Open Circuit

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, hit a new all-time demand record.

The Energy Department issued emergency orders to keep the lights on. And people living next to data centers wondered: how much diesel pollution would they breathe if all the backup generators kicked on at once.

This week, we'll look at two energy stories playing out in response: the top-down effort to manage grids stressed by data centers and extreme weather — including the biggest-ever virtual power plant getting built to take the pressure off.

We’ll also look at the bottom-up movement of Americans bolting solar panels to their balconies and backyards. The market for plug-in solar has surged in Pakistan and Germany. Will it add up to something meaningful in the U.S.? And could it play a role in virtual power plants?

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 Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler.

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.

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 be sequenced together. And on top of it all, public opinion has radically shifted against data centers, adding new risks.

In this episode, recorded live at our Transition-AI conference in April, we hear from two executives navigating all of it: Holly Adams, SVP of Energy at Beale Infrastructure, and Ian Black, SVP and Global Head of Energy at Digital Realty.

They cover the similarities between renewables and data centers, the changing definition of "powered land," the evolution of large load tariffs, how community opposition has grown, and the hard questions around bringing your own generation that utilities are betting developers won't solve.

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 Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler.

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.

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 Public Service, and Karthik Moorthy, Chief Growth Officer at Bidgely.

APS initially partnered with Bidgely to solve a highly practical customer-service problem: helping call-center agents explain why a customer’s bill had increased. By using appliance-level energy disaggregation, the utility moved beyond generic explanations to identify the likely drivers of higher usage.

But the project soon raised a bigger question. How could the same intelligence support a wider range of planning and operational solutions across the utility? Venkat and Karthik explain how APS began bringing Bidgely’s models closer to the utility’s own data environment, creating a foundation for broader experimentation and deployment. 

They discuss data sovereignty, centralized AI governance, the difference between buying a point solution and building deeper capabilities, and why AI transformation is ultimately as much about data and operating models as it is about technology.

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

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, Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion company to file a generation interconnection request with PJM. The company has a site in Virginia, customers in Google and Eni, and a timeline that could put power on the grid in the early 2030s. That’s roughly the same window as a conventional power plant built today.

The science is far from done, and fusion has burned optimists before. But for the first time, the conversation has shifted from "can this ever work" to "can this work on a timeline that matters for today's grid planning?"

This week, we interrogate that timeline with Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

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 inside the company, SpaceX is pitching itself as an AI company, an emerging hyperscaler, a satellite broadband network, and eventually a vertically integrated chip manufacturer, solar manufacturer, power developer, and operator of orbital data centers.

In this episode, we tackle some of the energy storylines behind SpaceX’s public debut. 

We’ll ask what it means for Elon’s energy master plan, the pathway for powering terawatt-scale compute, and whether it presents an opening for other hard tech energy companies coming out of Elon’s orbit.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.