Doug Haugh

Energy Executive, Husband and Father. Thinking, Speaking and Writing about Energy and Leadership

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

@GavinNewsom We are not confederate states you jackass, we are the United States thanks to a brutal civil war that killed 600,000 Americans. So reverting to 150 year old name calling for great states, like those of us in SC, now that makes me angry.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

The real drivers of our rising power costs are not data centers, they are being used as a scapegoat for decades of poor management, over regulation, lack of any competition and lack of investments by those you in the government granted monopolies.

Focus on bringing investment to our state and sure let’s be smart about the supply and demand balance for electricity, but this is a once in a lifetime chance to bring abundance of generation to our state and have investors not ratepayers footing the bill.

Read up if you want to understand the facts https://t.co/FkNc84r8NS

[Todd Jones 🦊 @toddrjones]

Here are some ways in which the world has gotten better.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

@elonmusk

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

https://t.co/IAtg3Yew82

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

Most AI pilots don’t fail because of the model. They fail because organizations aren’t ready to scale.

That’s the real takeaway from my recent Future of Convenience podcast conversation between very experienced industry guys I like to listen to: Dan Munford and Jeffrey Rubin.

Listen to this podcast on the GC website or see links to Spotify and Apple Podcasts https://t.co/8xiGTQWmJI

We’ve entered a new phase of AI adoption:
👉 The question is no longer “Can we build it?”
👉 It’s “Can we operationalize it at scale?”
And that’s a completely different challenge.

From what we’re seeing across industries, a few patterns are clear:

🔹 Pilots are easy. Production is hard.
Controlled environments hide the complexity of real-world data, systems, and users. What works in a demo often breaks at scale.

🔹 Data is still the bottleneck.
Without reliable, well-governed data, even the best AI models underperform. Most “AI problems” are actually data problems.

🔹 Integration > innovation.
The real work is connecting AI into existing workflows, systems, and decision-making processes—not building flashy use cases.

🔹 Change management is everything.
AI adoption is as much about people as it is about technology. If teams don’t trust or use it, it doesn’t matter how good it is.

🔹 Value beats volume.
Scaling AI isn’t about running more pilots—it’s about focusing on fewer use cases that deliver measurable business impact.

✅The companies that are winning with AI aren’t experimenting more..They’re executing better. They treat AI as infrastructure, not a side project.
They design for scale from day one.
And they stay relentlessly focused on outcomes.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

@Houseofyogi Wonderfully put!

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

They want you to be ashamed of the American Dream

Your grandpa showed up with a suitcase and $40. Didn't speak the language. Didn't know anyone. Washed dishes until he could afford something better. Saved enough to buy a truck. Started a business. Then bought the building.

Your grandma watched it happen. And she raised four kids to believe they could do it too.

That's the American Dream.

It never mattered if you were born here or came on a boat. What mattered was what you were willing to build.

A kid grows up on a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. His dad never finished high school. His mom works the register at the only store in town.

Nobody in his family has ever left the state.

He tinkers with engines after school. Builds things out of scrap. Shows up to college with everything he owns in the back of a pickup truck.

Ten years later he's running a manufacturing company.

Not because his parents had connections. Not because someone handed him a trust fund or a last name that opened doors.

Because this is America. And in America, you're allowed to try. You're allowed to dream.

And the numbers prove it.

~23 million millionaires in this country. 79% of them are self-made.

902 billionaires. More than anywhere else on the planet.

13 out of the 15 richest people in the world are American.

73% self-made. They didn't inherit empires. They built them. In garages. In dorm rooms. In strip malls. On kitchen tables.

Jeff Bezos never knew his biological father. He started Amazon out of a garage and couldn't afford a desk so he bought a door from Home Depot and screwed four legs onto it.

Larry Ellison was abandoned by his mother at nine months old. His adoptive father told him he'd never amount to anything. He dropped out of college twice and built Oracle into a $200 billion empire.

Oprah was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother. She became the most influential media figure on the planet.

Three people who had every reason to fail. Look what they built instead.

Tell me where else a broke kid with no connections can build a billion-dollar company and nobody asks who his father was.

You won't find it. Because every other system on this planet was built to keep people where they were born. Castes. Classes. Last names. Bloodlines. Old money. Old power.

America was built to break all of it.

An entire generation has been brainwashed into being ashamed of it.

They taught your kids that this country was built on nothing but slavery and genocide.

They put it in the textbooks. The movies. Every feed.

Until your 19-year-old can't say "I love my country" without feeling like he has to apologize.

They told you the American Dream was a lie sold to keep people down.

53 million people born in other countries chose to live here.

71% of them say they'd do it all over again.

They didn't pick France. They didn't pick Germany. They didn't pick China. They picked here.

Because they already know what you've been gaslit into forgetting.

Don't let them do this to you.

Don't let some professor who's never built anything tell your kids that the country their great-grandparents bled for is irredeemable.

Don't let some activist with a blue check convince you that a nation of 22.7 million self-made millionaires is a monument to oppression.

Don't let a politician shame you into believing that the people who build are the villains. Every time this country creates greatness, they tell us to apologize for it.

And don't you dare let a foreigner who's never set foot here tell you what your country is.

They've never watched a janitor's daughter become a surgeon.

They've never seen a single mom put herself through night school and end up running the department.

They've never sat at a Thanksgiving table where five different accents argue about football and nobody thinks twice.

That's not some ad, it's a Thursday.

Somewhere right now a kid is lying on the floor of a studio apartment doing homework while his mom works a double. He doesn't have a trust fund. He doesn't have a single connection that matters.

But he's got a shot. A real one. Because he lives here.

And if you let them take that from him, what are you even defending?

This is the country that looked at the moon and said "we choose to go, not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

So build.

I hope you understand what's at stake.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

@handre https://t.co/RzbNbeJpnR

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

https://t.co/n4HGce2hpi

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

@handre

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

The real contest is not capitalism vs. socialism on a spreadsheet.

It is myth vs. myth:

a utopian promise of purified justice
vs.
a harder, humbler story of fragile freedom and imperfect progress.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

https://t.co/n4HGce2hpi

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

Because socialism is not defeated by white papers and policy memos.

If its power comes from myth, then the only serious response is a better story.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

It is good to make sure they are not confused. Communism is far less insidious. While Socialism snakes up the back steps Communists just blow down the front door. Either way both of them take your house if you let them set up in your neighborhood., but yeah good to know the difference.

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

The Return of Industrial Policy Brings the Physical Economy Back Into Focus - How Marco Rubio’s speech on national security in Munich highlights the importance of energy policy and investment in industrial capabilities.https://t.co/EvdtnB9Ab3 via @doughaugh

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

Electricity Affordability, AI Data Centers, and the Real Drivers of Rising Rates https://t.co/ktQxtoasGu via @doughaugh

[Doug Haugh @doughaugh]

So one size doesn’t fit all, doesn’t mean it’s not a great fit for some hauls. There are a lot of lanes that cube out long before they weight out and the extra truck weight doesn’t restrict those lanes . We did this with CNG tractors for the last 20 years, they work great in certain applications and not great in others, which was fine, did not mean they didn’t work.