Doug Burgum
speaker
1,008 appearances
32 recordings
11 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Doug Burgum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
You can't run an electrical grid with just intermittent power. You cannot run with something that is based in intermittent is the definition of solar or wind because the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow every day and you can have it. And so in America, we became dangerously close to that right now. We've got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kind of
of what I'll call the Biden brownouts and blackouts to happen because we oversubsidized the intermittent and we overregulated all of the baseload in an idea to, quote, save the planet. And all we're doing is potentially putting our own country at risk.
Well, the regulatory attack was a whole of government. So it did attack the formation of capital. I mean, you came up with regulatory rules that made it impossible for baseload power from fossil fuels even get a permit. Well, if you can't get a permit, then you can't get access to capital. You can't get access to insurance.
And then you had protests and social media and everybody going online saying, oh, we've got to exit from all this. And this same phenomena happened in Germany. I think it's very clear right now that a lot of that A lot of what I call the social media driven concerns were part of, you know, psyops operations from places like Russia.
I mean, it was Russia's great advantage to get Germany to shut down nuclear, to shut down all their coal production. And hey, we have a solution, just buy all your natural gas from us. So Germany spent a half a trillion dollars, $500 billion on the quote, air quotes, transition to green energy. They were transitioning to wind and solar. half a trillion, $500 billion.
They today produce 20% less electricity and that electricity costs three times as much as it did before they began the transition. And now we have the war with Russia and Ukraine. What are they doing? They were scrambling to try to reopened coal plants. They were scrambling to try to get back in the nuclear game. They were saying, wow, we overshot the mark. We went too far.
Again, highly subsidizing intermittent sources. And so it's like, I think part of the awakening that is occurring right now is that if the greatest existential threat to the planet and to America is not one degree of climate change in the year 2100, because guess what? Innovation
We'll solve any challenges that we have with climate change, with innovation, and we won't have innovation without electricity. And actually losing the AI arms race to China is the real threat.
Yeah, and some of that could be coming in the next decade. It doesn't help us today because today we've got to shore it up. And I think one thing that, you know, having spent 30 years in tech, we never used more than 1% of the nation's electrical production. And it was because computers were getting more... You mean tech? Yeah, tech.
The tech industry. We used 1% and no one paid any attention. And the tech industry didn't pay any attention to power generation because they didn't have to because PCs got more efficient, software got more efficient. And then America was rich. Everyone was buying appliances that were more efficient. So there wasn't ever really a demand curve on electricity.
But then today with AI, the demand curve is just flying in the face. And when I was at Sarah Week, which is the biggest – energy conclave. When I was speaking to the group, I said, there's something different here this year. And what's different is the five biggest tech companies in America showed up at that conference with $300 billion of CapEx.
You know, the big ones have got 75 billion a piece, you know, for the top ones on that chart. And I'll reflect back to not that long ago, a couple decades ago, I was a corporate officer at Microsoft for seven years. I never went to a CapEx meeting. Somebody said, well, weren't you invited? I said, no, there were no CapEx meetings. You know, we hired salespeople and software developers.
And if we needed an office in Singapore or Munich, we rented it, leased it. And so there was no CapEx. And now they showed up at that conference and I had to speak to all the executives and said, look, these guys aren't here trying to sell you software. They're your biggest customers. They need power and they will do anything.
And the regulated power providers and some in the industry just have never seen a demand curve. So it's like a collision between high tech and the power generation in America. And coming from that, we've got to figure out a way to break through this.
Well, I'd say that the good news is that we have a president of the United States that understands this. And that's why on day one in office, he declared an energy emergency. Some folks that aren't. familiar with what you've just described, this awareness that we're facing a crisis.
We're questioning whether we had an energy emergency, but as you've just described, we have a huge one relative to our grid, grid stability. We don't have enough power to win the AI arms race. And the AI arms race means without that, we lose the defense battle. Because it's not just robotics in manufacturing,
you know, if we're going to have a golden dome, if we're going to have any ability to defend ourselves from hypersonics or, you know, protect our fleet around the ocean, not to have them all wiped out in the first hour of a conflict, we have to have AI both targeting and a defense standpoint. So you can't separate defense from AI anymore either. So this is, it's a mission critical. So with that,
with that energy emergency then we have to pull out all stops so back to any dc uh which by the way for those that are easy to remember it's like acdc it's any dc and then we could even have a little lightning bolt and the logo i don't know if you're gonna get there dog but you know t-shirt have t-shirts i actually might make that t-shirt for you i mean i think it's you guys sell swag on this podcast i think that's going to be the new one uh new bestseller anyway with with the you
could sell that swag you know we could fund a new energy program yeah we go yeah with the but what are we're not a organization we're like a small tiger team and think of it more like a governor's economic development super super team president trump is asking us to find things that are critical to the infrastructure where they're running into roadblocks and then help them i want to say white glove concierge service help them get the permit help them get started the capital is there
It's often a regulatory thing that's stopping, you know, like natural gas getting into New England. We've got, I mean, we're never gonna build an AI data center in New York or in New England if the price of natural gas is three times higher than it is in Pennsylvania. And yet they're still campaigning on, hey, we blocked this natural gas pipeline.
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