Recorded 22 February 2026. Episode Discussion Points:

• Two solid-state transformer startups raised major funding this week
• Why transformers are a critical bottleneck in grid expansion and amidst modernisation pressures
• Differences between traditional iron-core transformers and solid-state transformers
• How SSTs use semiconductor power electronics and software control
• What the benefits of SSTs are
• Why data centres are an early target market for SST technology

Energy Security

• Coal becoming linked to energy security narratives in the US
• Energy security increasingly shaping policy decisions
• Government support for coal plants despite economics
• Military interest in resilient energy systems and microgrids
• Role of renewables in reducing fuel logistics risks

Future / Speculative Energy Infrastructure

• Space-based solar power concepts
• Space-based data centres powered by solar
• Economic and engineering challenges of space energy systems

Delivering the energy transition increasingly depends on the inputs required: materials availability, processing capacity, & the industrial policy that determines what actually gets built.

Rising demand for critical minerals is driving supply-security concerns, strategic stockpiles, recycling scale-up, & copper innovation. It’s also increasingly shaping industrial investment decisions, particularly in Europe. This week’s headlines illustrate that:

· Policy signal - Project Vault: The US proposed a strategic critical minerals reserve with $12B of financing to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, mainly China. It could work if treated as a resilience stockpile, but $2B of private investment signals returns expectations, which may push it to act like a market instrument not insurance.

· Rare earths - geopolitics most concentrated & recycling as a hedge: Cyclic Materials $75M Series C to scale rare earth recycling & diversify supply beyond primary mining. RE magnet supply chains remain highly concentrated, especially in heavy’s where China has almost a complete monopoly & has tightened export controls since 2023.

· But in battery recycling, a pivot: Redwood Materials $425M Series E, for a growing stationary energy storage business using recovered & second-life batteries. Originally focused on circular battery supply chains, the move reflects tighter recycling margins, rising storage demand & benefits of vertical integration.

The story extends to copper, the metal of electrification. Without significant new supply coming online soon, net-zero risks being short-circuited as it’s highly conductive, durable & recyclable, with few grid-scale substitutes:

· Cu processing: Two biomining deals - Transition Metals Solutions ($6M seed) & Endolith ($13.5M Series A) to improve Cu recovery from lower-grade ores using microbes. The promise; lower energy & access to stranded resources. Challenges; speed, control & industrial scale-up.

· Cu recycling: Recuperate Metals $6M seed to mechanically upgrade Cu scrap & industrial waste into higher-quality secondary feedstocks. If scalable, it could accelerate capacity with lower capex & energy intensity, but impurities, input variability & qualification timelines remain hurdles.

· Cu substitution: DexMat $5M seed to scale production of carbon-nanotube conductive fibre. It won’t replace copper broadly, but could be used in weight-sensitive or high-performance niches like aerospace or satellites.

Materials pressure doesn’t stop at clean-tech supply chains, it’s reshaping heavy industry as carbon policy tightens:

· European steel: ArcelorMittal confirmed a €1.3B EAF project at Dunkirk - currently its only new-build investment. Using scrap steel, DRI/HBI, & some hot metal, it cuts emissions 3x cf. the traditional BF-BOF approach.

· Policy driver - CBAM now operational: Europe is extending carbon pricing to imports making C intensity a real competitiveness factor. It’s creating investable conditions for industrial decarbonisation by narrowing the cost gap between EU producers & higher-emissions imports - favouring lower-emissions production, particularly scrap-heavy EAF steel backed by low-C power.

Recorded Feb 6th 2026. Access to electricity and speed to power remain defining challenges, but the deeper issue emerging is how to ensure deliverable capacity at the exact moment demand peaks, which is increasingly critical for grid reliability.

With transmission projects often taking a decade, substation upgrades costly and contentious, and new generation facing interconnection delays, this week’s deal headlines centre on a core question: how do you create dependable capacity without simply building more generation?

The answers are emerging in layers - from grid-scale storage to distributed assets, orchestration software, market consolidation, and policy reform:

1. Grid-Scale Storage: Terralayr secured $72M in project-finance debt to deploy front-of-the-meter battery systems, highlighting grid-scale storage as one of the fastest deployable reliability resources. Batteries are increasingly treated as predictable infrastructure assets delivering dispatchable capacity without new power plants.
2. Distributed Capacity: Lunar Energy raised $232M in growth capital to scale residential battery deployment. Homes are becoming active grid participants, with distributed storage transitioning from backup resilience products to scalable capacity assets aggregated into VPPs. his shift places flexibility at the grid edge, helping defer costly infrastructure upgrades while improving utilisation of existing assets.
3. Orchestration Layer: WeaveGrid expanded its DISCO (Distribution-Integrated System Capacity Orchestration) platform beyond EV charging to include residential batteries through a partnership with SolarEdge. As distributed assets scale, software coordination is becoming critical, making flexibility visible, controllable, and dispatchable for utilities.
4. Market Validation: Storm Fern provided a real-world test of how storage, distributed assets, and market signals performed under stress, and at scale. Storage and demand response played a central role in maintaining reliability, with volatility increasingly tied to short flexibility gaps rather than prolonged generation shortages.
5. Market Consolidation: NRG’s acquisition of CPower as part of a $12B transaction with LS Power, signals incumbent adoption of flexibility as core infrastructure. The deal adds roughly 6 GW of commercial and industrial demand-response capacity, effectively expanding virtual power plant capabilities within mainstream utility operations.
6. Policy Signal: Virginia passed the first U.S. legislation explicitly focused on grid utilisation, requiring regulators and utilities to measure how effectively existing infrastructure is used before approving new buildout.

Then we move on to discuss:

• Data Centres & Speed-to-Power: Over 50 GW of on-site generation, much of it gas-fired, is being built ahead of grid connections, raising concerns about emissions lock-in.
• Overbuild vs Grid Integration: Off-grid renewables require significant overbuild reinforcing the continued value of interconnected grids that aggregate flexibility across regions
• New Procurement Models: Mechanisms like CTTs and BYOC allow large loads to contract power directly while leveraging distributed flexibility, accelerating deployment without full co-location.

Recorded 30th January 2026. With AI, hyperscalers, and the broader ‘electrification of everything’ accelerating demand for clean, firm, and reliable power, capital markets are beginning to reopen to fund it. As speed-to-power becomes the decisive factor, strategy is moving upstream toward how electricity is secured, controlled, and delivered efficiently.

This shift shows up clearly in the week’s deal headlines - from owning and optimising dispatchable fleets, to upgrading brownfield assets, to tackling the bottlenecks that have historically constrained scale.

Together, the deals reveal a growing split in how ‘clean firm’ energy is being financed. Geothermal is being steadily de-risked across the value chain, with capital flowing into discovery, drilling, and operations. Fusion, meanwhile, is testing public markets as a frontier bet, shaped by vast capital requirements and long development timelines.

1. Constellation’s $16.4B equity acquisition of Calpine (≈$26.5B EV) signals incumbents securing near-term capacity by acquiring the ability to control dispatchable portfolios under reliability pressure. Calpine’s geothermal fleet includes ~200MW of underutilised turbine capacity. With existing permits, turbines, interconnection, and subsurface data in place, brownfield upgrades offer a compressed timeline to deliver additional clean firm MW and place a premium on assets that can be upgraded.
2. Zanskar’s $115M Series C highlights capital flowing upstream to address exploration uncertainty. By applying AI to subsurface mapping and geothermal discovery, the company aims to reduce the dry well problem that often halts projects before development. Lower exploration risk strengthens the project pipeline and geothermal’s evolution into a scalable infrastructure category.
3. Sage Geosystems’ $97M Series B co-led by Ormat, addresses operational credibility. Its geo-pressurised geothermal approach uses the subsurface as both a heat source and a compressed-rock energy storage medium, enabling load shifting and expanding the value stack toward firm power plus flexibility. Ormat’s participation signals confidence in operational discipline, uptime, and long-term asset performance.
4. Fervo’s IPO filing marks a category transition. After years of climate-tech investors pointing to a lack of exits, the filing signals that liquidity may be returning, with geothermal emerging as an early test case. Having raised more than $1B in private capital, Fervo’s move to the public markets will assess whether enhanced geothermal is valued alongside established infrastructure assets.
5. Fusion also moved toward public markets this week: General Fusion’s planned ~$1B SPAC transaction (≈$300M proceeds) and TAE’s proposed all-stock merger illustrate how long development horizons and large capital needs are pushing fusion developers toward broader funding pools. Public listing introduces access to capital alongside heightened scrutiny, volatility, and milestone pressure.

We close by bringing the discussion to the UK. The Warm Homes Plan reframes energy policy around affordability and resilience at the household level. Through insulation upgrades, heating support, and distributed energy technologies, the programme targets renters and lower-income households while incorporating tighter implementation standards to address past failures.

Across the episode, the pattern is clear: as electricity constraint intensifies, value accrues to those who can compress timelines, reduce risk, and deliver bankable capacity.

Recorded Jan 16th 2026. Exponential demand growth and AI mean the 2026 conversation is shifting from simply ‘power and data centres' to who can actually build what and when, as clean, reliable electrons grow scarce.

We track this shift through the week’s deal headlines, which naturally fall into layers of the same system. Read in sequence, they show how electricity constraint propagates upward from rack-level efficiency and inference per MW, to securing alternative compute architectures, vertically integrating generation ownership, procuring firm nuclear & geothermal power, and ultimately orchestrating an increasingly complex grid.

Incremental efficiency gains still matter, but as grid constraints tighten, the system increasingly needs technologies that materially change power requirements, deployment flexibility, operating envelopes, and siting options.

1. Groq’s $20 billion non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia reframes chip efficiency as grid strategy: if you can do more inference per megawatt, you can deploy AI where others can’t, as power-efficient inference translates directly into deployable capacity when power delivery to a rack is constrained.

2. OpenAI’s $10 billion, multi-year commitment to Cerebras goes beyond marginal optimisation by securing alternative compute architectures at scale with distinct power and siting characteristics.

3. Google/Alphabet’s $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power shows that when efficiency gains aren’t enough, hyperscalers move to vertically integrate and own the power pipeline, as uncommitted, secure, grid-ready capacity and optionality become the most valuable strategic assets — reflecting the reality of interconnection queues and time-to-power.

Control over power supply then raises the question of quality. Intermittent renewables and batteries are improving, but hyperscalers are also looking for long-duration, clean firm powerm not from a decarbonisation perspective, but for reliability, security, and scale.

4. Meta signed three nuclear deals for up to 6.6 GW with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo.

5. Fervo Energy raised a $462M Series E, positioning enhanced geothermal as a complementary route to 24/7 clean power that could scale faster and across more geographies than nuclear alone.

6. Octopus Energy’s $1 billion raise to spin out Kraken Technologies at an $8.65 billion valuation shows that as the system becomes more distributed and complex, coordination and grid orchestration are becoming as critical as generation itself, increasingly determining who gets power, when, and how efficiently.

We then bring it home to the UK, unpacking the latest offshore wind auction outcomes and what they signal, the north–south transmission bottlenecks driving curtailment and balancing costs, and why “cheap renewables” don’t automatically translate into cheap bills without major grid buildout.

We explore why prices can go negative while gas still runs, why strike prices can rise even as renewables mature, and why the UK continues to avoid locational pricing—for now. The energy trilemma remains real, but in today’s environment, resilience and security are increasingly setting the agenda.