This Week in Startups - Data Centers and Energy with Phil Deutch | E2015

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Timestamps: (0:00) Teaser of today’s Liquidity Summit talk from Phil Deutch. (1:29) Alex kicks off the show. (2:11) Jason introduces Phil Deutch at the Liquidity Summit 2024 (3:52) Phil Deutch’s t...alk “Data Centers & Energy: A First Principles Understanding of Investment Opportunities & Challenges” (4:39) Data center power demands and the impact on energy demand (7:30) The complexity of energy generation and distribution (9:24) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (10:55) Electricity generation in the US, transmission, and distribution challenges (15:17) Market opportunity for faster electricity delivery and sustainability challenges (20:08) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (21:14) The nuclear power debate, role of AI and batteries in energy management (25:55) Consumer awareness and recent outages' impact on energy consumption (29:16) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ (30:39) Audience questions on the transition to AI and EV adoption challenges (34:09) Future innovations in energy: Solar, storage, and the potential for free electricity * Subscribe to the TWiST newsletter: https://www.ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out NGP Energy Capital: https://ngpenergy.com/ * Follow Phil: X: https://x.com/pdeutch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-deutch-21a76a6/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:24) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:08) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (29:16) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 When you have your electricity bill, let's say it's $100, only $25 of that is from the generation source, the rest of the wires to get it to you. But electricity in Texas is a good example, might cost you $0.3 a kilowatt hour at a cool winter day. In the summer, that can jump to almost $1,000 kilowatt hour to the utility. They don't pass it through. But I can't think of a commodity in the world
Starting point is 00:00:25 that goes up 300X in a day. No, 3,000 X in a day. Just GameStop. Right, just GameStop. The thing I think I'm close to being able to say is, I think in our children's lifetime, electricity would be close to being free. Wow. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace.
Starting point is 00:00:46 Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist and open phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your
Starting point is 00:01:25 first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, Alex here, and I have a treat for you today. We have the very first talk from our Liquidity Summit, 2004. Phil Deutsch, a partner over at NGP Energy Partners, kicked things off with a look at the domestic energy industry. Now, if you've been watching the news at all, you know that Microsoft is currently working to actually get a nuclear power plant to turn back on just so it can help power its data centers with low carbon energy.
Starting point is 00:01:55 So this is an enormous topic. If we're going to see Open AI and Anthropic and all the other model companies become what we hope they will, we're going to need a lot more power. Where is it going to come from? What are the challenges and opportunities there? Well, Phil knows, and now you are about to. We're going to start off with a bang today. The two most important topics on everybody's mind are AI and energy, and they dovetel together quite nicely.
Starting point is 00:02:21 I was able to meet Bill Deutsch through our group. He's on the board of Chimot's social capital partners and one of the most intelligent, considered individuals, also incredibly generous, but he's so quiet about it. You wouldn't know that. But he frequently sends me emails explaining things they got right, things they got wrong. You know, little bits of coaching here on the margins, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels more like having a big brother. So he's with NGP Energy Capital.
Starting point is 00:02:50 He's going to talk today about these incredible opportunities and energy creative. by explosive data center growth, the first principles approach. Please welcome my bestie, Bill Deutsch. First of all, I want to thank Jason and the liquidity team. I think the innovation, enthusiasm, originality is just wonderful and infectious. And I just want to give a hand.
Starting point is 00:03:15 Jackie, thank you for everything you guys have done. It's a great thing. Second, I do want, as an organizing principle, the day is organized by intelligence. You'll start with me at the top, the most intelligence. and you'll finish with the besties at the end of the day. So it'll be a slow road down.
Starting point is 00:03:34 Jackie offered to coach me, and I said, what the f*** do I need coaching for? I've been doing this for a long time. And she said, well, Phil, I think you should introduce yourself and say who you are and what your talks about. And I said, geez, that sounds like a pretty good idea. So I'm going to listen to Jackie. As Jason said, my name is Phil Deutsch.
Starting point is 00:03:53 I'm a partner at NGP. I've been investing in the energy, transition for 30 years, which goes to show you how bad I've been at it since we're still at it. During that period of time, we've invested about a billion dollars across non-carbon solutions and products, created multi-billion dollar companies in a REG and TPI, and I think are considered a top, core top performer, if not the only fund that's been doing it for 30 years. So over the next 30 minutes, my goal is to teach you more. about energy than Sacks and Shemoth have ever learned in their whole life, okay?
Starting point is 00:04:32 So you're going to be well prepared for tonight. This means that if I lie about anything or I say anything wrong, you can't sue. Let's start off with data centers, okay? And this is for the people who are talking at the end of the day. This is a picture of a data center. This is what they look like. There are lots of things in them. But what's most important and interesting about a data center is it has very unique
Starting point is 00:04:55 power demands. It needs a lot of power. It's got a lot of hot chips and racks and servers and things that Sunny knows about. And it has to be reliable. So it's not like power can go out for a minute or two. You cannot have that happen in Data Center. It needs to be feeding those chips all day long. Second, I don't think this is terribly surprising to you unless you live under a rock. Data Center are growing in this world. We're going to spend something like $2 trillion over the next four years, and so data center growth absolutely explosive. Now, when we think about energy, as we'll talk about later and data centers, think about geographic problems, right? There's not just one data center. It's something that's across the United States. So there's going to be growth
Starting point is 00:05:39 that's ubiquitous geographically. When we take the data center growth that was already projected and we add artificial intelligence on top of it, the growth becomes even more dynamic. So here you see a slide that shows you power consumption of a Google search versus an inquiry under one of the models that Sonny will talk about later. And it's about a 10x increase for artificial intelligence. So we're asking more and more of our data centers. Data center scalers and producers are not sitting idly by. Everyone's trying to meet this increased power demand.
Starting point is 00:06:16 They might do it at the chip level. So here you see the Nvidia power consumption. on the left or the racks themselves. So everything is beefing up to meet the increased demands of artificial intelligence. And so when you look at a absolute chart of data center growth, it's enormous 3x increase in the demands that data centers are going to put on our energy systems. Now, just to put that a perspective, basically during our lifetimes, electricity growth in the United States has been about 0%. Because we get more and more efficient, more urbanization, we haven't needed more electricity demand. But the increase just from data centers alone plus EVs and others
Starting point is 00:07:00 is going to change that growth rate on the right hand part of this slide from 0 to 2.4%. Now, that might not be in a lot, I'll sound like a lot when we have companies growing at 20 or 30%. But think of the basis. We're talking about total U.S. electricity to me. Every single way we use electricity, we're going to now see unprecedented growth. So we're seeing technology drive unique demands on electricity generation in the U.S. So what we can walk away from this section saying to ourselves is huge growth in data centers, fueled by artificial intelligence, and the dramatic size of it is enough to increase the overall demand for electricity in the United States. It's a very, very big deal. So let's talk a little bit about energy and how we think
Starting point is 00:07:52 about energy connecting to this. And this is where I really want you to kind of slow down and think about the different parts of what it takes to get an electron from being generated to being used. Because people will say things like, okay, where you're going to use, create solar power in the house and therefore will demand less oil from OPEC. Those are apples we're going to be able to interest. One's electricity, one's a transportation fuel. So whenever you think about energy, you really have to get down to first principles and think about each step of the way. It's a complicated equation here. And that's what I really want to focus you on next 10 or 15 minutes. So this slide, which is very busy, really is probably the most important slide in energy.
Starting point is 00:08:39 Because what you have on the left is sources of energy. Okay. And here when we mean energy, We're not talking about electricity. We're talking about energy. And so it comes from petroleum, nat gas, solar, and those are all the ways that can be produced. And then it could go through various intermediate forms. And then there's an output where it's, what sectors it's used by, transportation, industrial, etc.
Starting point is 00:09:04 So whenever anyone starts talking about energy, you want to know, okay, what's the source and what's the use? And in what form do I want my energy when I use it? Do I want a liquid, like a gas? gasoline in my car, or I do want it like an electron plugged into the wall. So never lose sight of the fact that this is really your organizing home base of your first principles. Founders, I know you're building the next big thing in tech, and you probably got some groundbreaking AI solution or a consumer app that's going to take the world by storm. Or maybe you're listening to this week
Starting point is 00:09:34 in startups and you're doing a CPJ business or maybe you're an investor in a restaurant. Well, first impressions matter. You need to have a gorgeous business website, and you want to do that for an affordable price and have gorgeous templates and have all the important features out there, there is an amazing solution for you. It's Squarespace. And that's what I use to make stunning professional websites quickly because speed matters. And Squarespace has a new product that's absolutely mind-blowing. It's called Blueprint AI. You answer a couple questions about your business, and AI does all the heavy lifting to give you a custom-built website tailored to your brand. And it's all powered by Squarespace, killer designs, keeping eyeballs on your website. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:10:13 There's this expression. Don't judge a book by its cover. Do you know why they have that expression? Because people judge books by their cover. That's why when people design books and you go by in the airport, the cover pulls you in. Same thing with your website. Beautifully designed templates are waiting for you there, as is the blueprint AI. Plus, you get built in analytics, SEO, e-commerce tools. So when you invest in a Squarespace website, you get all of those developers, designers, and brilliant people at Squarespace behind your business. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first. website or domain purchase, and when you're ready to launch, again, go to Squarespace.com slash twist and get that 10% off your first website or domain purchase, swearspace.com slash twist. Now, when we talk about data centers, we're talking about electricity. So we can go from energy, which could have been oil, gas, to electrons, okay? So you have to generate those electrons somehow. And here you see the various forms of electricity generation in the United States.
Starting point is 00:11:13 What's really interesting from the slide is coal is dying, nuke stays about the same, and renewables have been the highest form of growth for the last five or six years of the U.S. and globally. So the thing gets added the most is renewables, and it does so at the cost of coal. Now, just like data centers are geographically distributed, so too is electricity generation.
Starting point is 00:11:37 You have generation all across the United States, some places are good, producing wind. For example, the plains of Midwest. Some places do solar better. You can figure that out. But your generation is distributed. Each source of generation has a different cost to it, right?
Starting point is 00:11:57 That's intuitive. But you have to, you know, as we think about, if data centers are going to come up across the U.S., it's going to need power across the U.S., so it's going to be geographically. One issue will be where can I get solar in Maine? Probably not. But if I can I get Nat gas in Colorado, yes, but there'll be different costs.
Starting point is 00:12:18 So you're going to think geographic plus cost. Then you might care about the future, climate change. And if you do, you might want to lower CO2 emissions. So now you're going to overlay on your energy supply. Where is it located? How much is it cost and how much CO2 does it emit? Then different times a day, certain energy sources produce different amounts of energy. Solar, not so good at night.
Starting point is 00:12:44 Wind, not so good when the wind doesn't blow. So your generation, you're now going to think about when am I going to have it produce energy. And then there are also capacity factors as well. So you've got to think about all these things. Now, we've generated our electricity somehow, burn coal, use solar, use wind. Now we've got to get it from the generation source
Starting point is 00:13:08 to the use, okay? And so there are transmission and distribution lines across the United States, hundreds of thousands of high voltage lines and then millions of low voltage lines, an incredibly complicated system. And what's most interesting about this is there is not one U.S. electric grid. The grid is regulated by entities called RTOs and ISOs. Just follow the colors. But you cannot easily get electricity into and out of regions
Starting point is 00:13:40 that are not yours. So, for example, Urquot, Texas, it's its own world. Electrons do not flow in and out of Texas, easily. So to California, you may have heard about Path 4 or how you get electrons north and south in the state. That's been an issue. So we have a patchwork of grids, not one single grid. Now, you could say, let's fix it. So let's build transmission lines. Notoriously hard to do, very expensive, very expensive, very
Starting point is 00:14:10 very hard to get through people's backyards, now in my backyard, and long. Even if you had the transmission distribution lines, you have to connect to it. So you have to get approval from your ISO-RTO. I built a solar farm. I want to hook up to the grid I'm in. That too takes time,
Starting point is 00:14:29 and there's something called interconnection cues that make you wait to get onto your local grid. So in summary, what we see here is a very complicated system of energy generation plus transmission and distribution of those stable electrons. And you have to think about all of that together when you think about how do I provide data for data centers. So the reason we're here today, I think, is to make money and think about ways to follow investment opportunities, and opportunities are usually come from challenges.
Starting point is 00:15:04 but I'd like to spend a few minutes on the challenges and opportunities that we see by all this energy demand for data sectors. First, the most obvious, we need more power. So things that are going to produce power and electrons are an obvious win for the U.S. and the world in the next decade or two. Now, the nature of this need is pretty staggering, but when you look and compare to, how we plan to meet future additions now. And you see here the overall neck capacity additions, how much more energy we plan to do for wind or from solar. It is attainable.
Starting point is 00:15:45 So it's going out there and saying, can we add more solar? Can we add more wind? Absolutely. And we do it in better ways. So this is a problem that we can solve. And when you look at the impacts of these numbers on incremental natural gas demand,
Starting point is 00:16:00 again, this is a very solvable problem, but it's going to take execution and better products and better services to do it. Second, issue challenge opportunity. I talked about the interconnection cues. People are waiting in the line to get onto the grid. And this slide on the left, it is absolutely exploded. So this is the amount of, this is basically how long is it? I'm at the deli.
Starting point is 00:16:23 Jason, I don't know. We're in a deli, and you're at Katz's. In New York, I got a number. My number is 3 million and 1. A long time until I get pastrami. No, boy, no. So we got to get on the grid as fast as we can. That is, in some sense, a regulatory problem, which people like us in the room don't like,
Starting point is 00:16:40 because that puts time in the hands of bureaucrats, makes girly insane. So we want to try and avoid that. And two ways you might think about avoiding that are, one, distributed energy, right? If I produce power on site of the data center and I don't touch the grid, I don't have to get in line to queue up. But the amount of power I need a data center and the reliability I need make that a non-trivial. But it's still a pretty smart idea. You may have seen that Amazon did a deal to buy power kind of directly from a nuke that was
Starting point is 00:17:15 next to a data center. That's a way to try and cut in line and not have to stand in this queue. The second thing that's really interesting is a virtual power plant. And by that, we mean you take a variety of supply and demand resources. in an area and you connect them using software. So, for example, at a peak energy demand, I may reduce my load in one place so that another place could use it.
Starting point is 00:17:40 Or I may use backup generators that are sitting on site at this hotel and use it to control for other purposes. So you kind of create a network. And if you can do that, you might be able to avoid going to the grid. So these two ideas, you can go down those warm holes later,
Starting point is 00:17:55 of distributing energy resources and virtual power plants are a way to avoid the interconnect issue. Now, this is an absolutely fantastic statistic done by Borgon Staley. Right now, people like Sunny are so hungry for electrons to run their data centers and their AI products, they will pay twice as much as prevailing electricity rates to get it faster. They want the electrons today. So imagine if you all are attacking a market where the incumbents are saying to you, I will pay you two X over today. prices to get me this stuff. So that's a lot of fat to really go after with new business models.
Starting point is 00:18:35 So speed really is incredible value to these data centers. Finally, this is, not finally, but this is a little geeky and I'm sorry for the kind of complexity of this slide. Transmission, as I said, is very bulky, hard to build. And because of that, we have congestion and interconnection cues, and that leads to pricing differentials that are inefficient at their core. That is, if the grid was as fulsome as we wanted it at a peak moment, there wouldn't be pricing differentials caused by the transmission. You just can't get enough electrons through the pipe. Think about it that way.
Starting point is 00:19:11 So when you look at these colors and these price differences, what they say to you is there's an inefficiency going on that can be exploited if I could figure out how to deb bottleneck the grid or go around it. So this is another way of say the extent you think of businesses and ideas that can get you out of the congestion of the grid, there's huge opportunities to make money here. One way to do it that's a shortcut is you can trade electrons. So, for example, electricity, unlike stock, is not traded in one place, it's traded all over the United States. So there are some people that say, okay, if I can figure out where the bottlenecks are, I might create a software
Starting point is 00:19:50 program to buy electrons in moments. I think it gets congested. And it's the number one like traded commodity in the world electricity. So it's just a long way of saying it is worth those you are thinking about places to invest to think about the grid. It has huge dollars involved. Founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? I know you do. You got to get that ACV trending up. And you want to push your churn down, right? Sounds good. But to sell to those big buyers, you need to clear all of these compliance checks. You know that. That means you got to have things like SOC2 sorted out. What's SOC2? It's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe. And if you aren't SOC2 compliant, you can kiss those big deals goodbye. You're not going to
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Starting point is 00:21:10 That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your SOC 2. Finally, on the compute itself, we've presented there a host of issues around energy, citing, sourcing. How do you maintain assets? when do you turn certain things on, certain things off. And when you think about that, artificial intelligence will be something that matters. But the compute demand is outpaced the efficiency of the chips. So, again, anything that makes chips more efficient will cut down on the overall power demand.
Starting point is 00:21:45 So, again, efficiency in chips, in racks and servers and cooling, all that stuff is a tremendous investment opportunity. When we look at the biggest hyper-scalers, the people, who are demanding the biggest data centers, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, they've made very public and very bold pronouncements about where they want to be from a CO2 emissions point of view. They want to get to net zero by certain dates in time. So they've really put themselves a little bit of a box because the core of their business is demanding more and more electrons. Most of that electricity, about 60%, wants to come from nat gas because that's kind of how we We do it in the U.S. now, and it's fast and cheap, but that gives you CO2.
Starting point is 00:22:30 So how will these hyperscalers be able to meet their promises of being net zero? One way that everyone loves is direct air capture to suck CO2 out of the air. I'm not sure anyone's been able to show they can do it at a reasonable cost, and that leads to things like carbon credits and other workarounds. but there's going to be a big problem for these companies because they've made public announcements in their regulatory filings and their SEC enforced to live up to these promises. So you're going to see a big rush over the next decade
Starting point is 00:23:09 for these guys to figure out how am I going to reduce my CO2 emissions to meet my promises. This gets to probably, I think, one of the weirdest things about energy that I just don't understand. I am really, really, really, fucking old. And when I graduated from high school in 1982, I worked on how to solve nuclear waste to the United States.
Starting point is 00:23:35 Since then, what we've done in solving nuclear waste disposal is zero. There's been no advancement in nukes in the U.S. for decades. So the idea that we're going to solve the data center problem, which is measured in months, years, by building more nukes is insanity to me. Because the rates of planning, the amount of time it takes to build the nuclear power plant are enormous. These numbers in China, five to seven years,
Starting point is 00:24:02 they may actually be understated. It may take 10 years to build a nuclear plant in China. It's just because you see one coming online now, it wasn't started yesterday. So people say, okay, you're pessimistic about the way old plants were, but what about new small modular reality? actors, SMRs, or let's go to Fusion, not Fission. I mean, those are all great ideas, and I think there's some really great companies,
Starting point is 00:24:29 but the timelines are just a mismatch between adding power over the next 900 days versus 10 years. So I guess if you could solve this problem of how long it takes to build nukes, I'm for nukes, I wish we had more of them, but just derationally, it's a mismatch to the data center problem. All of this leads a whole bunch of problems and a whole bunch of potential solutions, and artificial intelligence itself will be, as I mentioned earlier, one of the ways we work ourselves at it. There will be eventually smart people that take the AI resource and apply it to the energy problem.
Starting point is 00:25:05 It's already being done, as I mentioned, with maintenance and how do you put generation online, but it'll be a really exciting part solving some of the challenges we had today. So, in summary, I want, I hope you all are really enthused by this area. We have a huge growth and boom and data centers. It's not going to be stopped connected to a very complicated energy system. And when you put those two together, you're going to just have a host of problems, challenges, and with that come solutions. And if you're the guys who are on the cutting edge of the solutions, you should make a lot of money.
Starting point is 00:25:45 So I hope that's a little bit of an intro, and I guarantee you you're all set for the podcast tonight on energy. Okay. So it seems like consumers in the United States have gotten a bit of a free ride on all of this, except when it comes to recent outages, Texas, California. I think the public's consciousness is starting to get triggered, not because they want to save the planet and put solar on, some people do. Not because they can save money, some people do. That didn't seem to drive a lot of consumer and consumers seem to be not the majority, but obviously significant here,
Starting point is 00:26:28 but redundancy and batteries. And one of the great things that seems to have happened is with smartphones and EVs battery technology has just absolutely been extraordinary. So how do batteries play into all of this. And maybe you could speak to that opportunity. I had a company on This Week and Startups two weeks ago. That's just not putting solar in houses in Texas. They're putting batteries in your house to load them up during the low cost times and then deploying it during the peak times.
Starting point is 00:27:02 Peak shape. Yeah. They're low management shape within the home. Right. And they told me it's an 8x difference in cost between peak and trow in terms of costs in Texas. Let me say, there's a lot. It's a great question. Lots of things go on there.
Starting point is 00:27:16 It would be great if I could say it's a question. Wouldn't it be great, but it was actually good on. Well, no, I was thinking it was such a comprehensive, it was such a comprehensive talk. The one thing on the company
Starting point is 00:27:25 is Texas has a weird regulatory thing. So you have to be a little careful with that company. I do know it. It's a great company, just whether it scales beyond Texas. So that's the first thing. What your friend Elon Musk has done
Starting point is 00:27:37 for energy is, cannot be overstated. Think about a home that has a power wall in a Tesla and solar on the roof. That home now has a mobile battery that is of significant size, and that allows for things like, okay, I'm not going to use as much electricity at the highest peak rate. I can store it. I can move it. And I believe the projections are in about a decade, there'll be more power in electric vehicles than there are in Nat gas power plants at a certain
Starting point is 00:28:10 moment in time. So you are right, it is going to change everything. Because we've never had that size of battery at our house. And I think it's only the lightning, Sonny used to be at board that allows bi-directional where you can plug in, but soon every car will. Is that right, Sunny? Cybertrack has. We have one outside. So that's going to change everything, Jason. And one of the neatest facts is when you have your electricity bill, let's say it's $100, bucks. Only 25 bucks of that is from the generation source, the rest of the wires to get it to you. But electricity in Texas is a good example, might cost you three cents a kilowatt hour at a cool winter day. In the summer, that can jump to almost a thousand dollar kilowatt hour to the utility.
Starting point is 00:28:58 They don't pass it through, but I can't think of a commodity in the world that goes up 300x in a day. No, 3,000 X in a day. Just GameStop. Right, just GameStop. So a battery allows you to Arb GameStop. So that's a long way to see. There are a lot of great things there, but they're all true. All right, everybody.
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Starting point is 00:30:31 Open phone's going to pour them over at no extra cost. head over to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. We'll take one question from the audience. Have anybody else a great question? You know, we used to hear about the demands of blockchain and crypto,
Starting point is 00:30:45 and so that seems to have gone away with the demands of AI. And so I'd like, maybe you can sort of talk about where you see that going and the demand. And then when you talk about software solutions, are you talking like solutions
Starting point is 00:30:57 like a power ledger, things where they're doing peer-to-peer trading? So first on the, on the, on the crypto. I've never understood the focus on crypto power usage. For example, let me give you an example. Let's say you wore Laura Piana sweaters. I don't know, but I would guess that the energy used to knit and make a Laura Piana sweater is 100x, a J-Cruz sweater. But we don't do it there. So there are lots of things in life.
Starting point is 00:31:31 I bet the best wine is more energy in it than the worst. So I think there are lots of things in life that improve with energy use. And for some reason, we say, I want to know how much it costs to make a Bitcoin. I'm okay with that, but then let's do that with everything. So, you are right that with the other power usage is there's been less focus on it. Now, there's one really neat thing about Bitcoin mining, and maybe data setters too, and this goes to inference versus training, which I don't really get, Sonny does. If you could stop using your power at key to key times, as I mentioned, it's very valuable,
Starting point is 00:32:08 particularly in the state of Texas. And the crypto miners can do that because they're making a straight trade. So they've become very good, and you've probably read about the swing capacity, it turned down when the electricity, and maybe you can do the same with data centers. So that'd be another example of the software that would shut you down at key moments, but yeah, peer-to-peer is one. So in the United States, EV adoption has stalled out right now at about 10 percent, and the U.S. government has put a few billion dollars at this problem, and it's been a couple of years,
Starting point is 00:32:40 and they really haven't built out the charging infrastructure. Why do you think that is, and do you think we'll have the infrastructure to hit about 50% by 2030 in the United States? Yeah. Today, I don't think I ever mentioned the word government. and, you know, there's a $2 trillion government program called the Inflation Reduction Act. I've lived in Washington for 30 years of my life, and the less I think about government, the happier I am. I'm not against it. I just don't, you know, our funds are 10 years in duration. I can't count on policy one way or the other.
Starting point is 00:33:15 I think every advance in energy, whether it's solar or electric vehicles or anything, is because technology has improved and a product's been created that people want. And I think that's going to continue to happen with EVs and chargers. And so I have utter confidence that no matter who's president, who's in Congress, that the forces that are creating energy transition in the United States, whether it's avoiding blackouts or whether it's reducing carbon, whether it's driving a Tesla because it's better than a GM Saturn, whatever they are, they're not stopped.
Starting point is 00:33:56 They're inevitable. So, yes, I think all those things are going to happen, and it's going to be incumbent on people like us to make it happen through the private sector, and the government may help us, but it's really our job, do it, not theirs. Where's the most unlikely innovation going to happen? I've been reading that solar just keeps making more innovations that were unexpected. Solar keeps making unexpected gains and costs, you know, keep plummeting.
Starting point is 00:34:24 Is that the place where you think there'll be maybe some unknown unknowns that allow us to get much more energy created? Do you think it's vision? I mean, I know some of this stuff is science fiction, but if you had to place your bet on something crazy, that could happen. Yeah, I think, let me kind of give you three ideas of what it could be. I think storage is going to be the first one. We're going to see a huge reduction in energy storage. Full disclosure, I'm talking to my own book.
Starting point is 00:34:52 We're big investors in the form energy. But there are lots of other companies trying to do it, and they want to see reductions in energy storage across the board, which will be really impactful on supply and cost of electricity. So that's one. Two, on vision, it's possible, but even the best CEOs, the best vision companies say there's work to be done to see if they can actually work. So, yes, that could surprise us, but that would be a surprise. The third thing that I'll say is, whenever I fundraise, I always tell every LP, I guarantee you'll be a blackout during this fund.
Starting point is 00:35:32 There's always a blackout somewhere. Then I'd say it's in the great, as you pointed out. The thing I think I'm close to being able to say is, I think in our children's lifetime, electricity would be close to being free. Wow. Because there be so much solar, so much wind, and so much storage that will really drive it down. Like Wi-Fi, right? When Wi-Fi first came out, you had to pay for it, when electricity first came out, you had to play for it. Now we get free Wi-Fi, free electricity, don't even think about it with a cup of coffee.
Starting point is 00:36:01 So I think you see that at a whole scale. And it goes negative sometimes in the country now. So it's not the most absurd thing for me to say. This has been amazing. Give it up for Phil Doyle. And great ending on a super positive note. That gap that Phil mentioned between how fast we can build data centers and how fast we can build new electricity generation capacity, I think explains why we're seeing so many
Starting point is 00:36:29 modular nuclear reactor startups, one of my favorite niches out there. But anyways, before we go, I do want to thank the sponsors from the event that Phil's talk came from. That was Forge Global. They do a lot of secondaries trading. I'm sure you've heard of them. Venture, which provides end-to-end solutions for payroll, HR benefits, and risk management. And then finally, Eventus Advisory, a quote leader in on-demand finance and accounting support. They help put on the show.
Starting point is 00:36:54 We appreciate them. We appreciate you. And we'll see you back on Twist real soon. Bye.

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