Inside the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office
Maria Robinson, outgoing Director of the Grid Deployment Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, joins us to share insights from her impactful tenure. Since stepping into the role in 2022, Maria has overseen $22 billion in federal funding to drive the development of new and upgraded electric infrastructure nationwide.
Recorded in person at the recent Deploy conference in Washington, DC, hosted by the DOE, Maria and Cody discuss her background, the mission of the Grid Deployment Office, and the initiatives she’s championed. We also dive into the complexities of the U.S. electric grid, including transmission, interconnect queues, permitting reform, and enhancing grid resilience amidst extreme weather and climate challenges.
Episode recorded on Dec 5, 2024 (Published on Dec 19, 2024)
In this episode, we cover:
[4:57] Maria’s background and work with Rep. Jay Inslee
[7:33] The complexity of the U.S. electric grid
[10:19] Funding sources for transmission projects
[11:54] Renewables’ impact on grid design
[15:13] The role of NEPA in grid projects
[22:37] Powering data centers and grid distribution
[25:37] Interconnect queue backlogs
[27:08] The benefits of reconductoring
[28:15] Grid resiliency and local utilities
[33:34] Maria’s vision for the next administration
[35:09] Cybersecurity challenges for the grid
[36:32] Federal permitting reform for transmission
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Maria Robinson, outgoing Director of the Grid Deployment Office at the US Department of Energy. Since taking this role in 2022, Maria has directed $22 billion in federal funding and worked to catalyze the development of new and upgraded electric infrastructure across the country.
(00:27):
Maria and I had this conversation together in person at the recent Deploy conference in Washington, DC, which was put on by the DOE. We discuss her background, the role of the Grid Deployment office, and some of the initiatives she's taken on, the complexities of how the US electric grid is organized and governed, and hot topics, including transmission, interconnect queues, permitting reform, and grid resilience in the face of extreme weather and climate change. But before we start, from MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable.
(01:09):
Climate change is inevitable, it's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
(01:30):
Maria, welcome to the show.
Maria Robinson (01:31):
Thank you so much for having me, Cody. I appreciate it.
Cody Simms (01:34):
This is the first time I've recorded where I'm literally sitting across the table from you. We're live here in Washington, DC, at the Deploy 2024 conference. We're live in an empty conference room. You and I are doing this conversation by ourselves, but this is an incredible event. There was something like 1,800 people or something at the event.
Maria Robinson (01:52):
It's absolutely crazy. It's a ton of folks. I think it speaks to how invested everyone is in making sure that we continue some of the investments that have started during this administration and figuring out where private equity takes a lot of those moving forward.
Cody Simms (02:07):
I mean, I have to admit, I booked this before the election to come here. I wasn't sure if I should still come after the election. I'm so glad I did because it's very clear that there are a lot of people motivated to continue to build and, the private sector is here in force frankly.
Maria Robinson (02:24):
And I think there are many different energy challenges that we'll be facing that are extremely bipartisan. I have the great pleasure of working on the grid system, and the grid, I can tell you transmission distribution does not care what color the electrons are.
Cody Simms (02:38):
Well, why don't we start with a little bit of a description of your current role and the work you're doing at the Grid Deployment office. Was that a new office that was created under President Biden or has that been around?
Maria Robinson (02:48):
It is a brand new office, so after the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, also known as the IIJA was passed back in 2021, this office started, and I came on board in July of 2022, and since then we've brought on about 130 folks, and gotten at this point more than $8 billion out the door, and awarded even more of that. There's certainly a huge need for investing in our grid. It's one of a bunch of new offices here. I think you've had Giulia Siccardo on as a guest before, and she helms one of the other offices that started around the same time. And it's great, we're tackling new challenges.
Cody Simms (03:27):
And what's the mandate been?
Maria Robinson (03:28):
The mandate is to make sure that we are investing in infrastructure that we haven't for a long time. I liken it a lot to our highway system. Every year they fund the federal highway system, and we patch potholes. There is not something similar for our electric grid, even though it is just as important, maybe more important in terms of basic infrastructure and how people live their lives. And so we've been able to give out some significant grants as well as work on different policy measures to be able to build outer grid, but more importantly strengthen it, especially considering all of the really intense extreme weather events that we've seen over the past couple of years.
Cody Simms (04:06):
That metaphor is interesting because as I understand it, the grid is much more complex in terms of regulation and also who's responsible for what than maybe the federal highway system.
Maria Robinson (04:18):
The governance system is a lot more complex than just dealing with the Department of Transportation in your state and the Department of Transportation here in Washington, DC. So it is a little bit more complicated in that way.
Cody Simms (04:31):
A lot more complicated.
Maria Robinson (04:33):
Yes. I want to give our friends over at transportation a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here. They're working hard as well in investing. But yes, how we generate electricity and the way in which we've built the system has been evolving since the beginning of electrification. It's never stayed static, and so it's not just patching those potholes, it's also figuring out how you utilize the system in a more efficient and effective way.
Cody Simms (04:57):
Before we dive into some of the work that you've done as well as maybe just an overview of some of these complexities, let's take a quick tour of your background. I noticed you started your career as an intern in the US House of Representatives for Jay Inslee, which I mean, amazing, climate champion, Jay Inslee.
Maria Robinson (05:15):
It feels like a million years ago at this point. So yes, I was at MIT studying chemical engineering thinking that I would go make prescription drugs for the rest of my life, and actually someone who was in my senior project with me was helping to make the Moderna vaccine, and my mother, of course, said, "Why weren't you doing that?" And instead, I chose to take on a different set of challenges.
(05:34):
There was this great program where we connected with policy offices and you got to do policy internships here in DC through MIT, which is not a place that I think people through traditionally think of with political internships. And so it was helping bring a little technical expertise, like a mini AAAS fellow situation. So that was a really amazing time. I never thought that I wanted to work in an elected official's office, and then later on found myself an elected official myself. We're learning, we're growing and continuing on.
(06:03):
And so I did a little of my time in consulting as we all do to learn how to use spreadsheets and PowerPoint the best way possible, and did some great work with Commonwealth Massachusetts. The last time around, there was federal funding during the ARRA days, and then I worked for trade association for quite a while, and got a wide breadth of experience.
(06:20):
People often ask, "Maria, how do you know so much about Tallahassee?" And I was like, "Well, I was assigned the Florida branch for a period of time and know a lot of the folks who are working down there and actually are coming back to DC in the relatively near future." I really enjoyed that. And then my husband and I were fostering kids for a while and I wanted to make a little change at the state level, so I ran for office, became a state representative in Massachusetts, and did that for a little while until I got called-
Cody Simms (06:45):
I saw you were re-elected with 98% of the votes in 2020, I believe.
Maria Robinson (06:50):
That is not a stat that I keep in the back of my hand, but yes, the folks there in our low municipality were quite kind. And climate was actually a very big part of their interest as well. We became a city, and folks really wanted to make sure there was a sustainability manager on board as part of the new city government, and so got to be a part of that as well.
Cody Simms (07:10):
Well, congratulations, and congratulations on being a part of the Department of Energy during the Biden administration, obviously a huge amount of progress toward clean energy deployment over the last few years. Let's start by maybe just a quick overview of the grid. In the United States, there is no one grid, as I understand it, there are multiple grids.
Maria Robinson (07:33):
There are very much multiple grids, although they're interconnected in a myriad of different ways. So you can look at the way in which we separate out the grid either from a physical perspective, from a governance perspective, there's a variety of different overlays there. You have your Eastern Interconnect and your Western Interconnect, and then Texas [inaudible 00:07:52] is the easiest way to divide everything up. But the subdivisions therein from a governance perspective is very important. And so you have these organizations called RTOs, Regional Transmission Organizations or ISOs, the Independent System Operators that are really in charge at the bulk, so that's the transmission level, that's a long distance, not the lines that come to your house that people are always complaining about double poles on. That's the distribution system.
(08:19):
At that bulk system level, we are at the whims of physics. And I think that's the piece that people forget about regularly is there's only so much of the electricity that you can actually move across lines, and there's only so much that you can generate without having to create new sources of power.
(08:36):
When I was an elected official once, someone once told me that we could never electrify the commuter rail because there wasn't enough power. And I said, "I know what you're trying to say, but also I'm the wrong person probably to be having this conversation with because there are lots of ways that we could add power to the system. You're just looking at it from one specific lens."
Cody Simms (08:57):
And these RTOs and ISOs that you talk about, I think the bulk term for them is TSOs, so yet another three-letter acronym, these are nonprofit organizations that are typically governed by utilities. Is that the right way to think about them?
Maria Robinson (09:12):
Not governed by utilities. They're quasi-governmental. They live in this nice liminal space, which is what everyone wants for regulated entities. So they're overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent body here with five appointed commissioners that rotate, and is pretty bipartisan across the board. And so they have to put in these things called tariffs where they explain how much money it's going to cost for ratepayers and explain some of their different investments and how they interconnect new sources of generation and new sources of load and explain all of that in their public filing.
(09:47):
So it's really important to have that level of transparency, and then of course that happens, again, differently at the individual state levels. What can be really hard is utilities can cover multiple different states. I live in Massachusetts, we're covered by Eversource. Eversource also covers other parts of New England in Connecticut.
Cody Simms (10:08):
So you're dealing with interstate commerce on top of everything.
Maria Robinson (10:11):
Exactly. And you're dealing with some parts of it are interstate, some of it is intrastate, and working through those regulatory pieces can be really complicated.
Cody Simms (10:19):
Historically, how have these transmission lines been funded? Who actually pays for them, and who owns them?
Maria Robinson (10:25):
Sometimes in certain places, the utilities own them. Right now we're seeing a real boom of merchant developers coming along and creating the lines. Whether they choose to sell them off to a utility at some other point in the future is to be seen. And so when you're developing transmission, it is a process. It is sometimes hard to explain to folks that it's a really thoughtful one where you have to bring together, not just a significant amount of capital, we are talking billions of dollars per transmission line, but then you have to be able to work through these arcane regulatory proceedings on the other end in particular around permitting, which can be really complex.
Cody Simms (11:03):
In oil and gas, I think of these big midstream companies that own the pipelines like a Kinder Morgan or something like that. Is there any such equivalent in electricity?
Maria Robinson (11:13):
Not exactly, and part of what makes this even a more complex system is there isn't sort of a single entity that we look at that's national in scope. Instead, we're looking at a variety of smaller folks. And this is something that we've actually come to better appreciate is difficult in supply chain conversations. Every single utility is trying to secure supply on their own, which means that their overall orders are not as large as some of our fellow utilities that we see in, say, Europe, which are fully nationalized. Some of that bulk purchasing, we have to be better organized on the ground in order to make sure that we're getting best deal for American ratepayers.
Cody Simms (11:54):
How has the continued increase in renewables changed how we think about transmission design?
Maria Robinson (12:02):
There's a couple of different ways to think about the increase in renewables. I was an elected official, got yelled at about things that were not in my purview and especially things that cost a lot of money. I think a lot about the ratepayer from that perspective. And we're seeing this shift in time where generation costs should be going down. The generation part of your electric bill should be going down as we see a lot more wind and solar on the grid.
(12:26):
That being said, because we have under-invested in the transmission system over time, and we have to figure out how to get some of that wind that's in the middle of the country into Chicago and into the eastern half of the country, those costs are going up. We're still in flux of figuring out exactly how those will balance out over the long term, but I think underinvestment in transmission over time is starting to really be seen, especially as you're dealing through just electrification in and of itself, but then adding the data center conversation, which I know is top of everybody's mind right now as the huge load growth that we're facing.
Cody Simms (13:04):
In a fossil fuel power grid where you're using natural gas or whatever, the plants are relatively near the point of consumption of the power, and so the cost is in generation less so in movements of the electricity, whereas potentially in a renewables powered grid, your generation is happening somewhere away from a population center like a big wind farm and the cost is less about the generation and it's more about building the infrastructure to move the power from where it's generated to where people need it.
Maria Robinson (13:34):
And I think what can be difficult is unlike, say, pipelines which are underground, so once they're built, people tend to forget about them. Transmission lines are very visible and incredibly important infrastructure, but the municipalities, the towns, counties that they've run through don't always see the direct benefit immediately.
(13:52):
So actually Congress put together this program we call the Transmission Siting and Economic Development program that we run, that will allow for municipalities to apply for direct economic development funds. For a lot of them, it's looking at improving their water quality and so on in order to make sure that they're invested in the build out of transmission that's going...
Cody Simms (14:15):
Through their community. It's not necessarily even a NIMBY problem per se because the local community may not be benefiting from these power lines. They're just passing through. They're going from Eastern Colorado or Western Kansas to Chicago and if you live in Missouri, you're maybe not even benefiting from this new electricity. You're just seeing lines go across your property or something.
Maria Robinson (14:36):
And historically that's been a lot easier to do that type of building. Now everyone is a lot more conscious about space, a lot more conscious about historical value. There's a ton of federal regulations now around involving the state historical preservation offices, and especially in parts of the West, you're dealing with tribal lands. You want to be extra sensitive there as well.
Cody Simms (14:58):
And this is where I understand the four-letter acronym that gets brought up a lot in this context comes into play, which is NEPA in terms of a lot of reviews that need to happen before a project can get approved and/or can get funding. Is that correct?
Maria Robinson (15:13):
NEPA is certainly one part of it. So my new mission in life is to make sure that people understand that it's not just NEPA. So NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, and so that requires for any sort of big construction project, especially on greenfield, to do an environmental impact statement, which is a very lengthy and in-depth understanding of what all the different environmental impacts are, water quality, air quality, so on and so forth, and oftentimes requires a number of different parts of the federal government to work together.
(15:45):
The Department of Energy actually doesn't issue that many permits. You're mostly dealing with the Department of the Interior, either Fish and Wildlife or Bureau of Land Management if you're out West. Those of us who live on the East Coast often forget that 87% of Nevada is federal lands, and so you're dealing with the federal government in a very different way than you otherwise would.
(16:04):
My new hill to die on is reminding folks that environmental permitting is not actually limited just to NEPA. There's a separate Fish and Wildlife permit that you have to get thinking about endangered species. And then there's the State Historical Preservation Office that you're working with as well, and they have a different permitting process too. So all these different pieces need to come together.
(16:25):
It's one thing to do that for a solar project or for a wind project that's in one particular location, you know where it is, it's not going to change. It gets a lot more complicated when you're talking about hundreds of miles of transmission lines that have a right of way that might change slightly as you move forward depending on what the terrain looks like, and so it becomes a much more complex process. And sometimes you can see that holding up the ability to build these projects.
(16:54):
One of the things that I'm really proud of that we did during this administration that I would like to think will be continued is utilizing one of those obscure pieces of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to make sure that the Department of Energy now can put a backstop on federal permits. So instead of waiting 10 years to go through that, we put a backstop of two years, and then the president has the option to actually issue those permits after two years just for transmission. So that's a neat new mechanism just to make sure that everyone's really organized.
Cody Simms (17:26):
Is that the NIETC provision?
Maria Robinson (17:29):
That's not NIETC. This is the one we call CITAP for Coordinated Interagency Transmission something and Permits, but CITAP, and that's a new program that we got going. NIETCs are a whole different animal, and I think people will think about them a lot because it was a big mechanism used during the Obama era until they were struck down in courts, and so that's designating certain parts of the country as National Interest Electric Corridors, and that can unlock some funds.
Cody Simms (17:59):
That's the actual acronym for NIETC, National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.
Maria Robinson (18:05):
We love an acronym in governments, there's one thing that I've learned for sure. If your transmission line is being built in one of those corridors, it does two things for you. One is it unlocks some money at the Department of Energy that was given at the IRA for a loan, and then at FERC, the other agency that does regulation, it allows to potentially backstop state permits. If state and local permitters are not necessarily issuing their permit or denied it, it gives them the opportunity to move forward.
Cody Simms (18:34):
So these are the zones that the Department of Energy has essentially said it's really important that we build transmission in these areas.
Maria Robinson (18:41):
Absolutely, and we've done a number of studies and released them, one of which was called the National Transmission Needs Study. And if you look at the National Transmission Needs Study, the answer is that we need a lot of transmission almost everywhere. We were talking about those RTOs before, especially we call them the seams across the two RTO governance spaces, being able to move power across them is really important.
Cody Simms (19:04):
Is that the primary motive here is how do you create more interoperability between at least the Eastern and Western Interconnects?
Maria Robinson (19:12):
Certainly, and so we've actually funded a couple of projects that continue to work across the different seams, one of which is the Joint Target Interconnection Queue between MISO and SPP, which are two of those RTOs. They're working really hard on seven different projects that will unlock 30-some gigawatts of power being able flexibility, and that increased flexibility is really going to help prevent building more generation than we actually need and leaving us with stranded assets, and instead making sure that all these operators can deal with the fact that there's a cold snap happening in Texas while there's also somehow a heatwave happening in New York, which is not unrealistic.
Cody Simms (19:50):
It sounds like you all have done a lot of work to identify where there needs to be new lines built out and to try to make the process faster or less onerous in those areas. Am I correct that it is still somewhat the wild west, if someone has a project they want to build, they have to go through all the approvals, they have to do their thing, but it's a private market, and people can do what they want to do?
Maria Robinson (20:12):
Especially in the West specifically, it is a bit more of the wild west, so it depends. In certain parts of the country, you're more likely going to see your utility actually building out some of these lines. And then in other parts, you do have these merchants, I'm thinking of Invenergy and of Patterning.
Cody Simms (20:30):
Invenergy's been on the show before. It was a good conversation.
Maria Robinson (20:33):
Yes, and so they're all trying to figure out how to unlock different pockets of power. What we forget sometimes is that one of the biggest areas of congestion right now on the transmission system is somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico. And you might not think that was happening, but they're building so much in Arizona right now as well and so many people are moving there that there's a lot more need on the grid than there was 10 years ago. And folks definitely want to build their new housing units and make sure that they can hook them up to the grid really quickly.
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Cody Simms (22:06):
You mentioned the data center challenge at the kickoff plenary of this whole event yesterday. One of the themes was will data centers actually be the forcing function that causes things to unlock more quickly across all of this? I mean, the risk I think is that power that needs to go from, like you said, a wind farm in the countryside to a major city instead is used by a data center. How in the world does all this get planned for?
Maria Robinson (22:37):
Planning sounds very unsexy, when we say, oh, we're making another plan, we're doing some studies, but it's so important to actually be able to model that in order to understand how the system is going to work.
(22:49):
A lot of credit to the big hyperscalers. I think they're trying to figure out how they can have power. They understand they're not going to get it directly from the grid without contributing some more generation resources along the way. I think they're very clear about it. I've seen a lot of news articles about other data center developers who seem to think they're going to get it from the grid, and that is a little bit more complex for sure.
(23:11):
That being said, it all comes down to cost allocation. This is where our grants have been really interesting. I said early on in my tenure at the Department of Energy, I'm not just handing out checks for free money. I want to know how it's replicable, how this is helping with the marginal costs? And a lot of the projects that we saw really needed someone to pay for the last 10% where they've cost allocated all the rest of it out, and generation and load all knows what they're paying for, but everyone will spend 10 years arguing over the last 10%, and I was like, I don't want anyone spending 10 years doing that. We have to figure that out. And I do think that's an area where private capital can be really interesting in figuring out is it worth it to pay that extra marginal percentage instead of having this project languish for a long period of time?
Cody Simms (23:59):
That's a different use of capital as an accelerant than I've heard from a lot of DOE yesterday and today. A lot of DOE I think talks about DOE uses capital to essentially write down risk on technology and to then attract private capital into fund something that has had some technology de-risked to it. I'm hearing you say this is an accelerant on efficiency almost.
Maria Robinson (24:25):
And that's the difference of the types of technology. We're the Grid Deployment Office, we're doing transmission distribution. Yes, there are new technologies being considered. It is not in the same technological de-risking situation as hydrogen. This has been one of the things that makes us a bit of an anomaly with some of our peers here is we're not trying to create something new under the sun from a technology and an R&D perspective, what we're trying to do is figure out a new cost allocation mechanism, a new regulatory mechanism, something that utility commissions across the country can replicate because they say, "Oh, this person's using GETS, and they figured out how to do the cost allocation mechanism. Oh, we can just replicate that." Everyone wants to be second in those types of situations.
(25:09):
In the grand scheme of things, when it comes to utilities, our $22 billion is a drop in the bucket. They invest $26 billion in their system year over year, and this is our budget across 10 years. We've been able to do a tremendous amount of acceleration and creating new partnerships that didn't exist otherwise with a relatively small amount of money and making sure that folks are really thinking deeply about these problems. And so I think that there is potentially a role for private capital do the same.
Cody Simms (25:37):
When I hear about the overall state of the grid, I hear about the challenges of getting transmission built out. I separately hear about backlogged interconnect queues. Is that a separate thing, or is it just a different way of saying the same thing?
Maria Robinson (25:51):
It is a separate thing, but like everything in the grid, it's interconnected, pun intended, I suppose there, so the interconnection queue is figuring out how you are going to add new generation to the grid. And it's incumbent upon these RTOs to figure out if I add this new solar generation asset in location X, is it going to cause reliability problems somewhere else? Their number one goal is to keep the lights on.
(26:19):
Doing all these studies, and there are so many folks, including many folks who are investing that I suspect listen to this, they're coming out of the woodwork being like, "Oh, yeah, it sounds like a great time to invest in solar, but then it means doing studies on every individual one of these." FERC has come out with some new rules to help look at it. They call it a cluster study, so you're looking at them in aggregate, but at the same time it's figuring out, again, this is cost allocation. Who's going to pay for the upgrades?
(26:46):
When we cut a ribbon on solar or wind, which everybody loves doing, former politician here, you forget that it has to connect to a substation and it has to connect to the grid somewhere and that can only hold so much capacity, and that's what's sort of holding us back is figuring out do we need to really upgrade some of these existing assets or build new ones? And building new stuff is hard.
Cody Simms (27:08):
And this is where I've heard of some new technologies that are coming into play, like reconductoring I guess is one way where you can take existing transmission lines and just allow them to have more capacity.
Maria Robinson (27:18):
This is one of those things that we don't think about as our local utilities running around doing work and doing some tree trimming in the area, which is vastly important, even though my neighbors complain about it year after year. They restring new lines every so often. There's been great technology advances.
(27:34):
One of the things keeping them from adding more capacity in the past is they were really heavy, and you don't want those lines to sag. That creates different sorts of physical mechanical problems. Now a lot of them have gotten a lot lighter in order to mimic existing weight and so you don't have to build new towers, the towers or the people shape things that you see along the highway as you're driving down the turnpike. That is a big part of it, but that assumes that you're still trying to get power from point A to point B where existing lines are. It's a little bit of a belt and suspenders. You need to do that reconductoring, you need to squeeze every ounce out of the existing grid, but you're still going to have to build new in order to make sure that you can get some of those new resources online.
Cody Simms (28:15):
You talked about some of the challenges of what happens if you have a heat wave in one place and a cold snap in the other kind of all at the same time. Obviously as we know, one of the challenges of climate change is just an increase in the amount of extreme weather events that are happening. How much of the work you do is focused on the resilience problem of the grid today? We've spent so much time just talking about how do we build out the grid we want to have, but how do we make the current grid that we have actually reduce outages and reduce challenges for people?
Maria Robinson (28:47):
That's been a huge part of what our office is doing is looking at that resilience angle. Plenty of folks have studied where the investments are. We understand that sea level rise is going to come up 20 feet. Oh, no, this substation that is connected to our entire grid here is only 10 feet above. How can we lift that up? How much does that cost? That's a few million dollars in and of itself, and so we've been funding different projects like that.
(29:11):
One that I really like is in Louisiana. There's this project called the HERO project, and it's basically to make sure that what happened during one of the previous storms never happens again where one big transmission line went down and everyone was without power for a long period of time. Instead, they're going to set up these smaller regional microgrids. I wouldn't be shocked if we see something similar coming out of Western North Carolina in the relatively near future because they ran into the same problem. We're relying on one piece of infrastructure, and if that goes down, you're in a really tough spot for a longer period of time. So that resilience aspect, no one's assuming that these are 1 in 100 events happening, these are going to happen on a much more regular basis.
Cody Simms (29:52):
At this point, it's the local utilities who are making those decisions on should I run a new line here or do reconducting, or should I bury the line underground, or should I keep the line I have, but install batteries, pay for battery storage to be installed over here because we know this is a high risk area that can't go without power? Is that correct?
Maria Robinson (30:10):
That is true, and so God bless our state utility regulators who are both trying to figure out how to make sure to do this really efficiently with the utilities and effectively, but also making sure that costs aren't going up precipitously. And it's hard because they have to take both the short-term view and the long-term view at the same exact time.
(30:28):
If we're just looking at long-term investments, sure, we'd be able to have they call gold-plated grid, but at the same time you need to make sure that you're still doing it in the public interest, and ultimately at the end of the day, what is that balance of risk. And I think it's shifting. I think people have much less tolerances for having outages.
(30:47):
I'm not extremely old, but as a kid, we used to have outages all the time, and everyone just lived with it, and it wasn't the end of the world. Now you have outages, you can't do online banking anymore, and you just can't even have access to your own money, so that's now become a place where we as a modern society are willing to accept it.
Cody Simms (31:04):
It's interesting. It goes back to your point at the beginning, which is in theory the cost of generation should go down as we move to renewables, but the cost of moving electricity around is not going down, in fact is increasing right now. And we talked about the need to build outlines across the country, but it's also all these local resiliency initiatives as well that are contributing, I would guess, to the cost of moving electricity even within inside an existing utility.
Maria Robinson (31:33):
A lot of low utilities are trying to figure out, again, how to optimize their systems. And they're doing a lot of building of transmission inside their own areas, but it's hard because you don't want to overbuild either. No one wants extra infrastructure that you didn't necessarily need. It's not like building an extra room in your house that you just never use. That is the complexity that I think a lot of utilities are facing here as well as figuring out how much they're willing to invest. Utilities are relatively low risk entities overall, and a lot of them are investor-owned, and so they're trying to figure out how to balance their own books.
Cody Simms (32:08):
It feels like a whole theme we're hearing where there's this tension in our system between essentially local control and top-down planning, which you've been living in the middle of.
Maria Robinson (32:18):
My specific perspective of folks who want a lot more local control, there are lots of folks who thinks that everyone should go to munis and co-ops out there, and that creates different sorts of problems because you still need to rely on someone generating power somewhere else. What it means is everyone needs to take a deep breath and learn work together in partnership.
(32:41):
People ask me the question, "What are you most proud of that you've done at this office?" Creating all the different partnerships for folks who applied for our grants, even if they didn't get the money, we were wildly oversubscribed. People asked for $80 billion and for the 5 billion that we had last round, which shows there's a lot of need of course, but some of those partnerships continue. They figured out, "Hey, this actually pencils. Hey, actually this is something our ratepayers care about a lot." We didn't take the time to really look at this new technology or work with our regulator. It turns out we're all actually on the same page, and so that to me is a great step in the right direction and one of the benefits of having federal governments do big things and try and build big things, even the ones that we didn't necessarily fund are still able to move forward.
Cody Simms (33:24):
As you are soon leaving office, there's an administration change, my understanding is as an appointed official, your time is coming to an end. Is that correct?
Maria Robinson (33:34):
Only about 46 days.
Cody Simms (33:35):
What would you love to see happen in the next four years in this space?
Maria Robinson (33:42):
Figuring out this resilience piece is so important, and I think it's something that we as a country have to figure out regardless of your partisan views. We need to figure out how we're going to continue to strengthen our grid, if you care about national security, you care an awful lot about bases, and you care about making items here instead of in other parts of the world.
(34:04):
I think we continue to want to make our lives easier so you care about data centers, whether you think you care about data centers or not. I am glued to my phone all the time. I'm an addict. I acknowledge that, and I know that I'm relying on data centers all over the place. I want to feel good that my data is secure and located here somewhere in the United States.
(34:23):
So all these pieces, I think one thing that folks are more and more aware of every day is how these pieces interplay with each other as we continue to invest in the resilience of the system because no one wants outages. That's going to be something that I'd like to see this office continue to work on into the future.
Cody Simms (34:40):
One thing we haven't touched on with respect to resilience, which is not extreme weather resilience per se, is cybersecurity. How much of that is an emphasis today in the work that needs to happen on our grid?
Maria Robinson (34:52):
Cybersecurity is such a huge concern, and what's interesting is we are moving from a space from maybe 10 years ago where folks were bolting on cybersecurity mechanisms at the very end, and it said, now we have to build them into our system from the chip on. Folks would be surprised at how much of our electric system is still really utilized manually in part to avoid cybersecurity concerns. We assume that everything is super optimized and everyone's using AI to use the grid. Actually, there's not a lot of consistency in some of the data platforms, and a lot of that is still done manually.
(35:28):
I think there's, again, a sweet spot in between there. We've invested in some funding in a company called GridUnity that's trying to help bring everybody up to at least a mid-2010s speed all day, so not everything is done quite as manually back and forth over email, and instead is looking at data platforms. So there's a lot to be done on the cybersecurity front. I think everybody is much more aware of attacks, both physical as well. That's a separate thing now for us to think about too.
Cody Simms (35:56):
I'm hearing you say there is work to be done on cybersecurity, but it's actually work that needs to be planned for in order to move more of grid management to a software-based system in the first place.
Maria Robinson (36:08):
It's all about that planning, Cody. We've heard here at Deploy from a lot of great leaders of utilities who are thinking really hard about this and understand that they can't just keep operating the same way that they have in the past. We've talked a lot about virtual power plants and the way to utilize those and all the existing assets that are out there. So the great news is there's a lot of focus on efficiency, and I think that that's ultimately really good for the American people.
Cody Simms (36:32):
Last topic I have for you, which is, I know in your role at the DOE, I think you're probably not allowed to comment a lot on a congressional wish list, but I do know that various instantiations of, quote-unquote, "permitting reform" have made their way in Congress. Do you have a sense of what in your job or in the person who follows your footsteps' job would be most helpful to see change?
Maria Robinson (36:59):
Well, first of all, as I always joke, if I understood what Congress did, I would be doing something that makes a lot more money. I assume there's a lot that can be done to figure out some of these different permitting pieces. What I see is a system that involves a lot of different parts of the federal government, and the more different parts of the federal government you involve or any government or any bureaucracy anywhere, that's not unique to DC necessarily, sometimes the harder it can be in order to actually build something. And I think it's just a question of whether the goal is do folks really want to build something, and that's why we're taking this two-pronged approach of VPPs and GETS and reconducting and using the existing grid while trying to tackle this larger permitting question.
(37:44):
That being said, there's only so much that Congress can do because a lot of the issues are happening at the state and local level. And that is an education piece of helping people understand, because no one wants to go to a city council meeting and get yelled at about permitting for a transmission line if you don't even really understand what transmission is, what it does, or what the goals are, or how your municipality benefits.
(38:04):
So I think there's a lot actually to be done at the state level to continue that out, and some states have transmission authorities, and I think that that's a great way, and some state energy offices are working on education there, and that will make a big difference.
Cody Simms (38:19):
Well, lastly, Maria, now with the time you have spent in the role you are in, if you could go back to your 2022 self and say, "Maria, this is where you should be really focused on your time and attention," where would you do the same things, and where would you shift your focus?
Maria Robinson (38:38):
We spent a lot of time making sure that we got things right, that we really engaged with industry, and that I don't regret spending a single second on, even though the most precious thing that you have in one of these jobs is time, of course. But a lot of us came in never thinking that we'd be in federal government and have industry experience, and I think that that's been something cool to have to make sure that folks can work together and that it's not just a bureaucratic process that came up in a vacuum. So that's something that I would do again in a heartbeat a million times over.
(39:10):
The other piece is I think we still need to keep pushing on interregional transmission. We've tried with the tools that we have. There's limits to that with congressional authorities, but I think continuing to explain to folks why that's so important is something I would want to spend more time with, and given the opportunity at some point in the future would like to continue doing.
Cody Simms (39:31):
Any last comments you want to make for our listeners who may be a range of people at large hyperscalers, project financiers, startups, a whole host of people trying to build in this space?
Maria Robinson (39:46):
Don't forget about the grid. You can't build something just in isolation. You really have to think about all of these different pieces. There's so much complexity to it, but you can do it. We've been able to see that we're seeing great projects being built right now. It is possible, but sometimes you're going to have to leave your initial vision and your ego at the door in order to get things done, but if you do, you're going to achieve great things.
Cody Simms (40:09):
And I would assume start early.
Maria Robinson (40:11):
Yes, absolutely.
Cody Simms (40:14):
Maria, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for your service to the country, and can't wait to hear what's next for you in the next month and a half.
Maria Robinson (40:22):
All right, appreciate it, Cody. Thanks so much.
Cody Simms (40:24):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change.
(40:37):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks, and see you next episode.
