American homes are filling up with batteries, EVs, and smart thermostats that could be coordinated to make the grid cheaper and more reliable — but almost none of them are. To understand why, it helps to watch what happens when the company best in the world at this tries to do it here. In Britain, Octopus Energy has built a giant virtual power plant out of its customers' devices. In the US, it has spent six years running into walls. Now it’s bought Uplight, which runs customer programs for 85 utilities. I talked with Nick Chaset, who runs both, about what's in the way and whether distributed energy can ever scale with US utilities … the way they are.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:02 – Octopus’s past year and the Uplight investment

05:18 – What makes the UK market work for Octopus

11:12 – Texas: fast growth, flattened volatility

14:57 – Will flexibility put itself out of business?

19:16 – Why Octopus stays out of Pennsylvania and New York

22:17 – Does residential retail competition have a future?

24:41 – Why utility programs trail Octopus on participation

32:17 – The demand stack and what planners can count on

39:11 – Kraken, Uplight and the overlap

46:04 – Consumer protection and the aggregator model

51:17 – Data centers and the social license to operate

55:11 – Do we need dynamic pricing?

58:30 – Five years out

Denmark gets a large share of its power from wind and other renewables and has cut its emissions roughly in half since 1990, but independent analysts doubt it will hit its 70 percent target for 2030. Kristian Jensen, CEO of Green Power Denmark and a former Danish minister of taxation, foreign affairs, and finance, argues the next stage is electrifying how Denmark uses energy: heat, transport, and industry. I talk with him about district heating and heat pumps, EVs and vehicle-to-grid, municipally owned grid companies and hourly power prices, biomass, carbon capture, power-to-X, solar’s “fields of iron” backlash, a grid oversubscribed with data center requests (an October 1 agreement has since put most data centers at the back of the queue), and whether the country’s political consensus will hold.

Chapters

00:00 – Introduction: Denmark and industrial symbiosis

02:44 – Is the 70% target for 2030 out of reach?

06:24 – Carbon capture and storage, and the peatlands lag

09:57 – Why electrification has lagged: biomass and wood pellets

14:45 – Few batteries, many interconnectors

16:48 – Data centers and the grid-connection prioritization bill

21:34 – Municipally owned grid companies

24:32 – Smart meters, hourly prices, and thermal batteries

28:40 – The solar backlash and local ownership

35:04 – Agrivoltaics and biodiversity

37:24 – District heating: heat pumps, geothermal, and finance

43:24 – The EV transition and vehicle-to-grid

47:45 – Road pricing and fiscal room

50:07 – Power-to-X and eSAF

54:21 – Can Denmark build enough clean power?

57:12 – Will the political consensus hold?

On this episode, recorded live at Climate Week NYC, I talk with Matt Traldi. He’s the founder and CEO of Greenlight America, which finds the local meetings where clean energy’s fate is being decided and recruits supporters to attend. Traldi argues that siting and permitting approvals turn on who shows up, and that local partners, conservative groups included, outperform outside advocates. We discuss how to measure impact, recent wins and losses, blue-state resistance, data center backlash, and Greenlight’s growth.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:09 – What Greenlight does and why Matt started it

04:41 – How Greenlight finds the decisions that matter

07:27 – Growth, and the tax credit deadline sprint

13:38 – Who shows up to local hearings

19:39 – Winning in conservative communities

22:35 – Bodies in the room, measuring impact, and win rates

27:46 – Losses, wins, and “there is no bag”

32:44 – Blue-state obstacles and organized opposition

36:31 – When data center backlash spills over onto clean energy

42:31 – Which projects Greenlight won’t back

45:38 – Lessons from housing and growing an organization

50:17 – Audience Q&A: disinformation and state permitting reform

54:39 – Audience Q&A: developers and elections

59:30 – Audience Q&A: funding local groups and designing community input