Powering AI with Clean Energy: Greg Robinson on Building Sustainable Data Centers
I learned so much about power and how “the grid” works from Greg Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Aston. Greg came on the podcast to discuss the future of clean energy and how Aston is shaping the way AI data centers are powered.
I asked him about his career journey, and he talked about how he drew lessons from his family’s funeral home business, before his early days working in the solar industry, to founding Aston, a company that focuses on providing firm power service using renewable energy sources like solar and geothermal.
The conversation dives deep into the challenges of meeting the growing energy demands of data centers, particularly those supporting AI, and how Aston is filling that gap with innovative, clean energy solutions. Greg shares his thoughts on the future of the energy industry, touching on topics like independent power networks (IPNs), the role of carbon capture, and how we can scale clean energy responsibly to meet the needs of our rapidly evolving world.
Chapters:
00:36 - Introduction to Greg Robinson and Aston
02:17 - Greg’s career journey: From physics to clean energy
04:29 - Early challenges in the solar industry
07:11 - The evolution of clean energy buying and the founding of Aston
09:48 - Bridging clean energy and firm power service for data centers
15:28 - Aston’s customer approach: Demand-driven power solutions
18:14 - The power demands of AI data centers and clean energy challenges
20:30 - The importance of solar and storage in clean energy projects
24:19 - The future of energy and carbon capture debates
29:57 - Independent Power Networks (IPN) and the changing utility landscape
33:20 - The power requirements of the growing AI industry
39:48 - Why Greg cares about climate change
46:15 - Personal impacts of climate change: From wildfires to water shortages
47:36 - What makes Greg hopeful for the future
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Greg Robinson (00:00):
It's not that the grid is out of power. I think that gets put in the headlines a lot. Like we're running out of power. There's no more, everyone needs to start figuring out how to go off grid because there's no more power. It's not that. It's just that it's not well balanced. So it's not when these data centers need is constantly. So if a data center comes to a public utility and says, how much can you give me? They're not saying, how much can you give me from midnight to 6:00 AM They're saying, how much can you give me around the clock, no matter what happens.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:36):
Hello everyone and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change every single day. We are not doomed as produced by Puddle Creative. We're a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. Today. Our guest is Greg Robinson, a clean energy entrepreneur. He's the co-founder and CEO of Aston Aston works with industrial energy customers to bring them clean energy for their projects. His main focus right now is on AI data centers, which use a ton of power. We talked about Aston and power generation in general, clean energy like solar and wind and geothermal and what the future of energy in the United States specifically is. We also talked about how climate change is changing, how he predicts the future about what clean energy projects need because of our changing climate. It's a really fascinating conversation that really opens the door to how power is used and consumed in North America. I hope you enjoy the interview. Give us a follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for, yeah, thanks for having me. Coming on. You have a great little microphone set up there. So it looks like you're a pro podcaster. We're going to talk about, you're the co-founder and CEO of Aston, and we're going to talk about all about who Aston is, what you guys do and kind of dive into it. But before we get there, I wanted to just hear a little bit about your career journey, how you started out in this energy field in the first
Greg Robinson (02:17):
Place. Yeah, so I'll kind of pull off the segment that I'm in because I think getting into the energy sector, it was like 2009. There were some pretty discreet paths to go down at that time. You could go into clean energy or you could go into oil and gas and get along. They didn't really talk much those two groups. And so I think it really getting into this career journey started with, I majored in physics in college, and what's interesting about physics, I don't know if it's this way everywhere, but at University of Washington there were so many different parts of that that you could kind of choose which discipline you wanted to do. So you didn't necessarily have to go do nuclear physics maybe a little bit, but not you could kind of pick something else. So I switched out a lot of classes for meteorology and climatology.
(03:14):
You just had to do a science-based or a math-based science was what it was. And so I started learning just about climate models and meteorology and how all that worked. And then over here on this other part of the curriculum, I was learning about power circuits and electronic circuits and electricity and magnetism and then quantum physics and sort of massive states of things changing their states. And so I guess if you just put that in a pot and stir it all together, it's sort of clean energy. And I came right out of school and went into a solar development company. And at the time I think the cost of solar panels were many, many times like maybe 20, 30 times more expensive than they are now, possibly even more than that. And my job there was to do everything from go find the property where you would put solar, figure out if it can go there, figure out if it's bankable, talk to local utilities, find who's going to buy it. It was just all of the pieces full stack. There wasn't really an industry well established for
(04:29):
Doing those things. So kind of ad hoc piecing it all together. And then after about five years of that started to kind of realize that everything was getting built in the clean energy space once the buyer was there. So if the buyer of the power was there, that sort of unlocked everything else, your financing, everybody started coming in. You could get your debt, you could figure out how much debt you could get, you could figure out if you were going to be able to build it. So it wasn't built spec real estate. It was like, no, we're going to get a long-term contract. You're going to guarantee me these revenues of the solar panels for a very long time or this wind farm, and then once somebody guarantees me revenues for a long time, I can now get it built. And that concept was like, okay, we need to figure out how to go to the buyer.
(05:29):
Who's the buyer? And at the time, in 2014, buying clean energy was buy some renewable energy credits from some random wind farm in western Texas or somewhere and then have sort of a debate about if that was really changing anything that seemed, it was, it was a marketing department and the finance department, they're like, we'll, buy it. You got to talk about it. How are you going to talk about it? Is this going to be right? And so we saw kind of a gap in the market to start a retail power company that could actually serve power service to a customer and then bring clean energy supply, buy clean energy directly from power plants and sort of look at clean energy as a component of actual power supply, build your power supply off of clean energy. That seemed to be the only route that was going to work. And I hate to say it, but eight years ago I was on a podcast, the Freeing Energy podcast, talking about 24 7 renewables, and I think it's now kind of becoming maybe a glimmer of that we're going to actually do this thing now. So that was kind of my career journey from physical development in the dirt plugging panels in it. It felt so real. It was like, oh my gosh, we are saving the planet. And then running a retail power company, it really felt like we were doing finance and marketing
(07:11):
And you could see it because as we built that company, the demand side was actually working really, really well. You could go to a company and say, Hey, I've got an offer for you. I can get you clean energy and power. And People would look at you and be like, what do you mean those are those two different products? It's like, no, no, I get you at the same time. And so it was almost like we were having to teach people that mattered. I have anecdotal things that I can't really, can't say exactly who said it, but just times where I was told, look, until somebody makes us do that, we're going to keep buying offsets from the other side of Texas. It's just administratively simpler. It was hard to buy new supply, to build new supply. And that was really the thing that, I guess it was the seed that got planted for us to start Aston. I didn't know it at the time, but now with hindsight, there were two different games being played. There was the clean energy, get stuff built where it could get built, and then there was this whole other thing over here, which was the grid and people consuming power constantly, which for your listeners, that's called firm Power Service. So firm power service is when you need power, where you need power at your door, run the thing you're using. And because clean energy wasn't really that big in the early days, it was just getting its legs. It could kind of be over here as this add-on, and now we're at this great reckoning where those two industries now have to collide. Clean energy is now such a major component of our grid, and now AI data centers, others are coming in and saying, I need 50% more per year. So there's this existential crisis of, okay, well what is the connective tissue between those two industries where we can provide firm power service to these really large users and then also feed the vast majority of that with clean energy. I think the way this industry has come up, stitching those two is not just as simple as saying, Hey, let's use clean energy and really has to be a whole company or it has to be several companies doing this. So I just merged a whole bunch of questions, but that was my career path was sort of from hardcore supply, like real electrical engineering stuff
(09:48):
To retail supply, which is really, you're sort of moving electrons, but you never actually see the electrons or the wires. And now to which is sort of a merger of both of those things. I mean, we're building new things, designing new grids, designing new circuits then, but also really focusing on the users, what do they actually need to run their businesses, which I'm happy to dig more into
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (10:17):
That. Yeah, definitely. I want you to maybe just tell the listeners a bit about, give the kind of elevator pitch of what Aston is, but also from your previous answer, I would love to hear a little of how you decided, I mean you became an entrepreneur too, how you decided that you were the person, you saw a need in the industry and you were like, I can do this. I can start my own company. So talk a little bit about that.
Greg Robinson (10:44):
Sure. Yeah. That goes way before college. Let's see, I actually think electricity goes way before college. I think in first grade, my first grade science project was the electric fuse, so I think it was, again, something was happening there and I grew up, my mom's side of my family has owned and operated a funeral home in upstate New York for five generations.
(11:15):
And I think what I learned through growing up around that was, well, for one, if you were there, if you were at grandpa's house, you were on customer service, you could run in this room in the building, can run upstairs, it's too loud, you're going to mess up the eulogy or something like that. If people came into the building, you kind of were always serving the public. And so I kind of grew up very customer focused. Even as a kid, you had to at least acknowledge that they were there and the customers were there. And the other thing I learned, because I actually worked in and around the funeral home growing up, part of the family, you help out, you clean the cars. As you get older, you become an usher or whatever, talking to people at the front door. And so I sort of learned that that business is not about people dying, that business is about the living people.
(12:26):
And so I really learned these people are having a problem and they just want, they want the situation to just go away. They want to be a part of it, they want to feel it, but they don't want to deal with all this stuff. So I really got to see in one of the most challenging industries, honestly, to make that happen because people aren't, it's not a forget it thing. They're in it, they're feeling it. You have to allow them to do that. You have to actually support them in doing that. But you also have to know that you're kind of supposed to be the wallpaper as the funeral business. You're not supposed to put on a big show for them. You're just sort of facilitating this. And so I think I kind of grew up not just seeing the customers and being around them, but as I started working at, I started to see that these are people in their worst moment, some people in their worst moments of life. And if you can go in those really bad moments and just fix the parts that they don't want to think about, I was always thinking about that. And it was details. It was like, make sure the car's not dirty. Make sure my uncle used to say if they notice us, we failed at our job. And so there was always that really fine detail. So I kind of always had that. And then my father, my dad was, for the first half of my life, he was in the Air Force and for the rest of my life, he worked on a dairy farm in mc, New York. And so meticulous, so detail oriented, if the water main broke, we went out and fixed it. So it was like, I think it was just details and just wanting to fix the problems. So I grew up with both of my mom's side of the family with my dad. And then other than that, I think it's maybe I just don't have the governor in my head to say, no, you probably shouldn't do that.
(14:33):
It's like there's an issue. And I'm just like, okay, well, if I can figure out a solution and then I can have somebody go tell somebody else, Hey, you want to help me solve this? Because sometimes, I mean, obviously this business essence, it's way too big for one person or two people to build an MVP and see how it goes. You know what I mean? Right, totally. This is a sustainable infrastructure business. You're sort of starting the modern day con Edison in some ways, and it's like, what does that look like today? Very different. But I think it still comes from the same seed. It's like there's a customer, they have a need. You have to think about the details. You have to build a service. Then honestly, if they notice your service too much, you've failed.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (15:20):
So let's transition into what is the customer for Aston and what is the problem that you guys are solving for them?
Greg Robinson (15:28):
Honestly, going back to my definition of firm power, I mean, we are creating new firm power service for the largest users of power in the world, which today, it's almost not even worth talking about anyone besides data centers in that category. And really without a focus on building new heavy on the firm power service with the highest content of clean energy you can possibly get sustainable AI is just not going to be possible.
(15:58):
It's just too easy to build a new, I mean, it's not easy permitting wise, but it's just too easy to build a new gas plant or build a new, it's just like it's been powering our power grids for so long. That has been the firm power service for so long that people know how to do it. And so given the simplest solution, people are just going to keep doing it. So that's where we're kind of filling that gap of data centers need new clean power service. Public utilities know how to do it with fossil fuels. Our whole team have people on our team who have come from Shell Oil who serve firm power service to entire cities or giant industrial customers. We have somebody on our team who was a VP of energy services for 10 gigawatt utility company. So they're all kind of cut from that cloth, but we kind of came up in the clean energy industry, a lot of us. And so we're kind of, again, bridging that gap, creating new firm power service for these really large loads maniacally focused on data centers today.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (17:07):
Cool. Take us through a customer journey of how they come to you. How are you working with them? And maybe give details about the power sources.
Greg Robinson (17:20):
Sure. Yeah. So we're taking really a demand driven approach. So instead of going traditionally in development, and even at the beginning of my career, we went and found a piece of dirt first and we said, where should the solar power go? And so we're kind of flipping that to the other side, going to, and we announced that we teamed up with JLL. They have a whole bunch of customers who are tenants, they're data center tenants, they have power needs, they need to grow their business. So we would approach a customer, like a data center developer let's say, and just kind of interview them about what do you need? What kind of service do you need? Do you have clean energy targets? Many of them do, especially if they're a data center that's hosting a large social media company or something like that.
(18:14):
They have certain requirements for clean energy content. What's your reporting needs for that? What's your uptime requirement? What markets do you need to go to? Not just today, but over the next decade. So it's really just about, again, sort of building that service and saying, we're not going to them and saying, Hey, look at this piece of dirt we have. Would you like to come here? We've got it already for you.
(18:40):
We're not doing that. We're sort of starting with the customer and saying, where do you need to go? And then over the past, we've been in operation for a little under two years, so still super early days for us, but we've made so much progress. We have sites that are under development now, and we have this partnership with JLL where we're kind of bringing these customers in and starting to line up those roadmaps so that I think 2025 is going to be a very interesting year. You're going to start to have public utilities saying, I can't serve you anymore. And so that's why we're starting with the demand side to really understand where do you need to go? What does your service need to look like? Once we do that, we'll then identify sites, some sites that are already under development by another developer. So then we kind of go to the market, look around for which ones would be most suitable for those needs, and then we start that service building. So you kind of build it from the ground up and you say, what's already there?
(19:49):
Can we even connect to the grid and get anything? Most of the time the answer is no or so little that it's not worth talking about. And then we start to look like how much clean energy can we get on that site and then we start to look higher. So how much if we can get a grid interconnection, not now but soon, how much can we pull into the site if the customer needs to scale larger? So again, it's sort of wrapping them up and saying, what can we fill in and how big can we get for you? And can we meet all of those needs? The specific supply, the simplest things are solar and storage.
(20:30):
And I think one thing for the listeners kind of demystify things. It's not that the grid is out of power. I think that gets put in the headlines a lot. We're running out of power. There's no more, everyone needs to start figuring out how to go off grid because there's no more power. It's not that. It's just that it's not well balanced. So when these data centers need, power is constantly. So if a data center comes to a public utility and says, how much can you give me? They're not saying, how much can you give me from midnight to 6:00 AM They're saying, how much can you give me around the clock no matter what happens? And the answer is very little because it's a little shred at the top. The grid's not sitting around with hundreds and hundreds of megawatts worth of power just hanging out, waiting for customers. So for us, we really look at it from that ground up approach with a site. And I know you've seen on our website the Aston campus, the Aston campus is sort of the building block of this network of firm power that we're creating. That's where the customer goes. That's where ideally the vast majority of the power supply is coming from.
(21:40):
But if we need for the customer, if we need to pull in from other sources in order to ramp beyond that site, we'll also do that. And then on the demand side, as I said, we're so focused on data centers right now, but as we begin to have these campuses, you can start to add other customers like cold storage, warehouse, green chemicals and others. It's honestly a rounding error. I mean, in terms of power consumption, you're talking about one two megawatts versus hundreds on the data center side.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (22:17):
And you mentioned the clean energy campuses and you talked about solar, but what are the other kind of sources like geothermal and all those other ones?
Greg Robinson (22:29):
So very site specific. Obviously geothermal is not everywhere,
(22:36):
But yeah, solar storage, geothermal, wind. We're constantly on the market looking for other forms of storage. Obviously long duration storage solves a huge amount of problems for us. So folks like Energy Dome, and we had the founder of Energy Dome on our podcast, Claudio. And so we're kind of looking at these new ways of shifting power. The bias is always towards solar is it has the least amount of cost overruns when you're building solar. It's just so modular and pretty manageable. So we have a heavy bias towards that. But yeah, solar and we'll do wind. If there's already wind under development, we are not going to go and say, Hey, this is a great spot to spin up wind. If it's a site where wind is already developed or is under development, we'd add that to the mix as well. But as anybody who knows in firming power, it's really about making sure that you have adequate amount of storage and the ability to shift that power to when it's needed. So every one of our campuses will have an overbuild of storage.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (23:55):
And so maybe zooming out a bit, what do you see as the future for this industry? Where is it going and what are your thoughts? I know you have some opinions about just the future of energy in general, like carbon capture and storage. Is that something we should be pursuing or not? What do you think?
Greg Robinson (24:19):
Yeah, I have to say one of the coolest things about hosting people on a podcast is you are constantly being challenged of your assumptions of the world. And we had Mark Jacobson, who is probably the most publicly adamantly opposed to carbon capture. And I am always evolving in my thinking, but carbon capture has to be powered to then capture the carbon. And there's so many more carbon producing assets being built right now to power data center load. And so it was like if I was going to spend that money to power a big building that had a bunch of fans blowing in it, I would probably do the one with the fans, cooling servers rather than one of the fans sucking the carbon out. But again, that's just me. That's just sort of a daily focus and I'm super biased. You asked about the industry, so there's probably more than this, but really there's three major types of utilities in the country. Utilities, which is the ones many of us know about the Edison's, the ones that are publicly traded, there's municipal power companies, Seattle City Lights, others like those. And then there's rural co-ops, so public utility districts and those kinds of things around, I think there might be 60 of 'em in the state of Washington, 60 different utility districts.
(25:54):
So those three categories have largely been able to supply customers with firm power service.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (26:01):
Yeah,
Greg Robinson (26:03):
There's some nuances behind those entities. There's sometimes Shell Oil has a network of assets that feeds through those municipal power companies, different flavors all over the place. There's like a few thousand of these utilities in the country. I think we're kind of moving into the age, we call it the IPN, which is the independent power network as an industry category. We were building one of them focused on clean energy for data centers. That's kind of our focus as we build our independent power network. But that's just sort of the age we're in. And I think the thing that's driving that is just customer fragmentation. Customers don't all want the same thing anymore. Once upon a time, we just all wanted lights
(26:51):
And then we all wanted refrigerators, and that was pretty universally known. And then we all wanted laundry onsite. We all wanted kind of the same stuff. Whether you could afford it or not was secondary, but we all were kind of the same customer. Very unlikely that a residential customer is going to go from using one megawatt, one megawatt hour for the whole month to all of a sudden using a hundred megawatt hours for the whole month. Very unlikely. So we were all sort of really well bucketed as like, okay, everybody's kind of the same. Maybe there's three or four different tariffs, which is the rate that a utility charges. And then that started to evolve where we moved out of that central utility being able to serve everyone as the same type of customer or similar customers. And then all of a sudden customers wanted to create their own energy. So then they're pushing power back into the grid, and then the grid is like, wait a minute, that's not, we bill for this. If I let you do it, I got to let that person do it. It's like,
(28:01):
You got to let us all do it. And so then now we're starting moving into this place where there's actually debates over whether people want certain things on the public power grid or not. If you went and did a survey, it just straight up asked, do you think data centers should be connected to the US power grid? You'd get a pretty good review of no, you get a pretty good amount of people who would say, no way, don't take my power. And I don't know if that's because of just that's in the zeitgeist right now is the data centers are stealing all of our power
(28:43):
Utilities feel that way. It's like, don't put it in my neighborhood. I don't know what to do with it. I can't balance that thing. And so that's one example. I think there's other customers, obviously this has been going on for a while with crypto, the crypto mining, the battle of like, oh, you're consuming all of our power. And then on the other side, people are saying, no, we're actually making more power exist so that we can shut off when you all need it. So there's that. There's the two sides of that. So I guess this is all coming down to buyer fragmentation and just not having a one size fits all service. When you start to see, that's what we think of as the age of the IPN. It's like they're going to be independent power networks that are as small as an HOA. And there's kind of examples of that. Like Fort Myers, Florida, there was one community of 60 homes that didn't go off. They had power after the hurricane came through. It's like they sort of stayed on, well, rest of four my was out. That's an example of a certain customer profile or certain customers saying, this is what I want. And then some service or some architect or somebody coming in and say, I can build that.
(29:57):
And I think the best analogy is to ISPs internet service providers because you do have, I lived in an HOA outside of Seattle that we had our own ISP just for that neighborhood, lots of Microsoft people. So there's an example of a fragmented buyer that says, Hey, I have a unique set of needs. I need this service for me to run my life. And I think we're going to start to see that. Now, the challenge, and it'll be really interesting, is how does capital organize around that category? Is it going to be the big private equity asset managers that organize around IPNs? How do regulators organize around it? Right now we have this very sort of arcane regulatory structure where it says, if you make a wire cross a road, you're now a regulated utility company. It's like, that seems like a weird one. Seems like that needs to evolve a little bit.
(30:58):
It was very simple and applied. Mostly we have utilities that have made huge investments and you can't just tell them I'm leaving. And so I think the reason I'll finish up with this with the IPN, I think the reason IPN will exist now, and we're kind of in the age of the IPN is because demand has been relatively flat for the last several decades. We've had a combination of growth, but also energy efficiency. So you've had energy efficiency sort of tamping it down with this slight growth, but now the growth has sort of started to hockey stick,
(31:41):
50 plus percent year over year growth we're looking at. And so it's the first time where you're kind of building enough new stuff that some new entrant can come in and say, I'm going to serve that customer segment, or I'm going to serve that customer segment. The challenge with what we've been trying to do for my whole career so far is you're trying to rip the customer away from a utility that has made investments. They made several decade investments in making sure that these people get their power and that people are like, nah, I don't want it anymore. And that doesn't really work out for their capital structures. It doesn't work out. They didn't want a bunch of stranded assets sitting out there. So it's been the push and pull here. But I think the reason we're kind of moving into this IPN era, we're kind of already there is there's enough growing demand that we can add new, and I think it'll really be the fourth, a fourth category. We have the investor owned municipal power companies, and then these IPNs that, as I said, are already starting to, they're already kind of here, but just
(32:48):
Nobody not well distributed, I suppose.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:53):
And then in terms of the future of Aston specifically, and AI is such as you said, it's in the zeitgeist right now. It's such a buzzy thing, but it's probably only at the really beginning of its hockey stick in terms of where it's going. And so are we going to need just 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 times the amount of power that we have now to keep feeding these data centers?
Greg Robinson (33:20):
Man, yeah, that's the 30 trillion question. There's this dotted line, which is now, and then on the other side of this thing, it either keeps bending around or it doesn't. But I mean, I think you have the training that if we are to continue to train and train and train and train and get better and better and more applications start needing that cars robotic manufacturing, say more critical industries rather than chat and LLMs, I can't really see an end for that, especially humanoid robots and all sorts of other things where it's like, I think the one thing I will say from our perspective is the numbers are north of 400 gigawatts that we want to add just in the US in a reasonable timeframe where if you're going to add that, you need to start now. So when you think of it like that, con Edison is like a 14 gigawatt utility. So they serve one of the largest cities in the country, if not the, and it's small compared to what we're talking about. I mean, these data centers are full on, they're full on cities. We're sort of, for us, when we look at it, we're just really trying to almost become the municipal power company, so to speak, for that
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (34:55):
City,
Greg Robinson (34:56):
Even though that city happens to only be a few hundred thousand square feet, but you need all of the services that a city needs. And I think we missed that. I've missed it almost my whole career of thinking about solar and it's like, oh, solar only costs a dollar per watt to install. Well, even if you use that dollar per watt to actually get it all the way firm,
(35:19):
You're looking at $7 a watt or more. So even in the Pacific Northwest, it's like you can make power for a penny. I'm pretty sure that you're not paying a penny for your firm power service at your house. It's not just paying things off. It's like it's all the redundancy. It's all the things that if this goes down and you find out that it was because of Portland general or whoever you buy from, you're going to have words with them. You know what I mean? You ruin have my career.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (35:49):
Yeah, exactly.
Greg Robinson (35:50):
Anyway, I absolutely think that it will continue to grow, but I do think, can't believe I'm saying this about technology, people will not want to hear that, but it's like there is going to be a rate limiter on the growth of that, and it's going to be power .
(36:06):
A Hundred percent.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (36:08):
Yeah. Awesome, Greg. Well, I have a couple kind of questions that I wrap up with and we like to end on an optimistic note since this podcast is called We are Not Doomed about climate change and stuff. But is there anything I missed in terms OFin specifically you wanted to touch on?
Greg Robinson (36:29):
No, I think in the next three to six months, we have some really interesting things happening. We are focused on building firm power networks, but I think maybe there's a round two or something like that. I think there are some things that we're working on where when you ask that very simple question at the beginning of a business, how would you build a firm power service business in 2024
(36:56):
Versus how you're not going to make it look like Edison's electric company? You know what I mean? Even though a lot of our current utilities look like Edison's electric company, you have to think about what does the enabling software, what is that platform? How do you allow the vast amounts of entrepreneurs and developers around the country possibly the world to be able to plug in or to be able to develop pieces of the IPN? So I think maybe there's a follow up to that, but we really think about with as and as really think about scale, how do you scale responsibly, but also very quickly when you talk about having to build 40 or 30 or 40 Edisons in the next decade, how do you do that responsibly? That's
(37:47):
Really tricky. And I think my bias, maybe it's my age or the era I grew up in, but I always think about what tools are needed for the entrepreneurs to build it? What tools do they need to have in their hands? Do they need a business model? Do they need financing? Do they need data? Do they need, what do they need? And so really think of our business that way as not just, let's go serve this company and let's go build a vertically integrated utility and make the same mistakes we've made during the last, say, 20 years where demand hasn't been growing. So maybe there's a round two for that, but I think,
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (38:31):
Yeah, definitely
Greg Robinson (38:32):
Just thinking about that platform and I think in the next three to six months we'll have kind of a public instance in that platform. That'll be fun to talk about.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (38:40):
Oh, cool. Yeah, I would love to mean just in terms of a lay person who you've kind of opened my eyes just of thinking about energy. I think most people go about their day, they pay their utility company and they're like, oh, I think some of it's maybe clean and I have this blue sky program that I can pay a little bit extra to get some clean power, but it's very visible in your daily life. So I wanted to transition that to my kind of last couple questions. And one I ask is, why do you care about climate change? And I would love to hear from your perspective as someone who, I think there's a lot of people who they have sort of like an eyeopening moment where they suddenly, or they grew up around nature or something like that. But you've also been thinking about an understanding energy for your whole life and professional career. So how has that shaped your view on the changing climate?
Greg Robinson (39:48):
Yeah, I mean, I'll start with the altruistic and then I'll get really selfish after that. I think at the high level, there's providing a service that humanity needs providing electricity. My whole career being in this, it was in solar because it was like, well, that's kind of the new technology. Clean energy to me is into a lot of people. It's a technology, not a fuel. So we've seen in our lives what technology has done and how fast it can scale and how quickly it can come down in price. So sort of made almost like an economic bet on clean energy is a great way to go. And then the challenge is as you're building a business like that, using the climate or using the weather to then provide a service, it's constantly on the top of your mind. If you're having to do a financial model, like a 20 year financial model, you have to take into account how the climate is actually going to change in that region potentially not just take the 500 year flood map and say, oh, we're need a culvert here.
(41:01):
That's a permanent solution to probably would fix a lot of years. But when you think about am I going to have off the charts heat? Am I going to have off the charts clouds? Am I going to have off the charts rain? Am I going to have all these models starts to come into how do you provide that service that fundamentally, those without the luxury of a long-term view, they're just looking to keep their lights on. If that's a Woodburn stove that they don't, that generates their power and their lights stay on for the most part, they're not going to think about it.
(41:40):
So I think providing that service like climate change is such a massive part of creating that service, especially if we're going to use clean energy for it. Very selfishly, just always looking at your own family. So I spent probably the most impressionable years of my life in upstate New York, just east of Lake Ontario. And so just gnarly weather in the wintertime. And so I kind of grew up learning about whether or not as an academic thing, but as a survival thing, you better know what a effect snow warning is versus what just a regular a noreastern or something like that is. So you kind of had to think about local climate from a survival standpoint. And so I was taught by my parents in that way. This is our climate. These are the things you need to know how to do. Don't forget your blanket when you drive to school and put it in the back of your car. You might not make it home. Those kinds of pieces. Now with little kids, it's like I don't really know how to teach them that. It's not a static thing that I'm teaching them. Just in the last couple weeks, I guess I would say couple months in the last couple months, we've had discussions about what do you do if the water doesn't show up at your house? So how should we be planning for no water?
(43:08):
And this is North Carolina, this shouldn't be thinking about that. But it's like we didn't get water for pretty good amount of June. It was incredibly hot. And so we're trying to teach the kids about water management,
(43:23):
And then a couple weeks later, we're trying to talk about, yeah, the rain is going to hit our house and we might need to seal up the bottom of the house so it doesn't get into the crawl space.
(43:37):
That's just something that you live in a certain area and it's like you're not dealing with droughts and floods. And so I think that kind of, and again, as we said, there's this dotted line at today and then after, we don't know if this trend is going to continue or if the earth will start to heal in certain areas. And I think earth healing probably looks a little more violent than anybody really wants to admit, or at least the models show that may be a more violent experience than anybody wants to admit. And so I think that's the very selfish sort of why I care. It's, I think it probably comes down to predictive modeling is why I care the most, whether it's from a business stand, I had a personal standpoint.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (44:23):
Totally. Yeah. And you answered my next question there, which was sort of like how is your life affected by climate change already by giving those stories of, yeah, I think for a long time people like us have had the luxury of it being climate change, being a little bit more distant than other people around the globe, but it is kind of at our doorstep now almost anywhere you are, even if you're in places where you don't traditionally think of wildfires or hurricanes everywhere, there's little things that are changing and those add up to big things.
Greg Robinson (45:00):
Yeah, I think the wildfire Pacific Northwest in California and the wildfires really hit you. I actually think that, I don't know if it's the same one you were mentioning around Portland, but I remember coming back from a wedding in northern California driving back to Seattle, and we just saw little glowing like fires at the base of trees as we were driving through, and I think we had three kids at the time, so they're all sleeping in the back. We're driving through the middle of the night kind of glowing things. It's like, oh, well, those could have been campfires or whatever they were. By the time we got to Seattle, it was like this is one of the, it had spread hundreds of acres and it just got worse and worse and worse. So I think the wildfires are the ones for me that were most the drought or the slight flooding or the hurricanes or any of that. We just haven't experienced it as personally here. There's sort of edge cases, but I dunno, there's just something, it's just something we never really grew up with who grew up with that. We just had smokey the bear telling us, don't do this. You can prevent these. It's like, I could have prevented this.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (46:15):
Yeah,
Greg Robinson (46:16):
Totally.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (46:17):
Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Chicago, so I didn't grow up on the west coast, but I came out here to go to college and there was not a single day of wildfire smoke in Portland during my first eight years of living there, of going to college and living there. And then all of a sudden it's like at least every other year we get some smoke, and that just is a night and day kind of switch of all of a sudden you live in a place where you're expecting to experience wildfires, whereas 10 years ago, you could talk to someone and be like, oh, yeah, that happens in California, maybe eastern Oregon, but never out here, which is
Greg Robinson (46:59):
Crazy. A wildfire season is now A Thing. It's Strange, which used to be the only time of the year in Seattle that you could get a really great 30 days of sun, Summer, sun, and now it's
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (47:13):
totally,
Greg Robinson (47:13):
it's wildfire season.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (47:15):
Yeah, yeah,
Greg Robinson (47:15):
Man. We are not doomed,
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (47:18):
But we are not doomed. So the last question I have for you is what makes you get out of bed in the morning and feel hopeful for the future? Obviously, you're in an industry where you are thinking about a lot, but what gets you up out of bed in the morning?
Greg Robinson (47:36):
I think the main thing that keeps me optimistic is, and maybe this is just being a natural optimist, but it's like the future doesn't have to be a continuation of the present.
(47:54):
If that's what keeps me going is there are step functions when systems change, when it could be technological systems, political systems, any of those things, when those things change or when there's a new, again, set tools that ends up in the hands of the right people, things can change, systems can fundamentally change. And so I think always in that sort of train you in that physics too, it's like find the discreet levers that control everything or can make massive, massive, massive shifts. And so that's the thing for me, it's just like I believe so much in just human's ability to adapt and see a situation and say, that could be different. And
(48:51):
That to me is just as long as we keep looking for those first principles, just the fundamental levers that have gotten us here, I think that would be the one thing I would say is my hope. But I just have such a belief that people will make the future look different than it is today. It will not just continue just because we're here, like, oh, we're doing this at 30% year over year, or we're doing this at 2% year over year. It's like, well, it doesn't have to continue to be 2% year over year forever if you change fundamentally change technology or some kind of system. So that's what keeps me optimistic that as a parent, you don't really have a choice. I agree. I saw some quote that said that it's probably from stolen from somebody else without credit, but it's like a moral responsibility to be optimistic, especially if you're a parent. You can't just tell your kids be like, sorry.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (49:57):
Yeah, totally.
Greg Robinson (49:59):
Good Luck.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (49:59):
Yeah, I feel you there. So where can people find, if they want to learn more about Aston, where can people find you and Aston?
Greg Robinson (50:07):
Yeah, I mean, Aston labs.co is our website. I think most of my content sharing is on LinkedIn and a little bit on Twitter, I suppose, the world changing podcast. It's super fun. I think if people want to know the depths of what's going on with small modular reactors right now, I've had a couple of people on talking about that. We've had some conversations, as I said, with a guy who went from a utility to Westinghouse to A B, B to now in Hitachi Energy. Now he's onto one of the largest transmission high voltage transmission contractors in the country. So we've had some really deep expertise on there. So I think that's, if you want to listen to more long form talking, then that would probably be the best place to find us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (51:07):
Awesome. Well, Greg, thanks so much for taking the time and being on. We Are Not Doomed. It was great to have you. Thanks Jonah. It's been a blast. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm Jonah Guile Neufeld with Puddle Creative. To find more episodes of the podcast, go to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, have a great week.