2025 will undoubtedly be remembered as a year of seismic upheaval for the energy sector. Facing corrosive political headwinds and ongoing transmission infrastructure barriers, nearly 2,000 power projects amounting to 266 gigawatts of mostly clean new generation capacity were cancelled this year.
At the same time, though, the need for new capacity just keeps growing. One estimate of U.S. load growth to 2030 quadrupled, as AI’s unquenchable thirst for energy intensifies. In part as a result, there’s a growing demand for fossil gas as well as clean baseload options — and a spike of consolidation in the power sector.
Through this year, Catalyst with host Shayle Kann has been capturing conversations with the energy and cleantech leaders navigating these shifts.
As 2025 comes to a close, we’ve rounded up a sampler of the year’s best episodes — from record-breaking capacity auctions and advances in grid flexibility to vertically integrated residential batteries — to catch you up on anything you may have overlooked.
Steve Piper on “PJM and the capacity crunch”
PJM, the transmission organization covering 13 states in the Northeast, captured the industry’s attention this summer when its capacity auction broke records with sky-high wholesale power prices. (December’s auction, just last week, hit the legally permitted cap of $333 per megawatt — but with a 6.6 gigawatt shortfall that threatens PJM’s own reliability targets.) The big driver of that tight supply? Data-center driven load growth.
In this episode, Kann speaks to Steve Piper, research director of North American power and renewables at S&P Global, about the remarkable price hike, the bottlenecks hampering new generation and the factors holding back demand response in the auction.
“This is a significant economic event, right? Customers in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Maryland, they’re getting these notices. Their bills are going up by 20 or 30 bucks a month, starting this year as a result of last year’s capacity auction price,” Piper explained. “ This capacity auction that was announced last week was a good 20% higher in round numbers. That doesn’t portend the bill’s going anywhere but even higher.”
Zach Dell on “How Base Power plans to use its fresh $1B”
As energy affordability becomes an increasingly salient voter priority, Texas-headquartered Base Power is pitching its product as a way to mitigate energy prices: vertically-integrated residential backup batteries that can also help stabilize the grid. And investors are taking notice; in October, Base Power closed a $1 billion Series C funding round.
During this interview, CEO and founder Zach Dell delves into Base Power’s vertical integration strategy, their power generation-retailer hybrid model in ERCOT, and the company’s appeal to residential consumers. They also touch on the challenges raised by fluctuating demand in the marketplace, and how Base Power plans to use its new funding.
“Our North Star as a business is to land a battery on the grid faster and cheaper than anyone, and then widen that lead. That will allow us to drop price, drop price, drop price… to the point where it becomes an IQ test,” Dell told Kann. “If you’re not signing up for Base, it’s like you can’t do math, because you’re obviously going to save money. And that puts you in a position where you’re not demand constrained for a very long time.”
Varun Sivaram on the “Mechanics of data center flexibility”
Although data centers have historically prioritized “five-nines” reliability guarantees of near-constant uptime in service agreements with customers, growing constraints on the grid have led to increased incentive to provide flexibility.
So the industry has begun to experiment. For instance, this July, the startup Emerald AI provided the software and Nvidia provided the hardware for an Electric Power Resource Institute’s DCFlex initiative. The program demonstrated that they could reduce load by 25% during peak demand at an Oracle data center in Phoenix, Arizona, while maintaining compute quality. Then in August, Google expanded its own demand response through two new agreements with Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
To make sense of the mechanics behind grid flexibility, Kann spoke to Varun Sivaram, the founder and CEO of Emerald AI. Kann and Sivaram discuss the distinct load profiles of training versus inference, and explore how data centers can pause, slow, or shift workloads to reduce demand. They also consider realistic expectations around flexibility, and the implications of weekly or even daily load shifting.
Despite the many challenges of actually making data center-level flexibility happen, Sivaram struck a positive note: “I personally view data centers as a potential holy grail, if not the silver bullet, to enable a generation mix…that’s far more clean and one that’s far more intermittent.”
And mere weeks after their conversation, the Department of Energy weighed in. Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track the interconnection of large loads that agree to be curtailable (i.e. flexible), as well as colocated facilities that are both curtailable and dispatchable. For more on the enormous challenge of putting these regulations together, don’t miss Kann’s interview with Tyler Norris and Allison Clements.
Anthony Brough on “The gas turbine crunch”
Demand for turbines is growing fast, but costs are climbing as well, with lead times stretching to four years and beyond.
To learn what’s behind the bottleneck, Kann caught up with Anthony Brough, founder and CEO of Dora Partners, a consulting firm focused on the turbine market. Kann and Brough dig into the competing demands on the turbine supply chain, including from the power, oil and gas, and aerospace industries. They explore why lead times have ballooned and consider the factors affecting the market beyond load growth: renewables, storage, affordable gas, and coal retirements.
“About half of the gas turbines that are ordered in the marketplace aren’t even for the electric power utility market — they’re for the oil and gas market,” Brough explained. “ It’s important to look beyond just the power generation or the utility sector when you think about what’s happening in the marketplace.”
Dana Guernsey on “The new wave of DERs”
DERs have evolved dramatically since their beginnings as tools to address grid shortfalls in times of crisis. In 2025, they were deployed frequently across the country, and encompassed everything from EVs and thermostats to sophisticated management systems at paper mills and data centers.
As load growth surges, DERs have the potential to play an even more crucial role in the energy sector. To dig into these dynamics, Kann spoke to Dana Guernsey, co-founder and CEO of Voltus. Their conversation covers the evolving use cases of DERs and VPPs, as well as Voltus’ new “bring your own capacity” model, which allows large loads like data centers to fund regional VPPs. They also touch on the market forces shaping DER adoption, and consider how DERs stack up against conventional power plants in meeting rising demand.
“Even if you could, I don’t think we should solve what’s fundamentally a utilization problem by just adding more steel. I really think it’s critical that we start thinking about the existing resources on this grid already that we should be using,” Guernsey told Kann. “Ten, 20% of the capacity is built for less than 1% of the time. That just doesn’t make sense.”
