Johanna Mathieu

We say behind the meters or at their site so that they can supply some of the load themselves.

And that helps because it solves some of these bottleneck challenges with respect to the grid.

Even if we have sufficient generation on the grid, if we can't get the power to the data center, it helps for the data center to have some things to generate power on its own side.

But I think a big issue here that we face is that whenever we connect anything big to the grid, either a new generator or a data center or something else, we have to run something called an interconnection study to determine when we do that connection, are we going to be able to supply power?

Is it going to be reliable?

Is it going to affect grid stability, et cetera?

And those studies take a while to run because you're doing a lot of engineering calculations to figure out if everything's going to work.

And that's why you're seeing some kinds of hangups now where

Things are taking a long time and then companies want to build their own generation to be able to expedite that process so that they don't look as large of a load to the grid.

That's a great question too.

Electric vehicles certainly is something we talk a lot about.

We also have been talking a lot about electrifying heating, like heat pumps, and also industrial processes that use heat that traditionally use fossil fuels to generate heat, but now we can use electricity for that as well.

Companies and homeowners that want to consume more renewable power, green power, often want to electrify things that traditionally use fossil fuels.

So all of these lead to load growth.

And so I work on a variety of these different topics, including thinking about converting our home heating and cooling systems into electric systems.

So replacing that gas furnace with an electric heat pump.

I think it changes a variety of things.

So we always are very risk averse in how we operate the power system because we want to make sure that failure has a very low chance of happening.

We don't want power outages to happen and for people to experience them regularly.

So we often operate the system very far from any chance of an outage.