AI for the grid, and when Big Tech ruins climate tech

Making sure you don't miss Gridmatic, and, a rant that's NOT about Gridmatic! But which is about how messaging and values matter, whether you're building clean energy or not.

What’s on Everybody in the Pool

I don’t want you to miss my interview with Gridmatic, which is sort of best described as a new kind of power company that sites in the messy middle between renewables, batteries, and electricity markets — and which uses AI to make that whole system work better.

I’ll admit it took me a minute to understand it, but I think I got it:

Gridmatic is trying to incentivize and improve the rollout of renewable energy by making cheap, clean power behave more like dependable (fossil fuel) power. The company sells electricity to commercial and industrial customers, but they also do a bunch of behind-the-scenes work that makes clean power more reliable and cheaper.

1. They line up clean supply by signing contracts (PPAs) with wind/solar projects.

2. They forecast (weather, grid conditions, and prices) to predict when that clean supply will be plentiful or scarce.

3. They use batteries and wholesale market automation to shift energy through time: store cheap, abundant power, then deliver it when the grid is tight and power is expensive.

Upshot: grid operators can be less worried about integrating renewable energy sources, thanks to reduced volatility; customers get steadier prices; and the grid gets greater flexibility, which reduces the need for fossil-fuel powered peaker plants.

And actually, not to geek out even more but I can’t help it. The flexibility and the reliability piece is the whole deal. The problem with increasing load demand isn’t actually not having enough power. It’s not having enough power at the right time, which means we have to overbuild grid infrastructure to keep things stable, or fire up coal or gas-powered peaker plants.

But if grid operators and utilities can be convinced that aggregated power or what I now know are called “controllable load resources” are actually reliable sources of dispatchable power (ie, it can be turned off and on when needed), then actually, even data centers that are willing to engage in flexible power agreements can be grid assets, too!

That’s all in the interview, I’ll stop now because, as you’ll see below, I have a lot more to say on a totally different topic.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Big thoughts

I heard an interview with a clean energy tech company on Marketplace this week (yes, I still listen!) that absolutely blew my mind. And not in a good way.

The company is Radiant Nuclear, which is producing micro nuclear reactors that can be built in a factory and then deployed as clean backup power for data centers, military bases (their top two customers so far), hospitals, or other businesses. The company says they’re designed to replace dirty diesel generators in areas and installations where grid stability might be in doubt or reliable backup power isn’t optional.

Now, as Marketplace host (and my old co-host) Kai Ryssdal points out in the Radiant interview, people do still have a lot of questions about nuclear power — where the waste goes, what it means to have a nuclear energy facility nearby, how it works, why we need it over other clean energy sources, that sort of thing.

Kai Ryssdal: So let’s say I’m on a farm in Iowa, or I’m a software developer in San Francisco, or whatever, just a random person in this economy. Make me care about this.

Radiant CEO Doug Bernauer: Do I need to?

Ryssdal: Yeah, I think you do. Because people are, honestly, people are going to say, oh my god, nuclear reactor is right next to my farm at this data center, and, you know?

Bernauer: I mean, possibly. The thing is that I don’t need to sell a huge number of these and make them go everywhere. It’s really for people who need it, who want to have a hospital that when the grid goes out, they don’t have a room filled with 12 diesel generators that they’re going to just pump a bunch of exhaust fumes out into the environment with.

Reader, my mouth hung open for so long that a fly flew in. First of all, from a messaging (and of course, public policy and human health) perspective, there is no conversation about nuclear energy that doesn’t or needn’t include a real answer about waste, waste disposal, and storage, no matter how many you plan to sell, or where they plan to sit. Yeah. Uh. You need to.

The interview goes on:

Ryssdal: I get all that, but here we get back to the people screaming at me on the radio, saying, Kai, come on, nuclear. Right?

Bernauer: Well, I think that there’s this association with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy -

Ryssdal: I think there’s an association with Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and that’s what people worry about. And I don’t want to go down the nuclear catastrophe thing, right, because, look, you guys are working on the safety thing, and I appreciate that, but, you know, if this is part of the energy future, I think people have to understand what’s going on.

Bernauer: Sure. For a large reactor, typically a utility chooses to build that. The utility is a public service, right?

The utility has to get approval from the citizens who are going to have to increase the fees that they’re paying. This product doesn’t do that, so we sell to businesses. We sell commercially.

A data center company, Equinix, could buy a reactor, set it down somewhere, use it for clean power. You’re not going to feel it in your pocket directly like you will if some utility chooses to build.

So this is where this interview goes from a stunning lack of media training, PR awareness, and thoughtfulness to a genuinely disturbing presentation of goals, priorities, and values that is all too Silicon Valley.

What Bernauer has effectively said here is, if we were building utility-scale nuclear or working with utilities, we’d be regulated. But, says Bernauer, in effect, since we’re planning to sell to private companies and the Department of Defense, that won’t matter.

And indeed, as Ryssdal points out, data center Equinix has already pre-ordered 20 Radiant micro-reactors, and the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force have ordered at least one for an American military base.

I suppose Radiant has reason to think it’s clear skies (no pun intended) for future growth. For one thing, the company has ties to the Trump administration — its chief nuclear officer, Dr. Rita Baranwal, previously served as Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy in the first Trump administration.

Bernauer himself is also part of a very specific Silicon Valley club: he spent 12 years at SpaceX before founding Radiant, and many of the company’s investors come from that pool of funders, including Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, and the massive Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism fund, devoted to funding companies and fields that are closely aligned with Pentagon strategy. (Oh, and Chevron.)

And this is a good place to point out that the Trump administration has cultivated deep ties with Silicon Valley on the topic of nuclear energy, per Pro Publica from early April. This article reports on a meeting last summer at the Idaho National Laboratory (where Radiant Nuclear is testing its reactor), at which a lawyer who joined the Department of Energy via Elon Musk’s DOGE, “repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns” related to nuclear testing and waste disposal.

When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

Also from Pro Publica:

Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”

Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.

The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

What could go wrong?

Back to Radiant Nuclear: it’s a red flag when you hear someone declare in an interview that they simply do not have to sell or explain themselves to communities or regular Americans, or even be prepared for such a question in an interview with a media serving a large mainstream audience.

And while I wished it were simply bad media training (I can help!), this attitude sadly appears to be the particular arrogance of a club that counts itself the winners of the future, and has no reason to believe otherwise. What Bernauer is effectively saying here is, I don’t have to worry about what you think because I’ll be doing private, commercial business with data centers and military bases with the full support and fast-tracking of the current administration, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That bugs me for a couple reasons. One, it’s not the world I want to live in. I’ve spent 25 years in a tech industry that has transformed itself over time from innovators, inventors, and nerds into a series of monopolies and superpowers and sovereign characters with little obvious moral compass. And this industry is constantly attempting to manufacture consent for money-making “innovations” regardless of whether they’re actually a net benefit for people.

It also bugs me because when clean tech companies blow up, are careless with public safety, or are otherwise frauds or fakes, the whole industry suffers. The Solyndra bankruptcy set back federal clean energy investment by at least a decade; the Nikola scandal cast a huge pall on hydrogen trucking. The clean tech SPAC boom brought Silicon Valley BS to public markets like never before, and when most of them went out of business, it just made investors less likely to bet on the next electric bus startup or solar technology, and we don’t have time for that crap.

And here’s the other thing. Radiant Nuclear knows damn good and well that you do have to explain yourselves to consumers and communities, because they had to move their own microreactor plant to an entire state over concerns about nuclear waste!

They’d originally planned to build the plant in Wyoming — and Dr. Baranwal was trotted out to try to explain that they prefer the term “spent fuel,” that Radiant’s fuel is safe, their plans for storing it were safe, and that the company’s presence in Wyoming would continue the state’s long history of mining (in this case, for uranium to create the microreactors) and energy production.

It didn’t work. The company, citing Wyoming’s law banning spent nuclear waste storage, is now building its microreactor plant in Tennessee.

Ironically, the problem in Wyoming was in part messaging and perception, since the state has made at least one exception to its spent fuel law in the past. As this writeup from Cowboy State Daily notes:

Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, chairman of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, […] told Cowboy State Daily the Freedom Caucus “draws the line at out-of-state waste storage.”

She said the group is standing up to California billionaires who “insist on saddling our landscapes with their windmills, their solar panels and now their radioactive waste.”

This trend is only going to grow — this pushback against out-of-control technocrats, billionaires, manufactured consent, and Big Tech writ large. Communities are shutting down data center projects left and right, while other communities are shutting down solar and wind farms over misinformation and sheer NIMBYism.

I believe in the power of technology, the uniquely human ability to invent and innovate and create — from electricity to skyscrapers to truly miraculous medical developments to the incredible spring bloom of scientific joy and discovery that was the (publicly funded!) Artemis II moon mission in April.

And therefore, it offends me to see a company carrying a clean energy banner try to run roughshod over humans and communities because they believe they’ve been anointed by the current administration and the particular slice of Big Tech that’s decided that the ends of progress justify any means they want.