The Gist

Carbon removal is in another difficult cycle. Investment has slowed, policy support in the U.S. has evaporated, and big buyers like Microsoft are reevaluating their commitment.

For this month’s Gist, Ad Hoc’s Max Tuttman spoke with Neil Renninger, a longtime climate-tech entrepreneur and investor to unpack the meaning of this moment. Neil co-founded Amyris and later founded Ample Carbon, which aims to convert retiring coal plants into carbon-negative power facilities, but is now pressing pause.

Can data centers become part of the solution to the grid constraints they’re helping create?

That’s the premise behind Google’s latest work on distributed energy resources
— from batteries and demand response to energy efficiency.

Ellen Zuckerman discusses why Google is investing in these resources, whether they can meaningfully free up grid capacity, and what regulators need to do to make these models work at scale.

Utilities have spent years reducing wildfire ignition risk, and much of that work has been necessary. But prevention has limits. Trees come down. Equipment fails. Lightning strikes. And when an ignition occurs, the first minutes can change the trajectory of an event.

In our latest piece, we argue that rapid suppression should be part of the utility wildfire conversation — not as a replacement for firefighters, but as part of a broader consequence-reduction strategy in the highest-risk areas. The question for regulators is no longer just: how do we prevent ignitions? But also: what is the plan for the fire that still starts?

Virginia is ground zero for the country’s data center boom and affordability crunch. Coupled with a new governor and a recently announced mega merger between the state’s biggest utility, Dominion Power and NextEra, things in Virginia are getting spicy.

In this month’s Gist, my colleague Max Davidson and I look at the first 100 days of Governor Spanberger’s tenure and, specifically, how she and the legislature are responding to the Commonwealth’s energy challenges.

The British are coming! Octopus Energy, the UK energy titan, announced it will acquire a majority stake in Uplight, which serves more than 85 utility customers in North America.

In this month’s Gist, we take you behind the scenes of the deal in a joint interview with Nick Chaset, who heads Octopus in North America, and Hannah Bascom, the GM of Uplight. What does this new partnership mean for the industry and why did it come together right now?

While the pitchforks are out for new data centers in some jurisdictions, creative approaches are emerging to facilitate speed to power without unreasonably burdening ratepayers.

In this month’s Gist, my colleague Annie Gilleo writes about the new “bring your own distributed capacity” concept that is getting the attention of hyperscalers, utilities, and regulators. It asks a simple question: Can we unlock capacity faster and more affordably by investing in new energy technology in people’s homes so that they benefit from the data center boom while also enabling it?

After a thought-provoking dinner conversation at last month’s Power Resilience Forum with Mari McClure, the CEO of Green Mountain Power in Vermont and Rudy Garza, the CEO of CPS Energy in Texas, that we asked them to do it all again for this month’s Gist.

In our interview, they break down the overly simplified narratives that have emerged about clean energy, resilience, data centers, and affordability. And they share what it’s really like to run utilities in two very different parts of the country right now; it turns out it’s neither monolithic nor simple.

The grid is reaching a breaking point. Utilities say they need a trillion dollars for upgrades by 2030. Regulators say: prove it. Somewhere between California’s wildfire zones and Florida’s hurricane corridors, we’re entering a period where every investment decision carries real political and economic consequences.

The core question is no longer whether we need a more resilient grid. It’s how much resilience is enough and who pays?