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 lost power every day. The fixes were concrete bunkers that let a substation take a direct hit, home batteries, a nuclear fleet kept running, and new wind and solar built in the middle of a war.The Iran war has since shown every oil importer the same vulnerability. Countries won’t go back to sleep after this, and the map of who buys energy from whom is being redrawn.Tim McDonnell is Semafor’s climate and energy editor and writes Semafor Energy, its twice-weekly newsletter. He lives in Kyiv, where the sirens go off all the time and some nights are spent in the metro. Getting out to report starts with an overnight train to Poland, because Ukraine still has no working airport.The interview was recorded at Climate Week NYC on September 21. The intro and outro were recorded before the energy ceasefire Trump announced on October 11.In this episode:The sirens, the metro at night, and why the air war over Kyiv is back to early-2022 levelsHow a substation wrapped in concrete takes a cruise missile and keeps workingWhy the free flow of oil through Hormuz that existed before February is probably gone for goodThe case that oil importers won’t “go back to sleep” once the Iran war endsEgypt’s six-month sprint into wind and solar after Iran sent gas prices upThe “tourists” arriving in cleantech funding rounds, and whether that’s a bubbleSubmit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 ballot in Virginia’s 2025 governor’s race. Abigail Spanberger won it by 15 points, and now she wants data centers to pay for the grid built to serve them.Recorded live at the Virginia Clean Energy Summit in Richmond for Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the midterms.In this episode:The breakfast in Norton, Virginia, where nearly everyone in the room wanted to talk about their power billWhy Virginia’s new energy plan puts a price on asthma and rising seasA proposal to make new data centers in Virginia face a local voteHow everyone’s bill changes when data centers choose batteries over gas generatorsVirginia’s first-of-its-kind tax on data center electricity, and the case for the industry’s sales tax breakWhat candidates should run on this November, and why state and federal races need different answersLinks:https://energy.virginia.gov/connect/www.energyempire.fm

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 demand-flexibility company in North America, just announced a $225 million Series D led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. Today's guest, co-founder and CEO Dana Guernsey, plans to use it to grow from 8.5 gigawatts of flexible capacity to 20 by 2030, a quarter of the Department of Energy's target for the whole country.Google is already a customer, paying Voltus to line up as much as 100 megawatts of that flexibility in PJM, the grid that runs from Illinois to Virginia, so its data centers can connect faster. It's the first deal of its kind, and Dana's argument is that "do no harm" is too low a bar for a company with Google's balance sheet; a data center can leave the grid better than it found it.In this episode:What a Walmart, a winery, a glass factory, and a sewage plant each do when Voltus callsThe church that stayed open and the factory that kept a whole shift, both because of Voltus checksFrom $25 a year for a thermostat to $11 million for a data center, who gets paid what for turning things downHow 50,000 homes become 100 megawatts, and the PJM rule that kept them out until AugustThe year governors and the White House learned what PJM isWhy Google is paying its neighbors to flex instead of building a gas plant that runs 25 hours a yearSubmit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

"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 your electric bill.When the Trump administration blocks cheap clean power, the grid falls back on pricier fossil plants and families pay the difference. He calls it a "ginormous money pump."Whitehouse represents Rhode Island and is the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is also one of four senators behind the bipartisan permitting bill released shortly after this conversation was recorded.Part of Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the 2026 midterms.In this episode:The half-price offshore wind power for Rhode Island that drew two federal stop-work orders"Have you ever seen anything go from zero to everybody hates you faster than data centers?"Why he hates, loathes, and despises one stage of federal review, and his fix for itWhat a plumber in Orlando loses when nobody will insure their homeRussia as "a gas station run by gangsters who have an army," and the sanctions law he wants the president to useThe dark money bill he wants Democrats to pass and dare the president to vetoLearn more at energyempire.fm

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 episode was recorded live at The Nest Campus during Climate Week NYC. Jigar and Jamie talk with Josh Parker, head of sustainability at NVIDIA, and Jim Gao, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA-backed Phaidra.In this episode:An AI agent that predicts heat spikes on CoreWeave's NVIDIA chips and stops them before they hitWhy NVIDIA is cooling its chips with 113°F coolant to cut water useWhether AI needs gigawatt-scale data centers, or GPUs on the side of a houseHow half a percent of flexibility could free up about 100 gigawatts on the US gridThe cost of adding 12 hours of battery backup to a $125 million data centerWhat it would take for a data center to lower its neighbors' power billsLearn more at energyempire.fm