Do they fall into certain categories? What's out there?

Oh, gosh.

There are a bunch of categories.

We've actually been working internally on sort of like a landscape mapping, and I don't have it pulled up in front of me, and I don't have them all memorized, but there's probably eight to 10 different categories.

I mean, one of the ones that we're watching pretty carefully that we see a growing need around is around weather data.

You know, there are a lot of companies that have been around for a long time focused on weather data, and now increasingly they're bringing those products to the utility market.

So that's sort of one category.

What are you worried about in terms of the grid? What keeps you up at night in terms of grid resilience?

What can be done about that?

Well, it's a real challenging problem, right? We are in a place where the electric grid was built 100 years ago.

We have had a real shortage of investment in upgrading that system over the past few decades.

And we're also at a moment where we're seeing increasing extreme weather.

We're seeing wildfires no longer just being a problem in California and the western part of the country, but now a real issue across the whole country.

So all these things in combination are really driving the need for much more investment in the system, which, as you said, is driving up the cost for customers.

So we really need to balance the need for safe, affordable and reliable electricity.

Well,

[laughs]

It's pr- it's probably some, some of both, honestly.

But, you know, I, I've said this before, I think you've even said this before last time I was on the show.

But I would love to see, love to see us try to change the national narrative to move away from this sort of general concept of affordability and really sta- start talking about customer- low-income customers that have high energy burden, right? And what energy burden is typically defined as is households that have...

that spend more than 6% of their gross income every month on home energy bills.

So, like, if we look at...

I was looking, there's, uh, some data from the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association, uh, from 2025, that low-income families typically are-- have a energy burden of about 8.6%, which is triple what the burden is for non-low-income households.

I think as long as they see earnings growth of, of X percent a year, I think they're probably fine.

What are the kinds of threats that utilities need to be paying attention to right now? What are the warnings?

Yeah, no, I, I think everything you just laid out i- is true, but, but I also want to acknowledge, you know, the utility industry for a long time has been thinking about threats from drones.

Like, going all the way back to the, the Metcalf, uh, attack in 2013, uh, that was not drones, but part of the sort of response to that physical attack on the system was a push from the federal government for utilities to build big walls around their, their substations and other critical equipment.But the utility industry response to that back all the way in twenty thirteen was, "But that's not gonna protect us from drones," right? Big walls do not keep the drones out.

So they've been thinking about this for a long time, and there is...

You know, one of the things that the electric utility industry is so good at is very close coordination, not only with each other, but also with federal, state, and, and other, you know, agencies that are very focused on, uh, security risks of all types, be it physical or cyber.

So I think the industry is very well aware of the risks and being thoughtful i- you know, in terms of, you know, how, how do we stop it? That, that's a good question.

[laughs] Um, but, but it, it's not just thinking about the use of drones to attack utility infrastructure, right? I mean, utilities themselves are using drones a lot and spending a lot of time thinking about what security risks does that introduce into the system, especially given...

Is that, like, in some ways related to this effort?

So what were they proposing? What was innovative and what was more conventional about the plan, and where did the friction with regulators come from?

Well, I think one additional sort of fact in, in this, Steven, that's interesting is, you know, so you mentioned the original plan they proposed was over 5 billion, so it was 5.75 billion.

They, they reached a settlement, uh, with the intervenors for 3.2 billion, and the commission actually rejected the settlement.

And tha- and that's pretty rare to see.

Uh, you know, typically when the utility and the, and all of the stakeholders are able to come to a settlement, the, the commissions typically, uh, accept that.

But in this case, the Texas Commission actually trimmed it even further down to 2.7 billion.

And, you know, I think the commission's perspective was, gets back to this data thing, right? Like, they, they felt they didn't necessarily have all of the support they needed to justify all of those investments.

How does the taxonomy break down? How are you thinking about the size and scope of this market?