Each morning, I ask myself, “What must be true in order for our customers to trust us?” It’s a way for me to focus on what we must do to bring something into being in the physical world of power. It’s a hard question to ask, and one that every builder asks, either overtly or intuitively.
America is in the early days of a new revolution. One that will certainly reshape the way we live and work. At the center of this revolution is power.
Power in the literal sense: generating electrons that turn into valuable work. This isn’t a new story but another chapter in a very long history of humans doing what they do: building.
It’s easy to get trapped in the macro view of this challenge and not go deeper. But deeper is where so many people I know live. They are at the coal face, facing the truth and solving hard problems every day. This includes our team at Alchemy Industrial.
This work is not glamorous. On most days it is very frustrating, with many steps backward and sideways as we move forward. It requires a mix of optimism about the future and making sure the actual work gets done. Often, it’s just about getting work done no matter how we feel. I learned this lesson from my dad, who was a pipe fitter, and my mum, who was a seamstress.
While there are many important issues to solve, like policy and funding, the core of the challenge is hardware that works. Building hardware can be a slow and arduous process. I wish I knew how to move faster, but shaping atoms into something real and valuable takes time.
Sure, we can “move fast and break things,” but not at the expense of safety and reliability. Pure software (especially AI) can have real safety consequences, but when hardware fails in the field, a human often has to go and fix it. Builders have to account for the consequences of that time lag. That’s part of what our customers trust us with. And that is the ground truth.
American Gigawatt is about exploring how we build the new American power system together. Over the issues that follow, I’ll share more stories about the real work happening every day.