"You Can’t Squeeze Blood Out Of A Stone" Featuring Thomas Popik, Foundation for Resilient Societies

Today we had the exciting opportunity to host Thomas Popik for a power-focused discussion. Thomas is the Chairman and President of the Foundation for Resilient Societies, a non-profit dedicated to strengthening the resilience and recoverability of critical infrastructure. In addition to his volunteer leadership at the Foundation, Thomas serves as a Principal at Geosegment Systems Corporation. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. The Foundation for Resilient Societies is distinguished by the depth of its scientific, economic, and legal expertise. Several of its directors have held senior policymaking positions in the U.S. Government and now continue their societal contributions through private action. The Foundation has been instrumental in advancing policies and recommendations to better protect the electrical grid and other vital systems from emerging threats. We were thrilled to host Thomas.
 
In our conversation, Thomas outlines the mission of the Foundation and how its nonprofit status strengthens credibility, recruitment, and advocacy. He highlights the rising frequency of outage “near misses” that the public is largely unaware of, the Foundation’s engagement with FERC, NERC, and DOE, and how this work has helped shift official recognition of risks, including DOE’s recent warning of up to 800 blackout hours per year by 2030. Thomas traces how we arrived at this level of instability, with factors including a net loss of ~1% per year in dispatchable capacity over the past decade, the retirements of coal, older gas, and petroleum-fired plants, and their replacement with wind and solar, which lack dispatchability. He shares market history, from the pre-2000 overbuild that drove up rates, through the 2010s when flat load growth masked declining capacity, to 2024, with excess capacity gone and the grid maxed out. Thomas outlines near-term solutions for grid stability, including halting premature retirements of dispatchable generation, enabling the use of backup generators at critical infrastructure, and improving legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent retirements and declare emergencies. On the consumer side, we discuss tools such as dynamic pricing to discourage peak-time consumption, shifting habits like EV charging, and aggregating flexible load reductions from schools, homes, and businesses. Thomas also highlights the importance of public messaging to encourage rapid conservation during emergencies and notes longer-term measures including building new dispatchable generation. As mentioned, the DOE Resource Adequacy Report published in July is linked here. We learned a lot from our conversation with Thomas and greatly appreciate him joining us.
 
To start the show, Mike Bradley noted that markets seemed to be in “no man’s land.” On the bond market front, the 10-year bond yield has risen over the last week, despite the Fed following through with a 25 basis-point interest rate cut and signaling the potential for two more cuts this year. Looking ahead, employment reports, rather than inflation reports, are likely going to be the Fed’s main focus. On the broader market front, the S&P 500 continues to hit all-time highs but is beginning to feel like it’s in no man’s land given that the FOMC meeting is in the rearview mirror and Q3 earnings reports are not on tap for several more weeks. On the crude oil market front, WTI price continues to trade in the low to mid $60s/bbl due to the give/take of Russian oil sanctions/energy infrastructure damage versus concerns of a 2026 global oil surplus keeping a ceiling on oil prices. On the electricity/energy equity front, he highlighted Landbridge Company’s strategic partnership with NRG Energy on a potential data center in the Delaware Basin and noted that Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania warned this