Open Circuit

Maeve Alsup, a senior reporter at Latitude Media who covered Lake County, Indiana, politics, utilities, and data center fights. She discusses why utilities are at the center of a bipartisan revolt. Short scenes cover community distrust, rising bills, opaque utility deals, local moratoriums, and how developers and officials fuel the backlash.

Global oil shortages and rationing spread from Asia to the West, raising questions about supply shocks and energy addiction. The conversation explores which clean technologies could accelerate, China’s surge in cleantech exports, and shifting geopolitical power from electrification. It also unpacks the dramatic collapse of a hyped data-center developer and the management, political, and financial failures behind it.

Rich Deming, founder of CERTscore and CEO of East Energy Renewables, is a veteran developer of bioenergy, solar, and storage projects. He explains how deals, not grids, often sink clean energy projects. He describes tools that structure fragmented data, surface hidden diligence risks early, and speed financing. He shares real-world deal landmines and how clearer visibility can unlock capital.

A live discussion about how rapid AI buildout is straining the electric grid and triggering community pushback. They call out shallow engineering fixes like bolting jet engines to trailers and off-grid data centers. Conversation contrasts long-term moonshots with near-term fixes like transmission and storage. Audience-suggested creative solutions are pitched and assessed.

Big tech is underwriting gigawatts of new natural gas capacity to serve massive AI campuses. The conversation unpacks financing hacks, turbine bottlenecks, and why gas looked like the fastest route to deliverability. They explore risks of overbuilding, rate impacts on consumers, and how virtual power plants and edge tech could change future gas needs.

Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and author on aligning data center buildouts with grid policy, discusses using hyperscaler demand to fund coordinated grid upgrades. She explains a grid infrastructure fund, why moratoria miss leverage opportunities, and how federal and state reforms could align private capital with long-term planning.

Hannah Bascom, Chief Growth Officer at Uplight, coordinates programs that turn customer devices into grid flexibility. She explains the “demand stack” that layers efficiency, dynamic pricing, and demand response. The conversation covers Evergy’s case study, AI forecasting for reliable dispatch, one-click device enrollment, and how aggregated customer assets can defer costly grid upgrades.

Brian Janis, co-founder and CCO at Cloverleaf Infrastructure, helps source powered land and unlock grid capacity for digital infrastructure. He dives into the Brattle report claiming better utilization could free ~100 GW. Short takes on how hyperscalers reshaped planning, local impacts of data center siting, the tension between using existing capacity versus building more, and the limits of distributed resources.

Michael Sembalist, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan and author of the Eye on the Market energy reports, offers a data-driven take on the biggest fights in energy. He breaks down debates on data centers and grid capacity. He discusses oil shock fallout, LNG and emerging markets choices. He also weighs costs and promise of CCUS, green hydrogen, SMRs and industrial electrification.

Julia Hamm, a coalition-builder in the electricity sector, and Jigar Shah, clean-energy entrepreneur and financer, discuss how Iran-related oil and LNG shocks ripple to electricity prices and grid security. They explore whether crises push utilities toward more coal or accelerate distributed solar, batteries, and demand-response. The conversation highlights BYO distributed capacity models, regulatory hurdles, and why large customers matter for grid flexibility.