🟠 Fixing the Grid Interconnection Queue: How distributed compute can accelerate grid infrastructure

​This event is part of The Drop 2024. To attend, you must have a ticket to The Drop.

​Session Overview: Grid infrastructure is costly and a limiting factor of the energy transition. 1TW of solar energy is in the interconnection queue in the US, double the entire generating capacity of the US, sits awaiting approval, and is observed in nearly every developed market economy. This grid interconnection time is getting longer, approaching 5 years, and grid interconnection is the primary hurdle to the development of solar energy in the US. There is a ready-made off-taker in the market that can address this problem, make potential solar and wind assets profitable as they await grid interconnection, and accelerate their interconnection to the grid—dispatchable compute resources.

​What we'll discuss:

• ​A new source of demand that is dispatchable and interruptible, and relatively high value (high willingness to pay).

• ​The many potential renewables projects that cannot get built despite the availability of money, opportunity, etc now because they cannot effectively float the connection costs from today to when they get connected.

• ​How providing certainty to these projects through a high WTP, high-demand off-taker enables rapid construction of solar projects and validates investment in the grid.

• ​How setting up a way to invest in public grid infrastructure via this mechanism is a market-forward way of building public goods, serving the needs of large software companies (MSFT, Google, OpenAI, etc) and the general public (consumer and industrial customers) who need cheap energy access.

​Who should attend? Founders considering building a new software company in the energy sector Grid infrastructure providers Solar and wind asset managers Compute supply providers: data center infrastructure owners, cloud infrastructure providers Compute demand: model developers, developers.