Casey Handmer

All the houses to all the power plants in some gigantic area divided by your marginal usage with all kinds of other complicated rules designed to make it fairer.

And the problem that we see and the reason that PG&E here in California, for example, is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy is that even though like the cost of an additional solar panel or additional wind turbine or additional gas turbine or whatever is relatively cheap.

getting that power to your house is actually really expensive.

Right.

Why?

Because you've got, you know, generally like unionized labor that has to build and maintain power lines in areas that already have built up infrastructure.

So you have like multiple collisions, whether this is like a power pole on your own street or like building a new transmission line, which requires you to like eminent domain land.

So you're in court for like,

Years and years and years spending public money litigating against other people who are also spending public money to litigate against you on behalf of other interest groups and so on and so forth.

And then you've got wildfires and it's just like the poster child for Balmoral Costasies.

So one of the reasons that we're going to see large-scale pruning of these grids is that we just can't afford under our current regulatory regime to maintain.

When you say pruning, are you just like everything will just go off-grid?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's fairly clear to me that for really large captive loads like our data centers or aluminum refineries or whatever, you're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work.

If you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.

It would seem inefficient, but actually, if you are sensitive to the cost of power expressed maybe in supply elasticity or something like that, you just have to do it.

There's no two ways about it.

Is it inefficient for the XIA Colossus data center to have its own captive power plant, which it does, on the backs of a bunch of trucks in their parking lot?

No, it's not inefficient.

Well, I think we haven't completely exhausted the supply of the turbines relative to GPUs.