When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts.
Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of ChatGPT 3 ... Show More
Oct 22
The thermal battery transforming cold storage for India’s dairy farmers
In 2007 Sam White, co-founder of Promethean Power Systems, was traveling through India looking for a rural electrification problem to solve. He and his team had just won a $10,000 grant in an MIT competition, and they wanted to find an industry in India that needed their help. Af ... Show More
40m 37s
Sep 30
How can the grid help AI, and how can AI help the grid? Live from NYU at New York Climate Week, featuring leaders from Nvidia and Amazon | Energy Gang Live from Climate Week
<p>Recorded in front of a packed room at NYU’s Kimmel Center during Climate Week NYC, Ed Crooks and Amy Myers Jaffe moderate a debate on the high-stakes topic of AI and energy. They dig deep into the questions raised by the surge of investment in data centers: what it means for g ... Show More
1h 8m
Oct 6
James van Geelen on the Next Phase of the AI Buildout
Money has been flowing into the AI space, with billions pouring into GPU clusters, data centers, gas turbines, and the infrastructure needed to train and deploy bigger and bigger models. So what comes next? On this episode, we speak with James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Resea ... Show More
38m 38s
Feb 2025
More 2025 trends: DeepSeek, plug-in hybrids, and curtailment
Didn’t catch last week’s episode on Nat Bullard’s mega slide deck on energy transition? Start there.
This is the second half of our extended conversation with Nat, the former chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon.
In this ... Show More
47m 45s
Jun 2025
The state of play of data center development
The future of the grid increasingly hinges on where and how data centers get built. To forecast the kind of power infrastructure we need to meet AI’s growing appetite, we first need to understand a laundry list of variables: data center size, workload type, latency, reliability — ... Show More
36m 24s
Jun 2024
AI’s Insatiable Needs Wreak Havoc on Power Systems
AI data centers are huge energy black holes, consuming as much energy as 30,000 homes – and their rapid growth is straining global grids. The numbers are astonishing: Sweden could see power demand from data centers roughly double over the course of this decade. In the UK, AI is e ... Show More
14m 44s
Apr 2025
What’s next for the battery storage boom? [partner content]
The U.S. storage market is experiencing hockey-stick growth, with multiple gigawatts being installed quarterly. But new policy uncertainties around tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act are threatening this momentum. But Jeff Waters, the CEO of Powin, remains optimistic. "This ... Show More
20m 4s
Jan 2025
'Godfather of AI' Backs Musk Lawsuit, Data Centers Distort Electric Grid, and 2025 Predictions From 1925
We're experimenting and would love to hear from you!In this episode of Discover Daily, we delve into the latest developments in the OpenAI lawsuit, where AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has thrown his support behind Elon Musk's legal challenge. The episode explores the contro ... Show More
8m 43s
Sep 2024
Get ready for season four
Over the past three seasons of With Great Power, we've met some of the incredible people working to make our power grid smarter, cleaner, and more resilient. We've examined the complexity of policy and regulation. We tackled the challenges of adopting new technologies like artifi ... Show More
1m 58s