In this live episode of Inevitable from Climate Week NYC, Cody Simms explores the history and future of the electric grid with Ben Eidelson of Stepchange.
Eidelson traces the evolution of the grid from J.P. Morgan and Pearl Street through the AC/DC debate, the rise of utilities, and Samuel Insull’s development of a scalable utility business model. The conversation then connects that history to today’s grid challenges, including transmission constraints, rapidly growing data center loads, batteries, renewable energy, and the need to modernize the infrastructure connecting increasingly digital and DC-based resources to the grid.
Episode recorded on September 22, 2026 (Published on October 15, 2026).
In this episode, we cover:
(0:00) An overview of Stepchange
(3:23) J.P. Morgan and the origins of the U.S. electric grid
(5:55) The AC vs. DC battle and the rise of the modern transmission system
(10:46) Samuel Insull and the utility business model
(13:55) How the grid scaled through consolidation, interconnection, and wartime demand
(19:07) Why transmission is central to connecting resources and load
(20:53) Three ways to create more capacity from the existing grid
(23:14) Data centers and the return of large, concentrated loads
(25:35) The history of batteries and their role in the future grid
(30:44) Why transformers need to evolve for a more digital, DC-based grid
(33:12) Electricity markets, data centers, and new generation
(35:33) The changing economics of coal, gas, wind, solar, and batteries
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[Cody Simms] (0:00 - 1:21)
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Ben Eidelson, co-founder and general partner at Stepchange Ventures. Stepchange is a venture fund that invests in climate and energy technology companies. Ben and his partner, and Anay Shah, also run the Stepchange Show, a long-form history podcast on the infrastructure behind the modern economy.Their latest episode is a four-and-a-half-hour history of the American electric grid. Consider this conversation the abridged version. A half-hour or so, double-click into some of the most consequential parts of that history.
We recorded this conversation live at New York Climate Week at the JP Morgan Chase Tower on Park Avenue. Let's jump in. From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable.
Each week, we talk to the people powering the world and keeping it running to learn what comes next. Alright, hello, everybody. Ben, why don't you start by talking about the JP Morgan contribution to the history of our power grid.
We're going to tell the story of the grid in like 15 to 20 minutes.
[Ben Eidelson] (1:22 - 2:14)
That's what we're going to do here. JP Morgan plays a key role. If we left the building to walk about a half mile that way, we'd be at his old Italian brownstone, which was one of the first houses ever lit by electric light.And it had a dynamo, which was an old coal engine in the cellar, powering incandescent bulbs throughout his house. And this was replaced in this coal gas, dirty coal gas that had burned inside the house. It was supposedly noisy, neighbors complained, and they kept improving it.
And the reason he was essentially dog-fooding this early beta product by Edison, who he was bankrolling. Now, you go down another four miles and you hit Pearl Street, who here knows the story of Pearl Street, Pearl Street Station, couple people. That's the first power plant in the US grid.
You know, JP Morgan was fundamental in financing us. Maybe we'll get into later some of the other roles that he played in bringing different businesses together, but a pretty foundational role.
[Cody Simms] (2:14 - 2:39)
If you're not familiar, Ben runs a firm with his partner, Anay Shah, called Stepchange. And they just released a four and a half hour single podcast episode on the history of the electric grid. I thought we could just hit the highlights of this 140-year-old, crazy patchwork, most complicated technology thing that's happened in America, you could say.[Ben Eidelson] (2:39 - 2:51)
The largest machine humans have created, and it's connected. And it's this machine of physics, this machine of economics, this machine of regulatory structure, sometimes it's worked together, sometimes they don't work together. Yeah, it's lots to talk about.[Cody Simms] (2:51 - 3:01)
Maybe before we do that, just what is Step Change and why did you spend, I don't know, six months, nine months, a year diving in on the history of the grid? Step Change is really two things.[Ben Eidelson] (3:02 - 3:41)
Step Change Ventures, we invest in companies like MCJ and CODRID on that. And then the Step Change Show, which is our attempt to appreciate infrastructure and appreciate where we are, how we got here. And the belief is that that informs where we might go and how we get there.And the better we understand those structures, I think the better we're motivated to improve them. These are all systems that humans have put together. And when infrastructure works, it's easy to treat it as invisible.
A great example of that. You flip on the light switch, you take it for granted unless it breaks. I think it's important, especially for the folks listening and folks in this room, to not take the system for granted because that's how we might improve it.
[Cody Simms] (3:41 - 4:07)
You know, you start the episode with the whole history of DC versus AC, which starts with the beginning of our grid not agreeing on how the grid should be built. Basically two very competing systems that at one point had Thomas Edison electrocuting a dog on stage to prove how his version was safer than Nikola Tesla's. Maybe walk through this AC versus DC debate.And how our modern transmission system evolved out of that.
[Ben Eidelson] (4:07 - 5:49)
Edison was really the chief proponent and kind of his business and his technology. It was really a chief proponent of this DC system. Pearl Street being this DC grid.So there were wire direct copper lines to these early dynamos, which are these coal plants, they're DC. And I mean, it's a simpler design. It's simpler to understand.
It's simpler to conceptualize. And this is, you know, if you today use a battery, you're using DC current. If you're today using a solar panel, you're using DC.
So it's still with us today in very much an important way. The challenge is that as soon as you're trying to move DC over a long distance, the wires resistance goes up. And as soon as you're doing that, you're losing a lot of power in those lines.
Now, if you can raise the voltage up, you'll be able to get much less power losses. The problem is there's no easy way to change the voltage of DC. AC has this amazing property, which is they can be transformed.
It can be stepped up. It can be stepped down. You can have a power plant.
You step up the voltage to hundreds of thousands of volts, transmit it over long distances, step it down into our house, into our buildings, into our lines of transformer, which is the thing that has all the coils coming off of it. You look outside your, you know, I guess here it's mostly underground in boxes, but if you live in a more suburban area, you see the poles, you see the transformer box. You know, that's essentially technology invented in this era in the, you know, 1890s that is fundamental to our ability to transmit power over long distances.
Niagara Falls was the first really, like, they didn't know how this was going to work. They didn't know how they were going to transmit the power from this amazing, you know, mechanical waterfall. There was some point where they were like, looking at compressed air.
They were looking at rope. And once AC started to really be cracked in this era, they realized that they could step up the power, transmit it 20 miles to Buffalo, step it down and use it there. It's a fundamental unlock.
Now Edison was kind of fighting until the end to keep DC going.
[Cody Simms] (5:49 - 5:54)
One point they both thought, no, my system is the only system, right? It wasn't this, like, handoff that we have today.[Ben Eidelson] (5:54 - 6:07)
Tesla was really the, like, an amazing human to study, but he paired up with Westinghouse, was kind of the industrialist that helped Tesla's technology scale. And they really rolled out. Staying out to the company today that large nuclear reactors are named after, right?[Cody Simms] (6:07 - 6:08)
So, exactly.[Ben Eidelson] (6:09 - 6:23)
And Edison had Edison General Electric. General Electric might sound familiar. And Edison still fought until the end when JP Morgan, chief investor in Edison's business, merged them at the times that AC has won.Edison actually got kicked out of the business and it just became General Electric.
[Cody Simms] (6:23 - 7:04)
I like to think of historical precedent where we sit in a place today that we take things for granted and you look back in history, it's hard to even imagine what things were like. You know, you see these pictures of Los Angeles that are covered in oil rigs everywhere, as an example. And, like, that's not what Los Angeles looks like today, but for many people, that was their lived experience.That was their life. That's what it looked like. You could Amsterdam and it used to be filled with cars.
New York City still filled with cars. Yeah. Walk me through what a home looked like in the 1920s and what it looked like by the 1940s.
What did that 20 or so year period of change feel like for people?
[Ben Eidelson] (7:05 - 8:21)
In 1920, for context, we're selling the early ramp up of the grid. So, most houses had no electricity. Their nationwide stat was something like, you know, 30% of houses had electricity in there.The use case was lighting. Like, it wasn't like, what are all the things? It was light bulbs.
It was the killer feature. It was the feature. Now, as soon as you had electricity, people started to invent new things, but there was no outlet.
So, you had to unscrew your light bulb, I guess, and get dark, and screw in the appliance, you know, a toaster, an iron for your clothes. Everyone was just kind of figuring this out as they went along. There was no standards.
You know, different grids were all over the place. The end of that decade, going into the Great Depression, we hit something like 70% penetration. And so, it's really like, most urban households started that electricity.
30% to 70% in a decade and a half. My analogy, it's like 2010 to 2020. If you can flash back to 2010, I think 25% of people had a smartphone.
It's hard to, like, put you on the iPhone, come out to 2007, come to 2008. Early adopters had it, but most people didn't. By 2020, everyone had it.
Like, this was that era for electricity. And so, it was like a fundamental shift. Now, the people that didn't have it still were largely the rural communities, and it wasn't until the mid-30s that Roosevelt kicked off with the rural communities.
The Rural Electrification Act, the ability to scale that out and kind of the economic model.
[Cody Simms] (8:21 - 8:40)
Your pod, you know, you hit on, at the start of it, some of these names we've all heard of, like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. But then you introduce a name that I think unless you're like a real student of the grid, most people maybe haven't heard of. And I think it's the most important figure in the thing.So, explain who Samuel Insull is and what he invented.
[Ben Eidelson] (8:40 - 9:03)
Yeah, so Samuel Insull, I think of as the godfather of the utility business, the business model. And so, he arrives from the UK in the early kind of Edison General Electric era, is just like, I want to go work for Edison. I'm just going to like go across the ocean and go work for this guy.He becomes his right hand kind of chief of staff and is ordering copper and doing all these things. Well, as Edison is kind of fighting the ACDC war.
[Cody Simms] (9:03 - 9:08)
By the way, today we have like the Tesla mafia or whatever, like people who worked. He was that for Thomas Edison, right?[Ben Eidelson] (9:09 - 10:25)
Surely the opposite of the Tesla mafia, I guess. And Edison sends him to go build this big factory to scale up the incandescent bulbs. He's doing all these things.He's studying the books and he's thinking about this business model. He's thinking like, what happens if you go 5,000 customers to 50,000? Like where do the economics flow?
Because right now they're essentially a device company. They're selling light bulbs, dynamos, wires. They haven't really figured out the subscription service of electricity yet.
And instead of taking a higher-paying job with General Electric, he leaves, I think takes a two-thirds pay cut, moves to Chicago to run Chicago Edison. This is 1894. And he gets there.
They have in an early coal plant, Central Station. It has a 5% load factor. I mean, 5% of the time it's being used.
95% of the time, no one's using the power. You have this amazing CapEx spend. They have 5,000 customers.
The city's about a million people at this time. And he knows exactly what he wants to do. He's going to drive up the load factor, expand the customer base, and bring down costs for everyone.
And this model became the model for the grid. I actually think it became the model for every utility business model. The cloud.
All these systems, AI hyperscalers. Like these are all systems we're trying to spread out the cost. And we're in this moment of electricity affordability conversation, right?
[Cody Simms] (10:26 - 10:34)
It's a scaled business model. The more customers you add, the lower the cost is for everybody, which sounds like it was counterintuitive to people at the time. They thought, oh, you're going to add more people.It's all going to get more expensive for everybody.
[Ben Eidelson] (10:34 - 11:10)
But electricity was this luxury product. We just started at JP Morgan's house. It was 5,000 people in a city of a million.It was the richest people in the city. They're like, I'm going to show off my cool, you know, magical light bulbs. He's like, no, this should be for everyone.
Not because of the goodness of his heart. He's also like, I think he's the Jeff Bezos of his time, right? It's the AWS model of I'm going to bring more people in.
And so he started to solve the grid utilization problem of we've spent all this CapEx. We've laid down all these wires. Let's get more people using it more hours of the day.
Let's go to meat packers. Let's go to industrial load. Let's make sure the street cars are running on it.
[Cody Simms] (11:10 - 11:15)
Let's say that's when electrical signs popped up all over the city, right? He was literally trying to platform the whole city on electricity.[Ben Eidelson] (11:16 - 13:13)
There started being these electrical parks that on the weekends would be this place to go to ride in like a light bulb theme park. Again, to spread out load, then you bring down costs for everyone. So within 15 years, he went from this 5% load factor to 50%.And the average cost per kilowatt went down 90%. So it became this scaled consumer product that like, of course, is how we treat it today. But this was that transitional time of figuring out the business model and then later figuring out the regulatory structure.
And then how did the rest of the country catch up? Because this was Chicago. Yeah.
I mean, this was the era also of trust and like large scale, you know, funded acquisitions. So he was buying up different utilities in different regions, aggregating them at his peak, which ends at the depression. And this all kind of falls apart.
He had 65 directorships, personally. It was like a very sizable share. Maybe something like 30% of the US utilities was under his umbrella.
Wow. And then there were a couple others like this. And so that crumbles, you have to say, enter the trust busters, right?
Enter the trust busters. You have Roosevelt coming in and Roosevelt pulling the depression does three big things to say, hey, this is no longer like we've all accepted. This isn't a luxury product anymore.
We want to give this to everyone. We want it to be accessible. So we're going to do a few things.
One, we're going to break up this trust. These are those Public Utilities Commissions Holding Act, PUCHA, which ends up setting up our regulatory structure today where a utility has to fit within a state regulatory structure. You have the Rural Electrification Act.
Let's get the remaining third of America hooked up so that on farms, you also have electricity. Let's make this a rain. Let's figure out the co-op business model that still a huge chunk of America runs on today versus the investor owned utility model.
They didn't still have built out. And then let's build public power infrastructure. This is Tennessee Valley Authority.
This is funding that went into BPA in the Northwest. This is finishing projects like Hoover Dam. Most of these huge hydro projects that bring down the scaled cost of power and was all very important as we lead into the war in World War II.
[Cody Simms] (13:14 - 13:23)
And then at some points, you ended up with Interconnect and these remote hydro projects getting all the way to reach a New York City. Right? How did that end up happening?[Ben Eidelson] (13:24 - 14:24)
So part of it was kind of the insult flywheel out play, which is you get better economics when you connect more generating stations and more demand together, because then you get more capacity utilization. So that's one. So by connecting Chicago to the nearby region, you end up with a bigger system that gets more economies of scale.So there's kind of an economic gravity to that. I think the other big factor was the war. When even people who were kind of fighting the economic gravity, well, the government came in and said, we need an immense amount of power in the south to smelt aluminum.
We need an immense amount of power to power Oak Ridge, which was this project with a few thousand people that needed the amount of power that New York City had because we had some secret experiments going on. Notice the Manhattan Project. They need a lot of power to and enrich uranium and run these experiments.
And so the government came in and there was a couple year period back to grid utilization and kind of the moment we're in now where with a 25% increase in generating capacity, we got a 60% increase and loads of the grid could handle because of that interconnectedness and because of pushing the system.
[Cody Simms] (14:24 - 14:35)
And then at some point, the whole idea of distributed energy resources kind of broke through. I think probably in the 1970s into the 1980s is that sort of the idea?[Ben Eidelson] (14:35 - 14:48)
Yeah. So for a quick, like we'll jump 20, 30 years, but basically post-war 50, 60s, that's like the American community of Ronald Reagan advertising on TV saying, electrify your home with these GE appliances in a whirlpool and kind of the boom of suburban America.[Cody Simms] (14:48 - 14:53)
That was I guess the second era of like big load growth, right? But the first one of interconnected load growth.[Ben Eidelson] (14:53 - 16:18)
Correct. And a kind of marketing engine that's really pushing it to kind of say, Hey, these are these like they called electricity like your domestic servants to help you around your house. And on the back side of that, what's going on in the power plant is bigger just gets better from an economics perspective.The larger the turbine, the larger the plant, the larger the system, you're just driving costs down and down and down. And I think going into this area, there's a five X use of average per household low load. So that is your heater, you know, your stove, like like all of us getting Netflix at home.
Yeah, all at once. Fast forward to the 70s. We have the oil crisis.
We have Carter coming in. We have this moment of like efficiency. And what are we going to do with all of this?
By the end of the 70s, they're looking at deregulation. And this law passes called PURPA, which is kind of a footnote in one of the power laws being passed by Carter, which was the pet project of a senator that said, any generator below 80 megawatts. And then so co-generation plant was the common use case.
This was like a trash burning plant alongside some industrial use. The utility has to buy power from that plant as well, not just generated in their own. And so before it was a fully vertically integrated utility, the utility is connecting to the customer, customers paying them, and the utilities generating all the power.
They own the coal plant. They own the wires. They own the end customer.
Now for the first time you get this crack in that model. And all of a sudden you're having to buy wholesale power.
[Cody Simms] (16:18 - 16:52)
All right. You've kind of talked about the story of this grid that grew organically. There's a lot of planning involved today, but it was an unplanned phenomenon.I want to talk about how that compares to China, which is very centrally planned. You did a little bit of exploration in the history of the grid. You took a tangent into China and some of the transmission projects that have happened there, some of the build out of power that's happened there.
Maybe compare that to what our interconnect structure in our grid looks like here.
[Ben Eidelson] (16:52 - 18:23)
Especially with the rise of renewables, there's this realization that sometimes where your resources are and where you're trying to use them are two different places. Something like two thirds of the load in the US is on the eastern seaboard. And yet a lot of our wind resources, a lot of our solar resources are in the middle or southwest of the country.China has a very similar issue where essentially the southeast of the country is the industrial center. It is the largest cities. It is where everything, all the load is.
And then you go kind of to the northwest of the country and you have deserts, you have wind, you have all these natural resources that you want to move through. So whereas the US has had a part, mostly because of our regulatory structure and the structure we give permission to any state along the way to block transmission line, we've been unable to build ultra high voltage transmission lines. So we have zero what's considered ultra high voltage DC lines.
Whereas China has I think something like 40 that are just crisscrossing the whole country, connecting all these resources. So it creates this economic flywheel to build out the resources there. And you might say, hey, what are we talking about DC long range lines?
This connects back to the beginning of the story, which is if you're doing one big line a long distance and now we have power electronics that can transform DC into AC and interconnect to the grid, you actually get better power transmission over long ranges. And so some of these things we built in the 70s in the US, I'm based up in Seattle. We have a line from there down to LA.
We export via this high voltage DC line, not ultra high voltage, that we built in the 70s. We essentially like many technologies gave up and gave the technology to China and they run with it.
[Cody Simms] (18:23 - 18:39)
Having dug into the whole how the grid came to be. Do you have confidence that the US can build what we need to build to hit the current load growth that is likely to happen without becoming an authoritarian government?[Ben Eidelson] (18:40 - 20:13)
Three things give me hope and kind of an order of time. The first is that we have a ton of headroom in the wires we have in place today. And we just don't coordinate it effectively and efficiently.And data centers present an amazing opportunity to coordinate that. You know, we're co-investors and companies that are trying to do exactly that, orchestrate the load, shift it to the place where you have that extra capacity. And right now, if you looked at the whole US grid, we're only using something like 30 to 40% of the capacity because you have to build for the worst day in the worst hour when everyone's air conditioning is on and the industrial load and you don't want to tell anyone to turn off.
Well, if instead you can coordinate and you can use things like the internet to send signals back and forth, you can actually build a much smarter system that drives that. Even if you go from 30 to 60%, that's an immense amount of headroom across the stack. And also batteries.
That's point number two is batteries. Now, so point number two is as soon as you start putting batteries at various points in the system, you know, we think of batteries today as like first thing to solve this kind of frequency response issue, then this capacity issue is another thing which is they start to replace the need for more transmission because you're able to essentially shift when you charge it. And then at the home level, it starts to replace the need for more distribution.
We're talking with one of the Base co-founders about exactly this. And this is our next episode on History of Batteries. It's where it's all intersecting.
Third is in the long term, the thing stopping us is policy and regulatory. And that's hard. FERC, it's the states, it's going to get some state rights issues of, you know, you'll have to put a transmission line over my state without me agreeing.
And I'm a short-term pessimistic about this is very pessimistic.
[Cody Simms] (20:14 - 20:31)
I had the former FERC chair on the pod a couple weeks ago and he was very clear, like, no states absolutely have to have jurisdiction and rights. And so you're stuck in this regulatory challenge of, yeah, but we need to put a line through this part of Arizona or whatever.[Ben Eidelson] (20:31 - 21:00)
There's kind of the way things have always been. Back to the inspiration of the show is like, over the last 150 years, we made a bunch of choices. The state's, you know, regulatory structure choice is not enshrined in the laws of physics, the way that the AC-DC behavior is.It's enshrined in the laws of our land, which are the things we should all consider updating if it's blocking what we need to build a functioning society. So it's up to us as humans and the government to figure out how we want to navigate. I agree that in the short term, that's the way it works.
I find that to be a very limiting view.
[Cody Simms] (21:00 - 21:37)
It seems like all the challenge, a big part of the challenge right now that we have on our grid and our power systems is, A, how do we decarbonize it? How do we create lower emissions power? We're here in climate week, you know, for goodness sakes.And two, or B, how do we deal right now with this large load phenomenon? It's the idea that, yes, there is growth on the grid for the first time in a couple decades, and it's not the kind of growth we've had recently. It's very concentrated growth in very specific areas and locations.
In the historical rear view that you looked at, did we ever deal with growth that had these large loads in the past?
[Ben Eidelson] (21:38 - 22:21)
Yeah, and there was a flywheel. Backed insoles flywheel, if you're eating exactly that, because those large loads provide that kind of sweet base load that can kind of amortize the cost of your system. And so the best echo is especially during the war.You know, I think AI load right now, 2024 was like four and a half percent of the US grid capacity data centers, total data centers. I think now it's like no one has perfect numbers on this, but maybe we're approaching five to six percent as these new gigawatt data centers come online. The most wild forecasts have us at like 10 percent of the grid.
In World War II era, 15 percent of our grid capacity was used to smelt aluminum in magnesium. And those were huge loads that you couldn't turn off, because the way that you smelt aluminum requires this high heat capacity where you keep it at temperature.
[Cody Simms] (22:21 - 22:27)
And you know, are we talking a dozen or two smelting plants, or are we talking hundreds? Like was it very centralized?[Ben Eidelson] (22:28 - 23:03)
You had Alcoa, which was the aluminum company that kind of invented the primary process, and they first were built up on next to Niagara Falls. Then they expanded the Pacific Northwest as we got the Grand Coulee Dam. So they went where generating capacity goes.And so if you think about the future of this moment, I think as we think about behind the meter, you co-locate potentially near that capacity. But ideally, preferentially connected to the grid, so you drive down the cost for everyone, you increase reliability, and you increase utilization. And so I think there's a lot of lessons.
I mean, I call AI, especially AI training centers, like the aluminum smelters of our time.
[Cody Simms] (23:03 - 23:09)
As long as they do ultimately take their behind the meter power and connect it to the grid, which most of them say they want to do.[Ben Eidelson] (23:10 - 23:46)
And then you get to the renewables point, which is we are in this moment where that can be the fastest, cheapest source of power if we get out of our own way and let things connect. You mentioned batteries as the next project. Give us the preview.Interesting starts around the same time. So like this period of 1780 to like 1820 in the US was like, I think it kind of felt like now. But right now everyone's like, I don't know what five years is going to look like.
AI and all that. Like this was the time when electricity was being discovered. And people were like, what is this magic?
And what are we going to do with this? And if you were like, oh, we're going to cook food with it. And other people were like, no, we're going to use gas though.
We're never going to cook our food.
[Cody Simms] (23:46 - 23:58)
This was like before finding out that the light bulb was the killer feature. Yeah, I mean, we didn't know it was a novelty that we didn't actually know what it would be used for. That's crazy to think about.Yeah, so the first battery I'll give a little like spoiler is a frog.
[Ben Eidelson] (23:59 - 25:13)
It is a frog that has been dissected mentally by this guy, Galvani. And he's doing the dissection in the frog's leg twitches. And he's trying to figure out why and he comes up the wrong reason.He thinks electricity comes from inside of an animal. This guy, Volta creates the Voltaic pile known as, you know, for volts. And that will take piles in early battery.
That's where the story begins. Fast forward. I think the story ends or is ongoing with China.
How many people in the room know the name CATL? Okay, good. Good half.
CATL produces 40% of the batteries in the world. Sibling company, cousin company, BYD creates another 20% of those batteries. The CATL did not exist until 2012 as a company.
And there's so much after putting their supply chain into their processes into the relationship they have with the Chinese state. They kind of created the flywheel around first EV buses and taxi fleets. And so there's this interesting thing that happens with batteries where the chemistry, the scale up and the use case kind of have to swirl together.
And that's how you go from the cobalt chemistry is eventually to LFP. And so the interesting story is like, why do these chemistries end up feeding through? And really like, what ends up leading to that scale?
What is your process like?
[Cody Simms] (25:13 - 25:24)
This crazy, right? Like these guys just riffing off top of his head on information he's learned over the last nine months? Like you certainly didn't just run an LLM and like write it down and then spout it back out.Like it's in your brain. Yeah.
[Ben Eidelson] (25:25 - 26:08)
I love using LLMs to help for various things. But it's nice to have things in the brain. Like it's useful, right?It's usually talking to a founder and you're like, oh, I actually understand the incentive structures of utility and what the difference is between an investor on utility and immunity and why they care and what they're optimizing for. So it's useful, which is also why you're produced and give this out to the world so people can go access it and get into their brains. But the transcript is available if you want to give it to your own process.
We go and read the top five to ten best books on the topic. On the grid, there's a bunch of batteries. What are your top three for folks who want to dive in?
The grid by Gretchen Bakke is great. California burning is great on the like fire story in relation to kind of fires in the grid in the PG&E story and Ron all that. And then empires of light is that 1880s story.
[Cody Simms] (26:08 - 26:21)
We didn't even talk about the PG&E wildfires or Enron. Like these are entire chapters in the pod episode he did. It's really amazing.My evening reading is three or four months. You're a lot of fun at cocktail parties, aren't you?
[Ben Eidelson] (26:21 - 27:02)
I can't get very tired of climate. We cocktail parties at works. My kids are very tired of me talking about the grid and then listen to a bunch of your pods.Listen to Bolts and Catalyst and just like soak it all up. Take notes. And then we interview 20 to 30 people.
And that is where like it starts to come together. We talked to, you know, folks like Jesse Jenkins, Integra Shaw and Rob Graham. Like in people that worked in the space, modeled it, then around deployment.
For the batteries episode, we got to talk to the CTO of CTL. Oh, wow. The American guy who went out there for nine years, set it up.
Some of the early folks at Tesla. And so that starts to give this extra texture. And then we spend like a week battling an outline and then we get in a room and we talk at each other.
Or as long as it takes, then we edit.
[Cody Simms] (27:02 - 27:06)
So you've done the grid is your most recent one. Batteries is next. What are the other ones you've done?[Ben Eidelson] (27:06 - 28:20)
The history of data centers, which actually like really worked in terms of like, okay, people want this. And that was, I think we've crossed 170,000 downloads of this four hour story, starting with the IBM tabulating machines through to today. And then prior to that, we did two on the history of coal.There's a good book called coal. It was published I think 15, 20 years ago. And I was like, oh, this is going to be like a good starter episode.
And the story is obviously like today, the thing that humanity does that causes the most emissions is the amount of coal we burned today in 2026. And so like, this really matters to why we're all here and what we're trying to do. A lot of folks just assume coal is a solved problem, but it's not.
And you go back in time. And so that's the problem side, but appreciating that coal powered the industrial revolution, which is a hundred years before the grid story. And powered the rise of the British Empire for better and worse, and powered how the British were able to beat the Germans because they mined Welsh coal and placed it around the globe so that their Navy, the Royal Navy could access coal within a couple of days of wherever they were.
The immense kind of human story with coal was a good kickoff to this whole adventure. So we hope to do two to three of maybe four a year and keep learning because I think it motivates us and others to work on this stuff.
[Cody Simms] (28:21 - 28:42)
Guys, give Ben a hand. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you.Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. Learn more at MCJ.VC and subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.MCJ.VC. See you next week.