Speaker 1: With Laurent's segle End from London and Gerard Reed from Berlin.
Speaker 1: This is redefining.
Speaker 2: Energy today on reilli if an energy job, we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about broken grids and how they can cope
Speaker 2: with the lord growth of data centers.
Speaker 1: Absolutely very topical given what's happened in Spain and also
Speaker 1: what happened to heat throw and on whatever grids, we
Speaker 1: realize the importance of them right.
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Speaker 2: Back to the show so Jab in order to talk
Speaker 2: about bockn grids and how to fix them, we have
Speaker 2: an extraordinary guest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jeremy Kent. I've known this man a couple of
Speaker 1: years at this point in time, and he's brilliant. He's
Speaker 1: the founder, CEO, and chairman of a company in the
Speaker 1: US called One Power, where he leads the company's vision
Speaker 1: and growth. And he's really a pioneer in the whole
Speaker 1: industrial power sector. And what I mean by that is
Speaker 1: he's bringing renewable energy to new industry. Really, you know,
Speaker 1: data centers and companies that are looking to electrify their processes.
Speaker 2: But he's doing it very fast, he sure is.
Speaker 1: And he's taken responsibility of everything from transformer all the
Speaker 1: way down.
Speaker 2: To meet Let's listen to Jeremy.
Speaker 1: Jeremy's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 3: Thanks Jardan and Laura. Nice to say me here.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll kick off by just asking really about the
Speaker 1: energy system in the US, and just we're hearing a
Speaker 1: huge amount that power demand is going up. Can't build
Speaker 1: a grid too much renewables. It all sounds like a
Speaker 1: bit of a mess, so maybe just give us your
Speaker 1: sense of it all.
Speaker 3: The American power grid is the largest machine ever built
Speaker 3: in the history of the world, and right now that
Speaker 3: machine is seeing new use cases, new demand, new problems,
Speaker 3: and it's not able to fix itself. It's not able
Speaker 3: to fix itself because of economic reasons, because of engineering reasons,
Speaker 3: because of policy reasons. And so now you have an
Speaker 3: American grid that isn't ready for the next iteration of
Speaker 3: American industrial revolution. And as we see new mega loads
Speaker 3: popping in the grid to give us the things that
Speaker 3: we like to use, that grid is on a path
Speaker 3: to fail if something doesn't change. And so that affects
Speaker 3: all of the new loads, and that affects all of
Speaker 3: the existing loads. And that's what we're watching and that's
Speaker 3: what we're focused on.
Speaker 1: Can you dig into that a little bit more when
Speaker 1: you say that, right, So just talk what the change
Speaker 1: is going on. So what we're saying is electricity demand
Speaker 1: is going up? Why is it going up? And then
Speaker 1: can be related to that, talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the grid across the US and distresses that you see there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you think about the machine that is
Speaker 3: the grid, that machine was based around the original big
Speaker 3: loads in the early nineteen hundreds. It was based around refineries,
Speaker 3: steel plants, chemical plants, these big things that may be
Speaker 3: really big, like one hundred megawatts or some of the
Speaker 3: biggest refineries in the world at like three hundred megawatts,
Speaker 3: And that was the big loads on the grid, and
Speaker 3: then there are a bunch of smaller loads that worked
Speaker 3: around the system. Now, all of a sudden, you're seeing
Speaker 3: a whole new industrial revolution with data centers, with bitcoin mining,
Speaker 3: with big industrial greenhouses, with big additive manufacturing where you're
Speaker 3: dropping in these new loads that are bigger than most
Speaker 3: refineries all over the place. You're seeing a grid that
Speaker 3: was never built to have a gigawat of new load
Speaker 3: in Columbus, Ohio that's now all of a sudden seeing that,
Speaker 3: and it can pop up super quick. And so what
Speaker 3: you're seeing is it's forcing stress on the whole system.
Speaker 3: How much can you move power from the existing power
Speaker 3: plants to those loads? How much can that transmission system
Speaker 3: deal with You're seeing lines that are one hundred years
Speaker 3: old in the transmission system that are now being stressed
Speaker 3: to their max and haven't been stressed to their max
Speaker 3: in the entire time, And now all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: for economic reasons, you have utilities that are so used
Speaker 3: to giving out dividends that are having a hard time
Speaker 3: investing in that. So they're saying, it's hard for us
Speaker 3: to build anything quick, and we can't do that without
Speaker 3: losing our credit rating because we don't have enough of
Speaker 3: a reserve built up because we never thought this was coming.
Speaker 3: And so for the first time in one hundred years
Speaker 3: in the power grid, you're seeing this astronomical change in
Speaker 3: the demand and the inability of that system that is
Speaker 3: coasted for one hundred years trying to serve that demand.
Speaker 3: And it's going to cost everybody because when the industrials suffer,
Speaker 3: which our twenty six percent of the actual energy usage
Speaker 3: today or electricity usage today and rapidly growing, is their
Speaker 3: percentage start stressing the grid and putting more load on
Speaker 3: the grid. That has an effect on everybody else, all
Speaker 3: the way down to your home.
Speaker 2: I like to word stress because we're all also seeing
Speaker 2: that on the supply chain. When we talk two equipment
Speaker 2: manufacturers and they all say, oh my god, I can't
Speaker 2: deliver anything before two thirty. So why we were very
Speaker 2: interested to have you on the show is that, in
Speaker 2: fact you are building those new load centers. What have
Speaker 2: you witnessed the past two or three years? And I
Speaker 2: don't even want to enter in the rabbit hole of
Speaker 2: tariffs and some which may add another layer of complexity,
Speaker 2: But from an induscal point of view, how do you
Speaker 2: assess the supply chain right now.
Speaker 3: The problem with the supply chain is that everybody is
Speaker 3: so used to the way they used to do things
Speaker 3: that nobody is adapting to try to solve supply chain
Speaker 3: problems like you would in any other industry. Right now,
Speaker 3: you have utilities who say, here are the only six
Speaker 3: facilities we buy breakers from. And now when demand goes up,
Speaker 3: those six facilities are stressed, and utilities aren't saying, let's
Speaker 3: go quickly add six more. They're saying, well, we'll just
Speaker 3: wait for those breakers to come out of those facilities
Speaker 3: that we know and trust. You're seeing that with transformers.
Speaker 3: I've had the privilege of touring some of the largest
Speaker 3: transformer factories in the world, and it is absolutely amazing
Speaker 3: to see how much they're stuck in the nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Every single transformer coming down that line is different, every
Speaker 3: single transformer is custom. It's rare to get an order
Speaker 3: for two or three of the same thing. And so
Speaker 3: these factories have adapted to all of this bespoke nature
Speaker 3: where they had the luxury of time and no demand before,
Speaker 3: and they weren't trying to grow fast, and so they
Speaker 3: could be bespoke in a world that you're seeing now
Speaker 3: with new load popping up at the scale we're seeing it,
Speaker 3: bespoke doesn't work. The entire system falls apart. And so
Speaker 3: what we're actively involved in is working with suppliers to
Speaker 3: get into mass produced, standardized things that are good enough.
Speaker 3: You can get the nice custom thing when you have
Speaker 3: the luxury of time. Right now, the American grid doesn't
Speaker 3: have the luxury of time. The American grid needs solutions
Speaker 3: that are repeatable and scalable quickly now. And the easiest
Speaker 3: way to do that is with all the load coming
Speaker 3: off and going on the grid. So at all of
Speaker 3: the generation points and all the load points, you can
Speaker 3: start standardizing like crazy. If the whole system's willing to change,
Speaker 3: you just have to get it to change.
Speaker 1: So, Jeremy, how do you get it to change? And listen,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day year at a CEO
Speaker 1: of an energy services business, so as you just gave
Speaker 1: that example there of the utilities just always going back
Speaker 1: to their old suppliers, and yeah, how do you get
Speaker 1: it to change?
Speaker 3: Basically, it's a lot of discipline and it's a lot
Speaker 3: of changing the way we think about things. What we said,
Speaker 3: Gerard is we need one standard design with as few
Speaker 3: different parts as possible that works from the widest range
Speaker 3: of things possible. We only buy a thirty megawat transformer
Speaker 3: for our one thirty eight kV to thirty four or
Speaker 3: five kV systems. If you have a twenty megawatt problem,
Speaker 3: you're getting a thirty megawatt solution from us. If you
Speaker 3: have a thirty five megawatt problem, you're getting a sixty
Speaker 3: megawatt solution for us. I've only got one block, and
Speaker 3: that block is thirty megawats. And it forces a lot
Speaker 3: of awkward conversations when the normal engineer for the customer goes, well,
Speaker 3: but we only need forty megawatts, and you go, great,
Speaker 3: that means sixty And they go, well, well, couldn't you
Speaker 3: adapt this design? I really like blank? And you go,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you do like blank. That's not our standard part.
Speaker 3: Our standard part I can have here on a much
Speaker 3: quicker schedule. I can mass produce my standard part with
Speaker 3: various factories around the world. I can now, all of
Speaker 3: a sudden two refine that design in a way that
Speaker 3: most people never get to refine designs. Most transformers never
Speaker 3: have a full suite of seismic testing of ballistic testing
Speaker 3: of load testing because they've only built one or two
Speaker 3: of them. Going back to Model T. This is ford
Speaker 3: to one oh one do the same thing over and
Speaker 3: over with interchangeable standardized parts on a line. The entire
Speaker 3: game changes and you go, it's good enough for everybody.
Speaker 3: And that's how we actually so you can keep up
Speaker 3: with this new load and with the new behind the
Speaker 3: meter generation and actually solve all these industrial power problems.
Speaker 3: But to really answer your question, Gerard, a lot of
Speaker 3: times we just say, I know you want that, but
Speaker 3: we're not going to give that to you. We're going
Speaker 3: to give you a solution that works that is not customized.
Speaker 3: It's a standardized solution. And if you want customized, and
Speaker 3: you can wait five years like everybody else.
Speaker 1: Can I just ask that. The question on this is
Speaker 1: explain a little bit why everybody has gone this customized
Speaker 1: approach in the past. I'm talking about a utility. Utility's bild,
Speaker 1: not a grid. Why would you go to a point
Speaker 1: where every transformer is different? Why did they go down
Speaker 1: this road?
Speaker 3: Well, there's two arguments. I'll give you the utility argument
Speaker 3: and I'll give you what I think is really going
Speaker 3: on the utility argument is that we put our great
Speaker 3: engineers to solve each unique problem, and each problem is
Speaker 3: a little bit different, and so they design it each
Speaker 3: time and end up with the solution that's best for
Speaker 3: that substation at that location, for that new load at
Speaker 3: that location, for whatever it is. And so let's apply
Speaker 3: good American engineering to a good American problem. The reality
Speaker 3: is in America almost all utilities are compensated based on
Speaker 3: the rate base that they create, and if they add cost,
Speaker 3: that cost is more rate base, then all of a
Speaker 3: sudden they get a higher actual cash value rate of
Speaker 3: return because they spend more money. The more they spend,
Speaker 3: the more they make. And when you have that model,
Speaker 3: there is no incentive from the CEO down to the
Speaker 3: head of engineering down to the guy in the field
Speaker 3: to cut cost. If you cut cost, you end up
Speaker 3: getting a lower bonus. And so when you take those
Speaker 3: two competing problems one hundred year culture of we just
Speaker 3: like to do everything bespoke for that site, that way
Speaker 3: through the overall financial incentive of that cost more and
Speaker 3: we get rewarded more. Nobody in that system is going
Speaker 3: to change. I don't know what it would take to
Speaker 3: make them change, but it's not going to happen naturally
Speaker 3: without some major legal wrangling of them.
Speaker 2: To illustrate what you're saying about, some realization the still
Speaker 2: could be about at the centers. We're seeing the XAI
Speaker 2: data center in Tennessee built in recall time, and they
Speaker 2: just put thirty two deesel engines. So it's the type
Speaker 2: of approach you are advocating.
Speaker 3: That particular data center may have some other legal issues
Speaker 3: that I'm not necessarily advocating, but what I am advocating
Speaker 3: for is a inventory of standard parts that can go
Speaker 3: do a new industrial load in record time. We have
Speaker 3: parts just coming in just on order. Let's order six
Speaker 3: of these thirty megawatt transformers. Once order six more, and
Speaker 3: now when that new load comes in, we can build
Speaker 3: those systems in record time. We're working on getting so
Speaker 3: standardized where every substation is the same, every distribution system
Speaker 3: we build is the same, every piece of equipment is
Speaker 3: the same, that we can build a substation from a
Speaker 3: green field to running in ninety days, right ninety days
Speaker 3: from the day we break ground to the day we go.
Speaker 3: Here you go, and now all of a sudden, you
Speaker 3: can move super fast. And by the way, if that
Speaker 3: location has a problem because the utility is taking longer.
Speaker 3: You can shift all those exact same parts to another
Speaker 3: site that is ready. That's the only way you solve
Speaker 3: this problem of how fast do you go? Is you go,
Speaker 3: I'm ready to drop a generic substation in anywhere. And
Speaker 3: these generic substations are big. These are one hundred megawatts
Speaker 3: to four hundred and fifty megawatts.
Speaker 1: So Jerry to just to be clear that what you're
Speaker 1: doing is you're bypassing the utility. Really, what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're going to your industrial customer, whoever it is
Speaker 1: an old world chemical company or a new world data something,
Speaker 1: and you're going.
Speaker 3: Okay, you're my client.
Speaker 1: I'm going to build this all for you. Right, that's
Speaker 1: what you do. So maybe talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: what is it actually delivered to them?
Speaker 2: What do you do?
Speaker 3: You hit the nail on the head, Gerard that what
Speaker 3: we're saying is the change is not going to come
Speaker 3: from the utilities. The change is going to come from
Speaker 3: the load saying here's what we want. Because in the
Speaker 3: United States, most customers have a right to take voltage
Speaker 3: or service at the highest voltage they want to. So
Speaker 3: if you're a new data center, take service at one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty eight kV or three hundred and forty
Speaker 3: five kV. What we do is either we go to
Speaker 3: your site and we own and operate your power system
Speaker 3: from where it ties into the transmission system to your door.
Speaker 3: So that means we'll own the underground cable system to
Speaker 3: get to a substation if we need to, or the overhead.
Speaker 3: We'll own the substation. We'll then own all of the
Speaker 3: power distribution on the site, and we drop power off
Speaker 3: at your door. In other sites, what we're doing is
Speaker 3: we're actually going out and finding where that power is
Speaker 3: ahead of time, and we're pre building those sites. We're
Speaker 3: building electrified industrial parks where it's our land and our
Speaker 3: power system, and you can bring your facility to us.
Speaker 3: If your bitcoin mining, you can show up with mobile units,
Speaker 3: drop them off and plug right in. If you want
Speaker 3: to show up and build a building, you can show
Speaker 3: up and do that. If you want to show up
Speaker 3: and build a greenhouse, you can do that. But what
Speaker 3: we're finding is that that bridge of getting from one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty eight kV or three hundred and forty
Speaker 3: five kV down to the four hundred and eighty volts
Speaker 3: at used at scale is where the bottleneck is five
Speaker 3: years if you use the normal system, and so the
Speaker 3: only way around that is to get into this mass
Speaker 3: production standardized parts. And the other nice part of that
Speaker 3: is now, all of a sudden, if everybody uses that
Speaker 3: same standard catalog of parts, the cost goes down for everybody,
Speaker 3: the reliability goes up for everybody, because we now have
Speaker 3: interchangeable parts. If I only have three different types of transformers,
Speaker 3: I can have a spare of each one of them
Speaker 3: here that can back up any one of the facilities
Speaker 3: that we work with, and it's good for all of them.
Speaker 3: And so what we're really seeing is industrials saying, if
Speaker 3: you've got a standardized solution that gets us online faster
Speaker 3: and higher reliability and more interchangeability. That's very interesting to
Speaker 3: us because for industrials, they don't get paid more when
Speaker 3: it costs more. They get paid more when they save
Speaker 3: more money, and so they're all for cost effective solutions.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you a little bit about the role
Speaker 1: of sort of renewables and storage in.
Speaker 3: This Yeah, For a lot of the emerging industry, the
Speaker 3: new guys, their business is about getting a business up
Speaker 3: and going right now as much as they'll tell you
Speaker 3: they have a long term plan. There is nobody there
Speaker 3: who knows what twenty years in the future is. Yet
Speaker 3: as those companies start maturing, we expect to see what
Speaker 3: we see with our current customers. Are existing industrials who
Speaker 3: had factories for one hundred years, is that they start going, Hey,
Speaker 3: how do I now also get rate predictability? How do
Speaker 3: I know what the cost of a kilo one hour is?
Speaker 3: And if you want long term rate predictability, renewables is
Speaker 3: still the best way to do that. You can't get
Speaker 3: a twenty year natural gas price, I don't care who
Speaker 3: you are. You can get a twenty year price from
Speaker 3: energy off of a wind turbine or a solar system.
Speaker 3: And so we're helping fifty year old factories now get
Speaker 3: to net zero, not match, not twenty four to seven,
Speaker 3: but like annual netted on an energy basis, which gives
Speaker 3: them a huge financial predictability that they didn't have before.
Speaker 3: I think you're going to see those new industrials eventually want.
Speaker 3: And then when you talk about storage, everybody gets all
Speaker 3: excited about big sexy storage. It sounds great, it looks great.
Speaker 3: That's nice, big sexy storage. At the scale of a
Speaker 3: five hundred megawad data center really doesn't exist in the world,
Speaker 3: and if where it does, it's just so hard to
Speaker 3: put into a single site. What you're seeing though, that
Speaker 3: super attractive and changes the grid is four hour on
Speaker 3: rack batteries. If you just have even a two hour
Speaker 3: on rack battery on the transmission system, that facility has
Speaker 3: so much more flexibility as the grid gets stressed to
Speaker 3: ride through a one hour event or most events are
Speaker 3: a five minute event, that just having one hour of
Speaker 3: on rack storage at the end solves so many problems
Speaker 3: for reliability for the grid that that almost like bulk
Speaker 3: but localized storage is way more valuable than here's a
Speaker 3: big battery that's only going to really draw down fully
Speaker 3: once every five years.
Speaker 2: Before we go into the hardware, there's always a layer
Speaker 2: on interest is software cod You see those new type
Speaker 2: of software, whether you know you build them yourself or
Speaker 2: the SaaS or are they really better than what you
Speaker 2: have like five years ago.
Speaker 3: The first thing I have to admit, Laurent is that
Speaker 3: most of the power grid when it comes to communication,
Speaker 3: is really really dumb. We the grid don't talk to
Speaker 3: each other at all. Well, I've had a thing written
Speaker 3: on my wall for eight years that essentially just says,
Speaker 3: how do we talk to each other? Because you can
Speaker 3: have all the software you want at your little facility,
Speaker 3: but that's irrelevant if you don't know what the facility
Speaker 3: next to you is doing, and the grid's doing, in
Speaker 3: the grid one hundred miles away at the main interconnects doing,
Speaker 3: and so actually getting the systems where we all talk
Speaker 3: to each other does not exist in the US period.
Speaker 3: By the way, we're part of the problem. We don't
Speaker 3: want to share our stuff with the utilities, and the
Speaker 3: utilities definitely don't want to share their stuff with us,
Speaker 3: and so until somebody forces all of us to talk,
Speaker 3: the software is all so localized it doesn't matter much.
Speaker 3: We're seeing software that's better at manipulating the market. Right
Speaker 3: it's able to predict when the rates are headed up
Speaker 3: and shut down ahead of time and try to get
Speaker 3: you the most cost effective price based on real time
Speaker 3: price signals. But that's not reliability, that's not operational, that's
Speaker 3: just playing the market. And so there isn't enough information
Speaker 3: sharing to even really have good software to help solve
Speaker 3: this problem. Right now, most utilities find out that they
Speaker 3: have an outage on their system. When they get calls
Speaker 3: from customers or the smart meter at the house goes down,
Speaker 3: they don't actually know that a lot of substations are down,
Speaker 3: and so at least at the bulk power system there's
Speaker 3: a little bit more communication, but those signals aren't all
Speaker 3: being shared with us, so we can predict it. And
Speaker 3: so what I really think the real question is the
Speaker 3: software code's not hard. It's the fact that none of
Speaker 3: us will share information with each other, and none of
Speaker 3: us have the ability to figure out who owes who
Speaker 3: a duty? Do I, the industrial user, have a duty
Speaker 3: to help protect the guy next to me? Do I
Speaker 3: have a duty to help protect the grid? Or can
Speaker 3: I just be a massively or energy your hog data
Speaker 3: center and suck everything out and say screw you, keep
Speaker 3: powering me. I'm gonna suck it all until you go down,
Speaker 3: and then I'm gonna be pissed. And so until we
Speaker 3: all figure that out. Software doesn't do.
Speaker 1: Much except it does one thing, Jeremy. What it does
Speaker 1: is enagbors the industrial customer, the new twenty first century
Speaker 1: industrial custer, to have cheaper, more reliable power. That's what
Speaker 1: enables it to do. Because you can do stuff now
Speaker 1: that you haven't been able to do almost for the
Speaker 1: laste hundred years, because we went back a hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: You were building the power center beside the industrial lord,
Speaker 1: and that's changed for one hundred years. You just move
Speaker 1: a too ca. Buts now we're going back to that world.
Speaker 1: Software is enabling you to do that right as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're able to operate more complicated systems behind the
Speaker 3: meter Gerard, that's absolutely true. And you're able to do
Speaker 3: better things economically for that thing by looking at real
Speaker 3: time power signals. That's very fair. I just don't think
Speaker 3: that solves the overall reliable of the grid problem you.
Speaker 2: Operate in PGM, my soul Harcot, Is it the same
Speaker 2: problem everywhere? Or some have started to find solutions.
Speaker 3: The only place where I've seen more sophisticated solutions is
Speaker 3: when you start getting into very small, locally controlled utilities.
Speaker 3: You have utilities like SMUT who are going out of
Speaker 3: their way to adopt new stuff to drive the price
Speaker 3: of power down. But like when you talk at the
Speaker 3: grid level and the bult power system level, I personally
Speaker 3: have not seen that anywhere. I haven't seen anybody forcing
Speaker 3: the conversation that I think has had in there.
Speaker 1: By the way, just for our listeners, SMUD, I know
Speaker 1: it's a California utility, but maybe you could just talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about that just to give you.
Speaker 3: SMUD is a Sacramento Municipal Utility District and essentially it's
Speaker 3: locally controlled, locally owned, kind of a self service utility.
Speaker 3: It's got a different profit model for its executives and
Speaker 3: its leadership, and they've done a lot over the years
Speaker 3: to explore things. They're one of the first California utilities
Speaker 3: to put in real amounts of wind. They've played other
Speaker 3: games to drive down the price of power and to
Speaker 3: have better data, and to reward their executives by driving
Speaker 3: the price of power down and protecting rate payers. And
Speaker 3: so that's a very different model than the publicly listed
Speaker 3: investor own utility who's trying to show that they're a
Speaker 3: better public company because they made more money off their
Speaker 3: rate payers, especially when there wasn't a lot of load growth.
Speaker 3: Are now in a very high load growth. They're trying
Speaker 3: to figure out how to survive that from a financial
Speaker 3: credit point of view. And so that's an example of
Speaker 3: a smaller utility where we're seeing stuff it's more creative
Speaker 3: and innovative. I know there's a couple smaller ones in
Speaker 3: New England that have done some things, but none of
Speaker 3: those are the mega investor owned utilities we all think of.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a bit about technology, and you've been need
Speaker 2: to transformer. You have ideas about how to better the technology.
Speaker 2: We've seen recently the famous drop Bagdino who is also
Speaker 2: launching a new type of transformer. So transformer is it
Speaker 2: the new hot technology.
Speaker 3: What we've found, Laurent, is that the most boring, reliable
Speaker 3: thing possible is the best answer.
Speaker 2: You're right.
Speaker 3: There are all kinds of cool transformers coming out that
Speaker 3: do all kinds of crazy stuff, and you can spend
Speaker 3: a lot of money on a transformer that will change
Speaker 3: its voltage for you, that has various different windings that
Speaker 3: can do different things. We don't think that's the thing
Speaker 3: that you mass produce, and we don't think that's the
Speaker 3: thing that solves most of the problems. We also have
Speaker 3: to realize that most of this all actually ends up
Speaker 3: being twelve or twenty four volt DC power for the
Speaker 3: servers that are being built at the end of the
Speaker 3: whole thing, So nobody actually cares about what the AC
Speaker 3: signal looks like. What we're doing is we're taking and saying,
Speaker 3: let's build the most boring, stable transformer possible. We are
Speaker 3: doing a FR three oil filled transformer, so it's not
Speaker 3: mineral oil, it's less likely to ever catch on fire,
Speaker 3: and it's less likely to cause an environmental problem. It
Speaker 3: has no moving parts in regular operation. We are not
Speaker 3: doing voltage changes on the transformer. If you want to
Speaker 3: change the voltage tap, you're doing that manually when it's
Speaker 3: de energized, because you should only do that once or twice,
Speaker 3: and it's a life. We're sitting there saying how do
Speaker 3: you get rid of all the exposed live parts possible?
Speaker 3: So we're trying to go to dead break connections where
Speaker 3: on the thirty five kV side there's nothing to touch
Speaker 3: that causes a problem. You can set an army of
Speaker 3: snakes and birds loose in your transformer and they could
Speaker 3: never touch anything that causes the short because that's the
Speaker 3: number one reason that transformers have failures as animals. And
Speaker 3: then we're saying, how do you get real time condition monitoring?
Speaker 3: Because if you've built this dumb thing that should never fail,
Speaker 3: the question is, how do you know it's okay, and
Speaker 3: I swear to God. America's power system still depends on
Speaker 3: once a year oil samples to figure out how transforms
Speaker 3: are doing. For like ninety five plus percent of the
Speaker 3: transformers in America, Once a year, a technician goes out,
Speaker 3: goes through the little valve at the bottom, draws a
Speaker 3: little bit of oil into a vial, sends it off
Speaker 3: to a lab, and then sees what gases are dissolved
Speaker 3: in it, and goes, oh, look transferwer two three seven
Speaker 3: one four. How does spike an argone over last year?
Speaker 3: I wonder when that happened. I wonder what caused that.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it happens slowly over time or
Speaker 3: all in one instant. And they sit there and go
Speaker 3: it's probably good for another year based on some archaic formulas.
Speaker 3: How the hell do you know how that transfomer is doing? Right?
Speaker 3: By the way, the utility solution is just have an
Speaker 3: extra transformer next to it, so we've got two. In
Speaker 3: case one fails, we're going, what the hell are you
Speaker 3: talking about? So what we do is we actually have
Speaker 3: condition monitoring where it's doing dissolved gas sampling on that
Speaker 3: transformer every ten minutes. Every ten minutes, that transformer takes
Speaker 3: a sample oil and says, what are my ten dissolved gases?
Speaker 3: And if there's ever a problem, it sends me a
Speaker 3: text message. Our control room gets it, we know what
Speaker 3: it was. We can watch it spike. And now all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, I can tell you, Laurent, at your facility,
Speaker 3: all of your transformers are good or Girard, your third transformer,
Speaker 3: I'm seeing a spike in argon I don't like. I'm
Speaker 3: gonna go ahead and schedule some predictive maintenance and maybe
Speaker 3: I'll just swap it out with the standardized part in
Speaker 3: four hours for you in next month, and then I'll
Speaker 3: deal with this one on the side and you have
Speaker 3: a new one that works. But now I actually know
Speaker 3: how my stuff is doing, and right now, nobody knows
Speaker 3: how their stuff is doing other than once a year
Speaker 3: they see one data point and go look there, we
Speaker 3: go like, what the hell? It doesn't exist in any
Speaker 3: other system.
Speaker 1: You're making me laugh because I'm just taking to the
Speaker 1: flintstones here taking care of everything for us. So my
Speaker 1: question to you is, yeah, so how does the change
Speaker 1: go fall? Because the system has to break down, and
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it is breaking down, isn't it. Because what
Speaker 1: we didn't talk about was the other thing is when
Speaker 1: you see far As fires, California, wherever it is, you
Speaker 1: can see the system is not built for the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, Right, how do we solve it now?
Speaker 3: Well, Gerard, there's the engineering question, and there's the American
Speaker 3: reality question. Americans are stubborn, and we don't like to
Speaker 3: deal with big problems until big problems cause really big
Speaker 3: problems and break and hurt people, and then we get
Speaker 3: very serious and we're going to fix it with all
Speaker 3: of the American might. I've been trying to figure out
Speaker 3: for the last ten years what's a big enough problem
Speaker 3: that it actually gets fixed ahead of time, And I
Speaker 3: don't know what that is. So my fear is it's
Speaker 3: going to be a major polar vortex. It's going to
Speaker 3: be a major terrorist attack. It's going to be a
Speaker 3: major failure in a backbone system that's going to cause
Speaker 3: a lot of problems where an entire region of the country,
Speaker 3: if not most of the country, is out of power
Speaker 3: for an extended period of time, like we saw in
Speaker 3: a Texas and all of a sudden, everybody gets the
Speaker 3: stomach and the fortitude to say we're going to go
Speaker 3: fix the problem and we're going to force utilities to
Speaker 3: either do better or rely on private industry to step
Speaker 3: in to fix it better. It's very easy for industrials
Speaker 3: to say we're going to make a change. This is stupid, right.
Speaker 3: I can make that business case to a normal, profit
Speaker 3: motivated private company. It's very hard to make that across
Speaker 3: the system. And so my fear is a bad actor
Speaker 3: is going to go realize how bad the system is
Speaker 3: and go do bad things to it, or a weather
Speaker 3: event is going to naturally force it. And we've gotten
Speaker 3: so close to the system truly going down. In the
Speaker 3: last twenty years. There have been four or five major
Speaker 3: weather events that have almost taken down PJM. Miso Urcott's
Speaker 3: gone down, and we're not that far away from one
Speaker 3: that just goes one or two days more. And you
Speaker 3: get into all the same black start problems, and you
Speaker 3: see how fragile the big machine really is that doesn't
Speaker 3: like to start.
Speaker 1: Jeremy, maybe we just finished the podcast by asking you
Speaker 1: ready to talk about your own business one power talk
Speaker 1: about you know what your vision for this business is
Speaker 1: and how you see the future over the next five years.
Speaker 3: I believe that there is a fundamental energy transition with
Speaker 3: tremendous new demand coming in, and that demand creates a
Speaker 3: lot of opportunity to actually really solve problems and show
Speaker 3: the rest of the industry problems can be solved. And
Speaker 3: so our goal is to be the essentially private utility
Speaker 3: of choice for new large industrials. And we are in
Speaker 3: a utility, but we deal with all of the utility
Speaker 3: problems on a one off, bespoke basis. And so our
Speaker 3: goal is be that solution that shows standardization as possible
Speaker 3: and that the customers who choose to standardize and choose
Speaker 3: to invest in their own power systems with us are
Speaker 3: more competitive, more reliable. And in doing a few gigawatts
Speaker 3: of that, all of a sudden, everybody goes that's actually
Speaker 3: a path to change the grid. That's actually a path
Speaker 3: for the grid to do better. We aren't just talking
Speaker 3: about standardization, repeatability, scale, cost effectiveness. Here's a few gigawatts
Speaker 3: of what's actually been done, and that's a model for
Speaker 3: everybody else to follow, including future competition. But that's a
Speaker 3: model that proved the grid actually can change.
Speaker 2: Do you know, I mean to us fantastic for once
Speaker 2: we didn't talk with guys or expert in excel sheet,
Speaker 2: but guys who know how to open and transformer and
Speaker 2: see what's in it.
Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with excel sheets. Just want to say
Speaker 1: that as a finance person.
Speaker 2: Jeremie, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you both for your time. Nice to see you.
Speaker 3: Thanks for setting up hard Yeah, thank you very much. Bye, guys.
Speaker 2: Well John, I have two things to say. The first
Speaker 2: is the podcast a bit longer than usual because the
Speaker 2: girl was so good. I love his st is approach.
Speaker 2: And you know what, when I was listening to him,
Speaker 2: I said, look, his name is not Jeremy Kent. His
Speaker 2: name is Clark Kent. He is Superman.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was brilliant. I don't think I can add anything
Speaker 1: to it. Maybe the only thing I would say it
Speaker 1: is very clear for me that one of the big
Speaker 1: growth areas for renewables clean energy going forward is behind
Speaker 1: the transformer solutions. In other words, you take an industrial
Speaker 1: park and you push the renewable solution there, okay, and
Speaker 1: that has huge amounts of advantage in terms of cost,
Speaker 1: resilient accession.
Speaker 2: And the second thing is a question for you, what
Speaker 2: is the relationship between the song by the Beatles A
Speaker 2: Jude and Israel report noinga well, the transformer blew Up
Speaker 2: came the same year as the song A Jude was
Speaker 2: fifty seven years old.
Speaker 3: Very good.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, as we announced that at the beginning of
Speaker 2: the show we're going to do a special episode on
Speaker 2: the blackouts, we need to find the proper guest that
Speaker 2: because on LinkedIn all of a sudden, within like twelve hours,
Speaker 2: there were hundreds of experts of inertia, but in fact
Speaker 2: we need to wait for and so his report, because
Speaker 2: these are the real experts.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just want to add something as well. All
Speaker 1: around the amount of bullshit that I saw in and
Speaker 1: around this blackouse, it just was mind marggling to me.
Speaker 1: I just stopped reading it because nearly all of it
Speaker 1: was sent us, and this is from people in the
Speaker 1: industry as well. I just went, oh my god, you know,
Speaker 1: no wonder we've got to black out when you guys
Speaker 1: are having a clue what you're doing. Sorry, that's what
Speaker 1: I concluded. I was reading stuff from grid operators where
Speaker 1: I was looking going, are you working for utility? I
Speaker 1: just find battling to you know. Anyway, we definitely need
Speaker 1: to have a deep dive in that we.
Speaker 2: Thank a Blockway Energy for supporting the show, and because
Speaker 2: we talk about the beaters, we cannot not mention as
Speaker 2: well the Ronning Stones. So I've got a song. Let's
Speaker 2: listen to the clip.
Speaker 1: You can always get what you want, but if you.
Speaker 3: Way you man just.
Speaker 1: Lauren is probably a fitting air head to this podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't end up what you want, but you get
Speaker 1: what you need.
Speaker 2: I like it.
Speaker 3: I like it.
Speaker 2: Okay, job, I talk to you next week, looking.
Speaker 1: Forward with my friend, looking forward to Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate the show
Speaker 1: and subscribe on Apple, Podcast, Spotify, or the platform of
Speaker 1: your choice.