With Great Power
Episodes
How Google is Taking Energy Efficiency from Server Rooms to Living Rooms
09 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Ellen Zuckerman followed her nose, literally, into her first career as an energy auditor in New York City. She had an uncanny ability to sniff out dan...
How a Florida water utility is tapping into AI
26 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
After emigrating from Cuba to the U.S. at age ten, Georges Gonzalez struggled to find his voice and his passion. It took joining the Civil Air Patrol ...
Taming explosive load growth with rate design
12 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fifteen years ago, Scott Engstrom thought utilities were boring, bureaucratic organizations where people went for job security. But after co-founding ...
Optimizing distributed energy resources
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Audrey Zibelman’s first job as a trial lawyer in a male-dominated firm in Minneapolis wasn’t a good fit. So she moved to the state’s attorney ge...
How VPPs came of age
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 2007, Apple released its first iPhone. That same year, Seth Frader-Thompson co-founded EnergyHub, planning to leverage smartphones to help consumer...
PJM’s high stakes reform
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 2019, when Julia Hoos moved to Houston for a role with Boston Consulting Group, she had no interest in the energy industry. For one thing, it was —...
Can AI help save the grid?
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in Silicon Valley, Varun Sivaram didn’t look to Elon Musk or Sergey Brin to learn about success stories. He looked to his dad, a material...
National Grid maps its wildfire risk
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From his early days as a paper boy and eagle scout to his time as a naval officer decades later, Casey Kirkpatrick has always believed in service. Tod...
How millions of small shifts make gigawatts of energy capacity
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most kids don’t think much about how buildings are powered or how much energy they waste. But growing up in an old, inefficient apartment building i...
How Eversource became the first US utility to provide geothermal power
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Nikki Bruno learned early in her career that debates over climate change – and how to respond – are seldom black and white. Progress comes from ho...
High stakes for state-level clean energy
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Heather O’Neill’s career in energy started in a pretty unusual place: working for a Republican billionaire. But in 2004 she joined the Robertson F...
‘Wonky solutions’ to support grid resilience
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
At age 10, Neil Chatterjee found common ground with his immigrant father through politics. Watching then-Vice President George H. W. Bush spar with Mi...
Season 6 is coming soon!
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The power sector is at an inflection point. Skyrocketing load growth and rising energy prices are converging with an aging electric grid, inadequate...
Unconventional lessons in customer experience
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Nigeria, tens of millions of people live without access to reliable power. Utibe Bassey grew up in Lagos, and knows what it’s like to not have el...
Why utilities are consumer product companies now
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chris Black had always planned on being an architect. But during his freshman year in college, he pivoted to computer science. On the surface, it look...
Can your EV save the grid?
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During a visit to Silicon Valley in 2015, Nick Woolley realized that the many Teslas he saw whizzing past him were not just new cars, they could also ...
A second shot at smart meters
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015, Laura Sherman and her colleagues from Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet’s office rode horses into a special part of the Rocky Mountains calle...
Crunching the numbers on the nuclear renaissance
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mike Kramer has always liked puzzles. But in 2017 he faced one harder than any sudoku. This one involved the livelihoods of hundreds of American famil...
Energy outreach from small towns to the world stage
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 2000s, when she was doing legal work in her native Texas, Sheri Givens held state government roles that put her in the thick of energy po...
Taming explosive load growth with rates
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fifteen years ago, Scott Engstrom thought utilities were boring, bureaucratic organizations where people went for job security. But after co-founding ...
Bringing organized markets to the Wild West
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2001, Carrie Simpson sat at her desk on the trading floor of Enron confused, disenchanted, and unsure of what would happen next. A recent ...
Your attic insulation is a grid asset
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Jurassic Park clip at an audio-visual store in Indianapolis got Seth Little thinking about smart homes as a teenager in the 1990s. That moment led h...
From pandemic to power grids
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Adam Helman has spent his entire career in emergency management. But after working for the New York State Department of Health during the COVID pandem...
Building AI tools to outsmart wildfires
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1994, Joaquin Ramirez took a job with a wildland fire-fighting crew in his native Spain. That year, Spain saw some of the most destructive fires in...
How a Colorado utility plans to generate 30 megawatts by 2030
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A decade ago, Zach Borton had a lightbulb moment when studying energy economics at Ohio State University: the grid was trending toward decentralizatio...
Mastering the demand stack
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since her first power sector job with Pacific Gas & Electric, Hannah Bascom knew she wanted to focus on people and clean energy — not on what she ca...
Season 5 is coming soon!
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re a With Great Power fan, you know that we launched this show over two years ago to explore how people are tackling some of the biggest prob...
Building a data-centric digital grid
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During her early days in Quaker schools, Alexina Jackson learned to question everything and examine how systems work. Years later, those same principl...
Unearthing geothermal’s potential for heating and cooling
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Yates co-founded Opower in 2007, based on the belief that consumers want to use less energy—and that their utilities could actually help them do...
The energy economics of safe, comfortable homes
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Destenie Nock knows what it’s like to struggle with the high cost of energy. When she was in grad school, her electricity got cut off because she co...
The Texas battery boom
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Keith Collins knows electricity markets. After a stint consulting for the New York Independent System Operator, he joined FERC in 2004. After that, he...
Harvesting food and energy with agrivoltaics
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, there’s not much growing in Iowa. But Nick Peterson, strategic partnerships manager for Alliant Energy, is already thinking about next su...
The realities of clean energy on tribal land
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chéri Smith is a descendant of the Mi'kmaq Nation, native to northeastern North America. She has worked in clean energy for most of her career, bu...
Turning school buses into a VPP
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With their short, predictable routes and large battery size, electric school buses are well suited for vehicle-to-grid applications, especially since ...
Severe storms are fast-tracking grid resiliency projects
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in 2021, it led to more than 240 deaths and hobbled the electric grid for days. At the time, Arushi Sharma Frank was w...
Survey highlights limits of green messaging
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Nathan Shannon was working for a community land trust in Georgia, building affordable housing. But following his interest in behavioral econo...
What is and isn't clean energy?
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Toby Ferenczi used to work for an energy provider that marketed 100% clean energy but also ran a demand response program. When customers started askin...
Will today’s election set the energy transition on a new course?
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sonia Aggarwal spent the early years of her career moving between nonprofits and the private sector, supporting renewable energy deployment. But after...
Get ready for season four
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 res...
Advanced processing is making clean energy cheaper
20 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Marc Spieler had been at the oil and gas giant Halliburton for 13 years when he first saw inklings of the energy transition – like Shell’s investm...
Grid-enhancing tech emerges from 'pilot hell'
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hudson Gilmer worked in telecom in the 90’s when the industry transformed how data moved. And it didn’t take long for him to realize that a simila...
Thinking differently about the utility customer experience
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Nigeria, tens of millions of people live without access to reliable power. Utibe Bassey grew up in Lagos, and knows what it’s like to not have el...
NOAA is helping utilities face multiplying climate threats
09 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Kapnick has always been drawn to solving complex problems, and as a kid she dreamed of being a mathematician. But a stronger desire to work on m...
Why a rural co-op wants to build green hydrogen
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Luis Reyes is a lifer at Kit Carson Electric, a rural energy co-operative in northern New Mexico. He grew up in a home powered by the utility and has ...
How Avangrid built a data foundation for AI
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Waclawiak was tuned into energy issues at an early age. Both his parents worked in the industry: his mom designed electrical systems for building...
Getting innovators to 'fail fast' in the energy industry
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kim Getgen moved to Silicon Valley from Washington D.C. in 2000, just in time for the dot com bubble burst. Despite her timing, she fell hard for the ...
Why dynamic rates are gaining momentum
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ahmad Faruqui has been researching electricity pricing since the mid 1970’s, when the cost of a kilowatt-hour was flat. But in the 80’s and 90’s...
How PG&E is using batteries to improve service
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Heather Rock has always liked grappling with big, existential questions. Knowing she wanted to “serve a carbon-neutral future,” she left Chevron i...
Forecast calls for an overtaxed grid
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From his early days working on regulatory policy on the Hill to his current role as president of Grid Strategies, Rob Gramlich has been focused on fut...
The urgent need for more grid automation
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, Dr. Kyri Baker was a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on a new home energy management system. Called Foresee, t...
Could utilities become the 'FedEx of electricity'?
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In early 2023, things were moving along as planned for a rate restructuring plan at Holy Cross Energy, a rural electric co-op in Colorado. The board o...
Season three is on the way
13 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past two seasons of With Great Power, you've heard stories from all kinds of people working at the front lines of change on the power grid. ...
Addressing inequities in the switch to EVs
12 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There are more than 250 million cars on U.S. roads today. Only about 1% of them are electric. But with seven million more EVs projected to hit the roa...
Making electrification accessible to all
28 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 20 years, Kerri Carnes has worked a lot of different jobs at Arizona Public Service, or APS. She's been an administrative assistant, rea...
Supporting the next wave of climate tech startups
14 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A wave of extreme weather this year has left Jim Kapsis questioning whether utilities are prepared for more frequent, intense weather events in the fu...
Bringing the electric co-op into the 21st century
31 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rappahannock Electric Cooperative recently received a $38 million grant through the Department of Energy's Grid Innovation and Partnership Program. Th...
Plotting clean energy strategy for the corporate world
17 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, Edison International was rethinking how to boost their efforts toward fighting climate change. As the parent company behind Southern Californ...
Making sure Chicago's energy transition works for all communities
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In January, Illinois' largest utility released ComEd 2030 – their roadmap for providing clean power for more than 4 million customers. For CEO ...
How green hydrogen could be the go-to fuel for the energy transition
19 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Renewables are having a moment. Wind and solar capacity in the US went up 13 gigawatts last year, now totaling more than 238 gigawatts nationwide. And...
The push for long duration storage
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
America’s new renewable power capacity is expected to triple each year through 2030. To decarbonize the grid, there needs to be a way to store those...
Preparing the grid for millions more electric cars
22 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
EVs are a huge piece of the decarbonization puzzle. But as Apoorv Bhargava realized over his career working in the power business, utilities across th...
How LA is putting the public first in its energy transition
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power asked NREL to help them figure out what would it take to get LA's enti...
How California’s worst wildfire rocked the power industry
25 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The 2018 Camp fire was the most destructive wildfire in California's history. By the time the smoke cleared, more than 150,000 acres had burned. Damag...
What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A third of the world's largest companies now have net-zero targets in place for carbon emissions. Google was ahead of the curve. Back in 2007, it had ...
Season two is coming soon
02 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last 12 episodes, we have heard some fascinating personal and professional stories about people who are pushing innovation on the grid – fr...
Distribution planning is on the docket
25 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, Lisa Schwartz was stunned when a colleague at the Oregon Public Utility Commission told her utility distribution planning budgets never saw t...
How can utilities harness their innovation mojo?
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Katherine Hamilton, working at Dominion Virginia Power ran in the family. Her grandfather Leon built a career there. As a young engineer, she lear...
The state of the digital transition for utilities
28 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The smart meter unlocked a trove of data on how people use energy in their homes. And it created the opportunity for utilities to offer more services ...
What cleaning the grid means for Californians
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and more frequent, which strains the electric grid. As an employee of Southern Californi...
Putting innovation into practice inside utilities
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There's a saying in the business world that if you're not innovating, you're dying. For Josh Gould, that applies to utilities, too.In the risk-averse ...
Tapping the non-energy benefits of efficiency
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Everything around us can be personalized. Our homes, our cars, our online shopping experience. And that’s what consumers have come to expect. As uti...
How the race to electrify is impacting utilities
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Buildings account for nearly 40% of America’s CO2 emissions, making the built environment critical for meeting net-zero goals. Utilities are starti...
Maximizing the value of distributed energy
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Distributed energy resources, or DERs, can be a powerful tool for managing the local grid. They’re more complicated to manage than traditional elect...
The complex puzzle of rate design
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Finding the local value of renewables can be a complex exercise. If rates don't properly reflect the value of distributed energy and the central grid ...
How utilities can help sell more electric cars
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The grid is no longer the biggest source of carbon emissions in America. It's transportation.Electric vehicles are a key part of decarbonizing the tra...
Tara Seavers on building real trust with customers
29 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This summer, a combination of extreme heat and soaring natural gas prices hit electricity customers hard along the gulf coast. And Tara Seavers had a ...
Carlos Nouel is making the “new stuff” normal
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When smart meters came on the scene, the industry talked about them in transformational ways. And while smart meters have given utilities more insight...
A show about the people building the future electric grid
06 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When an industry that’s remained the same for almost 100 years starts to change quickly, there are a lot of questions to answer. And every other we...