Electric vehicles create problems for the grid. Could they also help solve them? The plan to turn EVs into reliable grid infrastructure

19:27Katherine Hamilton:Apoorv, where does the company sit? You sell this system to the utility, you've got your own people sitting in the utility? Like, explain to us a little bit the business model. I mean, I think the function sounds very positive, but what's the business model?

19:42Stephen Lacey:Yeah, so we're an enterprise SaaS platform. It's boring as that sounds. We sit within the utility and we're a cloud software system. So we're not on-prem like some of the old sort of older software systems that utilities have. But we do often hook up to pretty important internal OT and IT systems within the utility. So it's not just hooking up to, for example, your billing system and so forth like other players do. I think it's going even deeper into SCADA and understanding their capacity, their hosting capacity, and all of these other things that utilities have, to be completely honest with you, imperfect information.

20:23Stephen Lacey:Utilities are trying. They're in the process of sort of digitizing as much as possible off a lot of those physical infrastructure components out there. They're trying to put more SCADA and more sensors out there. But the reality is that there's a lot of information gaps. And so we take what imperfect information exists and kind of bring that together with our own data and telemetry at the edge and can build a much better understanding of what's happening as people come home, plug in their cars, or people have batteries installed in their homes, or they're doing all of these other things. And then by building and dispatching those resources, building this optimization and dispatching those resources, again, all very much in the cloud, it allows us to build a far more granular optimization, something that really looks at the customer by customer, the device by device.

21:14Stephen Lacey:And that's really unique because again, Then in yesteryear, what everyone used to do and where there was such a huge gap in the market was they just said, I don't actually care what happens with Amy's thermostat. I don't really care what happens with Ed's thermostat. I'm just sending a signal to all thermostats and hoping that it sheds a megawatt. That's not reliable. What I need to know is what is happening with Amy? What is happening with Ed? When I add you up together, what is that reliability factor that I can trust on from each and every asset together? And then how do I turn that into a portfolio that has 99.9 % reliability for utility?

21:48Katherine Hamilton:And is it system-wide or it's literally at the distribution level? Because that's another thing that people debate about. Like, am I getting system flexibility, which some utilities say, well, it's great, but it doesn't help me at that particular transformer, right? Right. So does it help? Is this localized in nodes or it's just it aggregates system wide?

22:12Stephen Lacey:Yeah, that's a great question. So behind my head, you can see a disco ball. And part of the reason is our platform is called Distribution Integrated Smart Charging Orchestration, or disco for short. And it's a patented approach we built, which is which actually pays homage to a lot of distributed systems that you see in modern cloud computing and so forth. The idea is it is system-wide flexibility that starts with a bottoms-up approach. So we're going from the transformer all the way to the generator. So we can create absolutely bespoke groups that can solve those challenges down at that localized transformer.

22:49Stephen Lacey:Or we can go up to feeders or to the substation. Or yes, build a portfolio that serves your entire service territory. And so we've got programs with utilities on the East Coast and the West Coast and the Midwest where we're doing everything from co-optimization of wind energy over in Colorado where there's too much wind in the middle of the night. And so we turn thousands of cars on in the middle of the night to ensure that their charging is matching that excess production of wind. But sometimes when you're charging too many cars in, let's say, a place like Boulder, now you're creating feeder challenges because now you've got too much charging happening in one pocket.

23:22And so then we can co-optimize that charging so that we're not creating those distribution challenges and we're also sucking up all of that excess wind.

23:32Stephen Lacey:So that's really how the system works. It works in an incredibly flexible way for the whole system.

23:38Katherine Hamilton:Right. And to go back then to the question of visibility and how you're getting this data from these assets, you're getting data from EVs in particular, are you? And is that something, do customers opt into that? Adam, and if I've got an EV, do I need to choose to be part of the Weave Grid system, Weave Grid network? How does that work?

23:58Stephen Lacey:Yeah, that's a great question. So we started with EVs because it was the most misunderstood asset, is what I would say, the most poorly, the least visible asset on the system. I think there were people who were, you know, as you can imagine, EVs are being bought pretty quickly. There's seven and a half million plug-in vehicles today that has nameplate capacity of about 40 gigawatts in the United States. For context, that's more load than what the total data center requirements are over the next few years. And so it's a tremendous amount of load that's already being built up. And very little of it is being taken advantage of in terms of its flexibility and its ability to be useful to the grid.

24:42Stephen Lacey:So we started with EVs, very different. They also have a mobility component that is far more important to the consumer, frankly, than anything you do on the energy management side. If I'm paying$70 ,000 for a car, I don't really care for your$10 a month unless you're going to make sure that my experience of mobility is not tarnished in any way. That unique asset also has particularly unique attributes on the distribution grid. You know, EVs don't really cause a bunch of problems to generators. We're already pretty familiar with people's charging behavior. We know that most charging behavior will happen in the middle of the night.

25:16Stephen Lacey:But again, back to that experience that you talked about earlier, two to three cars charging at the wrong moment could cause a localized problem. So by starting with EVs, we actually built the platform architecturally the right way to start bottoms up so we could get that visibility. And yes, to get the visibility, the customer has to opt into a utility program where utility is offering you an incentive that allows us to then basically talk to, let's say, Tesla server or Rivian server or GM server and be able to pull that data so that we can now have better understanding and visibility of how your car is charging on that local part of the grid.

25:54Stephen Lacey:As we're adding other devices, though, for us, it's very similar. It's exactly the same concept. And the reason we're doing it, and it's much easier in some ways, is because those are already pre-established connections and relationships. I mean, your Nest thermostat's been in your home for many years. We've got other devices that we've already documented pretty well. Energy management on cars was pretty poorly understood. There wasn't really a standard layer. Weavegrid's been building very much that sort of standard operating layer for a lot of these automotive companies. And at the same time, as we're adding more and more resource types, it's allowing us to give visibility to utilities in a much fuller way of what's really been going on with these devices, with these resources.

26:34Katherine Hamilton:So it's not just cars then. It is what if you've got home energy storage or for your appliances, anything like that. you can read data from all of those. Yeah.

26:44Stephen Lacey:So as we're now expanding beyond EVs, I think the sort of paradigm shift we're trying to bring to the market is that historically other devices have only been used, you know, in a, I would say in a 50 % of their value sort of way, which is that we've only really used other devices as classic demand response resources. And that's perfectly fine. There is value in dispatching a fleet of thermostats to do sort of DR responsiveness in those moments where maybe you've got a peak or power plant that's turning on. But actually building holistic, systematic, wide, flexible capacity for the whole system is something that requires you to, again, go all the way down to the distribution edge and from the distribution edge up to the generator.

27:32Stephen Lacey:And so I think one of the things we're really trying to do as we think more holistically beyond EVs is starting to say, okay, what is the extra capacity and the extra flexibility and the extra value we can bring to the system by adding these devices that are much more cookie cutter, much more off the shelf. They don't move, unlike your EV. I've never heard of a thermostat rolling off of a wall. And so bringing all of those other resources to build a more holistic flexibility, such that you can actually start to say, okay, how do we ensure that when I'm thinking about whether or not I upgrade my substation, maybe by using Weaver Grid's platform, I can actually now have more reliable megawatts that every day are being managed in a more intelligent way.

28:18Stephen Lacey:And to be completely frank with you, I'm not sure that some of these customer resources can be used every day. There is some amount of customer friction that is felt when you tell someone to dial their thermostat up or down. And so we have to be very careful that we're not overselling the capability of some of these distributed resources. I do think that folks are willing to let go of, let's say, charging behavior because it is a daily behavior, because it is something where you know that as long as your car is fully charged at the end of the night, you're fine. But when you're trying to change someone's comfort levels, you do have to be very careful on how you manage it.

28:55Stephen Lacey:And so So we do really trust our partners on this, whether it be some of the heating and cooling companies, whether it be the thermostat manufacturers themselves. We trust that they know more about the customer's comfort than we do. But one of the things we're just trying to do is make sure we build the fullest amount of flexibility possible for the utility. And again, build that trust, which I think today has been shattered by years of, frankly, poor performance from these resources. And I think there's a way that we can kind of bring up the bar of performance, given what we've been able to accomplish with EVs.

29:27Katherine Hamilton:There's everywhere else in the United States, and then there's Texas. It's big, it's proud, it's got a lot going on. And it takes a daily news show to keep up with it all. The Texas Standard tackles politics, business and tech, the arts and the people and things that make Texas unique. It's smart, fast-paced, relevant, and sometimes even a little fun. After all, it's the news from a Texas perspective. Subscribe to The Texas Standard wherever you get your podcasts.

30:20Katherine Hamilton:and unprecedented load growth. We're permitting delays to all development. We'll cover energy storage business models, supply chain challenges, and emerging technologies such as virtual power plants. And new for 2026, a dedicated grid infrastructure stream, and the launch of our North American Power and Renewables Forum, exploring how the wider energy mix is evolving to meet surging demand for power. Whether you're a developer, a utility leader, or an investor, don't miss this opportunity to connect with peers and shape strategy for 2026. Learn more and register at woodmac.com. Right. So it seems to me, though, you've raised a really important point, which is right at the heart.

30:58Katherine Hamilton:A lot of these issues around VPPs, whatever you want to call them, the kinds of advanced grid technologies that you're providing, which is this question of control. If you are a utility, a grid operator, you need control. If you've got a problem locally on the grid, across the system as a whole, you need to be able to make changes and you need to be able to make them rapidly in order to keep the grid balanced and avoid having problems across the grid. But if you're a customer, you also want control. You want to be able to charge your car so that it's available when you need it to get to work in the morning.

31:34Katherine Hamilton:You want the thermostat set to a level that's going to keep you comfortable in the summer and in the winter. you want to be able to keep your food frozen in the freezer, whatever it might be, you need to be able to make the changes that you have to make in order to receive the energy services that you want to receive. And if you can't do that at times because you've surrendered control to the grill operator, that's potentially a big problem for you. And as you say, I think there is that issue of trust and the human factor then becomes very important and the psychology of the way people relate to the grid operator becomes very important.

32:12Katherine Hamilton:And people, I think, need to be convinced that they should trust the grid operator. And as you say, I think there's plenty of examples of people having bad experiences with that and pilots have been tried and haven't worked and so on. And so is there a sense in which the technology can do whatever it likes, but actually the job of winning over hearts and minds is the difficult part. And no matter how good the technology is, unless you can do that job of persuasion, you're not going to get an option. You're not going to get to where you want to be and where you could be in theory with the technology that you've got.

32:56Stephen Lacey:Yeah, you know, to be honest, I think too much of the conversation has been around technology. I think we have again and again done this thing where we talk about, oh, but the tech is better now and the tech is this and this and this. The technology is not the issue, to be completely honest. And back to your point of control, I think of control as a spectrum. Ultimately, it is also OK if we say that a certain asset cannot be controlled to do anything. Like it is actually an uncontrollable asset. If it is knowable that it is uncontrollable, that is also OK. And then there's also the other end, which is that this is an infinitely flexible resource.

33:34Stephen Lacey:You can do whatever you want, as long as you send me the right signal and I can manipulate my behavior. And I think that's sort of where we have to learn to operate. And I think grid operators are also getting used to that. I mean, taking a big step back, the thing we haven't talked about on this show yet are about data centers, right? And I think for the most part, almost all data centers, and I'm sure some people will, of course, there will be isolated cases here and there, which will be different. But for the most part today, most data centers want to run flat out. They want to just run flat out and they do not want to actually have conversations about flexibility.

34:07Stephen Lacey:And, you know, hopefully people will prove me wrong in that. But that to me is actually a knowable fact that as an operator has, they know that I don't have control over this. So it's just good to know that. And then that allows me to plan my system and what resources I'm bringing and what capacity I have to build out and what infrastructure I have to deliver in a known way. It's similar with distributed resources too. If I know that my portfolio of, let's say, EVs or portfolio of batteries and EVs or whatever else is going to deliver me this shape of flexibility, this kind of megawattage, we've got hundreds of megawatts on our platform, which we can easily scale to a gigawatt plus over the next year.

34:51Stephen Lacey:The way I look at it is I don't care about the number of megawatts and gigawatts entirely. I don't just care about that. I care about the time and the location of those megawatts and gigawatts. And being able to show those shapes, not just to, oh, this happens one off, but actually showing it to 95 and 99 and 99.9 percentile moments and building that trust with operators is very different. One of the things that irks me no end is when technology providers turn around and say, But look, one-off, I managed to make this load drop happen by 50 megawatts. Well, that's great. I can also one-off convince all my friends in my neighborhood to wear a blanket and put on a sweater and to not charge their cars.

35:34Stephen Lacey:And in those extreme moments, I can also basically go to zero. But that's not realistic. What I want to have is a realistic distribution of understanding as an operator of what is going to happen when you manipulate the behavior through automation, through all of your intelligence that you're doing on the edge. And then that allows me to plan how much I should or should not build out with how much extra headroom in my system. And that's a really important place to be right now because today we do not have the capital. We do not have the resources. We don't have the human capital, frankly, to go build out the grid as much as all the load growth needs are pushing us to get to, not to mention that it's causing huge affordability challenges.

36:15Stephen Lacey:And so I think it's really exciting. I think for that reason, tools like ours are actually stepping up to the moment and are saying it's not just about the tech. It's also about the trust we've been able to build with customers and with utilities, of course, and kind of step into the moment and show off what we can do to put that downward pressure on rates.

36:34Katherine Hamilton:Well, and I mean, I think the point also to the point here is that the utilities can't actually control what consumers do. And so especially at the residential level, but even, you know, when you were talking about the tech companies and other kinds of big industrial users. And so, you know, when people feel like it's not reliable, they go on their own, you know, and they're going to put in a solar system. They're going to put in storage. and then you know I was talking to some people from the trading side right and you know the problem we have on the trading side too is you've got people gaming certain markets and so someone was telling me an interesting story where they were studying trading markets and they found that this couple of big traders that have been moving in and out of markets Don't go to Vermont because Vermont has used all these assets, has visibility within Vermont, not necessarily doing an ISO, but within Vermont.

37:39Katherine Hamilton:So, you know, super small market. And they've completely eliminated the duck curve. And so there's nothing to arbitrage anymore. So no one's trading around in that market.

37:49Stephen Lacey:Yeah, I think, you know, this is one of the other challenges in our sector right now. And I think particularly, as somebody who grew up in Europe, I still have sort of a, I do a little bit of discounting of a lot of the ideas that come across from Europe, because a lot of European startups and a lot of European companies come across and say, there's so much value in energy arbitrage, there's so much value in energy trading, this, that. Europe is a totally different market, right? After Enron, they were the only ones that actually deregulated outside of Texas, whereas the rest of the U.S. actually stayed very regulated as a generally bundled entity.

38:23Stephen Lacey:And I think one of the things that's interesting is ARB arbitrage. It's a short game. In 2023 in Texas, the arbitrage value was so high at ARCOT that every battery manufacturer and every battery trader went out and said, I'm going to make a killing. And then you look at the prices today, you can barely eke out a living right now by trying to play the ARB game, right?

38:47Katherine Hamilton:Hey, listen, NYU, you know, I'm doing, I have a bunch of students working on this whole, these DPP statistics state by state, and then also working with the SADI data. So SADI data tracks total minutes of electricity outage by average customer per location. You know, we're working with the annual data, but, you know, you can get a little more granular. And the outage data for Texas, you know, 2020, 2021, 22 was out of sight. And now it's tiny. And you can really attribute that because, you know, those same traders are still there. But, you know, you can really attribute that to their reduced opportunity because the outage data for 2024 and 2025 is so small because a lot of batteries went in.

39:39Katherine Hamilton:And then also, you know, you get NRG doing a VPP one gigawatt. You've got a lot of other VPP players. It's probably the biggest state or one of the biggest states for VPP. And so, you know, there's a lesson there.

39:53Stephen Lacey:Arbitrage is generally a game that you should leave to traders and maybe utilities to go figure out. I don't want consumers holding the hedge risk off things like Arb. It's just too complicated. And I say this as somebody who spent my whole career in energy. What I think is different and unique about Weavegrid's business model and how we try to work with distributed resources is we're not trying to be an aggregator playing in power markets and pretending that we're going to be somehow better at that. We're actually trying to aggregate resources on behalf of the utility and actually arbitrage against infrastructure buildout.

40:29Stephen Lacey:And what I mean by that is infrastructure is going to take decadal time horizons to build out to the level of load growth that we're anticipating in this country, localized at the level of distribution, transmission, and of course, generation too. But generation infrastructure gets built way faster than you think, right? And that's why ARB goes away. However, poles and wires, transformers and substations, that takes time. We don't even have a supply chain for enough transformers today. The prices have gone up so much today. And so our ability to unlock capital flexibility using distributed resources requires us to bring up the bar of visibility, monitoring and control of those devices to a whole different level than what we've done before.

41:14Stephen Lacey:because historically, all we needed to do was say, I'm going to hit a button, hopefully a couple megs show up, and I don't have to worry about it beyond that. But now it is different. We really are trying to say, how do we defer spending more money on capital? And guess what? Utilities are the ones saying that because they have to make a choice between do I provide the infrastructure to that data center or do I go and upgrade parts of the cul-de-sac where people live with EVs and batteries and all those things going to homes. And the trade-off is real because it's economic trade-off. And I'd much rather be upgrading the power lines to ensure the data center comes online while keeping costs low for everybody else.

41:51Stephen Lacey:And so I think it's a fundamental shift in the business model of flexibility.

41:54Katherine Hamilton:But they're making people on the cul-de-sac really, really angry. So they're having to balance that. You've got to balance that. You know what I mean? And they want rates to go up. They're making big money. Their stock is way up. I mean, almost universally around the country. Well, not universally, but in a lot of key markets. But on the other hand, it's a lot of political pressure now. Right. Okay. So let's talk about scale and speed of deployment, because it seems to be then, if you're talking about offering material solutions to some of these problems, you're going to need to get to very large scale pretty quickly.

42:32Katherine Hamilton:Yeah, I think you were talking earlier about being in the hundreds of megawatts scale at the moment. U.S. demand is projected to grow by, what is it, 50, 100 gigawatts maybe over the next five years, as you say, because of data centers largely driving that very rapid growth. Is it going to be possible for platforms like Weavegrid and similar companies really to make a material difference to the extent to which we have to have a physical infrastructure build out to meet that increased demand? Or are you really just kind of of a scale, chipping away at the edges, maybe making a few little savings here and there, but not really fundamentally changing the structural equation.

43:17Stephen Lacey:No, look, I think that is a question that we're going to keep figuring out through the economics of this build out. And we'll see how much of that demand is real. And we'll see how much of that plays out over the next few years. Like projections are projections at the end of the day. what I think is that better utilizing the distribution grid from the about 25 % utilization that it has today to close to 50 to 60 % is something that WeaveGrid can facilitate. And I think that WeaveGrid can pull other aggregators, notably aggregators that sit outside of the utility fence line, into the fold to actually ensure that instead of, again, them just dispatching their resources for those few RB moments, arbitrage-y moments, they see out in the power markets, if we can actually better utilize their flexibility to better increase that utilization of the whole system, you're now talking about taking the same hundreds of billions of dollars that have been deployed, but spreading it out over a heck of lot more kilowatt hours.

44:14Stephen Lacey:And so there is an opportunity, no matter how many gigawatts of extra demand shows up, to actually keep driving down the cost of the fixed infrastructure. And that's, I think, a given. Now, do I think that we're not going to need to build out more infrastructure? Of course not. I mean, again, I'm an engineer by training. I believe in steel and concrete and copper doing its job. I think those things have been tested a lot more, frankly, to the limits. But at the same time, I think it's just not possible anymore to assume that we cannot use other resources because we're just going to cause cost increases of a kind that consumers will not be willing to bear.

44:51Stephen Lacey:And so we're going to get to a point, right, where the AI data center folks are going to have to make a choice. Do I continue to invest in the US? And do I continue to see the political backlash? And do I continue to see, you know, election cycles going against politicians who aren't doing anything here? Or, you know, can we find some sort of compromise where utilities are investing in these solutions? And then on the utility side, I think they're going to have to really kind of make sense of what I think is a loud and sometimes chaotic and confusing landscape. Some people claim that they can do XYZ magical things with their VPPs.

45:25Stephen Lacey:Other people claim that, you know, they've got, you know, a full suite of solutions that can do everything under the sun. I think the reality is we've just got to get to reliability. I want utilities to use these resources because they have tremendous potential, but I don't think that we should ever overpromise on these things. And I think the more trust that utilities get with it, the more they'll want to scale. That's at least been our success story so far. We went out, We started with pilots where utilities said, wait, I want to trust the technology. We checked that box. Then they said, I want to trust the value.

45:55Stephen Lacey:Can you deliver as much value as you talk about? And then we checked that box. And then we took it back to regulators and regulators said, OK, let's go from pilots to programs where we can really see these things scale. And, you know, that's where we're starting to see the next set of challenges, which is that you need to integrate with a whole series of other systems and so on and so forth. And that stuff takes time, too. But I think the ability to scale from hundreds of megawatts to even 10 plus gigawatts is far more doable than, frankly, waiting on some magical fusion to show up in the next couple of years.

46:26Stephen Lacey:And I think that is there's all known problems in some sense. And I think that's why I have a lot of confidence in our scaling.

46:32Katherine Hamilton:So I have a futuristic issue to bring up because part of the reason that I called you is I was at a dinner and we were in a heated debate about VPP. and I said, well, I was at some conference keynoting and somebody came up to me at the sidelines and said, you know, you really need to know as we go AV from the ride-sharing world, they are going to have a business model where they're going to have a whole fleet of AVs and then they're going to know that they can arbitrage between mobility services and plugging all those batteries from those AVs into the grid all at one time and providing, you know, a flex battery system for a distressed grid or a capacity market or whatever, like an hour, you know, had to be an hour ahead market, couldn't be a two year ahead market, but, you know, some kind of shorter timeframe market.

47:35Katherine Hamilton:And, and I was telling that story and everybody said, well, you know, you're the one who knows the poor, you should talk to him because he's the one that's closest to being able to organize that. And so, you know, let me ask you, like, do you see that in the future?

47:51Stephen Lacey:Yeah, I think. OK, let me take a bit of a step back. So, you know, there's this term that's become very popular recently when we're talking about data centers. It's this term known as the bit watt spread. What is the value of a bit relative to the value of a watt? And I think as somebody who believes he's probably been closest to looking at energy systems and mobility systems in the same framework, I'm going to coin a new term, which is what I call the mobility watt spread, which is how much do you value your mobility versus how much do you value the watt that powers your mobility? In this moment, I can guarantee that each and every one of us on this podcast has probably paid a lot more for an Uber or a Lyft or a taxi and definitely for a flight than we have our average monthly electricity bill.

48:38Stephen Lacey:And so we do value our mobility quite a bit is where I want to start this conversation. What I would say is, as we move to a world of autonomous vehicles, what they're building essentially, right, is a portfolio of mobility. So they will have a better understanding of the supply and demand of mobility needs in any city, in any region. And at the same time, they will also have a better understanding of the sort of downtime of that fleet and also the auction value of that downtime. And I think one of the things that they will have to weigh is the mobility value of even the option of having your car ready to go, rather than draining it off its battery state of charge, is that option value more than the value of the watt that it can provide in a market or in some sort of flexibility program.

49:27Stephen Lacey:And what I would say today, based on the modeling, based on the data we have, based on the tens of thousands of vehicles and other devices increasingly we have in our programs, is that today it's very hard to see a pure arbitrage in PowerMarket's case for an AV fleet to make more than incrementally few dollars in their total cost of running the or total value in their business model. However, if there is an opportunity where somebody says, look, Waymo or or whoever, right? Zooks. Instead of upgrading this substation, if we can actually curtail your charging by, let's say, 10 % on these 5 to 10 really hot moments, really tough moments in the year, and that means that your fleet might not be fully charged, but might be 75 % charged, we can save you, you know, two to three years of upgrade time, and we can actually offer you that in lower energy cost, I think they'll take that.

50:31Stephen Lacey:And so that's where the opportunity, I think, comes in again, which is the AVs actually saving infrastructure, time and money, which is where I think they will become curtailed versus turning them into a giant aggregated power plant, which are trying to bid into ERCOT or ISO New England or something like that, because I'm just not sure that the value is quite there, unless we frankly start seeing energy prices and capacity or energy markets going up another 10x. And so that's where my theory comes about right now, Amy. But I'm happy to debate that over another coffee.

51:05Katherine Hamilton:Yeah, definitely. A lot more to talk about on this one. Certainly, the future of AVs is fascinating. I think we're just about out of time, though. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. Just before we go, though, just time quickly for our free electrons, personal items that we've brought in. I'm going to start myself. I just wanted to flag up the film Eddington, which I just watched. It was out earlier this year. Really interesting about data centers and public resistance to new data centers getting built. Very much a film that speaks to our present moment. Pretty grim and depressing, actually, as I take on that, I think, but also, as I say, pretty prescient in identifying data centers and the way the public feel about them as a big issue in America today.

51:53Katherine Hamilton:And I would say definitely if you're interested in that issue, it's a film that's well worth checking out. Amy, what's yours? Mine, Ed, kind of comes from sort of the same thing, but a little bit differently. So a couple of years ago, we had a mockumentary, like a comedy series that was a film about aliens coming down from outer space. But now apparently you can go to Amazon Prime and there's a real documentary that is quoting like real government officials, you know, ex-CIA. I saw this. Apparently Marco Rubio is featured in this documentary, which I haven't had a chance to watch yet, about how the government is hiding from us the fact that there are alien spacecraft that are coming down to Earth.

52:44Katherine Hamilton:And so we this time of year in my clean tech class, each student is supposed to do a report like a Wall Street style report about a potential sector. And one of my students, I guess, you know, kind of was watching this documentary. And so he did his presentation on space solar and whether or not we've come to the moment. But Caltech has apparently had some breakthroughs on how you would manage to put some equipment up in space and then beam down solar energy down to Earth and have it be constant and not ever go off. So, you know, the sun is shining up there in space 24-7. So are we at the moment in time when we're willing to consider space solar and have 24-7 solar?

53:37Katherine Hamilton:and so I when he was making his presentation I showed him you know that Florida company that has a data center on the moon to be fair they don't when you say they have a data center they don't yeah no just they don't actually have one they would like to have one well it's this little they put this little data thing up on the moon yeah they did this from St. Petersburg they put some little, little data center is a big term, but yeah, good. Right. Yes. Yeah. Not a data center. Like, you know, we have a hair down on the ground, but the interesting thing is, you know, thinking about all of this is you have these big tech companies, you know, like SpaceX talking about going public and you have the, you know, you have other big tech billionaires investing in space travel.

54:26Katherine Hamilton:And originally, you know, I think they with thinking about bringing minerals back that would solve the minerals problem. But now, you know, now there's this new interest in, you know, could we solve our data problem in space, whether that's space solar or whether that's space data center, etc. And so that is my free electron because it's front of mind because I had a student say that it might be a business finding its time.

54:54Stephen Lacey:Yeah, that's pretty fantastic, especially with all the conversations increasingly now about data centers in space. Yeah, exactly. SpaceX is going to be doing that.

55:02Katherine Hamilton:And then what would happen if there are other civilizations out there? How are they going to feel about all these gadgets that we're going to put up there? Are they going to be downloading their videos from Amazon Prime to find out about life? Exactly. Anyway, Paul, what's yours?

55:20Stephen Lacey:Yeah, well, mine's probably a little less data center heavy. I'm somebody who loves salt. And so I'm going to give all your listeners a book recommendation, which is Mark Kolanski's Salt, A History of the World. And I love it because I think one of the things we all miss is how much the history of salt, I'm giving away the, I'm spoiling the ending here. But the reason we have salt in abundance is because of energy. And the fossil fuel revolution that sort of enabled us to have abundance of salt, which went from being a completely difficult to access commodity, something we fought wars over and so on and so forth, to now I think this really interesting moment where the salts are actually coming back to enable abundant energy because lithium and magnesium and all these things are actually coming back.

56:14Stephen Lacey:matter a ton.

56:15Katherine Hamilton:And sodium, of course.

56:16Stephen Lacey:Sodium batteries now becoming a thing. Sodium batteries. Exactly. So I'm going to go recommend you spend your Christmases and holidays reading about salt. It's a pretty fantastic book.

56:27Katherine Hamilton:Yeah, that is a fascinating point. Something I've never thought of at all, but the energy-salt nexus, as you say. Energy-salt nexus. So we do, unfortunately, have to leave it there, but many thanks, Amy. Thank you, Ed, for a great show. Yeah, many thanks to Paul.

56:43Stephen Lacey:Absolutely. Thank you all. And excited to have been here. Thank you for the invite.

56:47Katherine Hamilton:Yeah, thanks a lot for joining us. It's been great talking to you both. Look forward to talking again soon. Thanks to our producers, Stuart Duffy, Toby Biggins-Gilchrist and Dan Cottrell. And above all, many thanks to all of you for listening. We really value your feedback, so please do keep that coming. And we'll be back soon with all the latest news and views on the future of energy. Until then, goodbye. Thank you.