Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand.

We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast, driven by electrification and data centers powering AI. At the same time, the grid is getting more complex. Distributed resources, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are making it harder to plan, predict, and operate. And the tools utilities rely on weren’t built for this kind of system.

Our guest today has spent his career inside that problem, from working at a utility to building one of the early software platforms for managing distributed energy. Josh Wong is the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company. We co-led ThinkLabs’ $5 million seed round in 2024. ThinkLabs is building an AI copilot for the electric grid, helping operators understand and manage the system in real time. Using physics-informed models, the platform can compress analyses that once took weeks or months into minutes.

Josh was born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto. He began his career at Toronto Hydro, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to operate the grid in practice. That experience led him to found Opus One, a company focused on helping utilities manage increasingly complex power systems, which was later acquired by GE. Josh kept coming back to the same underlying problem: utilities need to move faster, but the tools they rely on make that nearly impossible. ThinkLabs is his answer.

In our conversation, Josh walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build in one of the most complex and risk-averse industries in the world. Today, ThinkLabs has raised more than $30 million from investors including NVIDIA and Energy Impact Partners, and is working with partners and customers including Southern California Edison, and other major ISOs.

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