Open Circuit

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.

The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media.

And you can see it in the polling. Across poll after poll, more people are saying that they can’t afford their bills and they think utilities need to change how they make money. And they are also very cynical about data centers. 

So will this be the push utilities need to finally change the way utilities pay for infrastructure?

This week, we dig into three indicators. First: 75% of Americans say their home energy costs have gone up, and a quarter of Americans now consider utility bills unaffordable. Second: 86% of California voters said executive pay should be tied to affordability. And third: 71% of Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home, a 49-point swing in less than a year.

Julia Hamm, a partner at Ad Hoc Group, joins us to explore how these economic anxieties may shift the electricity economy.

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.

First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it's getting harder than ever to site and build the data centers to alleviate it.

This is shaking up who builds the energy infrastructure to serve it, and how it gets built.

This week, we’re diving into the biggest utility deal in American history: NextEra’s attempt to buy Dominion. If it happens, it would combine the biggest renewable energy developer in the US with the utility serving the world's largest concentration of data centers. 

What does it mean for their power development strategy? We debate the regulatory path, the power mix question, and who actually benefits.

Then we turn to an infrastructure debate. Are we entering a new era of distributed, grid-connected data centers that will overshadow the gigawatt-scale campus model? 

And we close with a rapid-fire look at some ideas for solving the compute crunch: Home inference hubs, water heaters that serve AI, and wave-powered data centers.

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.

A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change?

It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing that Democrats should avoid talking about climate change. His case: climate carries far too much political baggage for working class voters that Democrats are trying to win back.

It sparked a conversation over whether "climate hushing" is a savvy political strategy or a dangerous concession.

This week, we take the debate head-on. Guest co-host Jane Flegal joins us to talk about the latest version of this argument, and whether dropping the climate frame is a smart tactical pivot.

Then we turn to a more fundamental problem. Even if we land on the perfect climate frame, it may not matter if the U.S. can't actually build the infrastructure the transition requires. A sweeping new essay in American Affairs argues that both parties have become functionally obstructionist — and that “ideologically portable” obstruction has become a feature of American governance.

We close with a look at an opening in philanthropy. Nan Ransohoff published a piece this month arguing that AI company wealth is about to generate up to $100 billion per year in new philanthropic capital. Do the institutions exist to deploy it? And how much might find its way to climate and energy work?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Jane Flegal. 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.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US.

And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man.

Now consider crypto. A few years ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best. And then the crypto industry decided it was done being ignored and attacked. It built a war chest and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024, representing nearly half of all corporate political spending that cycle.

As a result, crypto went from regulatory target to political kingmaker in a single election cycle.

Clean energy has been a legitimate economic force for over a decade and still gets pushed around Washington. Why? How does an industry that's winning on economics keep losing in politics?

This week, we're live from the Prelude Climate Summit, a gathering of the top investors and companies in climate tech.

Stephen Lacey is joined by Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of Ripple, who helped engineer crypto's political transformation. He is now deploying that same playbook in service of climate. He’s also joined by Mike Brune, the longest-serving executive director in the Sierra Club's history, who stepped away in 2021 to co-found the Clean Break Fund with Chris — a new climate investment and political initiative.

We get into bare knuckle politics, lessons from the crypto industry, when and how we should talk about climate in politics, and the way AI is influencing the conversation. 

Open Circuit is 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.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.