A Jurassic Park clip at an audio-visual store in Indianapolis got Seth Little thinking about smart homes as a teenager in the 1990s. That moment led him to a career in energy efficiency. Today, he's the director of market development and partnerships at CLEAResult, one of North America's largest energy efficiency implementation firms.

Seth has a provocative take on the energy transition: attic insulation is a grid-responsive asset. While the industry has been moving toward digital solutions, Seth argues that traditional efficiency measures should complement, not replace, active technologies. Unlike demand response programs that require internet connectivity, a well-insulated attic is always working to reduce peak demand—and it's often more cost-effective than deploying multiple digital systems.

This week on With Great Power, Seth explains why we need a full set of solutions to achieve grid responsiveness, how high-resolution meter data is changing program design, and why utilities need to do more with customer data.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

Adam Helman has spent his entire career in emergency management. But after working for the New York State Department of Health during the COVID pandemic, he wanted something new.

So in 2023, Adam moved from responding to a public health emergency to responding to the climate emergency, in addition to other hazards utilities have dealt with for decades. Just two years into his role as director of emergency services for the energy services company Avangrid, he’s already seen a number of back-to-back emergencies caused by everything from winter storms to gas leaks.

This week on With Great Power, Adam shares with Brad some of the ways that Avangrid’s emergency response operations are evolving as intense weather and other hazards put more physical and mental stress on first responders. They also discuss why  meteorologists play an increasingly vital role in utility emergency response, and how utilities are integrating new threats, like wildfires in the Northeast, into their planning.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

In 1994, Joaquin Ramirez took a job with a wildland fire-fighting crew in his native Spain. That year, Spain saw some of the most destructive fires in its history, and Joaquin quickly realized he just wasn’t cut out to be a wildland firefighter.

He left the crew, but he kept thinking about the outdated maps his fellow firefighters had relied on, and wondering how better sensing and mapping technologies could make fighting wildfires safer and more effective. That curiosity led him to found Technosylva in 1998 to provide firefighters with advanced fire mapping and prediction tools. In 2007, the company expanded to the U.S.

This week on With Great Power, Joaquin tells Brad how Technosylva provides wildfire risk analysis services to utilities and fire agencies, and how incorporating AI into its wildfire risk forecasting tools can help utilities make more informed decisions in managing power infrastructure.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

Since her first power sector job with Pacific Gas & Electric, Hannah Bascom knew she wanted to focus on people and clean energy — not on what she calls “the pipes and wires part of the business.”

That interest led her to Nest in early 2014, just a few months after Google had acquired it. Almost a decade later, she moved on to SPAN and then Uplight, a technology partner for energy providers. Today, as Uplight’s chief growth officer, Hannah thinks more than ever about how people interact with energy — and how to better manage that demand.

This week on With Great Power, Hannah talks with Brad about the vital role of demand side management, also known as DSM, for managing load growth, and why she thinks leveraging the demand stack can help utilities to better manage that growth. They also discuss how Puget Sound Energy is using a VPP and rate program to reduce peak demand. And she talks about the important role that rate design can play in encouraging consumers to electrify their homes.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

If you’re a With Great Power fan, you know that we launched this show over two years ago to explore how people are tackling some of the biggest problems in the power sector – from grid reliability and resilience to skyrocketing electricity demand.

Over four seasons, we’ve told you stories about the people working to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and more equitable. And we’re just getting started.

In our upcoming season, you’ll hear from some of the biggest names in grid-management; utilities building brand new programs from scratch; and non-profits pursuing their clean energy goals in a chaotic, dynamic market.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for the latest episodes when season 5 drops.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

During her early days in Quaker schools, Alexina Jackson learned to question everything and examine how systems work. Years later, those same principles are guiding her work to help build a clean, resilient, and modern electric grid.

Following an 11-year run at AES, Alexina recently launched a clean energy advisory called Seven Green Strategy, a reference to the seven greenhouse gases that cause climate change. As a lawyer and utility innovation leader, Alexina founded Seven Green Strategy to help large and small organizations accelerate their efforts to decarbonize. And sometimes, that starts by questioning the status quo.

This week on With Great Power, Alexina talks with Brad about what excites and frustrates her about grid enhancing technologies; why she thinks data efficiency and a strong data architecture are essential for the digital grid; and why she wants to see utilities change how they think about everything from competition to customer data.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

Dan Yates co-founded Opower in 2007, based on the belief that consumers want to use less energy—and that their utilities could actually help them do it. He was right. Opower took off, and Oracle bought the customer engagement platform in 2016. A year later, Dan became interested in another startup focused on residential energy: Dandelion Energy. Spun out of GoogleX, Dandelion developed a system for using geothermal energy to heat and cool buildings.

Electrifying buildings is a major tenant of decarbonizing the power sector, but air-source heat pumps can be expensive. Installation costs are even higher with geothermal heat pumps, but they offer energy efficiency advantages. Dan is a big fan. After investing in Dandelion and serving on its board, he became CEO in 2023.

This week on With Great Power, Dan talks about the potential for residential geothermal heating and cooling, why it could be the clean energy that gains instead of loses federal support in the near term, and the role he thinks utilities can play in the technology’s deployment.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.