Russel Fletcher 0:00
We had eight minutes away from blacking out the entire state of Texas, and ERCOT was the one who coordinated and saved us from that. And if we had blacked out the entire state of Texas, it would have taken weeks, if not months, to get back up entirely, just because it's a lot of work. That is what is called a black out or black start condition here in Erica, and we actually train for that every year up at ARCA. I'm actually going there for this training next week. And essentially what that means is we have certain generators in Arca that are able to start up without any external power. And as you bring on more generation, you have to bring on more load. It's a real distinct balancing act, and all the transmission companies will do that individually for themselves, while Arcot is just being a facilitator.
EB 0:55
So Russell, welcome to the Baxtel Meet me room podcast, and I understand that both you and our producer, Nolan Turner, you guys are in an improv class together.
Russel Fletcher 1:08
That's right, that's right, yeah, we've been doing an improv class for approximately about a year up at Texas Arts, which can I name drop stuff like that out in Lakeway. And it is a fantastic thing that everybody should get to do. We do a bit of comedy, a bit of just situations. We throw things at each other and just see how the other person reacts. There's mostly about four or five people in the class, and our instructor, so it's not a very big class. It's pretty intimate. Of the idea just being together and doing things. Everybody should be able to get up there and do something like that. It just helps you learn to think on your feet and be able to respond to situations. So yeah, Nolan and I are great friends, and we do that kind of thing
EB 2:04
quite a bit. You've been, you've been preparing, at least for last year, for this exact moment, then coming out of podcasting improv in
Nolan Turner 2:13
right putting the spotlight right on you. Yeah, awesome.
EB 2:17
Well, let's, let's kick off and understand a little bit about you in a minute, like in 60 seconds. So I asked you a series of questions, and just answer the first thing that comes into your mind. Go for it. All right. So do you let prefer late nights or early mornings
Russel Fletcher 2:31
about 15 minutes in the afternoon, maybe 30, if I'm lucky,
EB 2:37
and then New York or California? I'd say New York. How about Chicago or Dallas? I think I know the answer. Ooh, Dallas, sweet or salty, sweet, introvert or extrovert,
Russel Fletcher 2:53
both, depending on the time.
EB 2:58
Ambivert. I guess do you prefer a meeting or email,
Russel Fletcher 3:01
oh, an email, then I can just
Russel Fletcher 3:05
ignore it. Okay?
EB 3:08
Email our phone or text.
Russel Fletcher 3:11
I prefer a phone call. I'd rather hear somebody on the other line.
EB 3:15
Yep, let's see what is your favorite food.
Russel Fletcher 3:19
I like strawberry cheesecake. But if you're going for a like an entree, chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, perfect.
EB 3:31
Very southern favorite sport, college football, yep, yep. And then who's your team?
Russel Fletcher 3:40
I am a fan of Georgia Bulldogs and the UT Longhorns. Georgia Bulldogs is where I lived for many years.
EB 3:50
Yep, makes sense. What was your first job? Say, in high school or kind of around that time
Russel Fletcher 3:57
frame, my first job was catching rattlesnakes and selling them for anti venom to a lab in Corpus Christi, Texas.
EB 4:06
I didn't expect that. That was not my bingo card today. Yeah, all right, there's probably a lot there to ask. Ask about anytime I guess you did a good job, because you
Russel Fletcher 4:20
Yeah, me and my younger brother at 12 years old, would go and catch rattlesnakes in South Texas, and we'd put them in a feed sack, and my mother and I and him would drive over to Corpus, give them to a medical lab, and they would milk them for anti venom.
EB 4:40
Wow. Would you use some sort of like lasso, like a pole with the lasso type of thing, to rope it? Or how do you put in a sack?
Russel Fletcher 4:50
You put a stick on their head, and then you reach down and grab them right behind the head. We had leather gloves for it, and big rubber boots. And then you. Pick them up and you drop them directly in the feed sack.
EB 5:03
So that's why you need two people. That's why the other person grabs. Did you ever, yeah, obviously, were you the stick person, or were you the grabber?
Russel Fletcher 5:13
I was the person who grabbed. So you'd go out and you'd find them. My little brother would hit him with a stick, get him in place, and then I'd try to hold him down and pick him up and drop him in the feed sack. So he was busy holding a feed set closed with one hand and the stick with the other hand.
Nolan Turner 5:34
Wow, yes. And then it paid, well,
Russel Fletcher 5:37
um, not as much as I would like. And now looking back on it, I think my mother might have been crazy for letting me do that.
EB 5:47
Yeah, we just had a conversation with my son about, like, if he should have a e bike or not, because I see all sorts of kids running around on E bikes that without helmets, going 25 miles an hour, you know, like a motorcycle effectively, right? And he's 12, and saying that wasn't safe enough so to have your mom sanction or be okay with you going out catching rattlesnakes.
Russel Fletcher 6:10
I mean, I also rode my horse everywhere, like the old time West kind of thing. And, I mean, we had cattle and all of the other thing so it was so very different lifestyle than I live now.
EB 6:24
All right, so what's your secret talent? Or do you have a secret talent? Maybe most
Russel Fletcher 6:30
people don't know. This may or may not pertain to what I just said, but I can rope. I can use a lasso. I can rope from horseback. I can cut cattle out of a herd, all of that stuff, because I used to literally do cowboy work.
EB 6:51
So when AI comes and takes all our professional jobs, all the knowledge work, I mean, you have a fallback plan.
Russel Fletcher 6:57
It's true. It's true. I don't think I've seen any AI on horseback. I also have not ridden a horse in nearly 20 years now.
EB 7:04
So, all right, so large load or large Gen,
Russel Fletcher 7:09
I prefer all about the generators. I would much prefer generators more than bringing on another load.
EB 7:15
Beth or gas Gen, I prefer nuke. Nuclear Generation, Yep, I got you okay, I guess, tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. Who's, who's. Russell Fletcher,
Russel Fletcher 7:27
so I joined the Navy right out of high school, went into the nuclear submarine force, spent approximately four years on a submarine in the Bermuda Triangle. I was a nuclear electrician on the submarine while I was in, once, I got out of that in back in 2006 I decided to go to the civilian nuke force. Worked out of a nuke plant over in Georgia for two and a half years. Decided to get my degree electrical engineering. Unfortunately, life got in the way, and I needed a job. And so I looked around and said, Okay, I know how to do electrical engineering. I know how to do electrical operations. Found a job in transmission system operations, got a job with a company called wind energy transmission Texas, here in Austin, Texas, and I worked with them all the way up the chain to being the our act acting Operations Manager, 13 years now. I am at a different company still in Austin, doing the same thing, but I've just decided to go back to being a operator.
EB 8:39
So between the improv and the acting transmission operator, acting that's not acting in terms of, you know, improv. What does acting mean? From that perspective,
Russel Fletcher 8:49
acting means that we did not have a transmission manager at the time or a operations manager at the time, so instead, I had to fill it. Unfortunately, that turned into me filling in all the time for several years,
EB 9:03
yeah, but you were just, you're the transmission manager.
Russel Fletcher 9:06
I was the transmission operator, our transmission manager, the operations manager,
Nolan Turner 9:12
cool, yeah. I think we kind of glazed over this, the submarine part. I want to hear what was life like living on a submarine.
Russel Fletcher 9:20
So y'all have worked in offices, just imagine the idea of going into your office and not leaving for the next four months. You work at your desk, you turn around and you go sleep in that corner right over there, and then you get up and you do your work again. That's the job, part of it. Now also throw in that you don't see the sunlight and you don't see anybody other than your co workers for the next four months. After a while, you just get used to it. But in the beginning, it's horrifying to think about. And now, anytime that I tell. Somebody about it, they have the expressions that you all have on your faces now,
Speaker 3 10:04
of what? Exactly?
Russel Fletcher 10:08
Yeah, I don't know. I work from home. That sounds like my daily
Russel Fletcher 10:12
well, just imagine that cat never comes home, and you don't get to see the sunlight, and there's no animals,
EB 10:21
and it's much smaller and cramped. I would imagine it's like terribly cramped.
Russel Fletcher 10:25
My submarine was a ballistic missile submarine, and so we carried nuclear missiles on board, which, as a note, I have slept with my feet up against a nuclear missile. So my submarine was rather larger than what you think about from the old world war two submarines we we were about two football fields long and four stories tall.
EB 10:47
How fast can that travel? Approximately, like is it?
Russel Fletcher 10:51
Well, now you're getting into questions that I cannot answer, but greater than, I think the official term is greater than 25 knots, which is, you know, 30 something miles an hour,
EB 11:04
some ways, can travel faster on the water versus below water, right? You know, below water, you're going a little bit slower. I think
Russel Fletcher 11:11
other way around, actually, oh, is the other way around when, when you're on top of the water, you can open up your engines to full blast, but you have more resistance. There's a changing amount of pressure on the front of the submarine. So when you're underwater, you can accept that everything is going to be the same as you're traveling through the water. So we can open up to almost full and it be a constant thing, whereas on the surface, it's running into waves and going up and down a little bit and everything so
EB 11:49
and then in terms of exercise or even getting sunlight, are there like panels, light panels that simulate sunlight at All?
Russel Fletcher 11:57
No, we had fluorescent lights, and we all came out pale and pasty every time there was no no consideration for that, at least on the submarine that I was on and asked for exercise, it was four stories tall, and you had to walk up and down stairs and do all of that stuff every day just to get back to where you were going. So I worked at a plant over in Georgia, civilian plant near Vidalia, where the onions come from. So the whole thing smelled like onions, and the civilian plant was significantly larger, and it was a different make of plant. I had to learn a whole different system. Think of different computer languages. You know, a computer language. Somebody says, Oh, just work on this one. That's a different language. I have to learn that other language. So I went from a pressurized water reactor to a boiling water reactor that was 20 times larger than the one we had on the submarine. It was a significant change. I could go home at the end of the day. That was amazing. So being able to go home, and being able to walk around and not be in the same place all the time, because the engine room on the submarine was rather small, even as I talked about the rest of it being rather large. The engine room where I normally worked was small, and the space in the civilian plant was giant. I mean, there were spaces that I walked around for three years, and I was still finding new things.
EB 13:34
So I guess now changing the subject a little bit into transmission, what you're doing now, you know one thing that is admirable about the Texas grid, or ERCOT, so how fast you guys are bringing on generation, and how fast load is following, right? There's all sorts of generation, you know, from renewables to, you know, Texas is black blessed with, you know, not only lots of wind, lots of sun, but also lots of gas and oil too. So, I guess, how so it's, how do you guys balance the growth there, you know, in terms of, how do you think about, you know, how do you balance, I guess, in real time, generation and load, you know, how does that work? From a transmission standpoint, I've always been curious.
Russel Fletcher 14:25
The generators themselves have a system called governors, and they basically govern the speed of the unit to the to a frequency droop, and that frequency droop is synced up all across Texas. So every generator is going to operate off the same frequency group. So when a load comes online, all the generators, I say, across Texas that would be in an ideal world without congestion, but all the generators in the area are going to be. Droop by the same percentage of their total amount.
EB 15:03
Help me understand so as new load comes on, it acts as an inertia drag on the generation and and you guys calibrate that, you know, add new generation to help counteract that inertia, that droop.
Russel Fletcher 15:23
Yes, that is correct. And we don't have to do it in such minute amounts as each individual load coming on, because we have a buffer zone. We have over generate so we have a specific amount of capacity on top of what we have the load projected. So that keeps us if somebody turns on, that keeps us at 60 Hertz. If somebody turns on a generate or a load that we weren't expecting, we will still be able to compensate for that. There is a specific percentage and an amount roughly anywhere between five and 10,000 megawatts of generation is going that is not doing anything other than keeping that extra capacity online,
EB 16:09
okay, to overcome the inertia, drag or droop. The droop. I mean, it's a growing problem. Are these AI datacenters right now? I want to say that that's a wrong way to phrase it. But an issue with AI data centers are that they can turn on and off in a blink of an eye, go from 300 megs down to zero or down to 20, and then up to 300 megs and down to 20. You know, they can cycle on or off. And there's different solutions out there that datacenters can do to sell for that, but in the event that they don't, and they expose the grid to this kind of on off switch, you know that the you know these large loads, so from a transmission operator perspective, how does that impact you? Or how do you plan for that? Or is it just having that extra headroom that you just talked about is that the way you kind of sell for it,
Russel Fletcher 17:03
it's a combination of factors that we have to account for. It is having that extra headroom, as you put it, that capacity on top of our expected or projected load. But we also have to think about in terms of congestion on the lines themselves. We have to know, as transmission operators and the transmission grid, where the load could possibly be at all times. And therefore, if we have five datacenters off of a transmission line, we have to know that that transmission line can handle if all five datacenters are suddenly online and operating. It's not just about the generation, it's also about how much power is going to be forced down any one given line. A lot of the times we try to make it into a loop. So we have several lines going into one substation or one load, we'll have several lines that feed the substation that that load comes off of that way, if one line is overloaded, it can compensate with another line.
Nolan Turner 18:10
So I don't know what what questions you have, Eric, but I'm I would love to talk a little bit about the Great Texas freeze, or winter storm Yuri, which happened back in in 2021 if you were a transmission operator, were you active during this time?
Russel Fletcher 18:24
Yes, I was gonna say, do you want Eric to ask the question? Or, I don't know, that's fine.
Nolan Turner 18:31
I get to chime in when I want to. Eric lets me speak.
Russel Fletcher 18:36
Use that goofy guy and improv, not, you know, actual anyway, I was a transmission system operator during that time. I was also the outage coordinator, slash manager of wet of wind energy transmission Texas. Unfortunately, I did not foresee the storm coming to a sufficient degree, and I was at my in laws, out in East Texas, way far away from the office or any internet. So when the freeze started happening, we were stuck in place, and I was in my truck with it on for most of the time, trying to refill my phone, being on a meeting with ERCOT and being on a meeting with my my peers over at at my transmission company, the whole time coordinating outages, knowing what was going on, trying to figure out how we were going to adjust for certain things that happened, or preventing casualties. My company had to have people stationed out in the middle of nowhere. But now, with all the analysis that they've done on the on on it since we had eight minutes away from blacking out the entire state of Texas, and ERCOT was the one who coordinated and saved us from that. And if we. Had blacked up the entire state of Texas, it would have taken weeks, if not months, to get back up entirely, just because it's a lot of work to come back up after a blackout.
EB 20:13
Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of coming up after a blackout? Because I know Spain recently had an outage almost countrywide. And I don't know what the cause of that outage, but it seemed like it took at least days to come back up.
Russel Fletcher 20:29
That is what is called a black out, or black start condition here in Erica. And we actually train for that every year up at Erica. I'm actually going there for this training next week. And essentially what that means is we have certain generators in Arca that are able to start up without any external power. A lot of the oil plants or coal plants, you just shove coal in there, you shove oil in there, and you can bring them up. Some of our other generators, they need external power in order to facilitate a startup that includes nukes and a lot of our wind farms and solar plants. They need external power to their regulators, to their control systems in order to start up. So we have these certain plants in Texas that are called Black start units, and we have to start up the entire grid from just those plants. And there's probably 20 of them total in Texas, which is not that many for the entire state. So they bring up the power grid, and all of transmission companies work together to slowly bring up the grid, and as you bring on more generation, you have to bring on more load. It's a real distinct balancing act, and all the transmission companies will do that individually for the themselves, while ERCOT is just being a facilitator during a blackout condition, it is common for you to have a quarter of the state back up and running, and then you close in one breaker that y'all did not fully check the other side of, and everything goes dark again. In a real situation, you have to double check and triple check every single step that you're making.
EB 22:27
So there are a lot of questions that come up in my mind about this. So it sounds like certain types of generation can start without, you know, like oil, you said, and some others, right?
Nolan Turner 22:38
Coal, coal are the big ones, high, big ones. Why not natural gas?
EB 22:42
I guess, I guess. Let's first start with the problem. Why do some types of generation they can't start? Is it about, you know, harmonizing with the frequency of the 60 Hertz? Or what is it about, you know, that some can't start without already being connected to
Russel Fletcher 22:58
well, some of them, such as our, a lot of our renewables, solar and wind, specifically, not hydro, but solar and wind, they have varying degrees of generation that we do not control directly. Obviously, if the wind's not blowing, the wind farms don't won't be producing. So we cannot put anything on the wind farms to start up, even if they will run by themselves, they won't be able to be a stable power source for the load going forward. So instead, we need to use them as a supplemental power source that will be down the road, that will be after we have had a large enough area that the fluctuations of wind and solar are not going to affect our load going forward. I'm not a generator guy, so please forgive me. I don't necessarily know whether or not we have natural gas generators as black start generators. I just know people talk about oil and gas or oil and coal being black start generators. Yeah, I'm not sure on natural gas, but nuke plants are one of our big ones. We cannot start up a new plant without external power. And the reason being is all the safety protocols that we have in place for new plants the safety shutdowns. So one of the important things that we have during a blackout or black start condition is we have to get power back to the new plants so they can perform a safe shutdown.
EB 24:37
Do you need to have it? Does inertia come into play in this, in terms of starting up some of these large generation, like, do you have to have an equivalent block start source to balance, or, you know, to restart some generation? Or is, does it can be a one megawatt piece, you're starting up a 500 megawatt.
Russel Fletcher 24:58
You. Generation. So yes, there is a minimum load that you have on a generator that you need for that generator to be stable. Most of the black start units have a very, very low minimum load for that reason. That's why we have them as black start units, in addition to what I was saying earlier about being able to start up by themselves. The minimum load on most units is, you know, some percentage, say, 10 or 20% of the total capacity for that generation. Unit below that, they don't have enough pushback against their electrical inertia or spinning inertia.
EB 25:41
So it almost sounds like colocating load with generation is almost an ideal scenario, even from a grid perspective.
Russel Fletcher 25:48
Absolutely and during this black star scenario that I was talking about, the transmission companies themselves are the ones that are bringing on more load as we continue on and expand with the grid. So they'll bring on load. We'll get to a certain point, we'll get to another generator. We'll bring on that generator and then transfer load to that generator. So we have to make sure that we have enough load to meet the minimum specs of the second generator that we're bringing on. How?
EB 26:20
How do utilities view data centers with self Gen capability? So maybe even, like an from SB six perspective, you know, like when data centers bring their own generation? Can you talk a little bit about that piece
Russel Fletcher 26:38
to a certain extent? Yes. So I'm not a fan necessarily, of generation that is unregistered behind the meter. The reason being is we have certain restrictions as transmission operators, certain things that we watch, we see what's going on. If we know that a data center is going to be a 200 megawatt load. But for some reason, they never pull 200 megawatts. We just assume at some point in the future they're going to pull 200 megawatts. Now, if they calculate that in in the very beginning when they're proposing their load to the transmission company, that's fine, but that has to mean that they're that generation is always going to be running, and therefore y'all need to make sure that it is going to be a constant thing. We would need to know both the whether or not that generation is always going to be running, and if it ever goes out, what is y'all sudden new load, and how we can accomplish that? Because if we have it on a 200 megawatt line, and it's 300 megawatts, but y'all only told us 100 in the first place, then when it when your load is down, or it needs maintenance, or when your generation is down or it needs maintenance, suddenly we can't support that at all.
EB 28:00
Do you think for the most part, our data center operators are large load, larger loads registering their generation, their on site generation, or is it, you know, kind of 5050, or do you have any insight into that piece?
Russel Fletcher 28:12
Experience that I have with it is they are not they see it as it's behind the meter. They can do whatever they want with it. By the same token, we've had wind farms not registered a load behind the meter, a data center that is going on behind this meter because it's just attached to the wind farm. They're supplying the power that's that's their own doing, except for when we need to take out that line for our maintenance. We don't know that data centers there when we have some reason to drop a wind farm, because we have a line out in the area and we can't handle the extra generation or something like that. We don't know that that load is there, so we will just drop that line, assuming that it's just a wind farm. We may contact the wind farm beforehand and say we can't support this right now. We've got a curtail, y'all, to zero. We don't know that load is there, so we're not going to tell that load, and that load will get upset with us later.
EB 29:08
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about flexibility too, and what datacenters can do, because there's a lot of discussions now around flexibility and data centers and doing demand response or whatever, curtailment. There's all sorts of different words for this. I'm sure there's nuances between those words, but they're all under the guise of flexibility. And so from a grid operations perspective, is there any behind the meter activities that have flexibility, that are better than others? So for example, they could have gas Gen there. They could, I guess, behind the meter with wind, which we just talked about, or batteries, you know, like a best storage, you know, what? What are your thoughts on? Kind of that, not necessarily a pro and con of each but like, a little bit like batteries versus, you know, generation. What do you think from a grid operations, you know, what do you like better? Any, any thoughts from that perspective.
Russel Fletcher 30:00
So datacenters pull in a lot of mega bars, which are volt amp reactive. It's 1/3 of the power triangle. So we talk about kilowatts a lot, and kilowatts are real power. That is what is producing your heat, your resistance on your power lines themselves, mega bars are what's being used up by capacitors and reactors.
EB 30:28
Okay, so batteries are easy to conceive of, but for the audience, what is a capacitor? Or how does that work?
Russel Fletcher 30:36
So you can think of a capacitor as a quick acting battery. They are just two conductors with a space in between them. We use capacitors in lots of things, TVs and all electronics. They're one of the three basic electrical components that we have. Capacitors, which, like I said, act as a battery. They resist current flow, so they absorb power and keep voltage at a certain level. We produce a lot of voltage because we're sending it back elsewhere. So we try to keep it down inside limits out there in West Texas. So we use substations.
EB 31:20
We have lots of reactors. These are the oil. You know that that's the transformers, Transformers. So reactors are transformers, no, no.
Russel Fletcher 31:28
Transformers are separate things. Transformers transform. Hence the name voltage and current from one level to another. So we talk about the 345, KV system, which is the extreme high voltage lines here in Texas. And we transform that down to various other levels. So we have 138 system. And outside your house right now, you probably have a 4000 volt distribution system. Inside your house you have 240 and 120 so I actually have a different answer than what you were, what the options that you just presented, I would prefer if a data center comes online, and so would ERCOT. Don't think it's too out of line to say that this would help any data center coming into ERCOT, if they were a fast acting load, fast acting resource, meaning they registered being one of the first to be turned off in any casualty or event, right?
EB 32:31
So, if I'm understanding it correctly, you want what's called fast acting load, or fast acting resource, so that you're not going to just flip the switch and turn them off. You're going to call them first, so they'll get like, a few minute warning or so, and then they'll need to react quickly. That's within minutes.
Russel Fletcher 32:46
That's very true, and it will be us, the transmission companies, turning off that line, but basically them knowing that they could be turned off in this in a short time, and us knowing that they can be okay with that is going to be a huge benefit to the transition. From that perspective,
EB 33:05
it seems like batteries, if the datacenters have batteries on their campus or, you know, on their, you know, behind the meter, then that would be the best way to kind of take that over. If they're doing generation, they're probably generating that electricity. And so what they're gonna be hard to curtail what you're about to cut off, but batteries, that's where they're made for they batteries flip on
Russel Fletcher 33:26
absolutely and batteries, in that sense, would be great, but I will say that as part of the transmission grid, once y'all are off, once y'all have accepted that I'm flipping off that line, if y'all keep On running on batteries. That's fine with us. That's not going to be our issue. It's more about the speed at which we can turn you all off from the power grid, right?
EB 33:51
And how, when you make calls like that, what is the kind of typical time frame, you know? Can that be negotiated as well? I mean, is it an hour, a two hour or undefined?
Russel Fletcher 34:01
It's gonna be in the next few minutes
EB 34:04
to turn off, but in terms of turning back on, so you're like, Hey, it's 100 degrees out in Texas, all the air conditionings are humming. We need we need extra, we need some load to turn off. Can you turn off? Yes. And what you know in those environments, you know, is there, can you almost contractually, maybe you can't answer this, but from what you're you see or your experience, is it a defined period, they'll be off for an hour or two, something like that.
Russel Fletcher 34:29
There will be projections. I'm not privy to most of those, but you can look ahead on the ERCOT website, which I showed you all before the it's called ERCOT dashboard, and you can look ahead and see when the load is going to drop in the future. Typically, if we are going to perform a load dump like that, it's going to be for one of two reasons. One, like you just said about the high capacity due to extreme. Same weather, cold or hot, we can perform a low dump for that reason, just so we can make sure that people are still able to have the hospitals and fire departments making sure that they have far they have power.
EB 35:15
I'm just wondering, from a data center planning perspective, when you're building a data center, having these large batteries are expensive, particularly when it's over 100 megawatts, right? And so you know, you got to plan for it. And in other words, data centers almost need to be online. 24/7 you know, there are Bitcoin mining operations that are okay with being offline for undefined period of time, particularly if they're being paid for it. But you know, if they are an AI data center, if they are, you know, serving load, if you know that the conversation we're having now is over the internet, right? And so these things have to be up all the time. And so data centers plan for that, you know, very explicitly, they have all sorts of cascading backup, you know, scenarios to protect them from going down at all. And so I'm just trying to think of scenarios where they can be flexible and be good grid participants and help from that perspective, but also at the same time, be able to have it economically feasible. So, you know, building like a two hour battery, that's expensive, but it's something that could be within the range of what is financially feasible. But if you're building like a, well, we don't know, so we you have to build a 10 hour battery, then it, then it becomes economically infeasible. And so from that perspective, do, do you think that? And this might be something you don't know or can't answer, but you know, can you go through and cycle like, Okay, this data center is gonna go off that we have a contract with them for to go offline for up to two hours. This next one can go off for an hour. This one can go off for four hours, and you just cycle through them, turn them off and on, and you kind of look for load that way, and that way they can participate at kind of more defined periods that they're off
Russel Fletcher 36:56
in an ideal situation, absolutely, that is something that can be regulated between ERCOT and the datacenters themselves and the transmission companies, but we live in the real world where it might be that line that is going to that data center that is out. We don't know that might be the issue, and so trying to restring that line, we can't give them a four hour timeline when they first come online, because it's going to take work to get a helicopter out there and get the workmen out there, the line men to restring that. It could be that generator. Years ago, we've had power plants here in Texas essentially explode. That's bit of a term that I don't want to use, but they have failed and been unrecoverable. We need to find a different route for that power, a different generation plant that can service that load, and that could take weeks of time.
EB 38:01
But if you if there's a power plant out in the middle, like a gas plant out in the middle of, like, West Texas, if you put a data center right next to that, I mean, wouldn't that be also in a good position? It'd be almost, you know, from a grid perspective, and bringing it up online. Or would you still focus on Dallas over that one data center that's next to the generation?
Russel Fletcher 38:19
We would need to have load at the generation as well, because we need to meet those minimum load requirements. So in that scenario, yes, a lot of the power plants out in West Texas are renewables, so they don't come online during this process that we're talking about, before they come online at the end of the process, so that could be days or weeks into a black start. We're bringing back up the wind farms and the solar farms.
EB 38:50
And are there things that we as in the data center industry can do when we're seeking out, when we're making load requests early in the process? Is there anything that we can do and frame it so that we can make it easier on the grid, or easier for the grid to say yes to us as data center developers, particularly when you're asking for large load, because some of these large loads are as much as mid size cities. And so what can we do and think about in terms of the ramp or what our request is, or maybe even the location of it. So all those things you know, what can we do as data center operators?
Russel Fletcher 39:25
So one of the important things that I'm that immediately come to mind are building off of 345 KV lines. 345 KV lines are, as I mentioned earlier, our extreme high voltage here in Texas, those lines are what we normally consider to be transport lines. So they are transporting power from the wind farms and everything else way out in the middle of nowhere back to the Central Texas area. Those 345, KB lines are going. Going to be, we're going to have a lot of power that is already traveling across those lines. They're going to be high, high voltage, and they're at our limits already because we're trying to transport that amount of power. So if we actually put a data center there, it can help us pull down those limits, because we're pulling down the voltage, but we already have too high now, the 345, KV lines, by contrast, are also going to be some of the last that we're going to energize during a black start, because they absorb so much power
EB 40:33
I see. So instead of dribbling in these requirements to you and trying to make it quote, unquote easier for you to accommodate, it's really making it harder by dribbling in these requirements over years. And we should just lay them out to start and saying, over the next five years, we need this type of power.
Russel Fletcher 40:50
Yes, and even if you all are not going to start with the 400 megawatts, if you all start with 100 give us the total as early as you can. That way we can make sure and to have that in place to accommodate later
EB 41:06
on every podcast, we ask our guests to talk about a data center war story granted in your you have not worked in data centers before, but do you have a power or transmission war story, something where you know perhaps it was dramatic, or something went wrong and you recovered, or maybe you didn't recover. You know what? You talked about a helicopter hitting a line? I thought, Well, that seems like science fiction. But then I was like, maybe it's not because helicopters fly low, and there's probably happens about once a year, I bet. But regardless, I'll let you choose your story.
Russel Fletcher 41:41
No, I we did have a helicopter hit a line. That's not necessarily a great story because it involves death, but I have a different story that I'll I'll go for. I told this one to Nolan earlier, and he was all excited about it. So I was on a submarine, as I mentioned, and we had a nuclear power plant on board underway. We are chugging along in the Atlantic, underwater, and we are just maintaining power. Well, we're also a bunch of dumb 18 and 19 year olds, and so we're sitting there and the reactor operator accidentally SCRAMS the reactor, meaning the reactor completely shuts down while we're going underway. We all look at each other and go, Oh, crap. How quickly can you get this back up? And he goes, I can do it in two minutes. And so he just starts doing it. I mean, just going for it. Right off the bat. We're thinking, okay, maybe we we got through this, we just nobody noticed, which, I mean, everybody noticed. And so within that two minutes, or right after that two minutes, we had the captain and the engineer back in the engine room looking at everything, and I was standing out there with the captain, the engineer, and the captain and I are looking at the reactor controls, which has logs of everything that went on. And the captain was a former Navy Nuke, so he knew exactly, I mean, just by looking at it, he knew what was going on, and he could tell, you know, this is what happened. And I am looking at these logs, and I acknowledge one, and I'm looking at it, and the captain just reaches over and hits the Erase button. Just at that second, he was like, Yep, looks like nothing happened. We don't need to talk about it anymore, and walks away. And I was just like, I guess we don't need to talk about that anymore,
EB 43:40
but the fact that it got back up online, then he could perhaps erase it, cover the tracks a little bit. He kind of covered for you guys.
Russel Fletcher 43:46
That he did, he covered for us. And I was a fan of that captain for the rest of my time, because, I mean, he could have made it real hard on us, but instead, he was like, just keep on going, Yeah, but,
EB 43:58
I mean, I'm sure you have a certain amount of batteries on board to operate over a certain amount of time, but that's you have, like, an hour or two. I bet you know. I don't even know the specifics, but you know something like that,
Russel Fletcher 44:08
there is a rather massive battery on board the nuke sub, but it does not power the main engine. The main engine is powered by steam, and so if you're not producing steam anymore, you're not turning the engine,
EB 44:23
no, but at least you can wait for rescue. It sounds like you have enough battery to kind of wait for days or weeks, or whatever it is that that at least you could be rescued, I suppose,
Russel Fletcher 44:32
yes, yes, as long as we don't go down too far. Um, but like I said, we managed to get the reactor back up, on and online and running. There was another time where we ended up not the reactor, but the main steam valves failed on us, so they were stuck open and we couldn't close them, which is a whole. Different and terrible scenarios, because that means you cannot shut down the reactor.
Nolan Turner 45:04
Moving on to, I guess the last segment of the podcast is top picks. So this is your opportunity to share you know, anything in your life that you find useful, that you just want to open up to the world, and that can be related to the industry or not necessarily. It's just what brings you joy, what's important to you, and what do you think everyone needs to experience?
Russel Fletcher 45:26
All right, we
Russel Fletcher 45:27
talked about this a little bit before, so I'm going to go with the improv class or acting classes in general, being able to have that continuing education, and being able to think on your feet and respond instantly to somebody else that is saying something to you that is useful, not just in an improv style, but also in real life.
Nolan Turner 45:55
I will say, yeah. So as much as I mean we do the improv class together, as much as I'm the producer of the podcast here at Baxtel, I'm also a part of the sales team, and improv has saved my butt more than once on a sales call, just being able to riff or come up with something out of thin air, it's it's very helpful just, yeah, to be conversational.
Russel Fletcher 46:15
I'll tell you just a real quick story that how this has helped me even before I took took improv a couple years ago, when I was still at Wet we had a meeting. I was brand new into a management role. We had a meeting that I was told about, about five minutes before the meeting happened, I was just like, Okay, I'm just showing up to this meeting. I'm just gonna listen. It turns out that I was supposed to be leading the meeting. They sit down, and somebody hands me a piece of paper and says, Okay, Russell, let's just go ahead and get on into it. And I had to essentially improv a drill about what was going to happen if the power grid in one specific area of Texas had a cyber attack. And I just was like, Cool. I know my stuff. I can talk about this. And I just talked about it. And everybody was like, Oh, it was great. Good job. I was like, I had no idea what I was walking into. It was just off the top, you know, top of my head.
Nolan Turner 47:19
So okay, because you said something that really interesting to me, cyber attacks on the power grid. Of course, that's a given. It makes sense, thinking about it, that people would try and attack the power grid. How do we, how do we defend against that
Russel Fletcher 47:34
less than 10 years ago, or just about 10 years ago, there was a cyber attack on a Ukrainian power grid system. It's one that we talked about a lot in the industry. They used a combination of factors between phishing and key loggers and a brute force attack, I believe, for the three and essentially they controlled a large portion of the generators and power grid of the Ukraine system. 10 years ago, these hackers did the workers themselves noticed that they had systems that were operating without their input, without their control, and they managed to essentially shut down all of the servers that were accessing any of those systems. They just shut down all remote control, and that's a way that we can defend against that.
Nolan Turner 48:35
Well, Russell, thank you so much for taking the time today, if viewers want to learn more about you, what you do? I know you mentioned a couple of resources, like regarding the Archon dashboard. If there's anything you'd like to share just here in our closing remarks, please go ahead.
Russel Fletcher 48:52
The Ercot dashboard is a fantastic tool to see what the power grid in Arcot is doing right now, you can see that the wind farms and solar farms are producing a significant amount of the generation in Texas. Texas is one of the leaders in renewable energies. So please everybody, go take a look at that website. There's also one for Kaiso and PJM. Those are the other two systems that my company operates out of, and I will also just, you know, plug acting and improv classes in general and text arts and specific. Text arts is a nonprofit in Lakeway, Texas that deals with community theater and community theater classes.
Nolan Turner 49:43
Please support them. So if anyone's in the Austin area, yeah, absolutely fantastic. Russell, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yep, no problem. Glad to be here.