Open Circuit
A weekly podcast that decodes the energy transition. Three industry veterans examine business models, technological breakthroughs, and market changes driving the largest industrial transformation in history. The show provides an insider perspective on the clean energy market.
Episodes
Trump’s coal crusade is failing
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 futur
The hidden power systems behind AI [partner content]
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
Power is caught in AI’s doom loop
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 election
Empowering utility customers with demand flexibility [partner content]
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
Electricity bills are on the ballot
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 bi
The breakout moment for VPPs [partner content]
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. Th
Green Blueprint: Form's storage manufacturing breakthrough
We're on vacation through the end of August, so this week we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint.
Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage. But inexpensive, multi-day storage will still be critical for backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid.
Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron, Form
AI needs a different kind of power plant [partner content]
Arbor Energy is betting that smaller, modular turbines can solve problems the conventional generation model was never designed for.
Arbor Energy was founded with an unusual idea: take technologies from rocket engines and use them to make carbon-negative power plants.
Today, the market has radically changed. Demand for turbines is exploding, the supply chain is jammed, and data centers need power
Did China outsmart America after the oil shock?
After Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, everyone thought prices would hit historic highs. But they didn't. Why?
The answer is less about market resiliency, and more about two major government interventions. The U.S. intervened using a central banking model, and China intervened with a top-down government approach.
James Gutman, head of research at Abaxx Technologies, joins us this week to dis
Data centers have a Texas-sized energy problem
The showdown over data centers is taking a new turn. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a data center pause in order to audit how they’ll impact water supplies and the power grid. This comes weeks after New York issued a moratorium.
Not long ago, Governor Abbott was declaring Texas the center of the AI boom. But with his re-election bid under threat, he’s now responding to the radica
A simple fix that could unlock the heat pump market
It's been almost a decade since the “Electrify Everything” movement kicked off. And guess what? We aren't electrifying everything.
We're seeing strong growth in electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction cooktops. But we're still trapped inside a system that makes the electric choice harder to make. And nowhere is that more obvious than with heat pumps.
Every eight seconds in the US, an
Critical Capital: Is this infrastructure's once-in-a-generation moment?
This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios.
We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built.
In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by J
The off-grid data center fantasy
A major fault line runs through the data center debate: how many will actually go off-grid?
There’s a lot of enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for breaking free from the grid. But even the companies pushing hardest for off-grid projects now admit they want a grid connection eventually. So how much behind-the-meter power will actually get built in the next few years? And what fills it?
SemiAnalysis, t
Turning customer data into grid intelligence [partner content]
Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to time-of-day rates as electricity demand grows and delivery costs rise. But a harder challenge is giving customers the tools to save money under those new rates.
In this second episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Lou DeBrino, Vice President of Customer Operations at PSEG Long Island, and Ted Nielsen, Chief Pr
Plug-in solar meets the grid crisis
America turned 250 years old last week. While local leaders were busy organizing parades, re-enactments, and flyovers, grid operators and emergency officials were dealing with something else entirely: a heat dome settled over the eastern U.S.
Nearly 200 million people were under extreme heat warnings, the national parade in Washington was canceled, and PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, h
The new reality for data centers: no easy answers
For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastructure got built on separate tracks because the grid had room to spare.
That model is gone. Today, with long lead times for equipment, multi-year interconnection queues, and the pressure to bring your own generation, it all has to
How APS dove head-first into AI [partner content]
AI is about far more than chatbots and copilots. For utilities, the bigger opportunity may be in applying purpose-built models to the operational data from smart meters, customer systems, weather, outages, and grid equipment.
In this first episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Venkata Nimmala, Director of Digital Transformation and Enterprise Architecture at Arizona
Is commercial fusion finally near?
For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public's attention, and then leads to disappointment when people realize that limitless energy from the stars is very hard to produce on Earth.
But now fusion is evolving into a commercial story. This spring, Common
SpaceX’s IPO is an energy story
Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify.
But either way, the company’s public debut tells us something important about this investment moment: the next technology cycle is not asset-light. It is ambitiously physical.
SpaceX is now much more than rockets and launchpads. With xAI insi
America’s electricity rage is here
The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media.
And you can see it in the polling. Across poll after poll, more people are saying that they can’t afford their bills and they think utilities need to change how they make money. And they are also very cynical
The biggest utility merger in US history?
First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it's getting harder than ever to site and build the data centers to alleviate it.
This is shaking up who builds the energy infrastructure to serve it, and how it gets built.
This week, we’re diving into the biggest utility d
The climate messaging war returns. Does it matter if we can’t build?
A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change?
It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing that Democrats should avoid talking about climate change. His case: climate carries far too much political baggage for working class voters that Democrats are trying to win back.
It sparked a conversat
Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate
Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US.
And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man.
Now consider crypto. A few year
Can data centers regain their social license? A former Microsoft exec weighs in
For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development.
That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into
Utilities are in the crosshairs of the data center backlash
Data center opposition is now being called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” In Indiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, voters across the political spectrum are turning sharply against the large campuses powering AI. At least 28 of the 38 states that currently offer tax incentives are weighing whether to roll them back.
On this episode of Open Circuit, we dig into what's actu
As oil rationing spreads, what comes next? Plus, Fermi America's collapse
As the oil crisis persists, the world is running on borrowed time and borrowed oil. Inventories are draining, and the pain that started in Asian petrochemical plants and Indian cooking fuel shipments is now spreading west.
Now, the traders who move the world's oil are saying there's a reckoning coming for the rest of the world.
This week, we dive into what happens if this keeps going. Does a sh
The hidden bottleneck in clean energy [partner content]
What actually kills a clean energy project?
It’s not always interconnection delays, permitting, or supply chains. Sometimes, it’s the deal itself.
Even after years of development, hundreds of documents, and months of diligence, projects still fall apart late in the process — sometimes just days before closing. Often, it’s because risks aren’t surfaced early enough.
The result: capital gets tied
A reckoning for the ‘electro-bros’
With electricity now the limiting factor in the race to build superintelligence, the tech industry's response has been very Silicon Valley: move fast, break things, and relentlessly scale.
The result? An overtaxed grid, a wave of community pushback, and an obsession with jet engines, ship turbines, and small modular reactors that don’t solve today’s problems.
In this live episode, recorded at th
The natural gas ‘bridge’ becomes a highway
For a long time, natural gas was considered a bridge fuel. Even the gas industry called it a bridge, working hand in hand with environmental groups to push coal off the grid.
Then came the pushback over methane leaks, air quality in homes, and residential gas connections. The industry got so rattled it started hiring influencers to win back public opinion.
Well, all that has changed radically.
Have we run out of big ideas to fix the grid?
America’s grid problems are often framed as physical constraints: equipment shortages, interconnection backlogs, and a lack of powered land.
But are we missing an opportunity to bring bigger ideas to the table as we reindustrialize and electrify the economy?
This week, Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, joins the show to talk about why our biggest constraint is an inabili
The demand stack: Turning customers into grid capacity [partner content]
For years, demand-side programs like energy efficiency and demand response were treated as compliance, not real resources.
Now, that’s changing.
As electricity demand surges, utilities are facing a new reality: they can’t build infrastructure fast enough or affordably enough. So they’re starting to look in a different place for capacity: inside homes and businesses.
In this episode, Stephen La
Grid utilization vs expansion: The 100 GW debate
We’re entering an electricity supercycle that is reshaping how power gets built, where it gets built, and who controls it.
Across the U.S., developers are scrambling to lock up land with access to electricity. And the century-old grid is being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for. It’s also sparking a new debate about how exactly to modernize the grid.
For all the talk of capacity scarcity, the
State of the transition: The biggest fights in energy
Everyone has a strong opinion on energy right now. If you’ve followed energy for a while, none of this is new. There have always been strong opinions — renewables versus fossil fuels, subsidies versus markets, activists versus infrastructure. But the intensity feels different right now.
People are arguing about everything: the speed of the transition, how to fix broken electricity markets, whethe
Iran, energy shocks, and the case for distributed power
President Trump’s war with Iran has rattled global energy markets. Oil prices have surged, LNG markets are tightening, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply — has been severely disrupted.
Tankers are stalled, shipping costs are soaring, and energy markets are bracing for one of the largest oil supply disruptions in history.
Th
The problem with Trump's AI power pledge
The politics of AI and electricity came to the White House this week.
On Wednesday, the biggest tech companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle — gathered in Washington to sign what the administration is calling a “ratepayer protection pledge.” The promise: data centers will pay for their own power and grid integration costs.
But is anything actually changing? O
Clean energy didn’t collapse in 2025. It adapted.
When President Trump kicked off an aggressive trade war, a lot of people predicted economic doom. But it didn’t happen.
We’re seeing something similar in clean energy right now with ever-shifting tariffs, half-written rules on foreign sourcing, and the weaponization of permitting. But capital hasn’t fled. In fact, it increased last year. So what is happening here?
According to new market intelli
The Green Blueprint: Sage Geosystems' bet on underground energy storage
This week, we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint.
In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks with Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems.
Cindy and her team at Sage Geosystems are developing geothermal technology that could revolutionize energy storage. Instead of pumping water up a mountain, they pump it deep into the earth, providing cost-effective, long-term storage for intermittent renew
Are investors losing faith in Big Tech's infrastructure frenzy?
This year alone, the biggest tech companies plan to spend more than $600 billion on physical infrastructure — eclipsing the railroad boom, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo space program.
But are investors starting to flinch?
This week, we examine the negative market reaction to tech earnings. Is Wall Street reacting to the infrastructure bottlenecks that stand in the way of building
Is this geothermal’s breakout moment?
2026 could be the year of the mega-IPO, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic all rumored to be eyeing public markets. But for energy nerds and hot-rock lovers, there’s another IPO to watch: Fervo Energy.
With Fervo preparing for a long-anticipated IPO, the geothermal sector is heading into a moment of price discovery. It’s a test of whether next-generation geothermal has finally crossed a new comme
The politics of making electricity cheaper, from PJM reform to VPPs
Electricity affordability has become the defining energy issue of 2026. As policymakers scramble for solutions, two very different playbooks are taking shape.
On one side, a blunt-force federal approach led by the Trump Administration that treats affordability like an emergency. Keep coal plants open. Force markets to change. Make large power users pay directly for new power plants through market
A five-alarm fire for the grid? (Live)
It’s been nearly a year since a national energy emergency was declared, with big promises on prices and reliability. So we’re asking a simple question: how’s that going?
In this live episode of Open Circuit, recorded at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, we take stock of a power system under growing strain. Outages are up, prices are up, markets are stressed, and grid reliability experts are
Meta's nuclear deal explained: What's real vs hype?
Meta just unveiled the biggest-ever corporate deal for nuclear power. It’s a sprawling set of contracts for both existing plants and next-generation reactors that totals 6.6 gigawatts.
Just a few years ago, the conversation in the U.S. was about which nuclear plants were going to shut down next. Now, some of the world’s largest technology companies are trying to lock them up under long-term contr
Who controls power in the AI era?
This is an episode with a lot of firsts: the first show of the year, the first full show on video, and the first with our new co-host, Caroline Golin.
In 2026, we’re launching a new chapter for Open Circuit as we sharpen our focus on the physical constraints shaping the energy transition — exploding power demand, grids that can’t keep up, tech companies reshaping electricity markets in real time,
Katherine’s final episode
After more than 40 years in the energy industry, Katherine Hamilton is retiring. And that means she’s also retiring from the podcast after a decade behind the microphone.
In this farewell episode, Katherine shares insights into a career that spanned one of the most transformative periods in energy history. We’ll reflect on her accidental entry into grid engineering at Dominion Virginia Power in t
The year's twists, villains, and breakout stars in energy
This year, the energy industry changed faster than we could talk about it. We collectively said more than 225,000 words on this show — some of them were informed takes, some speculation. So how did they age?
This week, Stephen reaches into a stocking stuffed with quotes from past episodes, and Jigar and Katherine must decide to defend, update, or disown their own words.
Then, we honor the story
3 years after ChatGPT, vibes meet grid realities
Three years after ChatGPT ignited the AI race, the assumptions driving the trillion-dollar data-center boom are starting to shift.
The belief that endlessly scaling large language models will unlock AGI — and justify unprecedented growth in electricity demand — is now being questioned by some of the field’s most influential voices. At the same time, utilities are planning roughly a trillion dolla
A feast of hot takes
This year in energy has had the vibes of a dysfunctional family gathering: everyone showed up with big feelings, and no one agreed on the menu.
To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re processing the chaos right at the dinner table. In this holiday special, the team matches classic Thanksgiving guest archetypes with the biggest energy storylines of 2025.
Who is the drunk uncle sucking up all the oxygen
The grid resilience dilemma
Utilities are facing a collision of pressures: extreme weather, rising load, affordability concerns, and growing regulatory friction. Everyone agrees the grid needs to be hardened. But the real question is: how much resilience should we pay for?
On one side, utilities are confronting unprecedented stress from storms, wildfires, flooding, and heat. On the other, they’re under pressure from regulat
Bill Gates caused a climate meltdown
After Bill Gates dropped a new climate manifesto, the internet did what it always does: lost its mind. Conservatives claimed victory, progressives accused him of selling out, and somewhere in the middle was a real debate about how the energy transition actually happens.
This week, in our episode recorded live at Greentown Labs, we’re jumping into the fray. What does the debate say about the state
The real reason electricity prices are rising
Here’s something surprising: in states like North Dakota and Texas, the surge of new industrial and data center load has actually moderated electricity prices.
The very thing many people blame for higher power bills has, in some cases, had the opposite effect. According to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, load growth has slightly lowered retail electricity prices on average over
The AI race is really an electro-industrial race
After years of U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors, Beijing is fighting back by cutting off exports of the raw materials that make those chips possible: rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium — the invisible ingredients inside motors, power electronics, defense systems, and data centers.
The move caught Washington off guard. The Treasury Secretary compared it to “pointing a bazooka at
How to spot an AI bubble
The AI economy isn’t coming. It’s already here.
In the first half of 2025, investment in AI infrastructure outpaced all U.S. consumer spending. Tech companies are now building the equivalent of an Apollo program every ten months, while data centers are drawing capital away from nearly every other sector.
As money floods into chips, servers, and substations, the “B word” is suddenly on everyone’s
Is this moment for distributed energy different?
Distributed energy resources have never looked stronger. Fleets of batteries are now performing like gas plants, virtual power plants are dispatched daily, and hyperscalers are supporting new models to finance capacity around their data centers.
But investor-owned utilities? The Edison Electric Institute says they’re planning more than a trillion dollars in new infrastructure over the next decade
The case for a climate reset
For the last decade and a half, the loudest voices in the climate movement have treated decarbonization like a moral crusade: ban gas stoves, declare climate emergencies, punish fossil fuel companies.
But those tactics don’t lower utility bills or build durable political coalitions. And now, amidst a radical shift in U.S. politics where the economy dominates, there’s a growing call for a pragmati
Electricity is the new price of eggs
Eggs were the symbol of inflation in the last election. Now, as electricity bills spike, they are becoming a symbol for consumer frustration in 2026.
Americans are feeling the squeeze. Bills are up nearly 30% since 2021, outpacing inflation and straining household budgets. Eighty million Americans are struggling to pay, four in five feel powerless, and politicians are scrambling for someone to bl
Trump’s offshore wind war shakes investors
On his first day in office, Trump laid out his wind policy in one simple sentence: “We aren’t going to do the wind thing.”
With stop-work orders, red tape, and wild claims about whale-killing electromagnetic fields, the White House has stepped up its war on wind.
The flashpoint is Ørsted’s $5 billion Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, which was weeks from delivering 700 megawatts of clea
JPMorgan’s climate scientist thinks differently about risk
In 2004, Dr. Sarah Kapnick was a young banking analyst at Goldman Sachs when she spotted a blind spot: no one was helping clients understand climate risk. Two decades later, she’s the Global Head of Climate Advisory at JPMorgan, turning climate science into boardroom strategy.
Kapnick’s career path — from Wall Street, to NOAA’s chief scientist, and back to finance — mirrors the way markets are ev
Grab bag: the affordability crisis, a VPP tipping point, and solar’s moment
This week, we’re doing something a little different: we’re turning to Jigar’s social media feeds and listener questions to guide our conversation on the latest news in clean energy.
First, we tackle the affordability crisis. President Trump recently posted on Truth Social calling renewables "the scam of the century" and blaming them for rising prices. We look at how his policies are making the cr
The Latitude stage: How AI changes our digital energy footprint
We're witnessing a profound shift from discrete AI tools to always-on AI companions — systems that provide constant feedback, conversation, and support. Sound familiar? It's the 2013 movie "Her" becoming reality.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we have a conversation with MIT’s Vijay Gadepally from our Transition-AI conference about how the spread of artificial intelligence is reshaping our dig
The Latitude stage: Solving the AI load growth puzzle
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 utilit
Is America giving up on clean energy manufacturing?
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 manufact
The great divergence: Can the grid catch up to transportation innovation? [partner content]
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 connect
A post-OBBB market recalibration
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 re
What can ag tech learn from clean energy?
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 O
America’s building bottleneck
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 i
No, solar didn’t collapse Spain's grid
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 cross
Pain and resilience for climate tech investors
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
The grid is smarter. Why aren't we smarter about the grid?
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 coord
AI rewrites the corporate energy playbook
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 buildi
How Tesla bootstrapped the Powerwall 2
This week, we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint featuring Drew Baglino, a former SVP at Tesla. Subscribe here.
In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages.
Customers across multiple
The abundance agenda meets scarcity politics
America is facing an uncomfortable question: do we know how to build anymore?
House Republicans just passed a reconciliation bill that would repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act while adding up to $5 trillion to the national debt. The legislation doesn't just gut clean energy incentives — it hinders the most realistic path to meeting exploding electricity demand.
After leveraging hundreds
A high-stakes energy showdown in Texas
Texans take pride in their competitive electricity market, a system designed to let the cheapest resources win. And that market is increasingly choosing clean energy, with wind, solar, and batteries dominating new generation. Nearly 40 gigawatts have been added in just four years, equivalent to the capacity of a mid-sized European country.
This market-driven boom has unequivocally lowered costs a
Tesla’s fork in the road
When Elon Musk canceled Tesla's affordable Model 2 last year to go all-in on Robotaxis, he may have made the most consequential decision in the company's history. As Chinese automaker BYD captures global market share with lower-cost vehicles and superior charging technology, has Tesla prematurely surrendered the market it created?
"In his mind, I think he ushered in the EV revolution for the worl
Fear and Loathing at the Department of Energy
The Department of Energy is losing talent at an alarming rate. Described by insiders as a "hostile takeover," the agency's transformation under Trump has pushed out thousands of scientists, engineers, and policy experts. What's left behind are gutted offices, stalled infrastructure projects, and billions in funding commitments thrown into question.
This isn't a typical government transition — it
State of the transition: tariffs, shortages, data centers, and Europe vs China
This week, we’re asking the central question of the energy transition: How fast are we going?
Clean energy is bringing in $2 trillion of investment annually. Wind and solar now account for the vast majority of new electricity capacity globally. And we may already be at “peak trade” of fossil fuels.
And yet, when we look at the share of renewables in final energy consumption, they’re increasing o
Who’s really paying AI’s power bill?
When tech giants build massive data centers to power AI, they're often negotiating confidential deals with utilities that few people will ever see — but that everyone might pay for.
Harvard legal expert Ari Peskoe has uncovered a pattern across 40 state regulatory proceedings: special contracts between utilities and data centers being approved with minimal public scrutiny, potentially shifting b
A tsunami of uncertainty for clean energy
The business world is facing a tsunami of uncertainty. Across nearly every industry, investment is seizing up amid unpredictable tariffs and contradictory domestic policies.
In this week’s episode of Open Circuit, we examine how this compounding uncertainty is impacting clean energy during a critical moment of spiking demand and rising costs.
We dissect the signals from the market, revealing th
Energy dominance meets economic chaos
President Trump promised energy dominance. But his sweeping new tariffs are delivering the opposite – creating unprecedented uncertainty for every sector of the energy economy.
Faced with a market in revolt, the president blinked. Just hours after his tariffs went into effect, he put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, keeping a 10% baseline tariff and a 125% tariff on China.
In this episode
Tariffs, localization, and a new global energy order
It's fair to say the last decade was the climate era of the energy transition. From the Paris Agreement to corporate net zero pledges, reducing carbon emissions dominated the global framework for deploying clean energy. But something profound is shifting.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we explore how a new security-driven paradigm is replacing climate as the primary driver of energy investments
Five years later: the pandemic's energy legacy
Five years ago, as lockdowns swept the globe, we witnessed an energy shock that destroyed oil demand, upended electricity demand patterns, and dropped global emissions by staggering levels overnight.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we revisit predictions made during those early uncertain days and examine three major paradoxes that emerged.
First, how staying home rewired our physical and digi
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