We Can Get 2x More Energy Out of the Existing Grid | Ben Hilborn

Ben Hilborn (0:00)

We want more tokens, we want cheaper energy, we want a more resilient grid. We want all of these things, and we've already put trillions of dollars into our energy systems. If only we could spend a little bit more time thinking about how they work together, how they cooperate in real time.

This is the craziest part. You could get another America's worth of energy usage out of the existing grid. If only you knew how to use it right.

SPEAKER_2 (0:29)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to MTS. Today, I am joined by Ben Hilborn, who is the co-founder and CEO of Elastic Energy, the company building a platform to make the grid think for itself, coordinating solar, batteries, EVs, HVAC as one dispatchable system. And Ben, I'm really excited to have you here today because questions around energy and where all of this is going is one of the big questions of today's modern day topics. So welcome Ben to MTS.

Ben Hilborn (0:57)

Thank you so much, I'm really happy to be here.

SPEAKER_2 (0:59)

I'm really happy to have you. Right before we went live, you're talking to me a little bit about your guys' wider thesis about how compute is energy, energy is compute. Tell me a little bit about this wider thesis. Where are you guys?

Ben Hilborn (1:12)

So a little background. So I come from Alberta, oil country through and through. And one of the most interesting bits of narrative that's come out of just oil country in general is that data centers are virtual pipelines.

They take energy at its point source and they turn it into useful, transmutable, fungible bits and tokens. And so not only is the energy industry thinking about how do I offload my excess? How do I get the highest possible dollar per barrel, for example, of output of my energy systems? Compute is thinking the exact same thing just from the other side as well, which is how do I get faster speed to power? How do I get more of it sooner? And how do I get to my five nines reliability?

SPEAKER_2 (2:05)

Yeah, one thing I want to ask specifically about, you're from Alberta, oil, people associate Alberta with oil. You studied electrical engineering. This has clearly been part of your background. You've understood this whole energy space quite well.

What are the big problems in the space? Why did you want to work in energy?

Ben Hilborn (2:26)

To me, it all comes down to the more efficient you can make a system, the more value you get out of it per unit of effort you put into it. And everybody is at least a little bit lazy, not just as humans, but as industries. And we really want to get the most useful work out of our energy as possible. And so whether this is you have a bunch of oil stuck in the ground, or whether you have a bunch of solar generation that can't get out because the grid is constrained, this all comes down to how do we maximize utilization so that we can have more of what we want. We want more tokens, we want cheaper energy, we want a more resilient grid. We want all of these things and we've already put trillions of dollars into our energy systems.

If only we could spend a little bit more time thinking about how they work together, how they cooperate in real time.

This is the craziest part. You could get another America's worth of energy usage out of the existing grid. If only you knew how to use it right.

SPEAKER_2 (3:32)

Yeah, it's pretty interesting because right now a lot of the conversation around needing more energy is, okay, how do we build up whole new infrastructure? But almost what you're arguing is, hey, on our existing infrastructure right now, there's a way that we can use it way more efficiently to get way more energy from the infrastructure we have today. And you even brought to the studio a little...

I've got to actually see this device. I've never seen this up and close and personal. Tell me a little bit about what this is. How does this actually work? What am I looking at?

Ben Hilborn (4:03)

So we call this the energy router, and this is the brains of a distributed, federated energy system. Federated meaning like all the decision is happening at the edge amongst all of the nodes at the edge. I forget who it was, but someone wrote an excellent thought piece on Twitter just the other day around how AGI is coming primarily from swarms of coordinated mid-intelligence agents rather than waiting for one ASI agent. It's that coordination and that self-selection amongst all of the, all of the, call it semi-intelligent pieces, where you get to this broader intelligence across the whole. And we apply that exact same kind of thinking to the grid. This is the brains of one site. This is your home, this is your modular data center, this is your factory. Doesn't matter.