Interchange Recharged

Copper is moving from background commodity to frontline constraint. Demand is rising fast, high-grade deposits are getting harder to find, and the lead times for bringing new supply online remain brutally long. That matters not just for renewables and electrification, but for the basic energy resilience of modern life: the wires that keep lights on, water running, refrigeration working, and data centres scaling all depend on a meta...

Wind remains fundamentally healthy: electricity demand is rising, decarbonised power is still needed, and both Europe and the US continue to pull new projects forward, albeit for different reasons. But the industry’s center of gravity is shifting. The conversation is no longer just about building faster or installing more megawatts. As turbines get larger, OEM competition broadens, and project economics tighten, the consequen...

As AI systems scale, the infrastructure challenge is no longer just about chips, models, and software performance. It is increasingly about the physical systems that allow computation to happen at all: power delivery, cooling, water access, and the speed at which new capacity can be brought online. Power conversion is becoming a much more important design question. As racks move from conventional power densities toward megawatt-sca...

A year ago the data centre conversation was about scale. Increasingly it is about what happens when the announcements meet the physical grid. New capacity is being announced at roughly 435 megawatts a month, enough to power a city of 400,000 people, but two-thirds of that committed load tends to disappear the moment utilities ask for a financial commitment behind it. AI training facilities create load profiles that drop 30% in five...

The energy transition conversation focuses on what connects to the grid. Far less attention goes to whether anyone is coordinating what those assets do once connected. AI training runs swing hundreds of megawatts in seconds as GPUs checkpoint and restart a profile that looks like a generator tripping offline. At distribution level, millions of inverter-based resources create localised variability that overwhelms individual circuits...

As coal and gas plants retire, the energy transition conversation focuses on replacing their generation capacity. What gets far less attention is the loss of the physical properties those machines provided for free: inertia that stabilises frequency, fault current that supports voltage during disturbances, and reactive power that regulates voltage across the network. These services come from the physics of enormous spinning rotors ...

Utilities are under pressure to deliver generation that is dispatchable, affordable, and clean enough to satisfy increasingly stringent environmental rules, notoriously hard to do in one asset. As renewables grow, the gas turbines and engines that have historically filled the gap come with a NOx problem, a CO2 problem, or both. Hydrogen offers a path through, but the supply isn't there yet. So what do you build today?

Host Bridget v...

Empty gigawatt factories, product recalls, participation rates that never materialised, and a policy environment that has now stripped the green premium entirely. The electrolyzer industry has had a brutal few years and most of the companies that raised hundreds of millions on the back of the hydrogen hype cycle are now sitting with fixed costs they cannot sustain and field deployments they are not proud of. 

Host Bridget van D...

Millions of enrolled devices, 60 utilities, and the participation rate gap that's been embarrassing the US market for a decade.

 US residential virtual power plants have been a promising idea that's consistently underdelivered — participation rates below 5%, fragmented apps, siloed programmes, and utilities that have simply never had to compete for a customer's attention. Meanwhile, Octopus Energy has built the world's la...

Why nuclear has never been project financed and how that might finally be about to change.

Every nuclear plant ever built has ultimately been backstopped by taxpayers or ratepayers. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because nobody has ever cracked the construction cost and schedule problem well enough to convince a bank to finance it without government support. Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Jake Jurewicz, Co-founder an...

What two decades of flat demand means for a grid now expected to double in size

The US went from essentially zero load growth for twenty years to 3% national growth almost overnight. The supply chains, permitting pipelines, engineering workforce and regulatory processes were all calibrated for a different world. Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Tom Falcone, President of the Large Public Power Council, representing the 30 largest pub...

Carbon capture and storage has long been framed as a clean technology that’s forever five years away. Bridget van Dorsten speaks with Tim Vail, CEO of ION Clean Energy, to explore why a surge in AI data-centre demand is reshaping the market for decarbonised gas – and how viable a solution it really is.

Tim argues we’ve entered a buyer-led era for carbon capture, driven by hyperscalers like Amazon, Google and Micros...

After more than a decade of flat demand, the US power sector is now facing explosive growth, arriving faster than grids, generation, and transmission can be built. In this episode, Interim host of Interchange Recharged Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Chris Seiple, Vice Chairman of Power & Renewables at Wood Mackenzie, to unpack one of the defining challenges facing the modern energy system: how utilities, developers, and polic...

US data centre announcements are averaging 435MW a month, and there’s around 175GW of large-load capacity already committed or under construction. AI hyperscalers are looking for innovative ways to meet their energy demands. It’s one of the biggest infrastructure challenges in energy right now: how to deliver reliable, fast power without derailing climate and decarbonisation goals. Joining interim host Bridget van Dorst...

AI is changing the energy system faster than almost anything we’ve seen in decades. Interim host, engineer and energy analyst Bridget Van Dorsten is joined by Ed Crooks, host of Energy Gang and Vice-chair of the Americas at Wood Mackenzie, for a wide-ranging conversation about what’s really driving energy decisions in 2026. From data centres and “speed to power” to energy affordability and US energy dominanc...

At the start of the year things were looking uncertain for nascent renewables like hydrogen and geothermal. With policy support from the previous US administration they had boomed with the IRA, then came July 2025 and the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which tore up tax credits and removed incentives for those renewable technologies. As we approach the end of the year, has anything changed for the better? How ...

Utility-scale clean energy projects in development are still facing connection queues and regulatory barriers. RE+ may be done for 2025, but the debate is still going. Host Sylvia Leyva Martinez, Research Director at Wood Mackenzie, sits down with three leaders who are driving progress from different corners of the energy transition, from utility-scale project development to digital grid optimisation and solar system reliability.&n...

Electrification is surging, AI data centres are multiplying, and volatility is rising on both sides of the meter. Can storage step in as the flexible backbone the US grid now needs? 

Host Sylvia Leyva Martinez is joined by Joanna Martin Ziegenfuss, General Manager for Strategic Market Development (North America), and Ruchira Shah, General Manager of Software Product Management at Wärtsilä Energy Storage. Together they unpack ho...

This special wrap-up episode of Interchange Recharged takes listeners on a fast tour of the entire carbon capture value chain, from industrial emitters and LNG developers to UK transport and storage pioneers. Host Sylvia Leyva Martinez, Research Director at Wood Mackenzie, brings together three leaders shaping how CCUS moves from theory to reality.

First, James Lopez, Subsurface CO₂ Storage Advisor at CEMEX, explains why c...