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Bill had an impressive career as a tech entrepreneur and businessman before he turned his sights (back to) energy. He started his first company in highschool - a graphics software company when personal computers were still text based. He has started and sold several tech companies. He joined one startup as CEO, grew the company to nearly $100 million in revenue, and then sold it to IBM. He then served as an advisor to the C-suite on at IBM on strategy.
But even before all of this success, his first love was electricity and the power grid. After graduating from NC State University, Bill traveled all over North Carolina to inspect power plants - climbing down into dams and up towers - literally touching the vast infrastructure of the power grid.
So what does this technology and business guru think about the future of energy?
Looking through the lens of his technological and business experience, he began his career transition to renewable energy with a TED talk about accelerating the shift to clean energy. Then, he created the number one ranked renewable energy podcast called the Freeing Energy podcast and, ultimately, used his research to publish a best selling book called Freeing Energy at the end of 2021 - “how innovators are using local scale solar and batteries to disrupt the global energy industry from the outside.” Bill is now a Department of Energy clean energy champion. He co-founded a company called Solar Inventions, whose mission is to commercialize a set of scientific breakthroughs for improving silicon photovoltaics. He is again a venture capitalist, but for the energy transition.
We talk about the power of networked technologies, the monopolistic nature of current utilities and discuss parallels between the mobile phone revolution and the future of local, on-site clean power. We even get to hear Bill's personal story of what has fueled his entrepreneurial career from high school to this very day. This is a good one guys.
Outline
Chapter 1: Introduction
Description: Introduction to the podcast and its focus on decentralized and carbon-free energy solutions. Introduces the host and producer.
Chapter 2: Bill's Background and Freeing Energy Journey
Description: Discussion about Bill's background as a tech entrepreneur and his transition into the energy industry. Mention of his book "Freeing Energy" and the research journey behind it.
Chapter 3: Sparking the Journey
Description: Bill shares a pivotal moment that sparked his interest in transforming lives through local energy systems.
Chapter 4: Exploring Local Energy
Description: Highlights the importance of small, local energy systems and their potential to disrupt the global energy industry.
Chapter 5: Parallels with Computing Industry
Description: Discusses the parallels between the electricity industry and the computing industry, particularly in terms of scalability and technological advancements.
Chapter 6: Challenges and Opportunities
Description: Explores the challenges and opportunities in transitioning to decentralized energy systems, including interconnection processes and the potential for global utility.
Chapter 7: The Energy Internet
Description: Introduces the concept of the "energy internet" and the need for a globally scalable tech platform in the energy industry.
Chapter 8: Transforming Lives
Description: Bill shares a conversation with a utility executive that highlights the transformative power of decentralized energy systems.
Chapter 9: Fun Facts and Statistics
Description: Presents interesting facts and statistics related to energy, including the impact of solar and battery technologies.
Chapter 10: Conclusion
Description: Wraps up the podcast episode and encourages listeners to tune in to future episodes.
Creators & Guests
What is The World Changing Podcast?
Join us as we talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. Hosted by Greg Robinson and Flo Lumsden, an Aston podcast produced by Chorus Studios.
00:00
Bill Nussey
It's embodied by a conversation I had with a utility executive that captures the absolute truth of the statement. He said, listen, bill, I appreciate that people want to put solar on the roof. I get it. They want to make an environmental impact. But he says, I'm a dollar and cents guy. I've seen the math. You've seen the math. It is just much cheaper to build it in a large field at scale than it is to put in a roof. And that's just the bottom line. And I let it hang there for a second, and I said, it's cheaper for you. And. And no one ever thought about that before.
00:32
Greg Robinson
Welcome to the world changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it. We'll keep it anyway. How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, then we can take that out. Welcome to the world changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon free future. We'll talk to skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company. And on the other side of the camera here we have Flo Lumston, our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
01:26
Speaker 3
Our next guest on the world changing podcast is Bill Nussy. So I've been so excited to have this conversation with Bill. I first met Bill when he was kind of making a transition from his life as a tech entrepreneur, CEO, venture capitalist, and moving over into the following his passion of renewable energy. He was writing a book that's called Freeing Energy. It's still, to this day, my most recommended book to anybody who wants to learn about the energy sector. And it's really Bill's experience and background that makes me recommend that book. I think he has such a unique experience in the tech sector and what that means when you apply technology, business models and innovation to a sector like energy, that really hasn't changed much in 100 years. So Bill's first company was a graphics software company when personal computers were still text based.
02:23
Speaker 3
He started that in high school. His second company started in college. That company served millions of users in 45 countries. He spent several years as a venture capitalist until he took another job as a CEO, where he grew that company to $500 million in revenue and took it public. But he wasn't done. He joined another startup as CEO, grew that company to nearly $100 million in revenue, and sold to IBM, where he was an advisor to the C suite on strategy. And after that full career of creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value, he made the transition to his passion for renewable energy, which began with a TED talk. And then what became the number one ranked renewable energy podcast called the Freeing Energy podcast.
03:09
Speaker 3
And then ultimately his book that he published at the end of 2021 called Freeing Energy, how innovators are using local scale solar and batteries to disrupt the global energy industry from the outside. Bill is now a department of Energy clean energy champion. He's co founded a company called Solar Inventions, whose mission is to commercialize set of scientific breakthroughs for improving silicon photovoltaics. Bill is a venture capitalist again. And one thing that I just find.
03:39
Greg Robinson
So fascinating is it's really easy to.
03:41
Speaker 3
Sit at the top of this industry and not get down in the weeds. But Bill and his family have taken on a handful of projects providing off grid, resilient electricity in places like East Africa and Puerto Rico. In this episode, we cover everything from power plant inspections to monopolies to the future of microgrids. And we even get to hear Bill's personal story of what has fueled his entrepreneurial career from high school to this very day.
04:16
Greg Robinson
We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. How's that?
04:22
Bill Nussey
Yeah.
04:23
Greg Robinson
All right. I'm glad we're merging all of this into a recorded podcast. It's been a while since we got up.
04:33
Bill Nussey
It's good to see you, man. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I try to do a podcast every once in a while just to keep the story evolving and happy to do one with you and my podcast, which did quite well when it was in, but my job at engage has caused me to be crazy busy, so the podcast has gotten deprioritized. But I always use riverside. Love it. Great platform.
04:59
Greg Robinson
So, you know, not to close the browser at the end of the.
05:02
Bill Nussey
I do. I've had to call people up and say, use this URL.
05:06
Greg Robinson
All right, well, I know we have a tight schedule a bit today. We can't sort of spend the whole day together, so I'll try to achieve the impossible for me, which is be brief.
05:18
Bill Nussey
I feel your pain, brother man.
05:21
Greg Robinson
You and I met when you were starting your freeing energy research journey.
05:27
Bill Nussey
Yes.
05:28
Greg Robinson
And so I know one of two things I figured would happen today. Either you're totally sick of talking about that journey and you're on to being a vc and not thinking, or you're going to be really pumped to talk about the beginning.
05:43
Bill Nussey
Both. I have so many things I'm absolutely passionate about that it is depressing, despite my endless excitement, to not be able to do all the things I'm so in love with doing. So it's a wonderful point in my career to have so many things that I want to put time into.
05:59
Greg Robinson
Very cool. Oh, yeah. Nice. So I want to start with, I remember hearing your story of how you got into freeing energy and how you had spent about three decades being, like, a tech entrepreneur, and then you got into energy. But I'm really curious, if you go all the way back, was there any sort of earlier instance in your life when you were thinking about energy or electricity, or was it truly just like you sort of got through this entrepreneurial career and you're like, oh, I want to think about energy now. Was there anything earlier than that? Earlier than the start of freeing energy?
06:39
Bill Nussey
Oh, yeah, there's lots. When I was really little, maybe in middle school or somewhere in high school, I figured out that if. And I wrote down, like, I wrote down what I was going to do with my life, and I wrote down that whoever invents a better battery is going to be the richest person in the world. I think I was pressing him because that probably is true if someone can really crack the battery. Always. And then I got my undergrad in electrical engineering. And when I was going to NC state, my first job during the summer was to work at CP L, which was the precursor to Duke energy. And I was hired to do groundwater analysis, write software for groundwater analysis at some of their plants that were leaking chemicals.
07:23
Bill Nussey
And I think that was also a prescient and precursor to the advocacy I feel towards the environment that I didn't actually feel at the time. But they put me in a job to do this calculation of groundwater penetration. I was a freshman in college, and I was supposed to have all summer, and I did it in a. And so then they're like, what are we going to do with you? And that actually changed my life. They were trying to figure out what to do with me, and somehow they hooked me up to do plant inspections. And me and this woman, who was a bit older than me, traveled around the state of North Carolina. We climbed inside of the nuclear plant before it was fueled. We climbed inside of dams, we climbed up towers and used sensors.
08:02
Bill Nussey
And so for like two months, six weeks out of that summer, I went all over the state, looking at every kind of power plant the state had, looking for just basically doing inspections and it was absolutely remarkable. And I got to see the entirety of the utility industry, which I think is both simultaneously awe inspiring and civilization changing. But also, as many people know, it's really deep challenges that are becoming increasingly apparent. So that was probably the first part. I fell in love with electricity and been in love with it ever since. And then I guess the last part of the question is, when I was traveling in East Africa with my family, were with a Somboro tribe out in the field, three hour drive, way in the middle of nowhere. And they had no electricity and had no anything.
08:54
Bill Nussey
They dug holes in the ground to go to the bathroom. And this young lady was. We were in her hut, and there was a translator, and the hut was lit by a fire, a small fire in the middle of the hut. And she was explaining through the translator how she feeds her children. And the hut fire was the only source of light. And she and her husband slept with all the children in this little hut, mud hut. And as we're sitting there, my eyes are burning, my throat is burning, there's little fires going up there. And I can't believe I said, I asked her through the translator, how do you deal with this horrible smell? And she says, well, all the children are used to it because there's no other way to light it.
09:31
Bill Nussey
And the metaphorical light bulb went off over my head, right. And I said, man, I'm an electrical engineer. There's got to be a better way to do that. And that's probably the singular thing that sparked my journey into thinking about how to transform lives to local energy.
09:46
Greg Robinson
That's amazing. Yeah, well, that whole concept is still mind boggling to me after 15 years in this industry is how simple and sort of generally unchanged electricity systems are. I was actually teaching my son Ohm's law the other day.
10:09
Bill Nussey
Nice.
10:10
Greg Robinson
And I was just thinking about how that's unchanged. It's so simple. It's been around for a long time. This is not groundbreaking, cutting edge technology to get people electricity at this point.
10:28
Bill Nussey
No.
10:28
Greg Robinson
Yet there's still people who don't have that. So you really have to think about the business model, or there's got to be something else. It's not just some technological innovation. And so I really have always appreciated that in talking with you because you have that experience of becoming a tech entrepreneur and really sort of working outside of electricity for, I believe I read it was about three decades. Is that correct that you don't like to.
10:54
Bill Nussey
Decades, but, yeah, it's been a long time. Here's the crazy thing that I thought about this the other day, Greg. If you look at all the energy systems that power civilizations, fossil fuels, electricity, they all have two characteristics in common. That really blew my mind when I thought about it. It's not in the book. First of all, the only way to build those systems is to do massive infrastructure. You need to build hydro dams and transmission lines, and you need to build pipelines for fuel and gas, and you need to build oil rigs that cost 25 billions.
11:28
Bill Nussey
What ends up happening in the entire history of energy has required large government intervention for you couldn't have those energy systems without a complex society and government where it could aggregate the capital necessary or create the laws for capital to be aggregated in a protected way, which is why utilities are monopolies, at least back in the time. And so the government did an amazing job by allowing society to build these massive energy infrastructures, which by doing so create economies of scale. And everyone in the western world enjoys affordable energy. Oil, gas, electricity, city. It certainly could be cheaper.
12:07
Bill Nussey
And I think that anytime you build giant infrastructure projects, whether it's a city or a bridge or a stadium or a military complex or a power plant, and you aggregate large bits of capital to do it, there's a lot of people that get wealthy from that. And what I think happened was that, and this is not some conspiracy theory at all, but the fact is that oil and gas and electric companies are some of the most powerful, wealthy, profitable organizations in the world, perhaps deservedly so, because they have done something for civilization that's easy to overlook and take for granted. They more or less now have a system that works relatively well with things like climate change aside. And it's this local energy stuff like that small light that family ended up getting in Africa, it completely breaks that model.
12:50
Bill Nussey
You no longer need billion dollar infrastructure, you no longer need enormous government support to carve out the capital allocation. And I think this move to small, local energy systems is actually far more profound, from a history point of view, than I'd even realized when I wrote the book. We're shifting not just the way in which the technology is deployed, but the entire allocation of largest capital projects in human history and the way that the governments have been supportive of energy systems. We couldn't have energy systems without the government, and I think that's no longer the case. Yeah, big changes.
13:22
Greg Robinson
That's amazing. So you getting into free energy, that sounds like that was kind of like a hypothesis going into the research. And just to remind me and us, how long did you research for that.
13:36
Bill Nussey
Book experience that we don't try to talk about. Let's say that I told my wife I'd spend a year doing it, and let's just say it took three years longer. But the problem was that I started a startup, and I was also having more fun. We had given away the bulk of the money I made when I sold IBM, but we had enough for me to do this. And I traveled all over the planet Earth, meeting people, learning about local energy, large scale energy. I sat down with the founder of Jinko, the largest solar manufacturer in his headquarters in China and Beijing, and just. What a blast. And so I was dragging my feet doing the research, and then I don't think the book would have ever been finished had it not been for Covid.
14:16
Bill Nussey
And so Covid was a disaster for civilization and for countless families, and it certainly had an impact on my family, but it also meant that I had to quit traveling and I had to quit meeting people. And so I actually sat down and wrote the darn book and finished it. So, wow, there's some silver lining in that terrible era of human history.
14:35
Greg Robinson
Yeah. So, obviously, it sounds like you still are a believer in the local energy more than ever, and that is the revolution. Is there anything that you. When you kind of went into the book, is there anything that you changed your mind on? Was there anything that you just held as a strong belief going into it, but then got your mind changed on?
14:58
Bill Nussey
I think most people go into this industry, wherever they're coming from, whether they're doing big scale energy or carbon capture or small scale energy, whatever it is they're doing. And I think they come in seeing utilities as the foe. And I had met some really enlightened people, and they said, hey, this doesn't work unless we work with the utilities. And I dismissed it as people that had maybe once worked at utilities and they had drunk the koolaid. But the more I looked at the system from a mechanical and economic engine point of view, the more I realized that the electric utilities, for a long list of reasons, are an essential part of this energy transition. Now, could they move more quickly? Absolutely. Are some of them dragging their feet? Perhaps.
15:43
Bill Nussey
But generally, the legal aspects of how their monopolies are carved out, the infrastructure that they've built, like transmission and things like that, are an essential part of the future of clean energy as we go through this transition. As an example, and probably very specific to your question, Greg, I just assumed that it would better for everybody to do local battery, local solar on their house and that we would never need a grid. And when you do the math, and the math is on my website, it's in my book, it's actually incredibly obvious that like the computing industry, when you connect these devices, they're far more valuable than if they are isolated. There's a lot of reasons for that capacity and peak and a lot of other things. It's really basic math.
16:32
Bill Nussey
So it's the exact same underlying thesis that makes your computer more valuable when it's part of the Internet. It's the same thesis that makes your solar battery in your house or your electric vehicle more valuable when it's part of electric grid. Or as I call in the book, the energy Internet.
16:47
Greg Robinson
Yeah, that sharing. There's so many examples just in the last decade of sharing underutilized capacity. Like if everybody has their own car or everybody has their own.
16:58
Bill Nussey
Great point.
16:59
Greg Robinson
And those can't plug into a network that has some kind of piece of software, some kind of optimization model underneath it's very challenging to get the most out of the infrastructure. We all have to own a lawn mower, we all have to own a car, we all have to own everything individually. And it probably seems to apply. There's something in the back of my mind where I really want to go down this path and talk about Internet communities and cloud computing and all those things, because I think there's so many interesting analogies, and you're one of the few people I know in the energy business can really move across those from the tech side.
17:39
Greg Robinson
How do you build a globally scalable tech platform which has a set of underlying principles that every tech vc could just like rattle off, and every tech entrepreneur can just rattle off. But in the energy business, if you came up in the monopoly utility, you don't really think that way. You don't think about how can I launch some kind of app and then I can grow what would take 130 years in another era can now take ten years to launch global utility?
18:08
Bill Nussey
I think the metaphor or the parallels between the computing history and electricity history are shockingly relevant. And when I first started researching, and people made them superficially, then people that knew it better told me that, well, no, there's too many differences, it's just a trite analogy or trite parallel. And as I dug deeper into it, I think I can defend and have written it was a decent sized section of the book on just how much the electricity industry parallels the computing industry. When you get down even to the technical details of how you switch packets or do micro grids, is a point of common references, for example. But mostly it's a network effect. And Bob Metcalf made the great observation that's both drove the Internet and drove the electric grid, which is the value of a network is the geometric sum of their parts.
18:58
Bill Nussey
And so Sam Insol and Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse figured that out when they created the first grids. And it took the computing industry a long time to go there. But the irony is that the current model of the grid is a lot like the old model of the computing, which is you have these large giant pieces, they were called power plants. Or, you know, it's even more ironic that I worked at IBM, which gave rise to the computing industry, made it mainstream, inaccessible. And they are a bit like the utilities where if you fast forward, IBM's still around, they're still selling mainframes, they're doing fine. Their businesses didn't go under because of pcs and smartphones. They are still relevant because they do things that no one else can do. But they're no longer the only game in town.
19:42
Bill Nussey
And in fact, their relative importance to the greater computing industry is not nearly what it was once upon a time. And I think some utilities will sort of kick and scream and remain IBM like in their resistance to evolution and others. There are already many that are embracing what's coming, and they're going to be really successful in the same way that the companies like digital equipment and others followed IBM with a different model and embraced it and ended up, for a time, being really successful. Yeah.
20:12
Greg Robinson
And it seems know just the way that the cost structure of the technology that we run the Internet on, that goes down and down, efficient, and there's zero marginal cost. And what I've always found fascinating, I've been obsessed with this and actually made a couple of attempts at building companies around this concept. And it has been a challenge to actually get the ball rolling, which is how do you let the buyers or the users of the technology participate in the declining cost curve? And I think cloud computing has done a good job of, you know, if I'm Amazon Web services, I don't have to go to Netflix in the early days and say, Netflix, how would you like to run on this data center over here for 25 years?
21:06
Greg Robinson
Pay me this price and I'll raise your price on annual basis, 2%, so I can get it penciled and I can get it financed. They didn't do that. They said, I'm going to build this infrastructure, the network is going to grow over time. The technology is going to go down, the power is going to go up, the computing power is going to go up, and you, the person who subscribes to cloud computing services, are going to get the benefit of that either through better services or just the fact that the technology is going down in price.
21:38
Greg Robinson
And I've never really seen, despite the fact that we could go there now with solar technology and battery technology as it's coming down in costs, there's still this obsession, it seems, in the industry of, I have a big giant balance sheet like Google or somebody like that, and I have a big giant solar farm or a wind farm, and if I'm the developer, I just need to get that financed. So I need Google or some large balance sheet to sort of underwrite the financing there. So I'm curious to just know, having come from cloud computing, you've seen that has scaled so quickly and it continues to scale quickly. And now we see with renewables, that I heard a stat, and I don't have enough data on this.
22:21
Greg Robinson
I heard it at cop, but it was basically that only two windmills got built in the UK last. Like, if you look at that versus how much cloud infrastructure was deployed last year, it's just mind boggling. And so I'm just curious. I'm kind of throwing that out there.
22:38
Bill Nussey
There's so much there. Greg, there's one reason, one fundamental reason that Netflix and cloud computing grew so much more rapidly than the electricity industry in terms of embracing next generation technologies, which is that electricity industries are monopolies. So there is no equivalent. If you and I wanted to create a Netflix competitor legally, it's quite fine for us to go do so. We may or may not be successful. But Netflix knows is omnipresent risk that Greg and Bill are going to go out and create a competitor. So they have to lean in, they have to invest, they have to take risks. The electric utility industry has no competition. So they have a different set of guiding principles in how they make their decisions.
23:14
Bill Nussey
And even if you have a utility executive that wants to lean into the future, and there are many, they're entirely governed by the public utility commissions, as you know. And those folks tend to be even more conservative, on average, than utility executives. And so you have this self reinforcing system that says, let's not take any risks, let's not do any experiments, because they're correct. If we get it wrong, we're going to have massive blackouts, the consequences of which are terrible. So they stick to a system that's barely changed in 120 years. But what's going to happen is the change is being forced on them. And you talked about computing versus the electric utilities.
23:50
Bill Nussey
The metaphor for me, the reason that computing has become so inexpensive and so efficient is actually this little thing, smartphones, I mean, so even more than pcs, the cost, because they make billions and billions and billions of these every year, and that drives the economy's volume up to the point where the price of a compute has dropped maybe a billion times over the last 20 years. So for a dollar worth of compute, you can get a billion times more processing out of it. And because unlike every other power system and unlike mainframes, these things can be made in factories and factory lines. And that just changes the fundamental economic value proposition. One of my favorite stats in the book, when people really try to get their head around the fact that solar and battery are technologies and wind and power plants are not.
24:44
Bill Nussey
Nuclear plants are not. They contain technology, but they're not technologies. So you look at how many, I'll get the numbers roughly correct. I have to look at the book to get them exactly. It's been a minute, but nuclear power came back from cop. Everyone's excited about it again. So there's only about 450 nuclear power plants in the world. And of all the types of power generation that exist, it is the singular one whose costs continue to go up because there's only 450 of them. So you've only had a chance to learn the 500 times to build it, to see what it plus the consequences of making a mistake. From a nuclear fallout point of view, it's astronomical. So the risk aversion is off the charts, as it should be.
25:21
Bill Nussey
So you look at coal, we've made about 3000 coal plants, and we're getting better at coal plants, but we don't want them anymore. And at this point, when I started writing the book, there were still a lot of people that really thought we needed more coal plants. And pretty much I don't know anyone that will look you in the face, say, we need more coal plants, not even people at China. So then natural gas is really caught up. Well, guess what we've made. I think it was close to 10,000 natural gas plants because they can be manufactured centrally. And the other thing that people miss about natural gas plants was the fundamental engine. The turbine technology was also built in aircraft engines.
25:52
Bill Nussey
So you already had decades of improved technology, materials, manufacturing, factories, to drive down the cost of converting a liquid fuel into motion, which turns a generator for a power plant or fan blades for an airplane. But it's similar, not the same. So then you get to, you take a giant leap. So what is the next most fastest price drop there is? Well, it's wind. And we've built about 250,000 wind turbines across the world. So we've had a lot of chance. Not 450 power nuclear power plants, but 250,000 wind turbines. We're getting better. We build one, we improve it, we build another one, we improve it. You can build more of it in a factory, but it still takes a lot of manual work. It still takes a tremendous amount of onsite effort, and yada, yada.
26:34
Bill Nussey
So 453,000, 10,000, 250,000 we have made, as of 2022, 150,000,000,000 solar cells. So the degree to which we have learned about how to make a solar cell has no precedent. And the only thing that it costs money in a solar cell that you really can't get away from, and even they are getting away from it, is silicon, which is the second or third most common element on the planet earth. And all the solar cell technology is being built on 40 years of microchip technology. So we already figured out how to make pure silicon, how to manufacture it, to print on it, so we're building silicon. Solar cells have even more of a head start than gas turbines did relative to aircraft engines. So the learning curve is astronomical. And the battery learning curve is catching up quickly to the solar learning curve.
27:24
Bill Nussey
So I'm going to go out in a limb because I don't have the data, but I'm going to guess one of the reasons that the UK only built two wind turbines wasn't that they did no renewables. I would bet that I'm going to go read this after we're done. I bet you they built a ton of solar because it is just so much cheaper and easier to build solar. Now, even in London, where there's not a lot of England, where there's not a lot of sunlight, there's still.
27:48
Greg Robinson
Yeah, yeah. I think my first solar panel I ever was a part of plugging into the grid had to be on a two axis tracker just to make it even slightly pencil. And now it's like, you just add more solar panels.
27:59
Bill Nussey
It's so cheap. You're talking this first solar panels went up on satellites and they were about $70 a watt. And today you can get a solar cell for like 1015 cents a watt for the same technology, and it's going to continue to go down.
28:22
Greg Robinson
So that's a great. That sort of goes hand in hand with this idea of all of that technology cost curve going down by so much, how, in your mind, we still see price escalators in PPA rates, and we're still trying to make solar farms and other things like pencil. It almost seems as hard to get one financed today as when I first got into this. And we don't really have less tax incentives in some cases. You have more tax incentives?
28:55
Bill Nussey
More, yeah.
28:56
Greg Robinson
Do you have any insight into why are we still struggling? Why are we still, like, nickel and diming every project with tax incentives when the cost curve has come down so much? What are PPA Rates? A power purchase agreement. Sorry about that.
29:15
Bill Nussey
Yeah, that's okay.
29:15
Greg Robinson
I just want to.
29:16
Bill Nussey
Thanks. Yeah. So when you buy a large solar farm through a PPA or a wind farm, the price of actually generating that electricity, the building the solar farm, building the wind turbine farm, it's less than half of the cost of that project is actually the solar and wind. It's the building or utilizing the transmission to deliver it to its end destination is enormous. Part of the cost, and as most of your listeners probably know, that is now the bottleneck for all renewable energy in the world, and particularly for the United States, where interconnection queues are now backed up for years and years and years. That's one reason. But the real reason that I think it's become so crazy is that everyone and their brother is actually trying to make those solar farms. And so everyone's kind of going lower and lower on the price.
30:05
Bill Nussey
So that if you want to get in the business, you've got to basically get quarters of tens and hundreds of a penny margins, because there's 250 other people that are trying to do the same thing. And there's also unbelievable uncertainty, because all these projects are. Because this falls back to the point I made at the beginning of our conversation about the government's involvement. You can't build a large solar and wind plant without having multiple interactions with the government. And again, I'm not trying to bash the government. They're trying to keep the grid running. They're trying their best to keep it from overheating and not overheating, but from just not working. So they're being really conservative about adding new projects. And this has created a game between interconnection requests and people processing the interconnection, all the isos and the Tros.
30:53
Bill Nussey
And so you got this bizarre game that the only thing that happens is you don't build any large scale stuff. That's why the price keeps getting cheaper and harder to close them and longer to get them done. And it's amazing to me that more people, they come back from cop and they're like, wow, let's build more nuclear power plants. That's going to work. Like, why the heck don't we just build more small scale solar? You can do it anytime, anywhere. And then California, which was the beacon of small scale solar, they have completely done a 180. And now it's incredibly difficult and expensive to build small scale. It's uneconomic to build small scale solar anymore. When I was finishing the book, I got deeply involved in their net metering debate and the law that eventually, or the PSC that finally came out.
31:36
Bill Nussey
And it was just premised in my not expert but deeply involved opinion. It was premised on completely false data. And I did listen and participate in conversations between people that had 16 phds whose iq was 1000 on both sides of the topic about if you put too much small scale energy, you have this problem. Well, if you don't do this, you have this. And the point was that nobody, and that's why policy doesn't get done. Because if you have people who are well intentioned and that smart on both sides of the discussion passionately, you basically vapor locked. And the utilities got what they wanted, which was to slow the California's rapid embrace of small scale energy. And it worked. So the small scale energy business in California's all but stopped, which stinks.
32:19
Greg Robinson
Oh my gosh. It almost goes to like, it reminds me in a strange way of like, there are differing points of view even in the tech industry, of like should you build your own hardware?
32:32
Bill Nussey
Yes.
32:32
Greg Robinson
And deploy your own software and have your own ecosystem, versus should you depend on someone else's ecosystem? And I think the first principles there is like, well, does that other ecosystem that you're depending on have the same worldview as you? Because if they don't, your business model and their business model may diverge at some point of scale. And I think there's so many examples happening right now.
32:56
Bill Nussey
But again, in tech, if you make the bet in tech, you're going to win or lose on your own. You and your investors are going to win or lose independently. But in energy, the entire game, rules are changed regularly and changed by the government. And again, I'm not trying to bash the government utilities. They play an absolutely essential role because right now we are all talking on video. Our computers and our lights in our houses are working. We're paying a fair amount for electricity. So the system works and they're reticent to mess with it, but in doing so, their risk aversion is in the fact that they have 100 years of laws to support the decision making process they have today. They're just slow rolling it, terribly slow rolling it.
33:36
Bill Nussey
But the cool thing is, and here's the best news and why I became optimistic, is that the best analogy, which is in the book, is at and t owned all long distance and used to pay. I remember when I was a kid, it was like a dollar a minute, and that would be like $10 a minute. Now to talk to someone overseas. My dad would travel to London, it was $2 a minute. To talk to him, it was like $3 the first minute and a dollar. And you had all this piece of paper writing out how much it's going to cost. And at and t, that was their profit center, they made a fortune on it.
34:06
Bill Nussey
And there was a famous speech by the CEO of At and t was probably without question the most powerful business person on the planet earth, because it wasn't like electric utilities, where it spread across states. He had the entire country, the same kind of monopoly protection. That point was enjoyed by utilities today. And he said, listen, if we open this up to competition, it's going to destroy the network. And he explained in a big speech on some davos of the day, why it is that losing control from the top will cause the system to fail and prices will escalate in low income, marginalized communities, and people and families will be hurt the worst because the costs will become un, they won't be able to afford long distance calls anymore. And it is the exact same argument that the utilities use.
34:48
Bill Nussey
And he would have won because the government was behind him. It worked. I mean, the United States had an incredibly competitive communication network that the military depended on it. It was just amazing. What happened was the price of communications just kept going down and down and down. This little company called MCI, they bypassed the whole damn thing using point to point microwave relays. And they got around all the laws and eventually they were so compelling that no government person could look at them and say, yeah, that's actually better in every single way and it's way cheaper. So not a single politician could stand up to that fact. And the government relented and broke up at t's monopoly, and they did it badly, by the way.
35:28
Bill Nussey
So whenever that day does come in, electric utilities, I hope they learn from the mistakes were made when at t is broken up. But guess what? At t is doing fine today. None of us lost our telephone service. None of us were priced out of using our telephones, but it certainly was a lot more rocky than it could have been. In the end, the price deescalation will create an unstoppable force, as it's done in communications, as it will do in energy.
35:50
Greg Robinson
Yeah, well, you just sort of covered the whole concept that I want to talk about with micro grids and onsite energy. I mean, I think that's really, that movement is a freight train. It's not stopping and there's not really anything. I saw a stat the other day that was a utility, that they have these ratchet clauses in their contracts where if you're a large power user on a public utility, you can only decrease your consumption by like 25% a year or something like that, or else you still have to basically pay your power bill. Even if you went completely off grid.
36:28
Bill Nussey
Brilliant.
36:28
Greg Robinson
Still have to pay 75% of your power bill. And it's like, doesn't it just make you feel like, well, as these technologies get cheaper and the transmission line gets more and more expensive, it's like, well, at some point there's sort of a place where we all just say, okay, well, I'll just go build my next infrastructure without you.
36:51
Bill Nussey
So, Greg, you touch on what I think is the. I should have answered your second question this way. What was the biggest thing I learned that really changed my worldview? And this is the heart of my entire book. And I forget that even people that follow free energy just miss this absolutely true fact. Someone said there was a great quote once, what do you think is truer than true that you feel passionately about that nobody else understands? And I have that. And then it's the following. It is way cheaper to put solar on your roof than it is to put it in a field.
37:27
Bill Nussey
And every single solar advocate, including people that support residential and commercial scale solar energy, all agree, incorrectly, that it is cheaper to build solar in a field at 100 megawatt system than it is to put an eight kilowatt system on your roof. And everyone agrees because the way they look at it is to say, well, I can build that system in a field for one to two cent per kilowatt hour. And if I do it at my house, it's going to be so they say. Of course. Even the residential advocates say, well, of course it's way cheaper to do that, but we should still do it because it's better for communities and people to pay. Absolutely false comparison. It's embodied by a conversation I had with a utility executive that captures the absolute truth of the statement.
38:11
Bill Nussey
And he knew I was interviewing him about local energy, and he said, listen, bill, I appreciate that people want to put solar on the roof. I get it. They want to make an environmental impact. But he says, I'm a dollar and cents guy. And so I've seen the math. You've seen the math. It is just much cheaper to build it in a large field at scale than it is to put in a roof. And that's just the bottom line. And I let it hang there for a second, and I said, it's cheaper for you. No one ever thought about that before. No one says that, ever. And so he's kind of hanging out there. And he says, I'm not sure that's how it works. And I said, let me put it in the simplest possible terms.
38:49
Bill Nussey
I said, if you build 100 megawatt solar plant outside my town and you're generating that of solar electricity at, say, one fifth the cost of your coal plant and one 10th of your nuclear plant, and you turn that system on, will my electric bill go down immediately? Well, no, it doesn't work that way. I said, I know it doesn't, so I don't expect it to go down. I said, if I put an eight kilowatt solar panel on my roof and I turn it on, my electricity bill will go down immediately. And so you tell me which one's cheaper? It's cheaper for me if I build it on my roof. And there's a word for people like me, and they're called voters, and they just haven't figured this out yet. But the cheapest form of electricity is on your roof. Full stop. Full stop.
39:31
Bill Nussey
I should be clear, because a lot of your listeners are probably very sophisticated. I do understand that it's a very sophisticated system. Solar only generates electricity during certain times of the day. You need to have a system to balance it. It is a sophisticated system, but a lot of people who are smarter than all of us put together have done the math, and it absolutely works, and it's going to work more and more. And you don't require massive subsidies in the form of NeM in order for it to work. But you just need to also get out of the way, and the government and the policymakers need to get out of the way at the same time.
39:58
Bill Nussey
So punchline is that small scale solar on every measurable way is cheaper for consumers, voters, and commercial industries to build their own solar plants than it is to get it off the grid. And they're the only ones that matter doesn't matter if the utility is profitable. We want the utilities to be profitable because just like we want the military and schools and police forces to be able to have enough money to pay to do what they need to do, and we need utilities to do the same. We need them to operate for consumer benefit. It is way cheaper to put it on your roof, and it will be, and it's just going to get cheaper and cheaper. The price of electricity is going to go up from the grid and the price of solar on your roof is going to go down.
40:34
Bill Nussey
There's no one anywhere that doesn't argue that. The only reason it's even unclear today is because the policymakers are playing on the margins and the price difference, like it was with at T and MCI, at some point the price differences will be so stark that the policymakers can't sort of wrap circles around things and push a little here and thumb on the scale there. And it's going to become apparent to everybody that local energy is cheaper. And I think that's going to come in the next five or ten years.
40:58
Greg Robinson
Yeah, I always think about living outside of Seattle, Washington, and paying my Puget Sound energy bill at 1011 increasing. Well, all I see on the news is like, oh, well, this is the cheapest electricity in the country. We generate power, renewable, clean power for 0.7 cents a kilowatt hour. It's like, why the hell am I paying ten cents a kilowatt hour then? And the truth is, because we all know that the gap between where you generate it and where you use it costs money.
41:33
Bill Nussey
Yes. The more transmission of substations you need, that's a massive portion of the cost for the grid to work. And we need the grid to work because, hey, maybe your solar panel breaks and you still like to power your house, or you don't have batteries, and so you like to actually run your television and your stove at night. So you need the grid, and we're going to need it forever. It's always going to be the most economic mix. But like eBay, like the Internet, like Wikipedia, the more people contributing small bits to a shared system, the better, more powerful and reliable the system becomes.
42:07
Greg Robinson
I'm curious to go touch on that at T to MCI situation. Again. What so, like, is there analogy there for what the utility is going to have to do? Because again, if the grid needs to be there and we're going to put solar on a roof, the grid really truly needs to become a platform for people to run their own sort of commerce on top of it if this is going to work. How did at t evolve once they saw that MCI or other? Were those the MVNOs, the mobile virtual network operators?
42:39
Bill Nussey
That was way later. Way later.
42:42
Greg Robinson
Okay. That was when the cell towers came out.
42:45
Bill Nussey
Yeah, that was different. Yeah. I think that at T's deconstruction was deeply overseen by the government. A fascinating fun fact was at t was part of the settlement when they accepted the monopoly breakup and they negotiated with the government. The government said that at T could not be in the computer business. That was seminal. And very few people appreciate what a big deal that was. And I think that was one of the. I mean, I'm not sure you would have had the Apples and the Microsoft's that at t continue to put their massive capital and market power into the computing industry, but they were not allowed to do it, which was fascinating at the time. They were very upset about it because that was the next growth business, and so they were precluded from being in that industry.
43:26
Bill Nussey
So I think they broke up into the baby bells, and they ended up focusing on the physical infrastructure and long distance communications. The wires into your house, local, what do they call it? Pots. Pots is the basic telephony became what they focus on. And they also did things like yellow pages, and they invented the first ever I saw. The guy that led the project, he spoke at one of my firm's events a couple of months ago that you could call up and it was the first automated voice systems, and you could talk to it and say, I'm trying to find Greg Robinson's email. And it would have a voice data system, AI system back in the. Would listen to you and give you the answer. So they were trying a lot of innovation, but ultimately, eventually they got on the Internet and then mobile.
44:12
Bill Nussey
That was the saver. Those two things were the saver, but they futzed around. And you know the famous story, everyone knows the famous story that when at T post breakup, went to McKinsey and said, we think that this mobile thing could be a thing. So we'd really like to understand whether we should get into it or not. So they paid McKinsey tens of millions of dollars. The consulting firm McKinsey and the report, which is enshrined in business history, said that there may be as much as 900,000 mobile phones needed in the United States. And so at and t said, okay, this mobile thing is not going to work. And they moved away from it. They lost three or four years before it became apparent that mobile was going to take off.
44:49
Bill Nussey
And again, the point that I would love for you to take away from this is that it was not wide open competition like software and Netflix, but it was still somewhat competitive. So if at and t had just decided not to do mobile, and they had the same kind of draconian monopoly laws that at and t had up through the utilities still have, there would be no mobile telephony, there would be absolutely no Internet. There's a big difference between complete monopoly control and free for all markets. And I ran into a lot of sort of free market people, and I said, listen, if you don't, you have to have government oversight of markets. I wish you didn't have to. I really do. But the stock market doesn't work without the SEC.
45:29
Bill Nussey
We take it for granted because we can buy and trade stocks, and we do it with relative safety. And every year, too, there's some scandal, right, in other places in the world. And back in the 150 years ago, when stock markets were getting created, there were scandals five times a day. It was Tuesday. You had people losing their fortunes because the stock market was so. You had 100 years to get it right, and it works. And so the government does need to have some oversight. But today, particularly in today's political climate, it's difficult for governments to do their job and to actually govern. And it's more about politics and governing, which is sad. And I hope that fixes itself sometime soon. But fun fact, by the way, on local energy, then government like, I put solar panels on my roof here at my house.
46:12
Bill Nussey
This conversation is powered by solar and Tesla batteries. And my neighborhood had a law or a rule that said I couldn't put solar on my roof. And many neighborhoods have that all over the country. And so I had to go and get a special permission from my neighborhood. And I only could put the solar panels where it was not visible from anyone else's house. So I only have solar in a small part of my roof because it can't be visible from the street or to my neighbors. And I had to go through a whole silly process back in the day when politics was more about governing, the same thing happened with these little dish satellites on our roof and all these neighborhoods. And those things are actually pretty ugly, in my opinion.
46:48
Bill Nussey
And so the federal government passed a law that said they are illegal on all roofs in the United States. And so no city, county, or state or neighborhood association can outlaw a satellite dish on your roof. So that's why they're so omnipresent. You can't have a neighborhood association say, I don't want an ugly satellite dish on your roof, because it's a federal government law that you can. So you talk about silly things that are preventing local energy from happening. I mean, it's a trivial law. Just make the same law for solar panels, right? It doesn't exist. And because solar panels have fallen into this politically divisive part of the government world we live in, it probably won't happen anytime soon.
47:27
Bill Nussey
So every little neighborhood, every little county has to go through this whole gyration where the government passed a law on satellite dishes, I don't know, 20 years ago, probably wasn't even that divisive. Just passed it and bam, solved. So that said, the forcing function of cheap solar and battery is going to make this. It's going to fix it.
47:44
Greg Robinson
Yeah, I'm hoping. My wife spends a lot of time on native plants and regenerative ecosystems, really focusing on biology side, as I think spend most of my days on electricity and energy. And they have a similar problem with lawns. Like, a lot of Homeowners associations sort of mandate that you have this lawn that's very kept interesting. People have run into issues where they put in, like, pollinator gardens or native wild areas around their house, like a native meadow in North Carolina would basically just look like you did not mow your lawn. It would just be like, hey, why is your yard so messy? And so maybe they can just put those into one bill altogether and just say, hey, can we just stop blocking people from doing things that are good for.
48:35
Bill Nussey
Here's where you and your wife intersect. Fun fact. My book's full of fun facts. So if you wanted to power the entire United States with solar without even sort of next gen technology, it would take 10,000 sq. Mi of solar panels, which sounds like an astronomical amount, right. But this math has been done by a ton of people. Realistically, you could do it for a fraction of that, but that's like the most generous to do it. And people say, well, there's no way we could do that, right? There's just way too much land. It would destroy the country. Well, the United States, according to. You can just google it right now. The United States has about 50,000 sq. Mi of lawns, and we've got something like, I think it's going to be a million square miles of farm and pasture land.
49:18
Bill Nussey
So for less than 1% of the farmland in the United States, you could power the entire country by solar. And here's a fun fact, and no one disputes it. This is one of these things, Greg, that nobody anywhere stops and looks at anywhere. But the math is absolutely clear. If you own farmland anywhere, you can make between ten and 25 times more money putting solar panels on it and selling it at wholesale electricity than you can farming. And farming is a horrible business, because, again, this is where the government plays certain crops. The government plays a very active role in determining the price of crops, particularly corn. So year to year, depending on the political climate and also the actual climate, you don't know how much money you're going to make.
50:01
Bill Nussey
Whereas you put solar on 10% of your acreage, you know it's probably going to triple, quadruple your revenue. You can still farm, but at least some portion of your anchor portion of your revenue is going to be entirely predictable as part of a 25 year contract. But nobody talks. You hear in the news all the time, solar is taking out farm. We can't let solar take over our farms. There's another stat in my book is that in the world, there's something like 300,000 sq mi of abandoned farmland that no one's even sure of the owners, and it's just left fallow. And sometimes it grows back, sometimes it's been farmed too intensively and it's not growing back. But there's so much land, there's 100 times more land just being useless that you could put solar panels on. And people just. They talk about that.
50:44
Bill Nussey
Well, in this neighborhood, there was an acre of solar that took over farmland. It's going to be the end of thing. And maybe that is the acre that should have remained farming for a variety of reasons. But the general notion is that there's so much land to put solar on that anyone argues against it is looking at a one acre plot in someone's backyard. They're not looking at the totality of the land available in the world, and it has no good use today, including brownfields where you've got pollution and things where no human is going to walk. Put solar on it like they do. They got solar on Chernobyl now. It works great. No one wants to walk there, but the solar's cranking away.
51:14
Greg Robinson
That's amazing. Well, we covered so many of the other things that. Other questions I was going to ask. So really, one of my favorite questions to ask is we covered about your electricity origin story, so it doesn't have to be related to electricity at all. But I'm always fascinated to know if there was something that happened to you when you were a kid and go back as far as you want some exposure you had, whether it was your parents or some gift or whatever when you were young, that prepared you for what you do today. And that could be just venture capital, entrepreneurship, working with entrepreneurs, communicating really hard problems, anything, just your work today.
51:54
Greg Robinson
And I'm always curious to know if there was some kind of unfair exposure or some kind of experience you had as a kid that prepared you for your work. Today.
52:04
Bill Nussey
I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to tell you the actual truth or make up something for you that sounds good. I don't talk a lot about the actual truth, but I'm going to tell it to you because you ask and you've touched me with a question. So when I was eight years old, my father brought me into the living room and sat me down, and he said, listen, I've got this terrible disease. I'm going to go have this incredibly crazy surgery. Most people don't survive. This may be the last conversation I have with you. And he survived, but he was slowly becoming paralyzed with a disease that's similar but more slowly progressing than Lou Gehrig's disease. And so for the next ten or 15 years of my life, I watched him slowly die. And he lived. Well.
52:48
Bill Nussey
I'm not trying to tell you a story of some horrible situation, but knowing that my father could die going into these surgeries, it bought him a few more years, a couple of times in his life. But knowing he might not come out of it changed. We also went from, he was a very successful business executive, and we had a lot of money to. We had very little mean. I went to NC State because the university paid for my entire education. My parents didn't have the money. All of our money was in medical bills. And I remain grateful and a huge fan of North Carolina state because they were just so generous at a time that mattered to me in my life. I think what that did, Greg, was it wasn't just like an event. It was a journey.
53:25
Bill Nussey
And I had to accept mortality at an age that was really young. And it wasn't just a shock that he died. And then I realized and I moved on. It was this constant realization that we're mortal. And I watched this man of this incredible intelligence and drive reduced to things that were hobbies for most people, because that was all he could do, is he became paralyzed. And one side story with that was he decided to collect model trains. And as he was this titanic business executive, youngest vice president of the history of Becton, Dickinson became paralyzed. So he just collected and he read books and he could slowly slip through them. And he wanted to build train layouts, then drive the trains around. He couldn't do it.
54:05
Bill Nussey
So I was eleven or twelve years old, wiring up and soldering train layouts and doing things that at the time were incredibly unusual for a child that age because I was his hands. So all that together gave me a lot of things. It gave me the confidence that I could do things technically way before most kids gave me the appreciation that doing this technical thing made my father happy. It didn't just make the train ran, actually kept him from yelling at me, to be really honest with you. But it gave him great joy when the train layout worked. And I saw, not just that it worked mechanically, but I saw that it had an after effect. But mostly it set the pace of how I live my life. And I feel like there's this.
54:45
Bill Nussey
I found this quote, actually, and I'm going to read it to you and it's going to be the thing that we wrap up on. It's by George Bernard Shaw. And he said, this is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being of a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish lacloud of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me.
55:19
Bill Nussey
It is a splendid torch, which I have got to held up for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. And had my father not been sick, I don't think I would feel that as powerfully. It's not just a saying to me, it speaks to me. And that is basically that journey with my father's health struggle for his life basically defined how I view my life, and that George Bernard Shaw captured it perfectly.
55:48
Greg Robinson
I'm so glad you went with the truth. Probably way more interesting. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's incredible. We're going to close on that. There's nothing else to say. Thanks so much.
56:02
Bill Nussey
It was a pleasure.
56:04
Greg Robinson
See you, Bill. Thanks so much. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the world changing podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. ITunes, Spotify, fifth, YouTube, to hear the latest episodes.