Zach Dell

The grid is one of the most interesting machines in the world.

It is probably the most complicated machine ever built by humans.

It's a little over 100 years old, so it's not actually that old.

And it is something that's kind of out of sight and out of mind for most people until it breaks.

It's a real-time supply and demand machine that is held together by a series of

participants and technologies and regulatory bodies that sounds a lot maybe more complicated than it actually is.

So really what it is, is three grids actually in the US, the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and then ERCOT, which is primarily in the state of Texas.

The Eastern and Western Interconnect are

split by the Rockies.

And what you have is really three main components.

You have generation, so where power is created, wind farms, solar farms, gas peaker plants, coal plants, hydroelectric, geothermal, et cetera.

You have transmission, so high voltage lines that move power across long distances.

And you have distribution, lower voltage lines that move power at the neighborhood level.

In terms of scale, there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines and millions of miles of distribution lines.

And I'm definitely gonna get this fact wrong, but it's something like if you were to string all the distribution and transmission lines together, you'd be able to go to the moon and back like a number of times.

So it's just this massive network of infrastructure.

And the regulatory component is a big piece here.

In about 70% of the country, you have vertically integrated utilities where the generation, the transmission, the distribution are all owned and operated by one company, an investor-owned utility.

And then you have them broken out into service territories, and it's not exactly obvious.

Some states have multiple investor-owned utilities that