Pod Insights Odd Lots This Is How Electricity Rates Are Actually Set About this episode Utilities in the US have a couple big jobs to do. On the one hand, they need to deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. On the other hand, they also need to maintain and upgrade huge amounts of fixed infrastructure. Balancing those two jobs is getting more complicated thanks to America's aging electricity grid and the shift towards renewables. So how are big utilities squaring those two objectives? How do they decide how much money they need to fund new capital investment? How do they decide which customer pays what rate? And what role do regulators play in all these discussions? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Lon Huber, senior vice president of pricing and customer solutions at Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities in the US. We talk about why the ramp-up in renewable energy hasn't led to lower electricity prices for everyone, why fuel is ultimately the most marginal cost of electricity generation, and how utilities are handling booming demand from data centers. Read More:AI Needs So Much Power, It's Making Yours WorseUK Set to Spend £1.8 Billion as Wind Power Overwhelms Grid Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.
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1:04 Tracy Alloway? Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
1:08 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
1:10 Tracy Alloway? Joe, I have big news for you.
1:11 Joe Weisenthal? Go on.
1:12 Tracy Alloway? I'm an electricity generator now.
1:14 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, yeah. Tell me what's up with that.
1:15 Tracy Alloway? This is big news in my personal life. I am finally the proud owner of a pretty big solar panel that is feeding into the grid in Connecticut.
1:24 Joe Weisenthal? How's that going so far? Like, are you no, has it?
1:26 Tracy Alloway? So I got.
1:27 Joe Weisenthal? Do you have lower electricity bills?
1:28 Tracy Alloway? I got one electricity bill so far and it was about $20 for a few weeks, which is amazing.
1:33 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, that's amazing.
1:34 Tracy Alloway? However, I have also experienced my own intermittent energy problems because we are recording today on December 5th. And in case you don't know, it's been snowing up in New England and the solar panels are covered with about eight inches of snow. So there's no electricity.
1:51 Joe Weisenthal? They're not producing any electricity right now.
1:52 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, all the electricity is out. We have a power generator, so that's kicked on. But I'm now learning one of the downsides of renewable energy.
2:00 Joe Weisenthal? No, it's like perfect. This is the end of the conversation right here. It's cheap, but it's intermittent.
2:05 Tracy Alloway? It's cheap and intermittent. Yeah, that's basically it. But you know, it got me thinking. I'm not in Connecticut at the moment. We are both in Washington DC for a big energy conference. And because I am now an electricity generator of sorts and I feed into the grid that is owned by a giant utility, we have never actually interviewed someone from a utility.
2:25 Joe Weisenthal? That's right.
2:26 Tracy Alloway? I don't think we have.
2:26 Joe Weisenthal? I don't think we have either. And I have to say, and now this is starting to make sense to me, that like how utilities work, how pricing in particular works for electricity, is this incredible black hole in my knowledge. Because this has come up, but you know, we're not called customers. We're called ratepayers.
2:47 Tracy Alloway? That's right.
2:48 Joe Weisenthal? And I know that in many markets, there's this negotiation where there's some utility commission or something like that. And the utilities have to figure out, okay, we spent this much and can we raise our prices this much, et cetera. And then, you know, I know there is in some places sort of live auction markets and how the weather changes, the price changes. But I really find this incredibly hard to wrap my head around. I guess basically the question of why you pay what for electricity?
3:14 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, so two things here. Number one, it seems incredibly complex.
3:18 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
3:18 Tracy Alloway? Because of all the factors that you just laid out, including the patchwork of different regulations for different states and the limits there. And also, well, the political tensions as well. That's one thing we can maybe talk about. But the other thing is, it feels like the whole system is becoming more and more complex.
3:35 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
3:35 Tracy Alloway? Because you have more renewable energy coming on.
3:38 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
3:38 Tracy Alloway? A lot of that renewable energy, you know, you get credits for feeding that into the grid, which means special people like me are no longer actually paying that much for electricity, but we're still drawing on the resources of the utilities.
3:50 Joe Weisenthal? And I guess there's really two things. Because there's this rise of sort of distributed energy, rooftop solar and things like that, new forms of energy production. And then something that comes up a lot, the resumption of load growth for the first time in decades.
4:03 Tracy Alloway? That's right.
4:03 Joe Weisenthal? And so you have the renewables, you have load growth, you have this impulse from the public and the corporate sector to reduce emissions overall, net zero. There's always net zero press releases going out over the years. And so how this all comes together wildly complex. And usually when people are explaining it to me, I have to pause them every five seconds. Like, wait, what is that term? What's the capacity market again, all these things? So.
4:26 Tracy Alloway? It's nice of you to warn our listeners in advance that they're going to have to pause this episode quite a bit. No, hopefully we'll be able to explain everything because we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking. With Lon Huber, he is the Senior Vice President of Pricing and Customer Solutions at Duke Energy. So Lon, thank you so much for coming on the show.
4:43 Speaker 05 You bet. Great to be here.
4:44 Tracy Alloway? Is it terrible for companies like Duke when their customers get solar panels? Is it bad? I keep hearing about the utility death spiral.
4:53 Speaker 05 It all comes down to pricing and the rate structure. So it's not an easy answer. If you have the right rate structures, it can actually be a beneficial thing. But a lot of times that isn't the case. And so in your Connecticut example, you're basically getting your fully bundled rate as a credit. But that fully bundled rate, although it's in kilowatt hours, it's actually made up of a lot of KW and fixed infrastructure cost. So that pole outside your house, that's wrapped into an energy charge. Even though, as we all know, if your energy uses drops, that pole doesn't get cut in half. You can't just pull out that pole, hand it to your neighbor. That's fixed infrastructure.
5:32 Tracy Alloway? Right.
5:32 Speaker 05 And that's 70% of the grid.
5:35 Joe Weisenthal? Why don't we zoom out really big? What is the business model of Duke Energy?
5:38 Speaker 05 Ah, all right, this is good. So we have a franchise that enables us to furnish low-cost, reliable electrons as a precondition to economic vitality for our community. So we have essentially a set jurisdiction where nobody else can come in for certain services. And so we have our
5:59 Joe Weisenthal? This is a geographical jurisdiction.
6:01 Speaker 05 Geographical jurisdiction, right? And we're supplying the wires and in some cases, the power generation to that territory. And again, there's obligations and exchanges there. So we're under democratic control of those prices, of the return on equity for investors in this long-term infrastructure, right? So there's balances here. So you have this market discipline entity that still has accountability to local communities, to policymakers and has a way to spread infrastructure costs in a structure that can make long-term, intergenerational sense for communities.
6:43 Tracy Alloway? So you mentioned economic Vitality just then. And one of the things I often hear when I occasionally read books about electricity or the grid is this idea that electricity cost is still heavily subsidized in many ways because we still view it as a sort of social good that enables us to do things like manufacture stuff and power our homes. And I guess my question is like, to what extent do you think that's true?
7:08 Speaker 05 Well, it is certainly true that it is an inelastic necessity to modern civilization, right?
7:16 Joe Weisenthal? I agree.
7:17 Speaker 05 But for the most part, there isn't necessarily, I would say, a large amount of subsidies, at least on the state level. There's some federal tax credits, but again, a lot of those apply more broadly to the sector. But you know, what you could hear is, well, certain types of customers might be subsidizing other types of customers. And so that can pop up where you have these certain classes, whether it's maybe the industrial class could be subsidized by the residential class or vice versa. And that is inherent in a fixed network system.
7:49 Tracy Alloway? Or the non-net metered customers paying the net metered customers, i.e. me.
7:53 Joe Weisenthal? That's right. You explained what Duke is. What is your title is Senior VP Pricing and Customer Solutions. So what is that role?
8:02 Speaker 05 Yeah. So this is all about helping our customers out, not ratepayers, our customers.
8:06 Joe Weisenthal? Customers, right.
8:07 Speaker 05 So these are a large account.
8:09 Joe Weisenthal? Do you actually use the word customers?
8:10 Speaker 05 Yes. The industry has changed a lot. Just, I mean, when I first got in the industry, it was ratepayer all the time.
8:18 Joe Weisenthal? If I'm operating, if I'm operating on dated information, then I'm happy to be correct.
8:22 Tracy Alloway? No, but why was that the, like, why was that the common term?
8:25 Speaker 05 I mean, partly there was just not the technology or visibility into customers. There was a mentality there to a culture built up, but for the most part, it's like, if you don't have any of the analytics, if you don't have the meters, if you don't have the communication back and forth, you're sort of at a distance, right? And all that has changed dramatically in every category.
8:48 Joe Weisenthal? All right. I'm updating my, I'm updating my mental framework of how you see, how you see this. Okay. So you go on with what you do.
8:53 Tracy Alloway? Customer solution.
8:55 Speaker 05 Right, right. And so I've got economic development as well. And so that's new businesses coming in, the existing businesses that are there that also want to grow, the pricing and rate structures all around that. And again, this is for all of the Duke states and customer load analytics, things of that nature should have sort of make it all work and do an A to Z to solve customer problems or goals. So if a customer is like, hey, I want to bring a new manufacturing to the state, my team will work in conjunction with the government and we'll say, okay, well, here's a great site or here's a great community that would really fit the workforce you're looking for, the size of business you're bringing, that type of thing.
9:32 Tracy Alloway? So when it comes to actually setting those types of rates, can you talk to us about, I guess, the building blocks that would go into that? Like, what are you putting presumably into a giant Excel spreadsheet and then spitting out as the final number?
9:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, it all comes down to something called the revenue requirement.
9:49 Joe Weisenthal? Okay.
9:50 Speaker 05 And the revenue requirement basically says, how much money do you need to collect from your customers to cover your investments, to cover operations, and then taxes returned to investors? So that is the big number. Then from there, you slice and dice that based on how the different classes are using energy, right? The makeup, the load profiles and so forth. And you create pricing around that to collect that revenue requirement. But it gets really complicated because the easiest way to collect that revenue requirement is by just having everybody pay a big fixed charge, right? That would be the easiest thing. If I, you know, I need to collect a hundred from you, give me a hundred each month, right?
10:33 Speaker 05 But that doesn't send the best price signals, does it, right? For you to conserve because you would just be using a huge amount of energy because it'd be a hundred dollars every month, no matter what you use, for the most part, right? And there'd be a little bit of fuel there. And so that wasn't palatable, that type of pricing to collect that type of revenue requirement. And so then it was, well, what's the next easiest thing to do, given the state of technology that we have? And that's where you see a lot of the legacy pricing, where it's mostly just usage KWH based.
11:02 Joe Weisenthal? All right, let's talk about the different types of markets then. So there are markets where there's some commission, right, that determines a legitimate price or?
11:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, every state has a public utilities commission, or however they might label it.
11:14 Joe Weisenthal? And so you talk to us about how you interface with the commission. What are the conversations? Like, how often are they? And what are you actually talking about with them?
11:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, regulators are key to making this all work. And they have staffs that work and they scrutinize all of our filings. And so we're in there and there's just basic sort of automatic, oh, that's true ups because fuel went up and, you know, whatever else outside of the control, or we've got these programs that we're updating to more intensive processes like rate cases, where you go in and you say, okay, well, we have made these investments, we're about to make these investments. And, you know, here's what we think is prudent, and here's where we think the capital markets are in terms of return and debt markets and so forth. And so there's a lot of scrutiny there. There's formal data requests. We get thousands upon thousands of data requests, formal, that come in and then they're on
12:06 Speaker 05 the record. Some of them are confidential and then only with parties that that sign certain agreements. But everything is just very well scrutinized in these settings. Some of these proceedings are very contentious and you're under oath. Others, you know, most parties agree and they're like, hey, yeah, this is a good idea. Yeah, go forth, or it's so routine that it doesn't have a big impact.
12:27 Tracy Alloway? Remind us, how many states you're operating in?
12:29 Speaker 05 Six and seven, if you include in only gas, a supply state.
12:33 Tracy Alloway? So one question I wanted to ask, and, you know, hopefully in a slightly diplomatic way, but what are the, what are the big frictions with regulators? Like, is it mostly over cost and pricing structure? Or does it go to environmental? Like, what is it that you, you fight about when you're speaking to regulators?
12:51 Speaker 05 There's another key party involved in all this, and that's the consumer advocate. Most states have it. I used to be working in a consumer advocate office, actually, in the beginning part of my career. And they are meant to really scrutinize things from more of a using and consuming public lens.
13:08 Tracy Alloway? So they'll be representing the criticisms about pricing and things like that?
13:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, so they're representing a constituency there. And the Public Utility Commission is usually the entity in charge of balancing all the different parties and taking in this information. It's quasi judicial. And so you have-
13:28 Tracy Alloway? They're the ones that everyone gets mad at, presumably.
13:30 Speaker 05 They're the public face of sometimes a lot of it. And it really just depends on the state and what's going on. You typically always push back on rate of return, for instance, what you're paying for equity and investors. And that's sort of steady state. And then things can get controversial if something goes wrong on a power plant or something of that nature. But there's sort of that consistent rate case mode that provides some friction there, for sure.
14:15 Speaker 00 What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from the Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.
14:31 Speaker 06 We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.
14:40 Speaker 00 As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says-
14:48 Speaker 07 A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.
15:07 Speaker 00 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.
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15:46 Joe Weisenthal? Let's get into the economics of different types of energy production and consumption and so forth. We've added tons of renewables to the grid over the years, pretty much across the country. Some have gone really fast, like Texas and California. There's not as fast for obvious reasons. Why does that not cause the price of electricity to collapse?
16:07 Speaker 05 Great question. And it gets to all the different aspects of what makes up that electricity bill.
16:14 Joe Weisenthal? Okay.
16:15 Speaker 05 And so when I mentioned before that a lot of the costs are fixed infrastructure costs, right? This is a huge grid. It spans thousands upon thousands of miles, right? Our grid can wrap around the world, like, you know, six times.
16:28 Joe Weisenthal? That's a cool stat.
16:29 Speaker 05 That's how, like, just the mammoth, that's just our distribution system.
16:33 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
16:33 Speaker 05 So that's how big that we're talking about. And so you have that fixed infrastructure, which includes power plants, the power lines, everything of that nature. You have the fuel and all the different, you know, fuel supply and administration and just everything from, like, tree trimming, right? If you have that many miles, you have to think about the trees. And then what if a drunk driver hits one of the poles and a squirrel starts gnawing on things, right? There's a lot in that price of an electric bill. So if you have an intermittent renewable resource, well, what is that good at offsetting? Well, it's good at offsetting fuel expense. If it aligns with the peak of the utility system, it can also avoid future power plants
17:17 Speaker 05 or purchases on the market for capacity. But it all depends on the individual resource and the location to see if it can bring that capacity value. But at least it can provide a fuel savings. And so that's a smaller part of the bill.
17:30 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
17:31 Speaker 05 Right. And so if you're only offsetting a smaller part of the bill, that's why you don't see that downward pressure. And another thing is, a lot of different types of renewables are heavy upfront capital expenses, right? And so that initial investment puts upward pressure on rates, even though it gives a nice long-term hedge or discount on fuel.
17:50 Tracy Alloway? So you mentioned long-term just then. And one of the things that I do not envy utility providers in having to do is to try to sort out immediate energy needs, you know, for the state of our economy and our society right now, but also try to make those giant capital investments for like decades out into the future. How do you guys think about that? That seems tough.
18:12 Speaker 05 It's a lot of responsibility. And it's a collective decision, right? When I mention regulators and consumer advocates, other stakeholders, policymakers in the state. And if you look at utilities in the past, they have completely shaped the landscape of states. And so Duke Energy, for instance, I mean, we were like, hey, hydro. And we built a huge amount of lakes all around the Carolinas to get that power. Then we
18:37 Joe Weisenthal? There are a lot of lakes in the Carolinas, right?
18:39 Speaker 05 Yeah. And some of them are artificial from, from, you know, from, and that brings recreation. It brings, you know, it brings so many different other things to the state. It changes the landscape. You know, then you get into nuclear, right? These are like 80-year assets.
18:52 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
18:53 Speaker 05 And back then, you needed to have, and even still today, pumped hydro to store some of that nuclear during the down times of the day. And so now you're creating different lakes at elevations to move water up and down as long-duration storage. So these are like big landscape changing.
19:12 Joe Weisenthal? Just like the original battery, right? So you have like, you have excess electricity at some point, maybe during the night with nuclear or during the day with solar and use that electricity to lift water to a high elevation. And then at night it rolls downhill and then spins a wheel or something like that.
19:26 Speaker 05 That's exactly right.
19:26 Joe Weisenthal? I've always thought that was just such a fascinating concept, but on batteries. So you mentioned that one of the issues with, say, solar or what we think of as renewables is that they're intermittent and so forth. Battery technology. Technology is getting a lot better. And I keep seeing stats about how, again, in some markets like Texas and California, especially during high-stress periods, you increasingly see grid-level batteries playing an important part of the mix that's supplying energy. In the last few years, how much have you seen batteries and the improvement in battery technology sort of change the economics of renewables?
20:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, again, and this gets to the beginning of why this area is so complex, because not only do you have the patchwork of regulation and utilities, but each geographic region, when you have weather-dependent generation, it brings something unique. And so a solar plus storage facility in Arizona is going to have a lot of different economics than, say, a North Carolina.
20:26 Joe Weisenthal? Okay.
20:26 Speaker 05 Right? And so you've got more sun, maybe cheaper, flatter land, and you have a summer peak that you really worry about in Arizona. And so a four-hour mix with tracking solar can provide a decent amount of capacity value in Arizona. Switch to, say, Midwest, well, where can be the peak? The peak could be winter. Well, what does the winter peak look like? Well, it could be a week of cloudy weather where you see no sun. And it could, these very cold, extreme weather events could last for many days. So that's a very different set of economics and outcomes. And so it really depends on where you are. In general, batteries in around the four-hour duration
21:11 Speaker 05 have really come a long way, paired with renewables, especially in those markets where you have that summer peak. But we're still trying to crack the longer-term, extreme-weather-event type of peaks.
21:22 Tracy Alloway? So it is kind of true that, at the moment, we sort of perversely solve the problem of intermittent energy and the fact that, you know, solar and wind tends to come on and off with more generation. Right? So we don't store the extra energy. We just try to make up for it with generation from other sources when that goes offline, when the solar and wind goes offline. How far are we from solving that storage problem? Just to press on Joe's point.
21:49 Speaker 05 Well, that is the big question. Is there a startup out there that has the solution that'll be ready in five years and can scale with some type of new long duration storage technology, right? There's Form Energy, there's others that are out there that could be very promising. So time will tell when those breakthroughs will happen on the storage side. But to your point, right now, it takes a great diversity of resources to make this all work and all the above. And that's why there's concern of when certain states or advocates say, well, we don't like that particular resource, or we want you to do more of that. There has to be a balance there because they all sort of work in synergy. And there's really complex modeling that sort of shows how this all works to keep
22:33 Speaker 05 that reliability during those extreme events. But what you don't want to do is have to build two systems, a renewable system that is there when the weather is great, and then an entire backup fossil system, right?
22:44 Joe Weisenthal? Well, so the third thing that we haven't started talking about yet, when you talk about like these different conceptual systems, the fossil fuel system, the renewables and battery system, and that's nuclear. And one thing that's come up on the show in the past is that some of the advocates of much more aggressive nuclear build out don't like the current market structure model because they say, look, we have this huge gigantic upfront costs and we need some price certainty. And if we're going to have an electricity market in which we're not getting any revenue during the really sunny days because Tracy doesn't need to pay anything into the grid at all.
23:26 Tracy Alloway? It's all my fault.
23:27 Joe Weisenthal? It's really hard to justify the planning and the upfront cost and the years of construction and work for everything that we know that's difficult about nuclear. Do they have a point that when we're thinking about market structure for electricity, that it's hard to optimize for a world that has a lot of nuclear but also has a lot of room for the Tracy's or the solar firms in the world?
23:48 Speaker 05 Yeah. So this gets back to the larger market structures out there. And so. Some markets are considered restructured, meaning they have opened competition on the generation side of the business, right? The wires is a natural monopoly. You don't want a thousands exacting wires across the street, right? But generation was thought, well, there could be some competition there. And so some markets reformed, others stayed vertically integrated. And like I mentioned, we're in both, so we can see both and what works and what doesn't, and where you can get some advantages and where there's some issues. And again, as we talked about, there is a trend of a lot higher load growth.
24:27 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
24:28 Speaker 05 And these markets came about during a time where it's relatively calm and flat to maybe a modest load growth. And they set up their markets where, again, you have energy and capacity, and they have energy markets, which are a lot deeper, but capacity markets in the end of the day are fixed infrastructure, big, lumpy investments. How do you encourage fixed infrastructure out there? What price signals do you send? Because you're either sending too much dollars or too little dollars. It's very hard to get right on the infrastructure side. Some markets just said, like ERCOT, we're not going to have something specific for capacity at all. Others have capacity price signals. And so that's the inherent tension of where do you get that revenue to recover those big investments?
25:10 Joe Weisenthal? So just on this point, you mentioned ERCOT. And so that's Texas, right? So in Texas, basically, it's anyone can plug into the grid and sell, but there's no excess capacity. What is a capacity market specifically?
25:24 Speaker 05 A capacity market is all about providing the payments needed to encourage big new infrastructure investments with generators, right? So in this example...
25:35 Joe Weisenthal? So it's money to a producer of energy that is like, you're going to pay them to exist, basically.
25:41 Speaker 05 That's right.
25:42 Joe Weisenthal? Regardless of what that day's market conditions are like for electricity.
25:45 Speaker 05 And so if you have some, if the energy prices are very low because everybody has zero marginal cost renewables that day because it's sunny.
25:52 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
25:53 Speaker 05 They're still getting capacity payments.
25:54 Joe Weisenthal? Got it.
25:55 Speaker 05 Right? As long as they show up. And there's big penalties if they don't.
25:59 Tracy Alloway? Well, in terms of storage and maybe starting to fix some of these problems, we do have things that people talk about called virtual power plants or distributed power networks, whatever you want to call them. Like, is that a big deal for you guys? Or is it still kind of something that people are just talking a lot about at these types of conferences?
26:18 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. I only hear about them at conferences.
26:20 Tracy Alloway? Yeah. No, same.
26:23 Speaker 05 Well, it is a, I would say it's new branding to something that at least some utilities have, actually have a lot of experience with and have years of a track record with. It falls under the, all the above categories again. And these are devices or, you know, different resources that are out in the distribution system, a lot of times on the customer premise, sometimes behind their meter, oftentimes behind their meter. And it could be something as simple as energy efficiency, but you know, better light bulbs, insulation, and it can move and where virtual power plants really sort of captures it is dispatchable resource, think like smart thermostat, think battery storage on the home, those types of things, controllable water heaters.
27:07 Speaker 05 And the idea is you have an aggregation of all these and you orchestrate this so that it mimics a centralized power plant. Mm-hmm. Now Duke, we've started decades ago, so we have over a million connected devices already out there that we orchestrate. Wow. The numbers add up to something meaningful when we have what we call like demand response events during peak times, but it's not like 50% of the resources out there by any means, right? Now it can grow and people are excited about it now because you have new resources and new technologies that make that orchestration better. So in the past, all we had was just like a hard switch on an AC unit. Now you have the smart thermostat, so you can optimize that and make it so that the customer doesn't even feel that you're making minor changes to their thermostat.
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29:51 Joe Weisenthal? let's talk about load growth so obviously you operate a lot of the southeast we've seen a lot of the sort of new industrialization endeavors battery plants and car plants etc I imagine a lot of these entities are Duke Power customers talk to us about okay I'm setting up a new battery plant I'm looking for a site how long does it take me to plug in and what does that whole process look like when I come to you say hey I'm thinking about I got some tax credit I got some money from the government I want to build a plant somewhere in you know South Carolina or something like that how long does it take until I can actually plug in and get power from you yeah well unfortunately it all depends okay and so when I mentioned there's those restructured markets there's the vertically integrated markets when it's vertically integrated we can see the
30:36 Joe Weisenthal? whole system we can plan for it so if we know a large customer is coming we would put it in what we call our integrated resource plan so you'll often
30:43 Speaker 05 Here IRP.
30:44 Joe Weisenthal? Yep.
30:44 Speaker 05 So we're planning, making sure that generation is there. If you're in a restructured market, it's a bit more complicated. A lot of times utilities aren't necessarily in control of that. You're at the whims of what is trying to be interconnected in queues and so forth. And so there has to be certain bilateral agreements that the customer would have to make perhaps. But in a vertically integrated market and in a restructured market, you do have the teams on the ground that work with that company. They find sites, maybe that have been already just made ready for an economic development opportunity. So that customer would come in, they would give the specifications, the power, the size, workforce, and there'd be a matchmaking.
31:25 Speaker 05 And that matchmaking could actually be pretty quick depending on if there's a site already ready. If there isn't, that will take more time. And then they have to acquire the land. They have to build. At the same time they're building, the utility is building infrastructure, wires infrastructure to serve them. And so it could be a year, it could be five years. It really depends on the site and how fast that customer wants to ramp up. But we know a lot of times to build new manufacturing, they can't do that overnight.
31:53 Joe Weisenthal? Right.
31:53 Speaker 05 Right. And then you have the new complexity of supply chain. There's supply chain constraints on some key equipment out there.
32:01 Tracy Alloway? Oh, this is our chance to talk about transformers, right?
32:05 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
32:05 Tracy Alloway? That's been going on for what, like four years now?
32:08 Joe Weisenthal? Fifty months. So for the latest ISM, electrical components have been in shortage now for four years and two months.
32:14 Tracy Alloway? That's crazy. How are you guys handling that?
32:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, luckily, you know, we can use our size and, you know, move things between states if we need to and work with suppliers. And there's, the utility industry in general is very collaborative, especially when you have emergencies. Right. So we, when we were hit with all these hurricanes this last season, we had to replace, I think it was like 18,000 transformers, right? And so there was, there's industry collaboration that makes that all work. But the real issue gets into these large power transformers for large customers. And, you know, those just take such a long time to build and there's limited production lines for them. And so it definitely, you know, keeps folks up at night as we look to expand and reshore manufacturing.
33:00 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
33:01 Tracy Alloway? So Joe asked you how long it would take to plug in a battery manufacturing plant or something like that. I'm not starting a battery manufacturing plant. I'm doing a data center. How much more complicated or different is that process if I'm running a data center versus batteries might not necessarily fit into this box, but sort of run of the mill manufacturing base?
33:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, most standard manufacturers are a lot smaller in size than a data center. Actually, some of the newer data centers and you can think some AI data centers, those can be a gigawatt and most manufacturing is, you know, 500 megawatts tops typically. You know, you always have outliers and for the most part, it's below 100 megawatts. So all of a sudden you have this big size differential. There's can be a little bit of speed differential there too, where the data center could move quicker, but this really impacts, especially smaller utilities. Duke has a huge system. So, you know, we can absorb some of this, but if you're a smaller utility and you have a two gigawatt peak and all of a sudden a data center comes in with a gigawatt load, that's huge.
34:08 Speaker 05 And what if they don't materialize or what if they're in business for 10 years and then they go away? That fundamentally creates the stranded cost that all the customers have to pay. So these are the tricky issues that are popping up and then you layer on clean energy, right? Do you want to have to build new fossil for that? And a lot of data center companies also, they have clean energy goals. So how do you start to marry these complexities?
34:33 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. How do you marry them?
34:35 Speaker 05 Multi, multi dimensional.
34:37 Tracy Alloway? Long's like, how many more hours do you have?
34:39 Speaker 05 It's a lot of tools in the toolkit. You start with smart contracting and tariffs on the front end to protect all customers in case something doesn't happen. Basically it would be saying, hey, you have obligations, customer. As we build out the grid for you to connect, it'll be X amount of dollars. You've got to pay that even if you don't show up.
34:59 Joe Weisenthal? It's like a purchase commitment, kind of.
35:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, pretty much. So, you know, letter of credit and then there's longer term agreements too, where, and these are newer, where if you said you were going to use 500 megawatts and you're only using 200, you've got to compensate for a portion of that because we've had to build new resources, generation resources to handle you, right? And so you've To cover that. And then you can get into different pricing elements where you have maybe time of use base rates and then you marry that with new ways to bring them clean energy and for them to contribute to clean energy. And that is really sort of the frontier and the exciting stuff. And Duke announced a partnership with a lot of the hyperscalers and Nucor earlier this year that gets into exactly that. How do you accelerate clean energy in a sustainable way financially?
35:46 Tracy Alloway? Is it inevitable that like non metered that system is going to go out of style in a lot of jurisdictions? I know Hawaii ended it recently, I think. And then I think you guys did something in North Carolina relatively recently that went to court. Am I getting in at exactly the wrong time?
36:02 Speaker 05 Well, you're probably getting in in the right time if you're thinking about you individually and your maximization and not societies. And so, so because, because a lot of times your grandfather did once you make that. So you'll be protected for 10, maybe 20 years. So you probably made the right individual purchase decision. Net metering has been reformed in most major markets already. And it's just reflecting the fact of, hey, does this add value to the network or subtract value? Is it financially scalable? And then also, if you're a clean energy advocate, you would look at the price per carbon saved. And so in Connecticut, you have a lot of nuclear clean energy, right? And so you're just how much CO2 savings?
36:43 Joe Weisenthal? You're swapping one clean energy for another one.
36:46 Tracy Alloway? There's actually not that much nuclear in my mind because I think we send it elsewhere is part of the problem.
36:52 Speaker 05 But looking at the overall grid mix, it's always good. It's always good to calculate what you're paying per CO2 saved. And I've done this for Connecticut in my past life. And back then, it was one of the most expensive ways to reduce carbon was rooftop solar in Connecticut.
37:09 Tracy Alloway? So I'm the problem.
37:11 Joe Weisenthal? To the future of solar. Is centralized solar farms? Or if like, or something like that?
37:18 Speaker 05 No, we need, we need it on every scale. But really, there's a lot of promise in distributed energy resources. You just have to get the pricing right and you have to get that combination of technologies right. So at the home, if you had a controllable thermostat and you had battery storage and things to complement that solar system, then it's creating all these other values. And that's what we did in South Carolina in partnership with the solar industry is we said, hey, how can we make these resources more valuable? And then form compensation structures that the industry can sell customers on. And so that's what we did. And so we launched Power Pair, which is a large solar plus storage program that does exactly that encourages solar plus storage coupling. And then it's tied to time of use rates and also controllable batteries. So we're using that during peak time.
38:02 Speaker 05 So there's room for that. There's good space for that and including on like commercial industrial scale. And then you also absolutely need the centralized large scale that brings us great economies of scale to the system.
38:16 Joe Weisenthal? What happened to the grid or the price that people pay for electricity? So there isn't a lot of new nuclear. There's some restarting of plants and there's that one in Pennsylvania that one of the big tech companies is behind, although I don't even think it had been closed all that long. The only like sort of like true recent nuclear were those reactors in Georgia. What happens the day after? So you spend billions of dollars on tons of upfront costs, tons of upfront time getting these new reactors on. What happens the next day when there's just tons more? At that point, kind of free electricity on the grid.
38:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, so it gets to unit order and dispatch. And so grid operators are constantly trying to optimize the system for economics.
39:03 Speaker 05 Yeah. For the most part, right? And so when you have a new generation resource that has a very low marginal price of production. Yeah. That's going to then reduce the output from plants that have a higher cost of production. And so things sort of get restacked and reordered in terms of the merit of what's going on in the system. And that's why natural gas is such a versatile resource because it can go from sort of higher output to a lower output, more of a peaking capability. And so that's why gas is just such a great sort of intermediate type of technology to balance all of that.
39:42 Speaker 05 And so that's essentially what happens. And then, you know, you have load growth and other things that then start to reform the original set of conditions.
39:50 Tracy Alloway? Okay, so you mentioned the revenue requirement as the sort of all important number that you are working towards. How do you actually start to design the rate so that you hit that magic figure?
40:00 Speaker 05 Right, great question. So first, you've got different classes of customers. Industrial load profiles are going to look different than a residential load profile, right? And then you have classifications of what type of system assets you're recovering for. So are you covering for energy related, capacitor related, fixed infrastructure, like the, you know, pole outside your house? And so you break this all up and then you have certain methods to know, well, hey, this customer class is using a lot more transmission versus distribution. And so you have these allocations. From there, you figure out, well, what pricing can I set to recover the revenue requirement? Because again, this is recovering the investment that investors have made, right? Like this is critical. Like if you don't capture this, your credit metrics just go south
40:46 Speaker 05 and it's extremely expensive to borrow money. And this infrastructure game is all about long-term investment. So a change in your borrowing rate has a huge ripple effect on the cost for all the customers in that jurisdiction. So that's why it's really important to collect that revenue requirement. But at the same time, you have to send the right price signals to customers because you don't want to just have them pay that hundred dollars, right? And in the past, it was all volumetric because we didn't have the meters, especially for residential. You didn't have the meters to do anything other. You can do a demand charge, you can do time of use rates. At some point, we actually did have meters, but you have to roll out a truck to the customer to get them on a time of use rate. So you had to drive somebody there, swap out the meter, right? It's incredibly expensive.
41:32 Speaker 05 We've now with advanced meter, we can get around that. So now we can introduce pricing that's more accurate to like how the system actually works. Right. But there's still reluctance to go much more complicated on the residential side because of just how customers understand their energy.
41:46 Joe Weisenthal? Last question, when Tracy gets a big discount on her electricity because of her solar, you know, there's still, there's still all of these costs that have to be borne. And you mentioned that earlier. So who's paying the cost now?
41:59 Speaker 05 Basically, everybody else that does not have that solar, it gets reconstituted.
42:04 Joe Weisenthal? Don't tell your neighbors, Tracy.
42:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, directly to, because this is a, remember, this is a fixed infrastructure system. So this is not like tennis shoes or candy, right? This is a big network, one of the largest, most complicated networks, the first network of modern civilization, pretty much.
42:18 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
42:18 Speaker 05 And so that infrastructure gets just, you know, spread out to others, right? So that's.
42:25 Tracy Alloway? Cry harder about Con Edison, Joe. I'm free. I'm, I'm an independent energy supplier now, kind of. Lon Huber, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts.
42:36 Speaker 05 Thank you for having me.
42:49 Tracy Alloway? Joe, that was pretty fun to learn why I'm the problem.
42:52 Joe Weisenthal? So we, yeah, we've discovered that you're the problem.
42:55 Tracy Alloway? I mean, I do think like there are so many renewable energy solutions out there and all of them do seem to come with some form of downside, whether it's like the very significant capital investments that you have to pony up for stuff that ends up being like very intermittent, whether it's the idea of net metered customers being subsidized by non-net metered customers for their grid use. Everything just seems very complicated.
43:21 Joe Weisenthal? First of all, it's really helpful. I know this is the most basic thing, but it's really helpful to remember that like fuel is just this marginal cost of what you're paying for.
43:29 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
43:30 Joe Weisenthal? That there's everything, there's the line maintenance, there's the production. And he mentioned tree trimming, which is huge because that's a source of wildfires in a lot of areas when the lines touch trees. So there's. All these huge costs. And so it becomes very intuitive that you can add a bunch of solar panels, either on individual households or across the grid in general and see why not only does it not like move the dial down. I don't know if it moves the dial at all. It just moves the dial to other people.
43:58 Tracy Alloway? Well, he did say it was marginally helpful on the fuel cost, but to your point, the fuel costs are not the big thing here. But it was also very interesting to just hear how a utility kind of thinks about designing those rates and all the different like considerations that go into spitting those final numbers out. I guess I hadn't realized like how individualized some of them actually are. Like, I know that we're not all paying a flat number, obviously, but like the differences across residential and commercial and data centers versus a battery plant or something like that.
44:29 Joe Weisenthal? It's also here, just very interesting hearing the different types of, because there's two things, right? There's different types of electricity market structure. And then there's also different types of markets by virtue of their weather, whether we're talking about Arizona versus the Midwest versus the Southeast. But it's interesting to think, you know, like every couple of years now, or maybe every year, you hear about a blackout in Texas. And Texas obviously makes it incredibly easy for pretty much the producer of any kind of power to plug in and start selling their generation instantly.
44:58 Tracy Alloway? And they've got lots of sun, lots of other stuff.
45:01 Joe Weisenthal? They've got a lot of wind, they got everything, but what they don't have is any guaranteed payments to that spare capacity that is not getting paid during most of those sunny days, but then on the day when it's like crazy sunny or crazy snowy or whatever, suddenly needs to be turned on.
45:14 Tracy Alloway? Well, you asked that question about how do you like actually incentivize big nuclear power plants that cost a lot of money? When, you know, someone knows that if they build a nuclear power plant, they might not get like a particular rate for X amount of years. And I think we're back to why solar is the problem, but.
45:32 Joe Weisenthal? No, I don't think it even is that, but I do think it's like, I mean, look, I just think it'll be very interesting under this next administration, because I do think that there are a lot of people who are like, solar is part of the solution. Nuclear is part of the solution. And by, when I say solution, I mean the problem of how do you get more electricity?
45:52 Tracy Alloway? Right.
45:52 Joe Weisenthal? Not more.
45:53 Tracy Alloway? But put it all together.
45:54 Joe Weisenthal? But it's not clear that they were. They fit together and it almost does seem, at least in some markets, like you sort of have to pick one or the other. So lots of fascinating, I guess, question marks about how this evolves.
46:04 Tracy Alloway? Or figure out a new way to design the grid or new storage is probably what we really need.
46:10 Joe Weisenthal? Battery breakthrough, which could solve everything.
46:12 Tracy Alloway? All right. Someone, please, you know, start working on that battery now because you probably haven't realized it's this much of a problem. So you can get started now.
46:19 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
46:20 Tracy Alloway? All right. Shall we leave it there?
46:21 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
46:21 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
46:27 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Lon Huber on Twitter, at Lon Huber. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin, Dashal Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have transcripts, a blog, and a daily newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
46:52 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we record these energy episodes, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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