Open Circuit

In the last two quarters, capital spending on AI has blown past all U.S. consumer spending. Investments in AI infrastructure have already eclipsed the telecom and dot-com booms. The top tech companies are pouring so much money into computing power that they may be single-handedly propping up an economy wobbling under chaotic tariff policy.

Gigawatts of new data center requests are flooding utility interconnection queues. And while the numbers are big, the uncertainty is even bigger. Which projects are real? Which are just phantom projects? And how do you plan a grid for a future where half of all new U.S. load could come from data centers by the end of the decade?

In this episode, recorded live at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference in Boston, Stephen Lacey talks with two experts watching the boom from different angles: Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies; and Anuja Ratnayake, an emerging technologies executive at the Electric Power Research Institute.They break down the scale of the AI-driven demand surge, the challenges of forecasting in a speculative market, and the implications for utility planning.

Registration is now open for the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas next January. Power Resilience Forum 2026 is the premier event on grid resiliency, bringing together leaders from across the power sector to address the new realities of planning and operating the grid in an era of extreme weather and wildfires.

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

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

Over the last four years, the U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector saw a historic boom. Factory construction doubled, foreign firms opened production in dozens of states, and federal policy spurred over $150 billion in manufacturing plans.

But a swirl of conflicting policies — from chaotic tariff threats to complex foreign sourcing rules — is freezing planned investments, spooking some manufacturers, and prompting some firms to halt growth plans.

Core incentives like the 45X manufacturing tax credit remain intact. But new sourcing regulations are complicating those incentives.

In this episode of Open Circuit, MJ Shiao, VP of supply chain and manufacturing at the American Clean Power Association, breaks down the recalibration now underway for companies making equipment in the U.S.

We explore the rise and stall of the manufacturing boom, dig into ACP’s latest data on where facilities are being built, and unpack the cascading uncertainty created by new FEOC rules and tariffs.

We also ask whether the U.S. can rebalance its industrial strategy to move beyond final assembly and build a more resilient, upstream supply chain. 

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

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

Why can your phone instantly reroute you around traffic, but your utility can't tell you when to charge your car for maximum savings? Why can Uber optimize thousands of drivers in real-time, while the electrical grid struggles to optimize distributed resources?

Both transportation and electricity systems emerged during the Victorian era with remarkably similar infrastructure: central hubs connected by sprawling networks. Train stations and power plants. Main lines and transmission lines. Local roads and distribution networks.

But over the next century and a half, these parallel systems took radically different paths.

Transportation embraced real-time telemetry, dynamic pricing, and consumer-centric innovation. But electricity remained fundamentally unchanged — still moving electrons through the same basic infrastructure with minimal visibility into what's happening at the distribution level.

Devrim Celal, chief flexibility and marketing officer at Kraken, has been studying this divergence. And he believes we're finally at a point where electricity systems can catch up.

"We've just left the Victorian era and we've got a long way to go," says Celal. "But we're seeing incredible results that consumers are willing to participate."

In this episode, produced in partnership with Kraken, Stephen Lacey talks with Devrim about why utilities are finally ready to embrace the same consumer-centric innovation that transformed transportation decades ago.

The conversation reveals how historical innovation patterns in transportation offer a roadmap for electricity's next phase — and why the convergence of these systems through electric vehicles might finally force the grid into the modern era.

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

Kraken removes the outdated, siloed tech that's holding back most utilities. Their unified operating system streamlines and enhances operations, meaning happier teams and happier customers for a fraction of the cost. Join leading utilities across the globe and redefine the sector with Kraken. Go to kraken.tech to learn more.

As America faces a surge in electricity demand, the federal government is working hard to slow the very resources needed to meet it.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to slash clean energy deployment by as much as 60% over the next decade — bringing back hard tax credit sunsets, introducing tight construction deadlines, and imposing strict foreign entity restrictions. 

Meanwhile, a DOE reliability report warns of a 100-fold increase in blackout risk in high-renewables scenarios. And a new permitting order now puts decisions on fencing, road construction, and land grading under the direct authority of the Interior Secretary.

It’s a moment of cognitive dissonance in Washington, as policymakers talk about building energy faster, while quietly dismantling the tools to do so.

In this episode of Open Circuit, we’re joined by Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon and former White House climate and energy advisor, to make sense of the moment.

We unpack the contradictions at the heart of the GOP’s energy agenda, explain why the post-IRA tax landscape is still favorable for some sectors, and explore how the politics of permitting could shape developer decisions for years to come.

Later in the episode, we dive into the DOE's blackout modeling, and explain why the report’s assumptions are so misaligned with the on-the-ground reality.

Finally, Costa lays out his vision for a Grid New Deal, explaining why AI fast lanes, public investment, and smarter grid interconnection rules are essential to meeting this demand surge with clean energy.

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

Learn more about 38 North Solutions’ Policy Pulse, providing highly curated, actionable snapshots of the political developments shaping the clean tech landscape.

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

The story of climate change is usually told through fossil fuels — pipelines, coal plants, oil companies. But there's another story that accounts for nearly a third of global emissions: agriculture. And we've barely begun to grapple with it.

In this episode of Open Circuit, we're joined by Michael Grunwald, longtime journalist and author of the new book "We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate." Grunwald spent years investigating why agriculture lags decades behind energy in decarbonization, and what it would take to catch up.

First, we tackle food-based fuels. Grunwald profiles researcher Tim Searchinger, who discovered that biofuels accounting ignored land use. While ethanol was hailed as a homegrown climate solution, it was actually worse than gasoline once you factored in the "carbon opportunity cost" of using land for fuel instead of food. Why did it take so long to recognize?

This land use blindness persists today. Despite the science showing the climate impact of biofuels, the government is backing a sustainable aviation fuel program with tens of billions in new biofuel subsidies — including explicit language preventing regulators from considering land use impacts.

Then, we tackle feel-good agricultural solutions like regenerative agriculture, vertical farms, and local food systems that may have ethical benefits, but often don’t have meaningful emissions impacts. 

Finally, we ask what ag tech can learn from energy's scaling playbook: How do we deploy high-yield agriculture and synthetic biology solutions in a rapid, ethical way? 

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

Learn more about 38 North Solutions’ Policy Pulse, providing highly curated, actionable snapshots of the political developments shaping the clean tech landscape.

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

America is choosing obstruction over abundance. While AI, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing require massive infrastructure investments, we're trapped in a permitting system designed for a different era — and a political system that rewards blocking over building.

In this episode of Open Circuit, we're joined by Brian Deese, former director of the National Economic Council and current MIT innovation fellow, to unpack why America's building capacity has become our biggest competitive bottleneck. 

Drawing from his Foreign Affairs piece, "Why America Struggles to Build," Deese explains why breaking down physical infrastructure constraints could drive the next wave of economic growth.

Deese argues that 80% of project delays stem from state and local regulations, not federal policy. Using a "zero-based budgeting" approach to permitting, states could dramatically accelerate deployment of projects. Meanwhile, AI could slash the time and cost of environmental reviews from months to weeks, if regulators allow it.

We also explore the outcome of the recent GOP’s tax and spending bill, and examine why the Inflation Reduction Act's messaging failed to create political durability. Deese argues that winning on infrastructure requires both economic arguments — jobs, wealth, and lower costs — and visceral arguments about strength, reliability, and energy security.

As Deese explains, we're at a "unique economic moment" where AI, clean energy, and geopolitical fragmentation are converging to create unprecedented infrastructure demands. Can America overcome the politics of obstruction to build it?

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

Learn more about 38 North Solutions’ Policy Pulse, providing highly curated, actionable snapshots of the political developments shaping the clean tech landscape.

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

When 47 million people across Spain and Portugal lost power for nearly half a day in April, the finger-pointing began immediately. "Too much renewable energy," declared the critics. Even U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright piled on: "When you hitch your wagon to the weather, it's a risky endeavor.”

There's just one problem with this blame-renewables narrative: it's completely wrong.

In this crossover episode with the Redefining Energy podcast, we examine the official Spanish grid operator report that reveals a complex web of failures. 

While the blackout began with a solar plant sending frequency oscillations through the grid, what followed was a cascade of problems: conventional generators that failed to provide required voltage control, inadequate battery storage to balance massive solar capacity, weak interconnections to neighboring grids, and ultimately, poor system management by grid operators themselves.

Our guests, Laurent Segalen of Megawatt-X and Gerard Reid of Alexa Capital — co-hosts of Redefining Energy — help us decode what went wrong and what Spain needs to fix. 

"Spain has installed 30 gigawatts of solar in the past 10 years and there's hardly any batteries and there's hardly any connection with the rest of the continent,” explained Segalen. “The system has become more fragile." 

“We've had, in the UK, an interconnector going down, 1.4 gigawatts. Well, guess what? There was no blackout. Why? Because batteries came in straight away,” said Reid.

We’ll discuss the many factors behind the outage, and explore why Spain’s grid operator is trying to avoid blame.

Then, we’ll look at how security is reshaping European energy investment. As America leans into its role as a dominant petrostate and pulls back from post-World War II security commitments, Europe is being forced to reconsider how to structure clean energy supply chains. 

We also explore the emerging split between "petrostates" and "electrostates" — countries that control energy through scarcity versus those that build abundance through manufacturing and technology. While America doubles down on fossil fuel dominance, can Europe position itself alongside China as a leading electrostate?

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

Learn more about 38 North Solutions’ Policy Pulse, providing highly curated, actionable snapshots of the political developments shaping the clean tech landscape.

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

The climate tech investment landscape is undergoing a major recalibration. After a period of rapid growth and inflated valuations, investors and startups are now navigating a complex environment shaped by tariffs, shifting incentives, and economic clouds.

In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine the latest data and investor sentiment trends with Kim Zou, CEO of Sightline Climate. 

Sightline’s data shows climate tech investment declined 19% in the first half of 2025, reflecting both macroeconomic pressures and sector-specific challenges. 

The firm’s recent investor survey reveals how the sector is grappling with extreme policy whiplash, with tariffs leading the list of worries. The ongoing reconciliation bill debate adds another layer of uncertainty around IRA tax credits, leading investors to search for “policy proof” business models. 

Startups are also facing a growing funding gap. Companies developing first-of-a-kind projects face a particular hurdle: they need infrastructure-scale capital but still carry venture-level risk, creating a mismatch that "most private investors aren't really willing to accept," said Zou.

That gap — what Zou calls "the missing middle within the missing middle" — is heavily weighing on companies ready to build their first commercial facilities.

Despite the headwinds, new opportunities are emerging: grid-enhancing technologies had their best quarter ever, driven by the growing power demands of AI; companies focused on cost savings rather than green premiums are attracting more attention; and innovative financing structures are evolving beyond traditional equity models.

Acquisitions doubled in the first half of the year, driven by bargain-hunting “where corporates and strategics are buying up companies at more opportunistic costs,” said Zou.

We also explore how U.S. investors and companies are increasingly looking to European markets, the practical challenges of scaling hardware-intensive technologies, and why some sectors are better positioned to navigate the current environment than others.

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

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

The grid faces a mismatch: the system is getting smarter, but we're not getting smarter about how we use it.

Utilities have installed 130 million advanced meters. Millions of homes have smart thermostats, water heaters, and batteries that could work in concert. Data centers could unlock over 100 gigawatts of new capacity without major infrastructure expansion.

Yet most smart devices aren't coordinated, advanced meter data sits unused, and there's no standard way to plan for or pay flexible loads. 

In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine what is holding back grid flexibility — and what it would take to unlock the resources we've already paid for.

We’re joined by Arushi Sharma Frank, the founder of Luminary Strategies, and former markets policy lead for Tesla, who explains the imperative for flexibility: "We have a massive opportunity to leverage this for the whole grid. Why would you not want to leverage the opportunity that is staring at you in the face?"

Sharma Frank, who is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has long been on the front lines of DER policy. We examine the barriers to deploying VPPs, AMI, and flexible data centers. Utilities want these services, but why don’t planners and regulators trust them?

The fix isn't complicated: align state agencies with regulators, make sure all customers benefit from flexibility programs, and bring tech companies into the grid planning process. As Sharma Frank puts it: "If we're going to procure a grid asset, it needs to be in a procurement process for a grid asset, period."

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

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

The exponential growth of AI is colliding with the linear reality of building energy infrastructure — forcing a rethink of how tech companies power their ambitions. 

Is the corporate clean energy playbook becoming obsolete?

In this live episode from Transition-AI in Boston, we dive deep into the infrastructure challenges of the AI era. We’re joined by Caroline Golin, who spent eight years building Google's energy strategy before leaving earlier this year.

We examine how tech companies moved from a buyer's market with abundant resources to a seller's market with serious capacity constraints. 

"The vast majority of procurement in this country looks like single-source renewable PPAs, and that's what it's been for years," Golin explained. "That wasn't going to get us to where we needed to go."

Then we turn to a financing puzzle. We need to see more than $5 trillion in capex spending on data center infrastructure by 2030 to keep pace with computing demands from AI. But even with many different types of capital trying to solve the infrastructure challenge, they all want completely different things. How do we align them?

The just-in-time procurement model that served the hyperscalers for a decade must evolve into global-scale, integrated infrastructure development. Can regulators, utilities, and policymakers keep up?

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. 

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