The explosive energy demand from data centers is breaking our grid, pushing desperate developers to build their own on-site gas plants just to get online. To figure out how we avoid locking in decades of new fossil fuels, I’m joined by Camus CEO Astrid Atkinson and Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins to break down their proposed alternative. We dig into how adopting flexible grid interconnections and clean, battery-backed “power parks” can meet this massive load growth without abandoning our decarbonization goals.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is trying to delay or roll back the state’s landmark climate law in the name of affordability. I’m joined by activist Pete Sikora to discuss the governor’s claims, what would actually serve affordability, and the larger politics behind this puzzling own-goal of a fight.

In this episode, I’m joined by Kunal Girotra, who helped start and run Tesla’s residential energy business before leaving to start his own company. With Lunar, he has tried to create the most consumer-friendly possible battery and software ecosystem, which can seamlessly plug into solar panels, other devices, or VPPs. We talk about lessons learned and the future of residential electrification.

I’m back with part two of my conversation with Jan Sramek, founder of California Forever, about his plan to build a brand-new city in Solano County. We get into the nuts and bolts of the urban design, discuss affordability and sustainability, get into governance issues, and look forward to what might happen next.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisitions and the billionaire backers. Is this an urbanist utopia in the making or a grandiose con job?

If the world takes its climate targets seriously, the coming decades will see fossil fuel systems shrinking as clean energy systems grow. In this episode, I talk with associate professor Emily Grubert about the issues that may arise during this “mid-transition” period. She has fascinating new study on the physical and financial cliffs that fossil fuel systems may go over as they decline and reach their “minimum viable scale” — and argues that public ownership of these dying industries might be the only way to gracefully phase them out.

In this episode, I chat with Catalyst host Shayle Kann about the most pressing unresolved questions in the clean energy world today. We explore whether data center gigantism will break the grid, if the smart home revolution is destined for platform enshittification, whether billionaires should start testing solar geoengineering, and more.

PJM is the largest wholesale power market and transmission planning region in the US. Currently, it is stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one side, rising demand from data centers; on the other, a choked and congested interconnection queue that can’t keep pace. The result: rising prices and political discontent. I talk with Clara Summers of the Citizens Utility Board about how PJM can solve this dilemma and get prices under control.