Open Circuit

Not long ago, we were asking if AI would save the climate. Now we’re asking if it will wreck it.

The truth is somewhere in between. But it’s easy to see why sentiment swung so radically.

When the AI race kicked off, we were promised rapid breakthroughs in materials, a business model revolution, and a radically more intelligent energy economy. But many people feel like we got hulking gas plants, higher electricity prices, and broken emissions promises instead.

Behind the scenes, AI is working its way into every corner of the clean energy industry, across forecasting, basic research, product design, and resource dispatch. And researchers continue to advance these tools for the benefit of clean solutions.

So what’s the real story? Is AI still a positive force for the climate?

This week, Priya Donti joins the show to tackle this question. Priya is an AI researcher, MIT professor, and co-founder of the non-profit Climate Change AI. In 2019, she co-wrote a paper with a group of leading AI researchers on how the technology can be used for climate — and explicitly warned not to treat it as a silver bullet.

Priya talks about where AI is delivering, why claims got so inflated, the limits of general purpose models, and how she thinks about risk.

Open Circuit is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Giving Green. Giving Green researches the climate nonprofits best positioned for the next big climate win, and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund to them. Make your first gift before 2027, and it’s matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Circuit or select Open Circuit at checkout.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. Everyday Electric simplifies savings at home, helping support a more reliable, affordable grid. Operating the country’s largest residential VPP, it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products. Learn more at everydayelectric.com.

It’s really hard to build infrastructure in America. And it’s particularly hard for clean energy, which is overwhelmingly stalled by outdated and onerous permitting.

But we have never been able to get to the root of the problem. And that’s why a new bipartisan federal permitting bill is such a big deal.

The bill sets hard deadlines for environmental reviews, limits lawsuits, and makes it harder for a president to block permitting processes. It also gives federal regulators new authority to approve transmission and open up markets to distributed resources. And it puts the cost of grid upgrades squarely on large data centers.

For builders in clean energy, it's a deal they've been dreaming about for years. For many green groups, it's a deal with the devil that will overwhelmingly benefit fossil fuels. Why is there such a deep split?

This week, Jane Flegal joins the show to talk about how permitting reform is taking shape. We’ll explore the details, the debates, and the trade-offs.

Then, we’ll revisit President Trump’s ratepayer protection plan. Tech companies and utilities signed onto the White House's pledge with great fanfare, but critics say it hasn’t worked at all. Can the permitting bill bring some needed accountability to the plan?

Open Circuit is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Giving Green. Giving Green researches the climate nonprofits best positioned for the next big climate win, and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund to them. Make your first gift before 2027, and it’s matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Circuit or select Open Circuit at checkout.

Open Circuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. Everyday Electric simplifies savings at home, helping support a more reliable, affordable grid. Operating the country’s largest residential VPP, it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products. Learn more at everydayelectric.com.

Across America, people are screaming “no” — no to data centers, and no to the energy projects that serve them. So what gets people to a “yes”? Perhaps an enthusiastic yes?

Every utility and tech company is scrambling to answer that question. And so far, they haven’t been able to find one.

Our guest this week, Sparkfund CEO Pier LaFarge, has thought a lot about this problem. And he’s trying to prove that you can get local buy-in through better energy development models.

First, we’ll talk about the state of grid utilization. At a moment when there's a deep fear of overbuilding and anger over rising electricity rates, the idea of getting more out of our existing infrastructure is taking off. Pier argues that utilization is the first step toward restoring trust in growth of the grid.

Then we’ll talk about Sparkfund’s partnership with Xcel, backed by Google, to deploy distributed batteries around Minnesota. While only a small part of the answer, Pier sees it as a way to create local buy-in to data center infrastructure.

We’ll end with a deeper look at what’s driving the backlash. Pier shares a playbook for local abundance that he developed with local leaders in Alabama. When promises of jobs and taxes stop working, what comes next?

Credits: Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Join Latitude Media on October 14-15 in Austin for Flex Summit 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the AI demand economy. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by New Mexico Women Lead, an organization dedicated to empowering women, elevating communities, and leading New Mexico forward. Explore how New Mexico is advancing energy production, research, and innovation at the state’s official energy data platform, detectnm.com.

The biggest story in Washington is President Trump's rejection of AI safety regulation. But the White House is waging an equally consequential regulatory battle against carbon regulations.

This month, the EPA finally rolled back the Biden-era carbon rule for power plants, arguing that the agency does not have the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases. It's setting the stage to block any future administration from writing new rules.

At the same time, the Trump Administration is forcing old coal plants to stay open under a Depression era wartime statute. But a federal court told the Energy Department’s efforts to keep a Michigan coal plant open was heavy handed and legally unfounded.

This week, we’ll revisit Trump’s efforts to save the coal industry. Will any of these efforts change the trajectory of the power sector? Or are they just symbolic?

Then, we’ll look at some new polling from Heatmap and Embold Research on what messaging moves Americans on climate and clean energy. Turns out, almost no one likes the word “crisis.”

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

Join Latitude Media on October 14-15 in Austin for Flex Summit 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on distributed capacity, grid-edge flexibility, and the AI demand economy. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

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.

Open Circuit is brought to you by New Mexico Women Lead, an organization dedicated to empowering women, elevating communities, and leading New Mexico forward. Explore how New Mexico is advancing energy production, research, and innovation at the state’s official energy data platform, detectnm.com.

Data centers are known for their hulking exteriors, rows of blinking servers, and massive cooling equipment. But there’s an entire ecosystem no one gets to see: the electrical architecture that sits between the power source and the GPUs.

And as data centers integrate more battery storage, there’s little consensus on what that electrical architecture should look like.

Batteries used to have one job inside a data center: keep servers on until backup generators kicked on. But today, they're being used to smooth out volatile loads, support onsite generation, and buffer the grid. And that shapes the power system around it.

In this episode, produced in partnership with Shoals Technologies, Stephen Lacey talks with Kishan Ponnadurai and Cayman Berg about the expanding role of batteries inside AI campuses, the shift from AC to higher-voltage DC, and navigating a market that is constantly changing.

This episode was produced in partnership with Shoals Technologies Group. For 30 years, Shoals has designed and manufactured the electrical backbone of critical energy infrastructure. Learn how Shoals' solutions are helping power data centers.