Zach Dell

Some states have municipally-owned utilities, what are called cooperatives, co-ops.

And there's a bunch of interesting history, by the way, to how all these things came together and the sequencing of them.

But the grid is a real-time machine.

There's no storage, effectively, on the grid.

That's changing, and we're going to talk about some of that today.

But it's an always-on, real-time, safety-critical machine that is, unfortunately, not sized for modern power demand.

It's really not sized for where power demand is going.

And part of why BASE exists is to help scale this infrastructure to meet the power demand that we're seeing today and what we think we're going to see in the future.

So I'm very grateful for the history and the companies and the people that have come before us to build out this infrastructure.

And it's really been the backbone of the American economy.

If you look at the turn of the century, early 1900s, sub 5% of people had power to their home.

That changed dramatically through the 30s and the 40s and then

the New Deal brought a bunch of electricity infrastructure to the country.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam were all products of the New Deal.

And then into the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you had the build-out of electricity infrastructure across the country.

What's really interesting is the deregulation that we saw across the country in that time period, the airlines, telecommunications industry, the trucking industry, the electricity industry didn't really see that until the late 90s.

And

California was one of the first states to start to deregulate in the late 90s.

And very quickly, the Enron situation happened where you had a number of market participants manipulate power prices in California.

And that put a real quick stop to deregulation across the country.