Open Circuit

Empowering utility customers with demand flexibility [partner content]

As data centers, factories, and electrification push growth to unprecedented heights, customers are looking for greater control over their energy use. But the traditional

Electricity bills are on the ballot

Electricity prices have become a central storyline in upcoming U.S. elections. All over the country, Americans are finding it harder to pay their bills, and they’re getti

The breakout moment for VPPs [partner content]

Virtual power plants are having a moment. Suddenly, this once-niche solution for the power sector is breaking into mainstream discourse. The convergence of sudden load g

Green Blueprint: Form's storage manufacturing breakthrough

We're on vacation through the end of August, so this week we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint. Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage. Bu

AI needs a different kind of power plant [partner content]

Arbor Energy is betting that smaller, modular turbines can solve problems the conventional generation model was never designed for. Arbor Energy was founded with an unus

Did China outsmart America after the oil shock?

After Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, everyone thought prices would hit historic highs. But they didn't. Why? The answer is less about market resiliency, and more a

Data centers have a Texas-sized energy problem

The showdown over data centers is taking a new turn. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a data center pause in order to audit how they’ll impact water suppli

A simple fix that could unlock the heat pump market

It's been almost a decade since the “Electrify Everything” movement kicked off. And guess what? We aren't electrifying everything. We're seeing strong growth in electric

Critical Capital: Is this infrastructure's once-in-a-generation moment?

This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike a

The off-grid data center fantasy

A major fault line runs through the data center debate: how many will actually go off-grid? There’s a lot of enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for breaking free from the grid

Turning customer data into grid intelligence [partner content]

Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to time-of-day rates as electricity demand grows and delivery costs rise. But a harder challenge is giving customers

Plug-in solar meets the grid crisis

America turned 250 years old last week. While local leaders were busy organizing parades, re-enactments, and flyovers, grid operators and emergency officials were dealing

The new reality for data centers: no easy answers

For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastru

How APS dove head-first into AI [partner content]

AI is about far more than chatbots and copilots. For utilities, the bigger opportunity may be in applying purpose-built models to the operational data from smart meters,

Is commercial fusion finally near?

For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim

SpaceX’s IPO is an energy story

Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify. But either wa

America’s electricity rage is here

The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactio

The biggest utility merger in US history?

First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhi

The climate messaging war returns. Does it matter if we can’t build?

A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change? It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed

Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in th