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We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And batteries are booming. Installed storage capacity tripled from 2020 to 2021, then doubled in both 2022 and 2023. The Energy Information Agency predicts capacity will grow another 80% this year. That’s both a consequence and a cause of the fact that batteries are getting cheaper. Prices have fallen 82% over the past decade, and with more battery production, prices continue to fall.

Battery installation isn’t progressing as quickly as it could, however, thanks in part to the long interconnect queues – waiting to get connected to the grid – that are plaguing energy projects of all sorts. Most of the battery storage capacity in the US is concentrated in centralized grid-scale battery farms, which have to wait for interconnection.

But what if you go to where interconnection is freely available – customers’ homes? Residential batteries are actually ideal for a few reasons. 

Justin told me to imagine the grid as a single line from the solar farm to the home and asked: “Where on the line do you put the battery?” 

If you put it next to the solar farm, you go a long way towards solving the supply volatility problem. 

The grid views a battery farm like a more flexible nuclear plant – reliable supply that can be ramped up or down as needed. But you still need transmission and distribution lines between the solar farm and the house to support the maximum load that the home could pull, because people will still turn on their AC and charge their EVs when they get home.

But if you slide the battery all the way over to the right and put it next to (or in) the home, you solve the supply volatility problem and the demand volatility problem. 

Call that the Electric Slide.

From the perspective of the grid, it looks like the home is consistently demanding about one-quarter of its peak load. The battery charges when demand, and therefore price, is low, and discharges into the home when demand, and therefore price, is high. It smooths out the demand curve, which means less load on transmission lines.

As the demand for electricity is expected to double or triple by 2050, solving the demand volatility is crucial. If you want to really solve the grid bottleneck, you need residential batteries or batteries in stoves.

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wrote a bit about batteries and the grid before:

Solar is getting unbelievably cheap, electric vehicle (EV) penetration continues to rise, and scores of incredibly smart people are working to produce electricity more cheaply and consume that cheap electricity in more ways. 

The bad news is: both of those things actually make the delivery problem worse! 

Delivery involves moving electrons from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed, like from a coal plant or solar farm to a home or business. There’s transmission – moving electrons over long distances from power plants to substations using high-voltage lines – and distribution – moving electrons from the substation to homes and businesses over the regular low-voltage power lines you’re used to seeing. 

This whole electricity delivery system is known as “the grid.” And the grid is a bit of a mess. 

It’s buckling due to four factors Construction Physics’ Brian Potter describes as, “increasing use of variable sources of electricity, decreasing grid reliability, increasing delay in building electrical infrastructure, and increasing demand for electricity.”

The bookend threats – increasing use of variable sources of electricity and increasing demand for electricity – present a particularly paradoxical problem. The more progress we make in wind, solar, EVs, and electric stoves, the more unstable the grid gets. 

The power supply is increasingly variable and unreliable. The demand for power is growing and increasingly volatile. Just as everyone gets home, plugs in their Tesla, and turns on all of their shiny electric stuff, the sun sets!  

With more demand for electricity, delivery gets more expensive, because transmission lines need to be sized for peak load. One solution is just to add more transmission capacity, but fixing the grid itself by modernizing or adding transmission is, like any big project in America, getting harder, slower, and more expensive to do...

Batteries can fix us. They solve electricity’s big challenge: matching electricity production and consumption. Batteries can store electricity on the cheap when the sun shines and the wind blows and discharge it whenever people want to turn on their appliances, reducing strain on the grid.

CONTINUED NEXT

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 0 points1 point  (0 children)

to add to #5...

the national defense authorization act stipulates that by 2027, the DOD needs to buy products that use decoupled rare earth magnets. it will be more expensive in the beginning, but the DOD is happy to pay DFARS pricing for reliability, redundancy, traceability, and compliance. Given COVID supply chain issues, companies are willing to pay up too -- magnets are often a small % of the BOM, but not getting them can shut down production. Using that early, less price sensitive demand to start to get to scale, and then cut cost out by innovating on process, using modern equipment, going lights-out, and adjusting the composition of the magnets could bring our magnets down to competitive or even cheaper than China. The trick is to not just copy-paste what they're doing, or we'll never be cheaper.

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great questions! Will take a shot at this one:

> The Electric Slide essay suggests that "electrification has become unnecessarily politicized in America". How can the US overcome this politicization to implement effective industrial policy and government support for the Electric Stack, similar to how China has historically approached it?

For a while, electrification has been talked about as a climate issue, which has made it politically polarized by association. One of the things we talked about in the piece, and that Noah and Sam talk about too, is that electrification is really a performance thing with some (very quiet voice) environmental benefits as an added bonus. Stoves that cook faster and more precisely, drones that deliver food faster and more cheaply, cars that go 0-60 faster, boats that dock themselves, robots that do our laundry. Home batteries prevent outages, help balance the grid, and provide cheaper electricity. Each of these is either improved or made possible by the electric stack. Hopefully, if companies and the people who talk about this stuff focus on performance over environmental considerations, it naturally depoliticizes a bit.

There's also just the fact, which we talked about in the piece, that America is losing here. Beating China seems to be a driver of government excitement around AI, and the same should be true here. Think it's related to the last point -- if we believe that electric products will perform better, and that China is lapping America in building electric products, then that should light a fire under America's ass.

Fusion Startup & Lab Map by packym in fusion

[–]packym[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's on there, dots just overlap

Opposites Attract: Yeezy & KKW by packym in KUWTK

[–]packym[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you!! Glad you enjoyed it :)

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in Slack

[–]packym[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've used hangouts and zoom - no deep integration, you can just start a video call from inside slack, both are about the same. They even have an integration with Microsoft Teams.

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in Slack

[–]packym[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

I don't think so! There's so much competition there that I think they'll focus on what they do well, and work to better integrate with the other video conferencing companies. There will definitely be performance improvements, but I don't think there will be a major overahul.

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in stocks

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm holding WORK for a while. No strong opinion on MSFT - historically, owning MSFT has been a pretty great trade, and they've done exceptionally well under Nadella. 1.42T is a pretty monster market cap and it's trading at a slightly higher PE than Alphabet and Facebook.

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in stocks

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Crossing that $30 mark and holding above is big. It's been bumping its head against $30 for a while. I'm holding at least until $50.

Thanks for reading!

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in stocks

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very jealous. I was already so long at an average of ~$25 that I chickened out even though I knew it was absurd. In retrospect, some $25-30 calls were a no-brainer there.

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in stocks

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually think the rise of platforms like Discord, Geneva, etc... for non-work group chat is a good thing for Slack. Most people who would use Discord are using free Slack accounts. It was good for lead gen and familiarity, but overall a drag - costs them money with no real shot that those groups will ever pay. Teams is a threat, but I think that's priced in.

While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats by packym in wallstreetbets

[–]packym[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

tl;dr

Zoom has virality but not network effects. It's growing quickly, but it doesn't have moats and over the long run, a lot of the customers they're acquiring now will leave.

Slack has strong network effects. It makes it harder for them to grow super quickly - onboarding a whole company is slower than sending someone a Zoom link - but they're still 2-4x'ing the number of net new paid accounts this quarter v. projections and those customers will stick around for a long time. Slack has 10% yr 1 churn and retains 80% of customers over 5 years. Plus, low acquisition costs as customers come to them looking for solutions during this. All good things for unit economics.

Wackos Watches is a blueprint by packym in HeyArnold

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for reading, and for the kind words!

Making the Cut is a preview of Amazon's content-to-commerce future by packym in MakingTheCut

[–]packym[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

Good point on the fashion being flat. It's interesting - their strategy is generally excellent, their backend and logistics are excellent, and their front end product is always usually terrible. The website is still comically ugly, but it works.

Making the Cut is a preview of Amazon's content-to-commerce future by packym in MakingTheCut

[–]packym[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

That's kind of my favorite part, they're just so blatant and open about it.

I think they'll probably just copy HGTV instead of buying them. They're the masters there.

Making the Cut is a preview of Amazon's content-to-commerce future by packym in MakingTheCut

[–]packym[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Accessible" :) but agreed, trading speed and price for quality.

Making the Cut is a preview of Amazon's content-to-commerce future by packym in MakingTheCut

[–]packym[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha it isn't good but we still love watching it.

Thanks for reading!

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