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Department Of Energy's Plan
00:15:08
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| I'm very pleased to introduce and to welcome Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh, Department of Energy. | |
| For the last two days, we've been talking, I think also 12 members of Congress from the administration, the Commerce Department, the Permitting Council. | |
| and now the Department of Energy. | |
| As I had mentioned to you in the back room, I don't know if I should say back room, but in the side room, yeah, the green room, is that Encompass started 45 years ago as a long distance as we were deploying the new digital Internet backbones of the 80s and the 90s, | |
| and then the local competition to break up the Bell regional monopolies, and then the Internet economy and infrastructure, and the companies that both deployed the content, the over-the-top, the streaming, the applications that we know today, and the cloud, and then the broadband infrastructure of every technology. | |
| And then AI burst onto the scene, and now we have energy companies, data center companies, broadband companies, and all the models, the companies that are doing the AI large language models and other advanced applications from new entrants to well-established American technology companies. | |
| Energy has become the primary input that drives everything and determines whether America can win this now critical geopolitical race with China, much like the nuclear race, the space race, now the AI race. | |
| And you're in a position of leadership that really, as we talked in the background, is really core and critical to our nation's success. | |
| Talk a little bit about what you do and your background. | |
| Yeah, thanks, Chip, and thank you all for attending today. | |
| Excited to be here. | |
| Before I answer that question, I'll give you a little bit of background. | |
| I'm a West Point grad, engineer geek. | |
| I was in the Army Corps of Engineers. | |
| I was deployed in the first Gulf War. | |
| I think you heard yesterday from Senator Dave McCormick. | |
| Dave was actually my right-hand guy. | |
| I taught him everything he knew, knows today. | |
| I've been good friends with him and Dina ever since he was actually in my wedding. | |
| He went on to Princeton. | |
| I went on to Stanford after that. | |
| And then I started working in the semiconductor industry building chip plants. | |
| And at the time, you know, you've heard of Moore's Law about how the pace of chip manufacturing, but there was also a concern because we were doing some of the first sub-micron manufacturing plants that electrons wouldn't be able to travel through the circuitry of chips and that we were going to hit the end of what we could actually put on a silicon wafer. | |
| But here we are 35 years later and nanotechnology and more and more is being compressed. | |
| At that time, it was hard drives for memory storage. | |
| They were just starting to talk about flash memory devices. | |
| Now we couldn't exist without flash memory. | |
| My point, though, is it takes a while for adoption of all of these technologies. | |
| But what's behind all of it, it all starts with electrons, moving electrons through circuitry. | |
| And in this case, we're talking about AI. | |
| AI is really about moving, converting electrons into intelligence. | |
| And that's where the future is. | |
| We are in a race with our adversaries. | |
| If we don't lead, which we are going to lead, because America always rises to the occasion, our adversaries will lead and out-innovate us. | |
| And we need to maintain that status of the world leader in innovation for both national security and I would say global security. | |
| You mentioned Senator McCormick yesterday. | |
| His message to the audience was both the transformational benefits of AI, but also the urgency of the moment of being able to win the race that you just mentioned against our potential adversary in China. | |
| The administration has developed the AI action plan and the energy dominance plan. | |
| Talk a little bit about energy dominance, the energy dominance parks, and what you're doing in your role to promote a comprehensive strategy to win that component of the energy, both the innovation side, the new technologies, but the current dominance that we can develop with existing energy. | |
| So Secretary Wright brought me on board. | |
| I actually started on September 2nd as a senior advisor with really the sole focus then before my confirmation was completed to start engaging with the hyperscalers and lead our AI data centers on DOE sites. | |
| So I got started getting engaged with that. | |
| But AI data centers won't exist. | |
| They're the apex energy users if we don't first start with building more generation. | |
| And we have a unique opportunity on our DOE sites across the country to really be these American energy dominance parks is what we're going to be calling them. | |
| Next week you'll hear a large announcement about a new gas-fired 9.2 gigawatts of gas-fired generation that we're going to be standing up in southern Ohio along with upgrading the grid in southern Ohio to take those electrons. | |
| So that's the start of a lot of new power generation that you'll see across the DOE complex. | |
| It also is going to be the bridge that will allow us to stand up these gigawatt scale AI data centers on DOE properties. | |
| The real long-term goal is nuclear power, both using AP1000s, Westinghouse, sort of Gen 3 reactors, but also enable a lot of these smaller SMR companies like Oklo. | |
| Oklo has actually acquired land adjacent to our site in southern Ohio and has an agreement with Meta to build one and a half gigawatts using their Aurora reactors. | |
| You know, I want to back up a little bit because nuclear generation requires nuclear fuel and we really quit enriching uranium in the United States Probably in mid-2015-ish timeframe. | |
| And now we're standing up uranium enrichment again in the United States. | |
| We signed a lease on a DOE site with General Matter in Paducah, Kentucky. | |
| We just did an agreement with Arano in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a $5 billion investment there. | |
| Another announcement was this week in Hamford, Washington with General Matter. | |
| So we need to start enriching, and then the process before that is converting and then deconverting and then fuel manufacturing. | |
| And I can see each of our DOE sites really being the hubs for these nuclear fuel cycles where we can produce the fuel and then stand up reactors there to burn the fuel to put the electrons on the grid. | |
| So it sounds like a comprehensive strategy. | |
| It is. | |
| I mean, that's why we're calling these the American Energy Dominance Parks. | |
| I want to go back. | |
| You said a 9.2 gigawatt announcement coming. | |
| Yes. | |
| That is huge. | |
| Yeah, it's about a $30 billion investment. | |
| Yeah, I just want to repeat that one more time. | |
| 9.2 gigawatts. | |
| When's the last time we built that much power in our country? | |
| I don't know, if ever, of a project of that size and that magnitude. | |
| And, you know, we're mapping out a pathway to get to about 50 gigawatts of new power generation on DOE sites at least in the next three years, have it stood up, ready to go, so the next administration can continue that on. | |
| So as we start deploying nuclear reactors, everything is sort of teed up and ready to go. | |
| When you bring that much power online, two questions. | |
| How do you upgrade the grid and the transmission to take that? | |
| And then two, what does that do on the affordability debate on driving the cost of electricity down when you bring the supply that far up? | |
| That's a great question. | |
| So there's other offices within the Department of Energy that are working on modernizing our grid, unlocking some of the bottlenecks in our grid. | |
| The key, though, is we are tapping into a lot of the hyperscalers and asking them to bring their own power. | |
| You know, we'll give them the land, a lot of our infrastructure in place. | |
| What we're asking them to do is pay for the utility upgrades in return for us, giving them the land and other infrastructure on our DOE sites. | |
| Yeah, the great thing about the last two days is we've listened to the administration officials, whether it is on the Permitting Council or from NTIA and now from the Department of Energy. | |
| There is a clear strategy that is being executed, and the energy dominance is not just a brand. | |
| Right. | |
| It's a plan and execution to meet the energy demands and then to upgrade the grid, the transmission, the pipelines that we need for the capacity to meet the AI and to win the race. | |
| And so I just want to thank you for the leadership and the strategy and the execution. | |
| The fact that you'll announce 9.2, you have a goal within three years of 50 gigawatts. | |
| When was the last time our country grew that much electricity? | |
| Yeah, this truly is the Manhattan Project of our era, as Secretary Wright has said. | |
| You know, and we need to step back and really give thanks to President Trump because it was his strategy and Secretary Wright's strategy to do certain things to enable all of this to happen, including reforming FERC so that instead of a multi-year process to get permitting approved, we're down to a year or less. | |
| So there's alignment there to speed up. | |
| Working on DOE sites, you know, we can have category exclusions from NEPA requirements that, again, will allow faster permitting and faster deployment of electricity on the grid. | |
| I want to go back as DOE is doing everything possible to achieve energy dominance, win the race. | |
| You mentioned our hyperscalers, and Encompass is very proud to have leading American technology companies like Google, Amazon, AWS, Microsoft, and Meta. | |
| You mentioned in the side room Google's commitment to upgrade transmission and grid in the PGAM. | |
| Talk a little bit about that as a positive example of where the private sector partner with what DOE is doing is making this strategy possible. | |
| Yeah, you know, I think all the hyperscalers are going to be on board with the concept that they need to bring their own power, that they need to overbuild their capacity to put electrons on the grid to keep ratepayer pricing low, and put the bill to upgrade any grid or transmission lines required. | |
| And, you know, I think it's that public-private partnership that exists there, and I think it's the commitment of these hyperscalers to the communities where they're going to be building. | |
| Let's talk about communities, community engagement, and the messaging around both the public commitment and the private commitment to drive energy electricity prices down. | |
| Not only to keep them stable, but to have so much supply come in and capacity added that we can actually achieve affordability goals while we race to win AI and do a Manhattan project. | |
| We can also, through competition and new technology and these private investments, drive prices down for the American consumer. | |
| Talk a little bit about that goal, the President's goal, and what you believe will happen a year from now, two years from now, three years on electricity prices. | |
| Yeah, I mean, absolutely. | |
| I mean, the world doesn't exist without firm, reliable, and secure power. | |
| I live in Colorado. | |
| We had a horrendous windstorm right before Christmas. | |
| Our power was out for five days. | |
| Fortunately, when I built my house, I got a backup generator and backup batteries, so all our neighbors were coming over. | |
| But I think it woke a lot of people up in Colorado that energy is required for everything in modern life today. | |
| And it's our goal at the Department of Energy to ensure that we deliver that reliable and affordable and secure energy to the grid so that people can better their human lives and in the process, lowering rates across America. | |
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Why SMRs Offer Hope
00:09:37
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| You also mentioned one of the new nuclear companies coming out of DOE Labs. | |
| One of our member companies is X-Energy. | |
| They came out of Oak Ridge. | |
| They're doing a prototype pilot with Dow Chemical in Texas. | |
| They have agreements with AWS in Northern Virginia and others in the northwestern region of the country. | |
| Talk about SMRs and why you and I, not to use a biblical term, but AI and all of the energy and all of the change and all of this transformation can be scary. | |
| And how do we say be not afraid? | |
| Talk about why the new technologies, new generation of nuclear is safer, where the how we've used it in our national security and our submarines and our carrier fleets, and how DOE is bringing this into the commercial market in the safest way possible. | |
| So how do we give a message? | |
| Be not afraid. | |
| Yeah, that's a great question. | |
| And I've been thinking about this a lot. | |
| And a lot of the anti-nuclear activism came from the nuclear weapons program. | |
| And there have been issues with nuclear power plants. | |
| Some of those were overly hyped, fear-based by activist groups. | |
| But when you look in totality, nuclear energy has been the safest form of energy to deliver in America, safer than coal and other forms of production. | |
| So, you know, and I think the positive news is Gen Z is really embracing nuclear as a clean energy, and it is a clean energy for the country and for the world, and will not only in the U.S., but in foreign countries like Africa that is energy starved. | |
| SMRs is a perfect example, or small island countries or nations as well, where you can, instead of burning diesel, you can have a SMR there. | |
| So we are at an exciting time. | |
| DOE funded multiple startup companies with the idea that they're going to go critical, split their first atom by the 4th of July. | |
| I think there are some companies on track to do that prior to that. | |
| So that's the first stage of it. | |
| And then getting through the NRC licensing and completing that and then next deploying. | |
| But the great thing with SMRs is you can factory build them, you can transport them to the site, you can build them in series. | |
| And then I think, you know, we're in generation three of Westinghouse nuclear reactors, large 1.2 gigawatt reactors, proven technology, safe, a lot of lessons learned. | |
| China is building 94 nuclear reactors right now, just to give you an example. | |
| So it is a very safe form of it. | |
| And another interesting thing, a lot of the small modular nuclear reactors do not, you know, they're not water cooled, they're metal cooled, sodium cooled, so you don't have to worry about, you know, leaks. | |
| And then the fuel form that a lot will be using is called Triso, which is really armored uranium capsule that prevents it from going critical and melting down. | |
| So it's super safe. | |
| Yeah, and most people think of nuclear energy like in the 1970s architecture of the big nuclear plants where you have shells of concrete, kind of like the Russian dial, layers and layers of protection against the meltdown. | |
| And with the new technology, you don't have a risk of a meltdown. | |
| That's correct. | |
| And so that most people think that commercial scale of SMRs or new technology is seven years out. | |
| And you had mentioned the over 9 gigawatts in Ohio of natural gas. | |
| And we happen to have Williams Company, the largest natural gas pipeline and generation company in the country. | |
| And natural gas is kind of the bridge until you get to the nuclear. | |
| How long is that bridge before we get to commercial scale nuclear capabilities with SMRs or other technologies? | |
| I believe the SMRs could be deployed in five years. | |
| We got to produce the fuel for them so that they can go live at that time. | |
| So that's why companies like General Matter are out there starting to rich uranium again and Orano and Centris and others. | |
| But the bigger scale reactors just take time to construct. | |
| Design and constructing those, it's going to probably be seven years, but seven years will go by in a blink of an eye. | |
| In the meantime, we have abundant natural gas and we know how to do that clean and safely as possible, and that will be our bridge until we get there. | |
| Well, you know, natural gas, because we have new technologies to make it as clean as possible, you know, is both a bridge and a permanent and part of the overall, all of the above strategy for us to achieve our goals. | |
| One big thing that you'd like to leave the audience with as we finish, as you look next two, three years, will we have 50 gigawatts of new production and generation? | |
| Will we be able to permit projects of national significance in a timely way to build the infrastructure? | |
| And will the AI race and the beginning stages of that, will we do everything possible to win that? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I believe we will, mainly because we have alignment from the President all the way down through the local communities. | |
| Everybody is embracing this. | |
| Local communities are super excited. | |
| Places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Paducah, Kentucky, and Savannah River, Hamford, Washington. | |
| Everybody sees the sense of urgency that we need to build. | |
| And they also understand the current capacity on our grid is insufficient. | |
| I mean, if you take AI out of the question, we were going 100 miles an hour down a road off a cliff with no plan on how we were going to provide safe, secure, and reliable energy to the American public. | |
| And that's truly what's exciting for me is now we have a plan to ensure that we can keep electricity prices affordable. | |
| The demand is really coming from AI data centers, AI data centers. | |
| Nobody should be afraid of AI. | |
| AI will better our lives in ways we can't even imagine. | |
| You know, going from a rotary phone to an iPhone, this is going to be the next technological leap. | |
| It's super exciting to be in at Department of Energy, where Office of Science launched their Genesis mission recently to really accelerate and advance science, including for fusion. | |
| Now we can iterate and model much quicker to make fusion a reality. | |
| And then there's other branches of science and also for national security that will be deploying AI. | |
| So it's a very exciting time to be at the Department of Energy. | |
| You know, all of our member companies are all over the country. | |
| They're engaging their communities. | |
| They're trying to tell the benefits or addressing concerns. | |
| One thing that you gave as just a little bit of a warning is that a lot of the negative messaging creating fear in local communities is coming from adversaries and outside the United States. | |
| Is there anything that you want to say about just be careful that misinformation may not be coming from our friends? | |
| It may be coming from places like China. | |
| And how do you? | |
| Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. | |
| That a lot of this fear-mongering that is percolating up in local communities where AI data centers, a lot of that is not coming from the U.S. | |
| A lot of the activist groups here in the U.S. are being fed misinformation from our adversaries. | |
| And like I told my kids growing up, don't believe everything you see on Instagram or TikTok. | |
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Fcc's Role in AI Deployment
00:08:36
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| Understand why they're putting that message out there and what's behind it and go do your own fact checking. | |
| Well, I want to thank you for coming. | |
| And more importantly, I want to thank you for your service. | |
| Coming from the private sector, you had a very successful real estate. | |
| You understand local permitting, community engagement, great background. | |
| I hope you and Senator McCormick can team up from the administration and the Senate to help lead our nation to the right place and to win the race as we go forward. | |
| And I'm confident after hearing everything that you're doing that we're going to achieve our objectives. | |
| So thank you. | |
| Yeah, thank you, Chip, and thank you all for being a part of this really exciting time. | |
| As everyone comes back from lunch, I want to introduce my friend, Kevin Martin, former FCC chairman, FCC commissioner. | |
| FCC Commissioner from 2001, Chairman from 2005 to the beginning of 2009. | |
| So the first decade of the 21st century, as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was being implemented, adopted, and then the resulting market forces, competition, | |
| innovation forces, and the emergence of the commercial internet and the internet age infrastructure that came, Chairman Martin had a lot to do with the success of where we are today, and now he leads for Meta, their global public policy. | |
| And so, Kevin, thank you for coming and kind of talking about as we look back 30 years to the 1996, what are the lessons learned? | |
| What worked? | |
| that we would do differently and how can we apply it to the ai age that we're now in how about now Good. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, first, thanks, Chim, for inviting me to come by and have a discussion with everyone and for you all for coming. | |
| And look, it's a very exciting time. | |
| And in that way, it's very similar to what was going on in 96. | |
| The changes in technology that were coming that you could see in terms of the digitization of the different technologies was going to allow much more widespread competition and it was going to allow much more widespread services for people. | |
| And I think that you had that kind of excitement about what technology was going to bring to people, and how do you make sure you have a policy environment that allows for that kind of a deployment so those services can be got to people. | |
| And I think that is similar to where we are right now with AI, where you can see how the benefits of the technology are going to provide some exciting, so many exciting things for people and going to make us more productive in a more enriched life. | |
| And how do we make sure that the government is putting in place policies that help facilitate that and make sure that they're putting in place policies that enable that to be deployed in a rapid basis? | |
| Because it's important from the United States' perspective that they have policies that facilitate that because there's other countries like China that are trying to end up getting the lead on that as well. | |
| And so, how we make sure that we do that is one of those lessons I think we could learn from the 96 Act. | |
| And I think one of the things that was important about the 96 Act is that they actually set that out as a principle. | |
| They had a policy statement at the very beginning that talked about that this was its goal of rapid deployment of underlying infrastructure so that it would enable innovation and competition. | |
| And the recognition of that as a policy statement, while it didn't have a particular impact or force of effect from a legal perspective, it did set what the kind of ultimate North Star was for the regulatory agencies trying to implement it. | |
| And I think that that was that recognition of that and that universal statement of policy was actually an important part of that 96 Act. | |
| You know, I believe that we use the word advanced networks because we wanted to be technology neutral in the framing and the drafting of the Telecommunications Act. | |
| But we really did want the digital networks, both wired and wireless, as they were emerging, and then to be able to have the devices like the iPhone, the smartphone, and what has eventually happened. | |
| And no one dreamed in 1996 as we were drafting the legislation that we would have the Googles and the Facebooks and the Metas and the Twitter and the X's that would emerge. | |
| As we look forward, what are the maybe unimaginable, unpredictable applications and uses and markets that are going to develop as we try to communicate to policymakers that as we build the AI infrastructure of today, the advanced networks of today are energy, data centers, and fiber and broadband, and they both meet at the data center. | |
| We're building those networks. | |
| But what are some of the things that we may not fully appreciate today that's coming for tomorrow? | |
| Well, it's so hard to see how those AI technologies are going to be fully utilized by people, fully appreciate those ways. | |
| But they're going to be able to be helping people in kind of their everyday lives all the time. | |
| And they're going to be able to be on all the time. | |
| We talk about how the kind of superintelligence of those AI and agents that will be able to be helping us facilitate all of our uses, both not just from an entertainment perspective or a communications perspective, but interacting with us and for us in all kinds of ways to make our lives easier. | |
| And I think that's really going to be the kind of uses that are hard to fathom or hard to appreciate, and I think that they're going to be coming pretty fast for us. | |
| And I think that when you talk about how important the data centers are to what's going on today, that's why it's to be able to achieve that goal. | |
| That's why it's so important to have, like I said, those policy frameworks in place that facilitate that. | |
| And like in the 96 Act, there were issues related to infrastructure deployment about getting permitting and access to lands to be able to deploy those, and that's similar to what's needed today. | |
| But there's some other things that are also needed today that probably weren't needed then, and that is, for example, access to data, because so much of what's going on in the AI training is access to data that becomes important. | |
| And then also the energy uses of these data centers and being able to access energy and making sure that we're meeting those needs and demands from the AI company's perspectives without overburdening actual consumers. | |
| And that's one of the things we're very sensitive to in our deployments about making sure that we're bringing and/or buying access to new forms, new forms, and new energy so that it's not overburdening consumers in terms of their rates. | |
| And how do we get that balance right? | |
| I think that's something that's really important from a policymaker's perspective that we're going to continue to work on. | |
| You know, as you look back at your tenure at the FCC, it was really the emergence of both the Internet and the digital wireless capabilities that gave us the iPhone and the mobility and the supercomputer in our hands that we could access and use. | |
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Regulating the Digital Age
00:05:04
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| You really were able to be a part of the decisions and the implementation of that. | |
| One of the things that Encompass has advocated for, and we had Congressman Jay Obernault here earlier, how do we have a national framework so that we avoid a patchwork of state laws and the uncertainty and the difficulty to deploy AI models on a state-by-state basis versus a national global basis and how really a patchwork does not serve the national interest or the public interest. | |
| But how do we communicate that in a way and take precedent from things like the Internet tax moratorium or the preemption that as we went to auctions for wireless that we said to the states, you can't regulate the rates of cellular service. | |
| In the 96 Act, there was great preemption, but there was a joint Federal State cooperation or division of responsibilities. | |
| Talk about those frameworks and how they could apply to our time today. | |
| So Will, so before we get into it, we were talking about how it was, yeah, when I was chairman, we had the introduction of the iPhone, which was exciting and certainly a game changer in terms of the way people were interacting with technology in a way that, kind of like we were talking about in the last question, that was kind of going to be unforeseen. | |
| I'll share one story. | |
| I was doing a conference like this, and I was in the green room back in the back with Randall Stevenson, who was then the chairman of ATT, and he had a prototype of the iPhone, and he was going to be showing it off to everybody at the speech. | |
| And so he let me play with it in the back. | |
| We were in the green room playing. | |
| And then during his speech, I spoke first and then he did, and he made a joke about how I didn't want to give it back and that I was playing with it so much. | |
| And so I got back to my office and I was sitting there having lunch or whatever, sitting there, and my secretary comes in and says, Someone named Steve Jobs is on the phone and wants to talk to you. | |
| And I was like, I'm like, this is probably a joke because they just made the joke. | |
| And I'm like, but yeah, I'll put it through. | |
| And no, and it was actually Steve Jobs, and he called and he's like, so what did you think of it? | |
| How did it work? | |
| Do you want to come out and play with it again? | |
| And so that was like one of the highlights, certainly when I was chairman of him wanting to know what I thought of it and getting a chance to talk to him about it ahead of time. | |
| So look, I think there's several important policy aspects of what occurred from 96 that should give us guidance for how we should be thinking about the frameworks here. | |
| And one of them is certainly, like you talked about from a wireless perspective, the 96 Act Declaration of making sure that wireless was viewed as an interstate service so that it was exempt from many of the state regulations. | |
| Not all some of the consumer protection issues still applied because they apply to any kind of a service, but they couldn't have direct regulation of the wireless service per se as a service. | |
| And so I think that actually framework of making sure that you didn't have a burden of state regulation that would deter and deploy these kinds of services from being able to enabling the companies to deploy them on a rapid basis. | |
| That's the similar kind of framework that I think we should be thinking about for AI. | |
| That if you have 50 different state regulations of these services and these technologies, it's going to really be a deterrence from us being able to deploy those and get those services out to consumers. | |
| And it wasn't just the 96 Act, as you mentioned. | |
| One of, I think, a very interesting analogous timeframe was as the Internet was being debated about how sales tax would end up working and should they be done and collected at the local level or the federal level. | |
| And what Congress did and I thought was very instrumental in that case was they just put a moratorium on state and local regulation of it temporarily so that they could actually consider what they thought was the right policy and then they set up a commission to go study it and make recommendations. | |
| And I think that that could be a very helpful framework to think about some of the issues we're facing today now of some kind of a moratorium on localized state and local regulation of what's inherently an interstate kind of a service and making sure that those local regulations are not deterring the ability of companies to deploy and compete with China and companies around the world. | |
| But maybe having a moratorium where they put in place some experts to go and study it and come up with some frameworks and recommendations for what is the right regulatory approach and for Congress to consider it. | |
| But while Congress is considering what that looks like, not having the states get out in front of them. | |
| And I think those are two ways in which Congress I thought was very insightful of helping facilitate that deployment and get us into the Internet age. | |
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Solutions for Gas and Electric Integration
00:10:01
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| So as we kind of finish the conversation and kind of look forward, Meta is making tremendous investments into communities all across the country, into data centers, into energy, into the AI models. | |
| How do we communicate and engage at the community level, at the State level and at Congress, to talk about all the different benefits, the uses, and the protections that we want to honor as we deploy this massive AI infrastructure and the models and applications that are coming. | |
| What is the best way to tell our story? | |
| So, I mean, one thing that is important is to highlight just how much investment we are all engaging in. | |
| And we've publicly talked about how we're going to be spending $600 billion before 2028. | |
| And that's just a staggering sum of how much money we're going to be investing in the underlying infrastructure to help us achieve those goals. | |
| And that means there's going to be lots of investments in lots of states around the country, billions of dollars in Louisiana and Ohio as we're trying to build new data centers there to be able to try to meet this great demand. | |
| And I think that there's a couple things that I think are important for people to understand and appreciate: when you have that much construction and that much investment going on, that's actually creating lots of different kinds of jobs in communities that wouldn't otherwise have them. | |
| All kinds of skilled labor jobs of people to be able to be working and deploying that underlying infrastructure is really good for those communities that are there, both in the short term in terms of construction jobs, lots of them, and in the longer term of the jobs that will be created in some of those otherwise oftentimes very rural communities. | |
| And then we are trying to, as I alluded to earlier, be sensitive to making sure that as you have these great demands on the energy infrastructure and energy creation, that we are not inadvertently causing energy rates to go up for consumers. | |
| And so we've been very committed to making sure that we're trying to pay for our own energy and upgrades that are necessary to serve us so that we're not imposing any kind of a burden on consumers in terms of the ratepayers. | |
| And I think making sure that we talk about the opportunity for jobs and how we're making sure to try to mitigate any of those harms, like in energy costs, I think is really important, and we've got to get those two messages out. | |
| You know, as you lead Meta's global public policy, I'm thankful that one, you have a rich history of the last major digital information Internet revolution and what came from that and the policies that shaped it. | |
| As you advocate for Meta, I'm very proud that META is a member of Encompass. | |
| I look forward to working and teaming and telling the positive story of what our companies are building, investing, and the hope for unimaginable, great superintelligent uses of the future. | |
| And I happen to like the term superintelligence better than artificial intelligence. | |
| We are certainly excited about it, and we are happy to be an active member of Encompass and have appreciated all of your help as we try to navigate the regulatory framework. | |
| And as someone who was involved in that in the past, I recognize the importance of making sure that we do have the government involved in the decision-making and certain parameters and rules that are put around this, but that we do it in a way that ultimately facilitates where we all want to get to. | |
| And that is a new world of, as you said, superintelligence, and making sure that we can all reap the benefits of that. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, I really want to thank you for staying in town, coming to our policy summit. | |
| More importantly, the work that you're doing on the Energy and Commerce Committee. | |
| We've spent two days, I think, 12 members of Congress from your committee, Chairman Hudson, Congressman Lada, was supposed to come, but I think the prayer breakfast went a little bit long this morning, and so he couldn't make it. | |
| We had Senator McCormick, we've had a bipartisan group, Senator Luhan and Congress, Congressman Lansman. | |
| And we've been talking about two or three big things as it relates to the race that we're in vis-a-vis China. | |
| How do we build the broadband networks, the data centers, and the energy networks of AI infrastructure? | |
| And how do we have a national framework that keeps us from having a patchwork and the uncertainty, unpredictability, and the delays that it could cost in investing into the AI models of the future? | |
| Talk a little bit about where you're from, about North Dakota, your history as a public service commissioner, and why you have come to the issue of energy, one naturally, but with a passion of bringing everyone together into the room and listening to both industry and on a bipartisan basis, your fellow colleagues. | |
| Well, first of all, thank you. | |
| Chip, I appreciate the invitation to be here with all of you energy sector leaders. | |
| And it was great to hear Mr. Martin and some of his comments earlier and the work that those companies are doing. | |
| So I spent 12 years as a state utility regulator. | |
| And what drove me to Congress was really my observation of the impact that energy policy, the direct and very significant impact that energy policy has on the energy that comes to market. | |
| I mean, it's no surprise, right, that would have an impact. | |
| But the impact that the state policies were having and some I saw growing concerns. | |
| I would look at the NERC maps and see the projections for not having enough power to meet demand in current circumstances. | |
| And then on top of that, the demand for more power. | |
| And so I wanted to come here and be part of solutions, like figuring out we should never be short of power in the U.S. | |
| We have abundant, we have been blessed with abundant energy resources and the innovation to develop them. | |
| We should get away from energy shaming and we should start embracing all of our amazing resources and bring them to production for the benefit of our citizens. | |
| And on top of that, you've got the AI arms race. | |
| It's a national security issue. | |
| And so I wanted to take my 12 years of experience in very technical situations on the grid, in the energy markets, in generation, in permitting. | |
| We permitted $15 billion worth of energy infrastructure in my state in the decade and more that I sat there. | |
| So I feel like that's just sort of central experience to some of our biggest challenges and wanted to bring them to bear for solutions in D.C. Tell the audience a little bit. | |
| You did something that I thought was very effective and very helpful and very useful. | |
| You asked the entire community that cares about energy policy and AI policy and all of the intersection of our networks, both broadband, energy, data centers. | |
| You ask for everybody to submit comments to you on recommendations of the best strategies and solutions of what our nation needs to do. | |
| Most members don't do that. | |
| But you did. | |
| And maybe it comes from your time as a public service commissioner at the state level. | |
| But why did you do that and what did you learn from it and what are the major recommendations from it? | |
| Sure, thank you. | |
| So working with my team, they had this idea that we should kind of really lean in in this space. | |
| My last effort when I was president of NAIROC, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, I did that job right before getting elected. | |
| And one of the efforts I led there was called GEAR Gas Electric Gas Electric Alignment for Reliability. | |
| And we brought together members from each of the sectors that are involved in that: the gas, the pipelines, the electric providers, rural electrics, brought them all together, one rep from each, to say, like, what are the solutions and how can we get to not just talking about this, not just sending some regulatory agency to figure it out and spend a year, but real solutions and negotiated an agreement. | |
| So, this was similar to that. | |
| Like, go ask the experts. | |
| The experts are the industry folks in the field. | |
| What do you need? | |
| How can we meet this moment? | |
| Having been a regulator for 12 years, I know we have a very stable regulatory environment, but it isn't built for speed. | |
| We need to be built for speed. | |
| So, we need to make adjustments. | |
| And who best knows those areas that need the most attention, but the industry who's working there every day. | |
| So, that's why we did it. | |
| We got 100 responses to our RFI, and the responses weren't necessarily surprising in any way, but they were helpful and they helped provide focus for our team and where we should dig in. | |
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Sorry, I Did Drink
00:01:09
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| But, you know, they fell in the buckets of we need more generation as quickly as possible, we need more transmission, we need to speed up the queues, the interconnection processes in the RTOs. | |
| We have supply chain challenges and permitting reform. | |
| I would say those were probably the biggest buckets of problems, and then there were solutions offered in those, and we can get to some of those more as we talk. | |
| As we talk, I'm sorry, I did drink. | |
| That's all right, that's all right. | |
| I'm good. | |
| I'm good. | |
| I want to bring mine up. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I've got a little bit of a message. | |
| I can bring you some water. | |
| Okay. | |
| Stacy, if she doesn't mind. | |
| So we've been talking to a lot of your colleagues over the last two days on the SPEED Act. | |
| We'll leave this here. | |
| Finish watching with the C-SPED Now video app to the White House now, where President Trump is making an announcement on prescription drugs. | |
| Live coverage on C-SPAN. | |
| This is a very big deal. | |
| People are going to save a lot of money and be healthy. | |