Open Circuit

America turned 250 years old last week. While local leaders were busy organizing parades, re-enactments, and flyovers, grid operators and emergency officials were dealing with something else entirely: a heat dome settled over the eastern U.S.  Nearly 200 million people were under extreme heat warnings, the national parade in Washington was canceled, and PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, hi...

For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastructure got built on separate tracks because the grid had room to spare. That model is gone. Today, with long lead times for equipment, multi-year interconnection queues, and the pressure to bring your own generation, it all has to...

AI is about far more than chatbots and copilots. For utilities, the bigger opportunity may be in applying purpose-built models to the operational data from smart meters, customer systems, weather, outages, and grid equipment. In this first episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Venkata Nimmala, Director of Digital Transformation and Enterprise Architecture at Arizona...

For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public's attention, and then leads to disappointment when people realize that limitless energy from the stars is very hard to produce on Earth. But now fusion is evolving into a commercial story. This spring, Commonw...

Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify. But either way, the company’s public debut tells us something important about this investment moment: the next technology cycle is not asset-light. It is ambitiously physical. SpaceX is now much more than rockets and launchpads. With xAI inside...

The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media. And you can see it in the polling. Across poll after poll, more people are saying that they can’t afford their bills and they think utilities need to change how they make money. And they are also very cynical a...

First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it's getting harder than ever to site and build the data centers to alleviate it. This is shaking up who builds the energy infrastructure to serve it, and how it gets built. This week, we’re diving into the biggest utility dea...

A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change? It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing that Democrats should avoid talking about climate change. His case: climate carries far too much political baggage for working class voters that Democrats are trying to win back. It sparked a conversatio...

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US. And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man. Now consider crypto. A few years...

For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development.  That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into...

Data center opposition is now being called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” In Indiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, voters across the political spectrum are turning sharply against the large campuses powering AI. At least 28 of the 38 states that currently offer tax incentives are weighing whether to roll them back. On this episode of Open Circuit, we dig into what's actua...

As the oil crisis persists, the world is running on borrowed time and borrowed oil. Inventories are draining, and the pain that started in Asian petrochemical plants and Indian cooking fuel shipments is now spreading west.  Now, the traders who move the world's oil are saying there's a reckoning coming for the rest of the world. This week, we dive into what happens if this keeps going. Does a shoc...

What actually kills a clean energy project? It’s not always interconnection delays, permitting, or supply chains. Sometimes, it’s the deal itself. Even after years of development, hundreds of documents, and months of diligence, projects still fall apart late in the process — sometimes just days before closing. Often, it’s because risks aren’t surfaced early enough. The result: capital gets tied up...

With electricity now the limiting factor in the race to build superintelligence, the tech industry's response has been very Silicon Valley: move fast, break things, and relentlessly scale. The result? An overtaxed grid, a wave of community pushback, and an obsession with jet engines, ship turbines, and small modular reactors that don’t solve today’s problems. In this live episode, recorded at the...

For a long time, natural gas was considered a bridge fuel. Even the gas industry called it a bridge, working hand in hand with environmental groups to push coal off the grid.  Then came the pushback over methane leaks, air quality in homes, and residential gas connections. The industry got so rattled it started hiring influencers to win back public opinion. Well, all that has changed radically. Wh...

America’s grid problems are often framed as physical constraints: equipment shortages, interconnection backlogs, and a lack of powered land. But are we missing an opportunity to bring bigger ideas to the table as we reindustrialize and electrify the economy? This week, Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, joins the show to talk about why our biggest constraint is an inability...

For years, demand-side programs like energy efficiency and demand response were treated as compliance, not real resources.  Now, that’s changing. As electricity demand surges, utilities are facing a new reality: they can’t build infrastructure fast enough or affordably enough. So they’re starting to look in a different place for capacity: inside homes and businesses. In this episode, Stephen Lacey...

We’re entering an electricity supercycle that is reshaping how power gets built, where it gets built, and who controls it. Across the U.S., developers are scrambling to lock up land with access to electricity. And the century-old grid is being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for. It’s also sparking a new debate about how exactly to modernize the grid. For all the talk of capacity scarcity, the s...

Everyone has a strong opinion on energy right now. If you’ve followed energy for a while, none of this is new. There have always been strong opinions — renewables versus fossil fuels, subsidies versus markets, activists versus infrastructure. But the intensity feels different right now. People are arguing about everything: the speed of the transition, how to fix broken electricity markets, whether...

President Trump’s war with Iran has rattled global energy markets. Oil prices have surged, LNG markets are tightening, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply — has been severely disrupted. Tankers are stalled, shipping costs are soaring, and energy markets are bracing for one of the largest oil supply disruptions in history. The...

The politics of AI and electricity came to the White House this week. On Wednesday, the biggest tech companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle — gathered in Washington to sign what the administration is calling a “ratepayer protection pledge.” The promise: data centers will pay for their own power and grid integration costs. But is anything actually changing? Or...

When President Trump kicked off an aggressive trade war, a lot of people predicted economic doom. But it didn’t happen. We’re seeing something similar in clean energy right now with ever-shifting tariffs, half-written rules on foreign sourcing, and the weaponization of permitting. But capital hasn’t fled. In fact, it increased last year. So what is happening here? According to new market intellige...

This week, we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint.  In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks with Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems. Cindy and her team at Sage Geosystems are developing geothermal technology that could revolutionize energy storage. Instead of pumping water up a mountain, they pump it deep into the earth, providing cost-effective, long-term storage for intermittent renewab...

This year alone, the biggest tech companies plan to spend more than $600 billion on physical infrastructure — eclipsing the railroad boom, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo space program. But are investors starting to flinch? This week, we examine the negative market reaction to tech earnings. Is Wall Street reacting to the infrastructure bottlenecks that stand in the way of building a...

2026 could be the year of the mega-IPO, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic all rumored to be eyeing public markets. But for energy nerds and hot-rock lovers, there’s another IPO to watch: Fervo Energy. With Fervo preparing for a long-anticipated IPO, the geothermal sector is heading into a moment of price discovery. It’s a test of whether next-generation geothermal has finally crossed a new commer...