It was a pleasure to share the stage with Will Conkling from Google this week to talk about a topic neither of us can stop thinking about: data centers and the energy transition. My key takeaways:
📈 When consumers rally around something, we’ve seen demand grow beyond imagination. I'm convinced that energy demand forecasts for AI are not just real—they're potentially underestimated when we look at historical computing paradigm shifts.
⚡ We can’t build and interconnect new power plants fast enough to support this demand. We need to be exploring new, creative ideas to solve our peak supply problem in years not decades, including the only thing we can scale immediately — latent resources already connected to the grid.
💡 Residential virtual power plants are clearly the most readily abundant and best solution that can bring benefits to both the community (bill savings, reduced rate increases) and the grid (fast, inexpensive, flexible, distributed megawatts). They are part of a larger strategy, but vitally important as we build out infrastructure and try to meet the challenges of this impending supply gap.
