Johanna Mathieu

You don't actually care about the exact timing of power consumption.

So the trick is that I don't want every home individually to look like a flexible load, a power plant itself, but I want to aggregate large numbers of these load side resources together.

and collectively they can behave like a power plant.

So we call this a virtual power plant where instead of flexibly producing power like power plants do, we're flexibly consuming power and that helps balance the grid because the grid has actually very little storage in it.

So you always need to make sure supply and demand are balanced.

And you can also do this with data centers.

So you can shift data center loads across the grid to different locations.

You can also change when you do the computing in a data center and shift that slightly over time.

And again, make that resource look flexible to the system.

And then it looks like a virtual power plant as well.

So what those headlines miss is that we have a century of innovation in power systems.

We know how to upgrade our grid.

We know how to better control our grid to optimize operations.

We have a lot of experience with fast load growth in the past from air conditioning load growth, but also even before that, industrial processes, manufacturing in the 1950s and 60s and so forth when our economy was booming on the manufacturing side.

So all of these things

taught us how to build out the grid, make it more reliable, more resilient, and we can react to these things.

I think a key here is we need to invest in a stronger grid and one that is more controllable and able to react to things that might come.

I think the key is when we think reliability for the grid, we think immediately of outages at our home.

And I think a lot of those outages are triggered by small local things.

Like it could be an animal on a power line, choose something they shouldn't chew.