Zach Dell - Powering the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.434]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Zach Dell. Zach is the cofounder and CEO of Base. Base is a modern power company building a reliable and affordable home energy service powered by distributed batteries. We explore one of the most underappreciated machines in our world, the electrical grid. Zach walks us through the complex world of electricity infrastructure and explains why the 100 year old grid is woefully unprepared for the explosion in demand coming from AI, electric vehicles, and industrial electrification. Base's approach involves creating a distributed network of home batteries that provide backup power
grid is one of the most interesting machines in the world. It is probably the most complicated machine ever built by humans. It's a little over a 100 years old, so it's not actually that old. And it is something that's kind of out of sight and out of mind for most people until it breaks. It's a real time supply and demand machine that is held together by a series of participants and technologies and regulatory bodies that sounds a lot maybe more complicated than it actually is. So really what it is is three grids actually in The US, the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and then
love you to do something similar to what you just did for what I'll call, like, the physical and historical piece of this. It's the three components. It's broken into these things. We can all visualize that, the wires going to the moon and back, and do it for the flow of dollars. And talk about the regulatory history here, I think, is a key part of this. Utilities that are investor owned have weird quirks. They've got limits on the returns on equity. They've got all this strange stuff that people may not know about. But if I think about there's this big physical infrastructure I can kind of im
Let's start with the power bill. So your power bill, and this obviously varies by geography, and I'm gonna oversimplify here, but is roughly half the cost to generate the power and half the cost to move the power. We talked about how this is a real time system, so you have to get power from where it's generated to where it's consumed in in real time. The cost of moving power across the transmission grid and the distribution grid has gone up really significantly in the last couple decades, primarily because this infrastructure is really aging. The way that this infrastructure is built out and u
Maybe say one click more about you said regulated, deregulated. Texas is this unique innovation experimental ground. What was the literal regulation that changed in the late nineti
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