The Electric Supercycle

TITLE: exxU1YtkVl4 CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- I’m Shayle Kann, I lead the early stage venture strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So, the electric supercycle, remember that term? It’s what we at EIP have started to use to describe the unprecedented times that we’re in right now in the power sector. And why I think most people still haven’t actually woken up to just how dramatic this next phase of the market is going to be. Anyway, Andy Lubershane, if you’re a regular listener, you know him, you love him. He’s my partner and our head of research at EIP, and he wrote the first of what I think will be a bunch of pieces on the electric supercycle a couple weeks ago. This one was focused on the hidden feedback loops within electro tech or the electric stack or whatever you want to call it that compound and drive more and more momentum in this space. So, we ran through it. [music] Andy’s coming up after the break.

Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments are driven by technology alone. They’re shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I’m Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by FischTank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. FischTank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that’s thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you’ll like FischTank PR. To learn more about FischTank’s approach, visit fischtankpr.com. That’s f i s c h fischtankpr.com. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can’t afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. Andy, welcome back. Thank you, Shayle. This is my first Catalyst video edition, so it’s it’s a new whole new world for me in podcasting. You’re looking good. Okay, so I think everybody who’s listening to this probably knows that like there’s lots of electricity demand growth, etc. etc. But I think we should start by talking through some of the ways that’s manifesting. Like if you’re trying to build new electricity generation or move electricity right now, what does it look like to you? I mean I it’s not just everybody that listens to this podcast. I think everybody in the world now, anyone who’s paying attention to the economy in almost any way is familiar with the impacts of the AI boom on the energy sector and specifically the power sector and and how how many bottlenecks there are basically. I mean that’s something you and I have been talking about for the past 3 years basically is this idea of the electricity gauntlet which is sort of the the narrow path that the the power sector, the the electricity business, and anyone in it has to walk between this kind of wall of surging demand on one side and and bottlenecks on supply which which are really popping up at every level of the system, I think from generation to transmission, distribution, all the way on down. Um and and that’s the state we’re in today. We’ve been there I think for about 18 months and and um and so if you if you or anyone in in the market right now that can deliver uh some piece of equipment to alleviate those bottlenecks at at any level of the system, you’re you’re feeling pretty good right now. Yeah, let’s talk through briefly at least a couple of those uh things that you can sell to potentially alleviate and like what’s happening in those markets. And we’ve talked before on this podcast a little bit about gas turbines, but what’s the state of the gas turbine supply chain? What’s the state of the power grid equipment supply chain? The renewable supply chain? Like this is pretty broad at this point. Yeah, I mean I think overall it’s it’s pretty similar dynamics in all of these and uh for for each of these pieces of equipment, which is that anything you want to order today is probably going to take three plus years. In the case of gas turbines, probably more like five years to be able to get your hands on. Uh anything you order today, whether it’s uh a turbine or a transformer or just the you know aluminum or copper conductor uh or switch gear, like any of those common uh building blocks of the grid is going to probably cost two to three times as much as it did five years ago. Um you know, we saw these increases in in prices for just about everything in the power grid supply chain during COVID and I think there was an expectation that after a few years those supply chain crunches would alleviate just like many of the other bottlenecks in global supply chains we saw throughout the economy, but that hasn’t happened because demand has continued to surge so much. So prices have really remained elevated well above inflation for for all that stuff um since the pandemic. Um and so yeah, that’s that’s the basic story. It’s like things are taking three to five years to potentially deliver and costing two to three times as much as they used to. And I think one thing people don’t think about as much as they should is that the time lag between those price increases for equipment and then what retail customers see. Like, affordability has become the name of the game. It’s the word that’s being used in every circle of electricity world. It has bled out into the broader political body, right? We see this now being an issue elections and so on. And yet actually it still hasn’t really hit yet for the most part because it takes some time. There’s a lag between when these prices of things increase and then the effect on retail rates. So in some ways I think it’s good that affordability has become a big issue now because we’re looking out into the future where, you know, the the broad overarching trend is probably that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Yeah, it’s frightening. I completely agree with you. The worst is kind of yet to come cuz so far actually the the retail electricity price increases that we’ve seen in the past 5 years have actually tracked pretty much with inflation overall. It’s a little different in different rate classes and depends where you are in the country, of course. There’s a lot of heterogeneity, but on average across the United States actually electricity prices have risen pretty much in in line with inflation. So in nominal terms they’ve gone up quite a bit cuz everything has gotten more expensive, but in real terms they really haven’t yet and I I have a very high degree of confidence that uh moving forward because as you said all this stuff is is leading indicators, um prices are going to rise faster than inflation overall. And because electricity is sort of a foundational good for the economy, they’ll actually be, you know, a feedback loop or they’re they’re a driver of inflation too. So um yeah, I think I think uh the affordability dialogue as a and in the political salience of affordability is sadly just getting started. Okay, so you might listen to what we’ve just been talking about and think that actually this is like a bearish statement about the future of electricity because yes, we have all this new demand, but it has resulted in supply chains getting gummed up and then more importantly in prices rising and more more to come at the retail level. And yet, I think the thing that you and I are here to talk about mostly is kind of the opposite which is think that there is a super cycle that we are in the early stages of and so despite all the challenges in getting new electricity supply online in getting that delivered to customers and in keeping rates low. I think both you and I having spent a bunch of time on this recently are increasingly bullish on the future of electricity. So start by making the case at the high level. Yeah, I I feel like for the past three plus years I’ve often been sort of the herald of doom in in a lot of rooms with with colleagues and friends in in the power sector sort of describing the state of affairs which has continued to get you know, to get more challenging over time, but in many ways that’s because we’re at the tightest pinch point in this this gauntlet and that is of course driven by the just extraordinary boom in demand from data centers that is happening right now and I’m pretty confident is going to continue to be happening for the next three to five years and honestly who knows after that, but I I think the reason to be bullish is that I don’t think that this phenomenon is just a is is only caused by the data center boom and the supply crunches that that are occurring because of it. I think that this really is a a generational phenomenon of the growing importance of electricity as a form of energy in society, which is uh you know, which is being caused by data centers, by electrification of transport, electrification of heating, by all kinds of other new sort of precision manufacturing, which by and large it is driven by electrical processes these days. Um and while data centers, I think rightly so, get a lot of the attention right now because they are, you know, by far the biggest source of new demand in the system. Um I I think they’re they’re the least certain form of demand in my opinion when you think 5, 10, 15 years out. And all of these other forms of growing electricity demand around the world, largely from electrification, I think have a lot more sort of robust, very clear secular ter- tailwinds over that period. And so, I I remain very confident in the sort of steady march forward of electricity demand for really decades to come. Um well beyond the the data center-driven crunch that we’re in right now. So, that’s one reason I think to be to be excited about it. And the other is is because of technology and supply chains, which um you know, I think are increasingly creating flywheels in favor of more electrification, even though at the moment it things feel pretty rough for the the power system supply chain. Yeah, I want to talk about these flywheels cuz I think these are what are most underappreciated. But on the first point, I periodically remind people that in Western countries, in the United States for example, electricity currently uh accounts for something like 20% of final energy demand. Um so, just in terms of stealing market share, this was the the trajectory we were already on prior to AI showing up, which is electrifying a bunch of things. As you said, passenger transportation in particular, and then heavy duty transportation, and heating, and some industrial processes, and so on. And so, like, that was like a slower, admittedly, but ongoing trend that looked like it was going to have a couple of decades of legs in it. And then, on top of that, AI shows up and supercharges demand. Now, in some ways, that creates a challenge for all the other types of electrification, like it’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room. If you’re trying to do, you know, electrified industrial processes, good luck finding a site that can host 100 MW of power that isn’t already taken by a data center developer. But, on the other hand, it also comes with a flood of money that is starting to be directed toward infrastructure upgrades that are ultimately going to benefit other things as well. And so, it’s going to take some time, and this is going to be the cyclical situation where sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters is AI, and other times it’s going to be like AI is the catalyst that enables electrification of other things. But, it is worth remembering that we have 80% of final energy demand still to eat up as a share for electricity, setting aside the net new growth that comes from AI. On balance, in the near term, this this AI-demand-driven crunch and price increases uh represent a challenge for electrification, but we’ve we’ve always thought that this is going to be the project of decades. There’s going to be bumps in the road along the way. There’s going to be a lot of regional differences in terms of where electricity demand growth is happening, where electricity is able to steal market share away from the direct combustion of fossil fuels. But, I thought uh actually, this was an interesting data point. Um the IEA recently came out with some data recently on global electricity demand growth, and it turns out that last year, in 2025, um from a from a global standpoint, there was almost exactly as much electricity demand growth around the world from electric vehicles as there were from data centers. It’s probably not going to be the case in 2026, 2027, but um it’s worth it’s worth un- you know, pointing out that uh having a purely US-focused perspective uh anchors you a little more on data centers than looking at things from a a global standpoint. Right. Okay, well, let’s move on to the feedback loops bit cuz I think the re- the reason yes, there’s this existing trend and you know, uh AI is going to accelerate it and so on, but I think the more interesting thing here is what what you and I have been thinking through in terms of the interconnected nature of some of the technologies that are being driven in different sectors, but all tied to people call it the electric stack or electro tech or whatever, but let’s talk through a couple of these feedback loops. So, give me give me one to start. I think the core feedback loop at the center of this of all of this is really between these four building blocks in the electro-industrial tech stack, which are are, you know, historically and I think uh for a long time to come will remain solar photovoltaics, batteries, predominantly lithium-ion batteries at this point. There there may be some other branches off that family tree, um electric vehicles and associated componentry, predominantly electric motors, and then power electronics, which are sort of the the the lesser-known fourth leg of the stool cuz they’re less visible to the to the common person, but are sort of the uh uh uh connective tissue between all of that stuff. And the feedback loops, there are multiple sort of um feedback loops within that system, right? For example, uh as you deploy more solar into power systems around the world, the value of energy storage increases, and so the uh ability to deploy batteries at grid scale cost-effectively to make use of some amount of excess solar energy during a few hours of the day and then use that to support peak capacity during a few hours of the day when when you have a deficit becomes more valuable and that creates a new market for batteries. Um Similarly electric vehicles which I I really think are the um sort of the keystone species of this ecosystem mainly because there’s just so much so many unit sales of electric vehicles. So as that market ramped up it it created a lot more mass manufacturing demand and capacity for all of this stuff. Electric vehicles have obviously had the had this tremendous impact on on batteries but electric vehicles themselves benefited from early investments from the solar industry in power electronics in wide band gap semiconductor materials which enable higher voltage higher frequency switching which is really important for allowing a battery to run the traction motors on a vehicle and to do high-powered fast charging. So you can start to see how like all of this stuff connects at a supply chain level and it’s sort of compounding on itself over time. Yeah, the power electronics one is interesting cuz as you said like early investments from the solar industry in wide band gap semiconductors EVs really scale that stuff up. Like EVs are where silicon carbide reaches its glory and then now a number of companies Hera and Power included which is we’re investors in and Drew was on this podcast a while ago talking about it. Now taking that technology that was scaled up in EVs and then bringing it back to the grid to use for solar inverters or to use for transformer replacements on the grid and so on. So you’ve got this like circular nature of one portion of the electric stack you know invest early in the new technology it’s scaled up by another one and then it comes back to that first one ultimately. And And because there’s this common need to move, transport, change the voltage of power, like a bunch of the things in the electric sector are all common across different parts of that ecosystem, you get this compounding effect. Right. And then it all it all sort of comes back to electricity demand growth in the end, right? Electric vehicles are this a dish this this vector for electricity demand growth, which creates more need to invest in grid infrastructure, and that need to invest in grid infrastructure presents an opportunity for uh power grid operators to experiment with new technology, kind of creates the the necessity for them to look to something like solid-state power electronics at grid scale to interconnect solar, to interconnect uh high, you know, electric vehicle charging, to interconnect um uh high-voltage data centers. And so um you’re sort of si- simultaneously seeing compounding of need and investment in supply and and technology improvement at the same time, which is at the core of these flywheels. And And one of the reasons to believe this is a a positive super cycle over time and not just um not just something that is going to con- kind of continuously create bottlenecks and constraints throughout the system for decades to come. We’re living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn’t shaped by technology alone. It’s shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I’m Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they’re delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks instead of engaging journalists or producing content? 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Energy Hub’s platform handles the full picture from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, “Did it deliver?” Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That’s why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. Another one that I’m just thinking about on the spot um is like microgrid controllers to an extent cuz uh you know the the early investment in microgrid controllers and the and the whole suite of things that are required to manage like uh a mini grid or multiple assets at a single site, that has been ongoing for a decade plus, right? You have off-grid situations, you have other like campus microgrids that have been developed and so on and then increasingly with heterogeneous sources of power and storage. So, batteries got included in microgrids at some point. You have usually generation, maybe some mix of like solar and a gas turbine or whatever it might be and that’s gotten more and more sophisticated. And then now, you have data centers that want to see a bunch of behind the meter resources get connected and orchestrated in concert and then get ultimately connected to the grid because usually what’s happening is that if the data center is operating off-grid, it’s temporary. It’s a bridge power situation. Eventually, they’re going to get connected to the grid. Now, you need to coordinate all those on site resources that you have with the grid as well. And I feel like that that early investment in how to manage a microgrid at a much smaller scale, admittedly, there weren’t many gigawatt scale microgrids historically. But, scale up what people were doing at hospitals and campuses and that’s kind of what people are starting to think about doing at data centers now. Right, you took a you took an early niche, a little bit of initial investment to create the basic technology. Data centers are taking it to 11, right? They’re they’re taking it to a thousand to gigawatt scale. And actually, you could see the the cycle being completed um at uh EV charging hubs, right? Especially as well uh we see more need for autonomous vehicle charging hubs, which I think is yet another one of the feedback loops in this cycle. But, as you see um the need for charging depots at megawatt scale, maybe 10 megawatt scale, 20 megawatt scale, the same um expertise in uh in uh islandable large-scale power systems that are grid connected but can take themselves offline, can provide peak capacity to the grid, can um ensure that they’re never drawing beyond a certain amount of capacity from the grid. Like, that same kind of technology, I think, will be deployed at EV charging depots as they scale up as well. And probably will have, by the way, batteries batteries on site if they are highway-based charging depots. They might even be interconnected with like a solar project that is nearby. So again, you can see these four building blocks coming together in in more and more ways over time. All right, so you mentioned autonomous vehicles. We should talk about autonomous vehicles themselves and the way that they compound growth for electricity. I mean, people I think probably understand that autonomous vehicles are almost certainly endemically electric vehicles. Like it makes more sense for them to be electric vehicles and the the proof is in the pudding. All of the autonomous vehicles on the road today are electric vehicles, right? That is true of all the Waymos. That is obviously true of the Tesla robotaxis. Like the fact that we have them, they are electric. But it also that’s that’s not coincidental. It makes more sense. And so there’s this obvious feedback loop of like autonomy breeds electrification, which accelerates the existing vehicle electrification trend. But I think we can also extend that a little bit out more broadly beyond just autonomous vehicles into the wider world of robotics. Right. Physically AI autonomy of all kinds of physical systems, like pretty much any anything you you want to create out there today that’s going to be a bunch of GPUs that are disconnected from from any kind of cloud-based computing because they have to do tasks in real time. They are probably going to run on electricity because GPUs run on power and it’s going to be inefficient to have like a lawnmower engine on a robot or whatever system you have out there that’s um that that’s intended to be operating with very very low latency in an autonomous fashion. That’s true of autonomous vehicles. They’re supercomputers on wheels. That’s true of any robotic system out there in the world today. Um and robots So, robots are probably going to run on batteries if they’re mobile robots. So, that’s yet another uh source of demand for lots of power dense batteries. Um they are going to um run on uh power electronics doing conversions from uh direct current battery power to AC power to run a bunch of motors cuz robots are also a bunch of, you know, collection of of uh high-performance, high-power density, high-efficiency motors. So, they’re they’re yet another type of equipment that is basically running on the same uh fundamental tech stack, these same fundamental uh building blocks. Um and they’re also another source of power demand. So, um I did some kind of back-of-the-envelope calculations just for fun on humanoid robots. Now, I personally am not crazy bullish on humanoids as like the ultimate best form factor for robots in in a lot of applications, but as you and I have talked about a few times, one application where humanoids might make sense is households, right? Because a household robot is going to be doing a bunch of different tasks. Uh most likely the kind of tasks that a a person does today and and the form factor has to fit into a household setting, which is built for people and you’re not going to retrofit your house to fit in some sort of new exotic robotic form factor. So, anyway, like just consider a humanoid or something like a humanoid, but in particular, consider the the power consumption needs of a of a humanoid robot. Uh and it turns out that if you were to sort of extrapolate from the humanoids that are that are being built today, uh and you were to run one for 5 or 6 hours a day doing various types of tasks around your home and your garden, sort of, you know, the the theoretical robo butler, that would consume roughly three to four times as much electricity per year as your typical refrigerator does today. So, your humanoid robot would instantly become the biggest power consuming appliance in the home save for your HVAC system. Um it would be, you know, maybe a fifth of of what a typical electric vehicle driver would be consuming uh you know, doing I don’t know uh 10,000 miles a year or something like that. So, um we see this like uh you know, simultaneously a new vector of demand for all these components and a new vector of demand for electricity supply at the same time. Yeah, I had been obviously curious about that question of like how much electricity load would a really bullish view on robotics be add um and you know, my takeaway on that one on the humanoids is like that’s meaningful, but it’s not enormous. Like it’s not it’s not a scary number. If you’re if you’re three to four times the refrigerator it that would and you know, in aggregate if we really everybody ends up with one of these robo butlers, that adds up, but it’s not enormous. The thing I wonder about is industrial robotics where you’re going to have some systems that are much higher power potentially and you know, predicting the number of those systems is kind of difficult. Um but I could imagine that in aggregate load terms for the grid, you end up with much more demand coming from industrial robotics than like humanoids in the home. And I would say industrial robotics combined with industrial electrification in general because again, like a lot of the a lot of the more advanced manufacturing processes out there, you know, high precision manufacturing, making semiconductors for example, are already highly electrified processes because electricity is just sort of the form factor of energy that gets you the kind of precision that you need to run these sorts of things. So, I’ve I’ve seen, you know, a semi a large semiconductor fabrication facility, a large um you know, chip fab could be tens of megawatts up to like 100 megawatts of power demand potentially. Um I think that’s sort of the order of magnitude that we’re talking about. So, yeah, I think advanced manufacturing, which includes a bunch of robotics within the facility and and other processes that are electrically driven, um you know, nothing today the the the the the thing about AI-driven demand today and data center demand is like pretty much no matter what, it’s it you know, any anything you consider that’s another vector of power demand growth, it’s not going to compare with data centers. Like data centers are just so big that they they they block out the sun. Um but all this stuff on the margins over time compounds, I think. And the other thing as we were talking about the beginning of the pod here is I have very high conviction in all these other sources of electricity demand growth, not just today, but for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. You know, data center demand growth may continue to be robust over that time period, in which case we’ve got a whole other world of considerations on our hands. Um but I’m much less certain in it beyond the next say 5-year time period. Yeah, and then also the thing that you said about what electric vehicles did for power electronics in particular, they they scaled up by um hugely large number of units, right? And that really got the silicon carbide supply chain so on. Um robots could do a similar thing, right? Robots also could be high-volume units depending on the type. And robots need, as you said, power-dense batteries, so you could see a lot more investment in a certain type of battery that we’re not seeing as much on the grid. They need motors, they need actuators. There’s There’s all this other stuff that comes with a scale-up of the robotic supply chain, much of which then could apply back into the electric supply chain in other places, too. So, there’s like another flywheel that robotics could kick off, I think, if if you really believe that that’s coming quickly, which I think I do, actually. Not necessarily in humanoids, necessarily, but like right, broadly. Well, there’s one robotic form factor that already we like we know is coming really quickly and being manufactured in the in the hundreds of millions, probably getting towards the billions already, which is drones, quadcopter drones, which now, uh as everyone knows, feature prominently in defense and in in warfare. And uh defense historically has been a sector that has a high willingness to pay for performance and you know, willing to pay pay a a lot for marginal improvements in performance. So, drones are one area we could see, I think, um a willingness to pay for further innovation in technology for batteries, for higher density power electronics, right? Which then again could have spillover effects for electric vehicles and for all the other stuff we’ve been talking about. Yeah, as you know, we have been talking with our our mutual colleague Greg Teel about um the increasing ambitions of the federal government, initially through ARPA-E and then now through the DoD, to uh find and discover and commercialize an extremely dense battery. So, there was a There was an ARPA-E program a couple of years ago that was called 1K. It was supposed to get, you know, it was looking for a 1,000 Wh/kg battery, which would be, you know, what is that? Like 3x the best on the market today. Yeah, uh but I just saw recently there’s a DoD initiative now to try to find a 2,000 Wh/kg battery. And again, these are predominantly, I think, because of drones. Like that’s the main reason you want that. But if you had a 2000 watt hour per kilogram battery and then you apply that into for example heavy duty transportation, complete game changer, right? So if that happens is always like who’s going to pay for the first thousand and then how are you going to scale it up to to the hundreds of millions and drones are one way you could see that happen. Like the military will pay for coming down the cost curve because it’s so valuable to have that increase in power density in a drone as a weapon. And then once once it’s proven out, you could see like the unit volume is so high that it’s worth investing in mass manufacturing. So like that’s one pathway you could see some alternative battery technology great gain traction when it probably would never do so in the electric vehicle market where honestly like lithium ion batteries we have today are kind of good enough for marine standpoint. So like it would be cool to have a thousand watt hour per kilogram battery, but not at four times the price. Like I just don’t I think that would not get traction in the EV industry nearly as quickly as in defense. Right. Okay, so to wrap this all up, I mean, we are still in the gauntlet, right? Like and in fact the gauntlet may have become like narrower than it was a couple of years ago. And so I guess if you had to bet on what what what will be the rate limiter? What’s the thing that’s going to be the hardest to scale up? If we’re if the whole premise here is that there’s all these feedback loops, all these different things that are all pointing in basically the same which is like increasing demand for electricity over the next decade or something like that. Um what’s going to stop the market from meeting all of that demand? There are a bunch of possibilities here. So you have to pick one. Yeah, so broadly speaking, I think you know, it’s my view is it’s the grid. The grid is the rate limiter, but that’s that’s too too big picture, right? Because the grid is lots is a big big system with lots of individual facets. I think, and I I believe this for a long time, that within the grid, the thing that is the biggest rate limiter is electric transmission. Because there’s no I I have not seen a technology solution that really changes the game for the amount of of uh in of in investment in transmission expansion that we need, and specifically just new transmission lines, new transmission corridors that we need in most regions of the world. Um and when you’re building a new big transmission line across a long distance, and it’s high voltage, and it’s it’s like big infrastructure, big towering structures, uh you bump up against this sort of societal willingness to pay, willingness to tolerate new infrastructure. You bump up against NIMBYism, for which we have not yet found a technology solution. Um and so yeah, that’s to to me the the long pole in the tent is electric transmission, and I think you know, we’ve talked a lot before on an Office Pod. I know you’ve had other guests talking about what that means for where some of this new power demand goes. I mean, I I’m still hopeful, actually, that we see some AI data uh data center growth go go off-grid, not powered entirely by off-grid gas as as, you know, some projects have been so far, but by a hybrid of solar and gas and batteries, which I think could make a whole lot of sense in some places. And if if this data center boom continues for longer than the next 3 to 5 years, if it’s really a robust trend that is going to, you know, be decade plus um [clears throat] you know, for the foreseeable future, then I don’t see any other option besides going to to something like um large-scale off-grid uh connected solutions. All right, that’s a good way to to wrap it. Off-grid, always every conversation ends with well, why don’t we just go off-grid? So, so why why should this be any different? Um Andy, thank you. Fun as always. Thanks, Shayle. Take care. Andy Lubershane is a partner and head of research at EIP with me. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today’s topics. This episode was produced by Max Levinson. Mixing and theme song by Shawn Marquand. Ann Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst. [music]