Casey Handmer

Because batteries can get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

But what it does mean is you can say, well, I know that I'm going to have three low days.

So I will start curtailing now by 5% so I don't have to curtail by 50% in three days.

And then overall for the whole year, I'll only curtail, you know, five hours.

So I'm still at four nines instead of having to curtail 24 hours because I can't predict the weather.

Well, I don't think we should constrain ourselves to being like, oh, well, maybe there'll be some fraction of current payroll, right?

Because like that, that's kind of a very contingent on like humans being humans thing.

Yeah, I think it's a lower bound, to be clear.

Oh, yeah, lower bound for sure.

But, like, if you think about, like, someone trying to, like, estimate the upper bound for the market value, the market cap of, like, Caterpillar, right?

Based on, like, well, it takes, you know, this many men and, like, burrows and wheelbarrows to, like, dig a trench.

And so, you know, it couldn't be more than that, right?

But actually...

One way to think about the industrial revolutions is every time you figure out an industrial revolution, what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck.

And the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was metabolism.

It's just like, how much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever?

And nowadays, we would giggle to think that, oh, the amount of food we produce is meaningful.

in the context of, like, the economic power of a particular country.

Right.

Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, you know, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and, you know, grids and stuff like that.