Why is it so hard to build big energy projects? The barriers that obstruct new infrastructure development, and how to get past them

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Energy Gang (July 7, 2026)

Episode Theme:
Why is it so hard to build big energy projects? The barriers that obstruct new infrastructure development, and how to get past them.

Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Ed Crooks of Wood Mackenzie, goes deep into the growing difficulties of building large energy infrastructure projects—especially in the United States—and explores what can actually unlock faster delivery, with real-world insights from one of the sector’s leading builders: Craig Albert, President and COO at Bechtel. The panel is rounded out by regular Melissa Lott (Partner, Microsoft), who brings a policy and technology lens to the discussion.

The episode covers:

• The specific regulatory, legal, supply chain, and workforce barriers to project delivery
• Real case studies from the nuclear, LNG, and solar sectors
• How lessons from one industry could transfer to others
• What could change through policy, permitting, and workforce reform
• What building big means for the energy transition and security

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Makes Building in the US So Challenging?

• Everyone Has a Voice:
  Craig Albert points out the positive intent: “One of the reasons it's so challenging in the US in particular ... everybody has a voice, every interest group has a voice. ... There's a lot of thought given to the ecosystem around that project, the environment, safety, community.” (09:28)
• The Irony of Long Timelines:
  “There's no energy transition without energy security. If we slow the path down to energy security because of long timelines to get jobs started, then you're actually slowing the path to energy transition.” (00:00 & 11:19)
• Permitting Complexity:
  Multiple agencies, duplicated reviews, and lack of deadlines lead to huge delays. “Right now you have to submit a permit application to five different agencies and ... there has to be deadlines. Industry lives with deadlines. Regulators have to live with deadlines.” (16:39)

Memorable Quote:

“The uncertainty in a construction timeline ... affects big projects and we see those effects amplified across big projects.”
—Melissa Lott (15:29)

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2. Comparing Systems: International Perspectives

• Australia’s Faster Process:
  Bechtel’s Sydney airport project: “It took two and a half years ... in the US that would take eight or ten ... And then we end up getting the job done early. Public infrastructure job done seven months early. It was unheard of.” (15:15)
• US vs Rest of the West:
  Issues like slow project delivery and regulatory delays are prevalent not just in the US, but also the UK, France, and other developed countries. (17:36)
• China Isn't the Only Benchmark:
  “When the playing field is level ... We’re actually more productive, better quality and safer and deliver better product.” (18:54)

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3. Beyond Permitting: Workforce & Supply Chain Constraints

• Labor as a Bottleneck:
  “We are turning work away ... The worst thing you can do for an industry is have a big failure on a job, that sends a wave of no confidence into the industry that's really tough to recover from.” (52:42)
• The Decline of Trades:
  “A good construction worker makes six figures. But somehow we are still a country that prioritizes college over the trades.” (00:24 & 61:29)
• Need to Value Craft Professions:
  “We have to restore the dignity to being a construction professional. … It’s a fantastic living.” (61:29)

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4. Lessons from Megaprojects: Case Studies

A. Vogtle Nuclear (Georgia)

• Atrophy of the Nuclear Supply Chain:
  After decades without new nuclear, skills and supply chains withered.
• Integrated EPC is Critical:
  “The number one lesson of Vogtle is that it was not an integrated EPC from the beginning … where you had one competent builder who could do all three things.” (29:17)
• Learning Curve:
  “Unit four was 30% faster [and cheaper] than unit three … it's pretty encouraging.” (27:56)
• Risk of Losing Capacity:
  If new nuclear lags, “all those gains you made, all those benefits ... don't get carried through into the future.” (31:53)

B. US LNG Export Boom

• Success Through Standardization and Scale:
  “32 trains, ... over half of the US's export capacity … all on schedule and all within budget, 100% every one of them.” (46:49)
• Deliberate, Repeatable Process:
  “The way we carry lessons and teams forward from unit to unit is very systematic and deliberate.” (46:49)
• Vertical Integration to Unlock Progress:
  “We fabricate our own pipe ... we decided to make our own pipe. We're constantly debottlenecking.” (50:30, 54:46)

C. Solar: Repeating Success

• Bringing Lean Techniques:
  “We are up at 15,000 panels per day in Indiana. ... using drones and machine-controlled feedback and automated piling, ... digital execution, integrated EPC.” (57:47)
• Permitting and Grid Connection as Remaining Hurdles:
  “Permitting is the biggest cost driver and getting connected to the grid is a big cost driver. ... Then it all comes back down to EPC again.” (57:47)

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5. What Changes Are Needed? (Policy, Regulation, Society)

• Permit Reform Is Key:
  “Permit reform and ... deadlines. ... That's number one and it's ... an unlocker.” (61:29)
• Workforce Development:
  • Expand access to trades training (e.g., Pell Grants for vocational education)
  • Change societal views: college is not the only path to success.
• Government's Role in Risk-Sharing:
  For nuclear: “Every party has to take a little more risk ... we are going to need a little help from the government.” (41:38)
• Leveraging Government Programs:
  “Those types of incentives improve the ROI ... the government's been really very supportive.” (44:51)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Building Decisions:
  “Once you've said, yes, we're going to do this, then you should be able to just go ahead and do it without unpicking that decision ... again and again and again.”
  —Ed Crooks (13:40)

• On Replicating Success:
  “If you do it right, if you really take the lessons deeply into consideration ... that was our role. Our role was we came in as the fourth contractor to just brute force it across the line.”
  —Craig Albert, on Vogtle (29:10, 24:11)

• On Vertical Integration:
  “By taking control of the supply chain, we also sped up the EPC process, and we basically moved pipe off the critical path.”
  —Craig Albert (54:46)

• On Societal Priorities:
  “Somehow we are still a country that prioritizes college over the trades. ... We have to restore the dignity to being a construction professional. It's a fantastic living.”
  —Craig Albert (61:29)

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Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment Highlight | |-----------|------------------| | 00:00 | The link between energy security and transition | | 09:28 | Why US (and other developed nations) face slow builds | | 15:15 | Australian vs. US permitting timelines | | 16:39 | The need for permit reform and clear deadlines | | 24:11 | Bechtel’s ‘rescue’ at Vogtle | | 29:17 | Lessons from nuclear and EPC integration | | 46:49 | LNG sector as a case study in big build done right | | 50:30 | Standardization and vertical integration thrill | | 57:47 | Solar build-out, scaling lessons from other sectors | | 61:29 | The trades crisis and changing perceptions of work |

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Summary & Takeaways

• Building big energy projects in the US (and comparable nations) is too slow, especially due to regulatory, legal, and permitting hurdles—with profound impacts on decarbonization and grid security.
• Success in sectors such as LNG and, increasingly, solar show that deliberate integration, standardization, and scale can deliver big projects on time and on budget.
• The human element—valuing trades, training a new workforce, and preserving expertise between projects—is as vital as policy or technology.
• Reforms must target faster permitting, shared risk (especially for nuclear), a changed narrative about skilled trades, and smarter government-industry collaboration.
• The energy transition requires not just innovation or aspiration, but the capacity—political, organizational, and social—to "build big" at the pace we need.

Memorable Closing Thought:

“Electricity doesn't arrive in my home by accident … it arrives here through infrastructure that has to be constructed and maintained and that takes people who understand that work.”
—Melissa Lott (64:32)

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For listeners who want a deep, practical look at the realities—and solutions—behind building the future of clean energy, this is an essential episode.

Transcript

[A]

And here's the irony is that you've heard the phrase there's no energy transition without energy security. If we slow the path down to energy security because of long timelines to get jobs started, then you're actually slowing the path to energy transition.

[B]

I was just thinking as Craig was talking about the difference between the words should and could. How long should these things take? How long could these things take? What are the compromises that we're willing to make?

[A]

A good construction worker makes six figures. Somehow we are still a country that prioritizes college over the trades.

[C]

Hello and welcome to the Energy Gang, a discussion show from Wood mackenzie about the fast changing world of energy. I'm Ed Crooks and on this show we're going to be talking about how big things get done. I think everyone who's interested in energy will know that it's very, very difficult to get new infrastruct built. It's particularly difficult to get it built on time and on budget. And that may be true most of all in the US but really it's a problem in all developed countries and in many middle and low income countries too. To talk about that, I am joined again by our good friend Melissa Lott. Melissa is a partner for energy at Microsoft. Hello, Melissa, how are you?

[B]

I'm great. It's early here on the west coast while we're recording and the sun is coming up to my right and I can hear the birds chirping. So that's a pretty good morning start.

[C]

I will say that is lovely.

[B]

Beautiful morning.

[C]

Yeah, it is not so early here in New York already. The sun is up and it's getting hot. I think they're talking about temperatures peaking at 101 degrees Fahrenheit, about 39 degrees Celsius today. An issue I think we're going to be talking about a little bit during the course of this show because it's certainly relevant to the question of getting infrastructure built. But yeah, so we're really, really living it right now. And of course, as always with you, Melissa, we have to tell people about your usual disclaimer. Anything you say on this show is your own personal opinion and not an official statement from Microsoft. So as I was saying, we want to talk about how big things get done and it's a great pleasure to welcome someone to the show who is facing those critical issues to do with construction, infrastructure development every day of his life. He's Craig Albert, who is the president and chief operating officer at Bechtel Corporation. Hello Craig. Welcome to the show.

[A]

Yeah, thank you very much. Good morning. Nice to see you both.

[C]

Thank you very much indeed for joining us. Now, something we always like to do with people who are new to the show is talk to them a little bit about their careers, how they got started and how they got to the roles they now hold, what career paths took them there. So perhaps, Craig, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get first started in working on these big infrastructure projects? And how did you get to that job you have at Bechtel?

[A]

Yeah. Okay. Good way to start. Thank you, Ed. So, first of all, I'm an engineer, and I think I realized that that was what I needed to be at a very young age. And I was always really fascinated by what a single engineer could do. And then early in my career, I started to realize that two engineers could do more than twice as much as one engineer, and the math sort of continues. And I got really fascinated by what could a thousand engineers do together and what kind of scale and what's possible. And so I was always really fascinated by that. And about eight or ten years into my career, I met Bechtel. Working together on a job. And as I got to know Bechtel, I kind of thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. What they do, building really, really big things that really matter, that serve an important need for the public, for industry, and they can do it anywhere, any size, anywhere. And I just sort of fell in love with that and so joined Bechtel 28 years ago. Have been on many, many different projects in many different positions in several countries, multiple industries, and really learned how to successfully build things, anything, anywhere. Also learned a lot about what not to do and which is often the best way to learn. And about seven years ago is when I was asked to take on this position that I'm currently in now as the president of the company. So it's been an adventurous love affair myself in big projects.

[C]

Right, Absolutely. As you say, perhaps at times a tortured love affair. We can get into some of the issues, as you say, around that, and some of the lessons about what not to do, I think was going to be a really important part of our conversation today. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about Bechtel as well as I think a lot of people will have heard of the company. People know the name. I think of you as it's an EPC company, right? Engineering, procurement, and construction. What exactly do you do? What is the role that Bechtel plays when a big project is getting built?

[A]

So first I would just say for those that don't know Bechtel, the people in the general public may not have heard of Bechtel because we don't usually deal directly with consumers in the retail market. Our customers are big industrial players. We are an engineer and a builder and we build really large things that only very few companies would even consider taking on. We are 128 years old. It's a really unique company. We can take on things that maybe publicly traded companies can't. We don't worry about quarter to quarter results. We really play the long game. So it gives us a lot of really, really good bandwidth and opportunity to get involved in a lot of different things. Epc, engineering, procurement, construction. So for anything to be built, engineering and procurement and construction have to be integrated. Has to be. What Bechtel does is we take on jobs where that integration is really needed more deeply. You know, the really big jobs, really complex or require significant speed or really big quality challenges. When the jobs get hard, the integration of those three things becomes more critical.

[C]

So give us some examples then. What are the kinds of projects that Bechtel's worked on or what other perhaps even specific projects are there examples of big bits of infrastructure that you have worked on that people might have heard of?

[A]

Yeah, we have quite a portfolio of jobs right now in a bit of a growth cycle in the industry. We are currently building 17 LNG trains, liquid natural gas liquefaction plants. 17 in the US on Australia. That's 85 million tons per annum. We have five major solar projects going on in the US including the first gigawatt size solar job in Indiana. We have an AP1000 nuclear plant that we're underway now in Poland we're building Terrapower's Natrium advanced reactor project. Wyoming we're working on the first utility scale light water small module reactor with the GE technology for Tennessee Valley Authority in Tennessee. We've got two really big semiconductor manufacturing plants underway now for intel and Micron, which was just recently announced, that'll be in New York. Copper concentrators in South America and Australia. We're building an airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and an airport in Perth, Australia. A lot of big jobs.

[C]

A lot of stuff indeed. Right, yeah, that's a very impressive list. And so certainly, as I say, if anyone knows about the challenges in getting those projects built and the obstacles and issues that you face, that's going to be you.

[A]

I think so, yeah.

[C]

Fantastic. Excellent. Well, let's get into that discussion then. So I mean as I Say, I think it's fairly sort of broadly accepted, I think probably across the political spectrum, probably in different countries around the world, that we have a problem with infrastructure. As I say, particularly I think in developed countries, it seems to be conventional wisdom now that we have made it too hard to build anything and that is leading to real problems in terms of economic growth, in terms of meeting energy demand, perhaps particularly in the context of AI driven increases in electricity demand. And it's made it too difficult to make progress with decarbonization because if the transition to lower carbon energy is anything, it's a massive project program of investment in new infrastructure. If you can't build that, you can't build a low carbon energy system. So I mean, perhaps before we start thinking about some of the specifics and some of the potential solutions. Would you agree with that general statement, Craig? I mean, do you think, is it broadly true that it's too hard to get stuff built?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I do agree with that. Too hard, maybe not the word too, but certainly much harder than it should be. And I think that is an issue. I do want to say maybe a point that I don't hear very often. One of the reasons it's so challenging in the US in particular and other developed countries, there's actually a positive reason. Before I go to constructive thoughts, the positive thoughts are, you know, doing work in the US everybody has a voice, every interest group has a voice. And when we, when jobs are planned in the U.S. there's a lot of thought given to the ecosystem around that project, the environment, safety, community. There's just, and that's not bad and it probably grew on us a little bit. But there are some real positive intended things by the difficulty of getting things done because you want them to be done. Well, the challenge, as you pointed out, is that the timeline, the permitting timeline, the policy instability, the resource constraints make it really, really difficult. And there's a lot of very significant implications that actually undermine the progress that we're trying to make. And you know, and if I could expand, I mean the implications are if you, if it's really hard and takes a long time to permit, it raises the cost to develop the job. It defers when you get to revenue service, it increases financing costs, reduces the percentage of the jobs actually to go forward and it hurts investability. And, and here's the irony is that you've heard the phrase there's no energy transition without energy security. If we slow the path down to energy security because of long timelines to get jobs started Then you're actually slowing the path to energy transition. And that's sort of the irony that I think a lot of people would be good for them to understand.

[C]

Right. So, Melissa, I know this is an issue that you and I have talked about many times. What's your take on this broad question of is it too hard to get infrastructure projects built?

[B]

I was just thinking, as Craig was talking about the difference between the words should and could. So it's how long should these things take? How long could these things take? And to your point, what are the compromises that we're willing to make? So around everyone having a voice? I mean, we've talked many times, Ed, and how big things get done. It's a book that we've talked about before. And then also the Speed of trust is something we've talked about and how nothing moves faster than the speed of trust. And so by having. Having voices involved, you have a lot of positives that help projects move forward. The uncertainty in a construction timeline, the uncertainty in when I can muster up. I mean, Craig, I'm sure you don't have this off the top of your head, but, I mean, do you have a single project that has less than 100 folks on site for if you're building an airport, I mean, that's thousands of people who are involved. And so when you have to marshal up that type of resources, there needs to be some path to understanding, some certainty around the timeframes. And I will say full disclosure, I went to school with a lot of civil engineers. I was rogue. I was mechanical and chemical. But a number of them have worked for Bechtel for decades. And they talk about these huge projects they're undergoing and the small town of people who are working on it in the offices and on the ground. And when you're talking about infrastructure projects that are that big, whether it's an AP1000, a huge solar project, an airport, I heard you mention. And man, the nerd in me wants to know more about how that kind of a project works. But there has to be a path forward to saying, once we've made a decision, we being a collective statement, how, once we've made a decision to build this, how do we actually move forward? Intentionally, productively, making sure that we're adapting when we need to, but also never losing our North Star in it. And so the idea of, should it take this long? How short of a timeframe could it take while still respecting and incorporating and keeping all of these good pieces that you just outlined, Craig, that's where My brain is going, Ed, I think we all can give examples of projects where, like, ooh, this could have taken a lot less time if we had not had these missteps.

[C]

And so that issue you raise, I think is a really interesting one about kind of taking a decision and then sticking to it. Is that your point? That, as you say, if once we as a society, involving everyone who is relevant and taking into account all the relevant considerations in terms of the environment, the economy, local communities, etc. Once you've said, yes, we're going to do this, then you should be able to just go ahead and do it with. Without unpicking that decision, constantly revisiting it, challenging it, overturning it again and again and again. Is that your point?

[B]

So when I'm thinking about your question, Ed, I'm thinking about. I wish I had one of my lawyer friends here to talk about nepa. You know, this process we have at the federal level in the US that we've talked about on the show, nepa.

[C]

The footnote we should always drop in the National Environmental Policy act, which is the kind of governing framework legislation in the United States for all infrastructure approvals, among other things.

[B]

And within that, what is the point of it? Let's take a look at projects, understand the impacts of it, understand what pathways we have to mitigate those impacts, and make a choice. Now, the choice is not part of nepa. NEPA is the process of actually identifying the impacts and identifying the different possible scenarios that you can move forward in. But I'll say it's a near universal piece of feedback I get from the folks who are coordinating the big NEPA projects and those processes where they're like, man, uncertainty about timelines, like, how fast is it going to happen? When do we do certain things? When is it done? When have we finished that process? But I also get that feedback from the communities that I work with. So different communities where they say, when do I put my voice into this process? When can I say, okay, we have closed that chapter of this discussion and I'm moving on to the next one. That uncertainty is certainly significant and it affects big projects and we see those effects amplified across big projects.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's a really good point that several points that Melissa's made, and, you know, one of the vantage points that we have is we're not just doing work in the US we are doing work in other developed countries and other developing countries, and we can see how the system works in other places and have some really good examples. And then maybe Some encouragement about, I think, where we're going with permit reform in the country right now that address a lot of the things we're discussing. So really we just finished an airport in Sydney, Australia. Very well done. Great respect for the community and environment and all the things that we're trying to protect with, with, with our regulation. It took two and a half years, only two and a half years from when they chose a site to, when they gave us the go ahead for full construction. Two and a half years. That would take eight or ten in the US and, and then of course, once it started, it was not interrupted, which often doesn't happen in the US there's often interruptions. So, and then we end up getting the job done early. Public infrastructure job done seven months early. It was unheard of.

[C]

Unheard of. Yeah.

[A]

So it can happen. And you know, the, the, the, the what's happening in the US right now is there's finally really good bipartisan support for permanent reform. And the things that we're talking about get it directly at this discussion how, you know, right now you have to submit a permit application to five different agencies and five different agencies are all evaluating the same things. So there's got to be a way to streamline, get rid of the redundancy. That's part of what the permit reform is about. There are no deadlines or consequences on an agency not issuing their conclusion. They can just drift. So there has to be deadlines. Other countries that do this have deadlines. Industry lives with deadlines. Regulators have to live with deadlines. So there's a few really specific things like that that can just make a huge difference in this challenge that we're talking about.

[C]

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And actually I want to just dig into that point about international comparisons because people talk about China a lot and they say, oh, they build all this high speed rail so quickly, they're building these new nuclear plants so quickly. Fine. The United States is never going to be China in terms of its political system. European countries are not going to do that. So China is probably not a great comparison. What I am interested in though is the question of whether the United States is noticeably worse in terms of these issues than other developed countries in, if you like, the West. And it does seem like if you look at, certainly in, in my home country, the United Kingdom, there are terrible horror stories about how long many big infrastructure projects have taken. If you look at high speed rail there or some of the new nuclear plants that they've been building, you know, that's Been true in France, in other European countries as well. It does seem to be a general problem around the world in many different countries. But question then, is there something which is specifically kind of unique to the United States, something about the American system that makes these problems particularly bad here?

[A]

I think we have to recognize that the intentions of the regulations in the US that take long are really good intentions and I think they do lead to better quality projects. In the end, it's just that it's overly penalizing industry and it might be causing us to suboptimize. We have to find a way to take the really well intended regulations and streamline them. You know, we compete with China in a lot of places around the world and when the playing field is level, we, we, we can beat them. And we, you know, in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans we go head to head with the Chinese on building motorways to. And when we have to play by the same rules and use the same supply chains and resources and they're not allowed to bring people from China to execute work in Serbia and they do it the way we do it, we win. We're actually more productive, better quality and safer and deliver better product. So we have to find a way to level the playing field with the things that are other than the actual project execution. If we can get it to where project execution is the only way we're competing, we can win.

[C]

Right, Because I was going to ask then, we've been talking quite a lot then about sort of political, regulatory, legal systems. Are there other issues that in Western countries make it hard to develop large infrastructure projects? Is it about the supply chain you just mentioned? Is it about the workforce? Is it about skills and capabilities, capacity in the industry, capacity in the EPC industry, for instance, that makes it hard to get this stuff done? Or from what you're saying, is it really those political, legal, regulatory issues that are at the heart of it?

[A]

My opinion is that the legal and regulation challenges are the primary contributor, but not the only contributor.

[B]

So I got a couple of different thoughts when I'm listening to you, Craig. And I want to make sure that I'm not a building a seven layer cake in my brain. And that's not how you're outlining it, but it's like when we look at the challenges of big projects, you're saying the regulations, the permitting, the policy environment is a primary challenge. It is very significant. But then, and this is why it's a cake in my head. So spoiler, that's what it is on Top of that we have. And I know we've talked about these aspects on the show Ed around supply chains and workforce challenges, which as an aside, in prepping for this show I ran across Yalls, what is it? Next Generation Builders program for high school girls in Ohio. So I'll camp build it. So that's really fun, but I'll park that for a minute. But when we go to the next layers, I'm hearing that there are more things that are shifting and changing in the environment and there's certain things you can do that add additional challenges to it. There's certain things you can do so you can start skidding up stuff in one country. You can start putting together something over here and then ship it versus shipping parts or pieces or constructing it over here. But there really are these. All of these challenges are piling up on top of each other and they all contribute just to lesser or more degrees. Am I building that right in my mental image of what you're trying to outline?

[A]

I think so. I think you are. I think that there's no layer in the cake that can't be improved and there's actions we're taking to improve every one of them. But fundamentally the word disadvantages, we'll have to call it a disadvantage that labor costs more. But you know, you really wouldn't want it any other way because you know, we, we have standards for, for how we treat people in the, in the workplace.

[B]

So within that, I've got one question which is how much of that cake is very much just general big projects and how much of it is really specific. So I'm thinking about nuclear. I was following Yalls announcements around your new office in GDASK in Poland and bringing in the new AP 1000 and, and in that whole transition away from coal that's going on in the country. And I was thinking through how much of this volume wise is very much just big infrastructure, big infrastructure things and how much of it is very specific to the type of infrastructure you're building.

[C]

Right. And that's a great segue actually to what I just wanted to ask about, which is. Yeah, well, yeah, because I think it's really helpful probably to look at specific projects in specific industries. And as I'm very interested to hear about what you're doing in Poland, wanted to look back at the experience of the last two big nuclear reactors built in the United States. Vogel in Georgia, Vogel 3 and 4, where Bechtel played a key role. You, you kind of arrived halfway through that project, didn't you? You were, I mean, essentially, as I understand it, sort of brought in to rescue it after the original companies working on it had some pretty severe difficulties. So, yeah, I mean, I was interested in hearing about your experience on that project, what you think you learned from it. And as Melissa was saying, then how do you apply that then to other projects you're working on in the future, including this job in Poland?

[A]

So let's talk about Vogel. In the nuclear business. The first thing that I would point out is that I really believe that the companies that took that on, Southern Company And Georgia Power, are national heroes for attempting the first greenfield nuclear project in America in 40 years. So I think there's a debt of gratitude to those two companies because that. That was so critical for. For us to make any progress in nuclear. Had to be. Somebody had to go first. And. And they did. We were brought in. We were actually the fourth contractor brought in. And, you know, we talked earlier about integrated epc, which I know we'll get into a little bit more. But on this job, the way it was set up, Westinghouse, the reactor supplier, was the engineer, and Southern and Georgia Power were the. Doing the p. The buying. And. And then they had a contractor doing the construction, the sea. So. So it was not integrated deeply from the very beginning. And. And there's also. There was a lot of atrophy. There's been a lot of atrophy in the. In the value chain in the US Nuclear atrophy, I would. I would call it so. And one of the things that we did in and Bechtel years ago, which I think is really good background in nuclear, is, you know, we. We designed or built two thirds of the nuclear power plants in the US over 30 or 40 years. And when after Three Mile island in Chernobyl, when we abandoned nuclear power as a future source of power, what we did in Bechtel was we moved our people to nuclear cleanup, nuclear propulsion, and nuclear deterrent. So we actually kept our nuclear capability. Other companies didn't do that. We did it because those were also really important missions. But we also believe nuclear power would come back someday. We just didn't know when. And so. So that kind of put us in a very unique position to still be able to reconstitute the nuclear capability, because we still had it, just not in the power sector. So when we got to Vogel, what we did was we resequenced the job. We prioritized design so that we would reduce, rework. We modified the work package approach, synced up material deliveries with construction. But really what we did was we worked with Southern and Georgia Power and Westinghouse, and we just plowed through it. You know, perseverance and fortitude and just got it done. And so many lessons learned. But to answer your question, that was our role. Our role was we came in as the fourth contractor to just brute force it across the line with people who understood from a nuclear context where we were.

[C]

Yeah. So as you say, then the nuclear supply chain in the United States had really atrophied over three decades and more. You had to acquire a lot of expertise and knowledge as you were working on it to get that project over the line, as you say, to get those two reactors completed, as you say, you acquired a lot of knowledge that way. I know it was said there was a factoid that was flying around, often quoted, that even just the knowledge you'd acquired on completing Vogel 3 then was very useful for Vogel 4, such that the costs of Vogel 4 were about 30% lower than for Vogel 3. Is that correct? That, as I say, I've seen people make that claim.

[A]

Yeah. Yes, that is accurate.

[B]

We.

[A]

Unit four was 30% faster, and that would translate directly into cost than unit than Unit three. And keep in mind, that's construction only. And so you can imagine, if you take all the EPC lessons, what would that mean for another unit after Unit four at Vogtle? You know, it's actually quite encouraging to get 30% just in construction alone, just on construction productivity, without ever having an opportunity to adjust the engineering procurement aspects of Unit four. So it's pretty encouraging. What it did for us in the industry was, you know, a lot of people, I totally understand the blowout of Vogel and how that might discourage people from wanting to go into nuclear. It would be. Could be portrayed as a failure. That is not how we look at it in the industry. We look at it as an argument for what's possible, as opposed to an argument against. If you. If you do it right, if you really take the lessons deeply into consideration. And I'd be happy to go over some of the key lessons, but yeah, we do, actually.

[C]

I'd be interested to hear them. I'm sure Melissa would be as well. Tell us what you think the key lessons were.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. So the first one gets back to how we started this entire podcast, and that is what's an epc? And I mentioned that E and P and C always have to be integrated to build anything. What it means for Bechtel is EPC means you are the principal, we are the principal. Designer, the principal buyer and the principal builder. And with competent people, single company integrated platform tools that use the same data in each of those three phases, E and P and C. And you optimize your execution for the total cost, your engineering to buy the right things and to build efficiently. And it's all very, very deeply integrated. And that was the key number one lesson of Vogel, is that it was not an integrated EPC from the beginning where you had one competent builder who could do all three things, doing all three things. And I know we'll get into some other industries later of where we have proof points and precedents of how that works, but that was the number one lesson. Set the requirements early in a really informed way for how it'll impact engineering and procurement and construction and design for field productivity and minimization of rework. So that's all that big. Lesson number one and just a couple more I'll mention, you really have to invest in training early. And we partner with the trades, I mean nabtu, North American Building Trades Union, they're like us, we're partners, a deep partnership and they're a fantastic partner. And you have to invest really early in understanding your labor challenge. And you can't just stumble into it. You have to understand what labor can do, what assistance is needed, what kind of training needs to be done. You have to invest, you have to get out to the colleges and the high schools and you just have to be, you have to, you can't underinvest in the human side of building these jobs and you just can't wait and react same for the supply chain. You have to invest much earlier. You have to understand what your supply chain is capable of. You can have a great design, but if the supply chain can't deliver it, it's not a great design. And so much greater insight into the supply chain. And those are some of the key high level lessons.

[C]

So what I wonder is, do those lessons then get forgotten? So what I mean is you've had this fantastic amount of learning by doing, you've developed all this capability in the workforce and in the supply chain. You've driven down the cost such that Vogel 4 cost a lot less than Vogel 3. Presumably the right thing to do at that point would have been to go on to build Vogel 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 or other similar plants wherever they might have been to take advantage of all that capability you've built up. If you don't immediately move on to new projects, how big of a risk is there that that whole Supply chain and everything just atrophies again. The workforce goes off, people take other jobs doing different things and so on. And so all that, all those gains you made, all those benefits you acquired from doing the hard work at Vogel don't get carried through into the future.

[A]

Yeah, so this starts to get back to the point that Melissa mentioned. A lot of the lessons I just described are actually not unique to just nuclear. You know, these lessons of integrated EPC have been learned in the LNG market, in the combined cycle power market, in airports and metro systems. Integrated EPC is typically poor. Integration is typically the cause of project blowouts and good integration is usually the cause of a success. Where nuclear is unique is. It's a different language. The quality requirements are unique, the way you trace materials is unique. And so there are additional requirements in nuclear and, and you don't want it to atrophy again. But I just want to make sure folks understand that the bigger issue here is just good old fashioned pure execution. And it's not just a nuclear issue in the nuclear world. We have such an opportunity now to reverse the atrophy, reconstitute it and hopefully if we're successful, it doesn't happen again, not in my lifetime.

[C]

Right, and so you're working on this one other project in Poland then. And what, there's the expectation hope that there'll be more AP1000s built in the US I know we've had quite a few, we've had some statements about that from the administration or the administration's keen to press ahead with new nuclear construction. Doesn't seem to have been that much actual activity so far. Not so many contracts being signed. What's your sense of how that's going?

[A]

I wish it were going more quickly but. But things are happening and I, I think I mentioned natrium. That's not an AP1000, but it's an advanced reactor and we're building a. We are in construction in Wyoming and.

[C]

Sorry. So which one is that then? That's one of the, that's kind of new advanced reactors.

[A]

That's the TerraPower project that Bill Gates is the principal investor in. And it's sodium cooled reactors and, and it's in, it's got their, they got their NRC license which is a huge. To construct, which is a huge accomplishment. It was the first, it's the first advanced reactor or SMR construction license and that's just a few months ago. So quiet progress, but definitely progress. And I'm aware of some of the larger nuclear utilities in the country that are seriously evaluating AP1000 deployments and lining up their investors and regulators and soliciting information from industry. And I so, so things are happening and I do believe that, I do believe that it'll happen in the same way. Vogel hopefully inspires someone to go second. Somebody who goes second will inspire someone to go third, fourth and fifth a lot more quickly.

[B]

Yeah. So just to baseline some of this, one thing I just wanted to review for folks who didn't follow or live Vogel very closely in terms of the overall timeframe. I mean it was a 14 year process roughly. And I'm thinking through it in terms of when an EPC could should we won't go into those pieces of it be involved, but it was March of 2009 when the Georgia Public Service Commission was approving that expansion project on Voelkal to add those. I think the first nuclear concrete was poured in 2013, so roughly four years later. And then it was roughly four years later when y' all got involved. Craig. So it was 2017 when y' all were stepping in. And then fast forward it was in the spring of 2023 when unit three came on and I think unit four followed roughly. Was it nine, ten months later, something like that? Yeah. And so I think about that and just as a high level to this question, it's like if we can translate a lot of lessons learned that are non nuclear specific and then layer on all the nuclear specific pieces of it and do the same for other big energy infrastructure projects, whatever they are, whatever fuel they are in. It feels like there is the first few years that's getting approval from the Public Service Commission, that's getting approval from the nrc. That's a lot of stuff that just has to happen. But it's really in that 2013 onwards and the run up to that 2013, pouring in the first concrete that we can do things to actually shorten up timeframes to give more certainty in terms of when this sucker is going to land and get commercially connected and actually be providing large amounts of electricity to the grid. Is that, is that fair to say in that way?

[A]

Yes, I think that I can't think of any of the periods from 9 to 13, 13 to 17 and 17 to 23 that didn't have significant speed up opportunities. Every aspect, even the decision to pour concrete in 2013, the minimum requirements to do that were met. But in hindsight, was there enough engineering maturity and supply chain maturity to financially justify that? Hindsight would say we should have waited at the time I might have done the exact same thing if I were there when that was happening. But there's no one part of the system in that whole 15 year period, 14 year period that didn't have a lot of opportunity to speed up.

[B]

And within that ad I'm thinking about to your question, this is where this popped into my head was, okay, if we want to not lose lessons learned, if we want to keep kind of the train running down the tracks and not have it slow down for a bit, then there's certainly that initial, before the first pouring of concrete where it's like lining up projects. I mean, even before 2009, there was a lot of work that went into actually getting approvals, having the concept for where these things are going to land, but that bigger plan, but without that kind of front work, we probably can't realize a lot of these opportunities. But lining up projects so that we can realize those opportunities say, okay, we learned this here, let's bring it over here. That's a pipeline of projects challenge.

[C]

And that does, does it not depend in large part on the economics of those projects, which at the moment for new nuclear in the United States are pretty marginal? If the market alone is going to drive what people are building, people will be building new gas fired generation and new renewables and new storage. And those are the things which will give you the lowest cost power supply and get it to market the quickest. Which is, as we've discussed many times on the show, a particularly important issue at the moment for everyone interested in data center development and AI. So does that mean, I mean, Melissa, I don't know what you think about this, but does it need a lot more government action then to put the economic frameworks in place before you get to any of these issues about how the projects are actually delivered? You know, the country needs to decide collectively we actually want new nuclear because as I say, if you leave it just to the market, it's not going to happen.

[B]

I think there's opportunities across the board. I don't think that you need to have absolute certainty in terms of what the total pipeline looks like to move forward productively with the projects that are in the pipeline and to be having this integrated approach to that can speed stuff up and make things, you know, land closer to on time, closer to on budget in some cases that you talked about ahead of time, and maybe there's some examples we could talk about ahead of budget or lower spending than expected is a more accurate way of saying that. It certainly helps though, Ed, and that is kind of the point I was driving at, which is how do you balance the decision making under uncertainty principles here? So we do have some uncertainty. We can't get rid of all of it, of where the next project is going to land, but then not lose these learnings in the meantime. And I think, Craig, y' all have a different perspective than most anybody because you do this internationally. So, okay, we don't have a pipeline here, but we have these things going over here. My number I came up with, I'll say is that y' all have been involved in more than 150 nuclear power plant.

[A]

I mean, that sounds. Yeah, that sounds right now. Now, most of those, you know, most of those were in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But since the 80s, there have been, in the U.S. we, there have been a few completions, jobs that were paused after Three Mile island got continued and completed. And we're the ones that did all of those. They were in the 90s and the early 2000s and even the teens, Watts Bar, Browns Ferry, we did finish those nuclear jobs. So we, we never, there was never a decade where we weren't building one, even though the people thought the industry wasn't. But what I would say about the feasibility, the financial feasibility in the US today, first of all, the regulatory system, the nrc, they're ready and that is not the bottleneck. And so we're in a really good position. I believe with the NRC's readiness and willingness, there's really good policy and public support right now. It's growing. And I don't think that's going to be the issue. The need for the power, really high quality. You know, there's a big difference in the power quality. When it's nuclear power, it's online all the time. It's very steady. It's high, high quality power, which is what the data centers need. And so there's a really significant demand for this type of large scale, high quality power. And I believe the return on investment parameters do work. However, there is a commercial hurdle right now in the next couple of units. And what I mean by that is it's still early in the cost curves maturation. As you go from serial number one to serial number two to serial number three, there's a phrase, you know, how quickly can we get to nth of a kind cost and schedule. Yep. And Vogel is like serial number one. And so there's still cost overrun risk that has to be dealt with. That's the hurdle that we have to get past what we've been out touting is every party has to take a little more risk to make this happen. We do, Westinghouse does, the utilities do. Everybody's got to take a little more. And then we are going to need little help from the government if we can get past that hurdle. I think it all works and we'll get into that pipeline of work that you're mentioning.

[C]

Yeah, that's really interesting. And of course, I mean one of the things about this is that it just because each individual project is so big, because they end up being tens of billions of dollars, as you say, then the risk of that going wrong for a specific company can be. Yeah. Enormous. It has huge impact on you or could have a huge impact on you. To that point, then, as you say, government backing being very important. I know the administration has talked quite a lot about the role of the Energy Dominance Financing Group, the, the old loan programs office as it was, that clearly could play a very useful role in backing nuclear projects. I think they've got resources already allocated by Congress to do that. Is that something you think is going to turn out to be important?

[A]

Yes, it is. First of all, every little bit helps and those types of incentives improve the roi. And if the ROI is improved, then the parties that are taking on the project have more capacity to absorb overrun risk. But there's still the issue of the last tranche of overrun risk. And, but, but, but those things that the government's doing absolutely helps and they've, and the government's been really very supportive and encouraging of industry and the government wants industry to go faster. Yeah, so, so it's very. Yeah, those are really helpful.

[C]

What are. Just to think about some other examples from the energy industry and perhaps some very clear success stories in particular interested in building LNG plants. So general view, it is too expensive and takes too long to build large infrastructure projects in the US LNG plants, it seems like, have been a pretty outstanding exception to that in that the industry has grown very, very rapidly. I think the first FID for a new LNG export plant in the US was in 2012, maybe 2011, since when capacity has absolutely rocketed. US is now by some distance the world's largest exporter of lng and it is growing very fast. There's a huge wave of construction now underway and I think great majority of those projects built by yourselves and by others have come in on time or thereabouts and on budget thereabouts. I wouldn't claim there's been no cost inflation. Certainly there's been some, but in general that industry really seems to work. Other particular lessons do you think that other energy sectors could learn from the LNG industry and what it's got? Right.

[A]

One of the things I mentioned earlier about, when I mentioned earlier that a lot of the challenges that the nuclear industry. Just one more point on the nuclear industry that face is the more generic challenge of just large scale EPC and not necessarily nuclear specific. Two different things and two different issues. To be clear, the, the cost of the EPC is always the most dominant cost of delivering a project. The, the equipment from the technology provider whether it's the compressors for a LNG plant or the reactors for a nuclear power plant or the, or the, or the turbine generators for steam turbine for a combined cycle plant. Those, those are the things that get everybody's attention and tickles everybody's fancy because they're technical and, and, and it's really exciting. But, but the fact is those things are generally less than one third of the cost of, of these jobs and the cost is in the EPC and that's where all the people are and that's where the costs are. And what we learned in lng, it's not not only their lessons, it's the model and it's, and it's what we're, it's the model that we're touting because it's a fantastic example. We, we've done, we've delivered 32 trains that are operating today that we delivered this century since the early 2000s, mid mid mid 2000 knots, 32 trains, 120 million tons per annum. It's one third of the world's capacity, over half of the US's export capacity. And it was all on schedule and all within budget, 100% every one of them. We didn't have any that didn't achieve the contract schedule. But you got to trace the roots of that back earlier to before the turn of the century when somebody was doing them first and there was overrun risk and there were things to be learned. And so the LNG industry went through what the nuclear industry needs to go through and the LNG industry is what sort of puts the North Star of what's possible like this can be done. And we're now doing. We just turned over six Corpus trains, Corpus Christi trains for Cheniere. Six trains in the past year and every one of them was breaking new records of time to market. So we're still breaking records at 32, 17 and we have 49 trains between done and doing. So there's a lot of encouragement there. And these are capital intensive jobs, compressed timelines. They require deep integration of enpnc. We're doing heavy digital delivery. The, the way we carry lessons and teams forward from unit to unit is very systematic and deliberate. And it is absolutely north, the north star for nuclear. And that's how we're approaching it.

[C]

That's really interesting. And so then basically volume is crucial then is it. It's being able to do essentially the same project or very similar projects over and over and over again. As you say, to get to that point where you're at kind of nth of a kind where the one you're going to do, you know, the N plus one and the N plus two are very much like the N which was like the N minus 1 and the N minus 2. That these are, you know, just things that are completely repeatable and standardized.

[A]

Yeah, that's exactly right. The engineering is done to optimize construction. The data is integrated between E and P and C. The tools talk to each other. We just take the risk of rework out of the system. Another thing that we do in lng, which is a really good lesson for nuclear is we've done it so well now that when we see an LNG job, we see like a organism and our job is to debottleneck it. It's like an assembly line almost and our job is to debottleneck it. So every single time we find a bottleneck in the process, we take control of that bottleneck. So for example, we fabricate our own pipe. Now pipe is the critical path of these jobs. We kept running into problems with pipe suppliers, so we decided to make our own pipe. We're constantly debottlenecking. And that's a great lesson in, in nuclear as we mature.

[B]

When you talk about a train with lng, so that's. What is it. It's a. It's an independent liquefaction unit and purification unit. Right. So taking that natural gas into and making into lng. Right. So when we talk about trains, that is. That is not small. That's a big. That's a big. A big one. So I just want to know these

[A]

are 10, these are 10 and $15 billion contracts for one train.

[C]

That is, that would be.

[A]

Or for a three train plant. You're in the 15 billion range.

[C]

Gotcha.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But then the second thing is I've got two things that I know this came up when we were talking before the show a little bit and when you and I were talking. But I also want to come back to like the workforce piece of this. So when you're able to go from LNG to LNG to LNG to LNG with the same or very similar workforce, you got a lot of folks who carry through them. You carry the lessons through. Through really similarly. So I've got two pieces that I'm thinking through, which is how much of this can be transferred to other projects, other energy projects, back to what we were discussing earlier. But the second thing is, I mean, the workforce is not infinite. And so, you know, when do you start hitting on those really uncomfortable places where you say, I mean, I've got a good lesson learned. I don't have the person to help me translate it to this next project if I want to.

[A]

That, yeah, that is definitely a factor. Melissa, we have a phrase in our company that we're paced by the capacity of our talent. And we can't, you know, we can't take on something we don't have the capacity to perform. And we are turning work away. To this day, we are turning work away because of this, but we won't take something on if we don't have. When we do our planning, we actually think through from the designers to the, to the craft professionals to the startup engineers. We were thinking, who are these people? Where are they coming from? By name to a large degree, and at what pace can we onboard new people. At one time, we were doing one LNG plant only, and then we went to two at a time and then three at a time. And now we're doing six different plants at a time by growing capacity. So we are doing that. But, you know, you have to be really mindful of the. Your ability and because the worst thing, the worst thing you can do for an industry is have a big failure on a job, that, that, that sends a wave of no confidence into the industry that's really tough to recover from.

[C]

A big failure in the sense of what you mean being cost overall. Yeah, got it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, my brain, I've got another question, but my mind goes to. If you don't do that, you lose trust, you lose confidence, and everything becomes a problem. So it's a very intentional investment there. But around this, you also mentioned pipes. I have to ask. So I live in Transformers world a lot of my life and other pieces. And so when you think about the things that are getting in your way of delivering on time, on budget, okay, so you got pipes. And you said, you know what, we're going to do it. We're going to pull that in closer. What are the other Things top of mind for you as you look at the. I'm focused on the energy portfolio, obviously, but, like, what pieces of that puzzle. Is it pipes across the board or is it other things that you're like, we may have to pull this one in closer to. To get the job done.

[A]

Yeah, we do it all the time. It's. It's actually one of the most fun parts of my job because Bechtel has the. The capacity, you know, we have the strength to do it when we see it needs to be done. It started. It's actually started a long time ago. We. We just. We basically fabricate our own pipe. Big spools, and. And it. Not only did it de. Risk the supply chain for us, but it allowed us to speed up the process of fabricating pipe. It's a very, you know, engineering feeds the requirements, and then. And then the fabricator gives information to construction. And there were a lot of handoffs. So by taking control of the supply chain, we also sped up the EPC process, and we basically moved pipe off the critical path. Like it's no longer the critical path of our work. It's amazing. We did it with steel. Just three years ago, we replicated our pipe strategy with structural steel. So now we fabricate our own steel. We get the steel from the mills, but then we fabricate the part that takes long. We do that ourselves now. We. We do it with labor in the sense that we have our own welding organization. And because welders are really hard to come by, and. And. And so we decided we would just have our own welding organization that we could call upon for some of the more complicated welding and not have to go to market every time. So we do it with people. We build our own LNG tanks, and we used to rely on other contractors to do it, but it got to the critical path, and it replaced pipe on the critical path. So we started doing the tanks ourselves. And so that's sort of. That's sort of a Bechtel way of doing things. We call it vertical integration. Vertically integrate to get control.

[B]

Sure. And pick the pieces on that. And am I right? I think, Ed, you flagged this. That Bechtel, this primary source of steel, is it from the uae? Did I remember that right?

[A]

Yeah, that's right.

[B]

For your world dynamics around that and just how that plays in. But I'll leave that one for the moment.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Go ahead, Craig. Sorry.

[A]

Oh, no, I was just gonna say. Yeah. UAE is where we made an investment. We source a lot of steel in the US And. And we do a lot of work with the steel fabricators in the US to better integrate with our engineering, but we don't have, we don't have a asset in the US that we, that we own and control in that way.

[B]

Yep, understood.

[C]

Yeah. And so when you talk about repeatable projects in energy, I guess the same is true with solar and wind. Right. That those projects are being built over and over and over again in very similar ways and that's been a crucial factor in contributing to being able to drive down costs for solar and wind power around the world. Is that right?

[A]

Yeah, it's more right than what a lot of people would think actually, you

[C]

know, solar, since there's, you know, good. Sorry. Going. What do you mean?

[A]

Well, in the sense, in the sense that people think it's simpler and maybe these things don't apply and, but that is not the case at all. I always like to tell people if the work is technically simpler then you have to, then you have a higher expectation for how well it can be done and, and that, and then everybody's trying to do it as best as they possibly can and competition kicks in and, and the definition of world class is just different. But it's still, the phenomena is still there. Solar has all the same matters. The permitting is the biggest cost driver and getting connected to the grid is a big cost driver. But then once you get those things done, then it all comes back down to EPC again and how efficiently you can build. With the five jobs that we have in the U.S. we, we took an industry that it was doing like maybe two or three thousand panels a day erected and we are up at 15,000 panels per day in Indiana. 15,000 panels per day. I had a conversation with the, one of the CEOs of the panel suppliers and they didn't, couldn't believe, they didn't even imagine that their own product could be installed that quickly. And it's because we're using drones and machine controlled feedback and automated piling and, but you know, digital execution, integrated upc. It's happening in solar and we're bringing the cost curve down and the scale of, you know, gigawatt scale now, you know, it's, it's, it was the vision of solar was to get to this scale and we're, we're kind of there and we're, it doesn't get as much attention in the country today, but we're, we're, we're, we're doing all of everything.

[C]

Yeah, no, that's fascinating and because as I understand it as the cost of the panels has come down and down and down, all those other things, everything to do with construction, balance of plant grid connections, guess the racks that the panels are mounted on, all of that, all that stuff becomes relatively more significant, relatively more important to the overall economics of the project and therefore something that it really makes sense to focus on. And actually, if you look at kind of all in system costs of construction of solar in the United States compared to other parts of the world, it's still relatively high. Right. The United States is one of the absolutely highest cost locations for solar construction. And so everything you can do to bring that down, say, not through working on the panels, but through working on everything else, is going to be really important.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. We're going to have to embrace automation.

[C]

Right. So I see we're getting a bit short of time, so I must get to the issue then, which I'm particularly interested in, about what could be done better, kind of at a social and political level to expedite these projects. You've talked quite a lot, Craig, about what you specifically have done at Bechtel. You've talked about the conditions that can exist in an industry to make infrastructure development more efficient. You've talked about the way developers need to think about projects. We touched a little bit on this earlier on, but just in terms of the regulatory framework, the legal framework, the things that could happen with permitting reform, what specifically would help you if I'm sure you do talk to members of Congress, talk to people in the administration, and you could say to them, this is what we really need. What are the things you'd ask for?

[A]

So what we do, we're right in the middle of it, advising on policy and sharing our views. And the good news is the government wants our views, which is always helpful. We have found that to be true across different administrations. So that's, that's pretty encouraging. You know, we discussed permit reform and I think that is, that's number one and it's to it because it'll just, it's just an unlocker. The, the next one is labor. And we have been working really hard and well with the government on this and you know, construction, labor, everything where you're talking about and, you know, the way I describe it, everything. We're talking about all these assets that the world needs for AI and more power and more transportation systems. Every one of these things sits on concrete, steel, electrical instruments, wires, you know, and that's, that's installed by craft professionals. And there are not enough of them in The United States. And, and, and we have to change the way we speak about the craft profession in our country. It's an honorable, highly respected, almost heroic living. It's very different today than it was years ago. A good construction worker makes six figures. But somehow we are still a country that prioritizes college over the trades. And, and we go about. And our generation, and my parents generation, sort of, we did this and it was wrong and it was a mistake and we have to restore the dignity to being a construction professional. It's a fantastic living. You can, you know, you could be 19 years old and making $100,000 and not have any debt and have a car and a place to live. You know, it's just complete. So and so we've been working with the government, like on how do you. How do you take the Pell Grant system and make it. And make a vocational education qualified for a Pell Grant? That's now passed. So. But that's the second area where government help is needed in changing the mindset of the country on what success means in America. It doesn't necessarily mean going to college and wearing a tie. Those days are gone and we have to fix that.

[B]

You're giving me a. You're making me remember a book that I read a while ago by Michael Sandel called the Tyranny of Merit. And it talks about how we measure success and failure and how we think about credentials and how we think about what a path to success looks like and how that's evolved over time. And it's like, oh, you went to this college or this thing, so you've succeeded. And it's like, oh, and how we think about that as a society. A discussion for another day in depth. It's a really good one, I think, Ed, I might have mentioned on the show a year or so ago when I was reading it a year or two.

[C]

You did? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

It's. It's a really. But this is a very important point to highlight just the. The value of those jobs and then the importance of those jobs and the importance of people who do that work that. Look, the electricity doesn't arrive in my home or anywhere else by. By accident and it arrives here through infrastructure that has to be constructed and maintained and that takes people who understand that work and. Yeah, I'm going to stop myself now because we do not have time to today's discussion. But it's such an important point.

[C]

You're right. This is a fascinating topic. There's so much more that we could say about this. Unfortunately we can't though because I know we have to end it here. And Melissa, you have to go, don't you? So let's wrap up the discussion now. But it's been fantastic talking to you both. Thanks very much indeed. Thank you very much, Craig, for joining us.

[A]

Yep, my pleasure. Thank you guys very much.

[C]

Great to see you again, Melissa. They will be talking again very soon.

[B]

Yeah, it was great to see y'.

[C]

All.

[B]

Craig, I really enjoyed this discussion. I've got so many notes written down of follow ups I have and things that rabbit holes. I wanted to have a great conversation like appreciate it.

[C]

I, yeah, I do agree. I feel like we've only scratched the surface. But yeah, plenty more discussions to be had on this topic and certainly it's been fantastic hearing your perspective, Craig. I've learned so much from this discussion just that we've had right now. Many thanks to our producer, Molly Merwin and above all, as ever, many thanks to all of you for listening and watching. We really value your feedback. Please do keep it coming. Send us a message, leave a comment and we'll be back very soon with all the latest news and views on the future of energy. Until then, goodbye.