Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[2:18] SM: "OhmGrid [...] [is] helping residential customers get off the grid. And they do this through a model where they effectively just switch out some equipment, do some upgrades, and then you're basically paying the same price as you would for your electricity bill. The major difference is that you are no longer reliant on the grid and will have guaranteed electricity. So they have solar and storage with generator backups in the event of a serious hurricane or some kind of weather event."
[11:17] BP: "What we're doing is making [it] incredibly easy for folks to just have a utility alternative, so that you don't have to be tied to the grid. Or we can also have a grid optional, where the grid connection is still there as a backup. [With] solar battery storage, power generator, and the grid, you have triple redundancy. So we're offering 100% guaranteed power, so you never gonna lose power. [...] We're just offering a subscription service, where we operate the equipment, and you just pay your monthly bill."
[21:09] BP: "The conversation changed from about 2013 on, where so many of our customers talk to us about resiliency and keeping the lights on. [...] It used to be we asked if they had power outages and they would say, [...] a couple years ago, we had one for 30 minutes or so. And then it got more and more frequent. [...] So we noticed the grid becoming less reliable. [...] It's so crazy that the stuff that powers our modern lives, like [...] a supercomputer in my hand, is powered by stuff from like 140 years ago."
[22:44] BP: "It's going to cost roughly $2 trillion to upgrade America's transmission system. And that's just the transmission system, those big steel towers from the industrial revolution, not the distribution system, which has all the power lines. [...] America is not gonna be able to afford $2 trillion dollars worth of grid modernization efforts in the next few years, so that the grid can handle both the electric revolution and EVs. So [...] distributed generation microgrids and off grid is not just an idea, but an absolute essential."
[43:32] BP: "One thing that the US military looks at is limiting points of failure. But if you look at the grid and the transmission and distribution system, there are infinite points of failure. Do you know that there are more power outages caused by squirrels and mylar balloons than anything else? The 2005 New York blackout [...] was caused by a squirrel in Ohio. [...] If you decentralize and democratize energy, then you're eliminating all those points of failure."
Rating: ⚡⚡
