Before 2019, satellites were nearly always custom-built, designed individually and launched one or a few at a time. Then Starlink standardized the satellite for mass production and paired that with reusable rockets. What was once a bespoke, years-long process became continuous. I see the same pattern coming to energy – moving toward standardized, repeatable construction. We tend to think of large, complex structures as the answer to powering the grid because it's inherently a gigawatt-scale problem. But several companies we work with at Gigascale Capital are approaching it from a megawatt scale. Arbor Energy is developing factory-built, modular supercritical CO₂ turbines to provide clean baseload power. Their units are 90% prefabricated, capable of producing 25 MW each, designed to link together into hundreds of megawatts or more at a single site. Radiant is building portable fission microreactors that ship fully assembled in a container and can replace diesel generators. When you approach a gigawatt-scale problem with compact models, you gain leverage points on several dimensions. Replication becomes easier, and so does iteration. Deployment is faster, and within the same capital and time constraints, you can bring more capacity online to meet demand. Energy is following the same curve that satellite technology did just a few years ago, and I believe we'll see more innovation pushing toward modular, smaller solutions to solve our biggest energy problems going forward.
Seymur RASULOV
1mo
Aaron, Innovation sometimes looks less like invention… and more like finding a better way to repeat what works
Clean energy solutions are way sexy Aaron Bernstein. So love seeing this.