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Open Circuit

The energy transition, decoded. Every week, three industry veterans explore the tech breakthroughs, market shakeups, and policy shifts that are driving the biggest industrial transformation in history.

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All Episodes

61:33

The real reason electricity prices are rising

Open Circuit ·

2025/10/31

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 past five years. So what’s really driving them up? The answer isn’t renewables or AI. The study

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55:06

The AI race is really an electro-industrial race

Open Circuit ·

2025/10/24

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 the industrial base of the entire free world.” These minerals only make up hundreds of millions of

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63:56

How to spot an AI bubble

Open Circuit ·

2025/10/10

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 lips: bubble. This week, Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View and one of the sharpest analysts of

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74:44

Is this moment for distributed energy different?

Open Circuit ·

2025/10/03

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 to support historic load growth — with no mention of DERs or flexibility as solutions. So which world

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66:33

The case for a climate reset

Open Circuit ·

2025/09/26

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 pragmatic reset. This week, we dissect two critiques of climate politics. In a Bloomberg essay, Michael

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69:41

Electricity is the new price of eggs

Open Circuit ·

2025/09/19

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 blame. On Truth Social, Trump points at renewables. On TikTok and Bluesky, users rage about data centers

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52:35

Trump’s offshore wind war shakes investors

Open Circuit ·

2025/09/12

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 clean power to New England, and now frozen by federal order. The threat against the project is more than a

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52:30

JPMorgan’s climate scientist thinks differently about...

Open Circuit ·

2025/09/05

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 evolving: from ignoring climate risk, to struggling with it, to finally beginning to price it. Without

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60:03

Grab bag: the affordability crisis, a VPP tipping...

Open Circuit ·

2025/08/29

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 crisis worse, and why Trump now owns the problem. Then, we look at how VPPs are hitting a tipping point,

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34:52

The Latitude stage: How AI changes our digital energy...

Open Circuit ·

2025/08/20

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 digital energy footprint. As a senior scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and CTO of cloud computing

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39:18

Solving the AI load growth puzzle

Open Circuit ·

2025/08/13

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

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60:54

Is America giving up on clean energy manufacturing?

Open Circuit ·

2025/08/01

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

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27:50

The great divergence: Can the grid catch up to...

Open Circuit ·

2025/07/29

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

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63:50

A post-OBBB market recalibration

Open Circuit ·

2025/07/25

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

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65:09

The ethanol disaster unveiled a bigger problem

Open Circuit ·

2025/07/18

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

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59:15

America’s building bottleneck

Open Circuit ·

2025/07/14

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

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66:45

No, solar didn’t collapse Spain's grid

Open Circuit ·

2025/07/07

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

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67:06

Pain and resilience for climate tech investors

Open Circuit ·

2025/06/27

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

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84:58

The grid is smarter. Why aren't we smarter about the...

Open Circuit ·

2025/06/20

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

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53:46

AI rewrites the corporate energy playbook

Open Circuit ·

2025/06/17

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

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