Open Circuit
The energy transition, decoded. Every week, three industry veterans explore the tech breakthroughs, market shakeups, and policy shifts that are driving the biggest industrial transformation in history.
Episodes
July 7, 2025 • 66 mins
When 47 million people across Spain and Portugal lost power for nearly half a day in April, the finger-pointing began immediately. "Too much renewable energy," declared the critics. Even U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright piled on: "When you hitch your wagon to the weather, it's a risky endeavor.”
There's just one problem with this blame-renewables narrative: it's completely wrong.
In this crossover episode with the Redefining En...
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June 27, 2025 • 68 mins
The climate tech investment landscape is undergoing a major recalibration. After a period of rapid growth and inflated valuations, investors and startups are now navigating a complex environment shaped by tariffs, shifting incentives, and economic clouds.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine the latest data and investor sentiment trends with Kim Zou, CEO of Sightline Climate.
Sightline’s data shows climate tech investment...
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June 20, 2025 • 86 mins
The grid faces a mismatch: the system is getting smarter, but we're not getting smarter about how we use it.
Utilities have installed 130 million advanced meters. Millions of homes have smart thermostats, water heaters, and batteries that could work in concert. Data centers could unlock over 100 gigawatts of new capacity without major infrastructure expansion.
Yet most smart devices aren't coordinated, advanced meter data sits un...
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June 17, 2025 • 55 mins
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 ...
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June 6, 2025 • 40 mins
This week, we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint featuring Drew Baglino, a former SVP at Tesla. Subscribe here.
In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages.
Customers across multiple markets were already excited about ...
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May 30, 2025 • 77 mins
America is facing an uncomfortable question: do we know how to build anymore?
House Republicans just passed a reconciliation bill that would repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act while adding up to $5 trillion to the national debt. The legislation doesn't just gut clean energy incentives — it hinders the most realistic path to meeting exploding electricity demand.
After leveraging hundreds of billions in clean energy invest...
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May 23, 2025 • 63 mins
Texans take pride in their competitive electricity market, a system designed to let the cheapest resources win. And that market is increasingly choosing clean energy, with wind, solar, and batteries dominating new generation. Nearly 40 gigawatts have been added in just four years, equivalent to the capacity of a mid-sized European country.
This market-driven boom has unequivocally lowered costs and improved reliability. But now, i...
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May 16, 2025 • 44 mins
When Elon Musk canceled Tesla's affordable Model 2 last year to go all-in on Robotaxis, he may have made the most consequential decision in the company's history. As Chinese automaker BYD captures global market share with lower-cost vehicles and superior charging technology, has Tesla prematurely surrendered the market it created?
"In his mind, I think he ushered in the EV revolution for the world, and that problem is solved, and ...
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May 9, 2025 • 54 mins
The Department of Energy is losing talent at an alarming rate. Described by insiders as a "hostile takeover," the agency's transformation under Trump has pushed out thousands of scientists, engineers, and policy experts. What's left behind are gutted offices, stalled infrastructure projects, and billions in funding commitments thrown into question.
This isn't a typical government transition — it's a systematic dismantling of Amer...
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May 7, 2025 • 21 mins
Alan Cooper and Ricardo de Azevedo have been business partners since they were teenagers. Today, they're tackling one of the most critical infrastructure challenges of the AI revolution: how to manage the massive, volatile power demands of modern data centers.
Founded in 2016, On.Energy has grown into an integrated energy storage company that designs, builds, and manages battery systems for customers across six countries. The comp...
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May 2, 2025 • 63 mins
This week, we’re asking the central question of the energy transition: How fast are we going?
Clean energy is bringing in $2 trillion of investment annually. Wind and solar now account for the vast majority of new electricity capacity globally. And we may already be at “peak trade” of fossil fuels.
And yet, when we look at the share of renewables in final energy consumption, they’re increasing only incrementally around the world....
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April 25, 2025 • 56 mins
When tech giants build massive data centers to power AI, they're often negotiating confidential deals with utilities that few people will ever see — but that everyone might pay for.
Harvard legal expert Ari Peskoe has uncovered a pattern across 40 state regulatory proceedings: special contracts between utilities and data centers being approved with minimal public scrutiny, potentially shifting billions in infrastructure costs to ...
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April 18, 2025 • 60 mins
The business world is facing a tsunami of uncertainty. Across nearly every industry, investment is seizing up amid unpredictable tariffs and contradictory domestic policies.
In this week’s episode of Open Circuit, we examine how this compounding uncertainty is impacting clean energy during a critical moment of spiking demand and rising costs.
We dissect the signals from the market, revealing that despite the chaos, certain secto...
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April 10, 2025 • 55 mins
President Trump promised energy dominance. But his sweeping new tariffs are delivering the opposite – creating unprecedented uncertainty for every sector of the energy economy.
Faced with a market in revolt, the president blinked. Just hours after his tariffs went into effect, he put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, keeping a 10% baseline tariff and a 125% tariff on China.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine the con...
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April 4, 2025 • 62 mins
It's fair to say the last decade was the climate era of the energy transition. From the Paris Agreement to corporate net zero pledges, reducing carbon emissions dominated the global framework for deploying clean energy. But something profound is shifting.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we explore how a new security-driven paradigm is replacing climate as the primary driver of energy investments. As supply chains fractured during...
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March 21, 2025 • 55 mins
Five years ago, as lockdowns swept the globe, we witnessed an energy shock that destroyed oil demand, upended electricity demand patterns, and dropped global emissions by staggering levels overnight.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we revisit predictions made during those early uncertain days and examine three major paradoxes that emerged.
First, how staying home rewired our physical and digital lives in ways that created surp...
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March 14, 2025 • 51 mins
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 beyo...
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March 7, 2025 • 70 mins
Major U.S. financial institutions are backing away from climate commitments – all six largest American banks have exited the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, BlackRock has quit comparable initiatives, and the Federal Reserve has withdrawn from climate risk assessment networks. Is this merely rebranding for the Trump era, or a fundamental shift in how finance approaches sustainable investments?
In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine ...
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February 28, 2025 • 66 mins
Elon Musk built Tesla with help from government loans and carbon credits. Today, he's swinging a chainsaw at the very agencies that launched his empire — while directly undermining President Trump's "energy dominance" agenda.
In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine the impact of the Department of Government Efficiency's indiscriminate cuts. When these cuts hit nuclear security teams and grid operators at the Bonneville Power Ad...
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February 21, 2025 • 63 mins
The tech industry is pouring $1.3 trillion into data centers globally over the next five years. While efficiency breakthroughs like the launch of DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model might reduce computing needs, the sheer scale of AI deployment means we're still facing historic demand growth. Data center electricity consumption doubled under Biden — and it's projected to triple by 2030.
In this episode, we examine how utilities, tech com...
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