The Energy Gang

In this second special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Reuters Global Energy Transition 2024 conference in New York, we speak with leaders at some of the key companies shaping the energy transition. We hear about how they are tackling the challenge of meeting rising demand for electricity while at the same time reducing emissions.Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, talks about his ambitions in the US market, which are centered around selling the company’s Kraken technology platform to utilities. He highlights the global potential of digitalization in propelling the energy transition forward.The transition towards renewable energy is governed not only by technological progress, but also by regulatory and policy frameworks. Our second guest, David Carroll, Chief Renewables Officer at Engie, talks about how legislation including the Inflation Reduction Act, and regulatory initiatives such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) Order No. 1920, can catalyze the adoption

This is a special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Reuters Global Energy Transition 2024 conference in New York. It has a great lineup of speakers from the worlds of business, finance, and government, giving us an opportunity to talk to some of the key people who are driving the energy transition. One of the panellists on the first day was Kristina Skierka, CEO of Power for All, a campaign group working on energy access in low-income countries. Host Ed Crooks talked with her about how decentralized renewables can reduce energy poverty, and how partnerships between business, philanthropy and government can help countries make progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.Power for All is working on what it calls its “Utilities 2.0” initiative, looking for ways to combine centralized and decentralized energy to create robust, integrated systems that will improve service delivery and stimulate increased demand.Another session at the event was a technology showcase,

Two books that are essential reading for energy wonks give contrasting views on how to tackle climate change.The hot book in the energy world right now is Brett Christophers’ The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. It’s a detailed look at the structural issues in electricity markets and the challenges of generating returns on renewable investments, arguing that inadequate profitability is the key reason why the transition to low-carbon energy is not moving fast enough to address the threat of global warming.It’s a provocative thesis that has sparked heated debate, on both sides of the debate. If you work in the energy business, you need to get to grips with the argument, even if you ultimately think it’s wrong.In this episode, Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, Professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, and Joseph Majkut, director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss the question of whether private inves

Regulators are trying to clear the path to the grid that clean energy needs.To go from an electricity system based on coal and gas to one based on solar and wind, the US needs a very different power grid. On some estimates, annual installations of new transmission capacity need to double. To help build the grid that a new clean electricity system will need, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been working on regulatory reforms, intended to smooth the path for new investments in transmission lines. Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe of New York University and Shanu Mathew of Lazard Asset Management, to unpack the latest orders from FERC. What are the regulators trying to do, and why do some people object to their plans? And what will the proposed reforms mean for the energy transition in the electricity sector in the US? It has been a busy few weeks for big announcements in energy. A new round of tariffs on clean energy products from China was announced this month by President Biden,

AI is driving up demand for electricity. How can we meet that demand with clean energy?It has been a big theme on the Energy Gang this year: the massive additional demand for energy that could be created by data centers for artificial intelligence. It’s an emerging issue that threatens to cause new challenges for the world’s attempts to achieve net zero goals.So it is a great opportunity for us to have on the show a representative from Google, a company that relies heavily on data centers and is at the forefront of the AI revolution. It also has some ambitious decarbonization goals: the aim is to power the company’s operations entirely with clean energy by 2030.  Maud Texier is the global director of clean energy and decarbonization development at Google. She joins Ed Crooks and Amy Myers-Jaffe to explain how she sees the path to achieving that goal by 2030. Google’s objective of 24/7 clean energy requires sourcing renewable power that aligns with its consumption patterns. That means not just buying

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has a grandstand view of the energy transition. Where is it going next?Jigar Shah, one of the originators of the Energy Gang, now runs the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, playing a key role in advancing clean energy projects. By helping to bridge the gap between R&D and large-scale deployment, it encourages private sector investment and supports the administration’s work to achieve its net zero goals.Jigar was appointed Director of the LPO in March 2021 with a brief to “to rev those engines back up” after a quiet period under the Trump administration. He returns to the Energy Gang to discuss the progress he has made so far, and the goals he is working towards in the future. In particular, he talks about the hot topic of the moment in energy: how to meet increased demand for electricity driven by data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles.Much of the new load being added to the electricity system will not be flexible. Data centers

Fossil fuels still dominate the world’s energy supplies. Do we need different terminology to talk about what’s happening?We talk about “the energy transition” all the time. But is that language misleading? 20 years ago fossil fuels were 85% of the world’s energy, today they’re just a few percentage points less. If there is a transition to low-carbon energy, it is happening only slowly, and it needs to move much faster to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. The world has made huge strides in both the cost and deployment of renewable energy, but can we really say that we are in a transition away from fossil fuels?Host Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, a professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, and Amy Myers Jaffe, director of NYU’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, to discuss the way the language we use shapes our ideas about energy policy. Amy quotes her Tufts University colleague (and previous guest on the show) Kelly Sims Gallagher: “climate doom and gloom really dis

Conversations from the Gulf Coast Power Association conference. This bonus episode of the Energy Gang was recorded live during the spring meeting of the Gulf Coast Power Association in Houston, Texas. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Beth Garza, President of the Gulf Coast Power Association, Frank O'Sullivan, Managing Director for Clean Energy at S2G Ventures, and Ken Medlock, Senior Director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. The GCPA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a strong energy industry in the Texas and Gulf Coast region.First up Ed speaks with Beth about the increase in electricity demand in the region. Unlike most of the US, the Gulf of Mexico coastal region has already been seeing growth in demand for electricity over past couple of decades. But now there are signs that this growth is being kicked into a higher gear as a result of a wave of new data centers, manufacturing facilities and LNG plants. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in this new era.Increas

As half the world heads to the polls, how important will the results be for efforts to cut emissions?Over half the world lives in a country that will be holding an election this year. The votes come at a time when resistance to the energy transition is building in many parts of the world, as concerns around energy security grow and some of the challenges of decarbonization come into focus. In the US, a finely-balanced election offers voters two sharply differing visions of the energy future. But there are other places around the world where elections could also shape the direction of energy policy, including the EU, where parties that are skeptical of climate action are on course to win an increased number of seats in the European Parliament.To explore the ramifications of these key elections around the world, host Ed Crooks is joined by Energy Gang regular Amy Myers Jaffe, director of New York University’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, and by Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global energy & climat

Big power users are getting together to accelerate the development of advanced clean energy technologies.The hottest topic in energy right now is the expected surge in demand for electricity. Data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles are driving power consumption higher in the US, after about 15 years of stagnation. Solar and wind power can meet some of that increased demand, but many users, including data centers, want clean electricity round the clock. So there is a new urgency in the need for new clean energy technologies, including advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal, low-carbon hydrogen, and long duration storage.Unlike wind and solar, these emerging technologies have not yet been deployed at scale, and they are generally have much higher costs. There is a chicken-and-egg problem: costs will only come down as these technologies scale up, but companies are reluctant to deploy them because they are too expensive.Now Google, Microsoft and Nucor have come up with an idea that could b

AI isn’t just threatening to take our jobs, it’s also draining our electricity.Data centres centers used to have power demand measured in the tens of megawatts. Now they are in the hundreds of megawatts, and the new ones that are being proposed have demand in the thousands of megawatts: gigawatts. At the Distributech conference in Feburary, Harry Sideris of Duke Energy said it used to be a big deal when they had a customer wanting to add 10MW or 20MW of load. Now they have several planned data centers for AI needing 1000MW each. How is this additional demand being met?  The good news, from a climate point of view, is that part of the answer is going to be a lot more solar and wind power, and energy storage. The bad news is that, according to the plans that US utilities are setting out, there are going to be more gas-fired power plants, too. US gas-fired generation capacity is on course to rise by 25% over the next 15 years, and although those plants will increasingly be used mainly to back up variab

This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our third from the Distributech conference in Orlando.Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use that technology to serve their customers.In this episode, Ed is joined by Ali Ipakchi, Executive VP of Smart Grids and Green Power at OATI, a grid technology company. Ali was at Dtech in 2014, and some of the issues he was talking about then seem familiar still today. So what has really changed in technology for the power industry since then? Ali talks about how ideas and technologies that were cutting-edge and radical a decade ago are now becoming mainstream.Ed also sat down with Don McPhail, who’s Business Manager for energy and decarbonisation at Uplight, a software company that serves ut

On this episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang: what the history of innovation in solar power and batteries can teach us about the right ways to support clean energy breakthroughs.As the world moves towards a more sustainable energy future, government support is essential for research to develop new technologies, and for investment to deploy them at scale. But policymakers often seem to be blundering in the dark, grasping for policies that they hope will have the outcomes they want. So how do we know which strategies will be most effective for encouraging the progress we need, both to bring down the costs of existing technologies such as solar and wind power, and to create new breakthroughs in areas such as long-duration battery storage and nuclear power.On today’s episode, host Ed Crooks and regular guest Melissa Lott are joined by newcomer Jessika Trancik, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to discuss the progress of clean energy technologies.Jessika expla

When most people drive electric cars, what does that mean for the grid?This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our second from the Distributech conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use that technology to serve their customers.In this episode, Ed is joined by Quinn Nakayama, senior director of Grid Research Innovation and Development at Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) in California, to help us understand the transformative impact of electric vehicles on energy utilities and the grid. Quinn dives deep into the ways that the EV boom is shaking up customer relationships and forcing utility companies to take a fresh look at grid management.California is at the cutting edge of the EV revolu

What AI means for the energy transition in the electricity industryWelcome to a special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Distributech 2024 conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event in North America for the electricity transmission and distribution industry. It provides a fantastic opportunity to talk to the companies that provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and to the utilities and other companies that use that technology.The impact of artificial intelligence is one of the central themes of the conference, and host Ed Crooks has been meeting industry leaders to discuss the implications of AI and other new technologies for the future of electricity. From the need for more power to supply data centers for AI applications, to the potential for AI tools for managing the grid, to the possible breakthroughs in nuclear power that could be discovered using AI, the speakers explore a vast range of possibilities. Hussein Shel, chief technologist for AW

There are no two ways around it: 2023 was a difficult year for low-carbon energy investment, and 2024 has so far carried on in very much the same vein.Rising interest rates, fears around future energy policy, cost inflation in some sectors, and perhaps a correction to some earlier over-exuberance, have meant that shares in clean energy companies have generally under-performed the market.To take a couple of high-profile examples, Tesla shares have fallen about 55% from their peak in 2021, while Ørsted shares are down about 75%.Capital flows into climate-focused funds has also fallen sharply. Morningstar data suggested that climate-focused funds attracted about $38 billion of new investor money last year, down about 75% from 2021 levels. In the private markets, on the venture capital side, the flows into clean energy also seem to have fallen, if not quite as sharply.To examine the reasons why low-carbon energy investment is having a rough time of it at the moment, and explore some of the more positive indicatio

The US is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), super-cooled to about -160 °C (or -260 °F) so it can be shipped in tankers. An investment boom means export capacity will soar over the next few years. But last month the Biden administration signaled it was putting the brakes on future growth, announcing a “pause” in new approvals for LNG plants to export to nations that don’t have a free trade agreement with the US.This decision is expected to stall future US LNG projects by preventing them accessing key global markets including the EU, China, Japan, and the UK. The pause could be an issue in November’s elections: former President Donald Trump has said he would immediately restart approvals if elected.On the show this week, Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, Director of Research at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and Emily Grubert, Associate Professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame, to discuss the implications of the pause for both th

The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week, bringing together leaders from business, finance, politics, academia and culture. Regular Energy Gang guest Dr Melissa Lott was there, talking about one of the meeting’s central themes: long-term strategies for the climate, nature and energy. On this week’s show, she shares with host Ed Crooks and guest Julio Friedmann – who’s chief scientist at the carbon management company Carbon Direct – what she learned there. The role of artificial intelligence was, inevitably, high on the agenda there, with some people arguing that it will turn out to be one of the most transformational innovations in human history. The world of energy is already being changed by AI, and the gang discuss how wide-reaching the effects could be.Julio recently co-authored a report titled the “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap”, looking at all the different ways that AI could change supply and demand for energy and so have an

Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe and Dr Melissa Lott to look ahead to 2024. They explore the people, places, and technologies that could have a big influence on energy this year. Amy kicks things off with a look ahead to the US elections in November. The results of that vote will have big impact on policy in the US, and there are several other elections coming up around the world that could also have significant consequences for energy.COP28 in Dubai may be only just behind us, but the world is already looking ahead to COP29, which will be held in Azerbaijan. With Brazil lined up for COP30 next year, that will make three consecutive UNFCCC COPs in large oil-producing countries. The gang discuss how that could shape the energy transition.Then there are the technologies to watch in 2024, including Melissa’s choice, enhanced geothermal power. Fervo Energy’s Project Red geothermal facility went online in December, marking a major milestone for an energy source with huge potential. As Melissa explains,

Further conversations from this year’s summit.COP28 was the largest climate talks to date, with global industry leaders, governments,analysts, journalists and climate activists converging on Dubai for the summit.The Energy Gang's schedule was packed, and host Ed Crooks was joined by manyinteresting and influential people from the world of energy across 6 full days. In this episode, we bring you three new conversations that we couldn’t fit into the regular schedule.Kevin Kariuki is the Vice President for power, energy, climate and green growth at the African Development Bank. Laetitia De Marez is the Senior Program Director of the Climate Finance Access Network run by the thinktank RMI. Together they discuss ways to increaseinvestment in cutting emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change.Also, Ed explores a technology for reducing emissions with Mark Davis, the Chief Executiveof Capterio, which works on solutions to stop gas being wasted by being burned off in flares.For our full COP28 covera