Energy Changemakers Podcast

Electricity prices are rising, data centers are struggling to connect, and consumers are feeling the pinch — yet utilities keep reporting record earnings. What's going wrong, and how do we fix it? In this episode, Elisa Wood speaks with Michael Lee, former CEO of Octopus Energy US and founder of Distributed Grid, about the structural flaw at the heart of the American utility model: an incentive system that rewards building infrastructure regardless of whether it is needed.
Lee argues that this cost-of-service model — largely unchanged for a century — is driving an inflationary spiral in electricity rates and blocking the distributed energy resources that could make the grid more affordable and resilient. But his argument is not simply that utilities are bad actors. It is that utilities are rational actors operating under the wrong rules. Change the rules — and the business model — and utilities could earn more revenue by coordinating a decentralized grid than by building poles and wires.
Lee lays out a detailed roadmap: from reframing utilities as "network coordinators" to paying them for outcomes (reliability, affordability, speed to power) rather than capital deployed. He also confronts the political and social complexities — utility shareholders who depend on dividends, governors who fear blackouts, and a public that has never had to think about how electricity works. The conversation is both an indictment of the status quo and a genuine blueprint for a better grid.

Produced in partnership with Xendee, this podcast explores the market dynamics that led the company to create a free, non-commercial gathering for the microgrid industry. In their conversation, Elisa Wood and Xendee CTO Michael Stadler discuss what's been holding microgrids back from achieving their full market potential, how utilities treat them, and why data centers are opening up opportunities that are reconfiguring what microgrids look like.Called University Week, the virtual event will be held June 8-10, 2026. Sessions will focus on:—Misperceptions and limited knowledge about microgrids and DERs—Macro market challenges—Older centralized technologies and grid limitations—Fragmented market with no common voice for the industryRegistration is free: https://xendee.com/xendee-university-week?.

What does it take to build a billion-dollar biofuels company from inside one of energy’s most durable entrepreneurial firms?
Michael Bakas has spent 25 years at Ameresco — and now he’s leading Neogenyx Fuels, a new $1.8 billion joint venture with HASI. Elisa Wood of Energy Changemakers gets the full story: the cocktail-napkin founding of Ameresco, the dual energy crisis (geopolitics + AI demand), and why RNG’s global moment has arrived.
Whether you work in energy development, finance, policy, or utilities — or you’re simply watching the clean energy transition unfold — this conversation is a rare look at how one company has been building the infrastructure for what now appears to be America’s biofuel moment.

Produced in partnership with Xendee, this podcast explores the market dynamics that led the company to create a free, non-commercial educational gathering for the microgrid industry.
In their conversation, Elisa Wood and Xendee CTO Michael Stadler discuss what’s been holding microgrids back from achieving their full market potential, how utilities treat them, and why data centers are opening up opportunities that are reconfiguring what microgrids look like.
For more information, join Xendee and Energy Changemakers at University Week, a virtual event that will be held June 8-10, 2026.
Sessions will focus on:
Misperceptions and limited knowledge about microgrids and DERs
Macro market challenges
Older centralized technologies and grid limitations
Fragmented market with no common voice for the industry
Registration is free. https://xendee.com/xendee-university-week?utm_source=ecm

This episode revisits one of the most-listened-to conversations in Energy Changemakers history—a three-way dialogue between Kay Aikin (CEO of Dynamic Grid, Maine), Lorenzo Kristov (independent grid market architect and formerly of California ISO), and Mark Paterson (Principal and Lead Systems Architect, Energy Catalyst, Australia). The original episode aired in 2024; this return engagement goes deeper, reexamining the concept of energy abundance through a more refined and urgent lens.
The conversation takes direct aim at the dominant political narrative of “generate, generate, generate”—the idea that energy problems are simply solved by producing more power. The guests argue that this approach confuses quantity with quality, and supply with access. They introduce the concept of “smart abundance” versus “dumb abundance,” and make the case that a truly abundant energy future must be planned from the bottom up, starting closest to the user, not at the distant bulk power system.
Ranging across economics, physics, regulatory law, and systems theory—and drawing analogies from photosynthesis to mycelial forest networks to Windows 97—the three guests explain why the current grid architecture is structurally incapable of delivering on the promise of energy abundance, and what reforms in planning, regulation, and market design would make the transformation possible. Australia’s experience with surplus renewables and minimum system demand serves as a real-world case study of what happens when abundance arrives without the right operating system to manage it.