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 energy disaggregation, the utility moved beyond generic explanations to identify the likely drivers of higher usage.

But the project soon raised a bigger question. How could the same intelligence support a wider range of planning and operational solutions across the utility? Venkat and Karthik explain how APS began bringing Bidgely’s models closer to the utility’s own data environment, creating a foundation for broader experimentation and deployment. 

They discuss data sovereignty, centralized AI governance, the difference between buying a point solution and building deeper capabilities, and why AI transformation is ultimately as much about data and operating models as it is about technology.

Learn more about how Bidgely works with utilities through its UtilityAI platform.

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 power on the grid in the early 2030s. That’s roughly the same window as a conventional power plant built today.

The science is far from done, and fusion has burned optimists before. But for the first time, the conversation has shifted from "can this ever work" to "can this work on a timeline that matters for today's grid planning?"

This week, we interrogate that timeline with Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

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 operator of orbital data centers.

In this episode, we tackle some of the energy storylines behind SpaceX’s public debut. 

We’ll ask what it means for Elon’s energy master plan, the pathway for powering terawatt-scale compute, and whether it presents an opening for other hard tech energy companies coming out of Elon’s orbit.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

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 into three indicators. First: 75% of Americans say their home energy costs have gone up, and a quarter of Americans now consider utility bills unaffordable. Second: 86% of California voters said executive pay should be tied to affordability. And third: 71% of Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home, a 49-point swing in less than a year.

Julia Hamm, a partner at Ad Hoc Group, joins us to explore how these economic anxieties may shift the electricity economy.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

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 utility serving the world's largest concentration of data centers. 

What does it mean for their power development strategy? We debate the regulatory path, the power mix question, and who actually benefits.

Then we turn to an infrastructure debate. Are we entering a new era of distributed, grid-connected data centers that will overshadow the gigawatt-scale campus model? 

And we close with a rapid-fire look at some ideas for solving the compute crunch: Home inference hubs, water heaters that serve AI, and wave-powered data centers.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

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 to talk about the latest version of this argument, and whether dropping the climate frame is a smart tactical pivot.

Then we turn to a more fundamental problem. Even if we land on the perfect climate frame, it may not matter if the U.S. can't actually build the infrastructure the transition requires. A sweeping new essay in American Affairs argues that both parties have become functionally obstructionist — and that “ideologically portable” obstruction has become a feature of American governance.

We close with a look at an opening in philanthropy. Nan Ransohoff published a piece this month arguing that AI company wealth is about to generate up to $100 billion per year in new philanthropic capital. Do the institutions exist to deploy it? And how much might find its way to climate and energy work?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Jane Flegal. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

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 of millions of dollars in 2024, representing nearly half of all corporate political spending that cycle.

As a result, crypto went from regulatory target to political kingmaker in a single election cycle.

Clean energy has been a legitimate economic force for over a decade and still gets pushed around Washington. Why? How does an industry that's winning on economics keep losing in politics?

This week, we're live from the Prelude Climate Summit, a gathering of the top investors and companies in climate tech.

Stephen Lacey is joined by Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of Ripple, who helped engineer crypto's political transformation. He is now deploying that same playbook in service of climate. He’s also joined by Mike Brune, the longest-serving executive director in the Sierra Club's history, who stepped away in 2021 to co-found the Clean Break Fund with Chris — a new climate investment and political initiative.

We get into bare knuckle politics, lessons from the crypto industry, when and how we should talk about climate in politics, and the way AI is influencing the conversation. 

Open Circuit is produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

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 HP and Microsoft. At Microsoft, he helped build one of the largest data center footprints in the world. 

He invented PUE, the efficiency metric that became the industry standard. And now he's arguing that the way out of this community crisis isn't communications, it's engineering. 

So how do we make data centers assets to the communities they operate in?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

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.

Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sent a letter to his state's utilities declaring that "the 20th century utility model is broken." We break down what he's actually proposing and what it says about the impossible position governors now find themselves in.

Later in the show, Latitude Media senior reporter Maeve Allsup to talk about her reporting on the backlash from Indiana, where a $5 billion data center has run headfirst into decades of broken promises and soaring utility bills.

We’ll also take a quick look at PJM's reformed interconnection queue, open for the first time in four years. We’ll look at the dominance of gas, the pullback of renewables, and what it tells us about where grid buildout is actually headed.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

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 the emerging clean energy storylines: Countries are dusting off their transition plans, Chinese cleantech exports are surging, and Gulf states may pull back on climate tech investing.

Then we turn to the world's most hyped data center developer, Fermi America, which raised nearly $750 million promising to build the largest campus ever. The company is now in freefall with no anchor tenant, a departed CEO, and a construction site that looks unchanged from six months ago. What went wrong?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.