Relentless
00:20:22 · Scott Nolan
[00:20:22] S2: Yep. Yeah. And it depends on how many 9s you're going for. So what sort of uptime do you need? If you're trying to do a high end reliable data center, you're looking for more than 99% uptime, 99.999 often. And so you can't afford to have the power source go down. That's why we think a lot about baseload, then baseload being really the dominant thing that you have to solve. You can get there with enough of a portfolio mix in certain geographies, but it's often getting to those same nines through a mix of different things with all the storage you might need or all the peaker turbines you might need, that ends up being just as expensive. So I think, yeah, it's exactly right. If you're trying to achieve baseload, it becomes all about the upfront CapEx, not as much about the OpEx, even for nuclear. The bigger the nuclear plant, the lower the cost of the fuel relative to the cost of energy. If you look at the classic huge gigawatt scale nuclear plants, the fuel is in the single digit percentages of total cost. The smaller you go, though, the more you solve the machine problem of actually building the plan and bringing that cost down, then the fuel becomes more expensive, which is why we're not just focused on schedule and being online this decade. It's how do we also bring the cost down over time just so The US can compete on baseload, just across the board?
00:21:40 · Ty Morse
[00:21:40] S0: There's this interesting idea that people are not very good at understanding exponentials. And right now, we can pretty well extrapolate the growth of energy demand for the next few years. But I think it's interesting to think about, like, what if we're massively underestimating what is required and what the demand might be? What are the biggest, like, constraints and things that are stopping us from moving faster on just turning on more generation?
00:22:04 · Chris Wright
[00:22:04] S1: Well, you know, we we do have transmission problems as well. Right? If you don't locate the source of electricity right next to the demand center and you can't always do that, we have a pretty extensive power grid. It's very expensive and crazy slow to build new power lines. That's a longer term problem we are also trying to fix, but you can take existing power lines and replace the conductors, you know, old school conductors with conductors, superconducting conductors or conductors with lower lighter weight cores and higher conductivity materials where we can deliver much more electricity down the existing power lines. Department of Energy and the Trump administration are pushing this reconducting so we can allow electrons to move faster. Permitting has been a problem. That still remains a problem, the Trump administration is working very hard at fixing that. In fact, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came out today with statements on natural gas power plants, how we're to sweep out a lot of the regulatory burden to allow people to build and permit natural gas plants and pipelines much faster than you previously could. This is very helpful. We want to move at the speed of AI and move at the speed of innovation. We've to have our government to move at the speed of business and innovation. We call Trump speed. He's willing to break things to make it move faster. Most people in government want to nudge and they want to push things that direction or that direction. President Trump has been very bold. He's like, We cannot have China lead the world in AI. Imagine a world where America's bumbling around with the bureaucracy. We had the second Biden administration come in and we were where we were before where we were more focused on taking power plants down and not letting you build anything that might generate greenhouse gas emissions. Just AI wouldn't be happening much in The United States. And to me, if you have a dominant power in AI, they will be the dominant power on the planet militarily, economically, technologically and ultimately socially. And I'm not ready and I don't think any Americans are ready for China as the dominant global power. We've had a freedom, opportunity loving America as the global power for the last century, I think, been fantastic. Is America perfect? Of course not.
00:24:20 · Chris Wright
But we are by far the greatest, most innocuous, most benign, most human promoting global dominant power the world has ever seen. And it's critical that we keep that going. And that means we must bring the dynamism, we must fix all the problems that need to be fixed. But again, it's America. We have American people. We have American businesses. Can we do it? Of course we can do it. Will we do it? We will do it. Am I wrong, Scott?
00:24:45 · Scott Nolan
[00:24:45] S2: Not at all. No, mean, you look at the consumption and consumers are on the question of like, AI be consumed? Absolutely, by both people and by companies. It will be consumed. It's being consumed. The growth is astronomical. To your point, people have a hard time thinking through exponentials. I did over a decade of investing in venture where all you're supposed to do is think about exponentials. People still have a really hard time with it, myself included. It's just very hard to imagine that something 10x's and 10x's again and like 10x's again after that. It's much, much easier to say, Okay, we could see it growing a little bit. Maybe it grows 50%. Oh, maybe that's a 3x, a 5x. People very rarely appreciate that a lot of the big changes that happen in the world are driven by things that 10x again and again and again. So I think that is what's happening and will happen, and it's on the demand side. And, therefore, someone's gonna serve that demand. And if The US doesn't do it, I I agree. It will happen in China. It will happen in other countries, and it will probably happen in a way that's not as safe, not as clean. So And we should take responsibility and make sure that can happen here in a way that we influence. I think that's the task. You then think through the next five years, and how is it all going to work? Great point on the deliveries. Yeah, it takes you a while if you wanna order a turbine now, but people have been ordering turbines for the past few years, so they're on their way. Could we produce even more turbines? Could we ramp production even more aggressively? Yes. But that's up to up to the companies to do. You do see some new companies jumping into the space because they think they wanna lean in, and they think that this is actually gonna be even bigger than the incumbents think. So I think that'll that'll help solve it. I think with the right regulations, American industry, if there is money to be made in it, people will find a way to to solve the problem. So I think I think we'll see a lot of things, like even the fuel cells being used to produce energy off of off of methane, off of natural gas, very unexpected, but turned out to be a use case, and now people are deploying that aggressively. So I think we're going to see a ton of innovation of how to actually deliver this more energy, period.
00:26:52 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
And then whether it's on the grid, I think we're going to see people innovate there. Think we're also gonna see a ton of it behind the meter, just production and consumption on almost isolated islands, whether it's nuclear or something else, and the data center and the power production being right there together with no impact outside of some fence line. [00:27:11] S0: And I think to stay ahead of China, it's going to be incredibly tough. What are the biggest things that you guys are maybe seeing today that people aren't paying attention to that are going to be issues? You could just see them from your vantage points.