Jigar Shah

That's a complicated question, right? I think that we just talked about all of the technology breakthroughs that we have in our pipeline that we're not going to be sharing with China this time around and that we're going to be manufacturing and deploying here. China has hit that price point by bankrupting their lithium. suppliers, right?

And so every lithium supplier in China is losing money and they have started shutting in capacity. So like, do I love the fact that the cost of batteries are lower? Yes, of course I do. But do I love the fact that everyone in their supply chain is losing money right now? Not really. It doesn't make me feel like this is a very stable supply chain that is going to be able to be

trusted to build our next generation grid on top of, right? And so I think it's important for us to recognize that when we think about diversification, we think about national security, we think about global competitiveness, but we also think about like figuring out how to make sure we have stable companies that can actually like participate in the private markets, raise capital,

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe. But in some cases, I would say, no, we need to make sure that these are stable companies that can provide the maintenance, provide the warranties, provide all these things so that we can actually build our entire modern energy infrastructure on top of it.

Well, look, I think that if you remove any of those policy supports, the question is, what do you replace it with? Right. And so you replace it with tariffs. You can replace it with other things. Now, that is a recipe for making things more expensive, not less expensive. But those are all policy choices. People can make those policy choices.

But in the end, if these companies go bankrupt, what happened last time is that those technologies made their way to China. And so I hope that that doesn't happen this time around.

I hope that people recognize that these are American technologies, that we invented them, and that we now need to make sure that they are supported so that we can actually make sure they flourish here in the United States, and then we can export them around the world. That has been the industrial backbone of the United States for decades. But I think that if the policy support starts to fracture—

Well, then, you know, these companies may end up being companies who are on the chopping block and those technologies will go to the highest bidder.

Remember that autos is one of the largest parts of our economy. I mean, it is not surprising to me that people do not want the big three automakers to go bankrupt. that they want to make sure that they can make this transition in a way that makes sense for workers, for supply chains, for all of those people who are employed in those industries, right?

And so we have the best technology in the world. Our automakers have the ability to make this pivot, but they're going to need a little time. And so we need to make sure that in these really important industries that we're not outsourcing all of it to other countries, that some of it is, a big part of it is being done here, and that includes steel manufacturing, aluminum manufacturing.

I think it's important to our national security for them to be very domestic.

I'm saying that if you think about what it's gonna take to decarbonize our grid by 2035, which is what President Biden has outlined, and our economy by 2050, you have to bring the American people along with you. And for them, importing every single thing we deploy here in the United States isn't gonna work. That's just not going to work.

And so we have to make sure that this is something that everyone is cheering about. And we can, because we have the best technology in the world. We haven't tried to do big things in these particular sectors in a long time, but we're doing them now. And I'm pretty sure that when we come back and talk about this in 2030 or 2031, everyone is going to be looking at themselves going, okay,

Yeah, we were a lot better than we gave ourselves credit for.

Well, I think we should start by saying that the Department of Energy has approved so many new energy efficiency measures that we're going to continue to have energy efficiency for as far as the eye can see. And I think that's going to play a major role in meeting load growth right now. But the bigger part of load growth is not AI data centers.

You know, I think people want to blame data centers, and data centers are important, but a lot of people want to store their photos forever of their children, right? And so they pay the extra $2.99 a month to do that stuff. And make no mistake, most of the load growth in the data center side is still cloud-based. AI is coming, but it's not yet the dominant thing that's going in.

Most of it is light manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, EV and, you know, heat pumps and all sorts of other stuff. Right. And so we have multiple solutions to load growth. But I think it's important to recognize that we have just had so much winning.

Like so many people have chosen the United States as their place to commercialize their technology and not just American innovators and entrepreneurs, Japanese and Korean innovators and entrepreneurs, European innovators and entrepreneurs. Everyone is choosing America to scale up their technology. And that is awesome. And that's where the load growth is coming from.

Well, I think we have to take one step back. I think there's a recognition by all the hyperscale data center companies that their power demand is uniquely harmful to the cost of electricity. And so I think there is a recognition by the hyperscale data center companies that they do not want to pass the costs of their data centers on to poor people like, you know, was happening in the past.

Not that they were wanting to do that, but the utilities sort of offered them an industrial rate. And so there is an awakening by the hyperscale data center companies and the governors and the public service commissions and the utilities to say, okay, hey, wait a second, if these guys are going to cost so much to serve, we should make them pay full freight.