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-tight market.

And that concern is suddenly political. This week, President Trump said tech companies need to pay their own way when it comes to electricity, signaling just how central data centers are to the national debate over affordability.

This week, we have a breakdown of Meta’s nuclear push. We’ll look at what it means for power markets, how it compares to what the rest of the hyperscalers are doing, and whether this moment actually changes the future of advanced nuclear.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 around it can move fast enough to support the next wave of industrial demand.

To kick things off, we dig into some of the forces redefining the power sector: the fight over capacity, the rise of co-located and merchant power, the limits of data center flexibility, and what Alphabet’s acquisition of Intersect Power tells us about the race to buy power.

We also officially introduce Caroline Golin as our new regular co-host. Caroline brings a unique perspective to Open Circuit: she spent the last seven years inside Google, where she served as global head of energy market development and innovation. 

Caroline helped shape how Google procures electricity, engages utilities, and navigates capacity constraints across global markets. That experience puts her at the center of many of today’s most urgent questions around energy.

Welcome to the new Open Circuit, where we decode how clean energy actually gets built. If you want to watch the episode, subscribe to the show on YouTube!

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 — a foundation that shaped her roles at NREL, in federal advocacy, in leading industry associations, and becoming a trusted policy voice in clean energy.

We’re deeply grateful for the clarity and optimism Katherine brought to every conversation. Over the years, she helped listeners make sense of policy upheavals, market shifts, and the messy, unpredictable reality of the energy transition. 

This is a chance for us to say thank you. Katherine was an incredibly effective translator for the clean energy industry, and we’re going to miss her deeply. 

This is our final episode of the year, but we’ll be back in January with fresh episodes.

Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 underrated storyline

Finally, we look ahead and make one bold prediction for 2030. In a year of growth, uncertainty, and a bit of existential dread, join us for our recap of the last 12 months.

Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

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 iteration and a power system built on decades-long investment cycles. What does that mismatch mean for forecasting, financing, and resource planning?

We then feature two conversations from Transition-AI Boston. Former FERC commissioner Allison Clements and Generate Capital’s Peter Nulsen explain why traditional planning signals no longer offer the certainty they once did. How do load uncertainty, short-term contracts, and sequencing challenges reshape the risk profile for new energy projects?

In the second discussion, Mike Kramer of Constellation, Dawn Owens of Fervo Energy, and Sam Simmons of Form Energy explore whether AI-driven load will create meaningful demand signals for clean, firm technologies like geothermal, advanced nuclear, and multi-day storage. What will determine if they gain a real foothold?

We will soon be opening registration for Transition-AI 2026 in San Francisco. More details here.

Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 serve an appetizer of the week’s biggest news: a new analysis from Grid Strategies shows that projected peak load growth has quadrupled in just two years to 166 GW. And we’ll wrap with leftovers — the unfinished stories we’ll be sharing well into next year.

Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 how much of that is truly focused on resilience? And how do we balance the need for those investments with all the other cost pressures hitting the system?

This week, we’re joined by Julia Hamm, a partner with the Ad Hoc Group, to break down where resilience fits in. We look at how utilities justify resilience spending, how regulators are responding, and why so much of the debate comes down to defining the line between reliability, resilience, and routine maintenance.

Then we widen the lens to the emerging resilience-tech market, a growing ecosystem of startups focused on wildfire detection, predictive weather analytics, vegetation management, sensors, and advanced grid modeling. We explore how these technologies could help utilities target investments and turn resilience into opportunity rather than pure cost.

Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 over innovation while ignoring the systems that help solutions scale?

Then we turn to the so-called “new normal” for climate tech capital. Venture investment is thawing, public markets have rebounded, and infrastructure money is pouring into the sector. What does that mean for startups?

Finally, we end with a little thought experiment about what history will remember us for.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 tripled and distribution costs have more than doubled. Billions are now being spent to upgrade the grid and harden it against extreme weather.

This week, we’re joined by guest co-host Caroline Golin to unpack the new data. We’ll discuss what’s driving those infrastructure costs, why utility spending remains so opaque, and what could happen over the next five years as large loads multiply.

Later in the show, we’ll talk about a new proposal from Energy Secretary Chris Wright to accelerate the interconnection of large loads with onsite generation or flexibility capabilities. The proposal could speed up data center projects, but also risks triggering a new clash between federal and state regulators over reliability, costs, and control.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.
With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

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 dominate.

And that’s the point. Under China’s new export rules, foreign companies will need government approval to trade or process these materials, giving Beijing leverage over the supply chains that feed both clean energy and artificial intelligence.

In this episode, we look at the impact of China’s restrictions. And we also ask: is the AI war really an energy war?

If you zoom out, this isn’t just a chip war or a minerals dispute — it’s a systems war. America has been pouring billions into digital intelligence, while China has been focusing on the “electric stack” that brings enormous strategic economic value.

The electric stack is the vertically-integrated network of mining, refining, manufacturing, and grid infrastructure that underpins both the emerging electricity-based economy. China has spent decades mastering it.

In the second half of the episode, we unpack an essay from Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico that argues America is playing the wrong game. Are we overestimating the value of artificial intelligence and underestimating the electric infrastructure that intelligence runs on?

Resources discussed in this episode: 

The Electric Slide by Packy McCormick & Sam D’Amico

Mastering the Electro Tech stack by Noah Smith

The Electrotech Revolution report from Ember

The Electro-Industrial Stack from Andreessen Horowitz

NYT: China’s Rare Earth Restrictions Aim to Beat the U.S. at Its Own Game

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!