Johanna Mathieu

And when outages happen, it's sometimes because we didn't forecast a situation, right?

So either something happened that has never happened before, something was unforeseen, or these extreme weather events that we just haven't experienced before happening at a degree or at a scale that we haven't seen before.

There's a variety of ways we can change how we do risk planning.

We can be more risk averse, which means basically bulking up our system, generating more power, building more power lines, all of that, so that we can make sure that we have a higher margin towards any kind of failure.

We can also control the power grid more intelligently.

so that we can do more with the infrastructure that we already have for example in my work i look at how to make the demand side of the grid so our consumption more flexible so instead of just turning on the lights turning on the tv turning on my air conditioner whenever i want that electricity are there ways to do that a little bit more intelligently so that my load can be shaped to match when power is available in the system to react to system needs

And some people frame this as a little bit scary, like you don't want the utility company playing with your air conditioner and changing your temperature set points in your house.

But you can do this in very intelligent ways where nobody would notice the impact because your house would be comfortable and you get to turn on anything you wanted.

Basically, just be small tweaks on when that happened.

And that makes the whole system much more efficient.

reliable and resilient so that you're basically making the demand side as responsive as the supply side of the system.

And this is what we mean when we say flexible electricity demand.

Yeah, that's super exciting.

That's exactly the sort of thing that I work on.

So I think a massive resource could come from the demand side, the buildings, the electric vehicles, the data centers themselves that we're worried about.

All of these things can provide flexibility to the grid.

There's technical questions around how to do that because like I mentioned before, you don't want to bug people too much by manipulating their air conditioner or their electric vehicle charging and have their car not charged when they're ready to go.

But all of these loads are flexible in the sense that you just want some service satisfied.

You want your vehicle ready to go.

You want your home comfortable and that's all you need.