Try to get a guest with knowledge of the solar panel market. Have sales and production of Chinese panels taken off since the Iran War started? Are the Chinese producing at close to 100% of capacity? Who is buying?
Can we agree that the "Big F'ing Battery at your house or workplace" is your BEV? If and when you work at home, it can be programmed to charge during solar peak generation, and discharge 5% back into to your local distribution grid whenever everyone's HVAC kicks on. If you drive to work, plug into the solar parking lot canopy +on-site non-flammable BESS +Vehicle-2-Grid chargers at your workplace. That's what France & South Korea are already doing, nationwide, within 3 to 5 years, largest parking lots first. This is the easiest, quickest, widely distributed, low-maintenance lift in energy electrification. Existing low-cost public BEV charger deployment in the US is pathetic.
It would be nice. But, I'm skeptical that employers are going to be particularly enthusiastic about participating, given that most employers other than large tech companies typically don't even offer basic EV charging for their employees.
We also need the costs of V2G to go down considerably. Right now, V2G still costs several times as much to install compared to a basic level 2 home charger. And, it's hard to make enough money from the utility to recover this cost.
Not sure how this is working in other countries. Are the utilities or governments subsidizing the install?
20 year Air-space leases of existing parking lot area for solar canopies pay new lease revenue to property owners who otherwise do not care about the utility & transportation expenses of their tenants & customers. Installation costs property owners $0. Similar to existing remote solar farms that require utility transmission but totally lack the synergy of parking lots, where canopies directly charge EVs & 12-hour BESS during daylight hours and the BESS powers building HVAC during the night. No new utility transmission spending required. EVs belonging to a VPP can program their vehicles to discharge a small % of stored charge back into the local distribution grid during evening peak demand hours for compensation that offsets their charging. The technology to do this has already been tested. Utility monopolies are slow-walking it. US cities need to inventory local parking and prioritize it by size, daytime occupancy & solar status. Then adopt expedited permitting for batches of multiple projects with pre-approved modular designs, and walk them thru the utility interconnection review & approval. This eliminates the 30% extra soft costs that these solar installations would otherwise face. If you want to verify the logic here, just ask Claude or Gemini.
I suppose you can redline a car engine every five minutes or bend a paper clip back and forth, but you just can't expect either to last. My question isn't whether hyperscalers are dumb (they employ the smartest engineers on the planet) — it's why Google appears to be the only one whose smart people are making the right decisions.
This is also going to date me but Jigar’s characterisation of utility management reminded me of Gordon Gekko’s speech to Teldar Paper shareholders in “Wall Street”. Gekko, and the real-life 80s corporate raiders that inspired him, were evil pieces of s***, but it didn’t make them wrong about sclerotic corporate cultures.
Which gets back to David’s hobby horse about the incentives for utility management and the need to realign them!
Great discussion. I’m glad I caught most of the acronyms but I’d suggest spelling out more of them for the audience, e.g., not sure how many people know that an ANOPR is an Advanced Notice of Proposal Rulemaking….
You guys covered a lot of ground for 90 minutes. I am a lot older than both of you so am more skeptical. Jigar is way too optimistic about coming back from the chaos and destruction Trump has caused. Hungary notwithstanding, I'm more concerned about if we can throw the bums out of office in November 2026 and 2028; that is our real problem. We'll see what happens in seven months. Good luck.
David, speaking of AI could I ask a favor? Could you ask AI to process your transcript and print out a glossary at the bottom with a translation of all the acronyms? I’m new to these discussions, and some acronyms I can figure out, but a lot of them I can’t. A hyperlink on each capitalized acronym would be even better, but whatever is the simplest automated solution would be great – thanks.
Thanks also for making me smarter about these matters!
Actually, David, I withdraw my request unless you want to do it anyway. But I just took the link to the transcript and pasted it into Gemini – just the link – and asked it to go through and prepare a glossary of the ACRONYMS. Took about 10 seconds, and it’s good enough for my purposes! It also offers to explain some of the more important concepts, but so far I’m gonna try to do that on my own.
Excited to see this as today's topic - this is the exact question I've been banging my head about - why are data center developers being so stupid? Don't they listen to Volts? Have to wait til after work but can't wait to listen.
Try to get a guest with knowledge of the solar panel market. Have sales and production of Chinese panels taken off since the Iran War started? Are the Chinese producing at close to 100% of capacity? Who is buying?
Can we agree that the "Big F'ing Battery at your house or workplace" is your BEV? If and when you work at home, it can be programmed to charge during solar peak generation, and discharge 5% back into to your local distribution grid whenever everyone's HVAC kicks on. If you drive to work, plug into the solar parking lot canopy +on-site non-flammable BESS +Vehicle-2-Grid chargers at your workplace. That's what France & South Korea are already doing, nationwide, within 3 to 5 years, largest parking lots first. This is the easiest, quickest, widely distributed, low-maintenance lift in energy electrification. Existing low-cost public BEV charger deployment in the US is pathetic.
It would be nice. But, I'm skeptical that employers are going to be particularly enthusiastic about participating, given that most employers other than large tech companies typically don't even offer basic EV charging for their employees.
We also need the costs of V2G to go down considerably. Right now, V2G still costs several times as much to install compared to a basic level 2 home charger. And, it's hard to make enough money from the utility to recover this cost.
Not sure how this is working in other countries. Are the utilities or governments subsidizing the install?
20 year Air-space leases of existing parking lot area for solar canopies pay new lease revenue to property owners who otherwise do not care about the utility & transportation expenses of their tenants & customers. Installation costs property owners $0. Similar to existing remote solar farms that require utility transmission but totally lack the synergy of parking lots, where canopies directly charge EVs & 12-hour BESS during daylight hours and the BESS powers building HVAC during the night. No new utility transmission spending required. EVs belonging to a VPP can program their vehicles to discharge a small % of stored charge back into the local distribution grid during evening peak demand hours for compensation that offsets their charging. The technology to do this has already been tested. Utility monopolies are slow-walking it. US cities need to inventory local parking and prioritize it by size, daytime occupancy & solar status. Then adopt expedited permitting for batches of multiple projects with pre-approved modular designs, and walk them thru the utility interconnection review & approval. This eliminates the 30% extra soft costs that these solar installations would otherwise face. If you want to verify the logic here, just ask Claude or Gemini.
I suppose you can redline a car engine every five minutes or bend a paper clip back and forth, but you just can't expect either to last. My question isn't whether hyperscalers are dumb (they employ the smartest engineers on the planet) — it's why Google appears to be the only one whose smart people are making the right decisions.
This is also going to date me but Jigar’s characterisation of utility management reminded me of Gordon Gekko’s speech to Teldar Paper shareholders in “Wall Street”. Gekko, and the real-life 80s corporate raiders that inspired him, were evil pieces of s***, but it didn’t make them wrong about sclerotic corporate cultures.
Which gets back to David’s hobby horse about the incentives for utility management and the need to realign them!
Great discussion. I’m glad I caught most of the acronyms but I’d suggest spelling out more of them for the audience, e.g., not sure how many people know that an ANOPR is an Advanced Notice of Proposal Rulemaking….
You guys covered a lot of ground for 90 minutes. I am a lot older than both of you so am more skeptical. Jigar is way too optimistic about coming back from the chaos and destruction Trump has caused. Hungary notwithstanding, I'm more concerned about if we can throw the bums out of office in November 2026 and 2028; that is our real problem. We'll see what happens in seven months. Good luck.
David, speaking of AI could I ask a favor? Could you ask AI to process your transcript and print out a glossary at the bottom with a translation of all the acronyms? I’m new to these discussions, and some acronyms I can figure out, but a lot of them I can’t. A hyperlink on each capitalized acronym would be even better, but whatever is the simplest automated solution would be great – thanks.
Thanks also for making me smarter about these matters!
Actually, David, I withdraw my request unless you want to do it anyway. But I just took the link to the transcript and pasted it into Gemini – just the link – and asked it to go through and prepare a glossary of the ACRONYMS. Took about 10 seconds, and it’s good enough for my purposes! It also offers to explain some of the more important concepts, but so far I’m gonna try to do that on my own.
Keep up the great work!
Excited to see this as today's topic - this is the exact question I've been banging my head about - why are data center developers being so stupid? Don't they listen to Volts? Have to wait til after work but can't wait to listen.
What a great crossover! Reminds me of when the Harlem Globetrotters appeared on Scooby Doo.