West Texas renewables can power data centers at the source

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:26:15

   so our philosophy has been sustainability from day one we have used 100 renewable energy since inception. What? 100. Wait, how is that possible? We use hydro in British Columbia. We use wind and solar in West Texas. In West Texas, where we're located, there's around 45 to 50 gigawatts of wind and solar. Yeah. The transmission line to export that down to the load centers in Dallas and Houston is 12 gigawatts. Oh. So you go and locate to the source of low cost excess renewable energy, monetize it into this digital commodity, export it at the speed of light as tokens.

2. 1:26:49

   great arbitrage and the wind is producing a lot but it's harder to get from those areas where people are willing to put up i mean people don't understand how big west texas is it is an incredible amount of land and you're coming from australia we're also on the west side people don't understand exactly how much just pure nature land there is yeah undeveloped so much land and the issue is distance you've got to spend billions of dollars on this transmission connection infrastructure to move that power to where people actually want it. You can build wind farms, you can build solar farms, but if you build it in the desert and no one can use it, then what's the point? So the whole opportunity for our industry is to go to the source of that power and monetize it. So the data centers follow the wind turbines, the solar installations. How do you think about

3. 1:27:37

   batteries and are you able to put those online? Because obviously you're going to have periods where hey it's not a windy day in texas we have very few days when it's overcast so that problem's pretty much solved but you're going to have 50 days where the sun's not beating down so how do you deal with the demand and softening that duck curve we don't need to the utility does that on our behalf so this is why these grid connections are so scarce, so hard to get, and so highly valued, because once you get that grid connection, the utility underwrites all of that variability. They guarantee you 24-7 reliable power.

4. 1:28:11

   Got it. So on their side, they're figuring it out. Something goes down, and they could fall back, even though you're 100% committed to renewables. If they needed to fall back to gas or whatever, they have that ability out there. So you have that as a backup. A lot of talk about,