Energy 101: We Ask The Dumb Questions So You Don't Have To

0:00 Hey, everyone. Welcome to Energy 101, where we ask the dumb questions, so you don't have to. Today, we have Haley with

0:10 Pioneer Miner, Chief of Staff and Operations, and we're going to talk all about the grid. The grid. And the gritty. The gritty. Yeah, so this is that episode where, you know, it's like, what

0:22 turned your lights on, you know, what's happening behind the scenes, kind of just getting that overview of everything. Then we'll get into some nitty gritty details You know, what Haley really

0:32 knows. But let's start with the grid. I think, you know, five years ago before I was doing any of this, I don't think I could tell you anything about where our power comes from. I couldn't tell

0:42 you that there was different grids. The whole country isn't just run on one thing that's plugged into the ground. You know, it's like, it's very complex. And I think Haley here can maybe start us

0:53 off with the groundwork of just the grid in general. I got maps here we could pull up to for reference. And then we can get it to the bottom. First, welcome. Thank you. I'm so excited to finally

1:02 make it. We were excited to have you. The new studio looks amazing, by the way. Thank you. Yeah, I like talking about the grid. And I actually like talking about it to people who are not from

1:11 the industry. You know, obviously Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, it matters very much to us. What we do with the grid, how we affect the grid and how the grid affects us.

1:22 Every day people probably don't, but they should, because if it doesn't affect you now, it will in the future Reason I talk about it the most is our grid is historically old. Like this stuff was

1:34 all built out late 1800s, early 1900s, and it's been minimally updated since the 70s. So what happened in the 70s, really about 1978, all manufacturing went overseas. We stopped needing large

1:49 electrical draws from our grid. And so we reduced the amount of new substations, transformers, all this infrastructure that you need for these things to run over time. And especially in the 80s

2:02 and 90s, it almost went down completely. 2000s come around and obviously you have the influx of the tech boom. That was problematic because that's when we started to realize we do not have enough

2:13 energy infrastructure to support all these new things that are happening. Cloud computing really changed all of that. High performance computing. And now you have things like AI and Bitcoin. But

2:24 that's not even the half of it I'd love to talk about how regional the grid is and how people don't understand that like ERCOT is different than MISO. Or if you live in California, you're not

2:35 receiving the same energy that you are in Texas. Again, things that affect people daily that they have no idea about. Yeah. I mean, let's start off with a picture of our grid, right? Yeah.

2:46 This is North America in general. Despite the colors, there's only three sections here. There's the West, the East, and then Texas.

2:55 I'd assume when seeing this map for the first time, you're like, Oh my God, is that really how it is? And it is, and we have East and West Conferences in all of our sports leagues, but we don't

3:06 have the Texas league. It's like, as a dumb comparison there, why the hell is our grid set up like this? It makes sense? I think there's four sections, right? Yeah, Alaska's got this weird

3:17 little thing. Well, they're Alaska, they can be weird. Texas is about that. What about that? Look, there's one, two, three, four, right? The Quebec one you're talking about? I don't know

3:26 what that is. But if we're gonna talk - Got it, got it, got it. The US. in general. Okay. It's split by the Rockies. Right, yeah. You know, they're like literally like, we do so many

3:33 things that it's like this, you know, this side of the Rockies, or the Mississippi, right? Right. But Texas, through a ranch and air, what is going on here? So it has largely to do with

3:41 population. So electrical draws are going to be dominated by larger cities or larger industries. You've got just about every industry you can think of in Texas, as well as how many of the largest

3:53 cities So along with, I mean, the Houston port alone, the electrical draw there is massive. So

4:04 I think it just made the most sense for us to have our own regional electrical grid as well as a governing body to manage said electrical grid. Everything else, especially once you start getting

4:14 into like the Midwest, everything is so spread out. And then there's not really many industries, you're not gonna have as much of a draw or need or historically you haven't, however that's

4:23 changing. Go back to the AI and a lot of the organizations or industries that are gonna need electricity, they also need land. There's nobody out there right now, so places like North Dakota are

4:38 about to get hit with more Bitcoin mines, more AI computing centers, potentially, you know, hydrogen. There's a lot of opportunity where there's sparse land but for electricity or available

4:51 electricity I should say. And so I wouldn't be surprised if in the future this changes just based on where population and where industry go. Do you know what the difference is and how like the

5:02 different grids operate in terms of like, are there different? I don't know, everyone always talks about Urkaw and they get it. Well Urkaw is controversial 'cause we're decentralized and - Right,

5:16 so that's the difference. That's why it's like a big deal. Yeah, we're also, if I think you have another map that might show like Myso, Urkaw, 'cause those are the regulatory bodies that govern

5:28 these grids, and I mean, you can see that. That's an absolute literal cluster. Yeah, let me interrupt you and just say, I wrote this down. There's balancing authorities. Yes. So it says the

5:39 Eastern has 36, the Western has 37, and then the Urkaw has one. Yeah. And this map kind of, it's like, okay, there's all these people doing all in the circle fat big has one center just Urkaw

5:48 then, and things these.

5:53 Yeah, what's going on there? It's, I mean, in a lot of ways, people have described Texas historically as the Wild West. It is still the Wild West in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to

6:03 regulatory and compliance with electricity. We've kind of done our own thing for a while and we've gotten away with doing it because we're so far removed from the rest of the grid in many ways. Also

6:15 why we've become a huge hub for Bitcoin mining and AI is because you can get away with things in Texas with ERCOT because it's only one governing body. Communication's a lot more smooth. Now people

6:28 are gonna come for me for that 'cause if you've ever dealt with ERCOT, it's not necessarily smooth. It's inherently complicated 'cause it's a government body. But like if you tried to go somewhere

6:37 in PJM or somewhere in MISO and build a Bitcoin mining facility,

6:43 you'd have an easier time building an AI facility because of the misinformation that exists about Bitcoin

6:50 which is ironic. I'm gonna go on a tangent here for a second. So bear with me. Bitcoin mining runs off a system where you are rewarded for minimal fluctuation or variance as possible, okay? So we

7:02 hash at the same rate all the way through. Even if you overclock your miners, even if you underclock your miners, it doesn't change the electrical draw over time. So 24 hours, you're gonna have

7:12 the same electrical feed through and through. AI depends on user input. So if you're talking to chat GPT, and then Julie starts talking to chat GPT, then I start talking to chat GPT, all of a

7:24 sudden they're gonna kick on servers, everything's gonna go up and down. They have a very inconsistent, unreliable electrical draw. But what's been interesting is you've been seeing those sites be

7:34 approved left and right, and Bitcoin sites be taken offline because of a misunderstanding, especially with environmental agencies and again, just different misinformation. They don't see the point.

7:47 They don't see the point for boiling oceans. But in reality, we have a huge role in balancing the grid because we're predictable. You can know that six months from now on my Bitcoin mine at 50

7:59 megawatts, it may fluctuate between 49 megawatts and 50, but it's a very predictable fluctuation. You can also turn it off. Thank you, that actually brings up a really great point. Also directly

8:10 related to ERCOT as well and why it's so favorable. You can turn it off, you can curtail it, you can easily abide by demand response So if ERCOT's like, Hey, it's about to get super hot, like,

8:23 I don't know, 106 in West Texas, 'cause that's where a lot of the Bitcoin miners are. We need everybody to go down to 15 capacity for the next 24 hours. Bitcoin can do that fairly easily without

8:34 interrupting any of the business. AI on the other hand, you've now pissed people off if you turn off your capacity. I mean, you've been there, you're on an LLM or a chatbot and you're talking to

8:44 it and it's like, Sorry, we're overloaded right now. It's not that they're overloaded. They don't have enough capacity in their data centers to properly exchange what they need to interact with

8:53 you as the customer. So you'll see a lot of those sites actually get hybrid Bitcoin and AI because when they need the energy for the electrical contracts, they have to say, we're gonna consume X

9:05 amount a month. Well, they turn on the Bitcoin side to reach that consumption. But when the AI demand goes up, they turn off the Bitcoin miners, which again, another benefit, you can turn them

9:15 off fairly quick without any damage to the machine, and then they turn on all their AI machines, and they're able to meet demand. And so that's how a lot of these guys in MISO and PJM are getting

9:27 away with having Bitcoin sites, is it starts out as an AI, and then they just do a hybrid model and they don't say anything to anybody 'cause everything else has already been approved and it's

9:36 technically just one big high performance computing. And all they see is the power going in and out. All they see is the power going in and out, yeah.

9:45 What were these data centers looking like before AI and LLMs? Like just what powered Google or just our everyday internet search? What did that look like? It's a very different setup and a very

9:58 different model. That's an excellent question. It was more predictable. It was more

10:06 streamlined. I think a lot, really up until the cloud computing came in, was very simplistic It was straightforward, 50 megawatts. It's an easy one to go with. And 50 megawatts out, shut it on,

10:20 shut it off, or turn it on, shut it off. Once cloud computing came in, that's when you saw more flexible loads. Flexible, in the sense that it peaks in valleys, not flexible in the sense that

10:30 it's flexible to the grid itself. It's actually a little terrorist to the grid because you don't know what's going to happen. What's funny, though, is that was largely hidden from the public and

10:40 no one cared for years, which which is why I think I get so. passionate about the fact that people are upset about Bitcoin mines going on because there's been far worse things on your electrical

10:51 grid through the 90s, early 2000s. Like this is one of the safest and most easy to maintain and anticipate versus anything else that is going on, you know, your grid. Yeah, I still see like

11:07 people be like, I don't use LLMs, it's like weird virtue signaling It's like if you just understood like the other things you do that are the same impact, it's just, it's so hard to explain. I

11:22 mean, we're talking about stability and stuff like that. You look at like the power generation on a daily use that like goes down at night, up during the day. And it's like, it does look

11:31 consistent and stuff. I mean, there have been some like monumental things like Winter Storm, Yuri, where, you know, that squiggle turned into something crazier Like, how did that impact? ERCOT,

11:43 why was that such big news? And has there been anything else like that? It was freezing. Yeah, we were freezing. Actually, since then it's been a benefit to ERCOT because it identified gaps in

11:55 their system and where the major issue came from is not having enough electricity to curtail and draw from. Now, we also have to, this is where it kind of FERC and some of the federal regulatory

12:07 stuff comes in. Each of these are responsible for anticipating and forecasting their electrical draw or theoretical electrical draw moving forward. Now, within these, you also have these little,

12:18 what I call like, islands. So like nuclear plants or chemical plants where they generate their own steam, they generate their own electricity and could potentially also offset to the grid. So to

12:31 go back to what you were saying, the winter storm happened, everybody lost power for a week, two weeks, depending on where you were at.

12:40 Everybody's just pissed off, said it or cots the worst. This is why it not being connected to the rest of the United States is terrible, yada, yada. What they

12:49 ended up going to pivot to after this was finding alternative means of like electrical storage as well as finding Bitcoin miners who would be willing to participate into man response and curtailment

13:03 efforts. By employing an army that can essentially turn off or turn on at your bidding, they have secured themselves the ability to prevent something like that from happening in the future. I mean,

13:15 we had a winter storm back in February this year, didn't have nearly the impact or effect that it did historically. Now, we also all got generators and were prepared to think individually, but

13:28 none of us needed that, thankfully. The irony is that the winter storm shouldn't have had the effect that it did on the grid because it was cold. Heat should have had more of an effect, which in

13:38 Texas, I think it's an infrastructure though. Like we, yeah, we weren't prepared for cold. Our equipment is all made for hot. Yeah. So it's hot here, it doesn't get that cold, so. And we

13:48 don't upgrade. Like you look at budgets and counties and any municipality, the minimal amount of funding is typically, unfortunately allocated to electrical and physical infrastructure to the grid

14:02 for upgrades and even just maintenance. Like, and again, it goes back to people not understanding everything you do runs off of this. Even if you don't think it does, like we really need to be

14:13 making more of an effort to increase our infrastructure.

14:17 I mean, that's why China is able to operate and run at the pace they are and electricity is relatively cheap over there. Again, in the 70s, everything goes overseas. They started beefing up their

14:27 grid and kind of getting prepared for what they saw coming. They can produce things at a lower rate. Therefore, we need more manufacturing. We need more.

14:38 infrastructure that supports those initiatives, we've essentially stopped in the 70s. And I think roughly the last 10 to 20 years, people have started coming online realizing that's a problem. But

14:50 we also don't have nearly enough electrical engineers. We don't have the expertise and the people who built this over the last 100 years here to tell us, like, hey, this is how you do it, bud.

15:01 Like, let me instill my knowledge into you. A knowledge gap. Not huge, huge knowledge gap I know you guys talk about that a lot with oil and gas. We're experiencing the same thing in electricity.

15:13 Yeah, I never thought about that. That's really interesting. I'm curious, I wish we would have pulled a chart for this, but the energy mix that goes into the grid, as it stands today, I haven't

15:25 looked at it in a real long time. So I don't know, obviously oil and gas is high up there, but is there any chart that also shows, like,

15:32 okay, the energy mix, but like, I don't know, comparison, like Bitcoin mining. How does that kind of fit in? That might be a really stupid question. No, I don't think that's a stupid question.

15:45 It may not be labeled as Bitcoin mining, but it's taking, not necessarily Bitcoin mining. High performance computing is taking up a large portion of the grid. I'm sure there's something. I guess

15:59 that is like kind of my question. The not only the like where it's being - Or let me peel that back It's produced by and who's consuming it. Yeah, they're a large consumer of the grid and it's kind

16:10 of sprinkled. So you have people who have a 600 megawatt facility in West Texas, but you also have somebody who maybe has a one megawatt facility on the Gulf Coast. And what's interesting is those

16:22 seem more familiar and understandable to us because, I mean, we've heard about it for a while. It's not anything new, high performance computing, Bitcoin mining, AI, the other things that also

16:33 take up large quantity of electrical infrastructure is electric vehicles. And like Tesla chargers are popping up everywhere. And that has become a real estate battle. So we're in Texas, obviously

16:46 we have buckies. Now you go to buckies, there's like 40 to 80 Tesla chargers. Buckies was smart to involve Tesla who would buy off any excess energy they have and put Tesla chargers down. And

16:60 Tesla only needs about a megawatt to even entertain if the real estate is worth them putting a charger. But that's gonna come into play when we start to look at forecasting. I mean, I think we have

17:11 more electric vehicles on the road now than we've ever had historically and we don't have nearly enough chargers. So it goes back to the issue of like, we don't have enough, we don't have enough

17:20 energy, we don't have enough electrical engineers, we don't have enough chargers. It's infrastructure. It's infrastructure, yeah. So I'm sure Tesla charging is somewhere on here as well. Yeah.

17:33 Not only Tesla charging, but the manufacturing of the batteries. I mean, that's a whole industry sucking up the grade two, right? The batteries have been to be charged. Like, no one thinks

17:46 about the fact that when you make the battery, you have to put energy into said battery. So those facilities, yeah, they are a massive, massive draw. If you are a battery manufacturing facility

17:56 for lithium ion batteries that go into any electric vehicle, it's an insane amount of energy that they are consuming on a regular basis. And they're historically bad at forecasting that. And I

18:07 think it's by design, but I'll keep that. They under forecast so that they can get all the buy in. It's less controversial. So you're going to put a strain. If you're going into a small community

18:20 that doesn't historically have a ton of big industry, you're going to minimize your impact on the environment around you. So it's a. strategic approach in that regard. Yeah. So you mentioned high

18:35 performance computing, right? Is that what you're saying, right? What exactly is that? What does that encapsulate? So a high performance computer is going to be what your, it's typically run

18:46 off of an ASIC chip and it's going to be something that can compute faster than anything the laptop you have on the table right now could. High performance computing typically involves what I like to

18:58 call puzzles So in Bitcoin, you know, in order to mine a Bitcoin, you have to solve an algorithmic puzzle. You get a reward for it. I'm simplifying it, obviously. But high performance computing

19:11 in AI is very, very similar. Cloud computing also involves high performance computers. These are extremely expensive pieces of hardware that can operate at a much more powerful rate. You can push

19:27 them a lot harder They can stay on 247. It's not encouraged, but. you can really just put them through the ringer and get a lot more output from them than you ever could on anything that's like

19:37 civilian level computers. And that's what data centers are, right? They're just centers full of these computers, right? Next up is quantum computing. Oh. Yes. We don't have time for that today,

19:50 but yes. Quantum computing, you wanna talk about electrical drills. Yes, I'm so curious how that will affect. Quantum computing will, it will absolutely change how we

20:04 interact with the grid on an electrical level. Like it is gonna have to be so well thought out, planned and strategized, because quantum computers, I mean, I can't even touch it with a 10 foot

20:14 pole with a hundred megawatt, you know, like think about it. Hundred megawatt facility, hundreds and thousands of Bitcoin miners, one quantum computer can do the equation of all those miners, if

20:28 not more. So crazy. It's insane. I wanna try and visualize like a megawatt. So a hundred megawatts, like put that in terms of something that we do every day. That's a good question. Like how

20:41 many times did I have to turn on a light? Well, for instance, if you look at your energy bill, it's in kilowatts, right? Yeah. You're not, I mean, I don't know how big your house is, but it

20:50 probably isn't dealing

20:54 in megawatts. Yeah. Yeah, kilowatts is what we use for any everyday use residential. Now how many kilowatts in a megawatt? That's a good question.

21:05 It should be a thousand. It's magic, it should be a thousand. Is it? I'm horrible at math, by the way. Everyday consumers, you're worried about kilowatts. Megawatts involves multiple houses on

21:14 your street, depending on how big your neighborhood is. I doubt you will ever deal in megawatts. If you do, good for you. Like your house is massive. You have like a bowling alley and laser tag,

21:26 I don't know. A couple Bitcoin mines. A couple Bitcoin mines, yeah. It's also why you don't typically hook up a Bitcoin miner to your house because of the draw. I mean, also you'll flag the

21:36 electrical company immediately. If you, all of a sudden spike in what your draw is, because your contract with the electrical company is very standard. It's copy and paste from you to you to you.

21:49 We very rarely have much variance there. So if all of a sudden you've gone way over what you said you would consume, you might even have like fuds at the door trying to figure out what you're doing.

22:01 'Cause we had one in our backyard. Oh, that's right. We never turned it on them. Okay, I was gonna say, usually they think you're

22:09 turning on lights to

22:13 grow certain recreational leaves. Is that even enough power? Oh man, you'd be surprised. Those heat lamps actually, they have a much bigger and very inconsistent draw as well It fluctuates. Like,

22:27 do you have a lizard or you strike me as somebody who has snakes or lizards? No, but I know you're talking about it. Yeah, the heat lamp that goes in their container, that draw is like, if you

22:40 ever look at it for a long period of time, you notice it kind of dims and brightens. So that is in an indicator of something that has a poor electrical stable draw.

22:50 Bitcoin miners are built in a way or all high performance computing, really, is built in a way to regulate that little like fluctuation. So sometimes you actually, from wherever you source your

23:00 energy, we'll have little blips in the system that are like a millisecond. And these machines are built to not even acknowledge that that happened. So they kind of just skip right over it, keep

23:10 mining, keep doing whatever they're doing. That's interesting. OK, so I looked at my bill. I use about 50 kilowatts per week on average. I'm going to look up mine. And that's a that's with

23:24 three kids who leave the lights on all the time. Do you have any gamers in the house? Yeah, okay. So actually gaming computers aren't too different from HPCs. It's a different chip that's in

23:36 there. And a lot of people do convert old school alien wear computers into other high performance computing

23:46 computers. But they're not super far off and it's because of what you need in order to get the perfect pixels and everything on the screen The difference is like Bitcoin mining, you're not looking

23:58 at anything. So it's all like binary code that's coming through. Yeah, yeah. Did you look yours up? Yeah, I'm a little mine real quick. I bet yours is all efficient and stuff. You seem like

24:09 the type of dad who's like, turn out the lights right after they walk out of a room. Yeah, I'm very anal like that. My dad was like that, but it's back on my partner who's also like, we need to

24:21 get our power bill down. It's so much money. Oh my God, I know either of you have. the Nest thermostats or the Smart Thermostats? No, I wish. No, you don't. Oh, why? Because there's

24:33 actually been some things, especially in recent history, that have happened, where ERCOT's saying it's gonna be 106, they need to curtail, and you have a thermostat that they actually have access

24:44 to. Can control, uh-uh. So what they'll do is bring everybody down, whether it's a couple degrees, or actually, didn't this happen like last summer or the summer before, when CenterPoint got in

24:54 trouble for telling everybody to keep it below 70. No, I'm sorry, above 72. And he was sitting with a picture and they had it like 68 or something in the background. So yeah, those are, um,

25:07 those are weird because in the terms and conditions, they can sneak in legalese that says, you agree to whatever the governing body in the area needs you to do with said thermostat. And we're gonna

25:19 go ahead and we're gonna bring it down for you in case you forget. You didn't forget. to be like a lizard terrarium above 75 degrees in Houston in the summer. Yeah. So, yeah, I know that I

25:31 didn't know they could do that. Yeah, I mean, technically anything that has an internet connection or Bluetooth capabilities can be controlled by somebody else. But nobody reads terms and

25:40 conditions. No, we, sorry. No, go ahead. During Winter's Soamiri, we were actually using Gritty. Do you remember Gritty? Oh yeah. Yeah, the wholesale platform for electricity, big mistake,

25:55 but I think a lot of people learn that and that's why they went out of business. You notice a lot of those went out of business. I'm trying to think there were a couple of them around at the time

26:03 and unfortunately, there's no such thing as like cheap or free energy and you're either getting a really poor electrical feed in an unreliable system or it's BS. Yeah. You know, there's not really.

26:16 Yeah. What I learned is I like the company like hedging to the electricity. which is funny. So that's another reason I asked if you guys had those thermostats. They collect data on you. And so

26:28 when they're trying to do these energy forecast, funny enough, the person who makes the most at these governing bodies is actually the weather guy. Because if he is wrong, everybody's screwed. So

26:39 you want your weather guy to be like the man when it comes to predicting the weather. On the flip side of that, when they're trying to forecast for the summer or the winter, they go back and

26:48 obviously not individually, but they look at a region and they'll go, okay, Julie's house historically uses more energy here, less energy here, it looks like they go on vacation every year at

26:58 this time, and then they make their predictions based on that. And so, yeah, you turning on a Bitcoin miner causes a kink in the system, and you will hear from someone at some point, and then

27:09 they'll look for if there's weed farm downstairs. That's crazy. That reminds me of a product. I actually found it online when I heard about it that I do. these wholesalers sell to like hotels and

27:21 stuff that have motion sensors in your hotel room. And when it has no movement, it turns the AC off. So it saves energy. I've noticed that when recently, when I go to say at new hotels, you have

27:33 to turn the light switch on for the AC to even kick on. But it's so hot when you go in there. I was about to say, it's a poor user experience. Like I don't, one of my favorite things, don't ask

27:43 me why. I love walking into a crisp cold hotel room and like the sheets are cold. It just feels clean Yeah, it feels cleaner, I don't know. There's something inherently like nice about it.

27:53 Walking into a muggy hotel room is horrible. Yeah. And they should

28:02 just stop doing that. They feel sticky and disgusting and gross and I'm not sleeping here. Exactly. Also, that's a misconception that it like saves energy. That is somebody who's really good at

28:05 sales because when you turn something on and turn it back off. It's gonna use way more. It uses way more, right. Like, you know, I don't know if you guys remember the old Dell computers, they

28:15 had to like send out

28:22 an informative video telling people to stop like just randomly turning your computer on and off because they were having to fulfill all these warranties because people were breaking their machines

28:28 because it takes so much to get it back on, so much to get it back off. Interesting, I didn't know that about computers. Yeah, well, it's really anything with that much of electrical draw. It's

28:37 not just like you press a button and it turns it on. There's so many mechanics and things going on behind the scenes It's why I'm a really big, I don't know, I'm a wet blanket when it comes to

28:49 turning off really any electrical infrastructure 'cause to get it back on, it's a whole thing. It's a whole thing more, like, yeah. Well, nuclear reactors in particular. You turn it off, it

29:00 doesn't go off tomorrow, it takes years. And it's not something that overnight happens. That's a horse and pony show to appease environmentalist or anybody who has advocated for it being turned off

29:13 Speaking of Japan just turned off. their last nuclear reactor, which is terrible. I think the country as a whole, if China decided to blockade and prevent them from receiving any more oil, I

29:27 think they have like seven days worth of energy reserve, whereas that nuclear reactor could have kept them on for a lot longer. Why did they turn it off? The party who ran on this platform had to

29:37 turn it off because that's why they got elected. Unfortunately, they were influenced by a small minority who was very, very loud in Japan And they turned it off. And at some point in the road from

29:51 being elected to turning it off, engineers told them like, hey, this is a massive problem. We are going to be in deep, deep shit at some point. But it was too late. It was a political

30:02 opportunity to follow through with what they said, but however, it's gonna take years for that to actually turn off. And if they ever wanna turn it back on, you're looking at years again. So it's

30:12 not just something you decide, oh, hey, we actually need that. Like, let's go ahead and turn it back on. Okay, cool. See you in five years when everything comes back online and is ready to use

30:21 and ready to go.

30:23 Since we're on nuclear, we can talk about the misinformation and why we need more nuclear and not less. I love nuclear. I'm a big nuclear fan. I didn't know that about you, Julie. Yeah. Yeah,

30:34 I think it's so cool. You can't. I think it's so cool. I think we should have more nuclear We should have more nuclear. And it's a PR problem. It's kind of like Bitcoin. It's got a PR problem.

30:46 It needs better public relations. I don't know who we have to hire. I'm trying to think of like, have any of you followed Wendy's on Twitter? Everyone knows the Wendy's Twitter. Who does Wendy's

30:58 Twitter? Hire them to do PR for Bitcoin and nuclear. And I think you would see a progression and understanding what is actually going on in those two industries I'm the Wendy's Twitter of our

31:09 company. just unhinged LinkedIn posts and shit like that. That is very true. You know what, maybe do you want to start doing PR for pro-nuclear and pro-Bitcoin? When we do it, we have someone

31:22 for - We have someone coming for nuclear? Yeah, we have a fission guy. I'm jealous, that's cool. And then I'm gonna look out for fusion and theorem and all the weird crap, 'cause nuclear's not

31:36 just like, one thing, it's a lot of things Fission is what we all use. I think for nuclear, the biggest thing is cost. Cost of the infrastructure to get it going. 'Cause if that, like that was

31:48 solved for, I think we'd be using it here. I hear the same thing. A lot more. Here's the problem, everything comes down to cost. And it's gonna cost us now or it's gonna cost us later. It'll

31:58 cost us in 20 years when we don't have enough electrical capacity to fulfill all the needs of what's coming. 'Cause we've only talked about a few industries for the past, I don't know how many

32:09 minutes it's been. There's so many more industries coming like hydrogen. Hydrogen is going to require a lot of electricity.

32:18 Again, more electrical vehicles and we're talking about buses and 18 wheelers coming. Those chargers are going to have to be like eight times the size of the Tesla ones you see at Bucky's. So yeah,

32:30 nuclear gets a bad rap. I think it starts with saying things though, like instead of calling it nuclear waste, it's not waste by the way, you can reuse it, you can recycle it So 90 of the nuclear

32:44 liquid can be recycled and be reused.

32:48 We're also seeing situations where nuclear, hydrogen, water, all of these islands that I spoke of earlier are looking to offset some of their draw in order to power up for their power contracts and

33:04 kind of like bulk up, so to speak And so they are asking AI and high-performance and. Bitcoin miners to come behind the fence, utilize that electricity and allow it to have a more predictable draw

33:16 so they are a friend, not a foe, to the grid. That's awesome. It is awesome. Yeah. I look forward to that future. Yes. With nuclear, there's next gen nuclear. What exactly does that mean?

33:29 Is that a buzzword or? I mean, I would assume it has to do with the electrical upgrade within the infrastructure of the nuclear plant. I'm not super well versed in that Have you seen the modular

33:41 nuclear? I've seen very few Instagram reels on it. I'll be totally honest with you. We had a company on the podcast a while back. They actually manufactured modular

33:56 nuclear plants or whatever. I don't know what they're called. So wait, it's like the sility? Yeah So it's

34:05 a lower cost to get started. I can't remember all the details, but it was really interesting because it was like it kind of solved for that price point I don't think it generated as much electricity.

34:17 It could be wrong, but I mean that would yeah I don't I don't think it generated as much, but it was like

34:25 To your point on microgrids, I think that's kind of like where it kind of fit in well I mean the United States is huge Microgrids make a lot of sense to offset when a municipality or the federal

34:35 government can't come in and like just build out You know an expansion to the existing grid

34:42 Nuclear is awesome for that, but I'm gonna have to look into these because that sounds awesome I know I'm I don't know what I'm thinking. I wouldn't trust like what I'm saying because I'm just

34:51 trying to remember I'm thinking of like the modular homes where they come they look like little legos. No, that's what that's kind of how you like Hey, like it was pictured. I'm having to find

35:01 that like what it was called. I'm speaking of nuclear. It's like I mean It is kind of turning around 'cause we have all the data centers. We're pulling up so we can like support our LLMs in all

35:15 this crazy shit. And it's like, we literally can't do anything except bring nuclear back or it's not really possible. So it is on the rise. It is all tying together and you've been talking,

35:26 you've been having a lot of like positive collaboration talk. You're like, did I need Bitcoin? People didn't work with hydrogen, they need to work with nuclear. It's like, well, that's actually

35:34 happening right now And they're trying to turn on these plants, they're trying to build new ones,

35:42 I mean. And then on top of that, there's all, like I said, the data centers, they're trying to pop them up in like these random spots, you know, like there's like South or Appalachia and

35:52 they're taking them in, they're declining them. There's a lot of like hubbub and controversy. Like what's really going on with - Well, this is what cracks me up. Okay, so you've got somewhere

36:02 like North Carolina that just said yes to an AWS. data center, right? But they will say no to a Bitcoin mine. Bitcoin mine

36:12 is probably smaller. Data centers way bigger. Data center probably promised jobs on a scale that the Bitcoin miner cannot. At the end of the day, it comes down to really great salespeople and

36:23 lobbyists, unfortunately, who are really great salespeople. So they've gone into either the state level, the federal level, municipalities, and they've just kind of talked their way into the

36:36 heart of you. So if you're worried about the deer, say, whatever area you live in, there's like white-tailed deer. As lobbyists, I'm going to go in and I'm going to be like, well, you know,

36:44 it's going to affect the environment of the white-tailed deer. Now you hate Bitcoin. You're like, oh, my God, not my deer. I can't have that. Protect the deer. Oh, deer. Yeah, no. And what

36:54 these groups do is they are very, very sophisticated at targeting things that are close and near and dear to the community's heart that these things are going into. On the flip side, you have meta

37:03 and you have AWS. We're also very good at targeting these people as well. So like Louisiana actually has one of the biggest meta data centers going into it. I think over the next five years,

37:16 what's crazy is that data center, meta has asked the state of Louisiana like, hey, we need you to put in all this infrastructure, right? We will go here, we're gonna provide jobs and you guys

37:27 are gonna become a hub for tech and expansion, yeah. Oh, but we're not gonna pay you back after 15 years So we'll pay you for the electrical infrastructure you're putting in now, only for 15 years.

37:39 Then guess who pays for it? Taxpayer.

37:44 So that's some of the stuff we're gonna start running into and this is one of the largest data centers ever built in the United States. Also, I mean, Jacob and I are both from Louisiana. Louisiana

37:53 is not a historically wealthy state, so it feels very targeted and I know this is gonna be controversial but I see it, I call it like I see it and it's unfortunate they're putting it in North

38:04 Louisiana A lot of land, sparse activity up there, not gonna really mess with anybody.

38:11 States paying for the electrical infrastructure because it's their grid, it's intergy, this is the one responsible for it. But then after 15 years, they're not contributing another dime to that

38:20 infrastructure cost that they needed in order to go into that region. How much do you think it covers? Like that 15 years of the full. Not enough. They need to pay it for life I mean, it's also

38:33 putting stress. Once you put in extra infrastructure, you have to maintain that infrastructure. And the more draw that you consistently have from something like a data center, who by the way,

38:43 data center is a very general, very blanket statement that could be AI, that could be just a server data center, could be cloud computing. The problem is by making it general, you don't actually

38:56 disclose what all it's going to do and how it affects the region around it, especially on the electrical infrastructure scale terms residential. So that would explain why there are places turning

39:10 away to data centers and stuff because they smell the bullshit or whatever. Absolutely. I mean, like, is it Louisiana is just desperate or they that's stupid? Like, I don't know. I don't think

39:19 they're stupid. I actually, what sucks is like, in one regard, I'm like, Oh, I want to see my home state thrive. I want to see them advance in every capacity that they can. However, I see an

39:31 organization that has targeted them and taken advantage of a situation. And the point I was making earlier is like, there's not a difference

39:43 relatively between a data center and a Bitcoin mine. This one is favorable. This one is not. And then in the same regard, nuclear, we start talking about solar when nuclear, high hydrogen. Now

39:56 I'm stuck on if I'm saying nuclear or nuclear, I've got the George Bush thing on, you know, how he used nuclear data. dang it.

40:07 Nuclear, right? Nuclear. I think I said nuclear a second ago. So nuclear. Yeah, nuclear. All right. This is terrible.

40:16 So it used to kind of be like you were in one of the verticals, all in for oil and gas, all in for solar, all in for nuclear. And now I think we're seeing more people be understanding that we need

40:29 everything on the energy spectrum Like if we want to advance especially in the United States as an energy hub and become self-sufficient, we cannot play favorites. They all have to work together.

40:42 So it's been inherently divisive among most of those verticals, but I think recently you're seeing a lot more of them come together. Yeah. Which is cool. Yeah. That's how it should be. Wait,

40:52 okay. I have some answers on the modular nuclear thing. Yes. It's called last energy Okay, is the company and so that what they build has It does, has, does 20 megawatt output. Okay. They can

41:10 build it in under two years, which for nuclear, it takes a long time to build, so. It does, and the regulatory side extends up. Yep, yep. And then so,

41:23 they're like nuclear plant. I don't know what they call this thing, is it a. I mean, wouldn't it some kind of, whatever, this little thing, it takes up half an acre So, the plant footprint

41:35 fits within a football field, which is big because they're huge. No, but compared to a normal site, I mean, that's minimal, half an acre. Yeah. I mean, the steam pipes are a football field,

41:47 you know? Yeah, easily. The Simpsons, you know, like, yeah. Yeah, so this is a really cool company. I wonder if they're. That's extremely cool. 'Cause then, I mean, relatively small

41:58 footprint. Right, that's what they do. You said 20 megawatts. Yeah, I think of some of these remote locations where they have a hard time getting consistent electricity and they usually put up

42:11 solar panels or try other means. Nuclear is incredibly efficient and very reliable. So 20 megawatts here, 20 megawatts here. I feel like they probably co-locate with data centers. Yeah. I mean,

42:22 I'm a big fan of co-location in every aspect. I

42:29 think, again, with behind the fence, we'll also see more of that, whether it's hydrogen, nuclear,

42:34 steam, steam's a big one. Steam, there's been a revival of recapturing steam. Now, Bitcoin miners, we like to do it 'cause it's cheap, we can recapture it, turn it to turbine, makes energy,

42:45 but then there's a lot of other industries, it just makes sense, if you're already creating the steam, why not take it back and use it, yeah. I mean, that's what geothermal is, but you're

42:53 talking about the steam that you're manufacturing, like the buy product of steam product. Like, you're already making it, you're letting it out into the air. Like, why not

43:04 Is that a thing? That is a thing. Yeah, it's a thing. Just not large scale, I guess. I don't know why, it's not large scale. I know like for instance with flaring. Big deal in Bitcoin mining,

43:12 it offered to the oil and gas community as like, hey, we can help you with flaring. You don't pay the EPA fines, we cap it, we use it as a form of energy, and then they give it to us cheaper

43:23 because we're providing a solution. Same regard, steam has started to be looked at in the same way, not necessarily for Bitcoin mining, but just as, you know, it's byproduct that you're letting

43:33 go for free when you could actually retain it and try to use it in other areas of your plant. Yeah, and it's just the same way. Like they still flare away gases and like every single flare stack is

43:46 covered and being used. Right. So, we should do something about that. Let's kind of wrap things up with,

43:55 you know, you did a lot of predicting of like what our high energy use is going to go towards, whether it's hydrogen our battery production. mining, like what other things have you not maybe

44:06 mentioned that are going to need a lot of energy in the future? Everything we are doing involves technology. We're looking to bring back manufacturing to the United States, especially on the

44:19 technical side with like ASIC chips and even car manufacturing. And I think those things are not being thought of just because they're not as exciting, if I'm being totally honest Not thinking about

44:30 the new Kia plant down in wherever, that that's going to take a massive electrical draw. We tend to talk about the same buzzwords over and over, AI, Bitcoin, nuclear even. But in reality,

44:44 there's a lot of just very boring things that require electricity that are going to grow in the United States over the coming years. And manufacturing, I think being one of the largest Hydrogen, I

44:57 look forward to when you guys talk more about that because that is something no one's talking about right now. and that will be a massive draw on the grid, but it's a huge benefit as well, so.

45:07 What about vertical farming? Vertical farming, like hydroponic farming or what? I mean, that or any, I saw you mention that on one of your articles. Like, is that one of these energy draws that

45:21 we need to look out for? I think it could be. It's interesting because they've historically used solar. I didn't realize you were referencing one of my sub stack articles Yeah, so the reason that,

45:34 man, this could be a whole 'nother episode, just like the byproducts that come from farming that we don't use efficiently. And then how it can offset the energy usage for like watering or atomizing,

45:46 atomizing, automating farming. That's coming soon in a big way. So that's another thing that could absolutely take from the grid. But it also gives back, we need food, we gotta eat. Yeah, yeah

45:58 All right, so we learned a lot today. you know, but there's, there's still issues, you know, I think overall what we're trying to do is stabilize the grid and predict and whatever. Like what is

46:11 your grand master theory? We get trillions of dollars for free and we get to use it. I've heard, I've heard as crazy as like, we need to completely redo our grid, like tear it all down and

46:23 rebuild it. Like what is like your impossible plan to fix everything? In a utopia, we would tear down our grid in tranches and reinforce it and also add security to it. Our grid is very insecure.

46:36 Not just from a physical standpoint, but a technological standpoint as well. And so in best case scenario, we have all the time and money in the world. We go state by state, city by city, street

46:48 by street, and we tear it down and we rebuild it with the best technology that is not able to be tampered with, messed with on a very high level.

47:01 that would require so much time and so much money. And like I said, unfortunately, electrical infrastructure and maintenance historically does not get enough money to begin with, so. All right.

47:14 So we're all screwed. We just honestly, we just want people to care about it. Like it's not a big button issue for enough voters. And a lot of this stuff does end up at the polls. Unfortunately,

47:27 people just don't care. Yeah. Damn. Well, if you want to send10 trillion to Haley to get this plan going, get her in the office, whatever we have to do,

47:40 she'll have to do with that money and we'll make the world a better place. We'll try. Yeah. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, guys.