Do data centers actually increase electricity prices? No...and yes

You don’t have to look far to see the vitriol and backlash ignited by the rapid expansion of hyperscaler data centers. While critics and activists tend to focus their ire on resource consumption and residents’ electricity bills, the reality of data center economics is far more complex. In this episode of Catalyst, host Shayle Kann sits down with Andy Lubershane, head of research at Energy Impact Partners, to unpack the nuances. They crunch the numbers behind utility rate structures, consider the "denominator effect" that can lower customers’ rates, and dig into the supply chain crunches pushing global power system costs higher. Shayle and Andy discuss: - Why a new data center can reduce utility rates for locals while contributing to rising costs elsewhere - How data centers impact utility tariff rates - Separating public perception of data centers from the reality of the grid - How soaring demand for transformers, switchgear, conductors, gas turbines, and labor is driving systemic cost increases across the power sector - Strategies to mitigate rising global grid costs, from load flexibility and distributed energy resources (DERs) to energy efficiency hardware - Catalyst: What comes after the data center backlash? - Catalyst: Enter the electric supercycle - Catalyst: Can AI revolutionize grid operations? - Catalyst: Inside the AI power wars - Open Circuit: As midterms approach, electricity bills are on the ballot - Open Circuit: Data centers have a Texas-sized energy problem - Latitude Media: The great home battery financing experiment Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at https://www.energyhub.com/ Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting https://www.bloomenergy.com This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at https://www.engieresources.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

• 0:07Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So, last week on the show, I talked to Brian Janis about the data center backlash. What else? And I alluded to this piece that my partner and frequent guest on the show, Andy Lubrashain, published recently about one component of the backlash, which is the impact of data centers on electricity prices for customers. The question is essentially whether data centers are causing electricity prices to rise, to which Andy's answer was essentially no and also yes. And I think it's really important and a not well-understood dynamic, why these can both be true. So I brought Andy back on and we're talking through it. That's coming up next.

• 0:58Speaker 00

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• 1:40Speaker 00

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• 1:55Speaker 02

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• 2:29Shayle Kann?

  Andy, welcome back.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I'm so excited to be back once again, talking yet again about data centers and energy and the interplay of those two things.

• 2:40Shayle Kann?

  As one does. So, okay, so you wrote this piece, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, that I thought made one, basically one central point that I haven't really seen anybody else make and that I think is really important, because there's all of this dialogue right now about the impact of data centers on electricity prices, and it's wrapped up in the backlash, et cetera, et cetera. But the key point that I think you made, that I think we should tease out in great detail, is the separation of, I would say, the local from the global. And the distinguishing between those two tells you kind of two very different stories in answer to that question of what is the impact of data centers on electricity prices. So let's talk about local first.

• 3:21Shayle Kann?

  What is the evidence today, like what can we say with any degree of definitiveness about the local impact of data centers on electricity prices? In other words, the impact that a data center in, within one's utility territory has on that repair's bill?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  I should say to begin with, the reason that I wrote this piece and the reason I've been thinking about this question is, of course, because so many people in my life, not just professionally, but also just friends and family members, because they know I work in energy, of course, and because everyone in the public now has some association between data centers and energy, which is part of the issue here. You know, I have lots of people, like my mom and some random friends, being like, are data centers making my electricity bill go up? And I had to, I realized that there is not an easy answer to that. There's not one simple answer. The answer is nuanced, and it really depends on your perspective. As we'll come around to, I think globally speaking, the answer is yes.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  But let's start with local, because in that context, I think the answer is generally no.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Because, you know, if you think about it, like, you know, naively, if you think about adding a new large electricity load to any utility system, any utility territory, it's going to have two impacts. It's going to cost something to bring that new load online, to interconnect it, to serve it with new generation, to do whatever you need to do to get the energy delivered to that large new load in your system. And then it's also going to have another impact, which is going to consume a lot of energy over time. And if you think about like the basic framework for how utilities charge for their services, which is a highly regulated rate structure, regulated at the federal level,

• 5:11Speaker 03

  regulated at the state level, if you are served by a cooperative or municipal utility, it's even at the city or the sort of community level, right? But the basic structure is always the same. The numerator is how much does it cost in aggregate to deliver energy to all the customers across that utility service area? And the denominator is how many kilowatt-hours do you sell? So it's dollars per kilowatt-hour, and there's all kinds of nuance and detail and how the, that basic formula is translated into everyone's rates, which are different across different customer classes, residential, commercial, industrial. But basically, how much does it cost in aggregate? How many kilowatt-hours are we selling in aggregate?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  And again, naively, if you think about adding a data center to any utility service territory, it's probably going to add, like, it's probably going to add more to the denominator of that equation than to the numerator, because chances are, it's going to, there's, well, let me step back for a second. It's probably going to add more to the denominator of that equation than to the numerator of that equation. And that was especially true, say, five years ago, where in a lot of utility service territories, there was some spare capacity in the system, some headroom on the grid, right? So that you didn't necessarily need to make lots of huge upgrades in order to bring a new data center online.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Maybe you had enough generation capacity to serve that new data center with some mild transmission upgrades to, you know, interconnect it to the grid, but there was enough generation already. Or maybe you need to build a little bit of new generation to serve it, but not to serve the entire thing. And, but you're getting the full benefit of that data center's denominator effect, because you're bringing all these new kilowatt-hours online. So sort of that basic formula would suggest that in many cases, like, you should think that bringing a new data center online will reduce rates.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  In reality, what we're seeing today, of course, is that in most utility service territories, it's not the case that there's a lot of headroom left on the grid. There's no more headroom left in the grid, there's no more spare capacity in most places, which means that oftentimes you will have to build new power generation, you will have to make some additional upgrades, maybe build some significant new transmission line or upgrades to major substations, in which case the picture is less clear, right? You're going to add a significant amount to the numerator of the utility's basic cost equation. You're also adding a lot to the denominator. It's a question mark, an empirical question mark,

• 7:58Speaker 03

  whether in that instance, a data center should make everyone's rates go up or down or stay neutral. But, you know, that basic equation is not, it's a useful formula and a useful framework, but in reality, it's not how rates are always set.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Data centers are extraordinarily large customers in most service territories.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  You know, for a mid-sized utility, most of the kind of hundreds of megawatt-scale data centers we're seeing today would add 10%, 20%, 30% or more, if we're getting up to gigascale data centers, to the utility's total load. So they're extraordinary customers, and so the utilities are, I think understandably and correctly, taking extraordinary care to make sure that the specific tariffs that they work out with these data center customers and the specific, you know, other negotiated agreements they work out with those customers. Are ensuring that the denominator effect is bigger, that the data center is paying their fair share,

• 9:10Speaker 03

  and oftentimes more than their fair share with a buffer, relative to the kilowatt hours they add to the system. So in fact, like, I think the utilities and the data centers are doing a pretty good job at the local level, like, when any given new data center comes to town, at making sure that that data center is not going to raise your rates, and in fact, should lower your rates a bit, right?

• 9:36Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, we're starting to see now, it's a little bit more anecdotal, because it's, I think it's just emergent. But we're now seeing the first, like, announcements from utilities of going to regulators and requesting rate decreases as a result of large loads in their territory. We've seen a few of those now. I think we're going to see more. I think the reason for that is that, you know, you described the fundamental equation. I think the key thing to understand is that the numerator, the cost to serve, it's really a, in this context, it's a net cost to serve, right? It's a question of how much does the utility need to invest, net of what they're getting out of the tariff from the data center? And so I think the phases that we've gone through,

• 10:21Shayle Kann?

  like, I think they're, I think we're in phase three now, maybe, of how this is all played out. Phase one is what you described, which is like, there's a period when data centers were already, you know, we were in cloud world and Bitcoin world, and there were data centers, and they were getting built, and there was headroom on the grid, and the denominator effect was, like, clear, and it was fine. Nobody was really upset about it. In fact, if anything, utilities were, like, creating incentives, utilities in states, right? Sales tax exemptions and so on. Everybody was creating incentives for data centers. Okay, then the AI boom comes, and data centers start flooding all over the country and utility territories. And there was a period of time when, I think broadly speaking,

• 11:02Shayle Kann?

  utilities were not, they had not yet adapted to then what they could command, or maybe they couldn't command it yet, I don't know. But either way, it hadn't changed that much, what they were commanding in terms of tariffs and bringing in capacity and all these things. And so then there was this period in between when, like, yeah, I think the evidence was sort of mixed, and it wasn't entirely clear at the local level where data centers increasing bills or decreasing bills. And now I think we're entering phase three, where utilities have wised up to this entirely. It is very clear that they hold all the cards, and everybody is so desperate to get capacity, they'll kind of do whatever they can. And so it's becoming standard and commonplace

• 11:45Shayle Kann?

  to ensure that when the announcement goes out that the utility has agreed to interconnect a new data center alongside that announcement, they can say, and this is, at a bare minimum, not going to increase rates, and oftentimes now, going to reduce rates. So I think it is becoming increasingly clear now that, like, hyperscale data centers at the local level, because of how the market dynamics are playing out, are mostly going to keep flat or decrease rates locally.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  I agree, and I would say trending towards are going to have to decrease rates locally. Like, you're going to have to be able to say that, because, because of this surge in public opposition to data center development that we've seen, particularly at the local level. And I thought it was really telling. There was a Gallup poll recently, which is one of the, one of the many polls that is showing that the public has turned pretty dramatically against data centers. And that, that much is, is very clear at this point. That's kind of like very widely reported on. But what I thought was interesting is if you dig one level deeper into the, into the responses in this Gallup poll, and you ask people, okay, why do you? People who, who are averse to having a data center built anywhere near them,

• 13:02Speaker 03

  you ask why? The number one reason is water consumption, which was kind of surprising to me. And it's actually, as far as I understand it, this is not an area of expertise for me. But I, I think it's probably a bit of a red herring in most places outside of very, sort of, water-restricted areas. But the number two and the number three reason people cite have to do with energy use. The, the number two reason is basically like, it's going to use too much energy. And the number three reason is it's going to make my electricity prices go up. So for better or for worse, the utilities and the data center operators are pretty much tied hand in hand in terms of public perception here. And I think you're going to have to make the deal sweet enough for people.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  You're going to have to make, it, it really behooves both of those parties to be able to say, with great confidence, this is going to reduce your electricity bill, you know, at least relative to the baseline without this data center in the area. And, and I should say, like, there's good data on this already. There was a study that EPRI put out pretty recently, I think just a couple of months ago. And they were just looking at different, you know, utility territories across the country and the impact of data center load on, on rates in those territories. And even if you're not controlling for any kind of correlated variables

• 14:30Speaker 03

  that might bias the analysis, just kind of like, looking at that in a very, again, naive way, you would see that there's basically no correlation between more data centers and higher electricity prices. And when you do control for other variables that might bias the analysis, EPRI found that basically, on average, data centers are lowering customer bills a little bit already. So we are seeing, it's, it's not a major impact. It's something like 6%, but data centers have had a beneficial impact for consumers up, up to this point.

• 15:06Shayle Kann?

  I think you sort of alluded to something that I think is like a really key point, too, which we'll talk about in the context of part two of your thesis on the global side. But it's basically like, are, are data centers locally reducing rates in an absolute sense, or reducing rates in a relative sense? Relative to what they otherwise would have been? Because I, I've done my own little informal survey of friends and family and spouse, and asked them. And I, I mean, I've gotten a remarkably negative set of feedback from people about data centers for, and basically, the, the rank order from that Gallup survey that you said is basically what I've heard, too. It's like water first, and then energy,

• 15:49Shayle Kann?

  and then maybe some other stuff, pollution, and, and, you know, blight or whatever. But mostly it's those things. But there's a component of it that I picked up, too, which is like, you know, I, I'll follow up and ask the question of like, okay, but what if it were going, what if the utility told you it's actually going to reduce rates? Or something like that? And, you know, what if I told you that the water consumption was insignificant? And there's an additional layer to it, which is like, they just don't trust any of the players who are telling them these things. Because it's either going to be the data center companies, or the utility, or maybe the politicians. And like, there's not a lot of trust in many cases for any of those.

• 16:31Shayle Kann?

  And so you, there is this risk that, on a relative basis, data centers do reduce rates, but rates still go up for reasons we're going to talk about in just a minute. And consumers, you know, you just don't get the credit for it.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  I hadn't actually thought about that, but that is obvious, like, yes, absolutely. That's a risk, because if you think at a global level, as we'll talk about, data centers are absolutely going to be pushing up rates and, and other factors, right, in the supply chain. Rates are going up for most people in most places, I think, in the years to come. Then, they won't, most people don't think about the counterfactual, right? And if they've heard that this data center was supposed to make their utility bill go down, and their utility bill does not go down, yeah, clearly, that, that, that will just compound the problem of lack of trust here.

• 17:29Shayle Kann?

  Now, there are some places where I think it will go down in an absolute sense. And that's what some of these, some of these recent announcements that we've seen of like, we actually intend to reduce customers' bills by X dollar, average of X dollars per month. And, and maybe people will notice that. So it's, it's going to be situation-specific. But, okay, so I, I think we've made the core point of like, generally, the direction of travel right now is if a large load shows up in your utility territory, probably it's going to have a zero to negative effect on your electricity bill currently. However, let's talk about the global perspective then.

• 18:13Shayle Kann?

  What would you say is the impact of data centers? We'll start with just data centers and we can broaden it out. But what is the impact of data centers on electricity prices in a global sense?

• 18:22Speaker 03

  So at a global level, data centers are one factor among many. But I'd say they're the biggest factor that is causing this global growth in demand for electricity, which is happening so quickly now, especially because of data centers and the urgency with which data center developers want to bring them online. It's happening so quickly that it kind of counts as like a demand shock in a macroeconomic sense, at least within this, within this sector. Right? There's a demand shock and supply chains, like basically every step in the supply chain

• 19:03Speaker 03

  for equipment for the electricity system to deploying that equipment and getting it online and hooking everything up is bottlenecked and cannot keep up with demand. And because of that, we're seeing, I think, systemic pressure on prices for almost everything in the supply chain that eventually it takes to get kilowatt hours delivered to your home. And so this is the big problem, basically. Like we're in this period of surging demand. Electric system operators, utilities need to build a lot of new infrastructure. They also need to keep up with the existing infrastructure,

• 19:45Speaker 03

  a lot of which is beginning to reach the end of its depreciation cycle, its useful life, right? Like I thought it was a really interesting stat from the Edison Electric Institute. Basically, two thirds of all utility spending across the board in the United States is just for maintenance and hardening of the grid. So keeping up with, with basic maintenance, like keeping the system running, swapping out new equipment for broken, old down equipment. And, you know, the most mission critical hardening things for areas that are being hit by intense storms or wildfire risk and stuff like that. Like sort of two thirds of the expenditures they're making today

• 20:29Speaker 03

  across utilities are non-negotiable and it's, has nothing to do with growth. Right? All that stuff would be happening even if the data center boom were not happening. And so all that stuff is getting more expensive too because of the impact that data center growth is having on the supply chain. So two thirds of their spend is, is going to be higher because of what's happening at a global level. In addition, you know, we talked about how today there's, there's no more headroom in most parts of the electricity system. Like there's no spare capacity. Any new capacity you build is going to be much more expensive than the capacity that we built 20 years ago

• 21:11Speaker 03

  because of this demand shock and supply chain crunch. And, you know, keep in mind, a lot of the capacity that we already have has been at least partially or maybe fully depreciated over decades. And so we're adding a bunch of new costs to the system at a global level that there's very little that, basically nothing that your friendly local utility or data center developer can do about. No matter what kind of, you know, special tariff or agreement they negotiate for that individual facility.

• 21:47Shayle Kann?

  All right, let's be a little more specific. Like name some of the things that have become more expensive and how much more expensive have they become?

• 21:54Speaker 03

  It's hard to not name things that have become more expensive, but like every, every component of the grid conductor is like twice as expensive. So like basic aluminum steel reinforced conductor. Transformers are two plus times more expensive. Switchgear is two times more expensive. Gas power plants are two to three times more expensive. Renewables have gotten more expensive to interconnect to the grid. And by the way, like renewables have been one of the really positive trends for electricity prices in the United States over the past 10 years because there have been many places in the country, especially when you consider the tax credits that renewables have benefited from,

• 22:38Speaker 03

  where the levelized cost of energy, the PPA price that you would pay for wind or solar power is lower than the average cost of, of fossil fuel generation that that energy is displacing. And so that's been a, you know, a trend that has been very much in favor of lower electricity prices in the past 10 years. Now those tax credits over the next four or five years will be expiring. And in addition, renewables are facing more interconnection costs. There's been some, you know, issues in the renewable supply chain as well, which have caused costs to increase. So we're seeing much, much higher costs for renewables, much higher costs for gas. Like basically every part of the system has gotten a lot more expensive. Oh, labor, that's something I think you and I have talked about on the pod before too.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Right? Like everything is more expensive for adding anything to the power system right now.

• 23:29Shayle Kann?

  Right. And then in addition to that, you've said this a couple of times. Like it's, it's not the only factor. There are other factors too, that are like inflationary pressure on electricity prices. And so we should acknowledge those. And those are, those are market specific to some extent. But in the United States, just to like some examples of things that I think about as being risking inflationary pressure on electricity prices. We have tariffs on various things. I mean, that also has affected the cost of renewables and batteries. We have LNG exports that on balance should increase the cost of natural gas in the United States. We have general inflation and cost of capital. I mean, there's like a bunch of stuff that would, is totally orthogonal to the rest of this,

• 24:13Shayle Kann?

  but also just like adds to the otherwise inflationary pressure on electricity.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm, I'm especially worried actually now about that macroeconomic pressure. Right? I mean, we seem to be moving into a higher interest rate environment in general. Certainly in kind of global capital markets. And, and the power system is a big capital expenditure for society that we make sort of generationally. And it would be really great to have been making that investment at the scale we're making it today 10 years ago, when money was so much cheaper.

• 24:56Speaker 00

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• 25:38Speaker 00

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• 27:07Shayle Kann?

  I think back to our mutual friend Nat Bullard had this, like, one of his, a great chart in his annual massive deck that went back to, I don't know, the 1950s or something like that. And it showed the share of GDP per capita. So basically, the share of any given average person's wallet that is spent on electricity each year over time versus the share that is spent on, I think, oil or gasoline, some, you know, version of that. And the electricity share was like remarkably stable. It's like the same amount of our collective income is spent on electricity for the past 70 years. Whereas it's actually pretty volatile

• 27:52Shayle Kann?

  when it comes to oil and gas, well, and gasoline, I should say. And we'll see if that changes. But here's the thing from, okay, so this, this gets to the crux of your analysis, right? At the local level, data centers seem to, on balance, probably decrease electricity prices currently. And at the macro level, they are definitely a factor contributing to an increase in electricity prices. So the logical thing then would be, we should all want as many data centers in our utility territory as possible, right? Like, that's actually the correct, in this specific context, that's the right way to think about it, I think.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. If we're in a data center version of The Prisoner's Dilemma of sorts, absolutely. Like, get it all to my territory to lower my electricity bill, for sure.

• 28:40Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. And make sure that, you know, my utility negotiates the tariff well, and they bring their own capacity, or pay for their own capacity, either way, you know?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's why I, I mean, this is, this is veering off course a little bit, but I, I do wonder how much of the public perception and public acceptance problem is really related to energy use and electricity prices? Like, people say those are the things that they care most about to a Gallup pollster. But as you noted, like, there seems to be something a lot more deep seated here for, for a lot of people around trust of the various parties involved, probably around their feelings toward AI more broadly. And so I don't know for sure if there's anything, like, if this, if you really focused on electricity rates

• 29:30Speaker 03

  and data center operators and utilities came to these incredibly generous agreements for the other ratepayers in the territory, like, whether that would really move the needle or not. That's, that's a, that's a question mark. I have a hypothesis that we need to test.

• 29:48Shayle Kann?

  There's an extreme version, which I don't know if you've seen this. So Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential candidate, is running for, I think, governor of Ohio now. And his platform is that data centers that come into, I guess, the utility territory in Ohio should result in free electricity for the local residents. Now, set aside that that's not how electricity tariffs work. Like, you don't, like, you know, give a particular municipality a different rate from a different municipality in the same territory. But conceptually, he's like, they should just make electricity free for those people. I haven't actually run the math on, like, how much extra, but the extreme version of this

• 30:31Shayle Kann?

  is something like that, right? Like, how much willingness to pay to these hyperscale data center operators have? And how much can they, there is, there is a point where maybe it's not free, but if they reduce everybody's bill by 20%, that's going to be noticeable. Depending on the size of the utility territory, that could be completely impossible or not, right?

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. I wrote a post, like, maybe a year and a half, two years ago. It was called, "For AI, Energy is Everything and Energy is Nothing." And it was all about how, like, if you're trying to build in a data center, an AI data center, computing of whatever kind, you obviously need power. Like, you need power capacity. You need to be hooked up to the grid or hooked up to something that can, like, you need the capacity to get started. But then, once you start running, energy is a pretty small share of the total cost of goods sold for, for that, that data center, right? It's something like 5% to 10% of the total cost. And so, yeah, you, you could, you know, if,

• 31:34Shayle Kann?

  What if you double it?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  What if you double it? What if you triple it? How much impact could that have on the rates for the rest of the, of the community, the ratepayers in, in the system? I think that would start to become pretty meaningful. So we'll see. We'll see if that's where, if that's where this has to go in order to, to secure community buy-in. And I just, following up on another point you made, that's kind of related on the share of global GDP, or sorry, share of national GDP in the US, the share of our wallets, effectively, of all of our, our labor, that is, that is going to energy and electricity specifically. Like, completely, that chart from, from Nat's deck is, is very telling. Like, it has been

• 32:19Speaker 03

  pretty consistent and actually remarkably low in the scheme of things for, for decades and decades. Electricity in particular, like, I was looking at some data going back just to 2010, you know, for the average consumer, it's been between 1% and 1.5% of average personal income over that period, and declining a little bit over that period since 2010 so far. And like, that, that seems like a very small price to pay for most of us. But I will say, like, where this really matters is for lower income consumers, fixed income consumers, for whom electricity could easily be 5%, 10%, maybe even more of their, of

• 33:04Speaker 03

  their wallet. And so, you know, for those people, if you were able to reduce the cost of power by, you know, via getting a new data center in your territory by, I don't know, 30% or something, you're saving up a meaningful amount of their annual budget for them to spend on other good stuff that they like. So I think it could matter.

• 33:25Shayle Kann?

  I would love to see one, maybe the right, maybe this should be a muni or something, who does this, or very small IOU, because the only way this would actually work. But I'd love, like, I'd love, like, some very small utility to issue basically an open call and say, "We've, we've got a site in our territory. We'll put a gigawatt scale data center here." So now you're in, like, pretty rarefied air. "We'll put a gigawatt scale data center here, and we'll interconnect it fast. What you have to commit to is a rate that we've calculated would be sufficient to lower customer, all customer bills in our territory by 25%." I don't know what the number is. And then just, like, see if anybody goes for it.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I would love to see this experiment as well. Let's see if anyone listens to this and decides to give it a shot.

• 34:09Shayle Kann?

  Okay. So then, the last question, obviously, is like, what to do about this? And in general sense, I mean, the, the, and again, this is more what to do about the global problem of all this. Because we're not, we're not headed into a world anytime soon, in my opinion, where these supply chains suddenly become really loose. Like, they're, they're tight, and they're going to stay tight for a little while. I don't know what the ceiling is going to be on, like, gas turbine prices, right? But, you know, every data point that I hear currently is like a new high number that I had never heard before, right? Some CCGT getting itself to, like, $4,000 a kilowatt or whatever.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was gonna say, I think I just saw one come across my desk at, like, $3,600. So that would be, I think that's one of the higher one, higher price points I've seen. But yes, yeah, it seems to, seems to keep going up.

• 35:00Shayle Kann?

  So what can we do about that, if anything?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, the problem, as I said, is everything. Everything costs more, and we need to build more of everything. So in a way, like, it's a cop-out answer, but the answer is do everything. I mean, there's such a panoply of potential solutions, things that can be done in the supply chain and by electric utilities and by data centers that, like, have theoretical benefits for reducing, you know, the total cost of deploying all this stuff, that it's, it's hard to figure out where to start. It's funny, at Energy Impact Partners, where, where we both work, we thought it would be fun to put together

• 35:45Speaker 03

  a deck full of solutions on, you know, things that can improve affordability from our portfolio of companies that we've invested in. And we quickly, you know, we, we thought that at first that we'd get to, like, maybe 10, 15, 20 companies, and that'd be it. But the more we, the more we started putting this together, we realized that, like, well, we're investing in things in general that have a claim to, for the most part, be cheaper, faster, better. And so, like, everything can, can, can make a difference. But, you know, there, there's a few areas that I, in particular, think this will cause more focus on. You know, this, this will raise the profile of a few opportunities relative to a historical trend. One of which I'm, I'm crossing my fingers, I'm sort of forever

• 36:30Speaker 03

  a believer, is energy efficiency. And that can come sort of just natively from consumers who start to see higher electricity rates and decide now is the time to invest in that next more efficient piece of equipment, or whatever it is, you know, insulation for their home, just because the economics pencil, in a way, they didn't before. Or it could come more from utilities who, for a long time now, have looked at these energy efficiency programs as sort of like a regulatory requirement, something we, you know, we put in the back room, we've got to do it, we think it probably makes a difference over time, but it's not something we can really plan on, these efficiency dollars going to work. You know, maybe this

• 37:15Speaker 03

  causes utilities to rethink energy efficiency, sort of bulk kilowatt hour savings in a way that has to be more of a planning resource. So that's one, one place I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, higher prices will, will move the needle for.

• 37:32Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, and I think a derivative of that also would be load flexibility, which is a different means to the same end, right? Conceptually, load flexibility is basically just a way to get our collective demand for electricity to better match the resources that we have on the grid, such that it's a lower cost to serve overall. And so you could do it by lowering the total number of kilowatt hours. You could do it partially by shifting where the, when the kilowatt hours are consumed. And that's what load flexibility is all about. Load flexibility is less unloved, I guess, than energy efficiency, so to speak. So maybe it like, you know, it doesn't need the profile boost quite as much, but I think it will certainly be a beneficiary here.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, load flex, distributed batteries, that sort of thing, at least has been, has been, gotten a lot of attention and has been sexy for people like you and me and a lot of the circles that we, we run in, who are, who are DER nerds and attend the Dervos conference every year. But, but I think, you know, again, it's getting more attention from utilities. And again, not just as sort of like, oh, we got to do some demand response because the regulator tells us every year we have to spend X dollars on demand response, but to something that they should, they should be planning on and planning for. And in some cases, like procuring much more directly. You know, our portfolio company at EIP, Spark Fund,

• 38:59Speaker 03

  has been out there promoting this model of, you know, distributed capacity resources, distributed capacity procurement by utilities, where a utility will go out and say, I want 300 megawatts of load flex and batteries in these specific areas, and I'm willing to go pay for it. And I'll just like, we'll pay for the batteries on customer properties in these places so long as the customer agrees to sign up. So, and, and, you know, I think they're getting some traction with that. So, so yeah, the, the time is very different for distributed energy broadly.

• 39:33Shayle Kann?

  Right. And then, of course, as you said, there are hundreds and hundreds of different things we can do, like every, every part of the value chain is, has inflationary cost pressure. And thus there are ways to make every part of the value chain cheaper. Conductors, generation, transmission, distribution, labor, hardware, software, all sorts of stuff.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, the answer to high prices is, is high prices, right? And to some extent, I think that, that formula is working out in the market. Like transformers are more expensive. So we're seeing more companies that are trying to figure out ways of assembling a supply chain for transformers, like one of, one of our companies, Air Energy, or alternatives, like solid state transformers, like Karen Powers is making. So not to belittle those efforts, like I'm glad those companies are out there, you know, taking really creative approaches to, to building the equipment we need. But I worry less about, about those steps in the supply chain

• 40:36Speaker 03

  because there are companies out there responding to this market signal, which is price. Labor is one, you and I have talked about this a lot, like that moves slower. It's harder to find and train people who can do the kind of work we need done in field settings. Like, you know, it takes, it takes at least a few years to train someone. Probably takes, I don't exactly know, to become like a master electrician, but well more than a few years. And first you have to find people that are capable and want to do the, do the work. I mean, that's, that's one that I worry more about in like a 10 year timeframe.

• 41:16Shayle Kann?

  I think there's lots of reasons to worry about that one. It's, it is a more intractable problem. That said, I think it is a pretty small contributor to the overall cost of electricity. Like the, you know, what is the portion of the cost of electricity that is, that is electricians? It's probably not that big, right? So, and, and so I, it's a big issue, but in this context, it's probably not the biggest one.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  You know, it may be like energy for data centers, like it's everything and it's nothing. You know, like it's not a huge contributor, but if you can't find the electrician to, to plug your thing in, or if you can't find a line worker, enough line workers to build the, you know, the new substation, then, then you got nothing. So I think that's probably how, how that dynamic will play out.

• 42:02Shayle Kann?

  All right, well, it'll be interesting to have this conversation again in like a year or two, when there's more data from this third wave. Right now, I'm, you know, you see announcements, but I think there's going to be like, fast forward 12 months, there's going to be a bunch of new studies that'll come out with like good data on the direct end. The direct impact for sure in local, in a local sense. I haven't seen anybody actually try to do like a comprehensive look at the, the macroeconomic question, but maybe somebody will listen to this and do that because I think it would be interesting as well. Either way, we will see where it goes and I appreciate you coming on again.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, Shayle.

• 42:37Shayle Kann?

  Andy Lubershane is a partner and the head of research at EIP with me. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage Levenson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. All of our episodes are on YouTube. Subscribe to Latitude Media for episodes of this show and Open Circuit. You can find the audio version of the show anywhere you get your audio podcasts. I'm Shayle Khan and this is Catalyst.