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.

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.

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.

As data centers, factories, and electrification push growth to unprecedented heights, customers are looking for greater control over their energy use. But the traditional one-size-fits-all approach falls short for customers wanting to know which energy choices will benefit them most, and how those choices will impact their bills. In this third episode of Bidgely’s four-part series, Stephen Lacey talks with Kirby Brinlee, director of customer experience at Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Abhay Gupta, CEO at Bidgely. Through their partnership with Bidgely, OG&E learned something surprising about their variable peak pricing program: Customers were shifting their energy use to the wrong hours. Personalized messages and recommendations proved a win-win for the utility and their customers. Flexibility programs became more reliable resources for grid planners, and customers learned how to keep their costs low.  Kirby and Abhay discuss how load growth is reshaping the utility-customer relationship, why personalization matters, and how AI is helping OG&E give more power to customers. OG&E’s experience reveals how AI can unlock more sophisticated demand flexibility by finding the right customers, accurately measuring energy usage, and building stronger customer relationships.  This is a partner episode, brought to you by ⁠Bidgely⁠. This is the third episode in our series with Bidgely exploring how utilities are deploying purpose-built AI to solve their most pressing challenges. Tune in to the other episodes: How APS dove headfirst into AI Turning customer data into grid intelligence