This year in energy has had the vibes of a dysfunctional family gathering: everyone showed up with big feelings, and no one agreed on the menu.
To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re processing the chaos right at the dinner table. In this holiday special, the team matches classic Thanksgiving guest archetypes with the biggest energy storylines of 2025.
Who is the drunk uncle sucking up all the oxygen in the room? Who is the pragmatic parent holding the family together? And who is the rebellious teenager threatening to upend the status quo?
But first, we serve an appetizer of the week’s biggest news: a new analysis from Grid Strategies shows that projected peak load growth has quadrupled in just two years to 166 GW. And we’ll wrap with leftovers — the unfinished stories we’ll be sharing well into next year.
Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card!
Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.
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Transcript
Stephen Lacey: Oh my God. Look at my beard. Look how white it is.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I got my first white eyebrow hair.
Stephen Lacey: I’ve had a mustache for a year. Then I just grew back in my beard and it’s now almost completely white.
Katherine Hamilton: The advantage of blonde hair is that the white is much less noticeable
Stephen Lacey: From Latitude Media, this is Open Circuit. Now, let’s be honest. This year in energy has had the vibes of a family gathering where everyone shows up with big feelings and no one agrees on the menu. So for Thanksgiving, we’re going to process some of that chaos right at the dinner table. We built a three course holiday episode, a quick appetizer of the week’s news, a main dish we’re calling Thanksgiving table steaks and some leftovers. The unresolved stories we’ll be carrying into next year. A Feast of Hot Takes is coming right up.
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I’m Stephen Lacey, Executive Editor at Latitude Media. The seating chart is the same. As always, at the table with me or Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah. Katherine Hamilton is the Co-founder and chair of 38 North Solutions. How you doing?
Katherine Hamilton: I’m doing great. We’re about to get into my favorite holiday of the year.
Stephen Lacey: You have a big family, so Thanksgiving is quite an event for you.
Katherine Hamilton: Absolutely. It’s chaos and I love it.
Stephen Lacey: Do you do a lot of cooking?
Katherine Hamilton: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all do. All of us pitch in. After this, I’m going to go make some biscuits. I’m really good at the biscuits.
Stephen Lacey: Can I tell you a little secret? A couple of years ago… I do a lot of cooking. My mom does a lot of cooking. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen together. But I got sick of spending the whole day cooking, and so we just started getting it catered. Is that a bad thing?
Katherine Hamilton: No. Do what you got to do. It’s just that I like to cook, and so if I have the time to do it, I will.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, I do like cooking, but full days cooking felt a little much, so I’d rather just sit around the fire and chat.
Jigar Shah: But did Walmart short you 25% of the Thanksgiving basket?
Stephen Lacey: Yes. This is a funny story. Walmart has this Thanksgiving basket every year, and the president came out… actually Walmart came out and said, “The Thanksgiving basket this year is less expensive than last year.” But what they didn’t tell anybody was that they actually took a bunch of items out of the basket.
Jigar Shah is the Co-managing Partner at Multiplier. He’s the former director of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office. Jigar, how do you feel about the DOE’s reorganization? They’re calling your former office, the Loan Programs Office, the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
Jigar Shah: So funny story. I was talking to a friend who still works there and she told me that the reason it got renamed was because Chris Wright accidentally called it the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, get out of here.
Jigar Shah: Even though it was only the 1706 Program that was renamed Energy Dominance. And so it was literally just an episode of Veep. Everyone was like, “Oh, well if he called it that, I guess we’re going to have to call it that.” And so they weren’t prepared, so they didn’t change the social media. They haven’t changed all the other stuff because they didn’t know that this change was coming. And so it was the last minute thing that got done because he called it something different than what it was.
Stephen Lacey: Something tells me that that is how a lot of decisions are getting made in the government right now. All right, we’re going to do things a little differently this week for Thanksgiving week. A bit later in the show, we’re going to talk through some of our choices for the top storylines of the year, but in the form of Thanksgiving guest archetypes. And I promise it’ll make sense when we do it.
But first, let’s bring out the tray of appetizers and take a quick look at what’s happening in the headlines. And I think we have to just start by mentioning COP 30. So the climate talks wrapped up in Brazil with, let’s call it a shrug. Many of the participating countries called the outcome disappointing. The US wasn’t there, of course. No one can agree on whether to identify fossil fuels as a problem. Jigar, have these climate talks reached their expiration date you think?
Jigar Shah: Well, I certainly haven’t gone since 2012, so if that’s any indication. But I actually don’t think this year’s COP was a bad one. I think that two things happened, which I was really impressed with. One was I think they shifted the voluntary carbon market so that countries could issue sovereign carbon credits. And I think you had that big transaction with Deutsche Bank in Honduras and Suriname, which I think is awesome, because that means the money goes directly to the government and not through some third party or whatever else.
And then the other big thing that occurred was everyone had to update their NDCs, which is their ambition. And the ambition was way higher than people expected because a lot of people actually see solar, wind, battery storage and EVs to be so cost-effective that they hired consultants and they know how to get private sector folks to implement it. And a lot of folks are now estimating that those NDCs will drive between $400 billion and $1.2 trillion of new investment into these countries every year to implement the NDCs. And so in some ways, I think that the technology curve has gotten to the point where Paris did its job, that folks view this as a commercial opportunity.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, it’s really interesting because since the US was not represented officially at all, that had two sides to the coin. One is that you did not have US leadership and buy-in, and that is in and of itself an act. But on the other side, it meant that everybody else had to come together and step up. And I think that’s pretty much what happened and I’m glad for that. So I think the US, as we’re saying, is going to be falling behind on things. I think everybody else wants to keep moving ahead and they’ll accommodate the US in some ways. They’ve done some dominance financing projects, programs put into place. But I think as Jigar says, everybody is moving forward and they see the pathway to do so.
Stephen Lacey: I mean, there’s so much nuance to the different types of negotiations here, and I don’t follow each track very closely at all, but I do feel like the COP is just so structurally stuck with these consensus-based talks, they just can’t really deliver. And there are too many veto points. And so I agree with, we talked a few weeks back about Michael Liebreich’s take on the Climate reset and his take was, “We need to break these talks into sector-by-sector deals. Get these practical coalitions together on aviation, on shipping, on steel, cement, methane, et cetera, instead of these one giant agreements that often collapse or slow down.” And I very much agree with that approach. I just think that we absolutely need to rethink here. And going sector-by-sector is one way to do that.
Jigar Shah: Well, where they made a breakthrough this year was on nature-based solutions. And land use has always been a big challenge for many of these countries. So I think that supports your point. I mean, I think if you had a nature-based track and figuring out how you actually put the money in to protect a lot of these rainforests and protect a lot of these undisturbed lands, I think that’s going to be super important going forward.
Stephen Lacey: So a bit of disappointment coming out of COP, but certainly movement in some areas. Let’s go to a story back home. Big development here. Grid Strategies has released its most recent load growth analysis. And if you remember a couple of years ago, Grid Strategies looked at all these load forecasts and showed a period of significant growth. And their new analysis looks at all these load forecasts and finds that we’re going to see 166 gigawatts of projected peak load by 2030 here in the US, up 38 gigawatts from two years ago. So that’s a quadrupling. Katherine, do these load forecasts change your perspective on the urgency of the moment?
Katherine Hamilton: So what’s interesting is I went back because there’s never anything that you can say that it’s never happened before, or at least the trend line. So I went back to see, all right, where else have we overestimated or underestimated electricity demand and load growth? And it’s been from the beginning of time. But right after World War II, the ’50s and ’70s, they overestimated electricity demand. There was a strong post-war electrification, but they did not expect that there would be efficiency standards. There was an assumption that electricity use would grow indefinitely with GDP. And a lot of the early load forecasting relied on trend extrapolation. And so it just was way off. So they expected 7% to 9% annual growth and it was really like 4% to 6%.
And then one of the next portion of time was the 1970s to the 1980s. And that was the biggest forecast miss in US history. And those projections were far too high. And that’s almost where I see us now. And this was in part due to the oil shocks. There was a recession, there was an industrial slowdown. Appliance and building efficiency gains were huge. Electricity prices went up. And then there were federal and state conservation programs. So a lot of this had to do with public policy put into place that prevented load and demand from growing too much. And so as a result of that, what they did was they put into place these modern integrated resource planning processes to try to get utilities, which had been really increasing their debt. They had projects canceled as a result of this over forecast, they needed to do better planning. And over since the ’80s, we’ve had, in the ’90s, underestimation of demand. And that was in part because there was the tech sector that boomed that we were not expecting.
And then in the mid-2000s, there was an overestimation before the Great Recession. And then another overestimation in the 2010s. In the early 2020s, right before this, we can see in Grid Strategies there were projections in 2022 of 24 gigawatts of growth rather than they found 166 gigawatts by 2030. And so we look now as if it were an underestimation, and that’s as a result of unforecast data center growth, manufacturing resurgence, electrification, extreme temperature, having to adjust to that, et cetera. But I actually think, and I think a lot of folks are saying this too, is as we move forward toward 2030, that may actually be seen as an overestimation of where we think we might be going.
And I think part of that will be because we will need to, because of skyrocketing prices, adjust not to IRPs even. I mean IRPs have been a bit of a cudgel too, and they haven’t taken into account any of the demand side. And I think that will adjust over time so that we will be able to forecast much better and plan much better based on being able to look at this whole system of systems rather than just supply and demand. And so I think the forecasting will be mitigated over time. Even though it’s still growing, I also think it won’t go as far as they say.
Stephen Lacey: That’s a really helpful history. Jigar, forecasting is really hard. How accurate do you think these load forecasts are?
Jigar Shah: Oh, not at all accurate, but I mean-
Stephen Lacey: In which direction?
Jigar Shah: Who knows, right? But they’re the best guess that Grid Strategies has and I think they do thoughtful work, and so I think it’s great. But I think the big thing is we are in the middle of a transformation of how we run our utility grids. And you see Texas basically meeting almost all of their load growth, which has been ridiculously impressive, right? They’re expecting to go from 70 gigawatts at peak to 130 gigawatts at peak, right? A full 30% of all data center load growth is expecting to go into Texas. And almost all of it’s been met with solar, wind and battery storage. And so when you think about what we said in the virtual power plant liftoff report that was published in 2023 was we said, “We have the technologies today and the venture capital backed companies to have a full 20% of our peak load in our country,” which is magically 160 gigawatts that can be flexible by 2030.
And if you did that, then rates would go down. Bills would go down by 20% by 2030. So we’ll see if people want bills to go down 20% by 2030 or whether they actually want to do things in the most backward-ass way that they could possibly do it, which is to serve people in real time. Oh, you have load growth. Let me build new generation, upgrade the transmission and upgrade the distribution just for you. That is dumb, but that is what everybody wants to do because that is how their grandfather taught them how to run the grid. And so we’ll see if we decide to move into the 21st century or whether we actually continue to do things exactly the same way we did in the 1980s.
Stephen Lacey: I’m not totally optimistic. Old habits die hard. One thing that stood out to me about these numbers is that for the first time, data centers really are dominating these load projections now. I think they’re 55% of the total. That’s a big shift from the previous forecasts. I also wonder actually, since data centers are a big piece of this and there’s so much uncertainty about the phantom cue, a lot of these data centers are going to shake out the friction in the electricity market, the friction being able to connect these data centers, just the regulatory friction, the long time it takes to build these facilities and connect them to the grid. I think that they’re a moderating factor right now in the current bubble environment around data centers.
Jigar Shah: Well, I mean you also have everyone, and I mean everyone that hates data centers. I mean that’s crazy. It’s not just Bernie and the MAGA people who hate data centers. I mean, The Bulwark Podcast hates data centers. Those are center right people. Pod Save America came out against data centers. I mean that’s the ex-Obama people. The entire magnet is against data centers. And so if you’re a governor that just got elected in Virginia and New Jersey, you’re like, “I don’t know how much I should do for data centers.” And then if you’re like a red state governor, every red state governor’s coming out against data centers, Indiana, Florida. All these red State governors are like, “I don’t know. I think politically we should be against data centers.” And so I think they’re losing their social license at the same time. And so the question is how do they get their social license back?
Katherine Hamilton: It seems to be a disconnect between everybody wanting AI dominance and the actual having to build data centers to get the dominance.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. Hold that thought. I totally agree and I think it’s going to create some really weird factors in politics and it is going to be one of my choices for stories of the year. So we will get to that.
I guess that brings us nicely into our main course, and we’re calling it Thanksgiving table stakes. So here’s how it’s going to work. I am going to introduce a classic Thanksgiving table archetype, and we’re going to choose which trend or storyline in the energy transition best embodies that character in 2025. Short answers, hopefully strong opinions. Let’s get into it. First up, invited to the table is the drunk uncle who is loud, provocative, takes up all the oxygen in the room and somehow dominates the entire dinner table conversation whether you want him to or not. So in the energy world of 2025, who is the drunk uncle, Katherine?
Katherine Hamilton: The drunk uncle in my book is local opposition, also known as not in my backyard or get off my lawn. And that is absolutely the drunk uncle. And I think of this because there has been a lot of opposition to wind and solar siting utility scale siting. About a third of the wind and solar siting applications in 2025 were canceled. But if you dig down into the numbers, yes, local opposition is some of it, but most of them were because of policy, uncertainty, tax credit risk, that sort of thing. So I think that even though the drunk uncle is quite loud and does have an impact and can make your life somewhat miserable, he’s not the only one at the party. So even though NIMBYism is bad, it’s not going to win.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, interesting. So you think that we’re overselling NIMBYism as the reason for these projects getting derailed or slowing?
Katherine Hamilton: Absolutely, yes.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. Jigar, what do you think about that? Do you agree?
Jigar Shah: Oh, yeah. I mean, I have spent a lot of time on this issue this year just because weirdly, people have reached out to me on LinkedIn and wanted to yell at me about it. And I talked to several county commissioners in Indiana, et cetera, and after I probed, it was like 20 people who were against the projects. And they were like, “Yeah, but the property taxes have saved our districts.” And so I think in general, most people are pro builders, right? They’re not necessarily pro solar and wind, but they’re pro economic development and builders in their communities. And so I think largely this is just a failure in the solar and wind industry side to donate $8,000 to local county commissioner races. I think it’s not that much money for their $400 million project to get a hearing and love from the local elected politicians, but I think they have to play the game a little bit more intelligently.
Stephen Lacey: That’s a good choice, Katherine. Jigar, who’s your drunk uncle?
Jigar Shah: I mean, obviously AI load growth data centers powered by behind-the-meter natural gas. I mean, if I have to hear one more tech bro online talking about how they should be spending so much money on running their data centers 100% of the time off-grid with highly expensive technology from Caterpillar, it’ll be too soon.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, really? I think it’s data centers in nuclear that’s more of a drunk uncle.
Jigar Shah: More, I mean nuclear is even worse because the way that the nuclear argument goes is, “Well, you know they already have their natural gas turbines, and then they’re going to start building nuclear plants that’ll come online by 2035.” And I was like, “Hell’s no. I am 100% sure that that is not going to happen, but I appreciate your enthusiasm, drunk uncle.”
Stephen Lacey: So do you think they’re drunk because the technology choice is wrong or because off-grid data centers aren’t feasible? The timelines are off? What are the reasons?
Jigar Shah: I mean, it’s just so much male energy. So much male energy. And you’re just like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” For instance, let’s assume that you really needed natural gas behind-the-meter, which I think you do. A simple cycle gas plant is one-third the cost of these expensive Cat facilities and it meets the needs of providing you power the 500 hours a year that you have a constrained grid and that you need the stuff. Why would you build a more muscular solar turbines, whatever, whatever? Because you don’t know any better and you’re just unwilling to educate yourself.
And you’ve heard Joe Rogan talk about it and you’re like, “Damn it. We need that stuff. It makes me feel so manly.” And then you’re like, “I need a nuclear plant and then I’m going to partner up with the ex-governor of Texas and I’m going to go public and I’m going to make him a billionaire and oh, we’re not going to build any of those nuclear plants.” I am a big nuclear fan, as you know, and there’s a right way to do it, and then there’s way they’re doing it. And that is not going to work no matter how much energy dominance financing you throw at it.
Katherine Hamilton: It’s emotional energy dominance.
Stephen Lacey: Well, it’s really interesting to see how the conversation has evolved and picked up, particularly on X, as you’ve gotten a lot of people in the tech industry suddenly so focused on power. And I think that that part of the conversation is very much influenced by this huge shift into people who are paying attention to the power sector in ways that they weren’t before. My choice is, so if your behind-the-meter gas and nuke bros are over there on X, my choice, which are the waterdoomers, are over on Bluesky. These people are all up in arms about water. “Not only our data centers going to break the grid, but they’re going to drain our watersheds.” And if you actually look at the numbers, data centers themselves have a very small impact on water.
There’s this guy, Andy Masley, who has a great Substack and he covers a lot of the tech industry. He’s written some really super analysis on his Substack. And here’s some figures that I think show just how little water impact data centers have. All US data centers consumed about 0.2% of America’s freshwater in 2023, and about 0.04% was actually on site at the data center itself for cooling. That’s 3% of the water that American golf courses use. So he writes, which I love this, “It’s a miracle that’s something we spend 50% of our time on, which is like the internet, only consumes 0.2% of our water.” And that water usage is about 8% of water consumed by US steel production. And so AI is about 20% of total compute load right now in data center electricity use. So if AI energy use increases by 10 x by 2030, Masley estimates AI would still consume 5% of total US golf course water use.
So I don’t dismiss this story entirely. I think water availability can absolutely be a challenge, particularly if you’re building a data center in an extremely water constrained area or if there’s an area with a lot of data centers in one location. But this is not an industry-wide problem where we’re going to run out of water, and I just think that this is part of that emotional conversation. A lot of people are coming in with very strong feelings and there’s a lot of hyperbolic nonsense. And so again, we need to pay attention to how water is used, particularly in sensitive areas, but we are not going to run out of water.
Jigar Shah: All right. More importantly, is the water getting too warm for me to swim in during the summer? Because I have to say, if you go to Lake Anna in Virginia, I mean that’s nuclear power.
Katherine Hamilton: It’s the dirtiest water in the state.
Jigar Shah: It’s too hot. That water’s too hot in the summertime. And I just think that folks need to watch how much heat they’re rejecting into that water.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, that’s a good point. Although, if you go to Iceland and swim in the effluent of a geothermal power plant, that heat’s a good thing. You ever been to the Blue Lagoon?
Jigar Shah: I mean, is it a good thing? They definitely take $40 of your money to get you to wade into it and then put some mud on your face. Anyway, so I think that the water thing really annoys me. And then just the energy, I think the similar crowd is arguing that data centers are going to break the grid, and as we have discussed, obviously they can potentially drive up rates. Obviously there are capacity challenges and if we don’t solve those, there will be pricing and reliability challenges. But the idea that data centers are inherently going to break the grid, which is how a lot of these conversations are characterized, is very removed from- So that I will disagree with you on.
Stephen Lacey: Tell me more.
Jigar Shah: I mean I do do think the way in which they’re building these data centers will break the grid. I mean, I think we-
Stephen Lacey: Like what? The large gigawatt scale data centers?
Jigar Shah: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think if you just put it somewhere and then you decide to build some behind-the-meter power generation and you don’t integrate it into the grid, you don’t figure out a way to force them to put in battery storage or you don’t figure out how to get them to weatherize homes in the community and reduce the constraints on the distribution grid, et cetera, then that means the utilities have to upgrade all of those wires and then they have to rate base that. And I think that when you look at what Entergy is doing right now, it’s crazy town in terms of how much they’re peanut buttering all of those costs from Meta onto all the rest of the repairs.
And the new Amazon announcements that came out yesterday that are basically the equivalent of all residential load in Indiana is crazy. And I don’t trust those utilities for a moment to do things in a way that actually manages people’s electricity bills. And so there’s the right way to do it, which is virtual power plants and demand flexibility and grid enhancing technologies. And then there’s the wrong way to do it, which is what most other people are doing.
Stephen Lacey: Wait, sorry, I might have misunderstood your argument. You said that installing behind-the-meter generation will cause that problem?
Jigar Shah: Installing behind-the-meter generation does not reduce the electricity costs for your neighbor. All it does is basically make you into an island that doesn’t actually help anybody. And so my problem is that if you’re going to have all this load growth, which means the denominator, the number of kilowatt-hours we’re selling goes up, well then you have to make sure the numerator goes down, the amount of investment that we’re providing. And so that means the investment by the data center companies, whether it’s behind-the-meter like with battery storage or whether it’s them funding heat pumps for people who are on electric resistance heating to free up capacity on the grid needs to be done in a thoughtful way. It can’t just be done haphazardly, which is what we’re doing now.
Stephen Lacey: Finally, we’ve got some good disagreement here. All right, so let’s shift gears here and invite the next person to the dinner table. This is our pragmatic parent. They’re not flashy, they’re not loud, but they’re doing all the thankless work that keeps the whole dinner from collapsing into chaos. So in the energy transition, who is the pragmatic parent of 2025, Katherine?
Katherine Hamilton: Let me smooth my apron and come out of the kitchen for a moment to talk to you about that. Energy efficiency. Energy efficiency holds the grid together. It reduces stress on the grid. It cuts peak demand with things like efficient HVAC and building insulation during critical peak hours. It defers or avoids expensive grid upgrades. It reduces fuel and generation volatility. It supports renewable integration, flattens the duct curve. It improves resilience during extreme weather. Energy-efficient homes and buildings and appliances are able to maintain temperatures during extreme heat or cold longer. And then it’s also the foundation for Jigar’s favorite thing, virtual power plants. So I’m all in for energy efficiency being the steady person at the table who is pragmatic and should always be the first solution.
Stephen Lacey: Tell that to lawmakers here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who are trying to gut our efficiency programs in the name of affordability.
Katherine Hamilton: No kidding. Yep. The opposite of what they should be doing.
Stephen Lacey: Do you think efficiency could suffer in this moment? I mean, actually, Massachusetts is a good test case here where some lawmakers are saying, “Why are we spending money on these programs,” that obviously do save consumers money, “but if rates are going up, why are we spending money on these programs?” Do you see it under threat in other areas of the country?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. Well, it’s under threat federally too. The US government is ignoring our statutes to say we have to be more energy efficient. And energy efficiency, as I said at the top of the show, is very much about why we have been able to manage demand in a way that’s reasonable and has always been the first solution. And it’s paid back in multitudes by… a small amount on efficiency pays back enormously at the end.
Stephen Lacey: I must admit it’s been a while since I have really dug into the details of energy efficiency programs and there has been this long debate over how we measure and verify efficiency and there’s constant debate over how to execute projects, how to verify that you’re getting the energy reductions. Anybody, can you characterize the state of efficiency today across America? Have we figured out a lot of those problems? And how are programs being run differently compared to, I don’t know, say a decade ago?
Jigar Shah: Well, I can add the flex market stuff. So Matt Golden has been working on this for the better part of 10 years where he has basically said that energy efficiency on its own doesn’t always help reduce rates. It’s energy efficiency that reduces peak demand that reduces rates. And so California has deployed almost all of his policy recommendations through their flex market program. I think you’re seeing New York and NYSERDA doing the same thing. And so that doesn’t mean energy efficiency isn’t valuable, as Katherine suggested. And so I think as you replace old appliances with new appliances, they’re more efficient, et cetera. But I think what you’re seeing is a lot of the thoughtful energy efficiency programs are moving their rebate programs to financing retrofits and things that actually reduce peak demand as opposed to providing more energy efficiency in the middle of the night.
Katherine Hamilton: And a lot of these efficiency tools, well, all of them now are pretty much connected to the internet, so you can control them in a much more granular way. They become much more useful. So I think that’s another piece of it.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, who’s your pragmatic parent?
Jigar Shah: I mean it’s the workhorse, the transmission and distribution grid. Mostly transmission. I mean, God loved Rob Gramlich and the Grid Strategies people, but he has not been getting a lot of love the last 12 months.
Stephen Lacey: Why?
Jigar Shah: I mean, Grain Belt Express goes away. You’ve got all these… all of that work that we’ve been doing to be like, “we need thousands of miles of more transmission grid every year.” Now, SPP had their big announcement on their new transmission program, but I think it’s one third of the program that they were supposed to announce. They were supposed to announce a $20 billion program and they instead only got like $8.4 billion announced. And so I think there’s a lot of these folks who I think have started to not really pay attention to the workhorse of the grid that is the transmission grid that we need to continue to invest in. And even if we say we can’t build new right of ways, maybe we need to reconductor the existing right of ways with new technologies like DS conductor and others that can triple the capacity of the grid we already have or deploy grid enhancing technologies or other things. But I feel like that conversation is not getting the love and attention that it should be getting.
Stephen Lacey: Cheers to that. I’ll raise a glass and agree, and I actually chose just the grid. It’s one of the most complex machines ever built. It operates in real time. It’s going to match supply and demand every second of the day. We’re asking it to absorb all this new load growth, integrate all these renewables, host millions of DERs, support these new AI data centers, electrify buildings and transport. It is doing an unbelievable job and a lot of emotional labor for the entire energy transition.
Jigar Shah: Not to be confused with The Wire, which was an extraordinary show that brought families together. And great plot lines.
Stephen Lacey: Indeed. Because I think we need a little disagreement here. I want to shake things up. I guess I’ll also give a toast to utilities too. I mean they take endless criticism, but they’ve got these teams that are… many of them have teams that are quite forward-thinking, but they’re buried under regulation legacy systems. They’ve got investor expectations that act as constraints, but they’re keeping this massive machine operational. And we may not love everything they do, but without them, none of this works.
Katherine Hamilton: You’ve just gone from pragmatist to victim.
Jigar Shah: Totally.
Katherine Hamilton: I don’t know.
Jigar Shah: You and I should raise a glass, Katherine, to Boeing because I feel bad for all those people who work there who don’t make airplanes that don’t have doors that fly off. Or Westinghouse, which is an extraordinary company who can’t build a nuclear reactor to save their life. Or there’s all sorts of CEOs who make $26 million a year who I should cry because they can’t seem to control their employees and help them reach high performing teams and actually implement new technology and do all the things that we expect from for-profit corporations. Oh, sorry. Was I speaking out of turn?
Katherine Hamilton: Now, I will raise a toast to the line workers.
Jigar Shah: Well, hell yeah
Stephen Lacey: Oh, definitely.
Katherine Hamilton: Those people, they work. It’s dangerous. It’s thankless. They’re the good guys.
Stephen Lacey: 100% agree. Definitely a toast to the line workers, all the folks out in the field. Utilities have a really hard job during this stressful period.
Jigar Shah: What about the lawyers?
Katherine Hamilton: The lawyers are great.
Jigar Shah: Would you toast the lawyers turn CEOs of large utility companies who basically don’t have any engineering acumen whatsoever, but they rose to the top because they figured out regulatory capture?
Stephen Lacey: Let’s invite one more person to the table here. This is our rebellious teenager, impatient, contrarian, rolling their eyes at the adults. And maybe just maybe a little right about everything. Jigar, who’s your rebellious teenager?
Jigar Shah: Oh, you know it, DERs.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, baby.
Jigar Shah: VPPs and distributed energy resources. My man.
Stephen Lacey: Tell me more. Tell me more.
Jigar Shah: Look, I think when you look at the situation that we’re in today, we are in a place where the electrostate has succeeded. We have ridiculously low-cost solar, we have ridiculously low-cost batteries, we have ridiculously low-cost electric vehicles, we have low-cost wind power, and we have a utility system that does not know how to integrate these technologies into their system in a way that reduces electricity costs 20% by 2030. We have all the modeling that shows that it should be able to do it. We have all the venture capital in the world that shows that folks are ready with solutions. We have front-of-the-meter solutions that utilities can rate base. We have behind-the-meter solutions, we have financing. We have all these things, but they’re still treated like the sort of bratty kid in the corner that just won’t shut up.
Stephen Lacey: Kathrine, you’ve got four kids. When does the rebellious teenager get taken seriously by their parents?
Katherine Hamilton: Well, the issue is when are they stopping kids? I don’t think ever. Although I do take them seriously. I think it’s when costs get so high that they better be taken seriously. I mean, it’s a real thing. And I think at some point, we won’t have any choice. We’ll have to say, “Y’all need to learn how to cook too.”
Jigar Shah: Well, that’s right.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, I mean, are DERs… have the parents locked them in their bedroom or are they sitting in their bedroom unable to get out because they don’t have the motivation?
Jigar Shah: No, I think these analogies at this point are quite strange. Look, I think where we are today is that you’ve got two governor-elects right in New Jersey and Virginia who are saying on day one, they need a solution that absolutely reduces electricity bills. Not reduces the growth in the increase of inflation of electricity bills, but actually reduces electricity bills. And the only thing available to them is DERs. Basically when you look at the full implementation of FERC order 2222, there are already 10,000 megawatts of demand flexibility resources that have been contracted in the PJM that cannot bid into the PJM.
Now, the PJM is suggesting that they will have their final rules for that ready to go for the auction next summer. So okay. But then they haven’t forced the necessary data acquisition changes, so they haven’t allowed for statistical sampling to be used for residential. So they’re basically saying no residential and small businesses should apply to this demand flexibility. So they only want to do large-scale commercial where you can overpay for the metering to be able to replicate the entire structure. So you start at 36 gigawatts worth of opportunity in PJM, they’re erasing 12 gigawatts of opportunity because you’re taking out residential and small commercial. So now you’ve got 24 gigawatts left. 10 gigawatts of that is already under some sort of contract or has been recognized by some VC-backed company.
So look, I mean there is a problem here and we need to figure out how to solve it. And I think that the challenge that we have right now is that when you ask these governors, who do they trust to give them advice? It’s only the utility CEOs. They don’t trust a whole cadre of people to give them advice. And so you’re in this weird spot right now where we all know that there’s only one road to Nirvana, but it takes some people a little windy road action to get there. And now there’s another 30 governors’ races occurring in the fall of 2026, and all of them actually are going to be running on electricity affordability too. And so as Katherine suggests, there’s only one road to Nirvana, but it takes some people a little windy road action to get there.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, who’s your choice?
Katherine Hamilton: So I looked at how old are teenagers? It’s really the Gen Z folks. So between ages 13 and mid-20s are considered Gen Z. and I think they’re less rebellious. I mean, what they rebel against is their parents who haven’t done a great job in this world on energy. So all the studies show that Gen Z is much more willing to do electrification. And so my choice is electrification, especially EVs. S. O 57% of youth are willing to change their travel habits to make sure that they use electric vehicles of transportation. They’re much more willing to pay for clean energy. They support energy efficiency technologies. They have a distrust of utilities and traditional providers. And they want to be included in the energy transition and often are more practical than their parents in making decisions. So their decisions are often about technology and apps rather and gamification, but that all leads to really good results because it leads to more uptick in electrification, especially EVs. So all the studies show that the youth want electric scooters, electric cars, electric bikes. And so that’s my rebellious teenager and I’m on their side.
Jigar Shah: But the real question is whether they’re going to abandon fast fashion and figure out a way to find a tailor to make high quality clothing.
Katherine Hamilton: Thrifting is the new thing. Everybody needs to thrift.
Jigar Shah: There you go.
Stephen Lacey: I remember after COVID Jigar said everybody was going to be tailoring their own clothes.
Jigar Shah: I really wish-
Stephen Lacey: When the fast fashion movement hit.
Katherine Hamilton: For like a minute and a half.
Jigar Shah: … I really wish that would come true. I really want tailors to make a comeback.
Stephen Lacey: You took this one very literally, Katherine, which I like a lot. I will say also, the electric technologies are often just better because the younger generations have grown up in an environment where they’ve been around smartphones their entire lives, and now you have cars that are iPads on wheels, right? You’ve got remote control heating systems that are on demand. They’re just better technologies and I think they fit neatly into the sort of digital, always on demand world that they grew up in.
Okay, onto my choice. I chose for the rebellious teenager, the abundance coalition. And I feel like the reason why this is a rebellious teenager is because I think it’s a major break from the historical left. This year we saw a general challenge to left orthodoxy on government rules and regulations. You have progressives who have traditionally viewed government rules as sacred, government process as sacred. And they’re suddenly talking a little bit more like free market libertarians when it comes to regulation.
So it’s an interesting group of people. Obviously, it comes from the progressive wing like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, whose book Abundance really just exploded this year and has become a manifesto of the movement. But there’s a lot of other people on the left who are part of this abundance movement and have been talking about this for a couple years now. And they’re sort of forming with the tech wing, the Silicon Valley accelerationists who are rallying around this concept, mostly because they just want to build more data centers and support their companies. And you also have the libertarian wing, which are like the Cato Institute, R Street Institute, who have hated these regulations for decades. But it’s really starting to look like a motley crew of teenagers all sitting around the lunch table together. And it’s an emerging coalition that I think is quite interesting, and it’s the closest thing we have to a rebellion against the current political status quo that has prevented us from building things. And I thought that was a really interesting thing that broke out this year that I will continue to be following.
Jigar Shah: I think you’re hilarious that you think that-
Stephen Lacey: Why?
Jigar Shah: … Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are progressives. I mean, they are basically the second coming.
Stephen Lacey: Why? They leave themselves progressive.
Jigar Shah: … they’re the second coming of Alex P. Keaton who has said, “We need to rail against all these excessive regulations.” I mean, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have been in the center for as long as I’ve seen this stuff. I agree with you to be completely clear. I think their central thesis is that blue states consider themselves super smart and are not super smart. They are actually not figuring out housing, figuring out rail, figuring out urban planning, figuring out all these things. Instead, they’re figuring out red tape. And so I think that we should have higher expectations of blue states and blue cities to actually manage their shit. But I don’t think that they’re progressive.
Stephen Lacey: Well, I mean they’ve been quite progressive on criminal justice reform and on healthcare, et cetera.
Jigar Shah: I mean, all of us are quite progressive on one issue. I think we should have universal healthcare. I don’t know why I have to be responsible for everyone’s healthcare. But-
Stephen Lacey: Well, I will say, I mean I disagree with you because they identify as progressives, but whatever. But I do think that the real progressive wing of the party really does not like them very much. And that’s, I think, because they’ve been-
Jigar Shah: Well, that’s my point, exactly. The real progressive party does not actually like them.
Stephen Lacey: But I spent some time in the Center for American Progress many years back a decade and a half ago, and I spent a couple years there. And I will tell you that there was an obsession with regulations, with defending regulations, with figuring out how to message around them to explain how they’re good for business. I spent a lot of time in some of those war rooms where that’s all anyone talked about was, “How do you message to the world that we need more regulation?” They’re coming at it from a good place. Often it’s about environmental pollution controls and climate regulations. And so that was the way they tackled these issues. It was coming at it from how do we support more regulations? And so I think that this is a big break from that mentality and it’s starting to seep into places like the Center for American Progress.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, but think about this, Stephen. Every single organization you mentioned is a think tank. It’s not real people out there. These are all think tankers. So they don’t even get a table in the lunchroom. They have to meet in the music room because nobody even wants them in the lunchroom. So this is all just people thinking about stuff and coming up with new ideas. Now we have to figure out how do we actually get ideas to start organically in places where we need to get things done?
Stephen Lacey: For sure. And I mean, it’s going to come down to a lot of local lawmakers. I mean, really this comes down to zoning boards and real local… You can talk in the federal level about building all the housing that you want, but it really comes down to ultra local organizations like zoning boards.
Katherine Hamilton: And then you got to get past that drunk uncle.
Stephen Lacey: Yes, exactly.
Jigar Shah: No, it’s always a drunk grandma, at least in my neighborhood. It is crazy. When I first moved into East Bethesda, so I live six blocks from the metro, and all these people came out of the woodwork and were trying to assess where I was on this thing. And they all have communities, not canyons, signs in their yard. And they basically don’t want any of the two-story buildings around the Bethesda Metro to be torn down and turned into seventeen-story high rises. And it took me a while, because I’m dense, to figure out what they wanted. And as soon as I figured out, I was like, “No, you’re crazy. I want seventeen-story buildings. I don’t know what you think is happening around here. If we’re next to the metro, I want high buildings and better restaurants. What are we talking about around here?”
Stephen Lacey: 100%.
Jigar Shah: Frankly, I think it’s mostly folks who’ve bought their houses for $200,000 that are now selling for 2 million who are like, “I don’t want any zoning changes or anything else”
Katherine Hamilton: Yep.
Stephen Lacey: Yes, definitely. It is people who are locked into housing who don’t want their neighborhoods to change, that is a huge factor.
Jigar Shah: Which I think the big problem with the abundance movement that I have is that I think they are totally dialed in on housing and they are not dialed in on anything else. So I don’t think they really understand the permitting reform stuff that we need to do to get residential solar costs down. I don’t think they really understand some of the other abundance areas where figuring out how we find smart regulation and getting rid of red tape could accelerate building.
Stephen Lacey: I think part of the reason why I think the movement does have some power is because it’s starting to influence a lot of folks who are working on some of those more niche issues. And I’m seeing it make the rounds and creating a lot more momentum on some of that regulatory reform that is not about housing. All right, let’s wrap up with some leftovers. These are the stories that played out in 2025 that are unfinished and are absolutely coming out of the fridge again next year. We’ll each choose one. Katherine, what’s your leftover?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I’m going back to the initial appetizer. We’re going to have a lot leftover from that, which is data center growth. Is it real? Are we going to have affordable solutions to it? I think that’s just going to be the gift that keeps on giving in the coming year.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, it is the center of the energy universe right now.
Jigar Shah: Oh, I think we’ll have a lot less clarity next year than we had this year.
Stephen Lacey: Oh yeah?
Jigar Shah: I think a lot of the basic concepts that we took for granted this year will be thrown out the door next year and we’ll have to reassess everything from the ground up again next year. I think you’ll see a huge move to edge data centers away from centralized data centers. I think you’ll see a huge move to demand flexibility away from new natural gas units that you couldn’t get until 2032 anyway. I think this FERC and Oprah thing, I read a lot of the summaries of the comments that came in. I mean, there’s nobody who is vehemently in Chris Wright’s corner. Even the hyperscalers were tepidly in his corner. So we’ll see how that plays out, but I think that hangs a huge cloud over a lot of stuff. So my sense is we’ll have less answers next year than more answers.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, are there any particular angles that you would be following into next year?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, just whether it does create more space for virtual power plants. That’s what I’ve been focused on. Or demand-side solutions just generally.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, what are your leftovers? What is your plate filled with?
Jigar Shah: So I am obsessed about lawn care. So this year-
Stephen Lacey: Oh, this is unexpected.
Jigar Shah: … I was really looking at… So we have 200 jurisdictions now, some states, but mostly cities and towns that have banned gas-powered leaf blowers. And in some places they have these tickets that they give you. Like in DC, if someone uses a gas-powered leaf blower, you can rat them out and get some sort of kickback. But in other places, they don’t enforce the rules because they haven’t really had a lot of solutions. But there’s a new solution that’s gone crazy and basically a lot of these… there’s 10,000 crews in the country basically that are professionally hired, and they’ve been all rolled up by private equity companies, think Brightview and some of these other type of companies. And so they’re all moving to electric appliances and they figured out an integrated charging solution to do that. And so I think when you think about the electrostate and one of the most polluting things that we have are gas-powered lawn equipment. I mean, they have no pollution control stuff on them at all. The amount of local pollution that comes from that is more than all the cars in your neighborhood. So I think we’re on track to that problem actually getting addressed in 2026. And so I am watching that carefully and will be pulling that out of the freezer on a regular basis.
Katherine Hamilton: That’s awesome.
Stephen Lacey: So the regulations piece?
Jigar Shah: Well, the regulations is what’s causing it to, I think, spur. But what you’re finding is a lot of the private are saying, “Oh, this is 10% cheaper on an operating cost basis for us to operate than the gas-powered stuff. So we are actually more profitable moving to electric.” So I think they’re going to go nationwide regardless of whether there’s regulation or not. And the battery technology’s gotten better, the equipment’s gotten cheaper, and so it’s great.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, we are at the top of a mountain and we do have to do a lot of leaf blowing so that our road doesn’t wash out every time it rains. And everything we have is electric. We just have a whole shop full of batteries charging all the time. Even our large, we have a huge tractor-mower situation, and it’s all electric too. And my husband just went out and got another leaf blower so we can all have one. It’s like a family event where you just plug in the battery. And go and it’s so much easier and it’s way less polluting, obviously, but just an easy way to do it. And it’s cheap. You can get this stuff at Lowe’s or Home Depot, it’s not a big deal.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, we were joking about it before. I use this little squeaky mechanical lawnmower and some shears and human power baby. But I will invest. I’m doing some landscaping right now, so I will have a bigger yard soon and I’m going to have to get something electric. So Katherine, I’m definitely going to look to you for a recommendation. And then maybe if this blows up, Jigar, we can create an electric lawn care spin-off podcast. I feel like that would do pretty well.
Jigar Shah: I’m there for it. I’m there for it.
Katherine Hamilton: Sponsored by EGO.
Jigar Shah: Exactly. I’ve spent a lot of time on this. For instance, did you know that this year alone, landscapers spent $8.3 billion on spare batteries for their lawn care?
Stephen Lacey: No.
Jigar Shah: And with smart charging solution, they can eliminate almost all of those spare batteries.
Stephen Lacey: We can take all those spare batteries and use them for stationary storage [inaudible 00:53:29] or something.
Jigar Shah: Give it to Redwood and they could get a data center online in 20 days.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so my final choice goes back to what Jigar was saying earlier about how we’re seeing a lot of ground up pushback on data centers, which I think is a huge story, but it is not just a data center story, it’s really an AI story. And so my leftover is what I see as a possible looming political realignment from AI, a scrambling of politics. And we’re starting to see traditional political lines dissolve over this issue.
So on the MAGA right, you have a split between the tech wing and the populist wing. So on the tech right, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, they view AI as the ultimate tool for American dominance. They want to bulldoze regulations to build gigawatts of power and data centers. And then on the populist right, you’ve got Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, they look at AI as a existential threat to their America first working class vision. And you are starting to see a significant friction between these two factions.
And then on the local level, you see a lot of alignment as well as you were suggesting earlier in the episode, Jigar. So from the left, you’ve got democratic lawmakers, environmental groups thinking about how to block data centers because of water issues, land rights, carbon emissions. There’s a lot of environmental arguments to what they’re doing. From the right, you have conservative landowners, Republicans blocking these expansions because of property rights, transmission lines, preserving natural character, et cetera.
And then I find that clean energy is in this weird spot because for a decade or more, for forever, clean energy and environmentalism were synonyms and they aren’t anymore. And the clean energy industry, for the most part, is kind of leaning into this build out. They want to build at scale, build more transmission, nuclear, solar grid infrastructure at this massive scale. But the traditional environmental movement is recoiling from this. And I think that split is going to continue to grow as well. And then on top of this, you have this massive investment bubble. And when that pops, depending on how bad that is, I think it could be a real catalytic force for new political movements. I mean, you think about what happened with the Tea Party and the rise of populism and just distrust of institutions in the wake of the financial crisis. So all of this just feels really fluid and highly consequential in a way that stretches way beyond the tech itself.
Jigar Shah: I feel like the tech right is going to come together with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson-
Stephen Lacey: They might.
Jigar Shah: … on the abundance side and they’re going to create a bromance.
Katherine Hamilton: And Stephen, I feel like what you have described as the archetype of the toddler at the Thanksgiving dinner that is just running around wreaking havoc and causing chaos and breaking things.
Jigar Shah: Yes. Well, it’s already scrambling politics. I mean, to be clear, I mean kids that are under the age of 25 have a 25.3% unemployment rate right now, and that is double what it was in 2009 at the end of the first year of the Great Financial Crisis. And so those kids have idle time and they’re doing the devil’s work right now. So my sense is that they need to get a job. We need to get them into productive work. And frankly, a lot of those jobs are in clean energy. And so come on home, we have places for you to work. And so I’m excited for the future, but I totally agree with you.
The one thing that I think you should look for, which I think you didn’t mention, is the ag community. I think the ag community is going through a huge amount of change because of all the trade tariffs and soy and that kind of stuff. And they have always controlled the Republican Party. And you saw that with the OBBB where all the biofuels credits got in easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. And you’re seeing all of the AG folks going big on the pro-solar side of things because they want those rent checks that they’re getting for solar on some of their less productive land. And so you’re seeing a huge push there. And even the White House I think is backing that as well as USDA because they’re recognizing that these farmers need relief and a lot of them are looking to renewable energy to get that relief.
Katherine Hamilton: Dual use, yeah.
Jigar Shah: So it’s going to be a fascinating 2026.
Stephen Lacey: Absolutely. All right. This was so much fun. We made it through dinner, guys. That is it for this week’s Open Circuit.
Katherine Hamilton: Time for a nap.
Jigar Shah: Time to get the leaf blowers out and clean off the road.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, you’ve got some lawn care to do. Katherine, you’ve got some biscuits to bake. Have a great Thanksgiving, Katherine.
Katherine Hamilton: Thanks. You too.
Stephen Lacey: You enjoy the holiday.
Jigar Shah: Happy Thanksgiving.
Stephen Lacey: Same. Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah are my co-hosts. Open Circuit is produced by Latitude Media. I am Stephen Lacey. I’m your host and executive editor, and I edit the show. Sean Marquand is our technical director, Anne Bailey is our senior podcast editor.
For more in-depth reporting on all the stories and topics we cover on this show, go over to Latitude Media and you can subscribe to our different newsletters. And of course, hit that subscribe button anywhere you get your podcast if you don’t already. And you can find the show anywhere you get your shows. And thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you all. This is a time of the year for gratitude, and we are certainly grateful that you choose this show and we will catch you next week.
