The POWER Podcast

The POWER Podcast

The POWER Podcast provides listeners with insight into the latest news and technology that is poised to affect the power industry. POWER’s Executive Editor Aaron Larson conducts interviews with leading industry experts and gets updates from insiders at power-related conferences and events held around the world.

Episodes

192. Grid Enhancing Technologies Do Exactly What They Say

June 2, 2025 • 43 mins
The world’s electricity grids are facing unprecedented strain as demand surges from electrification, data centers, and renewable energy integration, while aging infrastructure struggles to keep pace. Traditional approaches to grid expansion—building new transmission lines and substations—face mounting challenges including sometimes decade-long permitting processes, escalating costs that can reach billions per project, and growing p...
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191. Modular Geothermal Power: Gradient’s Scalable Solution for Oil and Gas Sites

May 20, 2025 • 22 mins
As the world transitions toward renewable energy sources, geothermal power has emerged as one of the most promising, yet underutilized, options in the clean energy portfolio. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal offers consistent baseload power generation capacity without intermittency challenges, making it an increasingly attractive component in the renewable energy mix. The geothermal sector has shown increasing potential in recent ...
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190. What Trump’s First 100 Days Have Meant to the Power Industry

April 30, 2025 • 38 mins
U.S. President Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second time on Jan. 20, 2025. That means April 30 marks his 100th day back in office. A lot has happened during that relatively short period of time. The Trump administration has implemented sweeping changes to U.S. energy policy, primarily focused on promoting fossil fuels while curtailing renewable energy development. The administration declared a “national energy emergen...
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189. Optimizing Supply Chain Processes to Ensure a Reliable Electric Power System

April 24, 2025 • 19 mins
The power industry supply chain is facing unprecedented strain as utilities race to upgrade aging infrastructure against a backdrop of lengthening lead times and increasing project complexity. This supply chain gridlock arrives precisely when utilities face mounting pressure to modernize systems. As the industry confronts this growing crisis, innovations in procurement, manufacturing, and strategic planning are essential. “Utilitie...
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188. DOE’s Loan Programs Office Offers Game-Changing Possibilities

April 10, 2025 • 25 mins
As the presidential inauguration loomed on the horizon in January this year, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Loan Programs Office (LPO) published a “year-in-review” article, highlighting accomplishments from 2024 and looking ahead to the future. It noted that the previous four years had been the most productive in the LPO’s history. “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Office has announced 53 deals totaling approxima...
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187. TVA’s Clinch River Nuclear Power Project: Where Things Stand Today

April 1, 2025 • 23 mins
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has for many years been evaluating emerging nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors, as part of technology innovation efforts aimed at developing the energy system of the future. TVA—the largest public power provider in the U.S., serving more than 10 million people in parts of seven states—currently operates seven reactors at three nuclear power plants: Browns Ferry, Sequoyah, and...
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186. How Virtual Power Plants Enhance Grid Operations and Resilience

March 18, 2025 • 27 mins
A virtual power plant (VPP) is a network of decentralized, small- to medium-scale power generating units, flexible power consumers, and storage systems that are aggregated and operated as a single entity through sophisticated software and control systems. Unlike a traditional power plant that exists in a single physical location, a VPP is distributed across multiple locations but functions as a unified resource. VPPs are important ...
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185. AI-Powered Energy Forecasting: How Accurate Predictions Could Save Your Power Company

March 11, 2025 • 29 mins
Net-demand energy forecasts are critical for competitive market participants, such as in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and similar markets, for several key reasons. For example, accurate forecasting helps predict when supply-demand imbalances will create price spikes or crashes, allowing traders and generators to optimize their bidding strategies. It’s also important for asset optimization. Power generators need...
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184. Nuclear Power Renaissance Underway in West Texas

March 3, 2025 • 35 mins
When you think of innovative advancements in nuclear power technology, places like the Idaho National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology probably come to mind. But today, some very exciting nuclear power development work is being done in West Texas, specifically, at Abilene Christian University (ACU). That’s where Natura Resources is working to construct a molten salt–cooled, liquid-fueled reactor (MSR). “We a...
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183. Geothermal Energy Storage: The Clean Power Solution You Haven’t Heard Of

February 23, 2025 • 22 mins
Geothermal energy has been utilized by humans for millennia. While the first-ever use may be a mystery, we do know the Romans tapped into it in the first century for hot baths at Aquae Sulis (modern-day Bath, England). Since then, many other people and cultures have found ways to use the Earth’s underground heat to their benefit. Geothermal resources were used for district heating in France as far back as 1332. In 1904, Larderello,...
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182. Space-Based Solar Power: The Future of 24/7 Clean Energy Generation

February 17, 2025 • 43 mins
Imagine a field of solar panels floating silently in the endless day of Earth’s orbit. Unlike their terrestrial cousins, this space-based solar array never faces nighttime, clouds, or atmospheric interference. Instead, they bathe in constant, intense sunlight, converting this endless stream of energy into electricity with remarkable efficiency. But the true innovation lies in how this power is transmitted to power grids on Earth. T...
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181. A New Paradigm for Power Grid Operation

February 9, 2025 • 41 mins
Power grids operate like an intricate ballet of energy generation and consumption that must remain perfectly balanced at all times. The grid maintains a steady frequency (60 Hz in North America and 50 Hz in many other regions) by matching power generation to demand in real-time. Traditional power plants with large rotating turbines and generators play a crucial role in this balance through their mechanical inertia—the natural tende...
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180. Data Centers Consume 3% of Energy in Europe: Understand Geographic Hotspots and How AI Is Reshaping Demand

January 30, 2025 • 30 mins
The rapid rise of data centers has put many power industry demand forecasters on edge. Some predict the power-hungry nature of the facilities will quickly create problems for utilities and the grid. ICIS, a data analytics provider, calculates that in 2024, demand from data centers in Europe accounted for 96 TWh, or 3.1% of total power demand. “Now, you could say it’s not a lot—3%—it’s just a marginal size, but I’m going to spice i...
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179. District Energy Systems: The Invisible Giant of Urban Efficiency

January 21, 2025 • 51 mins
District energy systems employ a centralized facility to supply heating, cooling, and sometimes electricity for multiple buildings in an area through a largely underground, mostly unseen network of pipes. When district energy systems are utilized, individual buildings do not need their own boilers, chillers, and cooling towers. This offers a number of benefits to building owners and tenants. Among them are: • Energy Efficiency. Cen...
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178. Why LVOE May Be a Better Decision-Making Tool Than LCOE for Power Companies

December 18, 2024 • 33 mins
Most POWER readers are probably familiar with levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and levelized value of energy (LVOE) as metrics used to help evaluate potential power plant investment options. LCOE measures the average net present cost of electricity generation over a facility’s lifetime. It includes capital costs, fuel costs, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, financing costs, expected capacity factor, and project lifetime. Mean...
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177. How Nuclear Power Could Help Decarbonize Industrial Steam Needs

December 11, 2024 • 32 mins
Steam is used for a wide variety of critical processes across many industrial sectors. For example, pulp and paper facilities use steam to power paper machines, dry paper and wood products, and provide heat for chemical recovery processes. Steam is used by metal and mining companies, as well as in the food and beverage industry, petroleum refining, pharmaceutical manufacturing, textile production, and many other industrial processe...
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176. Hydrogen Use Cases for the Power Industry

December 3, 2024 • 31 mins
Hydrogen is becoming increasingly important to the electric power generation industry for several reasons. One is that hydrogen offers a promising pathway to decarbonize the power sector. When used in fuel cells or burned for electricity generation, hydrogen produces only water vapor as a byproduct, making it a zero-emission energy source. This is crucial for meeting global climate change mitigation goals and reducing greenhouse ga...
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175. Communication Is Key to Successful Power Projects

November 20, 2024 • 20 mins
Power plant construction and retrofit projects come in all shapes and sizes, but they all generally have at least one thing in common: complexity. There are usually a lot of moving pieces that must be managed. This can include sourcing the right materials and components, getting equipment delivered to the site at the right time, finding qualified contractors, and overseeing handoffs between working groups. Getting a job done on tim...
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174. Kingston Coal Ash Spill: Cleanup Workers Were the Unfortunate Losers

November 4, 2024 • 33 mins
On Dec. 22, 2008, a major dike failure occurred on the north slopes of the ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) Kingston Fossil Plant. The failure resulted in the release of approximately 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilling onto adjacent land and into the Emory River. The Kingston spill is considered one of the most significant and costly events in TVA history. In a project completion fact sheet issued join...
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173. Why Data Center Developers Should Think ‘Power First’

October 29, 2024 • 42 mins
You don’t need me to tell you how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting the power grid; you can just ask AI. Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic, told POWER, “AI training and inference are driving unprecedented demand for data center capacity, particularly due to large language models and other compute-intensive AI workloads.” It also said, “AI servers, especially those with multiple GPUs [graphics processing units], r...
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