone over the years.

Well, I think the power system and the electric grid is really the most important thing that needs attention for both quality of life reliability, but also decarbonization and environmental issues. So I’ve believed that since, since I was in college and really started working on it there, and I keep learning more every day.

Happy to share with you and your listeners some of that, and hopefully more people get engaged. It’s really important stuff. It’s actually complicated and tricky, but you get used to it. And again, it’s just really important issues. We’re not going to decarbonize without building out the transmission grid. So it’s something everybody really needs to pay attention to. Yeah,

I certainly have read more and more about it over recent years, as I’ve become more engaged in environmental policy issues and and how important it is, and also some of the bottlenecks that the grid has faced, as far as building it out and lots of different regulatory schemes and states and federal government and permitting and zoning and nimbyism and all this stuff going on that has gotten in the way of building out our grid, maybe as well as we should or would like tell us a little bit about that.

And what do you see as the biggest hurdles, and what do you see maybe as the accomplishments of the last maybe three or four years, maybe the Biden administration. And then we can look back at maybe the Trump era, 2017 to 2021 and what changed?

If anything, sure, it’s a complicated industry, mainly because we started out at the beginning of the industry, over 100 years ago, with about 3000 little utilities that would sort of build generation to serve their local load. So think of these like little utility fiefdoms all around the country, and it was only an afterthought later to build connections between them, and we’ve been over the subsequent decades, built more and more stronger connections to connect utilities and states and whole regions, that turns out to be critically important for renewable energy.

As it turns out, the wind is always blowing somewhere. And so if you can connect up all the wind farms, and then you got the solar where it might be cloudy in one place and sunny in another, or solar in different time zones, we literally have gigawatts of power moving across regions. Most people have no idea that’s even happening, but that is how the grid operates.

So if we want to get to very high renewable energy penetration, we need to build out not only the infrastructure, but the rules, sort of the market rules, the rules on the road for how you deliver and transmit power.

So I’ve been working on that for 30 years now, and there’s, there have been a lot of attempts, some successes, some some failures over those decades, we have some good examples of tons of wind from the Upper Midwest being delivered on transmission lines into Chicago and points east, and then Texas did a big grid build out, which made it the, the national leader in renewable energy.

Most people find it surprising that Texas would be the renewable energy leader, but it’s because they built out the infrastructure out to West Texas and the panhandle, and now all that wind power is serving Houston and Dallas. So those are some of the successes in recent years. The Biden administration did quite a lot. They really were supportive of transmission from the get go, I actually had the opportunity to speak with the president directly about it, and he completely got it.

And everybody on the team all the way down into multiple agencies at the program level, got the memo that this is something to support. So that helped with permitting. It helps with policies and programs and processes. There’s a grid deployment office at the Department of Energy Now didn’t used to exist, and appointees to other agencies, including independent agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, were all pretty aligned. Transmission has never been a thing that necessarily had to be partisan. I was actually working for George W Bush’s longest serving appointee at FERC.

I was. Was the chairman’s advisor there, and he had also been worked for Bush in Texas, and at that time, this was 20 years ago in Washington, all these same transmission initiatives were led by Republicans, including the Bucha administration. So it doesn’t have to be partisan. Kind of hard to predict where things are going to go now in this 1/19 Congress and Trump 2.0 but doesn’t have to be partisan.

Clearly, the Democrats got excited about transmission because of the climate implications. I think you can trace that to, in part, President Biden’s leadership, but also, when Nancy Pelosi set up that Select Committee on the climate crisis, they looked at all the things needed for climate and the transmission grid showed up very prominently in that report as a top priority, and so I think that’s one of the reasons we have pretty much unanimous support among Democrats in Congress for building out the grid. But you know, Washington swings back in its political pendulum kind of way, and we’ll see. We’ll see what happens going forward.

So in terms of Trump in the 2017 to 2021 era, what was the policy? Was there a dramatic change, or any change at all from kind of Obama era? Policies about grid build out.

It was not a great time during that 2017 to 2020 time period for the grid. There was barely any new high voltage transmission built during that time. It wasn’t really a focus at either FERC or the Department of Energy. There were some transmission lines. Some of the lines that have recently been completed ended up taking 1820, years, and so some of that time was, you know, caught in lengthy permitting processes at different agencies. So it wasn’t a great time.

There wasn’t much development of the regional markets either. In fact, there was a very harmful rule put out by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that harmed the way that wind and solar could bid into the bulk power markets. Everybody bids in and they get the market clearing price in these auctions, but wind and solar kind of had to compete with one arm tied behind their back during that period, so it was a little rough. There was certainly a lot of valuable work to do for all of us. We were very busy, but that was not a great time period. We’ll see.

You know, there’s there’s reasons, there’s a lot more reasons why different policy makers of different stripes would support all this grid build out. I mean, we’ve got power demand growth like you wouldn’t believe, and it’s needed for AI and for cryptocurrency and domestic manufacturing. We’re bringing all this manufacturing back to the country. So there’s a lot of reasons why many Republicans in Congress, anyway and around the states are taking a new look at the grid, even if they don’t care about the pace of decarbonization at all, maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. There’s other reasons to focus on this issue.

Yeah, certainly. And as you said, Texas is a big wind state, and probably pretty big in solar as well. And a number of red states are major wind producers. I remember reading that, you know, Iowa could be the Saudi Arabia of wind, or some of those other states, like North Dakota and so on so forth, they get a ton of wind energy. And whether the politics or do you see the politics switching in those areas, because a lot of people must be making a lot of money or potentially losing a lot of money if they can’t sell their wind?

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of wind and solar development out in rural areas, and a lot of these rural states that tend to be represented by more Republicans in Congress and at the state level of conservative politics, but they do have a lot of local businesses employed by wind and solar, and that’s very meaningful. There’s a lot of jobs, and there’s a lot of, for example, you know, benefits to landowners who host the wind and solar project, or the county gets this property tax bump from these generation projects. So there’s a lot of local benefit.

That’s certainly it be an issue with things like renewable energy tax credits, which were, of course, a key part of the inflation Reduction Act, biggest climate bill ever. That’s obviously something that’s going to undergo intense scrutiny by the Trump administration in Congress. Hard to predict what is going to get trimmed versus thrown out versus preserved at this point. But you know, it does matter that there were, for example, 18 House Republicans not long ago who wrote to Speaker Johnson and said, Hey, don’t touch these renewable tax incentives.

We depend on these our communities, our manufacturing, our jobs, depend on some of these credits. And then, you know, you’re starting to see comments from people like Senator Murkowski say, Well, let’s take more of a scalpel than a sledgehammer to this thing, and let’s look at maybe some trimming, but let’s not go after these.

You know, a lot of these incentives are actually working well and pretty important. So it’s hard to say. I mean, Republicans, the reality is, they only have a razor thin majority in the House and the Senate, and you know, they have to be 100% aligned there. For if they want to pass it on a Republican only vote, and there was a lot of diversity of views among the delegation.

Well, it certainly would be good if some sanity returned to the environmental debate and something maybe not quite what the country experienced in the 19 early 1970s where I think 98 senators voted for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and similar numbers voted for clean air in water in the in the house, it was nearly unanimous that both parties were for a cleaner environment. Do we see a move in that direction?

I realize that those 18 congressmen Republicans are a move whether or not they would be sufficient to withstand the pressure that they might be under to cave and wipe this, this stuff out. Of course, they would probably lose their majority in in 2026 if they swing too far, because a lot of, as you said, a lot of communities are, are making money off of this, and to wipe it out, it’s going to cause a lot of pain.

Yeah, that is the challenge, even if you have a lot of strident supporters for some provision the need for whatever the number is, $7 trillion to fund the things that President elect Trump campaigned on, including the reinstating his tax cuts from five years ago.

Those things are extremely costly. Now, Republicans have been willing to do deficit spending in the past, so maybe they, maybe they would do that again. But if you’re not going to use deficits and add to the debt, then you’re going to be looking for all that money from some other program. So that means every single other item of the budget is under a microscope.

Well, this would be an interesting question for Elon Musk, and that his company certainly depends upon transmission lines getting power to consumers who are using Teslas, and if he hamstrings that effort while he’s cutting his nose off. So I’m assuming that he is going to try to be a voice for electric grid transmission. Where is what has he said in the past? What are his comments on this? If any?

I don’t know that he has said anything specifically about the grid. I may have missed it, but I do know he went to the Edison Electric Institute last year. That’s the association of all the investor owned utilities in the country. And he said, you know, utility executives and CEOs, whatever you think your power demand growth forecast is, you better double it. When he said that, he was thinking of not only the electric vehicle market, where, of course, he owns Tesla, and they’re doing a lot, but the artificial intelligence, he’s into that.

And you know, a lot of lot of tech investors are into cryptocurrency. That’s a another power, major power user. So, you know, I think, I think they’re generally right, that a lot of tech Titans and investors are well aware of the incredible power demand coming from these, these new uses, and you really can’t serve that, or at least you can’t serve them here in the US unless you grow out our grid. And it’s other things, like silicon chip manufacturing that’s extremely electricity intensive.

You got a massive plant in New York, and there’s a bunch around the country. Some of these new uses of electricity, you know that we’re doing more here in the country are really going to drive a need. So again, a lot of reasons for a lot of individuals, Elon Musk included, to advocate for building out the grid.

Lots of questions related to that, as far as crypto versus AI, which one is sucking up more power from the grid, and can you kind of measure that in terms of percentage of the total power usage in the country, and what, what it kind of relates to, as far as like, are they sucking as much as a mid sized city or state, or how much crypto is, I think, bigger now, but AI is the one that’s really growing.

We have data centers that are generally probably about 10 new gigawatts a year, which is about 1% of our total electricity load. And so we’re kind of adding 1% to our national power system every year just to serve the data centers. There’s probably another percent that is other uses like this, domestic manufacturing, where electric vehicles or heat pumps and electric space heating, that’s a couple of percent per year.

You know, 15 to 20 gigawatts per year of new uses, new load that we didn’t have. We barely had any power demand growth for the last 2025, years. So this is all new. The whole electric industry is scrambling to try to deal with it. They were already scrambling to try to connect all the wind and solar and storage and new clean energy projects, and deal with the fact that about that same amount, that 15 to 20 gigawatts of new power, that about that same quantity, is also being retired, because they’re just old plants.

Most of those old plants are coal, so that that retirement was helping our carbon budget, that’s why we’ve had. A pretty impressive carbon reduction relative to other countries around the world. So we were basically replacing coal with a little bit of gas, but a lot of wind, solar and batteries, and that’s what we’re doing, but now we have this low growth to deal with that we nobody knew about before about a year or two ago.

Yeah, it’s kind of a little frustrating for those of us sitting on the sidelines, saying, hey, you know we’re rolling out all this new renewable energy, and yet we seem like we’re just filling a hole that keeps on growing every time you turn around.

And I guess I question whether or not using that much power for AI is the best use of of all that power, and is the return on investment worth it? I guess there’s nothing we can do, maybe to stop it or say, Hey, do you really need this much power? Is this a waste of our resources?

Yeah. I mean, you look around at all the uses of electricity, and I think every, every user can point at other uses and say, Wait a minute, why do they get the power and it’s just the fact that AI is kind of the newest kid on the block here and now everybody’s pointing at them. But, you know, it’s also used for a lot of valuable things that could increase efficiency of our power system. Could increase efficiency of various other sectors.

They’re starting to use it more and even, like the processing of interconnection applications, to speed those up, because we’re we’ve got wind and solar projects jammed up. It’s taken them three to five years to get connected, so they’re starting to accelerate that process with some uses of AI and automation. So, you know, it’s hard to it’s hard to say we in the electric industry sort of all grew up with statutes around the country, state and federal legislation that just basically says the utility has an obligation to serve all uses without questioning them.

So it’s a little bit out of utilities mindset to even think about whether one use is better than another, you know. But the challenge, exactly as you said, is, you know, we were decarbonizing a lot now we’ve got all this growth, you know. You could probably also say that some of our decarbonization over the last 20 years was the fact that some manufacturing was leaving it wasn’t disappearing off the face of the earth. It was just going to Asia, going to China, and yet we as Americans were still buying those products.

So were we really decarbonizing as much as we thought we were? And now for bringing some of that manufacturing back to the US, isn’t really that bad. I mean, in a way, building things here to serve people here is more efficient than shipping it across the world. So it’s, it’s a complicated question, but the I think the point is it’s a real challenge now with power demand growth, to kind of keep up with it and keep decarbonizing.

At the same time, I was talking to somebody from Oracle about their software and their management of power systems, I guess, and utilities to help increase efficiency, and wonder if you had worked with any of their systems.

I hear about it. I don’t. I’m not very close to it. That’s not really my, my world.

Oh, okay, as you were talking about the 3000 utilities that were around the US. It reminded me that my grandmother used to work for a power company in central Illinois, and so she was kind of the representative to sell power. And, you know, like, kind of a strange job for a grandmother, strange job for anybody to go and market power. Hey, use electricity, like at this point, you know, everybody assumes electricity is just something everybody uses, needs for all kinds of things.

Well, I guess you probably would have been marketing to big manufacturers or big users of power, because they would be the customers that would make a difference, not going knocking on doors to consumers so much. But how many utilities are there now, down from 3000.

Well, it depends on how you count, if you count based on who owns transmission systems, which you know tends to be sort of the bigger utilities. It’s about 330 of them, so about 10% of the total number. A lot of the utilities in the bigger number are small ones that don’t really own their own utility systems. They just sort of buy off of the, you know, the local, bigger utility to serve, like a cooperative or something like that, a consumer owned group. So we have many, many cooperatives and municipal systems, and they’re not really, you know, operating the utilities you usually think of as a utility.

So a couple questions. One, what are the kind of investment opportunities given where the grid is growing and where power needs to be generated and things like that, as well as a question about what happened in the Trump Bureau when, I guess it was Rick Perry, who was a secretary Department of Energy during that period of time, initially, he said he wanted to close the department, and then he realized, after he was the, you know, the Secretary, oh, yeah, there’s actually some useful work that’s done here. You know, shocking, but tell us a little bit about both those topics.

So on the on the second one, Secretary, Perry, tried to do some things on keeping coal plants. Alive and around he actually one thing. He sent over a rule making FERC, the independent regulatory agency, saying, basically provide supports to coal and the market.

The Commission ended up rejecting that unanimously, on a bipartisan basis, because there basically wasn’t support for it. FERC operates by the facts in the law, and they have to use the Federal Power Act. And if there’s some proposal that would make rates just and reasonable, they’ll they’ll look at it, but if not, then they’ll reject it, because coal is actually more expensive to create power than either solar or wind, so it just economically is, you know, lost the race there.

That’s right, you know, nobody is really proposing any new coal plants now. I mean, you know to propose to build a 60 year asset that is going to have serious environmental risks associated with it for that entire time period is not something any investor is interested in right now. So and the old plants are really mostly uneconomic, as you said, they’re just not very efficient, so that gives regulators a reason to steer clear of proposals like that.

Well, in terms of batteries, we’ve heard there’s a lot of improvement in battery technology and related to some storing some of the solar and wind energy, so that there won’t be such spikes in prices, and energy prices going negative at some point in time because they can’t, they can’t sell it off. So where are we at in terms of improving use of batteries on the grid, and where do we need to be, given this massive grid growth?

Sure, storage has been doing great lately, so battery storage, so almost all of it right now is the lithium ion batteries. Same basic technology is what you have in your EVs. They tend to be, you know, grid scale batteries. They can be 1020, 30 or more megawatts, or over 100 even. And they’re big like, you know, looks like containers connected to the high voltage grid. And in places like California and Texas and through the southwest, they’ve really been keeping the lights on.

You might remember the few years ago, they were rolling blackouts in California. They were, they basically, as a state, kind of got behind. They just, you know, supply was lagging demand. They’d had supply loss of some supply without replacing enough. And also they had a kind of a mismatch of the time of day of operation.

So, like, you get a ton of solar at, you know, let’s say 2pm but then by 678, PM, whenever the sun goes down, depending on the time of year, they would run out. And so that would be the time period, September, October, they had, they had trouble around that end of the day time period. So the state deployed, I think it was like 10 gigawatts of batteries just in one year, or something like that.

So they got, now, you got batteries and solar working together very closely in California this past year was very reliable that California Independent System Operator has done a good job keeping the lights on and integrating those batteries so they’re kind of used at the right time. It’s a little bit tricky to do that, but it’s been working. And Texas is the same way.

They’ve got a lot of batteries, a lot of solar there. So for a lot of the times of year, you have the solar in the middle of the day, charging up the batteries, and then the batteries will keep going through the kind of the evening air conditioning time period when there’s no solar, and people have, you know, come home turn on their lights, and they got the AC still cracking.

So that’s working really well. And both those regions are also integrating solar and storage along with wind. In those places, wind tends to operate it to different times. So like, California now has some transmission lines out to like New Mexico, and, you know, they’re working on Idaho and Wyoming and the wind is blowing at the times when the solar is not producing, so that now they’ve got the power system is kind of a puzzle.

You have to put all the pieces together to figure out each hour of the day as like a different challenge. How am I going to get all the supply to meet the demand in this hour so now, but when you have the solar and the wind and the batteries all working together, you can get most of it covered.
There are certain times they get 100% of their power from renewables, but to get that over the course of a month or a year, you know, they can, they can get most of it over over half of it from renewables these days, taking us to like the hydrogen hubs that are created and potentially storing the solar and wind energy in hydrogen.

What are your thoughts on that? And has that been rolled out anywhere? And where is it proposed to be rolled out the hydrogen market from what I know has been slow to really take off, getting fully green hydrogen, meaning, you know, all of it produced from wind and solar. And doing that when the wind and solar are operating is tough, just because on the, you know, the early stage of the hydrogen market.

So we have not really seen those take off yet. And so, you know, the industry is going to be very dependent on. On some type of tax incentive or other support for some period of time. So certainly, everybody in that industry is looking to see, what if anything happens in terms of changes to the inflation reduction act on hydrogen incentives.

One sense, I mean, the incentives could be taken away. They could be trimmed. There’s another sense in which maybe they survive. And actually, the regulations on hydrogen under the Trump administration might be lighter than they at least, and we expect them to be under the Biden administration, they haven’t finalized the regulations in terms of what qualifies for those incentives. So I think there’s a lot of uncertainty right now based on the tax incentives. Well,

I saw that Exxon had kind of, I come out in favor of the US staying in the Paris accord, as opposed to where Trump has said he was going to do. So when Exxon is more environmentally friendly than the administration, you kind of feel like, Wow, big oil, you’re going to the to the dark side of big oil. That’s a that’s pretty dark place. Exxon and the other major oil companies have a fair amount of money invested in alternative energies and hydrogen. Where do you see them in this whole process?

Now, it’s a great point. Well, there’s a lot of companies in both the oil, gas and in power who are really caught between this pendulum swing of policies. I mean, we we went from it was only two years ago, we had a full democratic Trifecta in Washington, House, Senate, White House, and now we’re about to have full Republican Trifecta with very different energy policies.

And if you’re a company that invests in assets that are intended to last 50 years. That’s really, really difficult to operate in. So I think we see the similar dynamic from power sector executives to sort of plead with policy makers to give them more stability. And I think if you interviewed any of the say, Fortune 500 energy executives, they would say, Yeah, we need to decarbonize. We are steadily doing so we might disagree on the pace, and we might be, you know, the individual executives may themselves be Republicans or Democrats, but what they really want is stability.

They want to know kind of what are the rules of the game? What am I investing in here? What are the what’s it going to look like once I build this investment? So I’m hopeful that during this time period of Trump 2.0 that that voice really becomes loud in Washington, because it’s just, it’s just an impossible business environment for businesses to work in, amen on that front.

But manufacturers, who are building their own power, essentially, like many utilities, they saw in the news that some of the major tech companies are looking at building nuclear reactors, and they have solar and wind and whatever else they have that what? What are your thoughts on that front? Is that going to help solve this? Or is this a distraction from where we should be going?

Yeah, the tech companies in particular. But any large loads, including manufacturing, are definitely looking at their own power sources. Of course, the tech companies have really been driving renewable energy development over the last decade with their purchases. Now, physically, all those renewable sources are connected to the broad power system.

They might be a few 100 miles away from the data center, but they contractually are providing that output to the data center, because most of these companies have significant ESG and climate goals, so they’ve been trying to get carbon free power. So wind and solar have been selling really. A lot of the recent development has been sales to these, these companies to for the output of their power plants. Right now, the problem in with large loads is they can’t find enough power.

So they’re going around they, I mean, they, a lot of them wanted to be in Loudoun County, Virginia, which kind of data center alley until they got over overloaded. They just can’t keep up with the growth. A lot of them went down to Georgia, where they had the nuclear plant and got some of that power that seems to be kind of tapped out. They went to Ohio, where they have as the 765, kV transmission network, big network, and that’s, you know, got limitations. So that would go in anywhere in the country they can find power.

And then some of them, as you said, are even doing behind the meter, like, bring your own power. And that means either, you know, go to the site of a nuclear plant, if nobody bought up that power, and it’s available for for sale still, which, by the way, you wonder, why? Why these states, if they wanted carbon free power, why didn’t they buy up their power ahead of time they could have, and should have, but they didn’t. And so now it’s available.

And so, you know, the tech companies are going, some of them going there. I worry that we’re going to see a lot of on site natural gas plants being built. The only thing that will probably. Prevent that is the fact that there aren’t many turbines for sale. Like, the manufacturers of the actual turbines are, like, fully booked out. And so there’s a limitation on that.

So for the next couple of years, I know we’re going to see plenty of, you know, turbine sales, combined cycle and and combustion turbine sales, but it’s going to be limited by the manufacturing capacity. And then, you know, a couple years down the road, maybe the environment will change. Maybe there’s more ways to get clean power to these facilities.

But that’s, you know, that’s, that’s kind of where we are. It’s a, I mean, in a way, it’s fascinating. It’s also a little bit scary that there’s this much thirst for power, and how do we keep up with it, and how do we decarbonize at the same time?

Well, it’s fascinating. The analogy there the thirst for power and the thirst for political power and kind of the running in parallel tracks. I mean, the good news is that the Trump administration has to be hemmed in a bit by their thirst for political power. That crushing the IRA and crushing clean energy will hurt a lot of people and and would decimate their coalition.

So they can’t, they can’t completely wipe this stuff out, because a lot of the IRA investments went into red states or purple states, so doing wholesale damage to those interests, are going to swing states that are, you know, he won by a little bit, but he didn’t, he didn’t have a landslide, so he better be pretty damn careful with how he goes forward.

Yeah, I know that’s right. Clean energy is popular, okay? So it’s not, you know, top of the list inflation clearly was a an issue in the election. But, you know, there again, if he imposes massive tariffs of the sort that he said, including on things like solar panels, that’s very inflationary, we’ll see, you know, see how much voters really tolerate that.

We certainly should keep trying to domestically produce as much as we can. But you know, these sort of sudden shocks when we haven’t yet built up the domestic supply chain and manufacturing that just leads to higher costs. That’s just inflation for consumers.

Let me ask you about some other countries, and maybe you could throw in your own examples. For example, China is built out and still building out a tremendous amount of power infrastructure and and how they’ve been able to do that and manage their grid. Obviously, they have a central power system politically, so they don’t have to answer to anybody.

They just do it that we don’t have here. But maybe something looking at Europe and say, for instance, Denmark is producing, I my understanding, 100% of their power through renewables on many days. And how they have said, hey, they want to be the Saudi Arabia of wind. Or are there countries in Europe? How are they managing the grid? Are they having the kind of demand growth that we are having in the US?

Yeah, it is, I agree, instructive to look at those examples. So in like Denmark or Northern Europe, what they’re actually doing is using the Scandinavian hydro system as the big battery, right? So you can store that power.

So when they have surplus wind or renewables, they just, you know, reserve more water behind the dam, and then they run it through the dam later, when they need the power, they can only do that through transmission lines. So they’ve got interconnectors going all over Europe. The UK has two or three now. They all have interconnectors, these big transmission lines, high voltage DC cables, lying on the sea floor, connecting those countries.

And they’re basically using each other as batteries, you know, whatever resource they have to store the power. China’s doing the same thing. They’ve got like, 1000 kilovolt, like massive transmission lines going 800 miles or something, and also high voltage DC lines to kind of balance the wind. The wind’s always blowing somewhere. They either, you know, connecting all the different resource areas. That’s obviously harder to imagine, just going across the US.

But it can be done. We actually have built, like, 10 years ago, we built some of these lines. And there are lines I just visited, one in New Mexico. Super long, 500 mile line connecting New Mexico wind to Arizona, but the power is going to get into California.

And we got, again, lines from Wyoming into California. We got, you know, lines from Canada into New York City. So, you know, it can be done, never easy. But I think this is kind of the way things are going to get to high penetration. You need to connect these areas, and grid infrastructure is the main way to do that.

Well, certainly this is a fascinating time, which is kind of a thinking Chinese language a curse. May you live in interesting times. We’re certainly living in interesting times. You know, just kind of to wrap it up, what are the, some of the maybe top three issues that you’re seeing we should be focused on to roll out the grid more effectively, to deal with our you know, ginormous power needs there to. Growing?

Yeah. I guess the thing I would suggest specifically to your your listeners is, you know, wherever they live, check into what the state is doing on the on the grid, because there is this opportunity for the states to really work with their neighboring states to build out the grid and achieve each state’s clean energy goals. And a lot of states are active.

Some of them are not paying any attention to that. So it’s good to kind of make sure your state is proactively working on that there is a lot of good activity. And you know, this stuff doesn’t generate from Washington. Washington policy matters, but a lot of states are leading the way on clean energy and the grid, and it’s worth kind of checking in to what’s happening in your state in your region.

Well, appreciate your great work. And on this front, it’s one of those behind the scenes type jobs that we’re all dependent upon, but is somewhat invisible until the power goes off, and then we’re like, what the hell happened?

That’s true for just about everybody in the power sector. That’s right, we don’t matter until there’s no power.

But great work in in helping us be connected, stay connected, and you know, maybe this will be something that literally and figuratively connects us politically as a people, is realizing that we have so much that we rely upon and are interconnected, our values, our interests, and be far better off working together on these issues and being divisive and scoring political points.

Let’s hope so. Well, it’s great to be watching Matt.

Okay, thanks.

Have a great day, Rob.