Open Circuit

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 the US.

And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man.

Now consider crypto. A few years ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best. And then the crypto industry decided it was done being ignored and attacked. It built a war chest and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024, representing nearly half of all corporate political spending that cycle.

As a result, crypto went from regulatory target to political kingmaker in a single election cycle.

Clean energy has been a legitimate economic force for over a decade and still gets pushed around Washington. Why? How does an industry that's winning on economics keep losing in politics?

This week, we're live from the Prelude Climate Summit, a gathering of the top investors and companies in climate tech.

Stephen Lacey is joined by Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of Ripple, who helped engineer crypto's political transformation. He is now deploying that same playbook in service of climate. He’s also joined by Mike Brune, the longest-serving executive director in the Sierra Club's history, who stepped away in 2021 to co-found the Clean Break Fund with Chris — a new climate investment and political initiative.

We get into bare knuckle politics, lessons from the crypto industry, when and how we should talk about climate in politics, and the way AI is influencing the conversation. 

Open Circuit is produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development. 

That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into their backyards. Permits are being denied and projects are stalling.

The industry's default response has been to barrel forward and ramp up PR. But Christian Belady thinks that's the wrong diagnosis entirely. Christian spent decades at HP and Microsoft. At Microsoft, he helped build one of the largest data center footprints in the world. 

He invented PUE, the efficiency metric that became the industry standard. And now he's arguing that the way out of this community crisis isn't communications, it's engineering. 

So how do we make data centers assets to the communities they operate in?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Data center opposition is now being called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” In Indiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, voters across the political spectrum are turning sharply against the large campuses powering AI. At least 28 of the 38 states that currently offer tax incentives are weighing whether to roll them back.

On this episode of Open Circuit, we dig into what's actually driving the revolt, and why it's more complicated than simple NIMBYism. 

Utilities are at the center of the backlash. Governors are increasingly targeting them as anger grows over opaque deals and rising rates.

Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sent a letter to his state's utilities declaring that "the 20th century utility model is broken." We break down what he's actually proposing and what it says about the impossible position governors now find themselves in.

Later in the show, Latitude Media senior reporter Maeve Allsup to talk about her reporting on the backlash from Indiana, where a $5 billion data center has run headfirst into decades of broken promises and soaring utility bills.

We’ll also take a quick look at PJM's reformed interconnection queue, open for the first time in four years. We’ll look at the dominance of gas, the pullback of renewables, and what it tells us about where grid buildout is actually headed.

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

As the oil crisis persists, the world is running on borrowed time and borrowed oil. Inventories are draining, and the pain that started in Asian petrochemical plants and Indian cooking fuel shipments is now spreading west. 

Now, the traders who move the world's oil are saying there's a reckoning coming for the rest of the world.

This week, we dive into what happens if this keeps going. Does a shock this big finally weaken the world's oil addiction? Or do we just go right back to where we started?

We also get into the emerging clean energy storylines: Countries are dusting off their transition plans, Chinese cleantech exports are surging, and Gulf states may pull back on climate tech investing.

Then we turn to the world's most hyped data center developer, Fermi America, which raised nearly $750 million promising to build the largest campus ever. The company is now in freefall with no anchor tenant, a departed CEO, and a construction site that looks unchanged from six months ago. What went wrong?

Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.

Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

What actually kills a clean energy project?

It’s not always interconnection delays, permitting, or supply chains. Sometimes, it’s the deal itself.

Even after years of development, hundreds of documents, and months of diligence, projects still fall apart late in the process — sometimes just days before closing. Often, it’s because risks aren’t surfaced early enough.

The result: capital gets tied up in deals that don’t move forward, developers spend years advancing projects that can’t get financed, and critical information only emerges when it’s almost too late to act on it.

In a market defined by policy uncertainty, investors are more selective than ever, and there’s much less tolerance for surprises late in the process. So how do we fix it?

In this Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey talks with Rich Deming, founder of CEARTscore and CEO of East Energy Renewables, about why diligence still breaks down, and what it would take to fix it.

They discuss how risks get buried across fragmented data rooms, what prevents teams from fully understanding a project, and how better visibility earlier in the process could change how capital flows through the market.

This episode is partner content. The conversation was recorded live as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum with CEARTscore. You can access the full video here.

CEARTscore is building a platform to structure project data, surface risks earlier, and help developers, investors, and insurers make faster, more informed decisions. Learn more at ceart.io.