Speed to power: how can America accelerate the build-out of the next grid? | special episode from the ACORE Grid Forum in Washington DC

25:56And so now they're scrambling to catch up and get ahead of it. In terms of what could be done about that at the federal level, then there's, broadly speaking, it's saying two tracks. There's reform in Congress, some kind of legislation getting passed. We've talked quite a lot about that already. And then there's also the regulatory track and what could be done through FERC. FERC is going through quite a lot of changes at the moment. Two new commissioners just been confirmed by the Senate, expected to take up their roles very soon. What is that going to mean, do you think, for the future direction of FERC?

26:29Like, as you say, these issues are things that FERC has been working on for many years. Orders have been passed. There's been a big push to try and improve transmission planning. Do you think the commission is going to try and continue in that same direction? Or are you going to see a change of direction and new initiatives to address this issue coming out of this new set of commissioners? Let me start with what they should do. What they should do is say we have dramatic low growth. both if the administration's agenda, the president's agenda, is winning the AI race with China. And if, as is the case, almost every data center really wants full network access to the grid, and only, according to Wood Mac, like 6 % of them are actually looking at behind-the-meter options, then, you know, you need to expand the grid.

27:20And so let's expand it. And Order 1920 conveniently does include load growth as sort of an important factor. Here's, you know, look at the number, the amount of load growth and plan for the future for that. So in a way, I mean, I think Order 1920, even though passed during the Biden years, you know, is technology neutral and includes load growth. And I would think a, you know, a reasonable commissioner coming in, even if they're Trump appointed and whatever they might think about renewable energy or, you know, wherever they fall on the resource wars, they should just look at that as a pure transmission order and follow through and, you know, tell the courts, yep, we still want, you know, we're still defending this order and tell all the regions, yes, you still need to like really implement this in just as strong a way as we required.

28:11Will they do that? I don't know. Honestly, it's keeping me up at night. There's high drama here for the for the furt geeks among us. We're waiting for every little, you know, hint or whisper from the new commissioners about what they might do on this. Right. Yeah, that's really interesting because we just don't have a lot to go on. Right. I mean, the views of the two new commissioners are not super clear. As you say, the kind of direction they'll be getting from the administration in terms of the way they want to shape policy. All that's slightly vague still. Right. That's right. It's the tradition in Washington for nominees to agencies to say nothing in their confirmation process, right?

28:49That's the way to get confirmed because you don't give anybody a reason to vote against you. The uncertainty is especially great now just because the individuals, David Lissert and Laura Sweat, have not spoken publicly about these topics, which is sometimes that happens. It's somewhat rare, but in this case, it just happens to be the case that they have no public record to go on to sort of read the tea leaves on what they might do. Now, I really do believe that the Trump administration and the National Energy Dominance Council and the Department of Energy under Secretary Wright and the Grid Deployment Office there, I really do believe they all see the value of transmission.

29:33Obviously, it's for different reasons than, you know, climate or clean energy or reasons the Democratic administrations would have emphasized. Again, you know, there are, you know, sort of people are policy and, you know, they can get there and it takes three votes to do things at FERC. And, you know, it's just hard to predict what they're going to do. And as you say, that whole issue of AI data centers, load growth, the sense of being in intense competition against China is one very big issue in Washington, particularly with the administration. The other big issue that's clearly emerging is the question of affordability, electricity prices, electricity bills now rising significantly ahead of inflation.

30:19It's an issue that's very much rising up the political agenda. How do you think that might affect the whole debate over grid planning? Yeah, well, again, it could go either way. I think there are a lot of people at the agencies and in the administration and at FERC who recognize that you have to invest a little money in order to save money. And grid congestion is very expensive. What it means is you're having to dispatch higher cost units to serve load. And we've seen periods of recent decades in the electric industry where congestion costs can get very high and you have to invest in capacity on the grid to alleviate that.

31:06So, you know, it would be penny-wise pound-foolish to stop spending money on transmission, you know, under the false theory that, oh, you're saving consumers money because actually you're costing them more on the energy cost side. Now, there are better and worse ways to do that, and that gets back to the whole proactive planning idea of there are massive economies of scale and transmission. In other words, the dollars per delivered megawatt is much less if you do the high-voltage kind. And we do have some regions that are looking at 765 kV regional plants for the first time in decades that we've really planned that big.

31:46So there's some signs of encouraging developments. there. But, you know, with cost pressure, what often happens is, you know, people say regulators and stakeholders might say, well, we just can't stomach, you know, the cost of the bigger lines, let's just build a little the smaller lines. And of course, that's very short, short sighted, and ultimately cost consumers money. So, you know, it's hard to hard to predict as we sit here, how's that going to shake out? Yeah, as you say, it's certainly a very exciting and fast moving area feels surprising in a way to say that about the grid, which has often been very slow moving.

32:26Projects take a long time to get built. Infrastructure is there for a very long time, many decades. Policy even changes generally slowly, but we're not in that world anymore, are we? Policy is changing fast. That's right. Policy is changing fast. The needs on the ground are happening fast. And I should say, while we're talking about timing, there are advanced transmission technology opportunities here. And interestingly, in my direct and indirect conversations with the current administration, they are very interested in these technologies because they really do want speed to power. They really do want anything that creates capacity in the near term.

33:06And they're looking for ways to do that, which is really supported on a bipartisan basis. So the question is really, okay, what actually is that? So policy geeks like me are having a field day trying to figure out, okay, well, what can actually be done on that score? Yeah, I was about to mention exactly that. Because as you say, there's a lot of very exciting technologies out there, a lot that can be done, making sure that it actually does get done, those technologies get implemented, and the benefits from them are delivered. That's somewhat more tricky. That's right. Excellent. Well, thank you very much indeed.

33:40Rob Gronnick, great talking to you. Okay, good to be with you. Thanks. Good to see you again. So as Rob was just saying there, technological innovation is going to be critical for meeting the challenges that the grid faces. Theodore Paradise, who's Chief Policy and Grid Strategy Officer at CTC Global, joined me to talk about advanced conductors and the role that they can play in accelerating changes in the grid. So we were just talking about the potential for advanced technologies to help address some of the growing challenges that the grid faces today. And it's a great pleasure to be joined by someone who's working for a company doing exactly that.

34:13Theodore Paradise is the Chief Policy and Grid Strategy Officer at CTC Global. Hello, Theodore. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me on. Thank you very much for joining us. So I want to get into some of these issues around challenges facing the grid and how technology can help solve them. Before we do that, perhaps could you introduce us to CTC Global a little bit for the benefit of listeners who might not know the company? What is it that you do? Absolutely. No, I'm happy to. So CTC Global is a US-based company with operations in over 65 countries worldwide.

34:52And we are the largest manufacturer of what we call advanced conductors. Sometimes they're called high-performance conductors, but these terms are synonymous. essentially what it is that we invented over two decades ago and do is for your listeners and people who can see this will be able to see what I'm holding here yeah so this is the point where you should be watching this show on YouTube and when you'll be able to see this I will try to do my audio it's harder yeah tell us what we're right here but what I'm holding here is the transmission or distribution, high voltage or lower voltage power lines that move power around.

35:31You see these along the road, you're doing some sort of towers. This is essentially what the design is as of 1905 or so. It's a very simple design. It's steel in the middle as the structural support surrounded by aluminum, which moves the energy across it. And this is the vast majority of what's deployed in the world today. And so just before we move off that, any kind of high-voltage transmission would use that kind of steel and aluminum? Steel and aluminum, very common sort of way to do it. So a couple decades ago, CTC had the notion of, why don't we take out the steel, which reacts with heat, so as you move more power, it gets hot and it starts to sag, which is why you can make horseshoes and all sorts of things in a blacksmith shop, so it's pliable with heat.

36:19Could we move significantly more power, essentially just by changing the wire? And that thesis proved out. So when you change the core from steel to carbon composite, you are able to put more aluminum on it at the same weight and the same diameter. And you double the amount of energy that you can move. So it's like building a whole new transmission line just by changing the wire. And, you know, there's transformers and breakers as you add more power. But the real speed to power issue is to add a new transmission line. In the U.S., you know, it's seven years, ten years plus. This is true in Europe where we're talking about tenant system or ILEAS system, any of the TSOs, or globally.

37:03It's often very difficult to get new rights of way, the permitting that goes with it. And, of course, it's much less expensive to be changing the wire rather than building a whole new right of way. So in doing that, what we unlocked was the ability to quickly add really significant amounts of transmission capacity to the grid, where that has traditionally been a very slow process. Right. So that seems like a very compelling proposition, I have to say. So question, why isn't everybody doing it? You know, why hasn't the whole world switched over to this kind of conductor? Sure. Well, I mean, you know, a couple elements to that.

37:41And the answer to that is, in some parts of the world, they have. I mean, there is a lot of this happening. I'll take the U.S. and sort of outside the U.S. So we've got 125 ,000 miles of what we call ACCC, is the name for the conductor deployed around the globe. And just to pick up on that, ACCC stands for what is the? Aluminum clad composite core, I think. I'm going to have to check that. But I'm always someone who has to check the notes on that. But ACCC, so we have about 125 ,000 miles deployed around the globe. That's about 200 ,000 kilometers. 92 % of that is outside the U.S. So in places like India, for example, we grow, you know, double year over year.

38:30Bangladesh, we're doing many projects in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Which I have to say surprises me when you tell me that. on the grounds that you would think a lot of these countries, these low - and middle-income countries, would be looking for lower-cost solutions, which your product is not. So what's the advantage for them? Well, and that's a really important point, because when you think about it, that's exactly right. They're not looking for what is the most premium product we can put up. They're looking for the most cost-effective product they can put up. So whether you're reconductoring and essentially building a new transmission line without building a new transmission line, or building a greenfield new line, and just with much more capability, when you think about the cost of doing it with an advanced or high-performance conductor versus a traditional conductor, it's actually less expensive for the amount of power that you can move.

39:21And that's why you see it used all over the globe in these various places. So to your question, well, why not everywhere, right? So the good news is, as I mentioned, it's being used in lots of places. And in the US, it's in over 30 states with 55 utilities. but often for niche projects. We have a very long river crossing, and you don't need as many towers. The carbon's very strong. You just can't get a new right-of-way. But I've been in the utility world for 26 or 27 years now, and it is one of a culture that adopts something and sticks with it, I think. You know, there's some inertia to that, and that often has very good reasons to go with it.

40:05You don't want to be changing things up all the time. But we have a planning process in the U.S., for example, and this is true around the globe in many places, that is looking out 10 or 15 years, sometimes 20. And speed has never really been a component of that, right? It's been, I've got an issue. I've projected it 10 years down the road. I've got some time to fix it. I will build a new line is often the answer, right? Or if I'm replacing the line that's there because it's old, I'll just replace it with what was there. The thing that's changing, I think, Ed, is the element that speed now matters, whether it's AI data centers, new manufacturing, or just the cost of electricity.

40:47Speed is now something where how can we do that faster and more cost effectively is entering the equation in a way that it hasn't to date. Exactly. And as you say, we're now in a different world. What did you say, 26, 27 years in this business, in the industry? Right. So for the great majority of that time, you were operating in an environment of flat load. Basically, demand was not growing at all. Now that's changed. Demand is growing. It is, for all the reasons we've talked about quite a lot already on this show, really difficult to put completely new lines in. Again, it would sort of seem like a no-brainer to think, okay, in that case, given how hard it is to build a new line, and let's just change the type of line that we use.

41:33Yes. So why is that not happening always and everywhere right now with an extreme urgency? Well, it's a great question. And I think the extreme urgency part and the change in sort of load growth that you mentioned are two really important pieces here. I think what's exciting as your listeners and viewers join us right now at this moment is this is a moment of pivotal change in the utility world like I've never seen before. right? There's a lot of, if you go back 20 years, you know, during that time, things would have been very, very similar from year to year to year, you know, kind of flavors of issues being talked about in different ways.

42:15We're to a point where not only have we gone from very flat load growth or very small incremental load growth to massive load growth, right? And it's not just AI data centers. I think sometimes those get painted as sort of the villain of, well, if we didn't have AI, everything would be fine. Manufacturing loads are huge, right? And this is a great new story, right? In terms of economic development, jobs. If we're talking about the U.S., for example, 20 years ago, people were not talking about new manufacturing in the U.S. Now it's a constant discussion in the U.S. And those new manufacturers or growing manufacturers are facing the same issue as data centers.

42:53We can't get power. We can't get power in 10 years or we can't get power in eight years, we need it next year, right? And that discussion is really the answer to your question. It is a changed environment where the answer simply is now unacceptable to say, well, we can't add the data center, right? We're not going to have as much compute as China, right? Whether it's in Europe or the US, or we're just going to forgo that manufacturing opportunity. That's not acceptable. So it really forces the question out of this very sort of regimented, looking ahead, planning process to how do we enable the grid to be able to do that in a time frame that's usable?

43:35And that's the conversation that's happening right now. And if it's the U.S., we see various states, some more aggressive than the others pushing on it. I think we see the U.S. federal administration really focused on what can we do in the next 12 months or 24 months. and telegraphing that loudly to utilities. And same sort of messaging around the globe, whether it's the Europe, Asia Pacific, or Middle East. Right. So one thing that's happened in terms of accelerating deployment of your technologies, you had this agreement with Google announced over the last summer. A lot of excitement around that.

44:06Could you explain a bit about that? What does this cooperation involve? Yeah. So this is a great, I'm glad you asked about that, because it's a really interesting story in just how all of this happens. and the disruption and changes that we're seeing in the model to some of this. And not without precedent, but on the transmission side, this is new. So if you think about power systems, there's planning, there's look-aheads, what do we need to add? They sort of took care of themselves for the longest time. You go back 15 years or so to some of the first big Internet companies, is Meta, Google, Amazon.

44:46And you saw the rise of the corporate power purchase agreement where they said, we want to use all this power. We want to be good corporate citizens. So we're going to use our own money and directly contract for certain types of generation. And we're going to pay for it. And everyone, we've got this. You don't need to worry about it. So that was disruptive for the time because that was new. If you fast forward to what we just announced in June, which you mentioned our partnership with Google, it's something similar but for transmission. So instead of just looking at it and saying, well, it is what it is, and it's the timelines that exist, and we really don't have any inputs into that, we worked with Google to say capital isn't necessarily the issue, it's time.

45:30And if we could connect Google with technology and then with policymakers and utilities to say, don't worry about the cost allocation and those sorts of dollar issues that have typically been so intractable and everybody fights about well i'm benefiting and you're not or you're not benefiting whatever it is right and sorry i'll let you get to the end of your thought but i have to say don't worry about the cost allocation sounds like one of those things you can say to people right you know easier said than done right people will not often kind of oh yeah fine let's not worry about that's that's exactly right because that has never really been part of a utility planning discussion, it's usually a very heated argument about who is paying for it, right?

46:12So when you have the hyperscalers like Google say, you know, we can't buy a time machine, right? But we have capital to deploy these things to support reconductoring. Let's work together to highlight this and put funds behind it to accelerate it. That's really where the partnership was born. So in June, we announced a request for information, and we put it out there to utilities, independent transmission developers, states, to say, look, do you have areas or projects where you think if we did reconductoring with advanced conductors, high-performance conductors, we could materially impact transmission capacity in a way that would benefit, you know sort of on the ground level Google and Google data centers but also tell us if you think it just has a significant impact of benefit to the grid too because we'd like to hear about that at the right scale and we did this in part to show that if the focus is on the transmission and creative solutions are brought to bear we can accelerate things it doesn't have to be 10 years so we did the RFI in the middle of June less than a month later the responses were due we got about 35 responses from investor-owned utilities, co-ops, munis, states, independent developers.

47:35And Google, you know, looked at those, see which ones are the most interesting to them. And those quickly moved forward into commercial negotiations, essentially. So we'd like to have those projects under contract by the end of the year. Shovels in the ground next year would be, sort of the target. And if you think about the tone of the administration in the US, what can we do quickly? This is light speed, right? When you're talking about the grid or transmission systems, right? You're talking about 15 years to build a new line or whatever it is. Absolutely, right? But it sort of, I think, proves out the notion that, look, there are corridors, we can change the conductor, we don't trigger new permitting, we don't trigger new siting.

48:15This is something where supply chain is not a bottleneck. I think validating those points, I think Google is doing this to some degree, obviously, for Google, but also to act as a catalyst so that this is just much more widely adopted to your question earlier. Right. And so the first of these specific projects then that are the fruit of this partnership, we should be seeing by the end of the year there'll be announcements coming soon? Announcements coming soon, you know, under commercial negotiations in various states across the U.S. Well, it's a really interesting, exciting technology, a very exciting time for it, certainly.

48:52I'm going to be looking forward to hearing more about it. Certainly, in particular, I'm going to be looking forward to hearing more about these projects with Google as you announce them before the end of the year. For now, though, we're going to leave it, but it's been great talking to you. Great talking with you, Ian. Theodore Paradise, thanks very much indeed. Thanks for joining us on The Energy Gang. And finally, to wrap up, we're joined by the host of this event, Ray Long, who is the president and CEO of ACOR, the American Council on Renewable Energy. I started off by asking him what he thought were the most interesting ideas that he'd heard today.

49:20So first thing is we had four times a year, we have a board meeting, which is combined with an event, which is combined with a dinner, which is usually combined with a few other things. And this is one of those four times a year. So we had our third quarter board meeting yesterday. We had our annual gala last night that had about 400 people there at dinner and we had a speaking program and all that. And now today, everybody's up early, bright eyed and bushy tailed. And we're having our grid forum. And so the grid forum is something that ACOR has done for years. As you may recall, I've been here for two years now.

49:55So this is my second one. And it's unique in the industry because it pulls together people who want to talk about the transmission grid. So you think about the wires that deliver electricity to people's homes and businesses and factories and all that kind of thing. So what am I hearing and what am I seeing? Hearing a lot of interest in the things that are being done to build the grid out. Why is the grid exciting? I get home at night. I talk to my wife about these things. And the eyes roll in the back of her head. Because when you think about it, most people know that electricity comes from someplace, right?

50:30And they want to talk about electricity comes from renewables or it comes from fossil fuels or it comes from nuclear and all those different things. And a lot of people now like to talk about demand. Oh, demand is rising because everybody's got a heat pump in their house, or AI is growing, or there's a data center down the street. There's all those different things. People forget that there's something that connects the supply, the electricity to their homes, the demand, and that's the wires. So as you say, a lot of focus, a lot of interest now in the grid. it feels like there's a lot of change now happening in a way perhaps that there hasn't been for a couple of decades, maybe more.

51:12We talked quite a lot about this already, but the fact that demand in the United States for electricity has been very flat since sort of mid-2000s up until a couple of years ago, has only just started to grow, is now expected to grow much faster. What's different now? Ed, I was at Climate Week a few weeks ago. Yeah, we talked about that. And the thing that I, and I spoke at three different events that week, and we're all over the place walking around New York. I'm sure you were fighting the congestion at the same time. Getting a lot of steps in, yeah. The thing that I noticed from years past is that the language, the rhetoric around things had changed.

51:51So, and to me, it looked like this. In years past, there was a lot of discussions about lofty aspirations, about achieving things like 2050 decarbonization goals, about things like that. What I heard this year was less of that discussion about climate and 2050 or 2040 goals and more about the business or the nitty gritty of what's happening now. And you just started touching on some of those things. And the leading point that people wanted to talk about, about the time that we're in now, started with demand increasing. So you've got electricity demand in the United States increasing at an incredible rate.

52:34Now, in the last 20 years, we haven't had that. At best, depending on the power market area, you've seen 1 % to 2 % growth year over year for that period. Very manageable, very doable when it comes to siting new power plants, new transmission lines and all that. Now we're looking at things that are massive. So let's look at the next four years. In the next four years, Grid Strategies, Rob Gramlich's group. We spoke to him earlier on. We had him on the show just now. Oh, good. So hopefully I use the right numbers that Rob used. So Rob estimates that in just four years, 2030, we need to increase power electricity output in the United States by 120 gigawatts.

53:19Gigawatts are a funny term to use. A lot of people don't know what it is, so let's boil it down. 120 gigawatts is the equivalent of adding 12 New York City's worth of new power on the grid in just four years. If you don't like New York City, it's the equivalent of 133 Oklahoma cities to the grid. Either way you look at it, it's a lot of power. It's more than we've ever built in that short period of time before. So there's demand. And with that demand, of course, there's a set of buyers out there that want to buy that power. So with the demand and with the buyers, there are also a set of banks, financial institutions that want to invest in it.

54:02We looked at this worldwide because this phenomenon is happening worldwide as well. And it's playing out in other countries. We can come back to that. $2.2 trillion over the next 12 months are expected to be spent in electricity generation technologies and grid upgrades worldwide. And a large portion of that is going to take place in the United States or could be taking place in the United States. So you've got demand, you've got investment interest in investing in that supply, and you've got a set of developers all over the United States that want to build those new technologies to provide that supply.

54:39And so what that tells me and a lot of economic types, we've got a market. We've got a market that works. You've matched all the pieces up. We can get this built. So what are the issues that we're running into to that stuff actually happening? So a few things. One is we've got bottlenecks. We've got bottlenecks that are predominantly coming from government at the state and, of course, the federal level. There's been a lot of discussion about those things. So we need to clear out those bottlenecks to make sure that those things that are in the pipeline now that are going through different agencies for approval, that they continue to move through at a rapid pace in order to meet that.

55:16The second thing we have is we have permitting process challenges that have existed for a long time, but now we're really coming to a four because right now it takes up to 17 years to permit a transmission project, five plus years to permit a generation project. And just to put that in context, you know, these things should be permitted in about 24 months, give or take. And so we need to fix that. And we need to fix it at the federal level and we need to fix it at the state level. Because without addressing those two things, we're not going to get to a solution by 2030. Now, what happens if we don't reach that?

55:58Well, grid operators and utilities around the country have already been talking about that. And they're all signaling that, look, if we're not able to do this, prices are going to continue to go up, supply and demand. And then secondly, we're likely to have outages. We've looked at the numbers on this. And we talked about the 120 gigawatt challenge by 2030. The only things that can actually get built in the next four years are wind, solar, storage, and about 8 % natural gas. And that's all due to availability of equipment here in the States, right? We've done the numbers. If we take all those technology, well, if we take wind, solar, and batteries off the chart, we'll wind up with 109 gigawatt deficit by 2030.

56:49That's some pretty heavy increase in prices, and that's some pretty heavy outages that will result in in that time. Those are the things that people are trying to unpack here in a way that's very thoughtful. so that we can align government's objectives, getting those things done with what we're seeing in the marketplace. So you talk about four years ahead. Who knows where we'll be then? As you say, there are some kind of clear different options for the way things might go. What's your expectation for one year ahead? In one year, Ed, short period of time. But let's talk about what's doable. In one year, when we're sitting here today at the Grid Forum 2026, and hopefully you'll be back and we'll be doing this interview again.

57:32Hopefully, we're sitting here and what Senator Capito told us and Chairman Westerman told us will have played out. We will have had, we'll call it a technology neutral permitting reform bill that's substantial, that's passed the House and the Senate. It's been signed by the president and it's being enacted. And that bill is enabling a true all of the above solution for permitting. So what do I mean by that? we're doing essentially what China did, and we're leaving all technologies on the table in a level playing field. Secondly, that their bottlenecks have been cleared in Washington for all these projects.

58:15So we've got, whether it's the Department of Interior, EPA, or Department of Commerce, or DOE, or other agencies, right, that there is, they are acting with a sense of urgency that projects need to move forward quickly in order to meet that demand challenge. At the end of the day, that's something, those two things are very doable within a year. And given that, you know, there really could be or should be alignment on those two goals that we talked about politically and from a business context, you know, this is something that if we can get together on, get our heads around and move forward, there's a real opportunity to do that.

58:57And I'll just say this, you know, you and I have talked about this before. I spent 25 plus years working in energy. I've worked on pretty much every energy technology out there. I've done coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear. I've worked on carbon capture sequestration. And of course, I've worked on, you know, the renewable technologies as well. The value proposition for doing what we've suggested for the United States is enormous. We're a very research-rich country, including the fossil fuels that we've talked about, as well as the amount of wind that we've got in certain areas and, of course, sunlight, which hits everything.

59:40We've got the opportunity to do this and thrive. And the other technologies should not be taken off the table. This is an all-of-the-above approach. And as long as they're adding to a system that's diverse and delivering on what consumers at the end of the day want and need, lower prices and reliability, then we should be building it. Well, look, I very much hope we will get a chance to talk in a year from now about the industry and how things have evolved and hope to see that some of the changes you've been talking about have actually come to pass. So, as I say, going to be great to be back again in a year's time if we can do that.

1:00:18For now, though, we're going to leave it there. Ray Long, thanks very much indeed. Thank you, Ed. Thank you for having us at your event. And it's been great talking to you. Have a great day. And you're absolutely invited to come back again. Well, thank you. Thank you. So, we're going to leave it there. We have heard from a wide range of perspectives here. But it's clear there is one consistent message when it comes to investment in energy infrastructure. And in the grid in particular, it's that speed matters. The question now is whether the US will be able to make the changes that will be needed to deliver the pace of investment in the grid that's necessary to meet the goals of policymakers and the industry.

1:00:51Many thanks again to Heather Reams, Richard Kaufman, Rob Kramlick and Theodore Paradise. Many thanks to Ray Long for hosting us at this fantastic event. And above all, as ever, many thanks to all of you for listening or watching. Remember that if you haven't been watching, you can find us on YouTube. Just search Energy Gang to find us there. And we'll be back very soon with all the latest news and views on the energy transition. Until then, goodbye.