Hi, welcome to Power of the Network. I'm your host Tim Locker, Vice President of Broadband here at CBM. We got another honored guest today, Mr. Chris Kurtz. We've had him on a couple of times before. So this is actually his third time on the podcast with us. But it's been a couple years back since we've had him. So we're going to see if some of the statements he made back then still hold true. Talk about some trends in the utility market and also talk about what's up coming for Chris as he looks closer towards retirement. So let's get into our conversation with Mr. Chris Kurtz. Chris, thanks so much for joining us again. Great to be here. Number one, reoccurring guest on the show. This is your third time on the show. I don't know what that says about the show, but we'll see. Now thanks again for being here and all of your previous episodes have been big hits. And we wanted to get you back here one last time. But last time you're on, you talked about the Doomsday crowd and how they were wrong about the power grid. And that's been a few years ago. Do you still feel that way? Well, I do. I do. I think the power grid, if anything, is better today than it was when we last interviewed. And I think it's getting stronger and better protected all the time. So I think that from a customer perspective, you have nothing to worry about about electricity in the United States. You see these shows on TV every now and then that depict that they, you know, the foreigner or whoever is turning off the grid in New York or turning off the grid here. It takes so many things to do that that it seems impossible to me that that could happen certainly in our day and time. Yeah. You know, just here last weekend or so, you know, super hot understandings. There were some rolling blackouts down in the South and in Arkansas and so on. You know, if it's so resilient, why are we still seeing these kinds of problems? Well, I didn't say it was as resilient as it needs to be. I just said it's dependable. It's going to be there. From our resiliency perspective, there, we have a ways to go, but we're getting there. You look at the investments that are being made in the grid. And the reason you have rolling brownouts is because either you don't have the generation that you need or there's something going on in the transmission grid that's limiting the flow of electricity to the customers. One of those two things is happening. Both of those are very fixable. And in many ways, both of those have been being fixed and continued to be worked on as we go forward. So the grid is getting stronger. The grid is getting larger in size physically. And it is getting more resilient as we go along. But we're all humans. And it's not a perfect world, right? So, you know, you have someone that decides to take maintenance on a power plant. And it just so happens that a storm, massive storm hits at that time. Or, you know, a winter storm happens like happened back in 21 down in Texas. They really hurt them where they had a nuclear plant offline. And then they had a couple of other things. So it's not a perfect world. So some of that's just kind of coincidence of what's going on when no doubt about it. I mean, when you have to take a nuclear plant off, that's a major generation source for the grid. And so when it's down for maintenance, you try to plan that so that it's during not a peak time, during not a high storm time. But, you know, that winter storm that came through and hit the U.S. back in 21 was unforeseen a week before it occurred, right? And so some things you just can't predict with crazy world. How long is a plant like that down? Like, when you're doing maintenance, I mean, this is obviously a major deal because they've got to take it down. So they're trying to do as much as they can at once. But like, what's the schedule look like for a plant shutdown? So it depends on the kind of plant, right? In that case, we were talking about a nuclear plant. So a nuclear plant outage can be long because if they're doing, they're changing the fuel rods, that takes weeks to do that. You can't just run in there and do it overnight because it's all nuclear material and safety and all that kind of stuff has to be very planned out and organized. So if you're doing major maintenance on a nuclear plant, it can actually be three months or two and a half months, depending on what you're doing. If it's a coal fire plant or even a smaller gas fired plant, those outages can last, can be planned for a month. But in many cases, they can come back online during an emergency and 18 hours, depending on where they're at in the outage and what they're doing. That makes sense. So it depends on the facilities specifically. When we talk about the power grid, there's more than obviously just the production plants of the power. You've got all the transmission and the lines that get everything everywhere. What's the more important, where are we missing or are we missing more generation or are we missing more lines distributing it? Well, and that kind of depends on where you are in the United States, certainly in the world. But in most places, there's enough generation. It's the transmission grid that has been undersized and overburdened for decades. But fortunately for us, these days, that's being taken care of. There is more transmission work, either new transmission lines going in or rebuilding, upgrading existing lines, than in the 43 years I've been in the industry. And the amount of dollars being spent to do that is incredible compared to just even a decade ago. And so it's just a matter of updating. These systems are built for the long term. And obviously the growth from the 80s to now is different. And not even so much just people, but just society and what we do and all the expectations. We talked a little bit about EV vehicles, electric vehicles, last time you were here. Is that seeming to slow down a little bit? It really has slowed down in how long has this President been in office? A couple of years now because a lot of the rebates have gone away. Certainly solar rebates have gone away in that period of time. And so prior to that, two decades before that, there were a lot of government incentives that were helping to grow the EV industry and helping to grow the solar industry as well. And they haven't completely gone away, but they have shifted. You know, you don't see as many solar rebates. Now what you see is more battery storage or BESS rebates from the government. And so a lot of utilities are switching their investments away from say solar to best or battery storage because that's where they get the funding from the government to help support that. So the answer to your question is EVs have slowed down and solar has slowed down because the rebate structure has diminished over the last several years. What about the wind? Is it still? You know, wind is a very regional thing, right? The sun shines everywhere. The wind only blows in certain corridors across the country. And so there is still wind development going on, but there have been struggles in the wind industry over the last decade or so as well, because a lot of those wind farms that were put in service 20 years ago are now nearing the end of life, and they need to be replaced. And that's a large investment to do that. They've also had some struggles with maintenance that the equipment hasn't held up like they hoped it would. And in years gone by. So the wind industry is still there. Don't get me wrong by that. But it has it was being usurped by the solar industry by far until recently. And even even with the decrease in rebate, solar is still going out much greater terms and sizes than wind is these days. Okay. Well, you look at the size of those structures and those, you know, those blades just turning all the time. Well, they don't turn all the time. That's no more. But they put them in cycles. They rotate them so that one is an operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So they'll actually shut one down and turn on another one around the farm to kind of equalize but they do run. They do run a lot of their. They do run a lot. Yeah. You know, our last episode we had John Gaggy from Intersus on. And we talked about you know, data centers a lot in that episode. And you know, I guess I kind of from that aspect, I understand like a battery storage, you know, for a data center where you're picking up on the power of, you know, if you're short, the battery's kicking, whatever. So it smooths that power out. Right. Where does the utility put that battery storage? Where does it fit in their network? So normally utilities will use battery storage as kind of a peaking unit in a similar way that a data farm does, right? They're using it when the utility power is either out because of an outage or because it doesn't supply the level they need. Utilities are using battery storage. And again, utilities are just, you know, within the last eight years really starting to invest in battery storage. It's very expensive. It doesn't give you the kind of power coverage that solar would or that wind would because batteries are still limited and battery storage units are still batteries. They're just really big batteries and really large facilities. And the idea is that you charge those batteries overnight when there's not a lot of people using power and, you know, whatever source you're going to use to charge the batteries off the grid. And then during the day or during a peak time, those batteries and some of those are, you know, you can a small utility package can be one to two megawatts. But those megawatts are only good for six to eight hours before the batteries start to run down enough. So what does that, what does a battery system that large look like? It's, if you get into one megawatt units for utility skills, very small. And so basically, you think of these storage containers, shipping containers, it's about that physical size for a one megawatt battery. If you get into larger batteries, you're just stacking those types of storage containers. They're not really storage containers, but similar. Similar size. You're just stacking those on top and around each other's to make much larger facilities, adding more megawatts of battery capacity by simply doing that. And then you have a control enclosure or a house where you have all the controls and the protection for those devices. They would sit like at a generation plant then you put them out anywhere. Yeah, right. You think about, we talk about EVs. So they have rapid charging stations around the country and more and more coming in all the time. And the new way that they're powering those instead of having to run on electric service line from the local utility way out in the middle of nowhere to a gas station or whatever, to power those things are out at a rest stop somewhere. They're actually using best units, smaller best units that they put behind each one of those chargers. And they charge at night at a slower rate off of whatever the source is, whether it's solar that's charging them or whatever it is. And then they're used during the day to power those EV charging stations that are out along the highways where you don't have a lot of normal service from the local provider. So you see them there in small units. You see them at substations is where a utility would typically put them, where they already have a substation that's feeding a region or feeding, you know, even neighborhoods in a urban area. They'll drop a best setup inside one of those where they have physical room because they do take space to put them. And then they'll interconnect them right with those distribution circuits that go out of that substation to back up the power in case they need more power than they have because of outage is more than anything else for utility. And here in where we are locally, there's one of those setups and they feed a local hospital as backup in case they need that power for whatever reason. Yeah, interesting. So talking a little bit more about data centers, I know we talked some, you know, last time you're on, but there's been a lot of changes in that market, obviously. You know, as the power industry really set up to handle all the growth on the data centers, you know, you hear a lot of hype, a lot of pro, a lot of negative stuff. Like what's the truth about the power? I think it's a great topic to talk about because you do hear a lot of citizens groups that are against data centers because they're worried about, you know, water quality, they're worried about power drain, they're worried about noise. And those are all valid concerns. So I'm not here trying to say that there's not negative sides to these large server farms, especially the AI server farms that the regular server farms that have been around for decades, they don't put the strain on the system and require the resources from water and everything else that the new AI server farms that are out there which are much bigger, you know, they're going to utilities these providers, developers of these AI server farms and say, look over the next 10 years, we're going to need a gigawatt of power for me, not a megawatt, which is a million watts, not a kilowatt gigawatt we're going to need and we're going to need that and 200 megawatt loads over the next 10 years, every couple of years basically. Well, to a utility, that's a lot of power even for a utility. Let me give you a perfect, yeah, what would that compare to like a number of average houses? Oh, gosh, a gigawatt, it would be a town, it would be a, it would be a medium-sized city. Wow. Yeah. And but let me give you an example, there's a utility I'm very familiar with that here, let me see, I left it three years ago and so about five years ago was planning to shut down three of its major coal fire power plants around the area and had plans in place to do that, they were going to start doing that in 2026, you know, in this year. And then server farms, especially AI server farms, came to the area from Google, from Meta and even from other players that support that industry today, not only have they delayed shutting down those power plants for the next decade, they're actually building three new power plants to support that load. Wow. Just that AI server farm load, first of those is supposed to go into service in 2028 and the last one in 2032. So from a utility perspective, AI server farms are the best thing that could have happened to the electric utility industry. I'm working with a utility now and a consulting role over that's over on the East Coast and they're looking at putting 20 gigawatts of new power on their system power sources on their system for the sole purpose of providing power for AI server farms over the next decade or decade and a half. And so it's helped from that perspective, utilities are building new power plants. But the thing that's helped even more across the even the global setting that's based on server farms, AI server farms is it became very apparent about a decade ago to the federal government and everybody that plays in this in this industry that the transmission grid was woefully underdeveloped and overburdened and very old. And it couldn't handle all this new load. So about a decade ago, FERC, which is the federal energy regulatory commission that oversees all types of utilities, not just electric, put into place incentives for utilities to start building out and refurbishing their transmission grids and interconnecting them better between different utilities through from parts of the country. And so the investment that's being made, the increase in investment that's being made, why can't I tell you in the local area we just happen to be in, the investments in the transmission grid went from an average of around $400 million a year to almost $2 billion a year basically within three years and continued to be at that level. The utility I mentioned I'm working with on the East Coast, it's multiple times that. And the struggle that utilities are having is how do you keep up with that, right? How do you build as much as you're going to need to build when you're not used to that? You don't have the internal capacity, whether it's resources, equipment, materials to do that. And everybody else is doing the same thing, so everybody wants the contractors. Sure. Well, that's kind of one of my questions. So traditionally, like you said, we're talking about power grid that's 40 years old. It's much older than that, but so things in the utility space traditionally have moved pretty slow. Right. And even like you're talking about bringing these new generation facilities up, we're in a eight to ten year schedule. So how do we stay, how does the utility stay ahead of the needs of these data centers when that market is just going, you know, light years ahead of the utility? Well, first of all, things are not happening as quickly as those developers would like, right? They would like a gigawatt of power six months from now. And I think they're starting to understand that they just can't do that. They just can't have that world. And so it's taking longer than they want to develop these grids. From a utility perspective, you're right, it's a new paradigm, right? Not only from the construction world about how do you build all this stuff, but think about the procurement world, how do you buy all this stuff? You know, in the past, historically, if you were going to buy a large transformer for one of the substations that serves an AI server farm and those transformers can be, you know, 600 MBA, which is, let's just say, the size of a small house. Sure. I mean, large, large transformers, you would normally plan that. You'd have a project six years away from now and you go to purchase that. But you could get that transformer, even those large ones within maybe two years, two and a half years today. And part of this is because of the demand, a bigger part is because we still haven't recovered from COVID in the electric utility industry. And especially from a manufacturer perspective, there is so much demand worldwide for things like these large transformers that now, if you're going to order one, you've got ordered five or six years ahead of time. Well, these, these AI server farm developers, they're not planning that far ahead. They're coming to you and they want power next year. And so utilities are having to start buying these large, very expensive. I mean, you know, one of those transformers can be six and a half, seven million dollars a long just for the transformer. They're having to buy these things, assuming that they're going to find a place to use them six or seven years from now because they won't have them if they don't. And to relate that back to like the communications world of COVID, you know, that was kind of the the toilet paper buying, right? Everybody, you know, we can't get it. So we're going to place large orders and we're going to stock a bunch of it. So that's just kind of the same reaction only a little bit delayed from it. It isn't it. It just takes a lot longer to get along a lot of these large critical pieces of equipment, transformers, breakers, it just, and they become very expensive, right? Again, you know, that transformer that you're paying six and a half million dollars for today, you would have paid three and a half million dollars for it before COVID, you know, just a few years ago. So that whole dynamic of how you do business for electric utility has changed dramatically, you know, certainly since COVID. And you can't hire enough people quick enough to do that work. And you've got a lot of people like me retiring, you know, from that industry. And so you're losing a lot of that intellectual, you know, resources that you've been able to do a lot of this work based on. And a lot of the people coming in just too young, they don't have that experience and that background. And so in the past, you would go to consultants like the Burns McDonald's Black Beaches and those and those are still a great resource. But a lot of those people have retired too. And so there's a lot of young people, I would say, you know, from a CBM perspective, we've been in training people at like the Burns McDonald's and Black and Beaches on some of the newer technologies, because again, they have a fairly young workforce that end up having the experience. So there is that lacking of resources that is a real critical, critical area for utilities. Yeah. And we've, you know, we've got a lot of new folks to, you know, to our utility group as well. So yeah, the times are changing for sure. So no doubt about it. Let's let's transition a little bit. Let's talk about you and your, you know, retirement again. Again. And you know, you're working in a consulting role. What, you know, what does that look like for you moving on? You can continue to do some of that. I think I, well, it depends on whether you ask my wife or you ask me, right? So and she has a lot of say in the decisions I make, she would have liked me to retire completely, you know, four years ago. But you're not necessarily one that likes to sit around. No. And I will tell you retirement isn't, well, because I'm about 80% retired. Isn't what I thought it would be. And it's better. And we can talk about the differences there that I've gleaned just in the short time I've been kind of retired. But so after, you know, retiring from CBM, which I plan to do here in the fairly current, our fairly, we'll just stay at the end of the year. Yeah, sometime, sometime coming up maybe next then the consulting thing that I'm doing, it's nicer because there's no travel. You do it all at home and if you're here and there. And I think I'm really providing some value not only to train the consultants about electric utility industries, but also we're working with some pretty large utilities that are struggling right now. And I like the idea of being able to help them in that role. But retirement, you know, the more time I spend at the lake, the better it looks. I gotta tell you. Yeah, I don't blame you there. I don't blame you there. For sure. Powering the network starts with strong partnerships. At CBM, we connect broadband, utility, and commercial industrial customers across the Midwest with best in class, manufacturers, and solutions. As 100% employee owned company, we're invested in every connection and every success. If you need help with the project or looking for a quality rep firm in the Midwest, reach out to us here at CBMREP.com. Let's talk about, you know, for somebody that's done such a good job coming from a customer role into a sales position, you know, we don't see somebody do it so well all the time like you have. What is your advice for somebody that maybe, you know, maybe currently, you know, working at a utility but, you know, wants to dip their toe in the water of a sales position. How'd you do it so well? Well, I'm not, I did it well because I have a great support team at CBM, right? Certainly Tim Drake, my boss is very knowledgeable in himself and very supportive, has a lot of relationships that I wouldn't have had that helped me develop. But then also the the inside support team that picks up the pace and does all the stuff that either I didn't know how to do certainly when I started or that I still am not very good at. So great inside team support and then the leadership team overall at CBM, the structure of a company like CBM, which is not like all rep firms by any means, a shape or form, especially where you have an ESOP, you know, that's a completely different model. I had no concept of that. So, you know, if I were talking to someone and I've done that to try to help out recently, talk to some folks that are at utilities that are thinking about making this step, they need to understand what an ESOP is and the value and the power of an ESOP and how it's how it's so much better than you have where you are at any utility that I am aware of. So, you know, I would tell them to really research the difference. But then the environment, right? I worked at a utility with 5,000 employees and it was a great utility spent, you know, 38 years there and loved loved it. But it's a different environment, right? It's a Fortune 500 company, a different world than a like a rep firm and certainly CBM, which is a very family environment, right? Much smaller, obviously. But you still have picnics, family picnics, you know, you still have family events and you still, you know, you do things that are more related to personal relationships than business, where you just, you see that some at large companies like I worked at. It's probably more an individualized, you know, this group. It is, but even there, especially these days, you're so busy at those large utilities trying to do everything that needs to get done with limited resources that you have that you just don't have time for that kind of interactions like you do at CBM. So, you know, I would also say that like it or not, there is this idea of what a rep firm is and what a CBM is, right? And that is one of these sales guys because honestly, I had this for 38 years, this perception, this perception that either I'm going to lunch or I'm playing golf. And you know, and when Tim first approached me about joining CBM when I was getting ready to retire from my utility, I told him, look, I like lunch, but I don't play golf except miniature golf, and I'm not very good at that. And so I know I'm not a good salesman while he convinced me to try it. And with his help and everybody else is, it's been a great adventure for me in learning environment. But the type of work you do is much different than at a utility and in a better way, I would say, because what I told Tim is, I'm never going to be a good salesman, but, you know, I have had some excess at developing relationships and fostering relationships. And to me, it's 90% that and 10% selling anything. Because if you build that trust and you have that relationship, they're going to believe what you say that you're not trying to sell them something and try to make a bug and that you're there to support them, right? As much as support the manufacturers, you're there to support them. And so it's a different world. And the other thing, I'm not going to say it's easy, because it's a brain drain to be at a company like CBM because, you know, on the utility side, when I'd call Tim and I'd say, look, would you check with Siemens or whoever on this question I have, you know, I didn't even think about what it took to do that. Well, on the backside, you know, that's three questions and four teams meetings and all these other interactions that hit place to get a simple answer that may not, you know, I get that back. And from Tim and I say, okay, great, I'm moving on to the next thing. And I don't think about all of the legwork that goes in to not only creating a sales in the first place, but even more important supporting the customer in that sell after it's done. And and and then anything else they have going on by providing information, right? So yeah. Well, and in that in that market specifically too with the like you said, it can take six years to get a transformer, you know, there's a lot of different meetings and a lot of different work that's happening, you know, from the start of that inception of the idea to the actual delivery and install and support and all that. Well, and I got a great example for you. So when I first got to CBM, I was working with a utility and I found out that they didn't buy their metal client switch gear, which is a key component of a substation. And they're expensive. They can cost a million dollars piece, but they didn't buy them from Siemens and we represent Siemens at CBM. And so I thought that was interesting. So we started a conversation and a over a year and a half later that customer placed their first order. And so I had no concept because I never thought about it from a utility perspective, but from a from a sales perspective, it takes a while, even if you have the relationships to develop those sales that you know are going to be good for the customer. Well, and sometimes, you know, I don't think the customer necessarily always understands how we make a living as a rep. And so, you know, you may call on them, you may take them out to lunch, do whatever you know, and you spend all these years developing a relationship with people. But I don't think they always understand what you actually do for them. Right. And what you bring to the table, right? Because there's a difference at a utility between the decision maker and the implementer, the person or the group that's going to be whatever, whether it's a metal clad switch gear or breaker, what battery, whatever it is, the group that actually is going to use that battery and needs the technical knowledge about that battery isn't necessarily the group that's making the decision to buy it. So you've got to develop a relationship with whoever the decision maker is, but you also have to develop a deep relationship with the people that are going to be providing input to that decision maker, right? And so, what you do as much as anything else is try to educate that group. Not only about what your Siemens or whoever you're trying to sell them something from, but about batteries in general, or switch gears in general, and about how to use them. And the other thing we bring to the table that a utility I think does value is we deal with more than that one utility, right? We deal with a lot of customers, and so we see what other customers are doing and what innovative approaches they're taking and their designs and their use of equipment, and we're trying to share that information with our customers so that they can, and they, I've heard them tell me that they do value that input for us. Yeah, and I've seen that firsthand with some of the work that you've done with implementing the future paths here locally. And I've had customers up in Iowa reaching out to better understand how they're using and making different business decisions with different products like that. So that's a great example. Yeah, future path is another great example because a lot of people don't know about the codings, right? Inside the conduits. The future path is a very, very usable type of conduit, very flexible, very cost-effective, but the codings inside that help you to pull cabling through it and those things that you don't think about are very important to the people that are using that, but many of them don't even understand some manufacturers don't put that in or they put a type in that doesn't last as long, it becomes brittle and over time. And so there are value valuable information we have that we can share. And even from the revenue perspective, you know, the traditional utility doesn't, you know, they're not thinking about, you know, like the fiber asset asset or that, you know, the right way as an asset. And so they're starting to think more, you know, since the work you've done here, we're seeing more and more of that across the country where people are starting to understand the value of their rights of ways and the fiber and the duct that they have sitting there. So especially with this, you know, all the middle mile stuff going on with these things. And when you bring that up, you talked about revenue and our revenue. Another basic misunderstanding out of utility is that, you know, if Tim sells me something for a million dollars, he's making $100,000 on that purchase or $200,000 on that purchase. Well, I can tell you, you know, just the percentages that we make are much, much smaller than that. And that's not bad, right? That's the business. That's what we signed up for. And we're not poor. You know, we're making money as a business. So I'm not trying to plead for, you know, people to feel sorry for or anything, but it is a misconception that utilities have about our revenue streams. Yeah, for sure. You know, speaking of, you know, being a rep and, you know, we've got, you know, a lot of new people, you know, on the team here recently. And, you know, for me, like, when I came here, I came from selling trenches and drills and construction equipment. And so, you know, I made the deal, you know, I delivered the equipment. I got to check, you know, if I didn't get commissioned until I got, I brought the check back to the house, right? So, that's like very real and you've got control of that sale. Whereas, you know, in the rep role, you've got sales either, you know, through the manufacturer or through distribution or all these other different channels where you're still going out making all, all the effort you're making the sale, but then you don't have that final, like, piece of it. Right. And I think sometimes that's hard for people to understand it is a channel of how we, how we do it. It is. And it's, in the utility world, the other issue is that you're, our manufacturers deliver all over the world, right? They're, and so you may be working and because you're working with consulting firms and consulting firms work all over the world and have projects all over the world. So, in support of the consulting company, you may be out there actively educating and forming and even selling a large piece of equipment that's not going to be delivered into our physical area. And so we won't get full credit. You only get a partial credit for that. And so some people don't understand that and it's, it's a good thing. We need to support our other rep firms around the country in that way. And the other manufacturer reps around the country in that way. But it is part of the puzzle, right? That goes into everything that makes us money. And that we do a lot of work sometimes and get very little in return, short-term anyway for that. Yeah, for sure. You know, one thing that it comes to mind is like when, with the customers, not necessarily understanding kind of what we do, it's easy for them, you know, you can build a relationship and keep coming back and, you know, supporting them and stuff. But until they really understand they may be loyal to you or they think they're loyal to you, but they're not really supporting you. So, how do you make that switch? How do you address that? If you're, if you've got a customer and you're calling on them and they just love you, they love everything you do. Right. But then they're not supporting your lines. Right. How do you, how do you get them right over that edge? Well, and again, you know more about this than I do. You're better at it tonight. But what I've learned is if you hit a, if you hit up, you know, a ceiling, you hit a wall where you're just not making the purchases, you're probably not talking to the right person at that point, right? And so, you maintain those relationships and you look for who's above them or who's beside them that can be influencing or even making that decision for them and you may not be aware of it. And so, it's really trying to get, you know, fingers into a bigger part of the organization is what I found. Yeah. I think that just goes back to people finding their comfort zone. We know so, okay, I got in the door here and I know Larry, Larry and I are tight. Right. But then so, I'm comfortable with Larry and not making the next step or failure to ask questions or ask for the, you know, hey, we've, we've been working together all the time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, love coming here, but you're not really, you know, buying a lot from us can, you know, how can we support each other better? You know, just, just asking the questions. Just being honest, right? Just being honest, you know, and the more on, I mean, what I found through my whole career is honesty can never go wrong. I think I can get you into trouble and get you demoted even sometimes, but in the end, you could sleep at night. So, I think being honest with our customers about where we're at, you know, and what we're doing and if we're not making headway, you know, what could we do? Like you say, what could we do to make that relationship better so that we can move on to the next level of our relationship? Yeah. For sure. So, what would you say is, you know, in your 40 years in the industry is the biggest change? Well, there've been a lot of changes, right? There've been changes in the way that we deal with people. A lot of changes around safety, which has been great. Utilities are much safer today than they were 40 years ago. But I would say the biggest by far is technology. I started in the industry, got out of college, started in the industry in 1984. 1984, we still had mainframe computers at utilities. I got my first PC about 1986 or 1987, and on it, it was a zenith, and on it was a switch where you could, you had to select, do I want more RAM memory or do I want a higher speed in my processor, right? And the memory you had to choose from was one megabit, and the speed was one kilohertz, literally, or one megahertz. I'm sorry, literally. And so, you know where computers are today. You know that everything continues to get smart and smarter, substations and utilities in general, some are better than others by far, but tend to lag that technology curve. I mean, my saying has always been through my career that electric utilities are some of the most bleeding edge, innovative companies in the world. They'll try anything new as long as it's been proven for a hundred years. And so, you know, they tend to lag that technology curve, and that's still true. And for good reason, in some regards, because electricity is pretty important, right? You start to get a new stuff, and you start tripping people's lights off. That's never a good thing. The other thing that's changed is customer habits over the last 40 years that drive technology. For example, even 20 years ago, if we had a trelem fall into a distribution circuit and it put 1200 customers' lights out, residential and business customers' lights out, well, that was bad, but it wasn't a critical deal, right? Today with all the computer driven work that's going on and automation that's going on and industry. That's exactly right. If the power goes out for 10 seconds, it's a critical thing. And so, you know, outages are a much bigger deal, and not having them these days. And so, utilities, pump, and customers don't realize this, but they pump tens of millions of dollars every year into tree trimming to make sure that limbs aren't falling into trees like that. And then along with support from neighborhoods, a lot of utilities are doing and putting a lot more lines underground, right? So, they're protected from storms and those same things. But by the way, there's a downside to underground because they're more expensive to put in, and every time they fail, you got to dig it up and figure out where it's at. So, it takes a lot longer once the power goes out. But anyway, so technology has been a major change and you're going to see that into the future in certainly all aspects of electric utilities. Looking into the future, and you probably already know what's going to look like in 10 years because projects are taking that long, right? 20, 25, 30 years from now. What do you see changing in the utility space? So, let's take a substation. You can talk about the power plants. Same concepts going to apply. You can talk about, you know, out on the distribution and transmission lines. There's a lot of new automation monitoring that goes on that wasn't there even five, 10 years ago. Let's take a substation because I love substations. But inside a substation, you have different major components. You have the big transformer. What it does is take super high voltage from the big lines and convert it down to the voltage that runs up and down the streets and powers homes and businesses. And then to protect that transformer, there's breakers. And those breakers are just like the breakers or fuses in your house. They're just a lot bigger. Yeah. Cost a lot more money and they protect for a lot more current that's flowing through. So you got transformers, you got breakers. And then you have some type of protection. We call it system protection or protection and control that's in that substation that has all of the intelligence to tell the breakers when to open. You know, that there's been a fault. It's happened over here. We need to protect the transformer so open up breakers or it opens this breaker and closes this breaker to redirect power flow around those types of things. That's all and those are the basic, there's switches and other things, but that's the basic components of that substation. Historically, those have all been completely mechanical, non-technology-based devices, right? The only part that had some technology was those protection circuits and controls that were over there. What's happening as we go through time? And there's actually pilot projects of this today where we're developing the touchable substation, some call it the smart substation. And so, historically, every one of those breakers or every transformer had to have its own protection scheme in this control house or facility that's in that substation. And so those things had to be big. A lot of room in them, a lot of protection protective relays and things that are in them, were we're moving to because the newer relays are just little computers. There are individual boxes, but they're just little computers. We're moving to the touchless substation where you don't even need that control house. Where if anything, you got a little enclosure that's got one black box in it, it does all of the control, not only of everything at that substation, but interacts with other black boxes and other substations around the region to control the entire system. Today, we have dispatchers, we call them, that are on 24-7, around the clock that control everything and electrical grid. As that grid gets smarter, not that you're not going to need them, you're always going to need fail safes and people supporting these devices, but the devices themselves will become smart enough to know not only what do I need to do with this substation, but what do I need to do with that substation to maintain the regional load because now transmission systems are much more interconnected becoming that way all the time than they've ever been around the country, even across the Rockies, which has traditionally been the split between the East grid and the West grid. More and more lines are coming across the Rockies and interconnecting those grids. The smart substation is not that far off and it's good because, again, it can operate a lot faster than a human looking at alarms and looking at a board or computer screen reacts to do something to prevent a cascade event that, like back in 94, I think it was that blacked out the East Coast, basically, in part of Canada. All of that was from a tree getting into a transmission line in Ohio that started that whole thing. The systems are getting smarter. The technology change of the future is the number one is that technology change. Number two is batteries. Batteries, as you know, from solar, from wind, from EVs, they're going to be powering everything. And that, you know, even no matter who's sitting in the White House, that's going to be a continual change over time. Yeah. That you go to that. But our batteries not only are still pretty inefficient from a battery perspective, but they're very dangerous. They have a lot of very dangerous chemicals in them. And so the problem with battery technology today is what do you do when it's done? The chemicals are still there. And you basically have the same dilemma that people with nuclear energy have with spent fuel rods out of a nuclear reactor. What do you do with them? Well, they bury them in, you know, these large caves, right? And there was a talk at one time about sending them into space, let somebody else deal with them. But, you know, what do you do with all these batteries that are being produced 20 years from now when, you know, you can't do anything with them at that point, they're spent. The new battery technology that's going to be, I mean, it's not here today, but they're playing with it. Several places in the world isn't based on those chemical reactions near to the level, and some, not at all. It's based more on the idea of capacitance and doing different things with what we, and a lot of people don't know what capacitance is, but, you know, it's what utilities will put capacitors up on the line to maintain a voltage where it starts to go down. You put a capacitor there and it'll bring it back up to keep voltage to the customers at a level like that. And that's just one aspect of what a capacitor and an electrical grid can do, but you can also use capacitors and becoming more and more evident that the future battery will be a capacitor-based battery. If I'm right, which I may be wrong, but if I'm right and they continue that technology in the next 20 years, that will change dynamics. That will allow batteries, once that becomes the price of those batteries come down over, you know, a decade or whatever, everybody will have batteries in their house. They'll have solar panels on their house, and they'll be brideing all the electricity for themselves they need. If the grid is there at all, it's there is backup for those customers. And so, you know, I'll be gone by then, but 50 years from now, that's the world I see for the electrical agents in the universe. And so the smart utilities are not saying, oh, what are we going to do? You don't need power plants anymore. You don't need, you know, transmission lines anymore. They're saying, okay, we're going to need batteries. Well, let's start investing in battery technology. And so, that's why a lot of utilities, these best projects, battery energy storage projects, that's one reason, not the only reason that they're changing their investment strategy to start getting into that world. So that they can support customers. You that have that. That would be certainly a major shift. I mean, you look at battery technology and, you know, we've got new chemical types of different things now. You just go back to a lead calcium battery and that's 100 years plus old. So that could be a definite big change in that world. It would be a big change. But again, you know, if the battery, the intercesses of the world, all they need to do is get involved with the new technology and adopt it early and become a leader in that market. And they'll be as successful in that world as they are today in their world. Absolutely. Well, Chris, I enjoy every time you come on. I can't thank you enough. I learn so much every time we sit down and visit. Well, I appreciate you having me. And I bet it at CBM almost four years now. And I've really enjoyed my time at CBM. It's a great place to work. And we've got some new people. You mentioned that are coming in a couple of those from utilities, which is great into the utility group anyway. And so I think that the future of CBM supporting utilities and other customers is very strong. And I think CBM is going to be around for a long, long time in that role, doing a great job. But we appreciate everything you've done with us over the last four years. We wish we had, we wish we had you for another 10, but I have a wife. We're glad we got you for what we did. So I appreciate it. Thank you enough. Good luck. All right. Thanks. Thanks again, Chris, for joining us. I love every time we sit down and talk. I learned so much from you. Just a brilliant guy. We wish you luck as you move closer to retirement, you know, later this year, et cetera. You've been a great blessing to our team. And it's been great to have you on board. So we wish you nothing but the best moving forward. Thanks again. Remember, if you need help with the project or looking for representation from an excellent rep firm, look no further than CBM. You can find us right here at CBMrep.com. Give us a like, comment, subscribe. Let us know what you'd like to see on future episodes. And as always, thanks for watching Power the Network. And until next time, we'll see you next time.
