As data centers, factories, and electrification push growth to unprecedented heights, customers are looking for greater control over their energy use. But the traditional one-size-fits-all approach falls short for customers wanting to know which energy choices will benefit them most, and how those choices will impact their bills.

In this third episode of Bidgely’s four-part series, Stephen Lacey talks with Kirby Brinlee, director of customer experience at Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Abhay Gupta, CEO at Bidgely.

Through their partnership with Bidgely, OG&E learned something surprising about their variable peak pricing program: Customers were shifting their energy use to the wrong hours. Personalized messages and recommendations proved a win-win for the utility and their customers. Flexibility programs became more reliable resources for grid planners, and customers learned how to keep their costs low. 

Kirby and Abhay discuss how load growth is reshaping the utility-customer relationship, why personalization matters, and how AI is helping OG&E give more power to customers. OG&E’s experience reveals how AI can unlock more sophisticated demand flexibility by finding the right customers, accurately measuring energy usage, and building stronger customer relationships. 

This is a partner episode, brought to you by ⁠Bidgely⁠.

This is the third episode in our series with Bidgely exploring how utilities are deploying purpose-built AI to solve their most pressing challenges. Tune in to the other episodes:

Electricity prices have become a central storyline in upcoming U.S. elections. All over the country, Americans are finding it harder to pay their bills, and they’re getting increasingly cynical about utilities and data centers. 

While governors are caught in the middle of this voter anger, there’s a group of key decisionmakers that are often missed: the 200 regulators that oversee tens of billions of dollars in utility spending.

In this episode, Charles Hua, the founder and executive director of PowerLines, walks through why that gap matters right now. 

Utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases last year. And PowerLines’ newest research found that utilities are planning $1.4 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030. Hua dissects what is driving that spending, arguing that the real drivers of higher bills predate the data center boom. 

Still, the data center effect is real. And state-level regulators are struggling to balance the need for economic development with the massive rate increase requests that utilities are throwing at them. 

So how will electricity affordability shape elections? And, most importantly, how will it shape the way we pay for needed grid upgrades?

This conversation was recorded live at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Virtual power plants are having a moment. Suddenly, this once-niche solution for the power sector is breaking into mainstream discourse.

The convergence of sudden load growth, aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and electricity inflation is turning distributed resources into must-deploy assets. 

At the state level, VPPs are becoming a go-to tool for making electricity more affordable. They’re championed as one of the only solutions that can open up enough capacity to support load growth over the next three years.

But at a moment of historic utility spending, VPPs can still feel like a round peg in a square hole. Utilities and regulators treat them as a novelty, and market rules are not designed to unlock their potential.

So what still needs to happen to leverage the true potential of this resource? This week, we have a live episode recorded from Cpower’s GridFuture conference in Jersey City.

Stephen is joined by David Visneau, head of demand response and VPPs at NRG Business; Ken Schisler, senior director of growth & policy at NRG; and Mathew Sachs, chief strategy Officer at CPower​ ​. They dive into the unique tailwinds for the market, the regulatory constraints, the state-level policy activity, and some predictions about where we're headed.

This episode was produced in partnership with CPower. 

We're on vacation through the end of August, so this week we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint.

Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage. But inexpensive, multi-day storage will still be critical for backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid. 

Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron, Form is creating low-cost, multi-day storage that competes directly with natural gas peaker plants. 

Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, has spent over two decades in the battery industry, including building Tesla’s storage business. At Form, he’s leading the charge to bring these "E-peakers" to utilities across the country. The company recently achieved a major milestone: completing a one-million-square-foot factory on the site of an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia.

In this episode, Mateo talks with host Lara Pierpoint about the grueling realities of scaling up manufacturing, why they chose to build in West Virginia, using AI to drive material science discovery, and the immense logistical challenges of building physical infrastructure. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Arbor Energy is betting that smaller, modular turbines can solve problems the conventional generation model was never designed for.

Arbor Energy was founded with an unusual idea: take technologies from rocket engines and use them to make carbon-negative power plants.

Today, the market has radically changed. Demand for turbines is exploding, the supply chain is jammed, and data centers need power on rapid timelines. Suddenly, Arbor’s 3D-printed turbine is a potential answer to the power bottleneck.

In this episode, Stephen Lacey talks with Arbor CEO and co-founder Brad Hartwig, a former SpaceX engineer who found his calling in power generation.

They explore how Arbor is adapting rocket technologies for power generation, how additive manufacturing could unlock new turbine supply chains, and why the company believes cleaner power solutions are critical for community acceptance.

Can rocket engineering help reinvent the way we build power plants?

This episode was produced in partnership with Arbor Energy. 

After Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, everyone thought prices would hit historic highs. But they didn't. Why?

The answer is less about market resiliency, and more about two major government interventions. The U.S. intervened using a central banking model, and China intervened with a top-down government approach.

James Gutman, head of research at Abaxx Technologies, joins us this week to discuss how these two interventions influenced global oil flows, and why China emerged as a clear winner. Gutman wrote about the Chinese and American strategies on his substack, Arcs and Angles.

We look at how China cut crude oil imports and leaned on a decade of investment in electric vehicles, high-speed rail, and coal-to-liquids to defer demand. As China starts to come back into the market, the country is now operating at a position of strength.

We also discuss the U.S. model, which leaned on strategic oil reserves to moderate prices in a way that mirrors central banking. Gutman argues that this “central bank of molecules” model worked, but only for so long. And he worries about how it will get used in the future.

Finally, we ask how both of these approaches could get used again in other industries like critical minerals or equipment manufacturing.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

The showdown over data centers is taking a new turn. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a data center pause in order to audit how they’ll impact water supplies and the power grid. This comes weeks after New York issued a moratorium.

Not long ago, Governor Abbott was declaring Texas the center of the AI boom. But with his re-election bid under threat, he’s now responding to the radical shift in anti-data center sentiment.

So what will this mean for other states? And more importantly, will states use their pauses to find creative ways to upgrade grids and deploy clean energy?

Then, the end of the corporate net-zero era. AI load growth is blowing up climate goals in real time and tech companies are scrambling to explain their emissions increases. Meanwhile, many of the biggest corporate players are walking away from their targets.

But could this actually be a good thing for corporate decarbonization? We’ll look at more effective ways for companies to accelerate clean solutions.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

It's been almost a decade since the “Electrify Everything” movement kicked off. And guess what? We aren't electrifying everything.

We're seeing strong growth in electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction cooktops. But we're still trapped inside a system that makes the electric choice harder to make. And nowhere is that more obvious than with heat pumps. 

Every eight seconds in the US, an HVAC contractor installs an air conditioner that has only one mode: cooling. That one decision locks in fossil fuel heating for the next 15 to 20 years.

This week, we're joined by Nate Adams, known as the House Whisperer, to unpack the three-part series he wrote for Latitude Media on what's actually holding heat pump adoption back. Nate argues the fix isn't more rebates or bigger subsidies for homeowners. Rather, it's making it easier for upstream players to make and stock two-way ACs.

We dig into the emergency replacement trap, the importance of hybrid systems, how heat pumps got politically coded, and why leading with comfort — not climate — is the winning pitch. We also talk about Nate’s immersive, fully electrified Airbnbs.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios.

We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by Jessica Bailey, Global Head of Infrastructure at Nuveen, an institutional giant with over $1.4 trillion in assets under management. Jessica directs $40 billion in infrastructure investments and discusses how the collision of the energy transition, digitalization, and aging grid systems is creating an unprecedented investment landscape.

Jessica shares her unique journey from climate philanthropy at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to pioneering C-PACE financing. She also explains the financing structures needed to scale domestic manufacturing, why economic realities are beginning to override political gridlock, and why the biggest check on AI growth won't be capital, but could be energy and community pushback.

Subscribe to Critical Capital on Apple, Spotify, or any podcast platform.

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 fuel cells.

This week, Tim Hade, SVP at Voltus, joins the show to interrogate that forecast. He thinks that timeline is a fantasy, and that the real story for the next three to five years is load flexibility driven by batteries.

We dig into the SemiAnalysis numbers, the disagreement over how much headroom the grid has, and whether declining marginal value for batteries undercuts the case for storage. We close with a new framework from Rhodium Group that scores how these choices help or hurt the energy transition. 

Read Jigar’s ode to Lorenzo Kristov, mentioned in the show.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Tim Hade. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.