Jason Badeaux

The future grid will be built from the bottom up, driven by new technologies, DERs, that are in many ways superior to their predecessors.

With the right mechanisms in place, DERs will create a flexible grid by helping supply meet demand in a dynamic system. This represents a very exciting opportunity for electrification, with several software companies already developing solutions to make electricity demand digital and efficient.

A corporation making central planning decisions and compensating its stakeholders at its discretion will never be as effective as a properly designed permissionless network that scales and compensates its most productive actors using the free market’s conceptions of supply and demand.

In terms of its function on the grid, the best way to think of Form’s battery is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant. Rather than methane, it runs on renewable energy as fuel, but from the grid’s perspective, it provides basically the same service, which is reliable, dispatchable generation that can run for 100... See more

Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always... See more

Since 2017, Tesla’s capital expenditure per incremental unit of capacity has improved from ~$84,000, when the Model 3 was ramping, to ~$7,700. While these improvements indicate that Tesla could continue to increase margins, the more important takeaway is that capital no longer is a bottleneck limiting its growth. Instead, Tesla should be able to... See more

Delphia is the classic example of a network-effect based business model: as more users contribute data, the returns for funds using the data should theoretically improve. This creates a flywheel, in which more users are incentivized to provide data because hedge funds and other businesses (who benefit from crowdsourced data at scale) are willing to... See more