Episode 314- How Data Centers And AI Are Redrawing U.S. Infrastructure

AI is pushing America into a new infrastructure era, and it’s bigger than potholes and bridges. When Professor Rick Geddes from Cornell joins us, we zoom out and connect the dots between infrastructure policy, infrastructure finance, and “infretech” the technology that makes civil and social infrastructure run smarter, safer, and more efficiently. Along the way, we clear up a confusion that trips up even experienced leaders: the difference between infrastructure funding (who ultimately pays) and infrastructure financing (how projects get built and repaid), plus why operation and maintenance is where reliability is won or lost.

We also get practical about why projects stall. Environmental permitting and stakeholder engagement can protect communities, but they can also become slow, redundant, and expensive when timelines stretch for years. We talk about what states are doing to move faster, why design-build and progressive design-build procurement can reduce friction, and how AI could help agencies review applications, spot gaps early, and cut repeat work without cutting standards.

Then the conversation turns to the fastest-growing infrastructure in the country: data centers. The demand for AI compute drives massive needs for electricity and cooling water, putting real pressure on the grid and local utilities. From Micron’s semiconductor expansion in upstate New York to cybersecurity threats like pipeline hacks and even drone risks, the line between “civil infrastructure” and national security keeps fading. We close with a hopeful look at reliable power options, including small modular nuclear reactors and earth source heating, and why infrastructure careers offer something rare: tangible impact.

Subscribe, share this with someone who cares about how the country actually works, and leave a review with your biggest local infrastructure win or failure.

Transcript

Season Welcome And Guest

Announcer 0:00

Welcome to season seven of the Common Bridge, hosted by Richard Helpie, a leading analyst, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Now expanded with healthcare, education, finance, science, and world affairs bridges, the podcast now in its seventh season, with an audience of over seven million worldwide, explores issues in a fiercely nonpartisan way. Find us at the Common Bridge at Substack.com, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Rich Helppie 0:32

Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. I am your host, Rich Helpe, and we have one of our favorite and most informative returning guests from upstate New York, Professor Rick Geddes from Cornell. We're going to talk about infrastructure today. I encourage you to listen to the past episodes with Dr. Geddes because he is so informative. Professor, it's a pleasure to see you today. How have you been?

SPEAKER_03 0:57

I've been great, Rich. It's great to be back on. Thanks for inviting me.

Cornell’s Infretech Shift

Rich Helppie 1:01

And I understand there's been some changes at Cornell shaping the area that you work and some of the infrastructure around your teaching there.

SPEAKER_03 1:11

Yes, that's great, Rich. There's a lot going on here at Cornell in the area of public policy. I think it's just about four ago, uh, four years ago, uh, we formed a new school of public policy, and it's called the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. And my department, which as you know, was called PAM, Policy Analysis and Management, has now formed the foundational faculty for the Brooks School. So my center, my academic appointment, and my academic center are both housed within the Brooks School of Public Policy. And as a result, we changed the name of my academic center, which, as you know, used to be called the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy, is now simply the Brooks Center for Infrastructure because it sits within the Brooks School. So we call it uh BCI after the Brooks Center for Infrastructure. And our new focus, Rich, uh, along with the rebranding and the rename, is on infrastructure technology or infretech. So that's the application of all these new sets of technologies, new wonderful technologies that I hear about every day to civil and social infrastructure to make it operate more efficiently.

Funding Vs Financing Basics

Rich Helppie 2:27

Well, that sounds like a great point to leap off. Well, what are you teaching your students these days and what's changed?

Permitting And Stakeholder Friction

SPEAKER_03 2:34

Yeah. Well, I still I still teach a lot of the the same things in my signature infrastructure policy courts, which is how you fund infrastructure, that's how you pay for it. Where where does the the where do the streams of revenue come from that will pay for the infrastructure? That then can be be leveraged into how you finance the infrastructure, which a lot of people confuse funding and financing. So we try to sort out that that confusion. Uh along with that comes uh techniques in in design and construction, also improvements in operation and maintenance of infrastructure. As most Americans know, we're as a country very good at building shiny new uh infrastructure facilities, but not as good as take at taking care of what we have. So that's what we call OM rich or operation and maintenance. Uh that's actually where a lot of new technologies come in, uh is in OM. But in addition to that, we do a lot of work recently on environmental permitting, which uh is a huge policy issue now, is the length of time it takes to get permits uh to proceed, even if it's renovation of an existing facility. Oftentimes you have to get environmental permits, you have to file an environmental impact statement, and you have to go through a whole series of uh regulatory procedures to get the project approved. Of course, if it's if it's what we call a green field or new build, it's it's often even more difficult. So permitting and uh is an issue, stakeholder engagement. Whenever you do a project, there's a lot of stakeholders who might be impacted by that. And a big public policy issue is how you engage with those with those stakeholders. So that's but then grafted onto that, Rich, is all these these um new issues that have come up in infrastructure that a few years ago were not that salient. One is um the one technology, of course, is data centers. And I would say that's the fastest growing area of infrastructure now, and the demand for uh ever faster and better artificial intelligence is driving the demand for data centers. And so they're being developed in a in a whole bunch of places. Um, you might want them close to population centers, you know, in terms of siting. Uh, but it it's uh growing around the country as a the new and fastest growing area of infrastructure. And as you may know, Rich, to install, you know, you don't just build a data center like warehouse. You need a lot of water uh to cool it, cooling water. You also need a lot of power. So data centers are are are big demanders of electric power, and so that puts um added, added uh uh demands on those traditional infrastructure facilities to support the data centers. So that's been a policy issue that I add.

Rich Helppie 5:27

Yeah, hugely controversial in many areas. And are the ratepayers going to pay for it? Is it going to be capital? What happens to the water and advances that you're making in the curriculum? You've been teaching young people and mid-career professionals for a long time. Has there been any difference in the students in their terms of where their backgrounds are or their interests or how they're applying technology? You know, I've heard from other educators saying, well, I've got to make smaller classes in content because of attention spans. And I was just wondering, are you noticing any difference over the years?

SPEAKER_03 6:02

Well, yes, yes, particularly with regard to my infrastructure policy class. And keep in mind, Rich, it's not just my class. We have my I teach a course normally in the fall semester in infrastructure policy. We have a class in the spring that's taught by a colleague of mine named John Foote that's infrastructure finance. So John did infrastructure finance for a long time. And at the graduate level, so those courses are offered both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. And usually we have the graduate students do a little a little bit of extra work, you know, to reflect the graduate degree. And if they take a few additional elective courses, they can get a certificate at Cornell at the graduate level that's called Infrastructure Policy Management and Finance, IPMF. So John and I have seen tremendous growth in the interest and the focus of students in this area, really of infrastructure policy and finance. And that I think when we started out 10, 15 years ago, it was a niche, kind of a specialized area. And I think students are becoming more aware. You don't have to, it's great, we love engineers, engineering is great, but one does not have to be a civil engineer to play in this sandbox. It's a great sandbox to play in, and there's a whole lot of policy and finance and public sector opportunities, you know, are growing to deal with the infrastructure challenges, not just in the United States. The interesting thing about this, Rich, is that it's global. You go around the world and people have the same set of concerns regarding infrastructure. They all want clean water, they all want wastewater treatment, they all want uh safe roads, they all want reliable electric power, they all want reliable communications and internet access. Just on down the list. It is it the challenges are different across countries and regions, of course, where it might be where where I'm sitting is is a wet area. We have a lot of rainfall, we have a lot of water, but if we were out west, the challenges associated with drinking water and wastewater treatment would be different. The goals and the and the concerns, I would say, Rich, are are the same.

Rich Helppie 8:18

So recent days, earlier this week, I drove up from Florida to Michigan. And I was anticipating you and I getting a chance to talk again. And I noticed, well, there's bridge work going on, and there's also a lot of old bridges, old power plants. And I just thought that, you know, generations ago, we had the ability to build those things. And I recall in one of our earlier conversations, I said, you know, if we've got all this funded, do we have the people? And you were very positive. You said, oh, yeah, we've got the best material engineers, best civil engineers, and such. And I'm thinking, well, this is good. If we can get out of our own way politically and policy-wise, that we can actually redo a lot of this stuff and then add to it. And also part of infrastructure driving up the whole way, I had internet and cell service without interruption. In earlier times, it'd be, well, I'm in a bad spot. Couldn't make a call or couldn't download music or a book or something like that. So when you kind of look over the last few years, what's working? Contra structures, technical matters, supply chain, any other relevant aspects, accelerated permitting and all these things that we had talked about before, what's maybe what's going smoothly and what areas are we finding more challenges in?

Micron In Clay And Local Strain

SPEAKER_03 9:41

Yeah, yeah, it's great, Rich. So keep in mind that the permitting of projects um takes place at both the state and federal level. And if if a state chooses not to take federal, federal support, the main the main role of the federal government in most civil infrastructure, it's an important thing for the listeners to realize that the federal government actually does not own very much civil infrastructure. They own a lot of military infrastructure. But when you talk about the stuff that you and I are interested in, which is is is both civil networked, you know, infrastructure that's part of the network, like you drove on a road from Florida all the way up to your home, and that is a connected network of roads that that you know is a continuous smooth surface, is an amazing network. And that's civil or networked infrastructure, but there's also what we call social infrastructure. And those are standalone facilities that people think of as providing the basic building blocks of a of a of a developed economy, uh, but maybe not part of a network. So that would be a school, a hospital, a prison, maybe a stadium, things, things like that, that provide what we often think of as public goods and services. So both of those types of infrastructure are largely not owned by the federal government. They are state and local uh pieces of infrastructure. So in some states, the the type of permitting that applies if you don't take federal money, like Texas and Florida sometimes don't, is the is the uh state permitting process. And that varies a lot by states. So the state where I'm in, in New York State, is is known for having a pretty complicated environmental permitting process separate from the federal. So but states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, uh uh down the line can be very innovative and quick in how they uh get projects going. So it's very much a state, a state and local issue. So to answer your question, I think there's there are a number of bright spots, particularly at the state level, of states that are moving projects forward quickly, that that are that are not um you know bogged down in whatever the the disputes are about the project. And so I think I think that at the state level, there's certain states that we can learn from in terms of speeding things up. The other thing, Rich, that's interesting to to look at is artificial intelligence and the permitting process. So people, I know there's a lot of concern now about displacements in in jobs because of the impact of AI, that AI is going to take away jobs and so forth. And I I don't, you know, I'm not suggesting those are unfounded, but there there are a lot of upsides to AI, where AI can make processes more efficient and effective. And I think one way we need to uh think about applying AI is in the permitting process, where it can avoid redundancies and it can pre-it can go through your your application and sort of pre-examine your application to help help the application move through the permitting process quicker. So I think thing AI in general, I think, as applied to the permitting process is um is a bright spot. I think some states are streamlining their processes and and getting things done, and maybe other states um can learn from them. The other thing, Rich, that's more traditional, that I think you and I may have talked about in the past, is the notion of bundling, uh, just the word bundling. So bundling can take uh place in several different ways. It's bundling different elements of the delivery process, like design and construction together and what's called a design build. The Tappensee Bridge, the new Tappensee Bridge, not far from where I'm sitting, was done as a design build, which was unusual for um the state of New York. The new Gothels Bridge was done as uh that goes from northern New Jersey across to Staten Island, was uh a design build. And um the, you know, I'm from from Baltimore, so the the reconstruction of the the uh sorry, the Key Bridge, which collapsed in that terror terrible accident where there was a collision with a freighter, um, is being done as what's called a progressive design build. So there's innovations, I would say, in the procurement process that the United States has traditionally been slow to adopt. Then some states are adopting these innovations in the procurement process that I think are very positive. So that's that's a bright spot.

Rich Helppie 14:21

That is. And I know up in your state near Syracuse, there's a new micron semiconductor facility, and it's going into a small town of Clay, New York, if I'm not mistaken, maybe another 10,000 people. What's the impact on the community and and what's going on with that project up there?

SPEAKER_03 14:42

Yeah, um it's the impact is huge, Rich. So I did a uh a site tour of Clay, New York before uh they broke ground on the new project. I understand the project has has begun. And it was a, you know, it's it's a small town. It was very rural, uh, a lot of old farmhouses and fields and so forth. And um I th I, you know, was there's many, many different impacts. One I think is is uh the zoning uh was largely residential with single-family lots, is going to have to adapt to the demands of a large, several large semiconductor plants that that they're they're talking about in when it's fully up and running, 10,000 new people. All those all those people are gonna have to live somewhere, they're gonna have to have grocery stores, they're gonna have to have schools, they're gonna have to have sidewalks and all the things that you need uh to support that that sort of a of a large and and educated um community, you know, that's gonna have demands and and gonna be demands on the roads and and everything else. And it's not just that, Rich. There's a lot of other businesses. I think the vision for that county, for that region, is to have a lot of is to create a tech park. So it's not just Micron that would be in there. Micron needs a lot of suppliers. I've told hundreds of suppliers need to be close by to as the supply chain to feed into Micron. But then if you envision a technology park in that area, and I do want to say that I think it's an excellent location for a technology park, they're they're bringing in countries from Korea and Japan and other places to set up shop and research and research uh facilities there as well. But you know, so the the community um, you know, it was largely rural, 15, 20 minutes north of the city of Syracuse. But in some ways it's a great spot because they have a large amount of fresh water that comes down from the Great Lakes. A big pipe uh provides that. They are a few minutes from the Syracuse Airport, which is also north of Syracuse. They have a rail spur that comes in, so you can bring in uh supplies uh by rail. They're only 10 minutes or less to the interstate highway entry ramp. There's also an electric substation that can provide electricity to that region. And, you know, the other thing, Rich, that that uh I always try to remind people is upstate New York had a trem has in the past had a tremendous reputation as a tech area, right? Xerox was here, uh, you know, Kodak was here, IBM was here, uh Corning, uh, you know, fiber optics was developed at Corning, it's glass, right? So it was developed not far from from where I am. So and as a result, you have a tremendously educated tech um uh infrastructure for for tech education. So you have the Rochester Institute of Technology, you have Cornell, you you have a Rensselayer, you have all the SUNY state schools that are that are known for tech. And so it's in addition to the physical location, I think it's it's really great for that. So but your point is well taken. The effects on Syracuse as a city and clay, you know, as as a smaller rural area are going to be enormous. But you know, there's there's uh big sort of national security issues at stake, right?

Subscribe And Support Options

Rich Helppie 18:21

Right. And look, you made mention of that education infrastructure, and those are long-term investments, and those are outstanding technical universities. As you've enumerated, how much needs to go in there? And I'd be interested to know is why into that rural area and not into some, you know, Buffalo is not that far, and other areas that are a little distressed that might already have some of that infrastructure for like water and sewer and electric grid and such.

Commercial Speaker 18:55

Before we dive back into today's enlightening discussion, we have a quick message for all you Common Bridge enthusiasts out there. Did you know that you can find this episode and over 300 more on Substack as part of the Common Bridge series? You can also find written columns and opinions as well. Subscribe at the commonbridge.substack.com for a full Common Bridge experience. There you can comment and express your opinion on all the topics we cover on this and the past seven seasons of our podcasts. If you'd rather support the show without subscribing, you can do so with Zell at rich at richardhelpie.com or using Venmo at Richard-CBridge. Thanks for listening. Now back to the episode.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

Well, I think um it's it part of it is the Greenfield versus Brownfield distinction and infrastructure. Greenfield is where you have a relatively undeveloped uh site, and uh, you know, brownfield is where you would you would be taking an older site and and kind of cleaning it up and and redeveloping it. And so I think part of the appeal of this location, Rich, is it's largely greenfield. In other words, there's there's not a lot of, there's some, but there's not a lot of existing infrastructure that would you would have to um deal or not just infrastructure, but but um you know businesses and and factories and so forth that you would have to to address. But it does have all those those support services that I mentioned that that are freely available, right? So I think it but but let me be clear, Rich. I don't think the tech, there's a tech movement going on in upstate New York. And I don't think that Buffalo or Rochester, they're not being left out. There's a lot of other other stuff. We're just focused on semiconductors right now, which are particularly important, but there's a lot of other tech efforts going on to create this corridor in upstate New York that would extend from Syracuse to Buffalo, and with Rochester kind of in the middle, that that is stands to to to be um you know, to support each other, to be mutually supporting as uh I think upstate New York redevelops, recovers its tech uh tech history year.

Cyber Risk And New Threats

Rich Helppie 21:10

Yeah, and I like the model of uh private company coming in, being supported by the government and institutions for providing that. And who knows, I'm sure everybody in Albany will applaud moving bands heading into New York instead of that stream that keeps coming down I-95 to populate Florida and I guess to some degree Texas as well. Because none of us are immune from what goes on in the world. And as you talk about the supply chain being Korean companies, Japanese companies, et cetera, we've got a war in Iran. We've all read the news reports that the infrastructure of the Iranian regime is being attacked. They're going after the expertise that runs that. You know, I'm thinking, oh, this is all infrastructure. We're hitting Iran's infrastructure, but also that's got to be a Drain on our infrastructure. When you think about the Iranian war and infrastructure, are there direct impacts or is it still kind of distant?

SPEAKER_03 22:11

Well, I don't, I think that it's not as though the um that would affect our grid directly, or you know, obviously the anything that re relies on crude oil. And keep in mind that that um could uh just about all the stuff we're talking about for civil civil infrastructure, a lot of social infrastructure. What do you need? You need concrete, you need asphalt, you need rebar, you need other inputs, and almost all of them rely on crude oil, uh energy, right? There's a tremendous amount of energy required to create to make concrete. And think of steel in the rebar, right? It's so that's that's gonna have some effect just through the the global price. But what I think is is more interesting, Rich, to your point that I've you know been thinking about. Um back back in the day when I started doing this, you could kind of think of civil infrastructure in its own silo and defense and national security issues in a separate silo. And I think that's no longer um tenable because technology has had the effect of pushing together the concerns of civil infrastructure with national security concerns. Just what we were talking about with semiconductors, of course, is uh you know, in Taiwan and bringing that uh production capacity onto U.S. shores is itself a national security issue. But there's other things like um cybersecurity, right? When you talk about the grid, uh you're immediately concerned about hacking into the to the systems and somebody, some bad actor being able to cause a blackout or a brownout. Uh a few years ago, we saw the colonial pipeline uh you know shut down as a result of ransom. Uh we don't know exactly from where, but they were successfully able to hack into the system and shut down the crude oil supply through the colonial pipeline, which affected the East Coast energy supply. And there's a whole bunch of other examples I could give you of where um national security issues are are playing into civil and social infrastructure operations. And so so it's it's combined now.

Rich Helppie 24:23

Yeah, it sounds like as you're going through this, you don't need a bomb to take out the enemy's infrastructure. And we've been attacked here in the United States, and you know, we're attacking into Iran, and uh, you know, we all know this didn't start overnight. This has been going on for you know very, very long time. When you think about maybe what's not going as smoothly in the world of infrastructure, of course, we've had the well-publicized issues with the rail system in California with billions spent and not a foot of track laid, and they're going between two small cities. I don't know if that's typical or if that's just an outlier, but but there's a lot going well. What are some things that maybe aren't going as well and perhaps we're surprised?

SPEAKER_03 25:09

Yeah, so one a couple of things, Rich, I think in response. One of the the things is um is the development of drones. And we we saw uh Army Base, or maybe it was Air Force Base, was was uh recently uh invaded by a swarm of pretty sophisticated drones. And I I don't know if the origin and details of that have been uh under released yet. I'm sure there's an ongoing investigation. Uh, but I think I think the the fact now, and we're seeing that as a result of both uh the war in Ukraine and in Iran, it's drones have become much more uh visible and important in those conflicts. And it's pretty clear that that that drones could uh negatively impact you know infrastructure in a lot of ways. So affecting a natural gas pipeline, for example, or high-tension wires in the electric system, or are doing, you know, again, everybody's worried about something in the water, put it putting something in in the drinking water. There's just a lot of ways that that technology, I think, brings concerns that are that can no longer be isolated to a battlefield.

Rich Helppie 26:27

And they're cheap too. They're like 20,000 to make.

SPEAKER_03 26:29

Which is peanuts in the in the infrastructure world, right? And you could do a number of them. And and they're hard, some are sophisticated enough that we can't jam, you know, we can't jam their radio signals automatically. I think that that's so I think one of the things that that has become more salient is is that interaction of that type of technology with with civil infrastructure. And it won't just be, you know, it won't just be attacking an army base or an Air Force base. There's there's other other ways. And I think uh we're sort of exposed, and that's another example, you know, Rich, of technology. And how how that's why I want our program to focus on infra tech, because the security it plays into the security issues. I even if I would like to avoid national security issues vis-a-vis the infrastructure, I don't think I I have that that luxury. The other thing, Rich, is I think um there's um there's a notion in infrastructure delivery in the United States called citizen voice. And it's it goes back to the 70s, even maybe earlier, where local citizens should have um you know a big voice in in projects that are coming in. And I think I think that's right. But what's happened over time is I think that process has been captured by some groups that really want to hold up or slow down or entirely stop infrastructure projects. And so the the pendulum is in in in some ways swung too far to allow um pressure groups to hold up and raise the cost of, and in some cases, just stop infrastructure projects. And so that's that's something that the United States is is dealing with, restoring that balance. Other countries, by the way, uh you know, countries that we would think of uh, I don't know, as as maybe um also also not delivering super fast infrastructure are better at this, uh better at dealing with the balance between citizen voice, but the public's need to get the infrastructure delivered in a timely and cost-effection, uh cost-effective manner, right? So I think one of the policy things we're struggling with is that balance.

Nuclear SMRs And Earth Heat

Rich Helppie 28:40

And this is why I love talking with you, how you tie all the pieces together and the infrate that you know the military part of this or national defense, however you want to frame that, it's intertwined now with what we're doing as civilians because we're in a connected world. Every time we shoot off a bomb, somebody's losing infrastructure and we're losing funding that could be going toward a building or bridge or absolutely whatever. It's it's really at the center. And you know, when you think about uh legislation, federal, state, local, the big beautiful bill, anything in those legislations that are really good help or anything in there that are really detrimental?

SPEAKER_03 29:25

I think the helpful things are they're they're they're taking Congress is now seriously um uh undertaking, and it's a bipartisan concern now, of uh uh about the the the permitting issues and about just just the cost and speed. And of course, it it really is true, Rich, in infrastructure. It's the old saw, time is money. But but if you delay a big infrastructure project, the cost never goes down. The cost always goes up. And so I think there's um there's a notion that it used to be more partisan, I think, where conservatives generally wanted to deliver you know infrastructure more quickly. But now with and with uh renewable projects, the other thing that's interesting, Rich, that I think is is new so and we really need to talk about this, are new sources of power generation. Because really the data centers and reliable energy has people have come to realize that is so critical to growth. Yeah, I don't think you can have a growing economy without reliable and a lot of electrons, a lot of energy. So, one of the things we've seen that that again, this is why I'm stressing to you the this the importance of my center focusing on infratech is new types of nuclear power. And you know, I'm a child of the Cold War to some degree, and uh, you know, I've always been interested in how nuclear power works. And for so many years, the United States basically abandoned nuclear power. Cornell used to have a Department of Nuclear Engineering, and we shut it down. And it was, I think that was a sign of the times when it was frowned upon. You know, there were there were movies, China Syndrome, there was Three Mile Island, you know, so forth. But the technology of nuclear power has really developed a lot since those days. And the it's bipartisan now, and people realize that once you have a nuclear plant up and running, there's zero emissions. It's just the reaction, right? Now there's there's a lot of emissions in the creating the the uh concrete in the rebar you need to build the plant. But once that's up and running, it's a very clean, reliable, and it it you it just runs. It's like a uh a hydroelectric dam. It's going all the time. You're getting this baseload, reliable power. And there's new types of reactors that are called SMRs, small modular reactors. So the reactors are the same, it's like Lego blocks, right? And you kind of put them together and you can get more uh capacity. So I think that's that's uh type one. Type two, Rich, I really have to stress is um we call it accord now earth source heating. And we're we're a leader in exploring using the the heat that is inside the earth to make electricity. And so you you you know, I I and the beauty of that, it's it's uh constant. So you don't have the problem of the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine all the time. So you need battery storage with wind and solar projects. But with Earth source heating, it's kind of there all the time. So if you can figure out a technology to just offtake that heat and make electricity with that by making steam to turn turbines and make electricity, you have this wonderful source of renewable power. And actually, where I'm sitting on Marcella Shale here in this, it's it's very deep. So the heat, the heat, how close it is to the surface varies by the geology. If I were sitting in Arizona, it would be much closer to the surface. So you need to really develop those technologies, I think, for um for for earth source heating, for getting energy from the earth, but in a in an efficient way. Where the technology is not there yet, but I think the United States would do very well to expend a lot more resources on the research and development of that. And I'm not talking about the heat pump in somebody's neighborhood, right? I'm talking about our our well. We have a test well here on campus. I have to sing our praises, 10,000 feet down. So almost two miles, straight down, to test the conditions at that depth. It's hot, right? But there's a lot of other things that go on. So I think that type of exploration of uh earth source heating could be could be very good for this country, along with nuclear.

Career Impact And Gratitude

Rich Helppie 33:53

Look, I'm thrilled to hear that there is research being done. I don't think we built a nuclear plant in the United States since about 1972. And I of course do remember all the concerns and the accidents and such. If there is a problem, it's a big problem. But you know, generally they're they run. And I know Consumers Power is reigniting one or just did reignite uh a dormant nuclear plant in the west side of the state here. And you know, as we talked about all that need for AI to use their electricity, you know, that might be the way out. Professor, as we come to our close today, what else would you like our audience to know about you know infrastructure matters or anything else you'd like to cover? Because I, you know, every time I listen to you, I was like, I wish I was young enough to be a student, but I'm not.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

Well, thanks for the compliment, Rich. I I I uh you know, I I appreciate it. I mean, I th I think that uh I tell tell my students every semester that they they should study infrastructure first because you can have a great career, right? And and people, you know, I've been doing this long enough that that uh I talked to a lot of people who have kind of had had their careers already toward maybe the end of their career, and they they say the two the two things that matter are maybe not what a college student would think. One is the the quality of the people that you work with. Like who did you work with over the the course of your career? Were they were they good colleagues? And and second, did you have an impact? Did my career, you know, and and this work I put in over decades have have a positive effect? And I tell my students that infrastructure offers both of those, right? So you the I'm just I'm so uh lucky to have gotten into this area where as an academic I can interact with a whole in design firms, construction firms, architectural firms, toll road operating firms, lawyers, consultants, engineers, and they're just a great bunch of people who are really dedicated to the mission. And the mission, of course, is providing the infrastructure, not because you like to see a road, but because it provides essential public goods and services. So you can say, I worked for years and I've had a positive effect because the stuff that I worked on provides what you and I would consider to be the basic building blocks of a developed society, where you have transportation services, you have communications, you have heat, you have clean water, you have power, and so forth. The other thing, Rich, and I'll I promise I'll stop, is it gives you an attitude of gratitude. Because if you realize you won't just be a person driving on the road anymore. If you study infrastructure, you will understand what it takes to provide that road and to keep that road free of cracks and free of uh snow and ice and everything else and keep it properly drained. And that's just roads, you know. But you also appreciate what it takes if you plug your your computer into the socket, what it takes to get electrons out of that socket and into your uh your computer is an amazing thing. So I think I think that's the point.

Rich Helppie 37:12

Look, I hope any younger people um or people considering a career switch, look at infrastructure because I want to amplify what you said that if you're achieving something that's tangible and you can point and say, see that bridge, see that building, see that data center, see that power plant. I had a role in that. I made an impact and made people's lives better. You know, like we, of course, we've talked about the Gordy How International Bridge built over the Detroit River through our biggest trading partner, Canada, not our 51st state, it's an actual country for those not familiar with the geography. I can't even imagine the pride that must go into those steel workers when they can look up and say, look at that. Look what we did in the, you know, when they hung the suspension cables. Professor, you've been great. I love talking with you. It always gets me fired up. And uh, so for the audience of the Common Bridge, we've been talking today with Cornell Professor Rick Geddes, the foremost expert in my mind for infrastructure and related technologies. And with our guest, this is your host, Rich Helpie, signing off on the Common Bridge.

Final Sign Off

Announcer 38:26

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