Line of Sight Podcast · Don Heider PhD, Brigit Helms PhD

A Moonshot Focused on the World’s Electric Grid with Page Crahan

·39 min·2 clips

There is more clean energy waiting for permission to be built than all the energy the U.S. uses in a year.

1. Line of Sight Podcast talks with Paige Crahan about X’s Tapestry project and the electric grid. 2. Bridget Helms and Don Heider host Paige Crahan, who works at X and previously led commercial roles at Sunrun and other startups. 3. The episode asks what Tapestry is trying to solve in a grid system that has not kept up with rooftop solar, EVs, and weather-driven power. 4. Crahan says she came to Santa Clara University because her father, uncle, aunt, and cousins all attended, and she grew up in Iowa. 5. She says she became an economics major after liking the logic of how people make decisions and how the world works. 6. She describes a path from law-firm work in environmental practice to meeting Lynn Jurich, the founder and CEO of Sunrun, in 2006 or 2007. 7. Crahan says she joined Sunrun in 2008 when it had fewer than 20 people, and she called her father to discuss quitting her job for a solar startup. 8. She frames her lesson for people entering climate work as “It doesn’t matter” if they did not study climate, because curiosity and learning can get them started. 9. Crahan explains that X is Alphabet’s innovation lab and that its mission is to invent and launch moonshot technology that can become an enduring business. 10. She says Tapestry began with a small team around 2018 and is focused on the electric grid because the system is still run much the same way despite major changes around it. 11. Crahan says the grid problem is about adding new technology, partnerships, and information so the electricity network can stay reliable, low-carbon, and affordable. 12. She says Tapestry is aimed at enterprises, utilities, policy, and other system stakeholders rather than consumer-facing products. 13. Crahan gives the U.S. interconnection queue as a concrete example and says there is more clean energy waiting for permission to be built than the energy the U.S. uses in a year. 14. She says grid operators may need four, five, six, or seven years to tell a developer whether a solar or wind project can connect. 15. Crahan says Tapestry’s grid planning tool is meant to “100X the planning process” by giving operators better information while preserving reliability. 16. She says the tool is already being used by Chile’s national grid operator to run forward-looking scenarios for a coal-decommissioning plan. 17. Crahan says AI and machine learning fit this work because the team needs probabilistic models for a grid run by weather, not only deterministic forecasts based on past data. 18. She describes a street-view model in Michigan that identified a six-inch slipped pin on grid equipment and a weather model in Chile that improved wind forecasting using GraphCast. 19. Crahan’s tone is technical but conversational, with examples from Chile, Michigan, South Africa, and the U.S. throughout the interview. 20. People working on climate, energy, software, or grid policy would likely follow this closely, while listeners wanting a light general chat about startups may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical conversation about the grid, the operators behind it, and the tradeoffs of changing it.

This episode treats the electric grid as both a climate challenge and a systems challenge. Paige Crahan makes the mechanics easy to follow without flattening the complexity: weather variability, probabilistic modeling, mini-grids, and the constant pressure to keep the lights on…

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Why you'd press play

If you want the grid explained without the usual hand-waving, start here.

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