Aug 11, 2026 · 56 min · 12 segments
Headline: Thematic Investors: Fast-Tracking the US Grid – Policy, Power Demand, and Infrastructure The demand dynamic for US power growth is significantly accelerating, with spending on new…
Ravi BellurGuest
Peter LakeGuest
Kieran KavanaghHost
I wanna pick up on two things Peter pointed out because I think I mentioned that if we fall down from a regulatory and a reliability perspective, then you really gotta worry about investing in an energy system because that becomes a concern.

The affordability piece of this, where hyperscalers are providing es- essentially that backstop or that demand for new power generation, whether that's old school large gas-fired turbines or some faster kinda eighteen, twenty-four-month projects that are on site and smaller turbines that bridge the kinda long-term grid connection.

That is a really big part of kind of our comfort and confidence in investing behind the cycle alongside the, the dynamic that is you can deploy that capital.

We now have a better sense for what the returns on new investment are gonna be, and the relative kind of spread that we're earning is very attractive to other infrastructure assets out there in the digital sector or-

You make, you make a great point because I, I'll give you just real quick, I'm in New England where, where environmentalism is a big deal to people who live there, and yet at peak demand in summer, we're burning more oil than any other part of the United States to generate electricity.

And do you think there's an opportunity that, uh, for both, both you guys actually, that this kinda-- It just shows me how little long-term thinking has gone into building out the grid over the last twenty or thirty years, both, both parties.

But do you think there's a real opportunity to really build a better, more resilient, and a more affordable grid for an average ratepayer?

And it's what I tell the industry executives is what-- while we've got this tremendous challenge to build out the next version of the US power grid, that's a huge challenge that we talked about earlier.

... to have it's, it's essentially funded by the most valuable companies in the history of markets that have such a clear value proposition, like Robbie said, o- on the, the revenue generation opportunity per megawatt ins- i- installed is so extraordinary that what a blessing for the utility space and the power space to have that, those tailwinds driving, driving this demand forward a- and underwriting the, the future supply.

Because they can pay two to three X more, they're willing to pay forty to fifty percent more for fifteen, twenty years at a time and keep this off of the system or the consumers back, this CapEx build.

But also, Kieran, I think when you think about the resource endowment of the United States of America, we have a tremendous amount of natural gas.

Now, we have bottlenecks, we have constraints in infrastructure to move that gas around.

But at a high level, that provides a real ballast to add dispatchable generation or kinda twenty-four seven power resources on an, on a largely mo- across most of the country where a lot of this industrial development is gonna take place, places like Texas, places like the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, as well as the Mountain West and the Southeast.

Secondly, as that industrial growth happens, it obviously has positive benefits for the economy, but we're also seeing developments in battery storage technology that allow you in those very peak hours, and I think this is something that happened very successfully in Texas a few years ago that Peter obviously understands very well, you can add improved storage capacity where there's still a lot of spare capacity on renewable sites that ha- are connected to the grid, and manage those very peak hours of demand.

It's that combination of gas, some of the opportunities in battery, and from a very long tail perspective, the hope that maybe we see some progress in, in, in nuclear development, that package as a whole is pretty unique.

I wanna pick up on two things Peter pointed out because I think I mentioned that if we fall down from a regulatory and a reliability perspective, then you really gotta worry about investing in an energy system because that becomes a concern.

The affordability piece of this, where hyperscalers are providing es- essentially that backstop or that demand for new power generation, whether that's old school large gas-fired turbines or some faster kinda eighteen, twenty-four-month projects that are on site and smaller turbines that bridge the kinda long-term grid connection.

That is a really big part of kind of our comfort and confidence in investing behind the cycle alongside the, the dynamic that is you can deploy that capital.

We now have a better sense for what the returns on new investment are gonna be, and the relative kind of spread that we're earning is very attractive to other infrastructure assets out there in the digital sector or-

You make, you make a great point because I, I'll give you just real quick, I'm in New England where, where environmentalism is a big deal to people who live there, and yet at peak demand in summer, we're burning more oil than any other part of the United States to generate electricity.

And do you think there's an opportunity that, uh, for both, both you guys actually, that this kinda-- It just shows me how little long-term thinking has gone into building out the grid over the last twenty or thirty years, both, both parties.

But do you think there's a real opportunity to really build a better, more resilient, and a more affordable grid for an average ratepayer?

And it's what I tell the industry executives is what-- while we've got this tremendous challenge to build out the next version of the US power grid, that's a huge challenge that we talked about earlier.

... to have it's, it's essentially funded by the most valuable companies in the history of markets that have such a clear value proposition, like Robbie said, o- on the, the revenue generation opportunity per megawatt ins- i- installed is so extraordinary that what a blessing for the utility space and the power space to have that, those tailwinds driving, driving this demand forward a- and underwriting the, the future supply.

Because they can pay two to three X more, they're willing to pay forty to fifty percent more for fifteen, twenty years at a time and keep this off of the system or the consumers back, this CapEx build.

But also, Kieran, I think when you think about the resource endowment of the United States of America, we have a tremendous amount of natural gas.

Now, we have bottlenecks, we have constraints in infrastructure to move that gas around.

But at a high level, that provides a real ballast to add dispatchable generation or kinda twenty-four seven power resources on an, on a largely mo- across most of the country where a lot of this industrial development is gonna take place, places like Texas, places like the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, as well as the Mountain West and the Southeast.

Secondly, as that industrial growth happens, it obviously has positive benefits for the economy, but we're also seeing developments in battery storage technology that allow you in those very peak hours, and I think this is something that happened very successfully in Texas a few years ago that Peter obviously understands very well, you can add improved storage capacity where there's still a lot of spare capacity on renewable sites that ha- are connected to the grid, and manage those very peak hours of demand.

It's that combination of gas, some of the opportunities in battery, and from a very long tail perspective, the hope that maybe we see some progress in, in, in nuclear development, that package as a whole is pretty unique.
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