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Past Issues
The Ad Hoc Gist: Who Pays For a Resilient Grid?
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?
On last week’s Open Circuit podcast, my partner Julia Hamm joined hosts Stephen Lacey, Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah to cut through the noise and explain what’s happening behind the scenes. Julia and Jigar also went at it a bit, which I always find entertaining! Read this month’s Gist for the key takeaways.
The Ad Hoc Gist: How Urbint’s $325M Exit Proved Many VCs Wrong
Itron recently announced its $325 million acquisition of Urbint, marking a significant exit in the climate resilience software space. The deal comes at an interesting time. Climate tech M&A exits are down 25% year over year, yet acquisitions now represent 92% of all exits in the sector.
We sat down with Urbint founder and CEO, Corey Capasso, one of AHG’s first clients, to discuss what this exit signals for founders selling to utilities and how the utility market has transformed from a graveyard for startups into fertile ground.
The Ad Hoc Gist: AI is Transforming Weather Forecasting
Weather forecasting is undergoing a period of rapid transformation driven by AI and surging demand for more precise, local, and actionable information. In an age of increasingly destructive extreme weather, the right weather intelligence can be the difference between safety and calamity.
In this month’s Gist, we spoke with meteorologist Sunny Wescott and Matt Stein, CEO of Salient Predictions, about why utilities still get caught off-guard by predictable storms, how AI is reshaping risk assessment and complementing physics-based models, and what it really takes to embed weather intelligence into daily operations.