The cheapest megawatt on the grid is the one you don't use

👋🏼 Hi, I’m Moiz. I'm a Fractional Head of Product who helps top climate-tech teams build product from strategy, discovery, to execution. You’re receiving this because you’re building in climate and we’ve crossed paths. Each issue distills one proven concept that I use with my clients - and gives you a way to apply it to your work.

Here's what's inside:

• A frame to understand the wave of grid investment
• Flexibility is the frontier product of the grid
• What a great flexibility product must offer

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"The most sustainable unit of energy is the one you never had to generate."

— Amory Lovins, RMI Founder

The grid is about to get expensive, unless we're smart about it

US utilities are planning to spend $1.4 trillion on grid upgrades by 2030. That number is striking on its own. But what matters more is what happens to electricity prices on the other side of it.

RMI just published a useful frame for thinking about this moment. Their argument draws on a remarkable fact from the 20th century: between 1960 and 2000, US utilities presided over a fourfold increase in electricity demand — while cutting inflation-adjusted prices by more than 20 percent.

That wasn't an accident. It was the result of deliberate choices about technology, speed of construction, and how to squeeze more value out of infrastructure that already existed.

The question for 2026 is whether we make those same choices — or whether a $1.4 trillion investment cycle just becomes a $1.4 trillion cost passed on to ratepayers.

We've expanded the grid and dropped prices before

The utilities and policymakers who presided over that era of grid growth weren't just building more. They were obsessive about utilization. In the early 1980s, US power plants ran at full output only 45 percent of the year.

By using tools like off-peak pricing to shift demand, utilities pushed utilization higher — and by 2000, that improvement alone contributed to a 21 percent drop in real electricity prices.

The insight is simple but easy to miss: you don't always need to build more capacity. Sometimes you need to use what you have more intelligently.

What a great flexibility product should offer

The companies winning on the grid in the next decade won't just be the ones who procured the most clean energy. They'll be the ones who figured out how to treat flexibility as a core product capability — something designed in, not bolted on after interconnection.

This is harder than it sounds. Flexibility requires knowing your load profile deeply. It requires understanding which workloads can be shifted, by how much, and at what cost to operations. It requires building systems that can respond to external signals in real time without disrupting the core business.

That's a product discovery problem.

Utilities should understand what their customers actually need from a flexibility product, versus what they'll tolerate, versus what will cause them to churn.

The gap between those three things is where products fail.

From Insight to Action

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