Open Circuit

Electricity affordability has become the defining energy issue of 2026. As policymakers scramble for solutions, two very different playbooks are taking shape. On one side, a blunt-force federal approach led by the Trump Administration that treats affordability like an emergency. Keep coal plants open. Force markets to change. Make large power users pay directly for new power plants through market...

It’s been nearly a year since a national energy emergency was declared, with big promises on prices and reliability. So we’re asking a simple question: how’s that going? In this live episode of Open Circuit, recorded at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, we take stock of a power system under growing strain. Outages are up, prices are up, markets are stressed, and grid reliability experts are w...

Meta just unveiled the biggest-ever corporate deal for nuclear power. It’s a sprawling set of contracts for both existing plants and next-generation reactors that totals 6.6 gigawatts. Just a few years ago, the conversation in the U.S. was about which nuclear plants were going to shut down next. Now, some of the world’s largest technology companies are trying to lock them up under long-term contra...

This is an episode with a lot of firsts: the first show of the year, the first full show on video, and the first with our new co-host, Caroline Golin. In 2026, we’re launching a new chapter for Open Circuit as we sharpen our focus on the physical constraints shaping the energy transition — exploding power demand, grids that can’t keep up, tech companies reshaping electricity markets in real time,...

After more than 40 years in the energy industry, Katherine Hamilton is retiring. And that means she’s also retiring from the podcast after a decade behind the microphone. In this farewell episode, Katherine shares insights into a career that spanned one of the most transformative periods in energy history. We’ll reflect on her accidental entry into grid engineering at Dominion Virginia Power in th...

This year, the energy industry changed faster than we could talk about it. We collectively said more than 225,000 words on this show — some of them were informed takes, some speculation. So how did they age?  This week, Stephen reaches into a stocking stuffed with quotes from past episodes, and Jigar and Katherine must decide to defend, update, or disown their own words. Then, we honor the storyli...

Three years after ChatGPT ignited the AI race, the assumptions driving the trillion-dollar data-center boom are starting to shift. The belief that endlessly scaling large language models will unlock AGI — and justify unprecedented growth in electricity demand — is now being questioned by some of the field’s most influential voices. At the same time, utilities are planning roughly a trillion dollar...

This year in energy has had the vibes of a dysfunctional family gathering: everyone showed up with big feelings, and no one agreed on the menu. To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re processing the chaos right at the dinner table. In this holiday special, the team matches classic Thanksgiving guest archetypes with the biggest energy storylines of 2025. Who is the drunk uncle sucking up all the oxygen in...

Utilities are facing a collision of pressures: extreme weather, rising load, affordability concerns, and growing regulatory friction. Everyone agrees the grid needs to be hardened. But the real question is: how much resilience should we pay for? On one side, utilities are confronting unprecedented stress from storms, wildfires, flooding, and heat. On the other, they’re under pressure from regulato...

After Bill Gates dropped a new climate manifesto, the internet did what it always does: lost its mind. Conservatives claimed victory, progressives accused him of selling out, and somewhere in the middle was a real debate about how the energy transition actually happens. This week, in our episode recorded live at Greentown Labs, we’re jumping into the fray. What does the debate say about the state...

Here’s something surprising: in states like North Dakota and Texas, the surge of new industrial and data center load has actually moderated electricity prices. The very thing many people blame for higher power bills has, in some cases, had the opposite effect. According to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, load growth has slightly lowered retail electricity prices on average over t...

After years of U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors, Beijing is fighting back by cutting off exports of the raw materials that make those chips possible: rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium — the invisible ingredients inside motors, power electronics, defense systems, and data centers. The move caught Washington off guard. The Treasury Secretary compared it to “pointing a bazooka at...

The AI economy isn’t coming. It’s already here. In the first half of 2025, investment in AI infrastructure outpaced all U.S. consumer spending. Tech companies are now building the equivalent of an Apollo program every ten months, while data centers are drawing capital away from nearly every other sector. As money floods into chips, servers, and substations, the “B word” is suddenly on everyone’s l...

Distributed energy resources have never looked stronger. Fleets of batteries are now performing like gas plants, virtual power plants are dispatched daily, and hyperscalers are supporting new models to finance capacity around their data centers. But investor-owned utilities? The Edison Electric Institute says they’re planning more than a trillion dollars in new infrastructure over the next decade...

For the last decade and a half, the loudest voices in the climate movement have treated decarbonization like a moral crusade: ban gas stoves, declare climate emergencies, punish fossil fuel companies. But those tactics don’t lower utility bills or build durable political coalitions. And now, amidst a radical shift in U.S. politics where the economy dominates, there’s a growing call for a pragmatic...

Eggs were the symbol of inflation in the last election. Now, as electricity bills spike, they are becoming a symbol for consumer frustration in 2026. Americans are feeling the squeeze. Bills are up nearly 30% since 2021, outpacing inflation and straining household budgets. Eighty million Americans are struggling to pay, four in five feel powerless, and politicians are scrambling for someone to bla...

On his first day in office, Trump laid out his wind policy in one simple sentence: “We aren’t going to do the wind thing.”  With stop-work orders, red tape, and wild claims about whale-killing electromagnetic fields, the White House has stepped up its war on wind. The flashpoint is Ørsted’s $5 billion Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, which was weeks from delivering 700 megawatts of clean...

In 2004, Dr. Sarah Kapnick was a young banking analyst at Goldman Sachs when she spotted a blind spot: no one was helping clients understand climate risk. Two decades later, she’s the Global Head of Climate Advisory at JPMorgan, turning climate science into boardroom strategy. Kapnick’s career path — from Wall Street, to NOAA’s chief scientist, and back to finance — mirrors the way markets are evo...

This week, we’re doing something a little different: we’re turning to Jigar’s social media feeds and listener questions to guide our conversation on the latest news in clean energy. First, we tackle the affordability crisis. President Trump recently posted on Truth Social calling renewables "the scam of the century" and blaming them for rising prices. We look at how his policies are making the cri...

We're witnessing a profound shift from discrete AI tools to always-on AI companions — systems that provide constant feedback, conversation, and support. Sound familiar? It's the 2013 movie "Her" becoming reality.  In this episode of Open Circuit, we have a conversation with MIT’s Vijay Gadepally from our Transition-AI conference about how the spread of artificial intelligence is reshaping our digi...

In the last two quarters, capital spending on AI has blown past all U.S. consumer spending. Investments in AI infrastructure have already eclipsed the telecom and dot-com booms. The top tech companies are pouring so much money into computing power that they may be single-handedly propping up an economy wobbling under chaotic tariff policy. Gigawatts of new data center requests are flooding utility...

Over the last four years, the U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector saw a historic boom. Factory construction doubled, foreign firms opened production in dozens of states, and federal policy spurred over $150 billion in manufacturing plans. But a swirl of conflicting policies — from chaotic tariff threats to complex foreign sourcing rules — is freezing planned investments, spooking some manufactu...

Why can your phone instantly reroute you around traffic, but your utility can't tell you when to charge your car for maximum savings? Why can Uber optimize thousands of drivers in real-time, while the electrical grid struggles to optimize distributed resources? Both transportation and electricity systems emerged during the Victorian era with remarkably similar infrastructure: central hubs connecte...

As America faces a surge in electricity demand, the federal government is working hard to slow the very resources needed to meet it. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to slash clean energy deployment by as much as 60% over the next decade — bringing back hard tax credit sunsets, introducing tight construction deadlines, and imposing strict foreign entity restrictions.  Meanwhile, a DOE reli...

The story of climate change is usually told through fossil fuels — pipelines, coal plants, oil companies. But there's another story that accounts for nearly a third of global emissions: agriculture. And we've barely begun to grapple with it. In this episode of Open Circuit, we're joined by Michael Grunwald, longtime journalist and author of the new book "We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Ou...