Beyond the Grid: The Race to Reimagine Energy with Nan Ransohoff & Duncan Campbell - E140

In this episode, we sit down with Nan Ransohoff and Duncan Campbell to discuss the evolving landscape of solar microgrids, AI data centers, and the urgent need for climate-driven innovation. Duncan reflects on how today’s energy solutions are just the beginning, predicting a future where bold, disruptive action reshapes the grid.

We dive into:

• How Stripe and Paces are driving groundbreaking projects
• Why the electricity sector needs faster adaptation to climate challenges
• The role of AI and next-gen energy solutions
• Why ambitious ideas that seem “too crazy” might not be crazy enough

James McWalter urges innovators to push harder and move faster—the fight against climate change isn’t slowing down, it’s speeding up. If you’re working on bold ideas in energy, reach out!

To learn more about the white paper visit www.offgridai.us/.

Paces helps developers find and evaluate the sites most suitable for renewable development. Interested in a call with James, CEO @ Paces?

Transcript

00:08.33
James McWalter
Hello, today we're speaking to Nan from Stripe Climate and Duncan from Scale Microgrids, who are co-authors on a recent white paper that we did on behind-the-meter data centers. Welcome to podcast, Nan and Duncan.

00:20.05
Nan
Thanks for having us.

00:21.51
Duncan Campbell
Hey, James.

00:22.68
James McWalter
Brilliant. um I guess to start, would' love to kind of you know I could not do justice to your own introductions, so yeah I guess with you, Nan, I would love to hear i guess a little bit about the work you do at Stripe and how you ended up there.

00:35.86
Nan
Yeah, so um our climate work at Stripe is, for the most part, focused on the carbon removal part of the climate equation. um and specifically the permanent carbon removal part of the equation.

00:48.57
Nan
um Essentially what we are trying to do is build the demand side market for carbon removal um to support innovative new solutions getting started and scaling up.

01:00.95
Nan
um So you know our work started back actually in 2019, ultimately with a small, or a relatively modest corporate commitment two for Stripe to buy carbon removal. It was about a million dollars at the time.

01:13.85
Nan
um That then, you know after we made those purchases, grew to ah Stripe Climate, which is a product that we have built for Stripe users um to make it easy for them to direct a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, which we use to pull ah pull together and buy even more carbon removal.

01:33.73
Nan
And then that ended up turning into Frontier, which is an advanced market commitment for carbon removal. We now have over a billion dollars um that we are using, um again, to essentially be revenue for carbon removal companies. And the whole sort of point is to um ah to really help this sort of public, carbon removal is a public good.

01:53.99
Nan
Public goods often struggle because they don't have market and we are trying to um help get these solutions started while we, you know in the meantime, hopefully get the the right policy in place. But that's kind of the role that we that we play, mostly in the carbon removal lens.

02:06.23
James McWalter
And I'd love to a dive into a few of those bits. But I guess first, Duncan, what do you do at scale and what's your background?

02:13.56
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, i I do like project analysis at scale. So we we sort of sit between project finance and engineering and figure out what the optimal scope for a given opportunity is, right? So we might have a customer who doesn't have enough power or loses power a lot, or just a customer who's trying to save money and hedge growing energy prices. So we sort of scope out.

02:36.90
Duncan Campbell
what that's going to be. And at scale, what we end up doing is, you know, designing the system, building it, financing it, operating it. And we're basically just the onsite utility for the customer, whether we're the only one or also in partnership with the other utility.

02:50.81
Duncan Campbell
That's what we do. We've been at it for eight years or so now. um Yeah, it's been great.

02:56.79
James McWalter
And your CEO and founder had one of the the best presentations at Dervos that I saw. was was a real kind of rousing up the crowd.

03:04.31
Duncan Campbell
like Tim Hade, yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:05.42
James McWalter
Yeah. and as as as As he kind of expressed.

03:06.64
Duncan Campbell
he Co-founder. Yeah, he's he's, I go to war with him. Yeah.

03:11.59
Nan
Mm-hmm.

03:14.66
James McWalter
I guess then, Nan, you kind of started touching upon these different kind of frontier decarbonization technologies. um A long time ago, I was working on soil carbon. I think that that's probably a little bit different and maybe not scientifically um as as as guaranteed as a lot of the kind of carbon markets that you guys look at funding.

03:33.95
James McWalter
ah I guess, you know, a lot of the impetus for what became the white paper came from from Stripe, came from you. um So I'd love to kind of like hear how the kind of work you were doing led you to wanting to eventually, you know, exploring why Behind-a-meter data centers is like an area worthy of research.

03:52.73
Nan
Yes, ah um that's a good question. So, you know, as I mentioned, we think a lot about permanent carbon removal. That is our sort of slice of the of the pie, so to speak. and And of course, over the last few years, there's been, you know, um increased, we we know that we're going to need a lot of energy to power the AI boom.

04:14.87
Nan
um And I basically got nervous that, you know, if we're going to need all of this energy for ai and we simply build a bunch of you know natural gas plants, that makes our team's job harder because we are then going to have to remove um even more carbon from the atmosphere.

04:34.11
Nan
And um i sort of, ah yeah you know, things that were going through my mind was like, well, should we just, you know, stop doing this? And everybody goes goes and works on on sort of how do we solve the energy problem for AI.

04:46.54
Nan
um I pulled in my colleague, Zeke, house father, and, you know, we're doing the math. And I sort of calmed myself down in the process of doing that. But, you know, what still came out of that was like, there is a really big opportunity here to at least you know try to use the energy needs for AI to pull promising new technologies the rest of the way down the cost curve and ultimately um you know not not build the dirty stuff. Can we build the clean stuff instead?

05:15.80
Nan
um And what's interesting is the companies who need the the all of this energy are you know more time sensitive than they are price sensitive. And so um I think that you know the the fact that There are huge energy needs um for AI, the fact that the folks who need it um have some disposable margin, so to speak, but they need things really quickly.

05:38.83
Nan
it sort of prompted the question of like, okay, if we were going to do all of this with clean stuff, is there even a good alternative like to natural gas? What would that look like? um And, but we're not experts in, you know, solar, we're not experts in renewables. And so um that's why we looped you all in to just sort of help think through, like, is this a real possibility? And if so, what would that even look like? And the the thing that was sort of exciting to me was, or that was interesting to me was like, can we make this as,

06:09.38
Nan
sort of non-theoretical as possible. Like, I want to know exactly, you know, exactly where in the United States would this be? um What would the configuration look like? What is the cost? Like, how do we make this, you know, appealing to folks that are actually building the data centers and seem more plausible than I think, um you know, maybe it's, it's, it's seemed historically. So that was the sort of impetus for this. um And, and of course, why we looped you guys in because you are the experts in this you're not.

06:39.46
James McWalter
But I guess like the Hyperscales, they all have carbon zero commitments. Surely they're not going to build gas, right? you know ah

06:45.06
Nan
Yeah. yeah

06:45.92
James McWalter
i And that was, I think, the thing. Even when we were starting to kind of look at this with some of our customers, it was like, you know, and and literally I was talking to a sustainability person at Hyperscala last week, and they were like, yeah, yeah, we're we're not building gas.

06:57.97
James McWalter
And I'm like, I promise you you're building gas. I was like talking to your colleague from elsewhere in your entity last week, and they are buying gas turbines like literally at the moment.

07:05.56
Nan
and and And how do you explain that, like that cleaving, like how do you explain that dynamic?

07:10.02
James McWalter
I mean, i think in any large organization, I think there's you know a lot of the time you're thinking at the net level. It's like, okay, we are a carbon neutral entity, right? And maybe they're buying you know you carbon credits from some of the frontier work and and the different kind of programs that you guys work on at Stripe. and yeah And I know you collaborate with a lot of other kind of similar big tech companies who have these.

07:31.62
James McWalter
ah But i think i think one of the kind of interesting things about how ah fast things change from the perspective of these large companies was like, it was very, very easy to be net zero and like have these very strong commitments. And not only will we have these commitments, but we'll go back in time and remove all carbon historically And once it became an existential issue for their business, it changed like that.

07:51.78
James McWalter
And the people who are getting the most you know voice in those organizations are the ones who are figuring out how to deploy megawatts and gigawatts of data centers. um And so you know a lot of what we're doing is like, it's down to what you you said, Nan. It's like, can we go fast?

08:05.72
James McWalter
Can we go cost effective? Oh, it's a nice sprinkling of cleanliness. That's great. um But really, the folks who are trying to figure out how to go at speed at a reasonable of cost, they're winning out.

08:16.48
Duncan Campbell
I would just jump in and say, i don't i don't think Nan's giving herself and Zeke enough credit here. you know They referred to us as the experts, and I don't know, maybe that's true. But you know you were talking about how what they care about is time to power, not cost of power.

08:31.68
Duncan Campbell
James, you're talking about how it used to be easy to make carbon commitments on power, and now it's much harder. um All these things really point back to the energy system in the US is not used to needing to grow, right?

08:45.63
Duncan Campbell
So everything was just these like marginal replacements, right?

08:45.66
Nan
Yep.

08:45.91
James McWalter
hundred percent

08:48.15
Duncan Campbell
It was really easy to say like, oh yeah, we just, we're going add some some renewables. It'll get rid of a little bit of marginal gas. Everybody's happy. um And I think Stripe um in looking at this in like a pure way and maybe a bit of an outsider's way was was able to kind of notice that something's different now and almost like lean into this nearly heretical idea, right? Because the conditions are actually different. Whereas a lot of us in the space were we're so just accustomed to like sort of ah a ah set of rules of thumbs, a bunch of heuristics that it, at least in my case, it took Nan and Zeke convincing me that microgrids make sense, which prior to that, I did not think they made sense. And I sell microgrids.

09:33.53
Duncan Campbell
So I would give you guys a lot of amount of credit for that.

09:36.64
Nan
That's nice. Thank you.

09:38.24
James McWalter
Also, you kind of refer to this, but like the standard, I think I was of the folks, and I should mention Kyle Baranko on the PASA side, who's our head of product. He was like the main author on their side. I just wrote three words at the end kind of thing.

09:49.73
James McWalter
But, you know, all of ye, and I think especially led by but but yourself, ah Nan and Zeke, where the standard has to be super high, right? Because we don't want to just put out some marketing copy that you know gets a few random tweets and that's about it, right? It has to be something that like actually is perceived as being a realistic thing.

10:07.94
James McWalter
So much so that we literally have maybe a dozen customers and another dozen like new customers who are literally trying to do this actual strategy now using bases. I'm sure scale is having a similar amount of like activity around this thing.

10:20.71
James McWalter
So like the idea that, you know, it's not standard. It's funny, we're actually working on a white paper unrelated to data centers right now. And like, I'm holding up this white paper as a standard, right? And like, we found, we went down a direction and the science is not there. The actual research was not there. So we went to a different direction. We didn't try to just double down on something.

10:37.50
James McWalter
I think that's like been a massive lesson for me that like, do you actually have big impact and like, you know, this kind of bullshit thought leadership concept, you actually have to build something and make something that actually is real.

10:48.80
James McWalter
And that's been incredibly valuable.

10:51.32
Nan
Duncan, how would you, maybe for both of you like how would you explain why the quote unquote like outsider perspective was needed in this case? Like why wasn't, why isn't, hasn't this been more evident from folks working on solar microgrids?

11:09.54
Duncan Campbell
I mean, i would just say that um anyone who's been working in this space for the past 20 years has only ever thought about costs. That's it.

11:17.13
Nan
Yeah, got

11:18.35
Duncan Campbell
Right. And everything boils down to that instantly. And you're like if if the status quo is $60 a megawatt hour and you're $61 a megawatt hour, you don't have a business. Right. That's like what everybody grew up on.

11:31.24
Duncan Campbell
And like, yeah I even see this today when people read the white paper and call me about it, they jumped right to the LCOE. It's just such a foreign notion to say no energy is in scarce supply. We need it really fast.

11:43.82
Duncan Campbell
And the use of it is extremely high margin. Right. That's like i people are getting it now, but I think it just took a little while. And yeah I don't know I think you guys were able to just kind of see that.

11:55.68
Nan
Were there other dynamics in, ah like when you think about speed, were there are other, are there other dynamics at play that make the kinds of microgrids that we're talking about in the paper more attractive than relative to the next best alternative than they might have been two or five or 10 years ago? Like, you know, where we've talked about supply chains for for turbines And talked about, you know, interconnection cues, like it it feels like there's this whole kitchen sink of things that are creating the the dynamic that this is is better than next best alternatives that maybe weren't true a couple of years ago. be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

12:31.64
James McWalter
Yeah, just on the interconnection side, like and into this idea that Duncan was referring to where folks had a particular mindset, people had a mindset that just every year interconnection will get three months longer.

12:42.38
James McWalter
Like, you know, every 12 months that interconnection is now 15 months. And so the entire industry has been kind of trained to just expect, okay, you're going to eventually have some sort of, you know, FERC order that might, you know, clean things up. But, you know, PJM is going to take the four years. Now it's to take five years. Now it's going to six years.

13:00.42
James McWalter
And then that obviously started happening on the load side. And the folks on the load side just never really had to worry as much because, again, they weren't in in such a kind of like, you know, fighting in the mud kind of competitive pressure. um I guess i get in terms of procurement, but can you know a lot more about that side of things.

13:15.12
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, I mean, first, i would totally agree. I don't think new load was was ready for the idea that the utility would say no, or the equivalent of no, like five years, it means no, basically.

13:24.66
James McWalter
for Absolutely. like They're the customer.

13:27.06
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, it's like, what? Like, that's never been a thing. what are you talking about? And so it doesn't matter how it didn't matter, like, you know, and whatever benefits of like solar based microgrids, right? Because it was just that's just what you do.

13:39.38
Duncan Campbell
You get it in eight months, everything's good. um um Then also, yeah, all the other stuff, right? Like I think the the the soaking up of gas turbine manufacturing capacity has been like a an incredible story.

13:54.14
Duncan Campbell
um It's actually a advanced so much more since even we were talking about it when writing the white paper. it is it's

13:59.76
James McWalter
it's Add a couple more years. It's crazy.

14:01.39
Duncan Campbell
It's done. It's done now, right? Like GE and Siemens all say, like, if you got an order in, you know, whatever, eight months ago, maybe you'll be lucky, but everyone else is waiting till 2031. um So it's it's it's just been incredible to see.

14:16.44
Duncan Campbell
ah my actually Actually, I'm worried that the white paper might be became become outdated very soon on the gas engine side, because I think the same thing is probably going to occur.

14:23.92
James McWalter
Right.

14:25.48
Duncan Campbell
um

14:25.87
Nan
but then If that's the case, you think it's then inevitable that this ends up happening? Or like, what, you know, why why haven't we then seen anybody announcing one of these yet, I guess?

14:35.70
Duncan Campbell
Well, we have. We have. I mean, it's been incredible, right? Like before we released the white paper, we saw the Intersect announcement with Google, how they're going to like do some co-location. But it kind of seemed just like they have grid-tied projects that they're going to stick data center down on because there's an interconnection there.

14:49.87
Duncan Campbell
But just whatever, ah a few weeks ago, a month ago, they basically said they're all in on the strategy. And they're the sort of strongest, most sophisticated utility scale developer out there.

14:58.66
Nan
Yeah.

15:00.35
Duncan Campbell
um they're They're a microgrid company now, um which is pretty cool.

15:02.88
James McWalter
i mean app I mean, like the first Stargate campus, like this is there's a huge amount of renewables in Nash.

15:03.89
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

15:10.51
James McWalter
It's it's basically ah a renewables grid tie plus gas mix. That's like broken ground and is actively deployed. Mm-hmm.

15:17.72
Duncan Campbell
So what well what I want to ask you guys, though, that I think is interesting is I think the gas engine supply is going to get soaked soon, too. um At which point your option for speed is only solar and storage.

15:30.71
Nan
Mm-hmm.

15:31.26
Duncan Campbell
um And what we know from our work is that 100 percent of time not going to really be realistic. um Something less than that. Still high, but something less than that. And I'm really curious to see, like, I have this nagging feeling like 98 percent of time is fine.

15:47.26
Duncan Campbell
and people are just religious about 99.999. um But now there will be a pressure for someone to actually try that, right? Because the fastest way to start a data center will be 98% of time 95% of time, whatever it is.

16:01.59
Duncan Campbell
um That's what that's what I'm curious about moving forward.

16:04.89
James McWalter
Well, think what you see is it's the nameplate on the um the data center is 200 megawatts, but it's really 165, five nines uptime. And that's fine, right?

16:14.36
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

16:16.05
James McWalter
You know, I mean, the other yeah i was I was talking to somebody on on the finance side, and he was like looking for big bets to make. And I was like, just start buying gas engine company. I mean, again, that's not what I like.

16:26.45
James McWalter
I'm not trying to promote that, but like.

16:26.57
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

16:26.59
Nan
Right. Yes. you

16:28.48
James McWalter
and And it was a funny thing. Even when Stargate was announced, it was like 500 billion. I immediately checked the market cap of GE to see, like, could they afford it? And that's 200 billion. I was like, honestly, just like if you're trying to do Stargate, go buy GE because you actually need to, cook like, guarantee supply ah of the gas turbines to, like, do any of this at scale that these guys in that model.

16:46.49
James McWalter
But I think, like, to go back to it, it's like,

16:46.91
Duncan Campbell
yeah

16:48.06
James McWalter
You can actually, you know, the the supply chains are so well built out for solar invests right now. um You can get to 98%, get to 300 megawatts, ah there's plenty of land and and go pretty fast.

16:58.25
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, all all this other stuff, the engines and the turbines are made to order, right? Solar panels and and batteries come off the line in advance, right? So you just got to find a container, right?

17:08.53
Duncan Campbell
Like it's it's just a whole different thing. um So I'm excited, yeah.

17:11.04
Nan
is it Would we see like China or some other country starting to spin up engine and turbine supply chains? Is that something that that you guys would think possible?

17:26.96
Duncan Campbell
um The engines are generally the only US s producer of kind of like these type of engines is Caterpillar. um

17:34.31
Nan
Okay.

17:35.34
Duncan Campbell
Otherwise, it's Yenbacher, which is Austrian, I want to say. Like, it's it's a kind of like a weird supply chain. There's Waukesha. There's, you know what I mean, like Mitsubishi, right? It's not a super US-based thing, to be honest.

17:49.68
Duncan Campbell
um I guess you have Cummins as well, though. So Caterpillar and Cummins are kind of the US-based... on turbines, um, I mean, you have GE, um, I think that's it.

18:02.19
Duncan Campbell
Um, but then the others are like Siemens, Honeywell, whatever.

18:02.52
James McWalter
There's a couple of small to mid-sized, yeah.

18:07.55
Duncan Campbell
Um, some of the Japanese and Korean ventures. Um, I don't know if the Chinese have like,

18:12.30
James McWalter
It's nearly like the Jensen Wong is giving people, Jensen Wong giving people permission to get like the next amount of like NVIDIA chips. Like you're literally starting to see that on the gas side as well.

18:20.41
Duncan Campbell
yeah Yeah. Yeah. ah So what I'm curious is if if if if i'm I'm China, that's a ridiculous statement, with enormous solar and battery manufacturing capacity, like outrageous solar and battery manufacturing capacity, is that just the route I go?

18:37.63
Duncan Campbell
Because I don't think there is a Chinese gas turbine design out there, really. And like they, China can build nukes, but that takes forever.

18:48.05
James McWalter
Well, but you just don't have interconnection queues like what you have in the United States in large parts of the rest of the world, right?

18:48.15
Duncan Campbell
yeah.

18:53.56
Duncan Campbell
That's true. You just like shut off some less productive factory and then like turn on the data center.

18:54.40
James McWalter
ah Exactly. Because ideally you just do everything grid connected, right?

18:57.60
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

18:59.56
James McWalter
like it's it's the That's how you get your five nines redundancy.

19:00.39
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:02.04
James McWalter
You're just grid connected. But if you like the reason all this has happened is because the queues have become ridiculous.

19:07.30
Nan
Well, so James, are you then seeing, like, what are you seeing on the land side? Are people just snapping this up left and right? ah what what's What's going on? from both I'm curious from both a private and public land standpoint, you're thinking good about it.

19:19.77
James McWalter
Yeah. So there is, it's kind of a land and a capital thing. So there's kind of like capitals being bookended. So there's a ton of money flowing into taking land positions in like the ring around particular Texas triangle cities, few other kind of metropolitan areas, you know, basically pick a place that has a big hyperscale data center and then draw a line 80 miles in a radius around that.

19:41.27
James McWalter
And if you can get like land enough, you know, couple thousand acres for the solar, You're near enough for some gas for backup and a few other attributes. Like those sites are, those landowners are starting to get hit in a similar way to what a solar developer in upstate New York for community solar was getting hit, you know, two years ago.

19:56.78
James McWalter
And so like that's, that's like happening. But so there's all this money kind of pouring into taking land positions. And then there's unlimited money to build a data center if it's a fully de-risked site, right? With the procurement tied up and everything else.

20:07.39
James McWalter
And there's this massive gap for capital in the middle where folks are not taking kind of mid-stage capital and and development risk. So what we're seeing is like, there's a lot of folks who are using, know, Paces and other solutions to find sites, get them, de-risk, and we're being really blunt.

20:21.47
James McWalter
It's like, this is a solid site, but it's still like a 1% chance this becomes a data center at best. Like this is, there's a lot of work to be done to get this site, but some people are still transacting very, very large amounts of money for these sites.

20:32.81
James McWalter
um And I guess a fear, a fear to certain extent I have on some of this is that you know some of these sites are really good for renewables, but if they do not have locked up even the renewables procurement or they just aren't used to building these projects, they're actually going to have a lot of sites that don't actually reach their full potential.

20:49.05
James McWalter
ah But I will say probably maybe one big difference from the white paper is we were looking a lot at West Texas. um In the end, data center developers do want to be closer to population centers than what we were saying in the white paper.

21:00.79
Nan
Oh, interesting for.

21:02.15
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, i've I've noticed that as well. Like, I think one of the one of the biggest whatever you can say critiques, I guess, of the white paper that I've continued to come across is this like fungibility of compute question, which is like, is anyone really going to build a training only data center?

21:17.17
Duncan Campbell
And I haven't found anybody who actually believes that.

21:19.27
Nan
Interesting yeah.

21:21.23
Duncan Campbell
Maybe Stargate, like, maybe that's it. I

21:25.94
Nan
What are the other areas, based on feedback that that you guys have gotten, where are the other areas that you think we might've been a little off?

21:26.17
Duncan Campbell
i

21:35.50
Duncan Campbell
That's the big one for me.

21:36.39
Nan
Okay, one.

21:36.83
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Assuming sort of like training only, which, yeah, I think is you can sort of deal with with this approach. So it just narrows the quantity of land that makes sense.

21:50.35
James McWalter
i think the I think maybe where we went off in the maybe opposite direction is a lot of folks have taken it as a pretty straightforward recipe for success.

22:00.86
James McWalter
And they're coming into this, like, and we're doing have to do a lot of education that, like, again, this is step one of a thousand steps to get to this, right?

22:03.96
Nan
Thank you.

22:10.36
James McWalter
And people are just walking in with, like, ah dollar signs in their eyeballs and being like, hey, I built four megawatts or farm once. like could You know what I mean?

22:17.94
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

22:17.95
James McWalter
I could build... I could build a 500 megawatts combined system you know and all this kind of thing. And and again, so I think like it's it's actually like been great, right? there's a lot of activity, a lot of people kind of flooding in, but there's a lot of noise and not that much signal in terms of like how many these are real projects.

22:36.65
Duncan Campbell
yeah

22:38.31
James McWalter
I guess then um you know one of the other aspects of like just in terms of like reaction to the white paper and so on, you know ah for those listening, Duncan is one of the supreme Twitter maestros or ex-maestros on the energy side.

22:51.62
James McWalter
um I guess like, you know, there was on your own podcast with your task force folks, you know, you're talking about the holy war between different factions. And even when the white paper came out, you had like the matigalists of the world kind of like ah misrepresenting the the white paper as being like really a pro-gas type thing and so on.

23:09.31
James McWalter
I guess what are some of the things you've been seeing like Duncan and and that you've been kind of reacting to and and trying to put the record straight on?

23:15.80
Duncan Campbell
um I mean, a lot of that's just like fun Twitter stuff.

23:19.40
James McWalter
Sure.

23:20.20
Duncan Campbell
But there's like real threads there. And I mean, what there's there's a bunch of different things. Yeah, one was the sort of like notion of, you know, is is this just a way to sell more gas and sort of dress it up?

23:34.29
Duncan Campbell
um I actually think the white paper was very much not that, right? Like we were trying to push the limits on it. how How far could you extend the solar penetration into the into the mix? um Or even proposing storage only systems that are slightly lower uptime. That was kind of one thing that I don't know, is not that interesting to me.

23:57.25
Duncan Campbell
Another one, though, connected to it was this idea that if you want clean power and you want a power industry, it must be like the chosen source, right?

24:09.71
James McWalter
Yeah, need the one true source.

24:09.74
Duncan Campbell
Like it must be a truly clean, truly reliable power quote, right? And this gets into kind of these like religious things, I feel like where there's just like certain things people believe for certain reasons that I don't always understand.

24:25.35
Duncan Campbell
um And I thought that was interesting ah because it sort of completely ignores the the core ah acknowledgement of the white paper, which is all that matters here is speed, right? So like, I don't know, go develop a hydro plant in eight months and get back to me. Like, it's just not a real thing, right? So I just thought that was interesting. But all in all, I mean, it sort of it sort of is what it is, I guess. But um I would actually propose, like, I think a more interesting question is

24:56.48
Duncan Campbell
In a world where load is growing quickly and there's large loads, not not just like, you know, oh, people are getting air conditioners. It's the 70s. Like, no, like large new loads. the The grid has never really proven its ability to site single source gigawatt loads, right? Like that's not a thing.

25:14.50
Duncan Campbell
um And obviously it is a thing, but like you can count them on your hands, right across the whole world, right? It's rare. And I can't help but wonder, like perhaps in the early days of the grid, that was just, you know, you, you you know, you would, the rare examples of this, you would cite that aluminum smelter, like at a coal plant, right?

25:35.06
Duncan Campbell
It's the same thing. Right. And um I just can't help but wonder if over the last like 30, 40 years, we forgot that this is one of the primary ways the system grows, right? When like big new sources of demand um express their interest in connecting to the system, the like coordination problem there is so great that they just build their own supply.

25:57.44
Duncan Campbell
And eventually over time, it gets and integrated into the grid. um And now we actually have like modular cheap technology to do that. It's not like some herculan Herculean civil engineering feat where it's like,

26:08.84
Duncan Campbell
we're going to like build Niagara Mohawk, you know, the Niagara Falls plant to like power something. It's like, you can just kind of do it. You place a bunch of orders, you hire a bunch of laborers, you build the thing.

26:19.56
Duncan Campbell
um So anyway, I think like the question I'm thinking about is basically just is the future of industrial load growth microgrids default grid secondary.

26:30.77
Duncan Campbell
And I think there's a strong case for it. I don't mean off grid always, right. It could be various things, but like co-located gen seems impossible to ignore at this point.

26:41.87
James McWalter
It's like the geography theory of everything, right? It's like, why why does a city exist? Because it's the kind of you know it's at the junction of two streams, right? Why does you know certain western towns exist? Because there was a stagecoast trail intersect, right?

26:56.06
James McWalter
It's like you start to see...

26:56.98
Duncan Campbell
why Why did America win AI? Because West Texas has cheap gas and great solar.

27:02.67
James McWalter
Literally.

27:03.30
Duncan Campbell
Yeah.

27:03.68
James McWalter
and and And they got a a couple of populated cities, right? In this like fairly tight tight area. And and they got ah a ton of wildcatters.

27:09.12
Duncan Campbell
Be clear, I'm not saying we have. I'm just saying, you know, if we do, you know, 20, 30 years later. yeah

27:15.79
James McWalter
Yeah, i think I mean, like we were looking at some load flow studies for, again, a part of Texas for how you're going to shift around three or four gigawatts, right? Because again, you need massive redundancy on um on the system.

27:28.89
James McWalter
And like the amount of upgrades needed to support this extra three gigawatts is like way more expensive than the actual projects that they're supporting, right? ah And, you know, as I was ah as in D.C.

27:39.37
James McWalter
last, a few days ago, um and, you know, there's a lot of folks from all these very impressive letters after the name kind of kind of places. um And, you know, we see the PJM, ah like for, ah but it's not quite an order, but like, hey, you need to explore behind the meter and what's the kind of potential tariff structure, all this kind of thing.

27:59.22
James McWalter
I think there's like this this kind of rapid concern that there's a technological constraint, right, that you can support these large loads, but then the financial piece, and you know in Ireland as well, that they just prevented planning permission for a big offsite data center because it's not just going to actually pour money into you know rate ordinary consumer rate payers.

28:19.78
James McWalter
So I think you're seeing a lot of reaction to this.

28:20.12
Duncan Campbell
Mm-hmm.

28:22.98
James McWalter
ah And I always like think of the Irish example because i Ireland's 20% data center of power use for the entire grid at this point. And there's no more hated person in Ireland than a data center developer.

28:33.82
James McWalter
Like if you um if you just go in a pub, I build data centers, they were like, get out of the pub.

28:34.06
Nan
Thank you.

28:38.38
Duncan Campbell
yeah out of here

28:38.50
James McWalter
Like, yeah, yeah this is this is not what you want. ah I guess, yeah. I mean, I think as you kind of think like, Nan, as you think i'm in a more holistic way, right, about...

28:49.59
James McWalter
how carbon is flowing in the economy, how things can decarbonize and so on. You know, like a lot of the even I'm sure the technologies you think about DAC and like all these kind of things, like these are also going to compete as like large areas of load and they need ubiquitous cheap power.

29:03.12
James McWalter
Like, are you also thinking about, you know, some of this kind of microgrid behind the meter solutions in those other technologies?

29:08.83
Nan
Yes, actually, we announced a um a deal yesterday with a company called Flare. They they are working on an electric chem DAC solution. And part of what is really interesting about their solution is it is designed to work with intermittent energy sources. So they're designing it to work with you know solar, basically. um And I think that there are you know, DAC in particular is, you know, very electricity intensive or energy intensive.

29:35.40
Duncan Campbell
Thank you.

29:37.17
Nan
And that is of course, um, a big consideration for that companies because it's a huge driver of their cost. Um, so yeah there's like the cost challenge and then there's the, is this robbing Peter to pay Paul for taking renewable energy for this? Are we, you know, making the the grid dirtier overall? So, um,

29:57.76
Nan
Yes, ah the the short answer is that this is a ah ah big question for not all um ah carbon removal companies. There are some you know that are are, of course, energy intensive, but they're not using electricity like enhanced rock weathering, for example, um or or ocean alkalinity enhancement. So not all of them require electricity, but a lot of them do. And for those ones, this is very pertinent as well. And we're starting to see some similar trends as we are in and ai

30:21.94
Duncan Campbell
Wait, so is there challenge then if if the thought is let's utilize cheap yet intermittent solar, their whole challenge then is like, how do you build the lowest CapEx DAC possible, right?

30:34.34
Nan
Exactly.

30:35.80
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, that's cool. How do you do it?

30:41.64
Nan
talk to Flair.

30:43.16
Duncan Campbell
Okay, yeah, yeah.

30:45.34
James McWalter
I do think there's like this, you know, lot of the data centers, right? Because it's literally, there's no higher best use from an economic perspective, like in terms of like off, collocated offtake.

30:56.19
James McWalter
And so one of the things I'm kind of a little bit hopeful for is because so many of these projects and these sites are not going to end up as data centers. It's like, what other things could be co-located load? Because there's going to be a ton of de-risking of you know big solar plus best project.

31:10.35
James McWalter
And green hydrogen, you know that market's basically collapsed. right like That was like an obvious potential technology for a lot of co-located offtake, at least in terms of you know potential dollars to be spent. um I guess like what you know if i was if I got a couple sites, it's not going to make sense for data center for whatever reason, but you know it's still going to be a plus 100 megawatts off-grid use case. where What are other kind of ideas for what we can do with those?

31:36.83
James McWalter
Flare.

31:38.15
Nan
Flair.

31:38.23
Duncan Campbell
Flair, fertilizer, green steel, ammonia, i don't know, just manufacturing of stuff, that chip fabs.

31:51.16
Duncan Campbell
I don't know, that's what I got.

31:53.71
James McWalter
Cool. I guess then, you know,

31:56.37
Duncan Campbell
I think the energy parks thing, though, is really interesting. Like if you build like, you know, a gigawatt of power to support whatever data data center, um I do, I can't help but feel you over time start, like, that's not just going to like be a little island forever, right? Like over time you start connecting other things.

32:15.96
Duncan Campbell
You know, the neighbor over there needs just a little bit of power. You give him some, I, I can't help but feel like the white paper, like in addition to being what it is kind of like waved the checkered flag on like private grids.

32:29.43
James McWalter
Uh-huh.

32:29.95
Duncan Campbell
Because i mean, if you think about how the grid started, right, it was like, we're going to build this plant to like power that thing right there. And then someone was like, oh, I have city lights. Can I hook them up to the, and it just sort of evolved, right?

32:41.90
Duncan Campbell
Out of like some big anchor user who could justify like getting the thing into orbit, right? um I don't see why that's not gonna happen here other than regulation, but like, it seems as if it should, yeah.

32:55.37
James McWalter
We literally have a new customer and they're like, we would never put this on our website because there's a lot of reasons not to, but like we are building utility. ah We are basically trying to build three to four multi 400 megawatt projects.

33:02.60
Duncan Campbell
Yep.

33:04.19
Nan
Hmm.

33:06.76
James McWalter
The data center is like the the tier one tenants and we are looking at advanced manufacturing. We're trying like maybe there's possibility, you a lot of folks trying to build a new town in like the middle of nowhere kind of thing.

33:18.05
James McWalter
um And so they are like pulling all that together. And there's serious capital like that is following that. Because again, there's capital following the data center use case. And then you can get like some of the rest of this stuff for free.

33:32.47
James McWalter
Cool. um I guess like you know we're kind of near the end. I guess like what are some kind of final thoughts and not just with the white paper, but I guess for the kind broader conversation, um things that you know people should be thinking of, ways that you know we can be ever doing a kind of a better job with things like this. I guess, what's what's your thoughts on that?

33:53.86
Nan
I mean well i guess what i'm not totally following the question ke just can you cut that

33:59.15
James McWalter
Yeah, yeah, sorry.

33:59.82
Nan
what what do you want well

34:01.03
James McWalter
Yeah, I guess this is kind of final thoughts, just kind of wrapping up things that you want the audience to take away.

34:11.99
Nan
i mean i think and that we'd love to see this actually get built like we'd love to see many more examples of this i think that the um

34:22.68
Nan
approached this we tried to approach this from a very like intellectually honest way of like is there an actual solution that could be compelling based on real constraints for real customers and it seems like the answer is is is probably yes um but at the end of the day like a white paper is a white paper who cares like the point is that we don't if we can avoid it we can avoid building the dirty stuff and build the clean stuff and so what we're excited to see is that actually happened

00:01.43
Duncan Campbell
Okay, cool. um So thoughts, final wrap thoughts. One, I think, you know, we and a bunch of other people are going to announce a bunch of these projects at some point in the near future.

00:12.30
Duncan Campbell
um So that's cool. I think we'll kind we'll kind of look back at like the, the like the V zero of AI data centers being like gas turbines and stuff. But this is going to be the this is going to be the v one. um ah So that's, that's cool. But I have my wrap up is just like, i I had so much fun doing the white paper one because The Stripe and Pace's teams are really cool, and it was just like a fun thing to work on.

00:36.77
Duncan Campbell
ah But two, because I really enjoyed how, at least for the electricity space, it was it was quite heretical. um And um I think my rapping statement is like, it's only going to get weirder.

00:51.76
Duncan Campbell
like that

00:52.36
Nan
Thank you.

00:53.17
Duncan Campbell
put out there was was actually very tame um and i think if you like could fast forward 10 15 20 years into the electricity system's future um it would be very challenging for the institutions that manage it to digest today um and so i think it's kind of all our jobs to just like do really awesome work but also be like a little aggressive about it because the The grid is like such a permission thing and it it it adapts to changing conditions so slowly that sometimes I think you just have to like, ah you know, plant a giant giant flag in the ground and do something that ah people think maybe you're not supposed to.

01:34.83
James McWalter
I couldn't couldn agree more.

01:34.97
Nan
Thank you.

01:36.99
James McWalter
yeah I think very excited. and Anyone who's listening to this, right, you know as you're trying to come up with something crazy, it's not crazy enough. Push yourselves a bit harder. Reach out to us. there's We'll add the white paper email address. And so that gets to all the folks who are involved in the white paper. And then you know the the most relevant folks will kind of respond to you.

01:56.17
James McWalter
um But yeah, every day here at Paces, we are trying to get some cool projects built. And the the message we always say is like, can we go faster? Can we go harder? um You know, the the the kind of mission of the company to, you know, prevent climate change, all those kind of things. It's ah it's not slowing down. It's speeding up. So um really appreciate all the time, Nan and Duncan. And then, of course, Zeke and Kyle, who weren't on this call, but were kind of instrumental for the white writing the white paper, as well as everybody who gave comments and, you know,

02:22.92
James McWalter
people who disagreed, you know all of those things, the Twitter conversations, all these things are like super impactful and appreciate it all.

02:30.27
Duncan Campbell
All righty. See you guys.

02:31.74
Nan
Thanks friends.

02:32.03
Duncan Campbell
This was fun.