Transcript
Jigar Shah: Hello, my name is Jigar Shah and I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
Arnab Pal: Hi, my name is Arnab Pal and I'm a self-described clean energy whisperer.
Jigar Shah: Love it. Well, look, it is such a pleasure to have Vishal on. I don't know if you know him at all, but he has had so many amazing experiences in his career. And frankly, I think what he's taken on right now has got to be the hardest assignment yet because he's working with the electric utility companies and they are his customer.
But I'm interested to hear what he has to say because Chris Wright this week talked about how grid utilization was going to be one of the top ways for us to get data centers online. I did not expect that. That was not on my bingo card, but I feel like he's reading the Brattle Report and the Deploy Action State Playbook. So congratulations on that, Arnab.
Arnab Pal: I'm sure that's exactly what Chris Wright does when he wakes up. Like, what's the Deploy Action playbook say about energy today?
Jigar Shah: I mean, five different people repeat what's in there and then eventually it gets washed out as a MAGA talking point. So there you go.
Arnab Pal: Yeah, that's my dream — to be a washed-out MAGA talking point.
Jigar Shah: And then we got the SPARK funding, right? So the old GRIP grants have been recycled as SPARK funding. And so that's coming out the door. So I'd be curious to see what Vishal thinks about that and whether he's chasing them.
Arnab Pal: Yeah, I really want to know what's his strategy for speeding up the process to get his technology deployed. I've had numerous utilities tell me — and probably you — in private, like, hey, we like all this stuff. We're just not the best product managers. And what I want to hear from Vishal is you have something that everyone agrees works, can bring down costs, can help with capacity. So how do we get it out there so everyone can benefit as soon as possible? I'm really anxious to hear what his take is on that.
Jigar Shah: Well, and the value of legislation. I mean, we just passed this great utilization legislation in Virginia, which I think is going to help him out a lot. And so we'll see what that looks like. Because as you know, I've said this multiple times — I have been in the room when every single person around the table, every single vice president is like, yep, this is the best idea ever. And then you leave the room for a bathroom break and they've rejected the idea. So I feel like utilities, even if everyone's on board, the utility itself — like the walls themselves make a decision. It's different than what everybody else in the room thinks.
Arnab Pal: Yeah, I mean, these are the most frustrating problems because everybody agrees and nobody agrees on how to do it. And you're like, well, why are we spending time doing something that already needs to get done? And I think these technologies and what Vishal is going to talk about is right in that problem set. So let's see what he has to say.
INTERVIEW: VISHAL KAPADIA
THE JOURNEY FROM WALL STREET TO THE GRID
Jigar Shah: All right, well this is a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time. Vishal, you and I have known each other for some time and it is just such a pleasure to see you in your not-so-new role. I think it's been over a year, right, as the CEO of LineVision — is that right?
Vishal Kapadia: It's about nine months, nine months at this point.
Jigar Shah: There you go. Well, welcome to the podcast. We are currently in an extraordinary moment — a moment where we've got a power crisis, we've got all of these conversations that are happening that you and I used to have just in a nerdy corner. Now it's being talked about by governors, talked about by other parties.
It's an interesting place you're in, but you didn't start here, right? You started as a banker, as the head of energy for Walmart. So all of these jobs to date have been really finance-related. They're not necessarily you understanding exactly how interconnection queues work or how the grid works or how even the procurement of power works per se. Did you pick up any of this stuff along the way, or is that post the Morgan Stanley role?
Vishal Kapadia: Well, along the way — when you are raising capital and financing all of these assets, you're the face of the project or the portfolio to the investor community. And that necessitates building some level of understanding — understanding the IE reports, the energy assessments, the power contracts, the risks contained in them. Particularly sitting at Morgan Stanley when we were financing a lot of utility-scale assets, that was with a lender hat on. And so I really did have to develop that in-depth understanding of what are the risks inherent in these assets, how are they being mitigated, what can be done to ultimately mitigate them.
There were a couple of assets that we owned within what subsequently became Ørsted that dealt with a lot of the issues related to Winter Storm Uri and had revenue contracts that left them vulnerable in that regard. And so there was a need to work with all of our partners to figure out solutions to the problems that that spawned.
And then the journey at Ørsted was very much a hybrid finance and commercial type leadership role that was not only responsible for financing and commercializing organic development assets, but that journey we undertook to become a five-gigawatt full-spectrum global platform over a few years — a lot of that growth was delivered via M&A and done in multiple markets, not just in the U.S. but beyond as well.
But I ended up leaving Ørsted in late 2021 to figure out what to do next. And I happened to get a call from someone representing Walmart. And I sort of laughed at the time, given everything that was going on in the environment. Why would I ever go off to Walmart with all of that opportunity out there?
Jigar Shah: I have flown to Bentonville way more than just once. The direct flight to Northwest Arkansas Airport was a mainstay for me. I'm curious though — you didn't just take the job, you moved to Bentonville, right?
Vishal Kapadia: I did not. I did not.
Jigar Shah: You're the one person that was not forced to move to Bentonville.
Arnab Pal: I mean, let's be real. You're a Bentonville guy, Jigar. You just can't believe someone wouldn't take that offer.
Jigar Shah: I love Bentonville. They have extraordinary barbecue in Bentonville. But it's not just Walmart. They've got three Fortune 500 companies from Northwest Arkansas — it's Tyson's Food and J.B. Hunt.
Vishal Kapadia: That's right. I think in that whole triangle, if you bring all of that together, it is Northwest Arkansas. And I think it's somewhere close to a million people in that little corner of the state. So it's grown tremendously.
WALMART AND THE GRID CRISIS
Vishal Kapadia: In 2022, I ended up joining Walmart to basically build and lead that new energy strategy for the company and really shift the energy function from being viewed as a cost center to a value creation platform that it could be.
What we really focused on building was a strategy and a team that was aimed at delivering energy security and affordability for our operations and then ultimately the communities that we were present in — and then building new businesses around the energy transition where there was an opportunity to be distinctive in doing so, with the ideal byproduct of those things then being able to help with emissions reduction and progress towards the 2040 goals.
Arnab Pal: Vishal, let's click in a little bit more on this energy transformation at Walmart. There's some specifics that you mentioned to us that we'd love to talk about. You said that non-weather-related outages went up almost 20% in three or four years. And there was some sort of grid deterioration around that. I'm curious — what does that look like when you're the one paying the Walmart electricity bills?
Vishal Kapadia: Well, it's not pleasant, Arnab. Let's just leave it at that. Part of what I oversaw was our energy P&L in the U.S. and because we were spread all around the country, I was in a unique position to be able to see across the country. And what we saw was that invariably — there's always some exceptions here and there — but for the most part, costs were going up and reliability was going down.
And that was really antithetical to anything in a Walmart context when you think about supplier relationships — we were effectively paying a lot more money for an increasingly unreliable product. And so there was a need to take on a more active role, more so than had already been undertaken, in advocating and participating, intervening in rate cases around the country.
It goes beyond just paying the bills. It was really about keeping the lights on in a lot of different places because we're also investing in an automation transformation across our footprint that was driving billions of dollars of capital into transforming the core supply chain operations of the business. And so you just sort of sit there feeling a pretty deep sense of urgency to dedicate lots of resources to take things into your own hands.
So we'd start with energy efficiency projects — obviously the premise being that the cheapest and greenest electrons are the ones that we don't use. But then also assembling new mechanisms to assess risks and then dedicating capital and other resources to go off and solve them. And so we were buying more diesel generators. We were building solar, storage, fuel cells, power quality monitoring infrastructure. And obviously none of that was cheap, both in terms of dollars but also time spent.
Walmart — we described ourselves as a tech-powered, omnichannel retailer, and I used to go around saying that you can't be tech-powered without power, in order to help people understand the gravity and to dedicate resources to what we're doing.
Look, from my perspective, there's nothing like being part of Walmart and everything and everyone that it touches to help you realize that there's really no more regressive tax that can be imposed on people than it costing more money to keep the lights on or to keep the refrigerator running. And so it's a pretty unique perspective that I was able to derive from my experience there.
Jigar Shah: It's also something interesting because retail feels old and stodgy. People have been doing it for a very long time. But when you think about Walmart and Costco and now Amazon — there's actually an enormous amount of innovation, enormous amount of cultural change, an enormous amount of adoption of technology. Which is almost the exact opposite of what you see in the electric utility space.
So when you're sitting at the Walmart desk and you're getting into rate cases and going to utilities and saying, basically, why are you forcing me to spend all of this money on backup diesel generators and all this other stuff — why don't you just do your job better? It must have felt a bit powerless. You could seize the power by putting in microgrids or putting in backup generators or whatever else, but you weren't really able to fix the electric utilities that were serving you.
Vishal Kapadia: No, Jigar. There's a limit to what can be done in that regard. And it's why we dedicated the resources that we did, and why you see a lot of the folks that are now looking for access to power and the timeframe that they're looking for — taking things into their own hands and going off and building these teams and building these capabilities too, because they've realized that there is an issue as it relates to speed to power.
Now look, from the utilities' perspective, putting myself in my customer's shoes now — it's not for lack of trying. There are great people at these businesses that are trying to do the right thing, but they have been working in a certain way for a number of years. They haven't dealt with conditions like this in quite some time. Many of the folks are not used to being able to operate at that pace. On top of that, they're stretched thinner than they ever have been.
I empathize with them, having to change virtually overnight on the back of really 18 or 24 months of just a full-on rush, from a place where we were just two and a half, three years ago with plenty of excess capacity. And here we are today where we're very short and we're talking about peak load being at 6X in 2030 what it is today or a year ago. It's a pretty significant shift.
And yes, from the perspective of a large energy consumer that's looking to achieve those objectives of keeping the lights on and keeping costs low, you almost don't have a choice but to go off and effectuate all of these new capabilities and ways of working to be able to respond to that.
WHY LINEVISION
Jigar Shah: One of the things that you saw firsthand from Walmart is that generation costs have basically stayed the same since 2010. They haven't really gone up that much on the wholesale power side. Then you've got transmission costs, which have gone up from 1.2 cents a kilowatt hour to maybe 2 cents a kilowatt hour today, but still in line with inflation really since 2010 or so. And it's distribution costs that have just spiked in a big way.
Now we're in a situation where we have to meet this speed to power, this load growth, this increase in peak demand. You've been CEO at LineVision for nine months, and you guys are talking about things on a specific basis — specific customers, specific states.
But now you've also got this macro view that's coming into focus, which is around how do we get more out of the assets we've already paid for. Some people are calling it grid utilization. Others are using things like grid-enhancing technologies or grid modernization. But ultimately there's some real barriers in the way.
Part of the challenge is that folks get paid to make money by spending money. The model itself is one of rate base. And when we had no real load growth from 2003 to 2022, you had to manufacture ways to spend money. Today, that's not the challenge, but old habits die hard. So how is it that you guys go to market?
Vishal Kapadia: I would say first off — I loved what I was doing at Walmart. Great people, diversity, the footprint kind of touched everything across energy, mobility, facilities.
I was living here in the Boston area the entire time though. And for us, moving to Bentonville wasn't something that was going to happen because during my whole career arc, we moved 12 times in about 10 years. And on two of those moves, my wife happened to be seven or eight months pregnant. So you talk about the critical backbone of our economy — she's the critical backbone of our family and none of what I do happens without her. We were done moving. I had two kids growing up super fast. I was missing out on a lot of time I wasn't going to get back.
But from the perspective of feeling powerless — it was pretty obvious that we have all these problems. Affordability, availability, reliability — they weren't going away. And I hear you on the distribution side, but I key in on the numbers. We do have a tremendous amount of wasted energy in the U.S. because of transmission grid constraints. And the cost of that is on average $15 billion per year now. And that average has doubled over the past five years.
On the CapEx side, we're spending $45 billion on transmission CapEx per year. And that number's only going up — I think in a few years' time, we'll be north of $50 billion and $60 billion by 2030.
Jigar Shah: It needs to be double that number.
Vishal Kapadia: Exactly. And in PJM, transmission is actually a third of wholesale power costs now. So all of this is coming at us collectively and it's only going one direction, and utilities need help.
The why around LineVision from my perspective is that — to be able to do that in a place where it's unquestionably the hardest to build new infrastructure on the transmission side, and with the traction that we have had in establishing relationships with some of the largest utilities across the U.S. and the UK — folks like National Grid, Dominion, Exelon, Georgia Power — I saw what the company was doing as a tremendously untapped resource that could deliver tremendous value for the system at large, if someone came in and was able to figure out how to make it all go faster.
But we are up against that inherent incentives misalignment, certainly here in a U.S. context. The UK is a bit of a unicorn in this regard in that they actually have policy mechanisms in place to incentivize the transmission operators to reduce congestion by allowing them to share in the savings. That is something that does not exist here in the U.S. in the transmission context. And it requires change, and requires repositioning of our solution to be able to ultimately help speak to a value proposition that they will respond to.
THE SLIDE RULE
Jigar Shah: I often say that our transmission infrastructure is measured by a slide rule — the amount of capacity that all this transmission has. Your technology really is replacing that slide rule with dynamic ratings and the ability to actually unlock the capacity that's just sitting there. How do you guys think about that?
Vishal Kapadia: Yeah, simplistically on the technology — I think about our transmission lines as highways and electrons as cars driving along those highways. And there's going to be certain times where you might have extra lanes available on those highways. In other cases, you might just have too many cars out there and you need more lanes.
When it comes to transmission lines, the determination of what is actually available is made on the basis of worst-case operating conditions — that it's really, really hot with no wind and the lines are therefore really hot. And so when you factor in hyperlocal environmental conditions — things like ambient temperature and what's most impactful is wind speed and direction because of the cooling effect that it has on lines — then you now have the most accurate information on what's actually available. How many lanes are there on the highway?
And that's what dynamic line ratings are. It is critical information to tell us more precisely how many lanes there are on those highways. In other words, it's the true capacity of transmission lines.
Look, that at the core is what we do at LineVision. We provide that critical intelligence layer on the critical backbone of our power system. And it matters because we do have these problems — availability, affordability, reliability. They're not going away. They're only getting worse. And what attracted me to the business and where we drive value is we unlock value across all of those things.
THE POLICY CASE FOR GRID UTILIZATION
Arnab Pal: Vishal, I want to go back to one of our favorite topics — that utilities need help. And I think that's right. And I think their intentions generally tend to be good here. Jigar and I have spent the last two years building the policy case for grid utilization, which is this all-encompassing term with what you're doing on the transmission side and a lot of the work we're doing on the distribution side.
Virginia just passed its first-in-the-nation grid utilization bill, still to be signed by the governor. And Dominion, one of your customers, didn't oppose it. In fact, they supported it and helped in the background on it. Is this legislation what we need to get utilities to look at what they already have before spending billions more?
Vishal Kapadia: Well, Arnab, when you talk about what we are trying to do — we feel like we figured out the "what" in terms of having a product that's flexible, scalable, utility-grade. We figured out the "why" in terms of articulating a value proposition for our solution. And what we're really now very focused on is the "how." How do we make it easier for our customers to do business with us and do more?
When you talk about air cover to help things move faster, nothing delivers that like regulation and legislation. But I do think there's other issues at play now. And I don't think stopping at reporting requirements or just commitments to evaluate and study really go far enough when it comes to proven technologies.
In the case of DLR, it's been utilized in Europe since the early part of the last decade. We're deploying at scale with National Grid in the UK. And look, as a country, I just think we need to deploy proven technology and we need to do it fast when we've got an opportunity to do that. Because there's not a lot of things that you can do quickly and cost-effectively.
And I think the dynamic now is that for utilities, every gigawatt of load that gets built off-grid is a tremendous amount of lost profit. And it also then ends up raising costs for consumers because it's depressing asset utilization of the existing infrastructure.
For our country, rising electricity prices don't just cause pain directly for residential customers — they cause indirect pain because when the costs of your core inputs increase, broader prices are going to increase. And then all of a sudden you wake up and your economy is structurally uncompetitive.
Improving utilization helps with speed, helps with affordability, and legislation is obviously incredibly helpful in that regard. And in the case of DLR, FERC — as they have done with Order 881 to mandate ambient-adjusted ratings and the steps that were taken to prepare for that — they could just mandate DLR everywhere. And that would solve a lot of problems and do it quickly.
THE ASPIRIN PROBLEM
Jigar Shah: Which they're not doing. I guess part of my problem, Vishal, is I want to understand — as somebody who has also worked on this for 20 years — when you have a no-brainer, which is what I think DLR represents, and you have a crisis, which is what I think load growth from data centers represents — how much time do I give people to get there?
Is five years what I should be expecting? In your job at Walmart or Ørsted or at Lincoln or at Barclays — is that what you would do when you're like, I got a tiger by the tail, this thing is going to really make everyone's lives better, we're going to make a lot of money at it? Let's figure out how to get it done in five years?
As Arnab said, I have a lot of empathy for the utilities and you said the same thing. I'm not trying to beat them up. What I'm trying to understand from a systems point of view is that everyone is in pain. The governors are in pain, the utilities are in pain, the public service commissions are in pain, the Walmarts and the people who use electricity are in pain. And over here, we've got aspirin. And everyone's like, I don't know, we need to do like a five-year study as to whether I should take aspirin.
Arnab Pal: And Vishal, to put a finer point on what Jigar is saying — awareness is important, that's why we do this. But what needs to change? Simply, if Jigar gets his wish and he has a magic wand and we get all this stuff done in 15 months — I know that's maybe not realistic, but it should be done in 15 months — what's one thing that we could do, the proverbial "we," to make that happen?
Vishal Kapadia: Well, lots of things should be done in 15 months. Having gone through what I went through at Walmart and understanding the scale of the operation — you're needing to wedge something in that quite frankly, in the grand scheme of things, is small relative to some of the other things that folks are spending their time and effort on.
And I will go back to the fact that people are trying to do the right thing. I haven't run into any customer who says, yeah, I don't want to do this because it's not aligned to my core business model of wanting to spend more money. These folks are working harder than they've ever worked. And I do want folks to be aware of that. You can't paint all of it with a broad brush. They're stretched super thin.
Having said that, I think it's about planning. The current planning approach isn't all wrong — obviously, on a relative basis, electricity service here from both a cost perspective and reliability perspective, if you look globally, is generally quite competitive.
But with all of these new technologies, they can be grid assets. I don't think there's any question about that. The argument has always been, look, they're not firm fixed — I can't rely on them in my N-minus-one cases. But I think current events are demonstrating that nothing is really firm fixed. If you're sitting in the UK, for instance, and you've just had a massive supply disruption to all the gas in your country — people were thinking about gas as firm fixed. That's no longer the case anymore because other things can happen.
THE NETWORK-LEVEL SOLUTION
Vishal Kapadia: I think the fundamental issue is that there's a need to look at all of these technologies as a whole instead of on an individual basis. And when you do that, I am certain that there are many one-plus-one-equals-five circumstances when you look at them in an integrated fashion.
For instance, DLR on its own — even in the middle of the country where your DLR is going to exceed your static rating over 80% of the hours in a given year — that's still not firm fixed capacity. There's a 20% gap that needs to be addressed. Storage — a four-hour battery on a standalone basis is not firm fixed capacity because of the duration limitations. Well, what happens when you pair those things together? Now you have something that potentially can be firm fixed.
And that's just a small example of looking at two of these technologies. So you then start to factor in VPPs, storage, EVs that are out there on the system. I think one plus one equals five and probably a hell of a lot more than that when you start to look at these things in an integrated fashion.
I heard a couple of things from our customers. One customer said, hey look, I really like the information that I get from your solution. But if you think that I'm going to put a sensor on 40,000 structures across my territory, it's just never going to happen. Number two — a lot of the work that we've been doing to reduce congestion in some of the territories, what we realized is that congestion might be resolved in a particular location by virtue of rerating a particular line, but the system operator might not actually see any value from it because it would just be getting pushed to another place.
And so it has become about delivering a fit-for-purpose solution that can deliver network-level visibility. The dynamic line ratings industry has not articulated the value proposition effectively enough, and then has not had a fit-for-purpose solution that can be deployed at that level of scale so that you actually can unlock that ROI.
With a lot of the change that we've driven here at LineVision over a nine-month time frame, we've very quickly evolved our solution from a line-level solution that's enabled by a sensor to one that is a network-level solution that is enhanced by sensors. We're able to do that because we had all those sensors out there in the field, on different types of topography, different terrain, different structures. And that has allowed us to now infer across the entirety of a network.
Now look, you're not going to have the same degree of accuracy at a place where you don't have a sensor as where you do. But there's also this reality that not all parts of a network are created equal. Some of the lines aren't heavily loaded. Some of them are very heavily loaded and are serving critical infrastructure. And so you do need that maximum visibility.
Having something that's fit for purpose, understanding that not all parts of a network are created equal, and understanding that a problem today is not necessarily where the problem tomorrow is going to be — these networks are not static beings, they're going to change over time — the industry would have had a better value proposition if it had addressed all of that earlier.
DEPLOYING AT SCALE
Jigar Shah: Let's talk about scale. We're still going to keep building more generation. We're still going to keep building out the transmission grid. All that stuff has to happen. But if people really took your technology seriously and deployed it at scale nationwide — and then also deployed batteries at Walmart stores and all of the competitors, and deployed the stuff that you and I believe are piloted, proven, we have data, we have case studies, we have a story — it does feel like you could do a lot.
Chris Wright, the current Secretary of Energy, just said on stage that he thinks that there's an extra 100 gigawatts of capacity that could be unlocked with all these solutions if they were deployed at scale. Is that the kind of scale we're talking about? How much scale can we get to and how fast can we get to it?
Vishal Kapadia: Yeah, look, you're going to have different circumstances in different places. And I'm going to speak to DLR specifically, because it's where we spend our time. I think there are certain parts of the country where there's a tremendous amount of latent capacity, particularly in the wind resource regimes — where what we are ultimately relying on to unlock this capacity is having insights into the wind speed and direction on these transmission lines. Places up and down the middle of the country across ERCOT, SPP, MISO — same places where a lot of the wind development is done — there's a lot of latent capacity.
Jigar Shah: So think North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas — these are all that wind belt where those states are all 30, 40% wind power.
Vishal Kapadia: You've got it. There's quite a bit of latent capacity in those areas. Now, there are other parts of the country where you have the opposite issue — that the use of ambient-adjusted ratings, which FERC has mandated, because it is also imperfect information, is in some pockets, as we're starting to do some work, showing that lines are actually now operating at over-capacity because of the use of imperfect information there.
So the answer is it's complicated. In some parts of the country, you have a very robust story. In other parts of the country, perhaps not so much. But from my standpoint, that is information that then helps you understand where do I need to invest resources to address these issues at scale in the most optimal way.
And that's where things like the SPARK program — round three of the Grid Deployment Office funding that is now being deployed towards reconductoring and advanced transmission technologies — from my standpoint, we can get a whole lot further with those dollars if we have information that can help us understand where and when those dollars are going to go furthest.
Jigar Shah: But to be clear — that SPARK program is like over a billion dollars of new grant funding. To roll out your solution nationwide would be like $500 million bucks.
I just want to make sure that people understand the context of what we're talking about here. It's not that much money to unlock all this extra capacity. It just isn't. And so — look, I get the fact that you've got a business to run and you've got to work with a lot of these customers. But from my side, I'm like, God damn it, why can't America do big things?
We've invented all this stuff. We then had to ship it over to the UK because we weren't going to scale it up. So we're like, why don't you take it, scale it up? And then they went to Belgium, they went to other places. I think even Brazil and India are using dynamic line ratings. And now we're like, all right, well, now that 20 other countries around the world have tested it, maybe we should take our homegrown technologies and deploy it at scale.
The thing that bothers me the most is that we have this venture capital ecosystem. We have all these investors. You guys have S2G and others invested in you guys. And I want them to make a lot of money. I want there to be a huge return on investment. So they'll keep investing in the next generation of companies. But that requires you to actually be able to realize your full potential. Am I wrong?
Vishal Kapadia: No, you're spot on. I would love for all of this to go faster. And look, I would just say — as it relates to DLR, I don't think the industry really gave anyone a reason to scale. I think that's the change we've driven here in the nine months since I've been here.
We've dealt with the "what" — having a product that is scalable, flexible, and utility-grade. Because I don't want to discount that it's not just flipping a switch. Some people talk about it like, hey, you can turn this on like Netflix. It's not that. There is a systems integration that needs to occur into utility EMS that takes time and resources. But we're positioned in a place where we've done that — we're on the roadmap to do that with seven different customers now.
We have a compelling "why" — the ROI is very clear in terms of the value that it drives. And we are connecting that with our customers to actual dollar-value outcomes.
And it's really just about the "how." And the "how" is complicated. Every utility is different. They've got different problems, they've got different types of customers that they're dealing with and managing against. And what I am trying to do is create more awareness of the scalability, the flexibility, the cost-effectiveness of our solution — not just as a value driver in and of itself, but as a value driver for how, when, and where to deploy the other grid-enhancing technologies, like reconductoring, like storage, and on down the list.
RESILIENCE AND WILDFIRE
Jigar Shah: Let's talk about one plus one equals five. The other thing you guys do is a lot of work on the resilience and wildfire side of things. You're providing information to utilities on that front too. Talk about that a little bit and how your product not only unlocks the grid, but also provides valuable information to prevent wildfires and other issues.
Vishal Kapadia: Yeah, so we obviously talked a lot about our DLR solution, which I think about as being enhanced by sensors. But what you're touching on, Jigar, is our situational awareness solution, which is entirely powered and enabled by our sensors.
The latest-generation hardware device that we're deploying is a camera-based sensor that's paired with a weather station and air quality monitoring capabilities as well. And so not only are we gathering the hyperlocal weather conditions that help enhance the accuracy of our DLR, but it's also unlocking things like visual intelligence along the transmission right-of-way to monitor a conductor for things like icing and galloping — which were incredibly relevant to the Texas freeze, Winter Storm Uri.
But it is also detecting things like vegetation encumbrances or other encumbrances in the right-of-way. And when you take into consideration the air quality monitoring capabilities, that becomes very valuable information as part of a broader wildfire risk intelligence program.
When you combine the information from our line ratings with a lot of these other capabilities, it puts us in a position to be able to stack value for our customers from the same platform. It's something we're quite excited about being able to deliver, but it goes back to the point around articulating the value proposition. There is a reliability and a resilience use case through the use of these technologies.
ONE THING TO CHANGE
Jigar Shah: All right, Vishal, I have grilled you, peppered you with questions. Let's do a final question. You've been the investor, the developer, the corporate customer, and now the grid tech CEO. You've seen this from every angle. If you could change one thing about how utilities approach grid planning, what would it be?
Vishal Kapadia: I'll build on what I said earlier, Jigar. I think there's a need to approach the available solutions that are out there now in an integrated fashion. Because one plus one will equal five when you do that, and maybe even a little bit more than that, depending on the circumstances.
To me, I would just say incorporate them — even if it's worst-case assumptions. Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Because we're in a circumstance now where costs are going up. We do have an imperative to enable speed to power. And by virtue of not capturing at least some degree of this information into these processes, there is inefficiency that is ultimately cascading.
And anything that we can do to chip away at that cascade of inefficiency — all of it is good. And we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Jigar Shah: Well, with that, Vishal, thanks for all of the leadership you've shown over the years. It's an extraordinary journey that you've had, but also just a lifetime of impact. Really appreciate your wife doing all that sacrifice so that you could do it. And appreciate that you're now in another extraordinary job that frankly, I think is going to be critical for us to be able to unlock data center load growth and the safety that we all want to see.
Arnab Pal: And Vishal, we'll expect this to be done in 15 months.
Jigar Shah: That's right. The clock's ticking, Vishal.
Vishal Kapadia: I'm doing my best, guys. All I can do is tell you that if I were asked to build a national intelligence layer for the critical backbone of our increasingly AI-powered economy, that is something that can be done with the right level of data and collaboration. So we're excited to go off and tackle it and excited to make more people aware of how quickly and how cost-effectively we can deliver that for everybody.
Jigar Shah: Amazing. Thanks, Vishal.
TAKEAWAYS
Jigar Shah: Well, that was fantastic, Arnab. Obviously, you and I worked together on that Utility Dive piece around getting more out of the grid that we've already paid for and how we really put this playbook in place for the governors. Vishal didn't disappoint. It was fascinating to learn about what he's doing at LineVision, but also all of the stuff that he accomplished at Walmart and some of his other jobs.
Arnab Pal: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to disagree with anything he's doing, except saying, hey, let's do it faster. And I think there's some consensus around what's going on, so we should go do it.
Jigar Shah: Well, it was funny — I think there were like seven ways that I was trying to get him to bad-mouth the utilities and he figured out a way to slip through all seven. That's got to be a skill in and of itself.
Arnab Pal: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he went to Harvard Business School or Columbia Business School, but wherever he went, they taught him that tactic and it worked well for him.
Jigar Shah: Well, look, I don't envy him, but it's very obvious that nine months in, he's really put in a full-court press. It does feel like he has prepared the company now for this moment. And I do think that with the comments that Chris Wright recently made about grid utilization, we are in a place where all of these solutions — these near-term solutions that can be deployed in 15 months, let's hope it's 15 months — can be essential to us actually unlocking AI load growth and figuring out how to finally get bills down.
Arnab Pal: Yeah. And I think for everyone who sits there and says utility bills are going up — and then they'll whisper, well, there's not actually anything we can do about it in the short term — it's like, there is. We've already built the infrastructure. We just haven't figured out a way to use it yet. And I think the challenge for us and all of our listeners here is how do we get this in place over the next year or two before the tsunami of demand and the price increases occur and we all suffer from that.
Jigar Shah: You know, this whole thing reminds me of — do you remember when George W. Bush was running for president the first time around? And he had that phrase, "the bigotry of low expectations." I feel like this is the bigotry of low expectations. We're just like, there is no way that the utilities succeed at this. And so we're praying and hoping for incremental improvement. But I don't know, I think they're going to surprise to the upside.
Arnab Pal: I do.
Jigar Shah: So with that, thank you for joining us, Arnab. It was great to have you. And thanks, everybody, for joining us here on the Energy Empire podcast.
Please listen and provide a review. That's how people find us. If you're watching on YouTube, smash the subscribe button. That's what my son likes to say, so I got to do it. And I really want to thank Simon and the rest of the team. They just do a fantastic job of getting these things out.
Arnab Pal: Smash and subscribe.