Computer Science, AI, and the Shift in Research

Behind the scenes, every few minutes, the ERCOT system generates tens of thousands of price signals, outage updates, and operational reports that demonstrate and drive the cost and availability of electricity.

Most of that data is public. But how can Texans access it?

This week, Joshua Rhodes talks with Max Kanter, chief executive officer of GridStatus, about the gap between public data and practical visibility and application, and why that matters in Texas.

In this episode, they discuss:

* Why public grid data is harder to use than it would seem.

* What real-time pricing signals reveal about system stress.

* How outage and congestion data shape ERCOT debates.

There are more than 70,000 pricing nodes across U.S. energy markets, updating every five minutes. ERCOT alone produces enormous volumes of operational data.Those signals often spotlight stresses on the system before they show up in prices and control rooms.

As Texas adds new industrial loads and faces continued risks from extreme weather, more policymakers, analysts, and large customers want to know what’s coming. They’re looking for distress signals.

On this week’s episode, Josh and Max tell you where to find them – and what to do with them.

Timestamps

* 00:06 – Welcome, Max Kanter intro

* 02:00 – Computer science, AI shifts

* 03:32 – What is GridStatus?

* 04:36 – What users see first

* 05:31 – Who uses GridStatus today

* 06:56 – Tiers, hobbyists, accessibility

* 07:52 – AI tools, new builders

* 09:47 – Why a business existed

* 12:49 – Early demand validated product

* 14:18 – From carbon to markets

* 16:44 – Data scale, nodal pricing map

* 32:20 – Flip script, Rhodes on public role

Resources

Guest & Company• Max Kanter - LinkedIn • Grid Status - LinkedIn

Company & Industry News• The power grid is hard to understand. This startup is trying to help. • Why We Invested in Grid Status

Related Podcasts by TEAP• The New Rules Behind ERCOT Prices with Andrew Reimers • Who Pays for Texas Grid Growth? - Roundtable Discussion• Texas’ Load Growth Challenges – And Opportunities, with Arushi Sharma Frank

Transcript

Joshua Rhodes (00:05.778)

everyone, and welcome to the Energy Capital podcast. I am really excited to have Max Cantor, CEO of GridStatus on today to just talk about data, all the data that are coming off the grid and everything like that. If you’re steeped in grids, you’ve probably heard of GridStatus, you’ve probably seen at least a screenshot of dashboards and things like that floating around social media. But one of the things I wanted to bring to this podcast was to kind of dig a little bit deeper into some of the more technical side of things. And I promised all

Joshua Rhodes (00:35.278)

I’d be listeners that I wouldn’t completely bore you to tears with data, but we are going to talk about it a little bit because it is so important. So we have Max Cantor on. has a bachelor’s and a master’s of computer science from MIT. And I don’t usually name check theses, but this one actually caught my eye. So his master’s thesis was the data science machine emulating human intelligence in data science endeavors, which sounds like a harbinger of basically AI. We’ll get back to that here in a bit.

Joshua Rhodes (01:05.294)

He started off as CEO and co-founder of Feature Labs, which was acquired by Alteryx in 2019. At that point, was the VP of Engineering at Alteryx for the next couple of years before going back to MIT as a visiting scholar in the Data to AI lab, where at that time when he was at MIT, launched Grid Status in August of 2022. And the tagline, or at least the one that’s on his socials is, the future of the electric grid runs on data and AI. Grid Status provides

Joshua Rhodes (01:34.562)

data and insights for the understanding, investing and operating of the electrical grid. And our goal is to be the most trusted source for whatever is happening on the grid. Max Kanner, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.

Max Kanter (01:47.522)

Thank you, Joshua. Happy to be here.

Joshua Rhodes (01:49.452)

Yeah, I should probably say full disclosure, I’m actually a client as well. So I have a subscription to GridStatus. So thank you for making it so easy to get all of these data.

Max Kanter (01:58.456)

Yeah, that was the goal from the very beginning.

Joshua Rhodes (02:00.46)

Yeah, no, I think it’s worked out quite a bit. It’s much easier. I wanted to actually immediately kind of go off script. Your bachelor’s and master’s are in computer science. Do you have a feel for what computer science means today, kind of in this age of AI? How has it changed since you were there?

Max Kanter (02:16.312)

Computer science as an academic field is younger than many, right? So things like biology or physics, right? Computer science, I’d have to double check, but I think it’s probably a phrase that has only formally been studied for less than a hundred years. And so it’s come a long way in just that time from something minor to one of the hottest topics. One of the things I think is so interesting though about AI in particular though is

Max Kanter (02:42.87)

A lot of the earliest computer scientists, their goal from the very beginning was to create an artificial intelligence. That’s actually how they thought about computers, know, replicate the stuff that humans were doing. And so in some sense, the goals actually haven’t changed at all, right? I think over the decades, think the biggest thing that’s different is, really the size of the compute that’s being undertaken to actually accomplish it. And, know, one of the things, you know, thinking back to when I first started doing say academic computer science is so much.

Max Kanter (03:12.45)

of the forefront of the field was happening within universities. think nowadays when you think of, well, where’s the frontier AI research happening, know, oftentimes it’s thought of outside of universities. And I think that’s one of the biggest changes I’ve seen. And why is that? There might be many reasons, but think one of them is just the size of the compute and the cost of doing that.

Joshua Rhodes (03:31.916)

Yeah, that’s big implications of particularly like size of the compute. I mean for the electricity grid, right? Because you got to get a bunch of electricity to that. I apologize for throwing you a curveball right off. Yeah, totally. So, I’ve introduced grid status a bit. With someone who’s outside of energy, I think a lot of folks who listen to this podcast are kind of in energy. But if someone’s outside of energy, ask you what you do. Like how do you describe, you know, grid status?

Max Kanter (03:41.998)

that makes it more interesting.

Max Kanter (03:56.514)

Yeah. I would say grid status is the homepage for the electric grid. I think a lot of people, when they think about the grid, well, first they don’t actually think about it that much. You you plug something into an outlet, you get power, right? But behind the scenes, it’s actually the world’s most complex machine. And even though it’s this big machine, it’s not like you have one person operating it or one person putting power into it or one person regulating it. It’s actually very complex with a lot of different stakeholders.

Max Kanter (04:24.82)

And so, yeah, the role of grid status is to be, you if you have a question about the grid or you want to have an understanding about what’s going on, we want to be the first place people go. And so, yeah, we’re the homepage of the electric grid.

Joshua Rhodes (04:36.27)

That’s cool. Grid status started out as doing mostly data, Mostly hosting data and having data. Now there’s a lot more dashboards and other types of things. Can you just talk through a little bit, of like, if someone goes to the homepage of the electric grids, you say like, what are they going to find?

Max Kanter (04:52.748)

Yeah, I’d say that’s kind of the core product and technical question we’re trying to answer or solve, I should say. Right. And what are you going to find is, you know, the answer really is like, whatever is relevant for you. And we serve a lot of different types of users. Some people care a lot about, you know, what the fuel mix on the grid is. Some people care a lot about pricing. Some people care about forecasts and, know, grid operations for the coming days. And so our goal at GridSat is to show you what’s relevant.

Max Kanter (05:22.088)

And we’ve honed in on that over time.

Joshua Rhodes (05:24.76)

Nice. And talk about like you said for different types of users, what all types of users do you have?

Max Kanter (05:30.84)

I would say anybody who cares about the grid is part of our user base. And that’s one of the things that’s most exciting about grid status for me. think if you rewind five, 10 years and you were to say, your electric grid data and analytics company, who do you serve? The answer would be pretty narrow. Energy traders, utilities, power plant operators. What I see with grid status is really have expanded the pie of people who can make use of the data. So today I think some of our bread and butter

Max Kanter (06:00.318)

are people who are buying and selling large amounts of power. You know, it’s energy traders, it’s asset operators, but we’ve also expanded it. We have researchers, we have these like large loads who need to be responsive to the grid. Even the regulators, you we talk to people in the federal government who are trying to make laws about the grid and, the fastest place them to figure out what’s going on is grid status. Very large swath of people.

Joshua Rhodes (06:26.572)

Yeah, know used to, someone would ask me what was going on in ERCOT, which is a common thing. Well, when people start asking me what’s going on in ERCOT, I start to get worried. I used to go to the ERCOT website and, you know, grab a screenshot of something, but now more or less it’s to the grid status web page. You got better colors and fonts too, by the way. So that’s really nice. In the app, you’ve got multiple different tiers of access that folks can get. I noticed recently you put in like a hobby tier. Are you starting to see more hobbyists out there? Like using the data?

Max Kanter (06:55.928)

For sure. And one of the fun challenges with grid status is, you know, didn’t even actually start this thinking about me as company. It was very much around how do we make it easier to get access to this data? And that came from a personal problem I had. I wanted to build some actually machine learning algorithms for forecasting the price of electricity. And well, I needed to get access to the raw data to train those models. And so a lot of our journey over the last couple of years has been, you know, how do you solve the problem of making data accessible?

Max Kanter (07:25.262)

but also do it in a sustainable way. I mean, it’s not cheap or free to be collecting all this. And so, yeah, I think one of the fun things about Gridset as you talk about the tiers is yeah, we have evolved into, we have a free offering that is for everybody, hobbyist offering that you mentioned, and then also professional enterprise offerings and figuring out what goes into each bucket and how to, you know, sort of serve everybody is kind of like the fun side of developing the business.

Joshua Rhodes (07:52.398)

Kind of sticking to that hobby tier, you know, one of the things that AI has done is really democratize coding. You can write a thousand lines of code so much faster. It was so much less, how do I say, experience than it used to take. I mean, these models are pretty great. mean, like, have you seen anyone create anything from the hobby tier or other things like that? Really, since like, AI has made it lot easier to code?

Max Kanter (08:15.822)

I would say so. think from the kind of building blocks of it all, we’ve seen people actually take our tools and then wrap them in basically libraries to make it very easy for the AI tools to automatically consume them. so, you know, one of the things I think a lot of people end up using that for and on the hobby tier is there’s this whole group, I’d say of like policy advocacy, nonprofits, you know, people that have in the past had very limited budgets.

Max Kanter (08:45.784)

to get access to this data. Having to go to the ISOs themselves is either too time prohibitive, right? Or yeah, you know, as you kind of alluded to, like too expensive to actually write the code to grab all the data. And so using grid status, they’re able to kind of further whatever policy objective that they have. We don’t personally take any sort of stance, but it is definitely a goal of ours to supply the facts and the data for people to explore and make their case.

Max Kanter (09:13.024)

And so, yeah, like one of the things I’ve seen with the AI tools is I’m thinking of like a particular example of somebody in Illinois, you know, that’s where GridStats is actually based here in Chicago. So, you know, something that I personally like to pay attention to, you know, someone who’s a nuclear advocate, right? And, you know, being able to pull the data from GridStats about how nuclear power, the amount of generation in Illinois, where it’s getting imported and exported, how that affects costs. Yeah, it’s, you know, somebody who’s definitely very talented, but they certainly don’t have a computer science or programming background.

Max Kanter (09:42.51)

you’re not able to use our free and hobby products to accomplish that.

Joshua Rhodes (09:46.712)

So one of the things you said there was talking about like not being able to go to the ISO to get the data. I mean, I’ve done that before, right? Like I’ve played mostly in ERCOT. So I’ve gone to ERCOT’s website and downloaded a CSV that has like five minutes worth of data for like all the nodes and like all these other types of things. it just, well, one, they can only host like so much of it. You know, it was free, but it was very painful, right? We’ll give you the confidence that a business could be built around, you know, cleaning it up and getting it.

Joshua Rhodes (10:15.318)

organized in one spot.

Max Kanter (10:18.062)

Figuring out how to gain the confidence, I think, is a key part of the story of grid status. So early on, there was no goal to make it into a business. I had my own goal of actually trying to build out a vehicle to grid product. And I was like, in order to implement vehicle to grid, you need to have a sense or a forecast of where you think prices are going to be the next day. And so I started this grid status actually as an open source library, just going to be a little side quest.

Max Kanter (10:46.572)

to make it easy to collect this data. You know, if I had this problem, I’m sure somebody else is going to want to run this code. But yeah, I’d spend a few weeks on this and then get back to building Veil Code to Grid software. So actually, yeah, first I didn’t think there was a business here. However, I put that code out publicly. So I put it out on a product called GitHub, right? Where software developers hang out and, you know, very quickly met a handful of people who were saying things like, Hey, I wish this existed when I started my current job, because I would have just used that directly.

Max Kanter (11:16.098)

Right. And then people started asking for more features. They started contributing some code themselves. And, you know, that’s when I realized that, I’m not the only person who has this problem. And at that stage, it wasn’t even, let’s turn this into a company. was like, well, let me just listen to what people are asking for and build out some of those things. Because honestly, what gets me most excited and motivated is to build a product people use. And so you have someone basically telling you they’re going to use this software. you build that X, Y, and Z, you know, I did it. And.

Max Kanter (11:45.474)

Basically what happened is, you one thing led to another. We started adding in data sets and then people were like, you know, I don’t want to run your open source scrapers myself. I wish I could just hit an API and it would return me the data from your servers. And so then we built out the API and then people were asking, well, how do I even know what data is on the API? So then we built out the homepage that would just let people go to a URL and see what data is available. Right. And then they were like, couldn’t you show the data like this? And we started showing the data like we started showing, let’s say all the LMPs in one place.

Max Kanter (12:15.182)

And like, could you put that on a map? And we built that out. And you know, one thing led to another. And you know, now we have tens of thousands of people that are coming to this site every month because we just listened to our users. And somewhere in the middle there, I realized if a couple of people find this very useful, you we could probably find a lot more and find one people who are willing to pay.

Joshua Rhodes (12:34.222)

I think I was probably one of the people emailing you in 2022 when you started this about like... You were. How to use your Python, like how to use the API or how to use... I mean, I literally have it up on my computer right now. was pulling data the other day.

Max Kanter (12:48.002)

You probably don’t realize how impactful those early emails were because, I didn’t come from the energy industry. You guys had to know there was business here and it’s like, you know, I came from the general purpose data science world. I kind of just stumbled into energy really as a hobby project, right? Related to the vehicle to grid stuff I was mentioning. And so, yeah, you know, you are someone who obviously knows the energy industry very well. And so being able to see people like yourself feel like there was an unmet need. That’s when I said like, Hey, there are some underserved people.

Max Kanter (13:16.95)

And that’s ultimately, you know, I think if you were to say like, what is the actual inflection point to starting a business is, well, find a big industry, pretty hard to find a bigger industry than energy. And then, you know, find a group of people that have an unmet need or are underserved by the incumbents and build the product that they want. I think that’s a pretty good formula for starting a company.

Joshua Rhodes (13:39.662)

Okay, maybe this makes sense in terms of like the timeline of kind of when grid status started, like you were still at MIT. And you mentioned it just a minute ago. When was that inflection point when you’re like, okay, this is no longer the side hustle, this is going to be the full hustle? Like when did that flip?

Max Kanter (13:55.19)

Yeah, I would say I waited as long as possible. We signed a contract with one of our first customers who actually happened to be a very large entity in the grid who I never thought would decide to be the first customer of a startup. But I was like, yeah, mean, if they’re willing to pay us, we should make this formal and really go after it.

Joshua Rhodes (14:17.646)

That’s really cool. So you’ve kind of alluded to it a little bit like before you were working on machine learning algorithms to do like be able to grid. I think there was something in there about looking even for the carbon intensity. How did that play into when you went on your side quest looking for all this data?

Max Kanter (14:34.638)

So

Max Kanter (14:34.998)

I’d say early when I thought about energy, I think what was very much in the zeitgeist was climate, carbon emissions. I think, you you try to buy like an airplane ticket. say, you know, paying $10 more and we’ll, you know, reduce your emissions or, you know, buy some offsets. And so I think when I first thought about energy, like that was very top of mind at the time I saw, you know, there’s probably a dozen different startups doing carbon accounting. It’s a very like, I’d say intuitive.

Max Kanter (15:04.824)

thing when you say you want to get into energy, where should I start? And so definitely that was on my mind. I still find it very interesting, but what I kind of found in building the company is like, what I really had taken for granted was the part that wasn’t intuitive. And that was how the electric grid actually works. The markets themselves, you know, there’s not an inherently best way to run an electricity market, right? And that’s why we have a bunch of different ISOs and they all do things slightly differently.

Joshua Rhodes (15:32.728)

Besides Texas though, right? Sorry.

Max Kanter (15:35.182)

besides

Max Kanter (15:35.642)

that’s the best way. Yeah. And maybe they are the best way. And I think part of the reason why they can make a claim for that is because they have chosen to make decisions in a certain way. And maybe other people will all copy them, right? But that’s kind of like the beauty of the markets. Even though that’s where I started, like what was really cool about this whole space is just how many layers to the onion there are. And, you know, can just continually appeal them back at a greater understanding.

Max Kanter (16:02.286)

And, know, from someone outside of the industry, was like drinking from the fire hose. And that’s why I got really lucky to, ultimately meet my co-founder, Connor, who kind of unlike me had spent his entire career in energy because now I had someone to help me learn this stuff. And then the feedback loop of working with the data, working with someone who, you know, is clearly an expert in these energy markets, that kind of just caught the bug. And I’ve been focused on that ever since.

Max Kanter (16:29.474)

What still amazes me is actually how little public awareness there is. And I know I’m preaching to the choir here with you, but you how little public awareness there is of just how both interestingly complex these markets are and how consequential there are.

Joshua Rhodes (16:43.694)

Yeah, I mean, you can kind of see it like in the data, right? know, prices are formed every five minutes. Dispatch decisions are made, you know, in RCOT every five minutes are getting bids every 15 minutes. I know RCOT the best and so I know there’s other regions that may do things differently. But like, what’s the velocity or volume of data that you pull in every day? How much are you adding to your suitcases full of data like every day?

Max Kanter (17:11.374)

So

Max Kanter (17:12.174)

there’s a lot of different dimensions to think about it. So I think the first dimension is how many different data sets do we collect? Right. So we collect, you know, over 500 data sets at this point from all the different regions or all the different grids in North America. And then each of those data sets, you know, might have updates ranging from every 10 seconds to once a day or once a week. And then within each one of those updates, and this is where I think

Max Kanter (17:39.402)

It is an example of something that didn’t come intuitively to me is the granularity of some of those updates. So the pricing information is perhaps the most interesting where there’s not just one global price of electricity on the grid, as you know, it gets down to like the node level and there are 70,000 plus nodes in the United States that are getting priced on a real time basis. And so that’s a huge dimensionality to this data that we’re updating.

Max Kanter (18:06.728)

And all that kind of led to like one of my favorite product releases we’ve ever done at Grid Status was making our nodal price map. So without an account to Grid Status, you can come to the homepage and you can see we’ve manually kind of mapped the geographic locations for over 20,000 of these nodes. And you can see for free without an account, how those are getting updated across the United States in one place every five minutes. you

Max Kanter (18:33.698)

As far as I know to this day, there’s no one else that offers that product. Going back to the point about being, do we become the homepage of the grid? To me, that’s the best encapsulation of it. Where can you go to see the most granular data possible? The data, you know, being updated every five minutes at 20,000 locations in one spot, kind of summarize in a very intuitive way. That’s been my favorite product release probably. We’re trying to one up it, but that’s a tough one to beat.

Joshua Rhodes (18:58.61)

awesome. I look forward to seeing how you’re going to best a map. People love maps. mean, one of the things that I learned, one of my most popular tools that I created, it’s an online map that shows the levelized cost of electricity in every county in the US and you can change the cost of fuel and it’ll update and all that kind of thing. And people love maps. And I think it’s intuitive because people know how to get around maps, right? They may not know how to get around the box plot or a scatter plot or something like that, but people generally, you’re from somewhere on that map.

Joshua Rhodes (19:26.85)

your kid lives somewhere on that map, right? Like it’s just intuitive. I think you’ve done a great job of getting all that data onto one map. Cause I know what we used to do back when X was called Twitter, whenever like people would want to look at price of electricity across different regions is you’d have Vercot’s map and it would have its color scheme. You’d have MISO’s map and you’d have SPP’s map and like all these others. And then you would like put them together, but the colors would be different. Yeah, it is nice just having them all in one place.

Max Kanter (19:55.584)

Yeah. I in one place I’d say is one of the most repeated value propositions I hear for users of grid status. You know, they say I used to have six different tabs open at a time when I wanted to figure out what was going on in the grid. Yeah. And now I just have one, you know, and they say grid status is my new tab in my browser. And so, you know, that’s not the only thing that we do, but what differentiates us, you can get this data from a bunch of different places. It is public. You go to the ISO directly.

Max Kanter (20:23.992)

but to have one place that is super fast, convenient, intuitive, know, what I think we do best.

Joshua Rhodes (20:30.39)

I mean, I’m probably sound like a fanboy here, but like, I mean, it’s true. The all in one place thing is so useful. I used to know my way around the aircott website pretty well, probably less so now because I haven’t had to go get it anymore. But if I remember one time trying to go look for KISO data and just like, it’s so completely different. Like I had no idea of where to go and like what I was doing.

Max Kanter (20:51.586)

Yeah. And you know, it’s one of the interesting aspects of the fact that it’s public data because, know, I think a lot of people say, Hey, this data is public. And I say, yeah, it’s public, but if you don’t know where to find it, does it matter? And so part of the value proposition is just making public data discoverable. And you know, one other point I want to make too is, we don’t necessarily see ourselves replacing any of the ISO sites. Like we wouldn’t exist if each of the ISOs didn’t put in tremendous effort.

Max Kanter (21:20.972)

right, to make this data accessible in public. So, you one of things that we do is, you we try to be very transparent to our users of where did we get it on the ISO site. We know we have a data catalog and on every page we have a link back, you know, as much as we can to like literally, you know, click this URL and you will see the exact same data on grid status and in the ISO. No, there’s no goal to like this and intermediate. It really is just to be, we’re not the source of truth, but how can we be kind of like the public record?

Max Kanter (21:50.784)

of where people find the data.

Joshua Rhodes (21:52.428)

Yeah, citations and getting that as an academic, that’s super helpful all the time. You mentioned how you started as kind of data, now you’re doing kind of these insights. How do you choose when you want to publish an insight and maybe explain, we’ve talked mostly about grid status, posting a whole bunch of data, making it easy to get, but what is this insights piece?

Max Kanter (22:13.142)

Yeah. So the way I think about grid status, what we build is it all starts with, you know, we live in the energy markets ourselves, right? Like we spend all of our days thinking about what’s going on. And so to actually do that, right, we build the tools that we want to use to understand what’s going on. And so that’s why we started collecting the data. That’s how we build the different applications for monitoring it. And then the third step is to share out what we see.

Max Kanter (22:41.134)

And so, know, insights and this new insights product you’re referring to is essentially us just sharing out what we’re finding and how we’re using our tools to find it. Because then the fourth step is to then enable our customers and our users to do the same thing. Then the process repeats itself with them living in the markets alongside of us, building out the tools, right? For all of us to use it better, sharing what we see. And so, you know, the insights release is really meant to kind of flush out our platform. We have the data.

Max Kanter (23:10.222)

You have the tools to understand it. And then of course, the final, you know, actionable analysis of what’s going on.

Joshua Rhodes (23:16.226)

Are there any data sources or are there other things that you found really interesting that you wish people knew more about? is there some undiscovered piece there?

Max Kanter (23:25.998)

Yes. I mean, the true answer is yes. I mean, I think almost every customer I talk to, they’re not using our entire catalog. In probably 99 % of cases, right? Like they haven’t spent as much time clicking through parts of these sites that we have, or we just talk to so many people every day. Like if a customer requests a data set and we add to our catalog, it’s now available to everybody as well. This discoverability question, I think it’s actually very pertinent to how we develop a product.

Max Kanter (23:54.862)

Cause one of the biggest challenges we’ve had, you know, I’ll say over the last few years is, know, when the site started, it was very simple. We had a dozen data sets and we visualize a dozen data sets. Now we have 500 data sets. can’t put 500 data sets on the homepage. And so what happens is as you start building out your breath of data and functionality, you make it kind of harder to find things. And so I think about that a lot for, you know, a particular customer and their use case, how do you make it possible for them to find?

Max Kanter (24:24.438)

And so like an example of something that comes up a lot is like people want to know outage information, you know, which power plants are going offline, which transmission lines are going out, which of these things are happening, you know, on a scheduled basis or which ones are, you know, unexpected, right. And both of those, you know, have very different implications for operations pricing. And so I want all of our customers to find many different data sets, but that’s one in particular that I was trying to point users to because

Max Kanter (24:53.4)

They don’t always realize how much publicly available information there is in that regard.

Joshua Rhodes (24:57.452)

Yeah. Do people ever come back to you and say like, this is what I built with your data? Has anyone ever done that? Said, Hey, I built this cool thing. Like I just wanted to share it with you.

Max Kanter (25:06.99)

all the time, I’d say, you know, some of the really cool things are, you know, I’d say like the people who are actually physically participating on the grid. Okay. Right. So, you know, I think when you think about say like some energy traders, you know, a lot of them are virtually trading power, right? They’re kind of taking a position in one market and then later closing out that position in another market. And they’re not ever physically producing or consuming power.

Max Kanter (25:37.038)

Other users of ours, so like one of our users is Rayburn Electric Cooperative, a municipal generation transmission co-op, you know, in Texas. They actually service, I believe, know, 600, 700,000, you know, people and their member utilities. Right. And what’s really cool about their usage of grid status is the stuff that they build is, you know, actually translating to the physical world. Take a little bit of a tangent.

Max Kanter (26:04.728)

One of the things that really attracted me to the grid and energy from my previous world, or my previous life of really working in AI and data science was, so much of software never crosses that boundary into actually making a physical impact. so energy really felt that way. So we can influence decisions about how power plants are generating power, or people are building things on the grid, or where and when they’re deciding to buy power. That has just this early clear

Max Kanter (26:34.062)

physical real world implications. And so yeah, I could talk about Rayburn Electric, they’re a big user of ours. They actually became an investor in grid status as well. The stuff that they’ve built and just how they’re kind of rising to the challenge of the demand growth that they’re seeing is really cool. And we’re just along for the ride trying to build out some software to help them do that. But it’s always cool to see the stuff that they’re building.

Joshua Rhodes (26:56.396)

That’s really cool. If you’re talking about electricity, particularly like electricity grid, there’s a lot of carbon implications like that. There’s climate stories that are happening. How has grid status been used to talk about the climate and the impacts from the electricity?

Max Kanter (27:10.648)

I’d say one of the biggest ways I think we play a role in that story. First thing you need to decide is where is your power coming from? And when I say where is it coming from, like what generation, what fuel sources is it coming from? So one of the most prominent things we show on grid status is the basically generation stack. How much power is going from nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas, oil, and you know, the list actually goes on like some parts of the country.

Max Kanter (27:38.584)

For example, in New England, like they actually burn wood to generate power at times. And so, you when you think of the climate conversation or carbon or anything like that, it’s aware, how are we actually generating the power? And I believe a lot of people, they have very strong views and biases towards what they want the generation sources to be. And, some of those might be well-founded, very well-founded, but you need the data to actually back it up. And so, know, how is Goodsad contributing to that is like,

Max Kanter (28:08.194)

How do we make sure people who have very different opinions on where we should generate our power, how do we make sure they’re at least talking with the same facts, right? Having a conversation, you know, looking at the same data, understanding what’s going on together. And so one of my favorite things that happens with grid status and our visuals is like, we’ll have two people share the exact same picture of California’s fuel mix with solar in the middle of the day, taking up a huge share and decreasing prices.

Max Kanter (28:37.674)

Some people, people who are proponents of solar will share that and say one thing, people who are proponents of natural gas will point to a different part of the graph and share that. People who like batteries will point to the same graph. And so that to me is like one of the most powerful things. And I would say a very divisive kind of topic of how we should be providing power to the grid and what do we optimize for the effect that people can use grid status to be looking at the same data, I think is a huge win. And that’s kind of the role we hope to play.

Joshua Rhodes (29:08.14)

Yeah, that source is like ground source of truth. People who can have arguments but from the same set of principles or same set of facts or like same set of like data. It’s actually kind of rare these days, right? I remember the same thing like when I built the online map that I built, I mean that was one of the things that we saw was, you know, people would take the map. It has the same math underlies it. It’s very simple like calculating the levelized cost of electricity. People could put their own cost and their own fuel costs in there and it would update and then people could

Joshua Rhodes (29:37.87)

basically use it to discourse with each other, but they were starting from like a ground truth, right? They weren’t able to like manipulate things. that says, guess it feels like that translates here. You’re starting from the data and like people can do whatever they want, but if they’re using your product, they’re not going to be able to manipulate it, which seems like it’s a really good place to be.

Max Kanter (29:58.162)

Yeah, that all goes back to our mission, right? We want to be a centralized place that people can go to to understand what’s happening. two different counterparties in a transaction or, two different policy positions, right? They can take their stance, but making sure they have common ground on the facts is I think pretty enabling.

Joshua Rhodes (30:19.714)

Yeah. So do you have the data you need now to do your carbon accounting for charging your electric vehicle?

Max Kanter (30:25.39)

Short answer is yes. The longer answer is I thought when I started GridSats to get this data, was going to be a four week side quest and that would get back to building what I wanted. Turns out it’s a lot more complex than I expected. for example, we started 2025 with 200 datasets in our catalog. We ended 2025 with over double that. And the pace has kept up in 2026. So I thought that this was a very concrete

Max Kanter (30:54.894)

discrete challenge of collecting data about the grid. It really isn’t. And so I think at this point, the goal is not to get back to building vehicle to grid software, but it is to enable users and our customers to build that. know, since embarking on grid sets, you know, I’ve learned of so many different use cases and honestly, just like companies and organizations I didn’t even know existed a few years ago, but are very important for the operations and reliability of the grid.

Max Kanter (31:23.106)

Data has become table stakes for these companies to operate, right? And just making sure that they have what they need. We will always keep on trying to get the best data available to make even better vehicle to grid or other kind of innovative use cases like that possible.

Joshua Rhodes (31:37.934)

Yeah, absolutely. You 500 datasets. We talked a little bit about like how much you’re pulling every day and the granularity. If you had to count all your data points, LMP at this time is one point. Do you have any feel for how many data points you have in your database? Multiple databases. How many trillions? I’m assuming it’s trillions.

Max Kanter (31:58.808)

Fair to say hundreds of billions. Fair to say that. It depends how you count a data point. But yeah, hundreds of billions for sure. But like we’re collecting like tens of millions of rows of data a day. And each of those rows of data have multiple columns. You can multiply it out. It’s a lot of data, put it that way.

Joshua Rhodes (32:19.638)

Yeah, I’m sure it is. Okay, so one thing that I am asking folks is like, if we could flip the script right now, you’re interviewing me. Is there a question you would like to ask me?

Max Kanter (32:30.232)

I do have a question for you. So before Grid Status, I had completely taken the grid for granted. One of the things, you know, following you over the years is you are one of the more visible voices talking about the grid, you know, both in, you know, I’d say close industry circles, right? But also more broadly in the mainstream media and, national publications. I guess, how do you approach, I guess, that role? Because I find there’s a lot of needles to thread.

Max Kanter (32:59.936)

And so, yeah, I’m curious how you approach that role of being a very public face of the grid.

Joshua Rhodes (33:05.73)

When I started, my dissertation work was on Smart Grid 1.0. So this was like money coming out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act after the Great Recession area. Like I actually wanted to look at green roofs and other types of things, but they’re like, hey, we’ve got this project looking at Smart Grid. And I’m like, what is Smart Grid? And they’re like, yeah, we’re going to figure that out. As I dove deeper kind of into the data, I just got really comfortable there. I just got really comfortable looking at how homes are using energy and looking at how

Joshua Rhodes (33:35.596)

that would translate to, you know, what home makeups were and that type of thing. And I had a mentor, Dr. Michael Weber, who like he was also in the media quite a bit and he couldn’t do all of his media stuff. And he would just suggest me for things that he kind of couldn’t get to. And so I just I’ve never really been afraid of trying new things. And so I just kind of like tried it and turned out I’m pretty good at talking in analogies in a way that normal people could understand kind of these complex things. And so just being able to take the complexity of the grid or in the data to underlie it.

Joshua Rhodes (34:05.398)

and put it into terms that normal people can understand. Like I was just pretty good at that. So I just kind of kept going with it. And then once you get in someone’s, know, Rolodex, they tend to keep calling you. So.

Max Kanter (34:16.206)

Awesome. Does it feel like a lot of responsibility?

Joshua Rhodes (34:19.244)

You know, it does actually because I don’t ever want to be wrong. Like if I’m going to be interviewed or asked about something, I’m going to go do research. And in these days, it’s generally pulling a lot of data and looking at things. And part of that research is going to grid status and looking and seeing kind of what’s going on in MISO or wherever. I think that one of the tricks is never getting over your skis, being able to appropriately caveat things.

Joshua Rhodes (34:47.277)

I do have like a little bit of a good setup such that like if folks are wanting to interview me, it’s generally they’re looking for an expert so they’ll actually make me sound smarter than I am, which helps me out quite a bit. And so maybe that’s actually what it is. Is there actually looking for someone smarter so they make me smarter? I don’t know. We’ll see. But anyways, Max Cantor, thanks for being on the Energy Capital Podcast.

Max Kanter (35:08.328)

My pleasure, anytime.

Joshua Rhodes (35:12.024)

Thanks for listening to the Energy Capital Podcast. If today’s conversation helped you make better sense of how the energy system actually works, share the episode with a colleague and hit follow on your podcast app. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the usual platforms. For deeper analysis and context each week, subscribe to the Texas Energy and Power at texasenergyempower.com. That’s where you’ll find every episode, every article, and our latest updates. We’re also on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

Joshua Rhodes (35:41.39)

where we share clips, insights, and ongoing commentary on energy policy, markets, and the grid. Before we go, a quick note. The views expressed on this podcast are my own and do not represent the official positions of the University of Texas, Ideasmiss, Austin Energy, or Columbia University. A big thanks to Nate Peevee, our producer. I’m Joshua Rhodes. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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