Open Circuit17 Jun 2025

AI rewrites the corporate energy playbook

The exponential growth of AI is colliding with the linear reality of building energy infrastructure — forcing a rethink of how tech companies power their ambitions. Is the corporate clean energy playbook becoming obsolete? In this live episode from Transition-AI in Boston, we dive deep into the infrastructure challenges of the AI era. We’re joined by Caroline Golin, who spent eight years building Google's energy strategy before leaving earlier this year. We examine how tech companies moved from a buyer's market with abundant resources to a seller's market with serious capacity constraints. "The vast majority of procurement in this country looks like single-source renewable PPAs, and that's what it's been for years," Golin explained. "That wasn't going to get us to where we needed to go." Then we turn to a financing puzzle. We need to see more than $5 trillion in capex spending on data center infrastructure by 2030 to keep pace with computing demands from AI. But even with many different types of capital trying to solve the infrastructure challenge, they all want completely different things. How do we align them? The just-in-time procurement model that served the hyperscalers for a decade must evolve into global-scale, integrated infrastructure development. Can regulators, utilities, and policymakers keep up? Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. Open Circuit is brought to you by Sungrow, the trusted provider of PV inverters and battery storage. With over 605 GW installed worldwide and a BloombergNEF ranking of “most bankable” in power conversion and energy storage, Sungrow provides solar tech you can count on. Learn more at sungrowpower.com. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.

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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