Open Circuit

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 influential chip and infrastructure research firm, recently projected over 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power at U.S. data centers by 2028, most of it gas turbines, reciprocating engines, and fu...

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 Product Officer at Bidgely.

As PSEG Long Island prepared to transition more than 900,000 residential customers onto time-of-day rates, success depended on building trust, improving transparency, and helping customers understand exactly where their...

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, hit a new all-time demand record.

The Energy Department issued emergency orders to keep the lights on. And people living next to data centers wondered: how much diesel pollution would they breathe if all the backup g...

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 be sequenced together. And on top of it all, public opinion has radically shifted against data centers, adding new risks.

In this episode, recorded live at our Transition-AI...

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 Public Service, and Karthik Moorthy, Chief Growth Officer at Bidgely.

APS initially partnered with Bidgely to solve a highly practical customer-service problem: helping call-center agents explain why a customer’s bill had increased. By using appliance-level en...

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, Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion company to file a generation interconnection request with PJM. The company has a site in Virginia, customers in Google and Eni, and a timeline that could put...

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 company, SpaceX is pitching itself as an AI company, an emerging hyperscaler, a satellite broadband network, and eventually a vertically integrated chip manufacturer, solar manufacturer, power developer, and op...

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 about data centers. 

So will this be the push utilities need to finally change the way utilities pay for infrastructure?

This week, we dig...

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 deal in American history: NextEra’s attempt to buy Dominion. If it happens, it would combine the biggest renewable energy developer in the US with the util...

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 conversation over whether "climate hushing" is a savvy political strategy or a dangerous concession.

This week, we take the debate head-on. Guest co-host Jane Flegal joins us...

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 ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best. And then the crypto industry decided it was done being ignored and attacked. It built a war chest and spent hundreds...

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 their backyards. Permits are being denied and projects are stalling.

The industry's default response has been to barrel forward and ramp up PR. But Christian Belady thinks that's the wrong diagnosis entirely. Christian spent decades at H...

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 actually driving the revolt, and why it's more complicated than simple NIMBYism. 

Utilities are at the center of the backlash. Governors are increasingly targeting them as anger grows over opaque deals and rising rates.

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 shock this big finally weaken the world's oil addiction? Or do we just go right back to where we started?

We also get into t...

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 in deals that don’t move forward, developers spend years advancing projects that can’t get financed, and critical information only emerges when it’s almost too late to act on it.

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 Transition-AI conference in San Francisco, we stress test three Silicon Valley mantras against the reality of what's happening to the grid. 

First, “move fast and break things”: data center bans are...

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. Who needs influencers when you have the tech companies who run the platforms?

This month, Meta announced it would fund 10 natural gas power plants for a s...

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 to plan, coordinate, and build at the scale this moment demands.

On the left, there’s a growing push to limit demand through data center moratoriums and price controls. On t...

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 speaks with Hannah Bascom, chief growth officer at Uplight, about the rise of the “demand stack” — a framework for combining efficiency, dynamic pricing, and demand response into a coordinated resource for the grid.

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 system sits idle for much of the time. A new report from The Brattle Group suggests that better utilization of the existing system could...

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 renewables raise or lower power prices, whether AI data centers are about to break the grid.

So who’s actually right?

This week, JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest joins the show to weigh...

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 result: higher fuel prices, rising electricity costs, and a reminder of how vulnerable modern economies still are to fossil-fuel geopolitics.

This week, we look at the wide-ranging impacts of the shoc...

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 is it just political theater?

This week, we’ll look at the politics and intention of the announcement, along with some real-world models emerging for powering the AI economy.

In Minne...

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 intelligence from the clean energy finance platform Crux, project finance, construction lending, and bridge lending all grew at a modest rate – with renewable electricity and batteries accounting for 80% of activity.

This w...

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 renewable sources. 

They’re piloting this technology at a new commercial facility in partnership with  San Miguel Electric Cooperative, a rural Texas electric cooperative that is transitioning from coal to solar and battery storage...

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 at that scale? Or are they worried about the tech industry’s approach to solving them?

Then we turn to one of the boldest responses to those bottlenecks: space-based data centers. After Spac...

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 commercialization threshold and becoming bankable, repeatable infrastructure.

Over the past few years, over a billion dollars has flowed into geothermal startups, including Sage Geosystems, Zanskar, Quaise Energy, Eavor, XGS Energy, and...

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 interventions.

On the other, a quieter, asset-light strategy is emerging at the state level. In places like Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey, governors and legislatures are increasingly looking to virtual power plants to meet growing peaks...

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 warning of a “five-alarm fire.”

We’ll start with a look at how accelerating load growth, tighter reserve margins, delayed interconnection, and extreme weather are colliding —...

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 contracts, while building new ones.

But critics argue that parts of Meta’s deal don’t add new capacity fast enough — possibly pushing electricity prices even higher in an already-ti...

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, and investors trying to figure it all out.

This is no longer a conversation about whether clean energy can scale. It’s about whether the systems...

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 the 1980s, where she learned to design distribution circuits, calculate load, and build early efficiency projects. 

She talks about how those experiences gave her an intuitive grasp of how the grid works...

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 storylines and surprises that defined the year. The categories include: 

The biggest plot twist

The breakout star 

The best villain 

The most u...

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 dollars in grid upgrades, much of it based on speculative data-center proposals and a still-evolving understanding of real load.

In this episode, Stephen Lacey unpacks the growing tension between an AI industry defined by rapid iterat...

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 the room? Who is the pragmatic parent holding the family together? And who is the rebellious teenager threatening to upend the status quo?

But first, we se...

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 regulators and customers to keep rates down — even as costs spike from inflation, supply chain delays, and long-overdue modernization.

The Edison Electric Institute estimates that utilities are planning about a trillion dollars in grid investment by 2030. But...

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 of climate tech in 2025?

We’ll start with a look at the debate over Bill Gates’ latest letter on climate impacts, philanthropy, and tech progress. Why does he obsess...

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 the past five years.

So what’s really driving them up? The answer isn’t renewables or AI. The study finds that generation costs are down 35% since 2005, but transmission costs have triple...

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 industrial base of the entire free world.” These minerals only make up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of imports, but their strategic value is enormous. They’re woven into every emerging industry the U.S. hopes to domin...

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 lips: bubble.

This week, Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View and one of the sharpest analysts of exponential technologies, joins Open Circuit to unpack the difference between a...