theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Powering Tomorrow | Dylan Morris, Stone Power

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Dylan Morris

Founder & CEO

Stone Power

play_circle_outline Stone Power Uses AI to Accelerate Design of Large Heat-to-Power Turbines Serving 80% of Global Grid Energy

play_circle_outline Scaling Turbine Manufacturing for Data Center Demand Amid Incumbent Supply Constraints Through 2031

play_circle_outline Hiring needs: mechanical and machinery engineers, turbine hardware experience, AI specialists

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Dylan Morris, Stone Power

Dylan Morris

Founder & CEO Stone Power

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John Furrier

>> Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Well, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here in our NYSE Cube studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. So our deep tech conversations around Powering Tomorrow, which is a play on words, but it's about the energy impact. AI is bounded by energy. There's huge demand for it. Dylan Morris is the founder and CEO of Stone Power. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.

Dylan Morris

>> Thanks for having

John Furrier

>> me, So you're an entrepreneur. You're tackling the power problem. You guys have a unique approach. First, explain what you do, then we'll get into how you got there.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.So we are— Stone Power is manufacturing large power generation turbines. We are an OEM. We're going up against the legacy incumbents, and we're doing that with really solving two problems. One is how to design a turbine faster. So we're injecting AI into our product development cycle. And then secondly, we're manufacturing them faster. So we're designing for manufacturing as well as building factories larger than I've ever

John Furrier

>> seen.Well, I got a lot of questions from my kids and even smart people that didn't even know what a data center is. So explain a turbine and why it's important on the energy

Dylan Morris

>> equation.Yeah. So there's a handful of different turbines, but all of them, you can think about them turning heat into power, right? So you have some arbitrary heat, whether it's from a reactor or geothermal or natural gas. And you turn that into usable power for the grid.

John Furrier

>> And so it's really

Dylan Morris

>> important.It is incredibly important. It is really like 80% of the global grid, 80% of it runs on a turbine. Right. So if you want more power, you need to be in steam, right? That's exactly where we're building the next generation of

John Furrier

>> power.All right. So you mentioned geothermal. That's another area. But at the end of the day, you need turbines. Where did you guys come in on this? How did you get here? What was the entry point? What was the breakthrough?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, the entry point is really about market timing as well as our ability to simplify the current natural gas turbine. So as you know, many of these data centers are being set up behind the meter, because the grid has long interconnection queues, blah, blah, blah, unreliable, spiky, all kinds of problems, all sorts of problems with it. Not saying that behind the meter is all that much better, but at least you have control over it. Right. And so they're often being set up with natural gas turbines. Well, If you're trying to buy a natural gas turbine here in 2026, you're sold out to 2031. If you're going to GE or Siemens, Mitsubishi, Solar, right, whoever you go to, supply constraints big time. Incredibly so. So there's a lot of market pull for this technology. And secondly, we're able to build out the factory in a way where we're able to build out the technology and the AI-enabled workflows on a product that we know will work. Right. We know that natural gas turbines have been around for literally 50 years. And it's pretty well established. And then lastly is if you really take a first principles look at the design of a natural gas turbine or any turbine, you realize that they're kind of designed for the grid of the 2000s, where there was no batteries on the grid or high renewables. And there's so much easy simplification to be had on the design. And so we're tackling that, and that's what allows us to have, some of the world's leading emissions profiles and one of

John Furrier

>> the—you're taking a modern approach to say, hey, what do we have around us today? How do we engineer this for rapid scale? Get them pumped out as fast as possible. Demand's there, obviously.

John Furrier

>> All right.

John Furrier

>> So what's the status of the product? I know you guys are pre-revenue. You're just getting started. Take us through the progress. Where are you guys at now?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, it's a really good question. So we are— we have validated our emissions technology is one of the really important components of our ability to deliver the best product. Secondly, we have one of the world's best turbine teams. We have like 20 engineers from, GE, Siemens, the whole gamut, Pratt & Whitney. And now we're delivering our first 1-megawatt subscale engine that'll be delivered in the next 2 weeks. And then following that, we have our 50-megawatt engine by the middle of next year. And, filling up the pipeline.

John Furrier

>> What kind of forecast on the power are you guys looking at? Delivering?

Dylan Morris

>> We will have about 5 gigawatts by 2030, 5 gigawatts of net new turbine power, generated by Stone Power.

John Furrier

>> Well, okay, so let me just back up and try to grok that for a second. So I see these gigawatt factories, they're like thousands of acres, big campuses. Yeah, huge buildouts.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Are you working with them? Or do you see this as being different? What's that distinction between the people trying to stand up— turn on, I guess the better word—

Dylan Morris

>> the AI factories? Yeah. There's— our best customers are going to be those large, large gigawatt factories or AI factories. And that's because these smaller ones, because they want reliability, and they want redundancy, right? So we picked 50 megawatt size because you can actually put them in and have a couple on spare, and that's going to be really important for our customers to be able to get proof points on our product, but also have incredibly high uptime for their customers. Right.

John Furrier

>> Also, 50 megawatts is a good footprint. It's a meaty edge node. You can go out and deploy that in metro areas, edge positions, telecom towers.

Dylan Morris

>> Oil refineries often are right around that size as well.

John Furrier

>> So you have more kinds of targets to deploy.

Dylan Morris

>> And that's the reason why we picked that. Really came down to our customers are like, hey, we don't care about anything less than 200 megawatts. It's like, okay, I need the ability to get to 200 megawatts, on our pilot. Yeah, right. And so they want the big power because the big factories need large scale.

John Furrier

>> But I was asking, I always ask people this question, what's a beefy edge node? Because AI factories are these big centers and it's distributed computing, right? You have a big, big fat node and then you have connected nodes to the factory. So everything from a telecom tower to a central office to a data center in a hospital. Those are nodes that connect to other intelligence.

John Furrier

>> Indeed.

John Furrier

>> So what would be a meaty edge from a megawatt perspective from your standpoint? 30 to 50, 20 to 50. What would it have to be to run a good intelligence layer, assuming that they can get the gear and there's a lot of gear out there that can get on a rack.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah. So NVIDIA's standard size puts what's called a scalable unit at about just under 50 megawatts. So that is, you know, that's a perfect size for like, hey, you have a block, you have a complete standardized IT load, right? You know how to set it up and those are super scalable. So that might answer your question.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the optimization. What are you working on now? Because you guys are getting going.

Dylan Morris

>> Mm-hmm.

John Furrier

>> You're going to have revenue soon. What's the focus? What are you optimizing for?

Dylan Morris

>> Number one right now is we are— we're focusing on getting our first demo out, 1 megawatt delivered to our customers. Okay, let's go through the whole cycle of going from blank sheet turbine to delivery of a thing. That's hard and complicated on its own. But then it's digging into the 50-megawatt cycle and going through the whole project plan.

John Furrier

>> then just get some turbines out there,

Dylan Morris

>> right?really, it's really what it's about. We're solely focused on delivering turbines that, look, there's a lot of expansion opportunity afterwards, but we— none of that happens without delivering your first turbine.

John Furrier

>> Talk about behind the meter versus the grid, because this comes up a lot in the series because the grid— there's two philosophies. One is the grid is unreliable, so we have to figure that out. Behind the meter, there's also talk about feeding the grid coming in from large gigawatts coming in or feeding local areas. So one company is like, hey, we're going to do geothermal and we'll just power the entire Pacific Northwest.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Okay. Well, they have, you know, if they can succeed. So a lot of these projects, what's your philosophy?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah. Yeah, I think the right way to do it is how PJM is doing it, which is, hey, we will speed up or change your interconnection queue if you bring your own power and then have that as an option to sell back capacity. That is definitely the right way to incentivize ISOs to actually go fast enough for the interconnection while also bolstering the local grid by bringing that power. I think that's the right opportunity. And it also makes those initial behind-the-meter purchases of power assets actually real cash-flowing assets for the durability of that engine, right? Yeah.

John Furrier

>> You're in a great spot. There's a lot of demand In April, I wrote a blog post that said energy is not only the bounding function, but finance is. And then since then, we've seen a wave. NVIDIA just came into the city a couple of weeks ago, big consortium of banks, investors.

Dylan Morris

>> Oh yeah.

John Furrier

>> So there's a financing angle here. How are you thinking about your financial capital? Where are you guys at now and what is the financing plan?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, no, this is a— so we're looking at probably $1 trillion a year of CapEx spend, not us, but the entirety of the industry before 2030, like very soon, right? Where are they going to get all that money? Right. So, however, for us, we're investing a couple billion, probably $1.8 to $2 billion into a forge. This is a, again, part of the manufacturing forward part of it is like if you look at the bill of materials or the cost of a turbine, so much of it's actually spent in the supply chain. It's like, okay, Why are you giving that margin away when they're also the bottleneck? Right. So we're doing that very pointedly only on a few things. But the forge is very important. We're the only ones that can extract the value from that. And then, of course, we also have project financing and of course, venture equity.

John Furrier

>> What are your needs now from a headcount standpoint? You guys looking to expand? Put a plug in for what you might be looking for. A lot of people love this area.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> you got mechanical, you got computer science, you got a lot of science going on there and you got the supercomputing capabilities as a potential support there in modeling the materials.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, so I'm a materials engineer, man. This stuff, it really gets me excited. So we are, we're looking to deliver our first turbines with about 50 people. I really don't think you need much more than that. And we're looking for mechanical engineers, machinery engineers, people who have actually worked on turbines and delivered hardware before. Everybody at Stone has delivered hardware. And of course, you know, we're looking for one, maybe two specialized operators who really understand how to use AI in the back office.

John Furrier

>> You got to get this right. That's your focus. You got to get this off— out in the market as fast as possible. Learn the lessons. Rinse and repeat.

Dylan Morris

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> So to speak.

John Furrier

>> All right.

John Furrier

>> So what's your vision on energy in general? Because a lot of people don't understand the importance of it. There's a lot of protests. I don't know where this gets politicized, but you have a regulatory backdrop and all this now has gone into the AI. People are going to think AI is going to kill them, which is ridiculous. But this is an economic opportunity. I think data center buildouts are a lot like when a baseball park comes to a city, you know, it gentrifies.

Dylan Morris

>> I

John Furrier

>> can't—Yeah. What's your vision? That's my vision. That's weird. But what's your vision on the future of energy and what it can do for folks.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, I— if you look at where the grid ought to be, like how do we— what's the distribution of how we get our energy? I think the top 30-40% of it will be solar batteries, and maybe some geothermal in there. And then the bottom half is going to be turbines, right? Now there's a couple of different types of turbines, right? You have your nuclear and you have your natural gas. But I truly believe that's where the grid's going. And what a, like, a marvelous expansion opportunity to be able to reduce carbon emissions, reduce NOx emissions, all the bad stuff that is currently coming off our grid, um, you know, for the climate. And then secondly, be able to bring in energy abundance, right? I started off this story with like 30% of the cost of goods sold out of a textile mill was electricity. So if you take out that 30% and you bring it down to 1% or 2%, you're bringing about material abundance, right? And that's why, that's truly what's driving me and the rest of the Stone team here is bringing about Energy abundance drives material abundance.

John Furrier

>> And we take electricity for granted, but the demand, some will say, is more than powering homes in the United States. What is the grid? Because people ask me all the time, what's the problem with the grid? people don't know how antiquated it is. It is. Explain, yeah, from your standpoint, it wasn't built in the modern era, yet it needs an upgrade. It certainly is a target. It's critical infrastructure. It's a target from a cybersecurity standpoint, one.

John Furrier

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Put that aside for a second, but just from a functionality standpoint, this is a huge national issue that affects everybody.

Dylan Morris

>> Absolutely, yeah. So there's a couple of interconnection services that manage what comes on and what goes off the grid. And then you have utilities that actually are usually publicly owned that will actually invest in that new infrastructure Problem is they've been— the incentives there are kind of misaligned for quite some time where they are incentivized to spend more on less, right, by having just more expensive projects that take longer.

John Furrier

>> And so pork barrel projects, as they're called, as they're— I can say

Dylan Morris

>> that.You won't say that. Yeah, I won't say it, but you can. Thank you. Some of these are my customers.

John Furrier

>> But they just haven't been optimized for this. That's their— because it's been business as usual.

Dylan Morris

>> Well, this whole market's been over-financialized, right? It has been. It's been stripped of all the useful parts. It has been divested in all these different ways and frankly been put overseas. And, you know, it made sense when the market was where it was, which was completely stagnant for 20 years. Right. And like 1 or 2% growth. Well, now we need 20. How do we get to 20% growth? Right. That is where a vertically integrated, founder-led, you know, energy and engineering-led company is able to really grasp a lot of that growth.

John Furrier

>> It's hard for an existing incumbent to scale up that growth because you're staring at the economies of scale problems. You don't have a lot of learnings. It's really tough. You need the entrepreneurial perspective. Great stuff. Dylan, I guess what's your North Star? If you had to look for the preferred future, what's it look like?

Dylan Morris

>> We'll be delivering 10 gigawatts a year by 2030. That will be our production rate. And so everything that we're doing, everything from the capital stack that we're touching through the technologies to the team is oriented around delivering that.

John Furrier

>> Well, thanks for coming on our Powering Tomorrow. It's a new series. There's a lot of energy behind it, pun intended. Thanks and congratulations on the venture. And looking forward to chatting again.

Dylan Morris

>> Appreciate it.

John Furrier

>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE's Powering Tomorrow, part of our NYSE Wired series, part of theCUBE here at the NYSE. Thanks for watching.

Dylan Morris, Stone Power

search

John Furrier

>> Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Well, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here in our NYSE Cube studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. So our deep tech conversations around Powering Tomorrow, which is a play on words, but it's about the energy impact. AI is bounded by energy. There's huge demand for it. Dylan Morris is the founder and CEO of Stone Power. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.

Dylan Morris

>> Thanks for having

John Furrier

>> me, So you're an entrepreneur. You're tackling the power problem. You guys have a unique approach. First, explain what you do, then we'll get into how you got there.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.So we are— Stone Power is manufacturing large power generation turbines. We are an OEM. We're going up against the legacy incumbents, and we're doing that with really solving two problems. One is how to design a turbine faster. So we're injecting AI into our product development cycle. And then secondly, we're manufacturing them faster. So we're designing for manufacturing as well as building factories larger than I've ever

John Furrier

>> seen.Well, I got a lot of questions from my kids and even smart people that didn't even know what a data center is. So explain a turbine and why it's important on the energy

Dylan Morris

>> equation.Yeah. So there's a handful of different turbines, but all of them, you can think about them turning heat into power, right? So you have some arbitrary heat, whether it's from a reactor or geothermal or natural gas. And you turn that into usable power for the grid.

John Furrier

>> And so it's really

Dylan Morris

>> important.It is incredibly important. It is really like 80% of the global grid, 80% of it runs on a turbine. Right. So if you want more power, you need to be in steam, right? That's exactly where we're building the next generation of

John Furrier

>> power.All right. So you mentioned geothermal. That's another area. But at the end of the day, you need turbines. Where did you guys come in on this? How did you get here? What was the entry point? What was the breakthrough?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, the entry point is really about market timing as well as our ability to simplify the current natural gas turbine. So as you know, many of these data centers are being set up behind the meter, because the grid has long interconnection queues, blah, blah, blah, unreliable, spiky, all kinds of problems, all sorts of problems with it. Not saying that behind the meter is all that much better, but at least you have control over it. Right. And so they're often being set up with natural gas turbines. Well, If you're trying to buy a natural gas turbine here in 2026, you're sold out to 2031. If you're going to GE or Siemens, Mitsubishi, Solar, right, whoever you go to, supply constraints big time. Incredibly so. So there's a lot of market pull for this technology. And secondly, we're able to build out the factory in a way where we're able to build out the technology and the AI-enabled workflows on a product that we know will work. Right. We know that natural gas turbines have been around for literally 50 years. And it's pretty well established. And then lastly is if you really take a first principles look at the design of a natural gas turbine or any turbine, you realize that they're kind of designed for the grid of the 2000s, where there was no batteries on the grid or high renewables. And there's so much easy simplification to be had on the design. And so we're tackling that, and that's what allows us to have, some of the world's leading emissions profiles and one of

John Furrier

>> the—you're taking a modern approach to say, hey, what do we have around us today? How do we engineer this for rapid scale? Get them pumped out as fast as possible. Demand's there, obviously.

John Furrier

>> All right.

John Furrier

>> So what's the status of the product? I know you guys are pre-revenue. You're just getting started. Take us through the progress. Where are you guys at now?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, it's a really good question. So we are— we have validated our emissions technology is one of the really important components of our ability to deliver the best product. Secondly, we have one of the world's best turbine teams. We have like 20 engineers from, GE, Siemens, the whole gamut, Pratt & Whitney. And now we're delivering our first 1-megawatt subscale engine that'll be delivered in the next 2 weeks. And then following that, we have our 50-megawatt engine by the middle of next year. And, filling up the pipeline.

John Furrier

>> What kind of forecast on the power are you guys looking at? Delivering?

Dylan Morris

>> We will have about 5 gigawatts by 2030, 5 gigawatts of net new turbine power, generated by Stone Power.

John Furrier

>> Well, okay, so let me just back up and try to grok that for a second. So I see these gigawatt factories, they're like thousands of acres, big campuses. Yeah, huge buildouts.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Are you working with them? Or do you see this as being different? What's that distinction between the people trying to stand up— turn on, I guess the better word—

Dylan Morris

>> the AI factories? Yeah. There's— our best customers are going to be those large, large gigawatt factories or AI factories. And that's because these smaller ones, because they want reliability, and they want redundancy, right? So we picked 50 megawatt size because you can actually put them in and have a couple on spare, and that's going to be really important for our customers to be able to get proof points on our product, but also have incredibly high uptime for their customers. Right.

John Furrier

>> Also, 50 megawatts is a good footprint. It's a meaty edge node. You can go out and deploy that in metro areas, edge positions, telecom towers.

Dylan Morris

>> Oil refineries often are right around that size as well.

John Furrier

>> So you have more kinds of targets to deploy.

Dylan Morris

>> And that's the reason why we picked that. Really came down to our customers are like, hey, we don't care about anything less than 200 megawatts. It's like, okay, I need the ability to get to 200 megawatts, on our pilot. Yeah, right. And so they want the big power because the big factories need large scale.

John Furrier

>> But I was asking, I always ask people this question, what's a beefy edge node? Because AI factories are these big centers and it's distributed computing, right? You have a big, big fat node and then you have connected nodes to the factory. So everything from a telecom tower to a central office to a data center in a hospital. Those are nodes that connect to other intelligence.

John Furrier

>> Indeed.

John Furrier

>> So what would be a meaty edge from a megawatt perspective from your standpoint? 30 to 50, 20 to 50. What would it have to be to run a good intelligence layer, assuming that they can get the gear and there's a lot of gear out there that can get on a rack.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah. So NVIDIA's standard size puts what's called a scalable unit at about just under 50 megawatts. So that is, you know, that's a perfect size for like, hey, you have a block, you have a complete standardized IT load, right? You know how to set it up and those are super scalable. So that might answer your question.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the optimization. What are you working on now? Because you guys are getting going.

Dylan Morris

>> Mm-hmm.

John Furrier

>> You're going to have revenue soon. What's the focus? What are you optimizing for?

Dylan Morris

>> Number one right now is we are— we're focusing on getting our first demo out, 1 megawatt delivered to our customers. Okay, let's go through the whole cycle of going from blank sheet turbine to delivery of a thing. That's hard and complicated on its own. But then it's digging into the 50-megawatt cycle and going through the whole project plan.

John Furrier

>> then just get some turbines out there,

Dylan Morris

>> right?really, it's really what it's about. We're solely focused on delivering turbines that, look, there's a lot of expansion opportunity afterwards, but we— none of that happens without delivering your first turbine.

John Furrier

>> Talk about behind the meter versus the grid, because this comes up a lot in the series because the grid— there's two philosophies. One is the grid is unreliable, so we have to figure that out. Behind the meter, there's also talk about feeding the grid coming in from large gigawatts coming in or feeding local areas. So one company is like, hey, we're going to do geothermal and we'll just power the entire Pacific Northwest.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Okay. Well, they have, you know, if they can succeed. So a lot of these projects, what's your philosophy?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah. Yeah, I think the right way to do it is how PJM is doing it, which is, hey, we will speed up or change your interconnection queue if you bring your own power and then have that as an option to sell back capacity. That is definitely the right way to incentivize ISOs to actually go fast enough for the interconnection while also bolstering the local grid by bringing that power. I think that's the right opportunity. And it also makes those initial behind-the-meter purchases of power assets actually real cash-flowing assets for the durability of that engine, right? Yeah.

John Furrier

>> You're in a great spot. There's a lot of demand In April, I wrote a blog post that said energy is not only the bounding function, but finance is. And then since then, we've seen a wave. NVIDIA just came into the city a couple of weeks ago, big consortium of banks, investors.

Dylan Morris

>> Oh yeah.

John Furrier

>> So there's a financing angle here. How are you thinking about your financial capital? Where are you guys at now and what is the financing plan?

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, no, this is a— so we're looking at probably $1 trillion a year of CapEx spend, not us, but the entirety of the industry before 2030, like very soon, right? Where are they going to get all that money? Right. So, however, for us, we're investing a couple billion, probably $1.8 to $2 billion into a forge. This is a, again, part of the manufacturing forward part of it is like if you look at the bill of materials or the cost of a turbine, so much of it's actually spent in the supply chain. It's like, okay, Why are you giving that margin away when they're also the bottleneck? Right. So we're doing that very pointedly only on a few things. But the forge is very important. We're the only ones that can extract the value from that. And then, of course, we also have project financing and of course, venture equity.

John Furrier

>> What are your needs now from a headcount standpoint? You guys looking to expand? Put a plug in for what you might be looking for. A lot of people love this area.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> you got mechanical, you got computer science, you got a lot of science going on there and you got the supercomputing capabilities as a potential support there in modeling the materials.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, so I'm a materials engineer, man. This stuff, it really gets me excited. So we are, we're looking to deliver our first turbines with about 50 people. I really don't think you need much more than that. And we're looking for mechanical engineers, machinery engineers, people who have actually worked on turbines and delivered hardware before. Everybody at Stone has delivered hardware. And of course, you know, we're looking for one, maybe two specialized operators who really understand how to use AI in the back office.

John Furrier

>> You got to get this right. That's your focus. You got to get this off— out in the market as fast as possible. Learn the lessons. Rinse and repeat.

Dylan Morris

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> So to speak.

John Furrier

>> All right.

John Furrier

>> So what's your vision on energy in general? Because a lot of people don't understand the importance of it. There's a lot of protests. I don't know where this gets politicized, but you have a regulatory backdrop and all this now has gone into the AI. People are going to think AI is going to kill them, which is ridiculous. But this is an economic opportunity. I think data center buildouts are a lot like when a baseball park comes to a city, you know, it gentrifies.

Dylan Morris

>> I

John Furrier

>> can't—Yeah. What's your vision? That's my vision. That's weird. But what's your vision on the future of energy and what it can do for folks.

Dylan Morris

>> Yeah, I— if you look at where the grid ought to be, like how do we— what's the distribution of how we get our energy? I think the top 30-40% of it will be solar batteries, and maybe some geothermal in there. And then the bottom half is going to be turbines, right? Now there's a couple of different types of turbines, right? You have your nuclear and you have your natural gas. But I truly believe that's where the grid's going. And what a, like, a marvelous expansion opportunity to be able to reduce carbon emissions, reduce NOx emissions, all the bad stuff that is currently coming off our grid, um, you know, for the climate. And then secondly, be able to bring in energy abundance, right? I started off this story with like 30% of the cost of goods sold out of a textile mill was electricity. So if you take out that 30% and you bring it down to 1% or 2%, you're bringing about material abundance, right? And that's why, that's truly what's driving me and the rest of the Stone team here is bringing about Energy abundance drives material abundance.

John Furrier

>> And we take electricity for granted, but the demand, some will say, is more than powering homes in the United States. What is the grid? Because people ask me all the time, what's the problem with the grid? people don't know how antiquated it is. It is. Explain, yeah, from your standpoint, it wasn't built in the modern era, yet it needs an upgrade. It certainly is a target. It's critical infrastructure. It's a target from a cybersecurity standpoint, one.

John Furrier

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Put that aside for a second, but just from a functionality standpoint, this is a huge national issue that affects everybody.

Dylan Morris

>> Absolutely, yeah. So there's a couple of interconnection services that manage what comes on and what goes off the grid. And then you have utilities that actually are usually publicly owned that will actually invest in that new infrastructure Problem is they've been— the incentives there are kind of misaligned for quite some time where they are incentivized to spend more on less, right, by having just more expensive projects that take longer.

John Furrier

>> And so pork barrel projects, as they're called, as they're— I can say

Dylan Morris

>> that.You won't say that. Yeah, I won't say it, but you can. Thank you. Some of these are my customers.

John Furrier

>> But they just haven't been optimized for this. That's their— because it's been business as usual.

Dylan Morris

>> Well, this whole market's been over-financialized, right? It has been. It's been stripped of all the useful parts. It has been divested in all these different ways and frankly been put overseas. And, you know, it made sense when the market was where it was, which was completely stagnant for 20 years. Right. And like 1 or 2% growth. Well, now we need 20. How do we get to 20% growth? Right. That is where a vertically integrated, founder-led, you know, energy and engineering-led company is able to really grasp a lot of that growth.

John Furrier

>> It's hard for an existing incumbent to scale up that growth because you're staring at the economies of scale problems. You don't have a lot of learnings. It's really tough. You need the entrepreneurial perspective. Great stuff. Dylan, I guess what's your North Star? If you had to look for the preferred future, what's it look like?

Dylan Morris

>> We'll be delivering 10 gigawatts a year by 2030. That will be our production rate. And so everything that we're doing, everything from the capital stack that we're touching through the technologies to the team is oriented around delivering that.

John Furrier

>> Well, thanks for coming on our Powering Tomorrow. It's a new series. There's a lot of energy behind it, pun intended. Thanks and congratulations on the venture. And looking forward to chatting again.

Dylan Morris

>> Appreciate it.

John Furrier

>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE's Powering Tomorrow, part of our NYSE Wired series, part of theCUBE here at the NYSE. Thanks for watching.