Energy Gang

The era of stagnant electricity demand in the US is over. Data centres, electrification, and reshoring of manufacturing are driving a surge in demand that is stronger that anything that anyone currently working in the industry has yet seen in their professional lifetimes. The question of which market and regulatory structures are needed to respond to this new and fast-changing world is now at the centre of the policy debate.
Host Ed Crooks is joined by Drew Maloney, President and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade body representing America's investor-owned utilities, which together serve more than 70 per cent of the US population. Drew argues that the current moment is exposing a fundamental divide in the US power system: vertically integrated, regulated utilities can plan generation, transmission, and distribution over 20-year horizons, while competitive markets like PJM are struggling to send the investment signals needed to get new power plants built.
The conversation starts with one of the hottest topics in US politics: affordability and household electricity bills. There are some misconceptions about electricity bills that have gained traction with the American public. Drew points to EEI research showing that 34 states have kept increases in electricity rates below general consumer price inflation over the past five years. And he adds that the states where prices are rising fastest tend to be in deregulated markets, where capacity costs are climbing but no new generation is being built.
Ed draws on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2025 study of electricity bills and data centres (You can read that study here.). That study found that demand growth alone did not explain rising bills, and that the drivers vary significantly by region, from wildfire mitigation costs in California to capacity market dynamics in PJM and New England.
They move on to another hot topic in the industry today: whether data centres and other large loads should go “off grid” and rely entirely on local on-site generation. Drew pushes back against the narrative that this model is now becoming widespread, arguing there is more talk than action. Building duplicative generation to create “five nines” reliability for a data centre is expensive, and can still be unreliable without grid backup. It also pulls investment and workforce away from the shared infrastructure that benefits all customers.
Most data centres want grid access, even if some are pursuing hybrid approaches in the interim until their hook-ups to the network can be connected.
The episode also covers FERC Chairman Laura Swett's emerging approach to market intervention, the prospects for bipartisan permitting reform in Congress, and the ratepayer protection plan brokered between the White House and the major hyperscalers. Drew closes with an optimistic long view: the current moment, though it needs careful management, could be an opportunity to transform the US grid for the better.
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The war with Iran has put a spotlight on the security and resilience of energy and supply chains around the world. In this second special episode from the ACORE Finance Forum in New York, host Ed Crooks explores what that means for the US power industry, at a moment when rising electricity demand was already putting the grid under strain.
Lori Ann LaRocco, a trade and supply chain expert and author of Trade War: Containers Don't Lie, explains the global impacts from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. She tells us that there are 70,000 products made from petrochemicals, including the components that go into solar panels, the chips for data centers, and your cell phone. Supplies of those products are being crunched because of the disruption to exports from the Gulf. Some are already in short supply. Even if the strait reopened tomorrow, the physical realities of repositioning tankers, clearing mines and restoring export infrastructure would mean supply chains would take at least a year to normalise. Her advice: know your supply chain not just to the first tier, but to the fifth, sixth and seventh.
José Antonio Miranda, chief executive of Avangrid, talks about the opportunities and challenges created by rising electricity demand. He says investment needs to start now and keep going. His one word advice for policymakers: certainty. Investors have the capital and the expertise to deliver the new grid and generation capacity that policymakers want, he says. What the private sector cannot work with is retroactive rule changes and unpredictable permitting outcomes.
Harry Krejsa, director of studies at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, is a former official in both the Trump and Biden administrations who is focused on the relationship between energy and national security. He argues that worries about depending on China for clean energy technology often conflate two issues: cybersecurity risk, and supply chain dependency. His principle is guard the smart stuff, buy the dumb stuff, and build the future.
Kara McNutt, Wood Mackenzie's head of power and renewables consulting for the Americas, shares her concerns about grid reliability. The share of dispatchable generation on the US grid is declining as coal-fired power plants shut down and new wind and solar capacity is added. Nuclear is genuinely exciting, with the global SMR pipeline nearly doubling in the past year, but it is a 2030s story rather than a solution for today.
Benoy Thanjan, founder of Reneu Energy and host of the Solar Maverick podcast, is a solar developer. He is seeing surging interest in behind-the-meter storage, driven in part by concerns about energy security and resilience brought to the surface by the Iran war. The FEOC (Foreign Entities of Concern) rules, intended to stop unfriendly countries benefiting from US tax credits, remain a real point of friction. Customers want US-manufactured equipment, but the price gap between compliant and non-compliant products is still very large.
Ray Long, president and chief executive of ACORE, closes by sharing his key takeaways from the forum. He says three things need to change to remove obstacles to investment: federal permitting reform, clear FEOC guidance from the Treasury, and faster approvals from the Departments of Interior, War and Energy for new projects.
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The numbers are staggering. The “magnificent seven” Big Tech companies are expected to have combined capital spending of about $800 billion this year. Data centres’ electricity demand is soaring, and hundreds of billions of dollars more are being mobilised to invest in power infrastructure to meet that demand. In this special episode, recorded at the ACORE Finance Forum in New York, host Ed Crooks speaks with five guests at the heart of the revolution in energy finance: bankers, a deal lawyer, a data centre operator and a head of policy.
James Wright, Managing Director and Head of US Corporate Banking at CIBC Capital Markets, explains the connection between power, data centres and AI with an analogy borrowed from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Think of AI as a layer cake, with power as the base, data centre infrastructure above it, then hardware, then AI models, and the applications as the icing on top. For banks like CIBC, it is those bottom two layers that matter most. James explains how power developers and data centre builders are increasingly converging. Gas, solar and battery storage are driving the bulk of activity in new power generation, though gas turbine supply chains remain severely stretched. “Powered land” projects, created as sites to attract data centre developers, are a popular idea at the moment. But many of them are highly speculative. James estimates that for every twenty conversations, perhaps a couple result in a financeable transaction.
Another hot topic is of behind-the-meter generation and co-located power. James sees it happening, but only at the margin. Grid connections are still the ultimate goal.
 Adam Altenhofen, Senior Vice President for Impact Finance at US Bank, brings a different perspective on energy finance. US Bank has deployed more than $33 billion in renewable energy since 2008, primarily through the tax credit programmes for solar, wind and battery storage. The wind and solar tax credits are winding down, but projects that start construction before 4 July this year can still be placed in service through to the end of 2030. The storage tax credit was preserved through to 2036.
Behind-the-meter generation, Adam argues, presents a fundamental challenge to the project finance model. If the load disappears, so does the revenue. And unlike for a grid-connected project, there will be no readily available alternative revenue streams to fall back on. Guarantees covering the full duration of the power supply contract are the floor, not the ceiling, for what lenders would need to get comfortable, Adam says.
 Mona Dajani, Global Co-Chair of Infrastructure, Energy and Real Estate at the law firm Cooley, sees something structural changing. Hyperscalers are now behaving like utilities, she says. They assess data centre locations based on access to power, reliability and duration of supply. Meanwhile, some utilities are becoming more like infrastructure platforms, building unregulated arms and investing in new technologies to serve growing demand. A cultural gulf used to separate the tech and energy industries. But as they have come to understand their mutual interdependence over the past few years, more constructive collaborations have emerged.
Jon Edwards, Executive Vice President and Head of Capital Markets at the data centre developer Switch, offers the operator's perspective. Switch currently consumes roughly one third of Nevada's total power supply and operates at 100% green power. Jon explains how the company decoupled from the utility grid for generation purposes back in 2015, buying its own generation while still using the utility for transmission and distribution, and how that model helped reduce Nevada consumer electricity prices by double digits in 2025. He is another sceptic about behind-the-meter power: it is useful as a bridge in some circumstances, but grid-connected utility power remains the primary and preferred solution for serious, long-duration data centre operations. On the financing side, Jon discusses Switch's recent $2.6 billion letter of credit facility, designed to give utilities the financial certainty they need to invest in new infrastructure, knowing they can be confident the data centre load will be there.
 The episode closes with Lesley Hunter, Senior Vice President for Policy at ACORE, who sets the policy backdrop against which all of this activity is playing out. ACORE's latest investor survey makes for sobering reading: 69% of capital providers who replied to the survey said they thought the US industry had in the past year lost attractiveness compared to clean energy sectors in other countries. The same proportion, 69%, expect a further relative decline over the next three years. Lesley identifies two main pain points: the still-unresolved foreign entity of concern rules (FEOC) for tax credit eligibility, and the Department of Defense slow-walking agreements needed for wind development that has held up more than 160 projects.
Her message for policy-makers is that regulatory stability is vital. “The core ask of the industry right now is to ensure that players have the rules of the road,” she says. “That those rules won’t change mid-stream, and they are able to deploy capital, and trust the federal government when making these long-term investments in US infrastructure.”
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Ten weeks into the war with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed. The ceasefire is officially holding, but occasional attacks on ships and installations continue. A difficult question is coming into focus: what if the strait never fully reopens?
Host Ed Crooks is joined by regular contributor Amy Myers Jaffe, Director of the Global Energy, Climate, and Sustainability Lab at NYU, alongside two guests. Edward (Eddie) Fishman is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Choke Points, a history of economic warfare. Christopher Aversano is Wood Mackenzie's Director of Maritime Partnerships, returning to give the view from the shipping industry.
Chris reports that the number of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz had risen from around 10 a day at the low point to roughly 25 a day, but then dropped off again as tensions escalated and the threat of renewed fighting rose. Even at their best, the number of transits has been just a fraction of the 150-170 a day that was normal before the war began at the end of February.
Some ships are still making it through the strait. Some LNG carriers have “gone dark”, shutting off their transponders, later reappearing weeks later on the other side of the world. Ship owners are pragmatic, Chris says, and high commodity prices create a strong financial incentive for tankers to pass through the strait when they can. But questions of insurance, crew safety, and freedom of navigation through the strait remain unresolved.
Eddie says the US decision on what to do next is like a choice between two doors . Door one would be a negotiated deal that leaves Iran as gatekeeper of the Strait of Hormuz. Door two would be full-scale military intervention, which seems politically impossible. With neither option palatable, the result is drift. His base case is that Iran retains permanent control. A toll of $2 million per ship passing through the strait could generate $30-100 billion a year for Tehran, potentially exceeding its oil export earnings. The drones needed to enforce the closure can cost as little as $20,000 each.
Amy argues the full impact of closing the strait has not yet hit. Emergency releases of oil from reserves, shadow cargoes from sanction ed countries that were already on the water, and seasonal refinery maintenance have all cushioned the blow. The real test comes in the weeks ahead, as those buffers run out. Ed argues that if the strait stays closed for six more months, oil at $150-$200 a barrel may be needed to balance the market, with a global recession as the likely consequence.
The conversation broadens into the geopolitics of the dollar. Eddie explains why the US currency remains the backbone of global trade, involved in 90 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions, and why that gives the US government powerful strategic leverage. Amy suggests that China may see US entanglement in the strait as strategically useful, draining American resources without it lifting a finger.
The episode closes with a warning. Eddie argues the weaponisation of American economic power against allies as well as adversaries risks fragmenting the global trading system further, with potentially disastrous consequences. History shows that when states cannot secure resources through open exchange, they tend to be tempted into conquest.
‘Chokepoints : American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare’ by Edward Fishman, published by Penguin, is available from bookstores now.

This episode is sponsored by Bechtel.
Nuclear is back — and Bechtel is helping build what comes next.
For more than 70 years, Bechtel has helped shape the nuclear industry, from work on the world’s first commercial nuclear reactor to designing, constructing, and servicing more than 150 nuclear plants worldwide. Bechtel has helped bring more than 76,000 megawatts of nuclear power online globally.
Today, Bechtel is helping deliver the next generation of nuclear energy — from large-scale plants to small modular and advanced reactors — using the company’s decades of mega-project delivery experience to bring new nuclear online safely, reliably, and at scale.
Learn more at bechtel.com/nuclear
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The past year has been challenging for electric vehicles. In the first quarter of 2026, US EV sales were about 27 per cent below their level in the first quarter of last year. But the ride-hailing industry still sees a future that is electric, autonomous, and shared, and is placing a multi-billion dollar bet on it. Ride-hailing services such as Uber could be one of the key sectors supporting the electrification of road transport in the years to come.
In this episode, host Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers Jaffe, director of NYU's Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab, and two guests from Uber. Andrew Cornelia is the company’s global head of electrification and sustainability, and Samarth Kedrawal is its global head of fleet and autonomous vehicles. Andrew and Samarth make the case for why the shift away from the internal combustion engine as the dominant technology for road transport is a question of when, not if. And the fuel price shock resulting from the conflict in the Middle East may be shortening the timeline.
Uber's EV strategy is about more than just going green, Andrew says. In markets where the economics work, including London, Paris, and São Paulo, EV drivers are earning more and spending less, and riders are consistently rating the electric experience among the best of Uber’s services. Charging remains the biggest barrier, partly because the infrastructure has been chronically underbuilt. Finding a free public charger can be a problem, especially for the drivers who need them most because they live in urban centres without access to home charging. It can also be expensive: public charging can account for up to 40% of the total cost of ownership of an EV.
Uber is now signing agreements with charging network operators to underwrite new infrastructure in exchange for preferential pricing for its drivers. The company is also helping drivers spread the upfront cost of home charger installation, and reports that the switch is saving some drivers close to $8,000 a year.
Autonomous vehicles (Avs) are even more capital-intensive. Samarth describes an AV operation that in power demand terms looks like a series of small data centres: sites drawing three to eight megawatts, using tightly sequenced charging algorithms to maximise utilisation.
Like hyperscalers waiting on grid connections for their data centres, Uber is in some markets using gas to provide a temporary power supply, bridging the gap while it waits for the utility to wire it up. The utilities have been willing partners, Samarth says, but the demand for charging infrastructure is significant. The conversations are becoming more complex, as EV charging lines up alongside data centres to queue for connections to the same distribution networks.
The conversation also opens up a longer-term question: could a large enough fleet of parked autonomous vehicles one day act as a virtual power plant, selling stored energy back to the grid during peak demand? The answer is yes, eventually. But the immediate priority is more basic: making sure there are enough chargers available so the cars can actually turn a profit today.
The episode closes with a discussion of Chinese EVs and what trade barriers are really costing consumers. Andrew says that EV adoption among Uber drivers is moving fastest in markets where low-cost Chinese vehicles are available. Latin America, Brazil in particular, is the next major frontier. In the US, the lack of those low-cost EVs is a barrier to making the economics work for Uber drivers.
Both guests believe the industry will be bigger, the cost per mile lower, and the share of electric miles far higher. The direction is not in doubt, they say. The question is how fast the infrastructure, the policy environment, and the economics can move to meet it.
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