With Great Power

Chéri Smith  is a descendant of the Mi'kmaq Nation, native to northeastern North America. She has worked in clean energy for most of her career, but it took a 2016 visit to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana to understand the severity and persistence of energy poverty on tribal lands.

For 14% of households on tribal lands, electrification isn’t about replacing gas appliances with electric ones. It’s about having electricity at all. Chéri launched the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy in 2016 to change that reality.

This week on With Great Power, Chéri explains why – despite a historic commitment of federal funds for clean energy development – tribes still face significant hurdles to building clean energy projects. The Alliance is working with philanthropic donors to raise $100M for the  Indigenous Power and Light Fund for Energy Sovereignty to address those challenges. 

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

With their short, predictable routes and large battery size, electric school buses are well suited for vehicle-to-grid applications, especially since they’re available during periods of high electricity demand. 

Last year, bus maker Zum launched a fleet of 74 electric school buses — the country’s largest — for the Oakland Unified School District in California. It worked with Pacific Gas & Electric to build a network of chargers and integrate the buses to the local grid to form a virtual power plant. 

This week on With Great Power, Rudi Halbright – expert product manager on vehicle-grid integration at PG&E – shares insights from launching the V2G program with Zum as well as lessons learned on how to deploy vehicle-grid infrastructure.

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

When Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in 2021, it led to more than 240 deaths and hobbled the electric grid for days. At the time, Arushi Sharma Frank was working on Tesla’s U.S. energy policy team, trying to convince Texas regulators to allow it to connect a 100 megawatt battery to the grid. It was part of a larger effort to encourage distributed energy resources (DERs) as a means of improving grid resiliency. After Uri, regulators greenlit Tesla’s pilot projects.

Today, Arushi runs her own grid resiliency consultancy and recently helped community groups in New Orleans draft a proposal for a $32M virtual power plant and microgrid project. The  city council quickly approved the proposal after hearing from locals and advocates from other cities that have already seen the benefits of grid resiliency projects.  

This week on With Great Power, Arushi tells Brad why she thinks experiencing grid failures has turned stakeholders – from regulators to politicians to consumers – into advocates for grid resiliency. 

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

In 2014, Nathan Shannon was working for a community land trust in Georgia, building affordable housing. But following his interest in behavioral economics, he attended the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change conference. That event piqued his interest in how and why consumers make economic decisions related to their homes, and that led him to the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), a nonprofit that surveys energy consumers in North America and works across the industry to share best practices in consumer engagement.

One of the key insights he brought to SECC — where he is now president and CEO — is that housing affordability is tied inextricably to energy affordability. That’s evident in SECC’s research, too. 

This week on With Great Power, Nathan discusses the findings of SECC’s latest consumer survey and Modern Energy Messaging report. It shows that as energy costs have risen in recent years, consumers are less motivated by environmental messaging — and what it takes for energy providers to keep consumers engaged in clean energy programs. You can learn more about SECC’s research here.

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

Toby Ferenczi used to work for an energy provider that marketed 100% clean energy but also ran a demand response program. When customers started asking him why they should shift their energy use to certain times of day if their energy was totally clean, he didn’t have a good answer.

During the pandemic he spent a lot of time ruminating on this disconnect and ultimately helped develop a new standard for tracking the renewable energy credits behind clean energy claims. He says his startup Granular Energy, which grew out of that work, ensures companies buying those credits are really moving the needle on a cleaner electric grid. 

This week on With Great Power, Toby shares his journey into the world of RECs and explains why there’s a big debate among some of the world’s biggest tech companies about the best path forward.

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

Sonia Aggarwal spent the early years of her career moving between nonprofits and the private sector, supporting renewable energy deployment. But after watching early climate policies fail in Washington D.C., she realized her energy modeling skills could better serve the clean energy transition. 

In 2012, she co-founded Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate research organization that works with policymakers on policy design. Today, after a two-year stint advising Biden’s climate team, Sonia leads Energy Innovation’s team of nearly 45 policy analysts, economists, and energy modelers. 

Kicking off the fourth season of With Great Power, Sonia tells Brad why the 2024 election is likely to send the energy transition down one of two very different paths. But, she explains, some areas of progress will continue, regardless of shifts in the White House.

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

Over the past three seasons of With Great Power, we've met some of the incredible people working to make our power grid smarter, cleaner, and more resilient. 

We've examined the complexity of policy and regulation. We tackled the challenges of adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence. And we've heard powerful stories of both personal and professional transformation. 

We need to build the grid of the future today – but it’s not easy.

In the coming weeks and months, we'll profile some of the most innovative utilities and technology providers. We'll learn about cutting-edge approaches to energy storage and vehicle-to-grid deployments. And we'll hear from regulators and energy providers grappling with growing demand, rising rates, and increasing climate threats.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast app to get fresh episodes when the new season drops.

Marc Spieler had been at the oil and gas giant Halliburton for 13 years when he first saw inklings of the energy transition – like Shell’s investment in geothermal and Exxon Mobil’s wind and solar PPAs. Once EVs started to go mainstream in 2019, he knew the energy transition was for real. And he wanted in. 

So he got a job at NVIDIA the same year the tech giant launched a new line of semiconductor chips specifically designed for processing artificial intelligence. Now, Marc works with other software companies and utilities to use technology to drive down the cost of the energy transition and speed up decarbonization. 

This week on With Great Power, Marc tells Brad about how advanced processing and artificial intelligence are changing utility operations, and why not all technology solutions need to be built from scratch. 

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

Hudson Gilmer worked in telecom in the 90’s when the industry transformed how data moved. And it didn’t take long for him to realize that a similar transformation would happen with electric utilities – and he needed to be a part of it.

So he started a dynamic line rating company, LineVision, that uses sensors and data to show what is happening on transmission lines in real time. But, like other start-ups in the power sector, LineVision was stuck in pilot purgatory for years, until 2022 when they were awarded a big contract from a utility in the northeast. Now they are working on projects with utilities across the country. 

In this episode of With Great Power, Hudson tells Brad why dynamic line rating technology is picking up momentum, and how it can help meet growing electricity demand. 

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

In Nigeria, tens of millions of people live without access to reliable power. Utibe Bassey grew up in Lagos, and knows what it’s like to not have electricity to perform simple daily tasks. 

When she moved to the United States as a teen, she didn’t think much about electric utilities. But she did think about how managers treat employees – a thought spurred by an unfortunate instance she witnessed while working at a fast food chain. Ever since then, Utibe has refined her personal philosophy, “Love as a KPI,” which prioritizes kindness and human connection in the workplace. 
In this episode of With Great Power, Utibe tells Brad about how she puts her personal philosophy to work at Dominion Energy, where she is vice president of customer experience. She also talks about what it means to work in the power industry, having lived without access to reliable power in her youth. 

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.