Energy Empire

Demand on ComEd’s grid barely moved from 2009 to 2022. Now the utility expects about 10 gigawatts of data centers to connect by around 2030, against an all-time peak of 23 gigawatts.

ComEd’s CEO, Gil Quiniones, wants to connect those data centers without raising everyone else’s bills. Rooftop solar and batteries, which many utilities have fought, are part of his plan.

Gil spent 16 years at Con Edison and more than a decade running the New York Power Authority. While he ran the Power Authority, he and Jigar worked on the state’s push to build the grid around energy that customers make and store at home.

In Chicago, he’s starting with the families who can least afford their bills. A pilot this winter will put solar and batteries in about 50 of their homes with no money down.

Gil thinks the setup could take about $70 off a monthly bill that typically runs $100 to $120.

Recorded live at Future Currence during Climate Week NYC.

In this episode:

• How deposits and letters of credit shrank ComEd’s list of serious data center requests from about 18 gigawatts to 10

• Why Jigar says a data center’s voluntary promise to power down in an emergency isn’t good enough

• What ComEd has to prove to regulators before it can build a new substation

• The 100 hours a year the grid is built for, and what using the rest of the year could do for bills

• Whether other utilities need a new state law to do what ComEd is doing

Links:

Future Currence: https://future.currence.ai

ComEd: https://www.comed.com

The Untapped Grid (Brattle Group): https://www.brattle.com/the-untapped-grid/

Illinois Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act: https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/gov-pritzker-signs-historic-clean-and-reliable-grid-affordability-act

More from Energy Empire:

The Cheapest Grid Is the One We Already Paid For: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/the-cheapest-grid-is-the-one-we-already-paid-for

Inside California’s Plan to Fix the Utility Business Model with Senator Josh Becker: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/inside-california-s-plan-to-fix-the-utility-business-model-with-senator-josh-becker

NVIDIA on Whether AI Can Fix Its Own Power Problem: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/nvidia-on-whether-ai-can-fix-its-own-power-problem-recorded-live-at-climate-week-nyc

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

Ukraine has learned how to keep a power grid running while someone is trying to destroy it. Every country that imports oil now needs the same lessons.

Last winter Russia blew up power plants and substations, and Kyiv lost power every day. The fixes were concrete bunkers that let a substation take a direct hit, home batteries, a nuclear fleet kept running, and new wind and solar built in the middle of a war.

The Iran war has since shown every oil importer the same vulnerability. Countries won’t go back to sleep after this, and the map of who buys energy from whom is being redrawn.

Tim McDonnell is Semafor’s climate and energy editor and writes Semafor Energy, its twice-weekly newsletter. He lives in Kyiv, where the sirens go off all the time and some nights are spent in the metro. Getting out to report starts with an overnight train to Poland, because Ukraine still has no working airport.

The interview was recorded at Climate Week NYC on September 21. The intro and outro were recorded before the energy ceasefire Trump announced on October 11.

In this episode:

• The sirens, the metro at night, and why the air war over Kyiv is back to early-2022 levels

• How a substation wrapped in concrete takes a cruise missile and keeps working

• Why the free flow of oil through Hormuz that existed before February is probably gone for good

• The case that oil importers won’t “go back to sleep” once the Iran war ends

• Egypt’s six-month sprint into wind and solar after Iran sent gas prices up

• The “tourists” arriving in cleantech funding rounds, and whether that’s a bubble

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

Northern Virginia is the biggest data center market in the world, and pushback is growing.

So are power bills. A typical Dominion bill is now about $180 a month, $20 more than a year ago.

Rising bills put energy on the ballot in Virginia’s 2025 governor’s race. Abigail Spanberger won it by 15 points, and now she wants data centers to pay for the grid built to serve them.

Recorded live at the Virginia Clean Energy Summit in Richmond for Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the midterms.

In this episode:

• The breakfast in Norton, Virginia, where nearly everyone in the room wanted to talk about their power bill

• Why Virginia’s new energy plan puts a price on asthma and rising seas

• A proposal to make new data centers in Virginia face a local vote

• How everyone’s bill changes when data centers choose batteries over gas generators

• Virginia’s first-of-its-kind tax on data center electricity, and the case for the industry’s sales tax break

• What candidates should run on this November, and why state and federal races need different answers

Links:

https://energy.virginia.gov/connect/

www.energyempire.fm

When a warehouse turns its freezers down for two hours, it looks to the grid like a power plant switching on. Voltus pays thousands of businesses to do exactly that, every day of the year.

Voltus, the largest demand-flexibility company in North America, just announced a $225 million Series D led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. Today's guest, co-founder and CEO Dana Guernsey, plans to use it to grow from 8.5 gigawatts of flexible capacity to 20 by 2030, a quarter of the Department of Energy's target for the whole country.

Google is already a customer, paying Voltus to line up as much as 100 megawatts of that flexibility in PJM, the grid that runs from Illinois to Virginia, so its data centers can connect faster. It's the first deal of its kind, and Dana's argument is that "do no harm" is too low a bar for a company with Google's balance sheet; a data center can leave the grid better than it found it.

In this episode:

• What a Walmart, a winery, a glass factory, and a sewage plant each do when Voltus calls

• The church that stayed open and the factory that kept a whole shift, both because of Voltus checks

• From $25 a year for a thermostat to $11 million for a data center, who gets paid what for turning things down

• How 50,000 homes become 100 megawatts, and the PJM rule that kept them out until August

• The year governors and the White House learned what PJM is

• Why Google is paying its neighbors to flex instead of building a gas plant that runs 25 hours a year

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

"Little Red Riding Hood is kind of a dumb story without the wolf."

That's how Senator Sheldon Whitehouse thinks Democrats have been telling the climate story. His wolf is the fossil fuel industry, and it shows up on your electric bill.

When the Trump administration blocks cheap clean power, the grid falls back on pricier fossil plants and families pay the difference. He calls it a "ginormous money pump."

Whitehouse represents Rhode Island and is the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is also one of four senators behind the bipartisan permitting bill released shortly after this conversation was recorded.

Part of Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the 2026 midterms.

In this episode:

• The half-price offshore wind power for Rhode Island that drew two federal stop-work orders

• "Have you ever seen anything go from zero to everybody hates you faster than data centers?"

• Why he hates, loathes, and despises one stage of federal review, and his fix for it

• What a plumber in Orlando loses when nobody will insure their home

• Russia as "a gas station run by gangsters who have an army," and the sanctions law he wants the president to use

• The dark money bill he wants Democrats to pass and dare the president to veto

Learn more at energyempire.fm

AI data centers are straining the grid. NVIDIA and Phaidra say part of the fix is more AI: software that runs the cooling, data centers that ease off when demand peaks, and chips that do more with every watt.

This episode was recorded live at The Nest Campus during Climate Week NYC. Jigar and Jamie talk with Josh Parker, head of sustainability at NVIDIA, and Jim Gao, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA-backed Phaidra.

In this episode:

• An AI agent that predicts heat spikes on CoreWeave's NVIDIA chips and stops them before they hit

• Why NVIDIA is cooling its chips with 113°F coolant to cut water use

• Whether AI needs gigawatt-scale data centers, or GPUs on the side of a house

• How half a percent of flexibility could free up about 100 gigawatts on the US grid

• The cost of adding 12 hours of battery backup to a $125 million data center

• What it would take for a data center to lower its neighbors' power bills

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Four senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act on September 30. One of them recorded this episode with Jigar the day before.

The bill puts deadlines on federal environmental reviews, gives opponents 150 days to sue instead of five years, hands the federal government a backstop for interstate transmission, and, as Heinrich describes it, bars utilities from putting a data center's grid costs on anyone else's bill.

Martin Heinrich is the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and negotiated the deal with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Republican chairs Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee.

In this episode:

• Why Heinrich didn't wait for a Democratic Senate: "why don't you just wait until you have the gavel?"

• The difference between a "sternly worded letter" and a law when a hyperscaler wants to plug in

• The one-year clock a state gets before a transmission route goes to FERC

• Why a geothermal well is harder to permit than an oil well on the same acre of federal land

• What got "a little rocky" with the White House the week before the deal

• "If you're calling people ratepayers, you're probably making some mistakes"

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar
S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds
Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas
Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

Electricity bills are rising across America, and for the first time in years, they're a campaign issue. Candidates on the left and the right are promising to cut your power bill. But are they even the ones in charge? What gets decided in Washington, and what gets decided in your state capital? And how do you tell a real promise from an empty one?

Those questions are what Energy on the Ballot is for: a new series from Energy Empire, released every Monday until Election Day.

To kick it off, Jigar and Jamie sit down with Arnab Pal, co-founder and executive director of Deploy Action, who spends his days in state capitals pushing laws that make utilities use the grid they already have before they build more and bill you for it.

Together they walk through the basics: what really makes a power bill go up, who signs off on it, and which of this year's promises to lower it can be kept. Recorded in person at the new Energy Empire studio in New York.

In this episode:

• Why the backlash against data centers is really a backlash against AI, and why the tech companies didn't see it coming

• The extra $5.77 a month on Arkansas power bills after the local utility refused to let Google pay for its own grid upgrades

• Promises made: Trump's pledge to halve energy bills in 12 months, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill's rate freeze that became a $25 credit, and a Big Tech pledge nobody can point a dollar to

• Paying people to use less power at peak times is 80% cheaper than building a new gas plant, so why aren't more utilities offering it?

• Why your state legislator matters more than your member of Congress when it comes to your power bill

Learn more at energyempire.fm

In Germany you pick up a solar panel at IKEA or the grocery store and plug it in at home.

Here you order online, the cheapest kits can take four months to arrive, and in most states you still technically need your utility's permission to install it.

Cora Stryker co-founded Bright Saver, a nonprofit that sells the kits at cost, $285 for a 180 watt system. They helped draft Utah's balcony solar bill, the first in the country, and have since worked with legislators in 35 states and DC. Nine have passed laws so far.

In this episode:

• Why some states make you hire an electrician to plug in an appliance

• What a $285 panel takes off a monthly bill, and how fast it pays for itself

• The emails from PG&E that killed Bright Saver's first business model

• The for-profit company that rewrote one state's bill so only its own product would be legal

• Why balcony solar has bipartisan support

• When Cora thinks you'll be able to buy one at Walmart

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

In most of America, the cost of generating electricity has barely moved since 2015. But, over the same 10 years, residential rates are up 37% (EIA).

Lee Taylor has spent 13 years pricing power in every corner of the country. He joins Energy Empire to explain what you're actually paying for, and why a windy day in Oklahoma never shows up on your bill.

Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Resurety. He funded the company in 2013 by selling shares in his own future income. Last year he got federal approval for CleanTrade, the first regulated exchange for wind and solar power, which now has 60 participants and $50 billion in bids.

In this episode:

• The three buckets on your bill, and why the one that keeps growing has nothing to do with generating power

• Oklahoma gets 45% of its power from wind and prices haven't moved in a decade. West Virginia has almost none, and prices are up 50%

• California has some of the cheapest electricity in the country and the most expensive bills. Both are true

• The $5,000 electricity bills from the Texas freeze, and why cheap power always comes with a catch

• A 1,000-page application, DOGE, and 4 of 5 commissioners gone: getting a first-of-its-kind market through Washington

• "Tax credits were always a really blunt force way to get around the fact that we don't actually charge for carbon"

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products