Open Circuit

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 radical shift in anti-data center sentiment.

So what will this mean for other states? And more importantly, will states use their pauses to find creative ways to upgrade grids and deploy clean energy?

Then, the end of the corporate net-zero era. AI load growth is blowing up climate goals in real time and tech companies are scrambling to explain their emissions increases. Meanwhile, many of the biggest corporate players are walking away from their targets.

But could this actually be a good thing for corporate decarbonization? We’ll look at more effective ways for companies to accelerate clean solutions.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

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 HVAC contractor installs an air conditioner that has only one mode: cooling. That one decision locks in fossil fuel heating for the next 15 to 20 years.

This week, we're joined by Nate Adams, known as the House Whisperer, to unpack the three-part series he wrote for Latitude Media on what's actually holding heat pump adoption back. Nate argues the fix isn't more rebates or bigger subsidies for homeowners. Rather, it's making it easier for upstream players to make and stock two-way ACs.

We dig into the emergency replacement trap, the importance of hybrid systems, how heat pumps got politically coded, and why leading with comfort — not climate — is the winning pitch. We also talk about Nate’s immersive, fully electrified Airbnbs.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

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 Jessica Bailey, Global Head of Infrastructure at Nuveen, an institutional giant with over $1.4 trillion in assets under management. Jessica directs $40 billion in infrastructure investments and discusses how the collision of the energy transition, digitalization, and aging grid systems is creating an unprecedented investment landscape.

Jessica shares her unique journey from climate philanthropy at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to pioneering C-PACE financing. She also explains the financing structures needed to scale domestic manufacturing, why economic realities are beginning to override political gridlock, and why the biggest check on AI growth won't be capital, but could be energy and community pushback.

Subscribe to Critical Capital on Apple, Spotify, or any podcast platform.

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, the influential chip and infrastructure research firm, recently projected over 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power at U.S. data centers by 2028, most of it gas turbines, reciprocating engines, and fuel cells.

This week, Tim Hade, SVP at Voltus, joins the show to interrogate that forecast. He thinks that timeline is a fantasy, and that the real story for the next three to five years is load flexibility driven by batteries.

We dig into the SemiAnalysis numbers, the disagreement over how much headroom the grid has, and whether declining marginal value for batteries undercuts the case for storage. We close with a new framework from Rhodium Group that scores how these choices help or hurt the energy transition.

Read Jigar’s ode to Lorenzo Kristov, mentioned in the show.

Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Tim Hade. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

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 Product Officer at Bidgely.

As PSEG Long Island prepared to transition more than 900,000 residential customers onto time-of-day rates, success depended on building trust, improving transparency, and helping customers understand exactly where their energy dollars were going.

Lou and Ted explain how appliance-level energy intelligence transformed that effort. What started as a way to explain electric bills evolved into a broader customer engagement platform supporting call center operations, targeted efficiency programs, EV adoption, demand-side management, and long-term grid planning.

Along the way, they discuss why the future of utility AI depends on building stronger relationships between utilities and their customers.

Learn more about how Bidgely works with utilities through its UtilityAI platform.