Open Circuit

Energy is at the center of one of the biggest political swings in a generation. Two years ago, Trump rode into Washington with a powerful MAGA coalition. He promised, among many things, to dismantle woke energy and cut utility bills in half. But the midterm elections cracked that coalition wide open.  Democrats flipped the House and Senate by historic margins, won governor's races in Texas, O...

The prepping vibes online are very high right now. Spend any time on X, and you’ll get inundated with warnings about AI hacking, possible grid collapse, and stockpile checklists. There’s a reason people are anxious. Security experts are sounding the alarm about AI agent swarms that are targeting infrastructure. Governments around the world are telling people to prepare for at least 72 hours of dis...

This was supposed to be the year when clean energy rode the AI wave onto Wall Street. Instead, the pipeline for energy IPOs is dwindling. What happened? A combination of high interest rates, uncertain AI revenue growth, investor concerns over capital expenditures, and local friction slowing projects are all putting pressure on AI companies — and the energy providers serving them. Companies that pl...

The last few months have brought more momentum for grid flexibility than the last decade.  All across the country, load growth is pushing policymakers to leverage DERs and other flexibility tech to get more out of the grid we’ve already built. But can utilities count on it? This week, live from Latitude Media’s Flex Summit, we explore how flexibility is getting integrated in pockets of the co...

Not long ago, we were asking if AI would save the climate. Now we’re asking if it will wreck it. The truth is somewhere in between. But it’s easy to see why sentiment swung so radically. When the AI race kicked off, we were promised rapid breakthroughs in materials, a business model revolution, and a radically more intelligent energy economy. But many people feel like we got hulking gas plants, hi...

It’s really hard to build infrastructure in America. And it’s particularly hard for clean energy, which is overwhelmingly stalled by outdated and onerous permitting. But we have never been able to get to the root of the problem. And that’s why a new bipartisan federal permitting bill is such a big deal.  The bill sets hard deadlines for environmental reviews, limits lawsuits, and makes it har...

Across America, people are screaming “no” — no to data centers, and no to the energy projects that serve them. So what gets people to a “yes”? Perhaps an enthusiastic yes? Every utility and tech company is scrambling to answer that question. And so far, they haven’t been able to find one. Our guest this week, Sparkfund CEO Pier LaFarge, has thought a lot about this problem. And he’s trying to prov...

The biggest story in Washington is President Trump's rejection of AI safety regulation. But the White House is waging an equally consequential regulatory battle against carbon regulations. This month, the EPA finally rolled back the Biden-era carbon rule for power plants, arguing that the agency does not have the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases. It's setting the stage to block any future...

Data centers are known for their hulking exteriors, rows of blinking servers, and massive cooling equipment. But there’s an entire ecosystem no one gets to see: the electrical architecture that sits between the power source and the GPUs. And as data centers integrate more battery storage, there’s little consensus on what that electrical architecture should look like.  Batteries used to have o...

We are in the middle of a radical political and economic realignment, with electricity infrastructure at the center of it. And this summer, the plot thickened. Power sector reforms are coming in fast and furious, across states, regional markets, and federal regulators. Local resistance reached new heights around the country. And data centers are scrambling politics as we near the midterm elections...

As data centers, factories, and electrification push growth to unprecedented heights, customers are looking for greater control over their energy use. But the traditional one-size-fits-all approach falls short for customers wanting to know which energy choices will benefit them most, and how those choices will impact their bills. In this third episode of Bidgely’s four-part series, Stephen Lacey t...

Electricity prices have become a central storyline in upcoming U.S. elections. All over the country, Americans are finding it harder to pay their bills, and they’re getting increasingly cynical about utilities and data centers.  While governors are caught in the middle of this voter anger, there’s a group of key decisionmakers that are often missed: the 200 regulators that oversee tens of bil...

Virtual power plants are having a moment. Suddenly, this once-niche solution for the power sector is breaking into mainstream discourse. The convergence of sudden load growth, aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and electricity inflation is turning distributed resources into must-deploy assets.  At the state level, VPPs are becoming a go-to tool for making electricity more affordable. They...

We're on vacation through the end of August, so this week we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint. Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage. But inexpensive, multi-day storage will still be critical for backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid.  Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron, Form is...

Arbor Energy is betting that smaller, modular turbines can solve problems the conventional generation model was never designed for. Arbor Energy was founded with an unusual idea: take technologies from rocket engines and use them to make carbon-negative power plants. Today, the market has radically changed. Demand for turbines is exploding, the supply chain is jammed, and data centers need power o...

After Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, everyone thought prices would hit historic highs. But they didn't. Why? The answer is less about market resiliency, and more about two major government interventions. The U.S. intervened using a central banking model, and China intervened with a top-down government approach. James Gutman, head of research at Abaxx Technologies, joins us this week to discu...

The showdown over data centers is taking a new turn. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a data center pause in order to audit how they’ll impact water supplies and the power grid. This comes weeks after New York issued a moratorium. Not long ago, Governor Abbott was declaring Texas the center of the AI boom. But with his re-election bid under threat, he’s now responding to the radical...

It's been almost a decade since the “Electrify Everything” movement kicked off. And guess what? We aren't electrifying everything. We're seeing strong growth in electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction cooktops. But we're still trapped inside a system that makes the electric choice harder to make. And nowhere is that more obvious than with heat pumps.  Every eight seconds in the US, an HV...

This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built. In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by Jes...

A major fault line runs through the data center debate: how many will actually go off-grid? There’s a lot of enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for breaking free from the grid. But even the companies pushing hardest for off-grid projects now admit they want a grid connection eventually. So how much behind-the-meter power will actually get built in the next few years? And what fills it? SemiAnalysis, the...

Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to time-of-day rates as electricity demand grows and delivery costs rise. But a harder challenge is giving customers the tools to save money under those new rates. In this second episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Lou DeBrino, Vice President of Customer Operations at PSEG Long Island, and Ted Nielsen, Chief Pro...

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...