Energy Empire

Ukraine has learned how to keep a power grid running while someone is trying to destroy it. Every country that imports oil now needs the same lessons. Last winter Russia blew up power plants and substations, and Kyiv...

Northern Virginia is the biggest data center market in the world, and pushback is growing. So are power bills. A typical Dominion bill is now about $180 a month, $20 more than a year ago. Rising bills put energy on the...

When a warehouse turns its freezers down for two hours, it looks to the grid like a power plant switching on. Voltus pays thousands of businesses to do exactly that, every day of the year. Voltus, the largest...

"Little Red Riding Hood is kind of a dumb story without the wolf." That's how Senator Sheldon Whitehouse thinks Democrats have been telling the climate story. His wolf is the fossil fuel industry, and it shows up on...

AI data centers are straining the grid. NVIDIA and Phaidra say part of the fix is more AI: software that runs the cooling, data centers that ease off when demand peaks, and chips that do more with every watt. This...

Four senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act on September 30. One of them recorded this episode with Jigar the day before. The bill puts deadlines on federal environmental reviews, gives...

Electricity bills are rising across America, and for the first time in years, they're a campaign issue. Candidates on the left and the right are promising to cut your power bill. But are they even the ones in charge...

In Germany you pick up a solar panel at IKEA or the grocery store and plug it in at home. Here you order online, the cheapest kits can take four months to arrive, and in most states you still technically need your...

In most of America, the cost of generating electricity has barely moved since 2015. But, over the same 10 years, residential rates are up 37% (EIA). Lee Taylor has spent 13 years pricing power in every corner of the...

The jet fuel that could replace kerosene is made from used cooking oil. It costs two to six times more, and there isn't enough of it. This week's guest is Lauren Riley, Chief Sustainability Officer at United Airlines...

Sheep are replacing lawnmowers on solar farms across America. They're quieter, cleaner, and in many cases cheaper. More than 113,000 of them now graze over 500 US solar sites — and for the farmers who run the flocks...

Amazon is building a 7.65 gigawatt gas plant in the West Texas desert. Microsoft just signed a 20-year gas deal with Chevron, 30 miles away, and Meta, OpenAI, and xAI are all doing versions of the same thing. The case...

On a podcast in 2020, Jigar called the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office "irredeemable" and said it could never be trusted again. A few weeks later, the Biden transition team called, asking him to become the...

A used EV costs $200 a kilowatt hour. A Powerwall costs $900. In this episode: Unsubsidized rooftop solar at $2,100 a kilowatt, and why Australia does it for half that 470,000 megawatts of data center requests on a grid...

Five months into the Iran war, the largest supply shock in oil market history has been managed into a strange calm. Exxon just made $14.5 billion in a quarter, gas is over $4 a gallon, and Washington is quietly running...