Open Circuit

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.

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.