Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

North American wholesale power markets settled into a milder, shoulder-season pattern during September 5-11 as the early-month Western heat wave crested and receded. In California and the broader Southwest, forecast demand climbed toward the high-40-gigawatt range mid-week and Southern California's SP15 hub posted its firmest day-ahead prints since late August, yet grid operators moved through the event without Flex Alerts or energy emergencies and with comfortable reserve margins. Elsewhere the week was notably quiet: ERCOT ran a routine, sub-record week in the mid-80-gigawatt load range, and the Northeast and Midwest markets—having set demand records and, in MISO's case, declared a maximum-generation emergency in the days just before the window—cooled as temperatures moderated and prices eased from their early-September peaks. Across the eleven markets surveyed, no operator reported a system-wide scarcity event during the seven days in question.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/091126_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

The American power system is producing more electricity than at any point in its history, and the pace is accelerating. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9, projects that the nation will generate roughly 4,368 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity this year—about 2.2 percent more than in 2025—followed by another 1.7 percent increase in 2027. Those percentages may look modest, but they represent successive all-time highs for a system that spent much of the past decade on a plateau. After years in which efficiency gains largely offset new consumption, record electricity generation in 2026 signals that the long-anticipated era of sustained load growth has arrived in earnest. For utilities, grid operators, and the industrial customers that depend on them, the outlook reads less like a forecast than a status report on a transition already underway. Understanding what is driving the surge, how the generation mix is responding, and where the strains are emerging is now essential to planning for the balance of the decade.

To read the full article: 

https://vedeni.energy/power-demand-breaks-the-plateau/

Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have crossed from pilot to commercial scale. By applying horizontal drilling and reservoir stimulation techniques borrowed from shale, developers can now create geothermal reservoirs in hot, dry rock far from the rare natural hydrothermal sites that defined the industry for a century. The result is a source of clean firm power that runs around the clock, occupies little land, and can be sited across much of the Western United States. Technology companies seeking 24/7 carbon-free energy for data centers have become the anchor customers, signing agreements that now approach a gigawatt at a single site. This paper examines the cost trajectory of next-generation geothermal, the drilling and subsurface advances that drive it, the resource geography and transmission realities of Western siting, the evolving permitting landscape, and how EGS compares with nuclear, gas with carbon capture, and long-duration storage as a source of dispatchable clean power.

Read the full whitepaper:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/090926-Enhanced-Geothermal.pdf

Picture the most expensive non-meeting on your calendar. It is Tuesday, the designated anchor day. Your team commuted in, badged through the turnstile, found desks, put on headphones, and spent the day on video calls with people in other buildings. At five o'clock, they commuted home. Attendance was 100 percent. Collaboration was zero. And somewhere, a dashboard turned green.

That is the hybrid work policy many companies have built: a fixed number of days, enforced by a badge reader, with no serious answer to the question that matters most — what are those days supposed to produce? The numbers on where people work have stopped moving. What has not settled is whether the office time you are paying for, and asking your people to pay for in commute hours, is producing anything worth the cost.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/stop-counting-office-days-make-hybrid-work-earn-its-keep/

North American wholesale power markets were dominated by an early-September heat dome that pushed the central and eastern grids into emergency or near-emergency operations even as the calendar turned toward Labor Day. MISO set its highest-ever September peak of roughly 123 GW on September 2 and briefly declared a footprint-wide Energy Emergency Alert, while PJM reached about 152.5 GW on September 1, issued Maximum Generation and Load Management alerts, and drew a fresh U.S. Department of Energy Section 202(c) order authorizing additional dispatch and large-load backup generation through September 8. ERCOT approached its own late-summer highs, peaking near 88.8 GW on August 30 before Tropical Storm Edouard swept moisture across Texas and cut demand to roughly 84 GW by September 1. Elsewhere the heat was more muted, as neither California, the Northeast, nor the Canadian markets reported a system emergency, and much of the week read as shoulder-season across the West.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/090426_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

When President Trump signed Executive Order 14420 on August 26, 2026, he did more than add another directive to the federal energy docket. By declaring a national emergency over the equipment that moves electricity across the country, the administration recast a supply-chain problem the industry has wrestled with for years as an acute matter of national security. The order restricts foreign-made transformers, inverters, batteries, circuit breakers, and the software that runs them from connecting to the United States bulk power system. It also contemplates a step the sector has rarely had to confront: removing already-installed hardware from substations if regulators decide it poses too great a risk. For an industry already stretched by record demand growth and multi-year equipment backlogs, the order lands at a delicate moment and forces utilities, developers, and manufacturers to treat bulk-power system security as a boardroom issue, not merely a procurement concern.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/grid-security-meets-supply-chain-risk/

Two things are happening on your team at the same time, and only one shows up in your dashboards. Your people are using AI far more than they were a year ago. They are also telling you about it far less than you assume. The 2026 Slack Workforce Index found that daily AI use among desk workers climbed 233 percent in six months, while adoption rose from 36 percent to 60 percent over the same period. In that same survey, 48 percent of United States desk workers said they were uncomfortable telling their manager they had used AI for an ordinary work task.

Read those numbers together and the problem becomes clear. Half your team is working in a way they would rather you not know about. That is not mainly a technology problem, and it is not mainly a training problem. It is an AI trust gap, and it sits between you and the people who report to you.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/your-team-is-using-ai-more-and-telling-you-about-it-less/

The week ending August 28 was operationally uneventful across nearly every North American market—no heat emergencies, demand records, or scarcity intervals surfaced in the reporting window—but it was among the busiest weeks of the summer for the policy fights that will shape prices for years. A single theme tied the continent together: the interconnection and cost-allocation strain created by large data-center load. In ERCOT, Governor Greg Abbott’s demand for an audit of roughly 300 data-center projects put the market’s “Batch Zero” interconnection process on a compressed December timeline against a queue that has swelled to some 474 GW. In PJM, consumer advocates from six states and the District of Columbia asked FERC to reject the Reliability Backstop Procurement, warning that its roughly $20 billion budget and elevated $555/MW-day cap would shift data-center-driven costs onto residential ratepayers. In Alberta, fresh analysis warned that connecting Meta’s planned load could raise consumer bills. The common question everywhere was not whether the load is coming, but who pays to serve it.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/082826_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

The American electric-power sector is now confronting two opposing forces at once: the largest load-growth cycle in a generation and a federal policy shift that is pulling back the incentives, financing structures, and permitting pathways expected to deliver much of the next wave of supply. Demand is rising from artificial-intelligence data centers, cryptocurrency operations, manufacturing reshoring, and the electrification of transportation and buildings. At the same time, new federal constraints are weakening the economics of wind, solar, and storage projects that utilities and grid operators had expected to rely on.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/when-power-demand-outruns-policy/

Hyperscale computing has become the fastest-growing source of electricity demand in the United States, and the speed of its arrival has outrun the rules built to connect it. On June 18, 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued six orders to show cause under Section 206 of the Federal Power Act, directing every jurisdictional RTO and ISO — and their transmission owners either to justify tariffs that lack provisions tailored to large loads or to propose revisions across five reform categories.

Running alongside that federal proceeding, twenty-three states have approved at least one large-load tariff, importing minimum-take obligations, multi-decade contract terms, collateral postings, and exit fees into retail service. This paper examines the emerging cost-allocation architecture at both levels of jurisdiction, the ratepayer-protection mechanisms now in commercial use, and the analytical questions that remain unresolved as the August 17, 2026 compliance filings move into comment.

The analysis covers the scale and forecast uncertainty of large-load growth, the five reform categories FERC identified, the wholesale and transmission evidence on cost shifting, and the contractual instruments — minimum take, collateral, exit fees, clean transition tariffs, and curtailable service — through which regulators are reassigning that risk.

Read the full whitepaper at:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/082626-Who-Pays-For-Growth.pdf