My guest today is Pradeep Tagare, head of investment at National Grid Partners, the US-based VC arm of National Grid, which is a grid operator active in the UK and the US.

We talk about the challenges facing grid operators at a time when the growth in demand for power is unprecedented, not least because of the phenomenal growth in data centres in the age of AI. We touch on how people are thinking about providing to these large demand customers like data centres, and what solutions exist to increase grid capacity even without a wholescale upgrade of the grid infrastructure itself.

We also talk about the progress being made in the area of distributed energy resources, and how the challenge of interoperability of those diverse energy sources is largely solved, and how AI can be used from anything from finding out where best to place data centres, to figuring out how to best reduce the problem of vegetation overgrowth which can bring networks down, and more.

But first, I speak to Kim Moore about the growth of the space startup ecosystem in Europe.