Open Circuit

For years, demand-side programs like energy efficiency and demand response were treated as compliance, not real resources. 

Now, that’s changing.

As electricity demand surges, utilities are facing a new reality: they can’t build infrastructure fast enough or affordably enough. So they’re starting to look in a different place for capacity: inside homes and businesses.

In this episode, Stephen Lacey speaks with Hannah Bascom, chief growth officer at Uplight, about the rise of the “demand stack” — a framework for combining efficiency, dynamic pricing, and demand response into a coordinated resource for the grid.

They also explore a new case study from Evergy, developed with the Brattle Group, which shows how integrating demand-side strategies can significantly expand peak reduction through better enrollment, forecasting, and customer engagement.

Hannah traces how the industry evolved from compliance-driven efficiency programs to a world where distributed energy resources can deliver real, planning-grade capacity. And she explains why utilities are starting to take these resources more seriously as pressure on the grid intensifies.

Learn more about how Uplight helps utilities unlock flexibility from distributed energy resources.

We’re entering an electricity supercycle that is reshaping how power gets built, where it gets built, and who controls it.

Across the U.S., developers are scrambling to lock up land with access to electricity. And the century-old grid is being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for. It’s also sparking a new debate about how exactly to modernize the grid.

For all the talk of capacity scarcity, the system sits idle for much of the time. A new report from The Brattle Group suggests that better utilization of the existing system could unlock 100 gigawatts of capacity, while saving ratepayers tens of billions of dollars.

But some are skeptical, saying the focus on utilization and distributed resources isn’t ambitious enough, and doesn’t solve the right problems.

So, do we build our way out of this moment with more steel in the ground? Or do we use what we already have more efficiently and more flexibly?

This week, Brian Janous of Cloverleaf Infrastructure joins the show to unpack the debate over grid utilization vs grid expansion.

Plus, we do a vibes check on the most popular narratives in energy right now — from the revival of coal, to the promise of nuclear, to America’s ability to build.

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

Read our new white paper from Latitude Intelligence analyzing data center tariffs.

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Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026.

Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

Everyone has a strong opinion on energy right now. If you’ve followed energy for a while, none of this is new. There have always been strong opinions — renewables versus fossil fuels, subsidies versus markets, activists versus infrastructure. But the intensity feels different right now.

People are arguing about everything: the speed of the transition, how to fix broken electricity markets, whether renewables raise or lower power prices, whether AI data centers are about to break the grid.

So who’s actually right?

This week, JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest joins the show to weigh in on some of the top fights in energy. Michael is the chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan Asset and Wealth Management. He writes the “Eye on the Market” newsletter, and every year he publishes a deep dive on energy market trends. This year’s report is called “Fighting Words.”

We talk with Michael about the fallout from the war with Iran and why the global economy may absorb it differently than past crises. We also dig into gas markets, electricity prices, data centers, CCS, green hydrogen, and sustainable aviation fuels — and what they all reveal about the reality of today’s energy system.

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

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026.

Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

President Trump’s war with Iran has rattled global energy markets. Oil prices have surged, LNG markets are tightening, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply — has been severely disrupted.

Tankers are stalled, shipping costs are soaring, and energy markets are bracing for one of the largest oil supply disruptions in history.

The result: higher fuel prices, rising electricity costs, and a reminder of how vulnerable modern economies still are to fossil-fuel geopolitics.

This week, we look at the wide-ranging impacts of the shock, from global oil and LNG markets to electricity prices and grid security. We’ll also ask the question: will this accelerate the shift toward clean, distributed energy or just push countries toward more coal? Or both?

That leads us to a big idea that is getting a lot of attention: the “bring your own distributed capacity” model where large electricity customers help unlock grid headroom through demand response, efficiency, batteries, and other distributed resources.

Guest co-host Julia Hamm joins us to talk about how the concept works, why it’s gaining traction among utilities and hyperscalers, and the pathway for distributed capacity to become a real solution to the grid’s growing constraints.

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. 

Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026.

Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

The politics of AI and electricity came to the White House this week.

On Wednesday, the biggest tech companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle — gathered in Washington to sign what the administration is calling a “ratepayer protection pledge.” The promise: data centers will pay for their own power and grid integration costs.

But is anything actually changing? Or is it just political theater?

This week, we’ll look at the politics and intention of the announcement, along with some real-world models emerging for powering the AI economy.

In Minnesota, Google is pulling together a package of renewables, long-duration storage, and distributed batteries for a planned data center. 

In Mississippi, xAI continues to build unpermitted gas engines and explicitly flouting air quality regulations.

And the Energy Department is also backing a grid modernization project that includes gas, nuclear, batteries, hydropower, and transmission upgrades. 

Three models. Three very different bets on what the future of AI power looks like. Which one wins out? And more importantly, who pays?

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. 

Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026.

Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!