Open Circuit14 Mar 2025

Does residential solar have a bad product?

The residential solar industry is facing its most challenging period in years. High interest rates, sweeping policy change, and stubbornly high customer acquisition costs are all causing a contraction after years of rapid growth. In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine this market transition. We’ll look at how the industry may emerge from the current downturn — through cost reduction, community-driven models, and evolving beyond a “bad product” to something that provides real grid services. We’ll also talk about troubles at Sunnova, and what it means for the company’s $3 billion DOE loan guarantee. Plus, as data centers get creative about sourcing power, a novel solution: off-grid solar microgrids that could bypass grid constraints entirely. Recent analysis shows hybrid solar-gas systems could deliver power at costs competitive with conventional options. Is this an answer to the AI power crunch? Sign up for our merch sweepstakes here. And sign up for our live episode on April 16 here. Open Circuit is supported by Kraken, the only proven, AI-powered operating system for utilities. Learn how Kraken helps unlock excellent customer experiences, increased innovation and reduced operational costs at kraken.tech. Open Circuit is brought to you by On.Energy. As one of the fastest-growing battery storage IPPs, On.Energy delivers turnkey resiliency solutions for utilities and enterprise customers. Whether you’re managing data centers or local grids, we help bring storage to your fleet. Learn more at on.energy. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(71)

The new reality for data centers: no easy answers

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 tr...

2 Jul 34min

How APS dove head-first into AI [partner content]

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, out...

30 Jun 20min

Is commercial fusion finally near?

For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public's attenti...

26 Jun 59min

SpaceX’s IPO is an energy story

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 ...

18 Jun 41min

America’s electricity rage is here

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 c...

12 Jun 49min

The biggest utility merger in US history?

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 e...

5 Jun 1h 1min

The climate messaging war returns. Does it matter if we can’t build?

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 th...

29 Mai 1h 7min

Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate

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 ele...

22 Mai 46min