Open Circuit3 Okt 2025

Is this moment for distributed energy different?

Distributed energy resources have never looked stronger. Fleets of batteries are now performing like gas plants, virtual power plants are dispatched daily, and hyperscalers are supporting new models to finance capacity around their data centers. But investor-owned utilities? The Edison Electric Institute says they’re planning more than a trillion dollars in new infrastructure over the next decade to support historic load growth — with no mention of DERs or flexibility as solutions. So which world are we living in? The one where DERs become essential infrastructure, or the one where they remain a rounding error for utilities? This week, we examine this critical moment for distributed resources. Tim Hade, a co-founder of Brightfield Infrastructure and former COO of Scale Microgrids, joins us to talk about the tug-of-war at the heart of the grid transition. We unpack a recent historical overview of DERs from Andy Lubershane, who argues that technical innovation and the desperate rush to meet load growth is turning them from nice-to-have experiments into distributed capacity resources that grid operators can actually count on. We also dig into EEI’s new report on utility planning, and examine why utilities still resist DERs even as customers and data centers push them forward. What are the consequences of ignoring them at this precarious moment when power prices are rising quickly? 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. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(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 Juli 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Maj 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 Maj 46min