Aired Jun 16, 2026 · 40 min

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Renewables are now the cheapest source of electricity in history—cheaper than gas, cheaper than coal, and with prices still dropping fast. So why are utilities still planning like the economics haven't changed?

In this episode, host Kinsey Grant Baker speaks with Ramez Naam, climate tech investor and one of the most rigorous trackers of clean energy cost curves, about how solar and batteries won on price, what it will take to rewire utility incentives to reflect that reality, and why hyperscale data centers should be looking at renewables (not behind-the-meter gas) to solve their speed-to-power problem.

Ramez Naam: When you're comparing a raw kilowatt hour, megawatt hour basis, almost everywhere in planet Earth, the cheapest option is renewable.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Hyperscalers happening today, natural gas specifically seem to be sort of de facto response from a lot of these developers and hyperscalers.

Ramez Naam: One technology that we're sleeping on a bit at the utility level is the power of batteries as a grid resource, but also behind the meter resource.

Kinsey Grant Baker: These for all of their low costs and great promise have not necessarily broken through at scale for utilities.

Ramez Naam: One of the core questions for the US is how do we re-engineer our systems and processes to optimize for moving fast so that we can power these technologies that are moving us into leadership in tech in the 21st century.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, wind is close behind, and battery costs have collapsed faster than almost anyone predicted. And yet, many utilities are still planning like energy economics are stuck in the early 2000s. Today we're getting to the bottom of why. Welcome to Power Perspectives, I'm Kinsey Grant Baker, and today we're talking economics. Not sustainability, not politics, not even necessarily the laws of physics, but simple, reliable economics. Because the renewable revolution has quietly become one of the most significant cost stories in the history of energy infrastructure, and that has positioned renewables as a potential key to meeting this historic moment of spiking demand.

The utilities and policymakers who figured that out first could have a serious competitive and regulatory advantage over those who don't, especially if they start to move at a new speed set forth by this quick moving renewable tech space. So who wins and how? My guest today has spent years tracking exactly that shift and figuring out that question's answer. Ramez Naam is a climate and clean energy investor, technologist, author, and one of today's most rigorous thinkers, I would argue about the declining cost curves of solar, wind, batteries, and EVs, and what those cost curves actually mean for how we build and run the grid.

Ramez, welcome to Power Perspectives, how are you today?

Ramez Naam: Kinsey, it's a pleasure to be here, I'm doing well, thank you.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Wonderful, I'm glad to have you. We are big fans of your work here at Energy Central. I hope that you know that in the outreach that we have done to you, but for anybody who is in our audience who might not be a big fan of yours just yet, I'm sure this will change their mind. I would love if you could tell us just a little bit more about, you know, your background for those who haven't checked out your work yet. Can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about what you're up to these days?

Ramez Naam: Absolutely. I'm a computer scientist by training, so I spent 15 years in tech, a lot of it in big tech, and I got very interested in energy, food, water, and natural resources sustainability around 2010, and I decided to write what would become my third book about innovating to provide more abundance for everyone on planet earth with less impact on the planet. And as part of that, I looked into energy specifically, obviously a core technology, and I found this exponential cost decline in solar. I was not the very first to observe it, but was the unique was I came from tech.

And in tech, we have what we call a Moore's law, which is doubling of price performance of compute every 18 months, we're seeing that in AI now. And when I looked at the cost of solar, it looked incredibly similar, not quite the same pace, but exponential decline in cost and the same with batteries and later on became croix happening with wind and EVs as well. So that led to me becoming a forecaster, a speaker, and advisor to many companies and an investor in startups in the space.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Wonderful. And I love that so much of the work that you're doing that is transformative and impactful today is really centered on this finding, this reality that was right there written out for anybody to figure out, right? But I think that it sets us up for a good context of this conversation to dig into how that maybe has shifted. I'm curious to hear sort of what the reality is today. Now that you've been working in this space for a while, you're writing has obviously emphasized a lot of these plunging costs when we're talking about solar, the reliability when we're talking about wind, battery prices, all of these exciting topics.

Could you do us a favor and potentially sum up the, let's call it economic reality of renewables in a couple of sentences for today, what does that, that reality look like?

Ramez Naam: Yes, it when you're comparing on just a raw kilowatt hour, megawatt hour basis, almost everywhere in planet earth, the cheapest option is renewable. And in the US typically that solar in Europe, it might be a little bit different, but most of the world it is solar. Now, that doesn't mean that you have 24/7, it's really a fuel saving technology of value to burn less gas or less coal, in some cases, batteries are plunging in price as well. So we see that in ERCOT now with batteries providing, you know, a quarter or a third of the evening peak. And that is really driven by economics.

In 2010 when I started telling this story that renewables were going to plunge in price, it was difficult for people to accept it. Around 2015 we had the first real crossover event and now it's just very good. And one way to see that is that in nameplate capacity, renewables are something like 93% of what's being built in a total energy generation. Last year, 2025, the growth of renewables in generation, not nameplate capacity, exceeded globally the growth of electricity demand. And solar was about two thirds of that. And solar is doubling every three years and it's it's pace of deployment.

So the world is going very rapidly in this direction and more rapidly each year.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, this is, this is an interesting point here when we're talking about all of this growth and especially when we're talking about this growth on the global scale of solar as a share of generating capacity across all of our power systems across all of the world. There is still a part of me that wonders how come this is still a question. You know, I think a lot of this has to do with what we're seeing with hyperscalers happening today. So much of their concern is speed to power when they are having the conversation around speed to power, whether it's, you know, a hyperscale like a big tech company, a data center developer, they often are falling back, I think, on behind the meter, natural gas.

Tell me a little bit more about why solar is not a bigger part of that equation right now or why gas and natural gas specifically seem to be sort of the de facto response from a lot of these developers and hyperscalers when they're considering how quickly they can get these huge projects online.

Ramez Naam: Yeah, it's really about the shape of the demand curve across the U.S. we see, and in most places, you know, peak demand happens in late afternoon hours on hot summer days or into the early evening and that lines up pretty well with solar generation both by hour of day and by season. And with batteries now getting cheap enough to shift two to four hours of generation, that gets into that evening curve. There's some great graphs of, I think, Ember called it putting solar where the sun don't shine. That now we have a special fraction of solar generation going into hours after sunset.

But that's because of how we use energy. We're asleep at night factories don't always run three shifts air conditioning is a big draw. Data centers are different. Something that people don't appreciate is that the electricity consumption of AI data centers is only five or 10% of the overall fraction of AI. The bulk of it is capex and the bulk of that is capex on the chips themselves. So if you've bought a chip that costs, you know, seven or eight times what your power will cost. You got a data center that makes that, you know, go up to 10 to 20.

You want to run that 24/7. And so critics of renewables have always pointed out to this issue of 24/7 as a core limitation. It hasn't been such an issue for the grid overall because solar's been small. And again, it lined up with that peak. So when you're building a data center, it's not just time to power. It's time to 24/7/365 power.

Kinsey Grant Baker: And this idea of getting to that 24/7/365 power, I would love to hear your perspective on the process, the speed. What is that entail? I know that you have pointed out before the difference between startup speed tech speed and then utility speed. Tell me a little bit more about how that factors into the conversation of renewables playing apart in the AI data center build out.

Ramez Naam: Yeah, I think it factors into renewables in the grid overall and transmission and distribution as well. Look, in the US, for the last several decades, every decade we've had slower electricity load growth, we hit zero per capita electricity load growth around 2000 and started to go negative on a per capita basis, that's not how it always was. In the 50s, we had 10% annual load growth. And so we had institutions built to move that rapidly, but we haven't had to do that. So I think we've had a number of things happen. We've had a more regulation has appeared permitting has gotten harder.

That's put a break on how fast we can build out new generation or new T&D. At the same time, our institutions have just not had to build at that speed. So I think what we're looking at now is seen as a stressor by utilities, but it's also a huge opportunity. We are seeing the fastest load growth we've had in decades driven by AI data centers, but also electrification of industry and eventually electric vehicles. These are just not in a mindset of how to address that, but fundamentally, it's selling more of the product. And so to me, one of the core questions for the US, really, and for the parts of the world, is how do we re-engineer our systems and processes?

Everything from regulation to the utility business model to utility incentive structures to optimize for moving fast so that we can power these technologies that are moving us into leadership in tech in the 21st century.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to dig into that aggressively. I've got some questions written down here that I wanted to get to, but before we do, just so we make sure we kind of cover all of our bases. From a cost perspective, specifically, what makes renewables the best option in your perspective for powering these hyperscale projects? Can you tell me a little bit more about how cost might factor into the decision to pursue solar, for example, instead of natural gas, if we can get these systems to the point where we have 24/7/365 power?

Ramez Naam: So we just see this incredible price plunge and solar. We think that by 2030, the cost of solar and the Midwest in the US will be something like 20 bucks a megawatt hour, which is below the fuel cost of gas. And even when you add in batteries at the incredible pace that battery costs are dropping and there are new technologies like sodium ion that get even the need for lithium that will drive costs further down, we're talking about 24/7 power in a sunny place with solar and batteries, maybe at 50 bucks a megawatt hour in the US, which is basically on par with the generation cost of a combined cycle, natural gas plant, and is lower than industrial power costs and is half, probably, of what these data centers are paying for behind the meter gas generation.

We already have an example in the UAE. They're currently building what they call a one gigawatt base load solar power plant. But it really is, it's five gigawatts of solar, 17 gigawatt hours of batteries. It's absolutely enormous in its scale. It will really generate most of the time more than a gigawatt, but a gigawatt is the minimum. And when you do the math on that, it's less than 100 bucks a megawatt hour is the combined cost of that, which again is on par with natural gas behind the meter in the Middle East or the US. The other thing I want to point out is when I talk about solar, I just want to be realistic, like powering the Northeast or Canada or Northern Europe with solar is really hard.

Wind can play a big role. We need a mix of different power sources to power places that are not sunny all the time. And we can't assume that people or businesses will just move. But we have yet to build the vast majority of these AI data centers. And in situations where you can move demand to where the energy is, you have all this flexibility. So I think our rational process would actually see a huge amount of data center capacity built out in the US Southwest, in the US, for example, or in very sunny countries to take advantage of that continual price decline in solar and batteries.

One last point I'll make is that data centers, which are the fastest load growth that we have in the US and in some ways globally, are becoming incredibly unpopular. And a lot of that is myth, not reality. But there are these perceptions, and some of it is reality. There are these perceptions of pollution, and behind the meter gas, if you look at the Colossus data center that xAI has, is exceeding the nitrous oxide emissions that we would expect from a combined cycle plant of similar size. It's probably exceeding the particulate emissions. It's a perception of water, well guess what, the overwhelming majority of the water use of data centers is actually power gen, which solar and batteries basically don't use.

So I think we have to think about that as well, as if we want to keep building data centers, we have to address the complaints and concerns of people in those communities, and we have polling that shows that powering those data centers with their renewables reduces opposition substantially.

Kinsey Grant Baker: And you know, one bad apple, right? I think that it's important to have the conversations about the impacts of some of these, you know, more negative or, you know, and perceived more nefarious kind of stories when we're talking about data centers and NIMBYism and all of this, because this is a huge factor that a lot of utility professionals too are up against. It's the one thing that they might have, you know, in common in terms of interest and priorities with these data center developers. I think that we, you know, now can, can use these sort of baseline ideas that you have have laid out for us here to have a really thoughtful conversation about what you mentioned before, about the ways that we can get to that speed element that you were, you're mentioning a few minutes back in terms of the processes, the institutions that are required to get to those speeds again, I would love to talk about what needs to change.

So what do you think is, is really the kind of core thesis or really the crux of the challenge for renewables, knowing that the cases is very compelling for renewables and hyperscalers to combine their, their powers, right? What do you think some of the core challenges are there in terms of, you know, regulation, permitting, market design? I would love to hear a little bit more of your perspective there when it comes to some of these more process oriented elements of the energy reality that we have today, potentially serving as roadblocks to renewables, playing a bigger role in the hyperscale build out.

Ramez Naam: If you just look at time to build for a medium-sized solar plant or solar and battery plant, it's maybe, you know, 12, 18 months to get it going and permitting is usually fairly easy. But for a data center wanting to get into the large load interconnection queue, it might now be five to seven years. And so a lot of that is about T&D is bringing the solar or whatever the, whatever the grid is, is powered by to the site. And so that's like the number one area that I'd focus on. There's a second area though that I also think is worth pointing out, which is for gigawatt scale data centers, we, you know, don't have a lot of examples of the new power plants on that scale.

And so then you start to get into real permitting challenges and also challenges that the developers can potentially address themselves as putting together large parcels of land to do this sort of thing. You could make a behind the meter, solar and battery data center, but you have to acquire a large amount of land in order to do that and that's the complexity. When we get to T&D, which is really the place where things move the slowest today, I think, you know, we have process issues, we have permitting issues, we have laws that affect how quickly we can do that.

We have pushback from locals in some cases, but the utilities also need to, or have an opportunity to improve the interconnection queue process itself to improve the speed of the studies, to create incentives to keep those interconnection queues clean, full of real projects that are actually going to get built, not phantom speculative projects, you know, make it, I see movement in this direction, make it cost something meaningful to get a position in the queue so that it's, you have fewer of these phantom projects. And in terms of the studies, these studies can take quite a long time today.

I think it's sort of ironic or funny or it's an opportunity that we see an increased need to do studies because of AI, and AI itself is a potentially incredibly powerful technology to speed up that analysis. And so you see some interesting things happening now. Microsoft has talked a little bit about some research they're doing about using AI models to speed up things like doing models of large load and large gen. I think you'll see more and more of that start to come to market. And the question is, how rapidly do utilities start to adopt that?

And one of my concerns, we go up to the highest level, I believe that everything can be fixed if you have the right incentives. And I'm not sure today that the incentives for utility business model, for utility executives or for utility employees really optimize for speed. Where utilities are regulated vertically integrated utilities, local monopolies are rewarded on CAPEX. So in some sense, there's a little bit of a benefit to speed you deploy more. You get to, you know, or a return on that new CAPEX, but there's nothing explicit. And so if I were a utility commission, I would be talking about, hey, we will create some structure in the rate base that rewards the utility for bringing projects to market to meet demand more rapidly.

Or we'd create some way for customers that AI data centers, for instance, to be able to, you know, provide a reward to the utility if they can bring things to market faster. This doesn't fit into how utility commissions or rate structures work today, but I believe if we had those incentives and those incentives ripple down to compensation for the people inside of utilities, we'd start to see things move faster.

Kinsey Grant Baker: So the question becomes to me then, how do we get there? You know, if you had the magic wand to wave, I'm curious what you think would move the needle most in rejiggering some of these incentive systems and business models to better serve that need for speed, if you will.

Ramez Naam: I think we have to see this as a win-win situation. You know, utilities work with their utility commissions in reality. Most of the time, the utility outguns its regulator. Utilities just have more staff, more analysis, more ability to present a compelling case than the utility commission does. And if I were utility exec, I would be thinking about, look, people want our product. They want electrons. They are defecting. They're saying, you can't deliver what I want fast enough. So I'm going to build behind the meter gas. We would like them not to defect.

Okay. Well, how do we move faster? Let's create the incentives for us to move faster. Let's go talk to our utility commission and say, here are some ideas. We think you should put us on the hook and or reward us or allow our customers to reward us for moving fast. That's the way to get back to the relative pace we were at in the 50s or 60s. Obviously, there's a host of technical issues and more detailed policy issues to solve beneath that. But that, to me, is really the first step.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I think that makes a lot of sense and on the note of technology too, this is another big element that requires solving. Do you feel that we currently have the technology we need to serve this version of reality or what kind of work needs to be done to get to that point?

Ramez Naam: So in some cases, yes, in some cases, no. So I think one technology that we're sleeping on a bit at the utility level is the power of batteries as a grid resource, but also behind the meter resource. So we have this concept that's being advanced in ERCOT now of an interruptible load where a data center can have a large behind the meter battery deployment that reduces its need to draw on transmission at peak hours. So if we think about this, why like T&D is the bottleneck for these large loads? What do we need T&D for? Well, we build it out for peak for a few hours out of the day.

That's a four hours out of the day. And in lots of markets and nearly every market, you can see that only is generation less utilized in the middle of the night, but the transmission is as well. And so if a customer says, look, there's a 10 gigawatt swing between midnight and 6 p.m. Let's say between the trough and the peak, I'm going to build out batteries. I'm going to draw from transmission that's underutilized when demand is low, fill up the battery, and then I won't need to touch transmission during the peak hours. So you utility do not need to build out any additional T&D.

That's incredible. That actually increases utilization of the current grid and has managed to reduce costs for everyone. We are just at the beginning of starting to think about how to incorporate that in regulation. So I think that's one to advance. And there that the tech is there. Let's figure out how to best utilize it. I think on the other two aspects, I'd say one is doing the studies faster. I think that tech is starting to be there. I think in this year, you will see a lot of work in AI to accelerate the process of modeling and doing studies.

The real challenge is the physical poles and wires. That's the place where technology has not advanced. You do see some interesting things. We've seen some demos from China of humanoid robot linemen, essentially. But I think this is an area where there's a need for potential advances, generation, if you look at costs, in the US, generation costs as a fraction of total utility spending, where the fraction of utility bills have dropped over the last 20 years. You grow a combination of cheap gas and renewables and T&D costs have gone up. Most of that is distribution, actually, the last mile, the last few miles.

So if I were an institute in the utility space, for instance, I'd be thinking about how do I seed innovative ideas of how to build T&D and especially distribution faster. I'd be thinking about prizes. I'd be thinking about pilot programs with startups. I'd be thinking about investing in startups in this space. Because that, I think utility professionals probably get this. Most of America doesn't get this. That the hold up on electricity in the US are the poles and wires. So how do we make that move faster? Let's spur the technology. Let's use AI to look through every regulation that exists in the community and identify the ones that are most hindering us and let's create those incentives as well.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Out of curiosity, beyond humanoid robot linemen? Are there any other T&D technologies that you think are interesting or worth tracking, we could say?

Ramez Naam: Well, I'm actually not the biggest fan of humanoids and a fan of automation. I think we could mechanize more of the deployment of T&D. And I think that really does become one of the core things that we can do. I don't think we're going to get to wireless transmission. There's lots of issues with that. We talked about that. Undergrounding is expensive. Though I think that we shouldn't totally roll that out. And whether or not there could be advances in how cheaply we can underground stuff to put the lines in place. It has benefits with reliability and so on.

But right now the cost is prohibitive. But I'd be thinking seriously about how do we put up the poles? I think it's probably not a humanoid doing that. But it might be an automated machine that moves much faster than it is right now. How do we string those wires? Are there heavy lift drones that can take a wire from one pole to another and speed that? Those are the types of things I'd be looking at.

Kinsey Grant Baker: You mentioned when we first started talking about the tech aspects of this conversation. The importance and the role that could be played by batteries and storage. So often on this show I have had conversations with folks who express something similar that batteries represent this huge opportunity to make the most of a grid that is under a lot of stress and pressure right now. Knowing that a lot of this T&D kind of technology might be a bit of a ways off. Batteries could be the bridge to get us there, if you will. Why does it seem still that batteries for all of their low costs and great promise have not necessarily broken through at scale for utilities?

Can you tell me a little bit more about that dynamic?

Ramez Naam: Absolutely. I mean batteries are where solar was 10 years ago. The price trend is clear. Everyone I think reflexively thinks the cost declines will stop. I don't think they will. I would expect that over the next five to 10 years, the cost of solar will drop in half again. The cost of batteries could drop by a factor of three or four. And so I think when we're doing utility planning, IRPs and so on, people are not taking that into account if they're building centrally. That's, you want to hear some concrete examples of that. In the US today, if you're deploying batteries, maybe you're paying about a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour at best.

It might be higher than that. Often is that I'm not counting all of the balance of plant and labor and so on. In China, we have, you know, solicitations we've seen, signed deals where containerized batteries with the inverter show up on site at less than 50 bucks a kilowatt hour. It's actually remarkable. Now, the the floor price of lithium ion batteries just based on the ingredients that go into them based on the lithium in large part, but also nickel, cobalt, and exactly what the chemistry is. That is maybe 25 dollars a kilowatt hour, but there's only so low you can drop, unless you drop the raw materials cost further.

Sodium ion. Sodium is sort of in the very similar in the periodic table to lithium. It's chemical properties. Sodium ion batteries are the probably the biggest real world new technology in energy storage. They really appeared on the market last year. They're they're being sold commercially now by Chinese companies. The raw materials cost of a sodium ion battery can go as low as like four dollars a kilowatt hour. So like one fifth or one sixth of lithium ion. So we have huge potential future cost reductions and I think utility planners are not taking that into account.

And that's one of the large issues. I want to be clear, you know, solving multi-day storage is still really, really hard. But at these numbers, the day and night cycle looks sort of economically feasible, you know, almost right now. Like in China, the day and night cycle looks pretty much economically feasible. And if not now in the next three to five years. And so I would be thinking about that heavily as a utility. And then I'd be looking like look at your major transmission lines. Look at your your most loaded distribution lines. And what is the gap between the trough and the peak?

Because that's your opportunity space. That's the energy with batteries that you can deliver to customers with no new T&D.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I think it brings up this interesting question for me that I feel like I have I've asked in several different, you know, shapes and forms throughout this conversation. But it's really the okay. And then what when we're talking about the promise for something like, you know, batteries and the example that you were just giving here, the impact that it could have on utility planning on the IRPs that we're seeing. What would it take to to convince some of these utility leaders and evidentially listeners today who are at utilities that they need to rethink what their strategy looks like.

They need to rethink what planning looks like to better incorporate some of these renewables knowing the cost story that we've talked about today, knowing the speed story that we've talked about today. What do you think you need to move the needle, if you will, in in how planning might shift?

Ramez Naam: Well, look, one thing I'd like to see and I think utility commissions could push this is every IRP should contain a scenario for what if solar battery wind cost declines continue at the same pace. And when you look at IRPs today, the cost assumptions are usually, you know, often they're just outdated that by the time the IRP is finished, we have examples of solar and batteries below the cost that the IRP projects for five years out. So I would say like, you know, utility like put down what you think is going to happen, but I want a scenario in every IRP that says if the learning rates continue, if the deployment rates continue, here's what solar and batteries cost.

Show me that and what you had built for that. And if that were mandatory in every IRP, I think you'd see utility commissions start to say, well, look, you you've said here that if these cost declines continue, which they have for the last 15, 20 years, that actually what you should do is not build a hangover gas and build more solar and batteries. So why isn't that the default plan? So just forcing people to look at those numbers, that's what I tell people all the time is, look, you don't have to believe that these cost declines will continue, even though they have fairly consistently with some some hiccups, some bumps, but you should at least do the math.

You should at least do the projection and say, what if the cost reductions continue exactly as they have and we see, you know, a halving of the cost of solar reduction and the cost of storage by a factor of four, what would be the rational plan? And at least have that as your backup plan. And then too, I put out a plan for what's on your radar? How do you track whether or not this is happening? And if you put out an IRP and you say, look, here's what the predictions say if the cost declines continue, but we don't think they will. So we're going to go with this model where the cost declines have stopped.

All right, 12 months later, I want to check from where I want to see what has happened on the costs. And if the costs continue to decline, then maybe your plan ought to change.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, a lot of this too is rooted in the very impossible task that utilities have of doing their best to predict the future. I understand that you're writing and then a lot of smart people who have talked about this too, they're writing sort of centers on this idea that clean energy can be a huge disruptor to fossil fuels. With this idea of disruption in mind, I'm curious what the next disruptor looks like. If you have any thoughts, any perspectives as utilities are trying to think about how they can plan for a future that they aren't exactly sure what, you know, it might entail any perspective to share on what the next disruptor might look like.

Ramez Naam: I can tell you some crazy ideas. We can talk about fusion. I think fusion is actually about to arrive. Will it be cheap? I don't know. And I think that's a big open question. We could talk about space-based power. I just invested in a company that was floating AI data centers using a wave energy around Antarctica. Those are lots of crazy things and you should prepare for them to some extent, but they are still wild cards. The craziest disruptor that's very likely is that the cost declines of the existing technologies continue. And if you look at the media, if you read news stories, we over-index on here's this spectacular breakthrough possibility, here's this thing we can talk about in a concrete but not economic sense.

And we under-index in here's the cost decline. People used to tell me we need a breakthrough in batteries, right? But what's happened is over the last 35 years on 99% reduction in the cost of lithium-ion batteries. And that was not appreciated or expected. So that is sort of the path of continuation of what we've been doing. And compared to utility plants, it's a massive technology breakthrough.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I think you could argue batteries are the breakthrough themselves, right? When we're looking at a transformation at that scale, it really is wild. And I'm excited to see if these big bets pan out. But I think it really highlights the importance of a conversation like this to talk about, yes, how cool some of this technology is, but also the realities of technology that 20, 30 years ago was the cool hot new thing. Now, let's have a real honest conversation about the realities and what it might mean for utility planning. So this has just been really, really wonderful.

I have learned so much. I have had such a blast. I would love to finish the conversation with a quick lightning round. This meant to be a quick rapid fire section, just to close this out here. So I've got three questions for you. If you could answer with just a couple words or a sentence or two, that would be wonderful. First question. What is the most common misconception that you find yourself running into and potentially correcting when it comes to your area of expertise?

Ramez Naam: That the cost declines have stopped. That cost are static.

Kinsey Grant Baker: All right. Second question for you. Any under the radar sort of tech developments that you think might surprise people in terms of maybe how much impact they could have on a conversation like this over the next five years or decade or so?

Ramez Naam: This is a couple: NET Power, like combined cycle natural gas that inherently has carbon capture, I think is a fascinating technology. Most fusion startups, I think look kind of expensive, but there are a couple like Helion here in the Seattle area that if it works, we'll have sort of modular 50 megawatt and up power plants that are clean 24/7 and cheap. And then geothermal, Fervo IPO'd last week, so I don't know if people are sleeping on it. Biggest clean energy IPO in history, but geothermal is another clean base load power source that now we think we can apply to a much larger area of the US.

Kinsey Grant Baker: All right. I love it. And my final question for you here is there a policy reform that you wish you could snap your fingers and make that would make all of the hypotheticals of talking out in this conversation happen. What would be your your number one?

Ramez Naam: Permitting reform at every level, federal, state, and local, especially for transmission, but also for solar and wind.

Kinsey Grant Baker: All right. I think a lot of people listening would probably agree with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has just been such a lovely conversation, and I am eager to get it published now into the world. I'm excited to see how people interact with it and what everybody listening thinks about what we have talked about today. So thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate your time.

Ramez Naam: Kinsey, thanks so much for having me and for your great preparation.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Of course. And thank you to all of you for listening to another episode of Power Perspectives from Energy Central. I'm Kinsey Grant Baker and I'll see you next time.

What are you doing on June 23rd? If you're a utility professional who wants to, one, meet and network with other big thinkers and two, get leadership perspectives on the future of energy business strategy from affordability to AI. There's only one place to be. Energy Central is hosting a happy hour in Washington DC on the evening of June 23rd. You might ask why? And it's because we think the very future of our energy industry depends a whole lot on how things shake out in data center alley. And we think it's high time that the smartest people solving the biggest utility challenges got together to share some good ideas.

So join us on June 23rd in DC for connections, conversations and cocktails in partnership with our friends at IFS Copperleaf. Save your spot by RSVPing at the link in the show notes and we'll see you there.