The Closest I’ve Ever Been to Changing the World (2) — The Beginning

Continuing from the last post, Here’s how it all started: One night, he was having a conversation with his colleague who happened to be a former Navy SEAL member and was talking about a past mission — one that involved cutting through ships and submarines underwater.

That suddenly reminded him of a thought he’d had as a child:

Why can’t we build a power network underground?

He said he has been working in the energy industry for decades, and the biggest bottleneck isn’t the energy itself, but instead, it’s the transmission lines — there simply aren’t enough of them.

In North America, people always see those overhead lines — ugly, hard to build, and they take ten to fifteen years to just get the permit to build.

But if you could put the lines underground, it would take only about fifteen months to get permits and finish construction.

So, he invented something called the Plasma Tunnel Boring Robot.

He said, “Just think of it as a lightsaber from Star Wars. It uses only electricity, costs a relatively small amount, and can dig tunnels underground.”

This kind of robot can excavate without contact and without noise, moving ten times faster than traditional methods and at only one-tenth the cost.

It doesn’t need blasting, drill bits, cutter heads, harsh chemicals, or heavy machinery.

In their tests, they’ve already successfully bored tunnels through limestone, granite, basalt, greywacke and other rock — one torch created a 10-foot × 12-foot tunnel in 30 hours, and it has successfully penetrated granite, quartzite, basalt — some of the hardest rocks on Earth.

I was completely lost listening to all this, so I asked:

“So, for someone like me who knows nothing about what you are saying right now to understand — you’re saying you can use electricity to melt through the hardest rock, dig tunnels without touching anything, at one-tenth the cost and ten times the speed?”

He said, “Exactly. No contact, no mechanical cutting. It’s fully electric — no noise, no vibration.”

I asked again, “But companies have been digging tunnels for hundreds of years — what’s the real pain point? Why reinvent this?”

He said, “You don’t get it — this technology lets us dig tunnels at ultra-low cost and ultra-fast speed, and we actually own the tunnels! That means we can develop our own underground infrastructure — the tunnels themselves — and rent them out to power companies, collecting rent and also charging fees for the power flow that goes through these tunnels.”

He said, “Think of it this way: on the surface, you build a highway and set up toll booths. That’s real estate. We’re building those ‘highways and toll booths’ underground. It’s real estate underground! But what runs underground isn’t cars — it’s electricity, energy flow, and data flow — things far more valuable than surface traffic. We are the world’s only company capable of horizontally tunneling with plasma technology. And speed and cost are the two most critical factors — both of which we’ve solved. Right now, to build a new power transmission line on the surface, just getting the permit takes more than a decade; doing it underground with traditional technology costs 5 to 20 times more, so nobody does it. People would rather be slow than expensive. But now — time is running out. Since AI came out, power consumption has increased fivefold, and the existing grid simply can’t keep up.”

He said, “Our technology allows surface-level infrastructure to move underground at the same cost, while saving 90% of the time. And underground power grids are nine times more stable than surface ones, requiring only 10% of the original maintenance truck fleet. Simply put, our technology makes underground power grids cheaper, feasible, higher quality, and massively expands global power supply. It solves supply, cost, and quality at once — a crushing-level revolution from every angle.”

I then asked, “What about permits? Won’t you run into community opposition or get stuck in hearings? Aren’t you being a bit too optimistic?”

To be continued next time!