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- The world's largest machine is so big, it can be seen from space. In fact, it covers huge areas of the Earth's. surface. Oh wait, sorry. Hold on. Gimme the other side. There we go. - Our lives depend on electricity, if you haven't noticed already, and all of that electricity in almost all parts of the world is delivered to you by the grid. The world's biggest, most complicated machine ever built. And if you start to notice the grid, you'll see it everywhere. But it is so everywhere that people just kind of forget it.
- For a long time, rich countries haven't had to think about their grids all that much. Their electricity demand has been pretty much flat since the 2000s. But times are changing. - The explosive growth of AI. - The rapid build out of data centers. - They're consuming enormous amounts of energy. - You have four companies now that are intending to spend over $300 billion this year. - With industries like AI and EVs growing fast, the world has predicted to use twice as much electricity by 2050. That's roughly a whole new USA's worth of electricity every five years. To make all that power and get it to where it needs to go,
the world's grids need to evolve. All that new infrastructure will cost billions of dollars, but so did broadband internet, and that's ended up creating trillions of dollars of value. And some countries' grids are evolving faster than others. - In China, power generation has gone up seven times since 2000. The battle to build the best grid is a battle to win the future. - And with more power comes more opportunities. New ideas and technologies are in the works to massively upgrade the world's wiring.
- It's spinning round at 1500 rpm. - Can it all happen fast enough to power the future? The answer is going to get a bit nerdy and technical. But we are all nerds here, right? Okay, good. Right. The show's called "Primer." So here's a quick primer on the grid. - So a typical grid structure looks like a large power plant somewhere typically far away from where you are. That is generating power.
Could be nuclear, could be gas, could be hydro, could be solar these days. And then a long series of transmission lines, a substation that makes sure that the electricity is distributed to you in just the exact form as you need it. And then it is consumed as charging a laptop or running a motor inside a factory. - These days, the grid is pretty much everywhere, string out all the world's transmission cables end to end, and they'd stretch 42 million miles. That's almost halfway to the sun. And all the parts of this massive system have to work together in perfect harmony. A sudden imbalance, say a large power plant switching off without warning can easily throw the whole system outta whack. Or even.
Well more on that later. But most of the time the grid works just fine powering our lives and helping our economies grow. - So there is a direct relationship between how much energy an economy consumes and how much economic output results. The richer you are, the more electricity you consume, the bigger your grid and the bigger your grid, the more electricity you consume, the richer you become. - That feedback loop has been going strong since the early 20th century. When electricity started to become a major energy source.
Suddenly all you needed to bring energy into your home or business was a wire. In 1910, just 14% of US homes had electricity. By 1930, it was 70%. Companies like GE sold millions of fridges and TVs and the grid grew fast. But things started to change in the 1970s when, thanks to the oil crisis, energy started getting more expensive. - So that's when the first big movements in energy efficiency began with major energy efficiency programmes run by electric utilities.
- That's Rich Miller, a former VP of Con Edison. New York City's power company, - Con Edison changed its slogan as a company in the 1970s from "Dig, We Must" to "Save a Watt." So you know a great example of how everything changed during that time period. - At the same time, rich countries started doing less manufacturing and more office work, which used less energy. - By the early 2000s, we really began to see some flattening of electric growth. - In fact, in western economies for the last two decades, electricity demand was either flat or declining. - So the grid, which had been growing nonstop for a hundred years, suddenly didn't have to grow anymore. And that was kind of nice while it lasted.
GDP kept growing while we used the same amount of electricity. But lately, energy demand isn't looking so flat anymore. - Now we're actually beginning to see a growth in demand and consumption again. It really is a three-part contributor. - It's moving from gasoline cars to electric cars, moving from oil furnaces and gas boilers to heat pumps, and of course the growth of artificial intelligence, which is powered by data centers that consume a lot of electricity. - Those industries could add a lot of economic growth, but they absolutely guzzle electricity.
According to one estimate, AI could boost the global economy as much as 15% over the next decade, but it could also use as much power as the entire country of Japan by 2030. - So meeting all that new electricity demand requires the entire grid to become bigger. And because it is the first time it's happening in three decades, the industry has been caught. I don't want to say it with its pants down. - If an industry doesn't build something for a while, it tends to have a hard time starting up again.
Supply chains, atrophy, infrastructure becomes outdated and run down and workforces dwindle and age out, that's what's happening with electric grids in many Western countries. But elsewhere in the world, some countries have their pants very much on. - China's been building its grid in real time. It's basically gone nonstop since the 1990s. So they still have a heavily, you know, employed skilled labour pool that they can pull from. And they have a supply chain that's mature and ready to grow as the needs are growing. - All that's been happening because it's had to. China does a lot of the manufacturing that western countries mostly stop doing, and the grid has had to keep up.
- In China, you still have pretty rapid economic growth. A bad year here is 5% growth, which is, you know, much higher than you normally see in developed economies like in the U.S. and Europe. And so whereas, you know, the U.S. has barely seen an uptick in power generation in China, power generation has gone up seven times since 2000. I moved to China 29 years ago. And the difference between now and then is just palpable. You know, I used to drive on my way to school and we'd pass, you know, people living in huts and hovels. Now, you know, in a city like Shanghai or Beijing, there's brightly lit skyscrapers.
- Energy is destiny. It decides whether your country has enough capability to do the things it wants. - And the countries that can't power new industries like AI and EVs just won't have as much of those new industries. - And so if as a country you're not able to build out the grid, you lose out on being a competitive economy in the 21st century. - For the rest of the world, keeping pace with China's fast growing grid isn't going to be easy, but the grid of the future isn't necessarily going to look like the grid of the past.
A new technologies to move electricity could be the key to getting ahead, especially for CEOs who can nail the photo shoot. - All right, gimme a real casual lean. Gimme the elbow lean. Nice. - My name is Tim Heidel. I'm the chief executive officer at Veir. Veir's building a new generation of superconducting power delivery hardware. - Here at Veir, liquid nitrogen is steaming, machinists are machining, and a whole new way of moving electrons is being commercialized.
- Expanding the grid is far too slow to meet the challenge that we're gonna see in the decades that come. We need new technologies and new approaches. We think superconducting transmission lines can play an enormous role. We can build lines that have a lot more capacity than what you've been able to build in the past. - So what is a superconducting cable? See, your typical power cable is made of a good conductor. A material that electric current can pass through without a lot of resistance.
The more resistance, the more energy gets lost along the way. Plastic has a lot of resistance, making it a bad conductor. That's why it's used for insulation. Copper and aluminium have low resistance, making them pretty good conductors. So we use them for most power cables today. Veir's cables on the other hand, are made of this stuff. - So I'm holding here a sample of the superconducting material.
It's a really special class of materials that in certain operating conditions, no longer have resistance. So when you can operate a material that doesn't have resistance, we can carry a lot more power in a very, very compact space. - Cables that can carry more power could be a big upgrade for the grid, helping move a lot of electricity to the data centers, homes and EV chargers that need it. They could also mean we don't have to build as much new infrastructure since one superconducting cable could carry as much power as several conventional cables. But first Veir needs to figure some things out, like how to keep its cables extremely cold.
- Yeah, so the cable, we have it in this test bed full of liquid nitrogen. The liquid nitrogen is like 77 kelvin, which is very cold. - In fact, it's somewhere between the temperature of space and the dark side of the moon. The cables got to be that cold to get into its superconducting state, so it can carry insane amounts of power. - Essentially, we use these large power supplies to put a lot of current into our superconducting cables. We're in like a pretty large building and that draws almost all the power from the building.
We have to like watch that the machine shop isn't using something powerful at the same time, so we don't overload the grid. Yeah. - When we visited Veir in 2025, the company was starting to produce 10-meter long sections of its cables on this assembly line. Uh, is this thing on? - We're going extremely slow. Typically takes about two weeks to make a cable. In normal cable manufacturing, you can't even see the real spinning.
It's spinning so fast. A lot of the manual things we're doing right now are gonna be automated and yeah, it'll be a much faster process. - Do you think about a future of these cables stretching across America, stretching across the world? - Um, I hope so. I really hope so. - Veir has raised a little over a hundred million dollars so far from investors, including Microsoft, and it says it aims to have its first cables on the grid within a couple of years. But none of this is easy or cheap.
The system needs vacuum tubes and a continuous supply of liquid nitrogen, which could add a price premium over conventional cables. And there's another issue, Veir's potential customers, electric utilities, aren't known for their high-tech risk-taking - It just can't be denied that utilities are conservative businesses. When you're worried about providing power a hundred percent of the time, you're gonna be very cautious about trying something new. - I don't know we'll ever seesuperconductors be the only choice in this field, but I expect that the power density that they can achieve will allow them to increasingly dominate conversations around future transmission systems.
- So will better cables moving more energy be enough to power the future? Well, even with better hardware, we still have to keep the grid stable. And lately that's been getting harder. - Large parts of Spain and Portugal have been hit by a power outage. Tens of millions of people now who are experiencing a total blackout. - It was the worst blackout in Europe's modern history, and it left millions of people in the dark. There were hundreds of people stuck in metros in trains, shops, and supermarkets couldn't operate because payment systems were down.
Spain's largest bank La Caixa, calculated that 400 million euros were wiped out of the Spanish economy - For most life without electricity was merely inconvenient or an excuse to party. And within about 18 hours, the power was back. But a blackout of this scale usually points to a larger problem. And this one has raised concerns about the very structure of the modern grid. - For now, what we know is that there was instability coming from some solar farms in southern Spain. - Spain has added a lot of solar power in recent years because, well, solar has a lot of advantages for a grid.
It's clean, cheap, and versatile, and as a result, it's growing exponentially, helping grids to keep up with rising power demand. But solar does seem to have played some role in the Spanish blackout. Not the sheep, though. The sheep are innocent. - A lot of people blamed renewables for the Spanish situation, but renewables did exactly what they were told to do, exactly what it said on the tin. You know, when you look back, it was a perfectly foreseeable car crash. - Guy Nicholson works for European power company, Statkraft and inside this building, guy's got a machine that he says could help prevent Spain-style blackouts.
- So this is a synchronous compensator. - Sorry, sinuous coffee maker? - Synchronous compensator. - What was it? Syllabus commentator? - A synchronous compensator, an electrical machine. It weighs a hundred tons. It's spinning round at 1500 rpm as you can see. - To understand why renewables can make problems for the grid and how this big spinny thing can help solve them, we need to dive a little deeper into the grid's, inner workings. For the grid to work properly, it has to be in perfect balance.
The amount of electricity being made has to match the amount being consumed second by second. If so, the voltage remains stable and everybody's happy. If not, the voltage can spike and the different parts of the grid start to disconnect to avoid being damaged. - It starts with something falling over that causes the next thing to fall over that causes the next thing. And you get this kind of domino effect where the whole grid goes down. - Now, if the system failed every time there was a slightest imbalance, but have blackouts every day. Fortunately the grid has a saving grace: inertia.
- And goes right the way back to Isaac Newton and the first laws of motion. A thing that is in motion, will remain in motion unless there is a force that acts against it. That property, which I am sure even if you've forgotten you all studied in high school, is called inertia. So when you have an object like a hundred tons spinning turbine, it'll continue spinning at that same rotation regardless of what's happening on the grid. - And these spinning devices can be found in any traditional power plant. They're the machines that actually make the electricity.
- Coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, all these have big spinning rotating generators, and those machines have a lot of inertia, a lot of spinning mass. - That inertia is like a little extra energy that the grid can tap in case of emergency. - So say suddenly a power plant goes down so you don't have supply and demand imbalance. The spinning device notices that something's gone wrong on the grid and uses the inertia that's been built up to inject just the right amount of power to keep the grid stable. In that instant, it loses a little bit of its rotational speed
and turns that energy into the electricity that the grid needs. And for most of the grid's history, this worked just fine. - But what's happening now on the modern grid is that you're adding things like solar that have no spinning devices in them. - Solar panels convert sunlight directly into electricity, meaning no spinning generator and no inertia. - And in the past five years, Spain has tripled the amount of solar it has added on the grid.
- So when a couple of solar plants suddenly went offline, there wasn't enough inertia to restore the balance and. lights out. - As we get more renewables on the grid, we are gonna need inertia. We at Statkraft, were very much thinking about this problem. - Which brings us back to this silly mush cogitater. Synchronous compensator. - Sorry, synchronous compensator. It's just like a spinning device you'd find in a coal or gas plant, but without the coal or gas, add enough of these
and your grid will have all the inertia it needs. Even with no fossil fuel power. - It's providing inertia to the grid, enabling the grid to run with more renewables. While we hear on the grapevine is Spain is possibly gonna do similar things. - Almost immediately after the blackout happened, the Parliament passed regulations that would allow for more types of devices like synchronous compensators to participate in stabilising the grid, - Making the necessary upgrades won't be cheap for Spain, but they'll probably result in more reliable and abundant electricity. Exactly what rich countries need to keep up with rising demand. But of course, not all countries have the money to make these kinds of investments,
and as a result, their grids have lagged behind. Sub-Saharan Africa has more people without electricity than any other region on earth, about 565 million. Grids are often limited to urban areas leaving large rural areas in the dark. But grids are growing here too. Just a different kind of grid. - It's just cheaper these days to build out a local mini grid. They're called mini because they are really much smaller than what typical grids are.
- Where a traditional grid can cover thousands of square miles. A mini grid typically serves a much smaller area like a small island or a village. This Nigerian village is beyond the reach of the main grid, creating an opportunity for private companies to bring electricity piecemeal. - Averagely mini grid serves about 400 community members. - Husk Power has installed dozens of solar mini grid across Nigeria.
- Our mini grids runs for 24 hours as who use our electricity to power up their appliances. like fans, TVs. Children cannot come back home and do their homework at night. - Electricity helps local businesses too by powering all manner of machines that help residents earn more income. Like this rice milling machine. Alright, it might be a far cry from a multi-billion dollar data center but every grid has to start somewhere. In the U.S. in the 1930s, the government spent billions electrifying rural areas extending the grid across the continent
and helping the U.S. to become the richest country on earth. In Africa, a similar project is starting a programme called Mission 300, backed by the World Bank aims to invest billions of dollars to get electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030. If all goes to plan in a few decades, Africa's grids might not be so mini anymore. - So you may start with a bunch of mini grids in Nigerian villages, which are then slowly interconnected into a grid. - If every citizen has access to electricity, right, businesses will prosper, the unemployment rate in the nation will reduce.
People will come up and do things for themselves, and life as a whole will be better. - As technologies change and economies grow, the world's grids are evolving in different ways and it's not yet clear which approach will lead to the greatest returns. But there's little question that the grid will keep growing, empowering modern life for a long time to come. - It's always hard to tell and predict what those next big steps are going to be, but the grid is never gonna go away. - The world has clearly hit an inflexion point when it comes to energy. All these new demand sources are gonna require more and more power.
- The grid isn't particularly glamorous and it's a big job keeping it going, but where there's grid, there's often growth. And that's a pretty good incentive to make the of the future the best that it can be.
