America's Power Infrastructure Revival
American power projects need to be executed like a customer-satisfying engine. This is the only way we can expect to win the intel race and keep our real estate robust.
Everyone’s Talking About a Power Problem
And everyone’s talking about the desired fix: speed to power — predictable, flexible power. Yeah, pretty invigorating.
America’s relationship to power has lived in the national subconscious for decades. Today’s power load growth is pushing demand far beyond what that system was designed for. There is a growing misalignment between what the existing grid system is capable of and the American way of doing things.
The obvious example is how Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” approach collided with the U.S. grid. Software is constrained by compute, which is constrained by grid transmission and distribution systems. The less obvious example is the fact that manufacturing plants that were once in Massachusetts have to move to Iceland because of high electricity costs.
If we don’t rethink how power infrastructure gets built, we’ll face a serious threat to day-to-day business operations, global supply chains, and national security.
American systems enable individual motion at scale.
This makes life free, exciting, and enables the art of the possible. It’s the core logic of a democratic republic. We built highways over rails because we like infrastructure that flexes around personal mobility. Big-box retail gave way to same-day shipping because we value speed, optionality, and service that responds to our finger placing an order.
This is why the grid feels wrong.
A future-fit American power system doesn’t look like a single monolithic machine. It is versatile, prioritizing economic growth, business innovation, national security, supply chain resilience, and keeping the lights on.
This is not to say existing power systems don’t play a role — simply that we need a new layer of infrastructure that quietly serves businesses and then disappears into the background, just as infrastructure should.
Here is how I think that infrastructure gets built
We have a power problem because moving electrons is harder than producing them
The centralized model has broken. Producing power far away and shipping it across an aging, stagnant grid is now economically irrational.
The marginal cost of generating a kilowatt-hour has collapsed, meaning utility-scale solar and wind — the cheapest sources to generate — now regularly clear below $25–40/MWh, and in some regions even lower. Meanwhile, the cost of moving electricity — transmission, distribution, congestion management, line losses, and interconnection delay — has only gone up.
Transmission projects now take 10–15 years to permit and build. Capital costs routinely exceed $2–4 million per mile, before factoring in land acquisition, litigation, or reliability hardening. Line losses alone bleed 5–10% of energy in long-distance transport. It is a costly and time-consuming endeavor to build more grid infrastructure to move increasingly cheap electrons to end users. So yeah, the economics of electricity have quietly inverted.
A stagnant grid causes big problems
When the grid bleeds, profits bleed. Prices are already up, and reliability risks worsen every day. Within this problem, I am particularly concerned for American buildings.
Our buildings are the heartbeat of American life — hospitals, high schools, office spaces, multifamily housing, warehouses, industrial plants, shopping centers. American intelligence lives in buildings, too. Crucially, commercial and industrial buildings consume roughly 70 percent of U.S. electricity.
The grid’s fixed costs are why energy reliability has become a site-selection constraint. This shows up in leases, capex plans, and whether a warehouse or data center ever breaks ground.
Prologis recently reported that nearly 90% of global executives experienced energy disruptions last year. Three-quarters expect facility power requirements to rise 10–50 percent within five years, largely due to AI and electrification. Seventy-seven percent of executives are already regionalizing supply chains, ranking energy reliability above labor or tariffs when deciding where to operate. The availability of reliable power has become a critical factor in determining whether sites can exist, scale, or attract tenants.
Fixing it: Orchestrated local power
You see it in price increases — an increasingly heated election topic — nodal price divergence, curtailment, and congestion costs that exceed the cost of new local capacity.
This creates economic logic for orchestrated, local power systems like battery storage.
A revision to grid architecture means systems that are coordinated, modular, and provisioned close to the load that actually needs them. One of our investors, Evan Caron, calls this the electron economy. Power is no longer just generated and consumed. It is routed, deferred, staged, stored — and it can be smart.
There is a fix to this.
Starting: Deploy batteries for buildings efficiently
I did not invent battery storage, and I certainly don’t have a PhD in the subject. What I do offer are insights from an avid Harvard student who has immersed herself in the worlds of finance, real estate, electrical engineering, and electricity economics over the past several years.
Battery storage systems are an emerging, highly lucrative asset class. They flip power volatility into value, capturing real cost savings by charging when power is cheap and activating when power is expensive. This shows up as savings — and sometimes profit — for a building. A great battery product produces a stable, reduced electric bill.
The beauty and practicality of battery systems cannot be understated. These units are a standardizable fix to many problems beyond bill stabilization. They replace consulting, defer retrofits, amplify the value of solar, and can even enable GPUs to add value to American buildings. They can also provide backup. When the power goes out, so does commerce. Battery storage solves real estate’s problems and enable growth for the country.
The Department of Energy projects that outages could increase one hundredfold by 2030 if new capacity — including battery storage — isn’t added to address peak demand.
Slow development is not an option
There is an execution gap embedded in traditional project development. American power infrastructure is getting in its own way. Jigar Shah recently articulated this reality in a LinkedIn post: “Batteries are proven at scale. The capital is available. Demand is exploding. And yet our current delivery approach makes it harder, slower, and more expensive to put clean power on the grid every year.”
The global market for battery storage is growing fast. And yet, a stable, predictable electric bill for an American building remains the furthest thing from simple, fast, or CapEx-light. This slowness deepens power problems and intensifies loss.
Starting a company to solve slow development
Getting battery storage systems deployed for American real estate is what I want to spend my 20s doing. It is why we started Powertown and why I am taking leave from Harvard.
I believe in delivering value to a paying customer. My parents both started companies, and I find entrepreneurship to be a deeply democratic approach to problem-solving and scaling impact. The potential for impact, the potential to change the outcome of disaster and save so many lives and build our country to be a stronger, more reliable and clean place, is too beautiful to ignore. It must start now. I feel a pressing, undeniable urge to build this company.
It is time to build, baby, build. We want to put angels in the architecture.
Selected Sources
PowerLines – Utility Bills Are Rising (April 2025)
https://powerlines.org/utility-bills-are-rising/
Montauk Capital — Electron Economy
https://montaukcap.com/electron-economy
Utility Dive — Distribution & Transmission Costs Rising
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/residential-electricity-prices-data-centers-lbnl/803217
Prologis — Powering Logistics: How Warehouses Become the Next Energy Platform
Lazard, Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+), 2025 Edition (New York: Lazard, 2025), accessed via PDF.
Unpatentable.org, Reversible Surface Corrosion Grid Storage: Infrastructure-Integrated Electrochemical Energy Banks, transmission cost and timeline discussion.
EIA, How much electricity is lost in electricity transmission and distribution in the United States? https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
Some thoughts:
America’s core electricity challenge is delivering reliable, on‑demand power at massive scale. The only realistic way to do that is with policy that directly rewards reliability and stops forcing unreliable resources onto the grid. Faster permitting for transmission and for dependable generation (especially gas and nuclear) would go a long way. My fear with solutions built around batteries, despite good intentions, is that they mostly function as a band‑aid rather than a cure.
It’s important to be clear: local storage does not replace a functional grid. Batteries don’t generate electricity. If a region is structurally short on reliable generation during high‑demand periods, then “charge when cheap” usually translates to “charge when someone else with real generation has a surplus" (typically gas, nuclear, or hydro). Storage can help at the margins, but it cannot substitute for healthy energy capacity or the transmission lines needed to deliver it.
The economics of depending on batteries only work if the spread between high and low prices outweighs the full lifecycle cost. That means installation costs, financing, round‑trip losses, degradation, and eventual replacement must all be covered by savings from demand‑charge reduction and arbitrage. Two big killers are worth emphasizing: (1) round‑trip efficiency losses (meaning you lose meaningful energy putting it into and taking it out of the battery) and (2) degradation/replacement, since a battery isn’t a reservoir but a piece of equipment with a finite cycle life.
I’d really like to see one representative PowerTown project: battery size (kW/kWh), installed price, expected cycles per year, tariff structure, and projected annual savings. Localized batteries may make sense for certain peak‑price tariff situations, but year‑round grid reliability requires a much higher burden of proof than these one‑off economics.
Local batteries can ride through short outages and clip peaks, but I need more evidence before I’d believe they can economically cover multi‑day regional shortages, especially in bad weather. A real grid must be able to handle the full range of conditions, not just sunny days and mild peaks.
I’m more optimistic about ultra‑dense, inherently dispatchable energy sources like nuclear, especially small modular reactors and microreactors, which are local and produce actual power, unlike batteries. But getting there requires a major overhaul of Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules that currently make nuclear far slower and more expensive than it needs to be.
One more issue: where are all these batteries supposed to come from? Most building‑scale and grid‑scale batteries today are lithium‑ion, which rely on lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, plus large amounts of copper and industrial processing. The U.S. and its allies remain heavily dependent on foreign (often China‑influenced) supply chains for mining, refining, and components. The U.S. can source enough batteries for profitable niches like building-level peak shaving but scaling that to the entire national grid is an entirely different question. I’m skeptical we’ll have the material supply, manufacturing capacity, or budget to battery‑ize the U.S. electric system at anything close to the scale some people imagine.
While perhaps this strategy can work in certain areas at a small scale, I'm skeptical that it's a way to revive America's power infrastructure as a whole. But I'm open to the possibilities; just make sure we’re using the right heuristics, comparing these ideas against what the grid actually needs to stay reliable, resilient, affordable, and dispatchable.
Love this