Open Circuit

The last few months have brought more momentum for grid flexibility than the last decade. 

All across the country, load growth is pushing policymakers to leverage DERs and other flexibility tech to get more out of the grid we’ve already built. But can utilities count on it?

This week, live from Latitude Media’s Flex Summit, we explore how flexibility is getting integrated in pockets of the country – and what it will take to get buy-in from utilities.

In the first half of the show, Stephen is joined by Jen Downing and Jigar Shah to tackle the latest policy developments for VPPs and other flexible resources in California, Virginia, and the federal permitting bill.

Then, we bring in Todd Conner, senior VP of electric distribution at Xcel Energy, who explains how he thinks about “harvesting” flexibility on one of the biggest networks in the country.

Open Circuit is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Giving Green. Giving Green researches the climate nonprofits best positioned for the next big climate win, and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund to them. Make your first gift before 2027, and it’s matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Circuit or select Open Circuit at checkout.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. Everyday Electric simplifies savings at home, helping support a more reliable, affordable grid. Operating the country’s largest residential VPP, it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products. Learn more at everydayelectric.com.

Not long ago, we were asking if AI would save the climate. Now we’re asking if it will wreck it.

The truth is somewhere in between. But it’s easy to see why sentiment swung so radically.

When the AI race kicked off, we were promised rapid breakthroughs in materials, a business model revolution, and a radically more intelligent energy economy. But many people feel like we got hulking gas plants, higher electricity prices, and broken emissions promises instead.

Behind the scenes, AI is working its way into every corner of the clean energy industry, across forecasting, basic research, product design, and resource dispatch. And researchers continue to advance these tools for the benefit of clean solutions. 

So what’s the real story? Is AI still a positive force for the climate?

This week, Priya Donti joins the show to tackle this question. Priya is an AI researcher, MIT professor, and co-founder of the non-profit Climate Change AI. In 2019, she co-wrote a paper with a group of leading AI researchers on how the technology can be used for climate — and explicitly warned not to treat it as a silver bullet.

Priya talks about where AI is delivering, why claims got so inflated, the limits of general purpose models, and how she thinks about risk.

Open Circuit is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Giving Green. Giving Green researches the climate nonprofits best positioned for the next big climate win, and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund to them. Make your first gift before 2027, and it’s matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Circuit or select Open Circuit at checkout.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. Everyday Electric simplifies savings at home, helping support a more reliable, affordable grid. Operating the country’s largest residential VPP, it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products. Learn more at everydayelectric.com.

It’s really hard to build infrastructure in America. And it’s particularly hard for clean energy, which is overwhelmingly stalled by outdated and onerous permitting.

But we have never been able to get to the root of the problem. And that’s why a new bipartisan federal permitting bill is such a big deal. 

The bill sets hard deadlines for environmental reviews, limits lawsuits, and makes it harder for a president to block permitting processes. It also gives federal regulators new authority to approve transmission and open up markets to distributed resources. And it puts the cost of grid upgrades squarely on large data centers. 

For builders in clean energy, it's a deal they've been dreaming about for years. For many green groups, it's a deal with the devil that will overwhelmingly benefit fossil fuels. Why is there such a deep split?

This week, Jane Flegal joins the show to talk about how permitting reform is taking shape. We’ll explore the details, the debates, and the trade-offs.

Then, we’ll revisit President Trump’s ratepayer protection plan. Tech companies and utilities signed onto the White House's pledge with great fanfare, but critics say it hasn’t worked at all. Can the permitting bill bring some needed accountability to the plan?

Open Circuit is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. 

Open Circuit is brought to you by Giving Green. Giving Green researches the climate nonprofits best positioned for the next big climate win, and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund to them. Make your first gift before 2027, and it’s matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Circuit or select Open Circuit at checkout.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. Everyday Electric simplifies savings at home, helping support a more reliable, affordable grid. Operating the country’s largest residential VPP, it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products. Learn more at everydayelectric.com.

Across America, people are screaming “no” — no to data centers, and no to the energy projects that serve them. So what gets people to a “yes”? Perhaps an enthusiastic yes?

Every utility and tech company is scrambling to answer that question. And so far, they haven’t been able to find one.

Our guest this week, Sparkfund CEO Pier LaFarge, has thought a lot about this problem. And he’s trying to prove that you can get local buy-in through better energy development models.  

First, we’ll talk about the state of grid utilization. At a moment when there's a deep fear of overbuilding and anger over rising electricity rates, the idea of getting more out of our existing infrastructure is taking off. Pier argues that utilization is the first step toward restoring trust in growth of the grid. 

Then we’ll talk about Sparkfund’s partnership with Xcel, backed by Google, to deploy distributed batteries around Minnesota. While only a small part of the answer, Pier sees it as a way to create local buy-in to data center infrastructure. 

We’ll end with a deeper look at what’s driving the backlash. Pier shares a playbook for local abundance that he developed with local leaders in Alabama. When promises of jobs and taxes stop working, what comes next?

Credits: Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Join Latitude Media on October 14-15 in Austin for Flex Summit 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the AI demand economy. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by New Mexico Women Lead, an organization dedicated to empowering women, elevating communities, and leading New Mexico forward. Explore how New Mexico is advancing energy production, research, and innovation at the state’s official energy data platform, detectnm.com.

The biggest story in Washington is President Trump's rejection of AI safety regulation. But the White House is waging an equally consequential regulatory battle against carbon regulations.

This month, the EPA finally rolled back the Biden-era carbon rule for power plants, arguing that the agency does not have the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases. It's setting the stage to block any future administration from writing new rules.

At the same time, the Trump Administration is forcing old coal plants to stay open under a Depression era wartime statute. But a federal court told the Energy Department’s efforts to keep a Michigan coal plant open was heavy handed and legally unfounded.  

This week, we’ll revisit Trump’s efforts to save the coal industry. Will any of these efforts change the trajectory of the power sector? Or are they just symbolic?

Then, we’ll look at some new polling from Heatmap and Embold Research on what messaging moves Americans on climate and clean energy. Turns out, almost no one likes the word “crisis.”

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

Join Latitude Media on October 14-15 in Austin for Flex Summit 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the AI demand economy. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by New Mexico Women Lead, an organization dedicated to empowering women, elevating communities, and leading New Mexico forward. Explore how New Mexico is advancing energy production, research, and innovation at the state’s official energy data platform, detectnm.com.

Data centers are known for their hulking exteriors, rows of blinking servers, and massive cooling equipment. But there’s an entire ecosystem no one gets to see: the electrical architecture that sits between the power source and the GPUs.

And as data centers integrate more battery storage, there’s little consensus on what that electrical architecture should look like. 

Batteries used to have one job inside a data center: keep servers on until backup generators kicked on. But today, they're being used to smooth out volatile loads, support onsite generation, and buffer the grid. And that shapes the power system around it.

In this episode, produced in partnership with Shoals Technologies, Stephen Lacey talks with Kishan Ponnadurai and Cayman Berg about the expanding role of batteries inside AI campuses, the shift from AC to higher-voltage DC, and navigating a market that is constantly changing.

This episode was produced in partnership with Shoals Technologies Group. For 30 years, Shoals has designed and manufactured the electrical backbone of critical energy infrastructure. Learn how Shoals' solutions are helping power data centers.

We are in the middle of a radical political and economic realignment, with electricity infrastructure at the center of it. And this summer, the plot thickened.

Power sector reforms are coming in fast and furious, across states, regional markets, and federal regulators. Local resistance reached new heights around the country. And data centers are scrambling politics as we near the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, AI models are breaking containment in alarming ways. The leaders of AI labs are openly calling for a slowdown and warning of dire security impacts, even while the rush to release new models and IPO intensifies. 

Poll after poll shows Americans are increasingly distrustful and cynical about AI. And tech companies are stepping away from their claims about AI being a climate panacea, while they invest in the biggest gas projects on the planet.

The future of power infrastructure is inextricably linked to all these forces. This week, we’re asking: How are they changing the trajectory of how power gets built? And what does responsible data center development actually look like?

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

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

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.

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.