41 Artificial Intelligence AI, the Grid-- what is a kilowatt?

Episode 41 – “AI, Electricity, and Powering Your Future” – Beau Leadership Group

Curious about how AI is changing your electric bill? This episode dives into the intersection of technology, energy, and personal power management—helping you think about the grid, potential savings, and future-proofing your home.

Key Topics & Highlights:

•  ⚡ AI meets electricity: How mini data centers, AI, and distributed computing are reshaping energy use at home and across the grid. 
•  🌞 From mainframes to Powerwalls: The evolution of power from massive centralized systems to smaller, smarter, and personal solutions. 
•  🏡 Decentralized energy: How solar panels, batteries, and home-based power generation are changing the game. 
•  💡 Understanding your electricity: Kilowatts, kilowatt-hours, and real-world examples—microwaves, hair dryers, Teslas—explained simply. 
•  💰 Saving money and energy: Tips on how to take advantage of time-of-use rates, home storage, and smart energy planning. 
•  📊 Investing in AI and tech: Why the shift in computing power (Dell, NVIDIA, micro data centers) matters to the economy and your financial planning. 
•  🌎 National security & resilience: The importance of distributed energy systems to withstand disruptions. 
•  🛠️ Practical steps for your home: How AI can guide you in energy management, maintaining devices, and even going off-grid. 

Why You Should Listen:
Learn how electricity and AI are converging to impact your bills, investments, and energy independence. Understand what’s happening behind the scenes so you can take control, save money, and prepare for a smarter, greener future.

Hashtags to Boost Reach:
#AI #SmartEnergy #ElectricitySavings #SolarPower #PowerGrid #FutureTech #DistributedEnergy #HomeAutomation #CleanEnergy #EnergyIndependence #TechInvesting #AIatHome

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Transcript

Good morning or good evening. Welcome to the Beau Leadership Group, episode 40. I'd like you to hang on and stay tuned so that you can learn how electricity is moving AI, and we're going to be moving into this age with AI and electricity, and knowing some stuff might help you to harness the power grid baby, and maybe take you off the grid too, so a little solar maybe. 📍 I hope to teach you how to save on electricity informing you about the grid and how things work, and things are changing 📍 rapidly . I used to be quite involved in electricity and what we used to call demand side management, which was using electricity. I always wanted lots of solar and even from junior high when I was building RadioShack solar powered things for the science fair it's always intrigued me how something could power and move something else. This week I got my mom in an electric wheelchair, I used to say I did consulting with some of the largest utilities on the West Coast, including eight states on the West Coast. And so hopefully I can explain some things to you that you need to know about electricity, because it may get expensive, and many do not even know what a kilowatt is. From mainframes to Powerwalls, why the future gets smaller, smarter, and closer is what I'm thinking about, and it's the ebb and flow of things. So welcome home, my leadership friends. I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, and then I saw one this morning about Dell, and how Dell was rocketing past NVIDIA. And if you look at the reason, it's they're selling NVIDIA chip-powered servers as part of their billion-dollar increase. It seems like NVIDIA is really still the bigger company. I don't know if people even look at that sometimes, like what the upside potential is of stocks. But man, I wish I was on the ride with Dell this week because they went up fifty percent this week with big earnings, and they're upgrading their earnings. And I have a friend that works in security with them or used to, and so I hope he's doing well and has lots of stock options. And hopefully he diversifies too. And hopefully my cousins with Micron will diversify too and not get burned like my friends that were at Intel and Enron when things shook out. And if you were a company person and, pulling the company line and looking at your retirement, you were looking good at Intel and Enron until you weren't. So make sure you diversify and you're not just in one stock. But anyway, that lesson aside, NVIDIA is helping to build mini data centers in homes. Huh, that was the article in The Wall Street Journal, and I thought, "That's not weird, right? That's history repeating itself." Because technology follows a pattern, centralized, shrink, distribute, network. So there's always this networking thing that happens at the end. And every time, as far as I'm concerned, computers did it, electricity is doing it, cell phones did it. You have T-Mobile in your home as a server. Manufacturing's doing it, and leadership should do it, too. Back in the 1960s, if you wanted computing power, you needed a room, right? Like a giant room, maybe even a dome, and a cold room, and it was a loud room, and there were big moving wheels. And it was a room so expensive it made Ferraris look practical. And NASA had these giant mainframes. My wife's going to visit NASA in a couple of weeks. And banks had mainframes, and MIT helped invent time sharing, letting multiple users connect to one big time machine. And if you read the Bill Gates Paul Allen story, they were renting time, and that was like the original cloud before the cloud became a marketing term for somebody else's computer. And there's been quite a bit of news about people illegally harnessing your computer, so hopefully, I have a firewall that prevents that. But you need to be on the alert because you could have your computing power used. And if your computer's really slow, you might think about running some virus software and taking a look at that. Maybe have ChatGPT or Claude or whatever your Gemini AI is walk you through how to do that, how to clean your computer up. Or you could do like my mom does and call me. But anyway Back to PCs. PCs came along and it was one machine, right? Not the mainframe. We went to one machine. So you kinda had the phone tethered to the wall, then you had the cordless phone, then you had the cell phone, you could leave the house. This is the mainframe that left the house and went to your house. It was on your desk. Then laptops, you're moving around. And of course, these analogies you can put to phones and laptops and lots of things, but what about AI? Now it's AI. Many data centers, nodes, right? Not one giant brain, but millions of little brains. Hermiston burns more electricity than Seattle because of its data centers, and that's how systems scale. And electricity is similar in that's how it scales. At first, you have one big power plant, coal, hydro, nuclear. Now we have these smaller distributed nuclear and natural gas. And some people think we're gonna have gas and power walls and things where you send electricity across giant transmission lines the same, but into substations and neighborhoods, right? But you might have something on your house for solar already, right? So it's centralized power becoming distributed power. But solar changed the game, right? Now your house can make your own power, and that's decentralized, and batteries changed the game again because you could store it, right? You can use the rates in the evening. We used to call those time of use rates because they're sometimes lower at night, and you could charge up batteries and then sell it back to the grid when people run their air conditionings during the day in California So you can store power now, and that's been true for a long time. I admired a guy named Gunderson in Portland who tried to start a solar store and ability to go off grid for about 10 grand when 10 grand was like a year's wages. And he eventually gave up, but at least I think he did. Maybe he sold his company. But it was hard to come up with 10 grand for something to make your house less reliable, and they hadn't really given a lot of thought to appliances and things that would work and how to do that. And now with AI, you can be walked through how to do all that. So that's personal again, right? It's-- You're able to be in control. And, there's national security issues here too. So we want a power grid that can't be bumped out by one bomb as has happened to our friends that I wish weren't being bombed in foreign countries. But think about personal power. Think about being off grid and AI data centers are changing it again, right? So your power might be more expensive. In my estimations, Oregon's doing a better job than Washington at keeping residential power at rates down. Residential power and business power are treated quite differently by the utility companies and the Public Utilities Commission. So if you want lower power to continue for you in the Northwest, talk to your congressperson, the, please don't complain to the PUC. They are busy and I'm sure aware. It would be better if you talked to your congressional person your representative because the PUC is is trying. They really are. But anyway, your house may at some point compute the power, right? You've probably thought of this. You may be doing your AI at home instead of on a data center, right? That's node power. Again, it's the network thing. Mainframe to node. Isn't it wild though? A house becoming a power plant, a battery and a computer center. If your garage suddenly became a Wall Street Silicon Valley. And that's another area where you see milliseconds and power and AI is extremely important, is investing, right? So we know that's gonna happen, and we know that's where the money is on Wall Street, so they're gonna invest in it first, and hopefully it'll trickle down to us. But let's do a quick lesson so you ca- can understand a kilowatt. What is a kilowatt? So kilo, you probably knew about for kilo in weight, been taught that at some point. It's simple. A kilowatt is a thousand watts. So think horsepower for electricity. Your microwave, about one kilowatt. Hairdryer, 1.5 kilowatts, but Tesla charger, 7 to 11 kilowatts. So electric cars, they definitely need some power, right? A house might use 20 to 40 kilowatts in terms of kilowatt hours a day. So that's how you measure energy in relative terms. A kilowatt hour means using one kilowatt for one hour. A kilowatt can also be 10 h- hours with 100-watt bulb, right? So that would cost you whatever your kilowatt rate is. Now that we have LEDs, we don't have to spend that much, but you can see how it adds up, leaving the light on either way, right? It's pretty simple. But what does it cost? Right now, average residential electricity nationally is about 17 to 18 cents per kilowatt hour. I remember when it was about a nickel. But here's the regional reality. Pacific Northwest, Washington, Idaho, 11 to 13 cents because we have this lovely hydropower, and it's less expensive. I wouldn't say cheap. I'd say less expensive. Thank you, rivers. Texas, about 15 to 16 cents. Natural gas abundance, big grid, big hat, big oil on the back burner. Anyway, Florida, about 14 to 15 cents. California 30 to 34 cents. So when you think about electricity and power rates, like I said, if you're in Washington, you might be talking to your politician to make sure that it's a priority. And I think that people are not aware of how much of that has happened and how much people have been doing to work and protect the environment already. People have known about it for a long time, and in fact, people in the '90s were talking about artificial intelligence and which they, what they actually at that time were calling virtual reality, but that's a similar idea where people would be spending a lot of time at home on their computers. So it's not like this is a new thought, and distributed generation is not a new thought. But think about how you can avoid costs and things in the future. There's a lot of science, and there's a lot of fiction out there, so try and look for the science. And one of the things that I've said is if somebody says to you, "Rivers are gonna be dry, and we're not gonna be able to do anything," ask them what they pay for a kilowatt hour and how they think it's gonna impact the power grid, and you'll see that they probably haven't looked at it at all. They don't understand that there are reasonable ways to look at these things. And we have to balance it out, and the tribes in our area are doing a lot of great things to look at fisheries and fish revitalization. But somebody introduced something recently where they're gonna stop hunting and fishing in Oregon. That's not a reality that's gonna happen in my lifetime anyway. So I hope that you en- have enjoyed this and that you enjoy using the abundance that we experience in the United States, and look for great ways to do things with clean power. And bless your week, and thank you for listening to the Beau Leadership Group podcast. 📍