Stephen Lacey on Muck Rack

Stephen Lacey

Verified
United States
As seen in: Latitude Media, Open Circuit, Apple Podcasts, LinkedIn, Medium, MSN, The New York Times, Yahoo Life, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Telegraph, USA Today and
Co-founder and executive editor of Latitude Media. Covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. Co-host of Open Circuit.
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Articles by Stephen Lacey

Plug-in solar meets the grid crisis

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
America turned 250 years old last week. While local leaders were busy organizing parades, re-enactments, and flyovers, grid operators and emergency officials were dealing with something else entirely: a heat dome settled over the eastern U.S. Nearly 200 million people were under extreme heat warnings, the national parade in Washington was canceled, and PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, hit a new all-time demand record. The Energy Department issued emergency orders to keep the lights on.
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The new reality for data centers: No easy answers

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastructure got built on separate tracks because the grid had room to spare. That model is gone. Today, with long lead times for equipment, multi-year interconnection queues, and the pressure to bring your own generation, it all has to be sequenced together.
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Is commercial fusion finally near?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public’s attention, and then leads to disappointment when people realize that limitless energy from the stars is very hard to produce on Earth. But now fusion is evolving into a commercial story.
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SpaceX’s IPO is an energy story

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify. But either way, the company’s public debut tells us something important about this investment moment: the next technology cycle is not asset-light. It is ambitiously physical. SpaceX is now much more than rockets and launchpads.
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America’s electricity rage is here

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media. And you can see it in the polling. Across poll after poll, more people are saying that they can’t afford their bills and they think utilities need to change how they make money. And they are also very cynical about data centers.
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The biggest utility merger in US history?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we’re back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it’s getting harder than ever to site and build the data centers to alleviate it. This is shaking up who builds the energy infrastructure to serve it, and how it gets built. This week, we’re diving into the biggest utility deal in American history: NextEra’s attempt to buy Dominion.
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The direct air capture debate is missing the point

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By Yannai S. Kashtan, Jonathan J. Buonocore, Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
As Occidental Petroleum and BlackRock prepare to bring Stratos — the world’s largest direct air capture plant — online in the Permian Basin, a familiar debate has reignited: Does direct air capture actually remove more carbon than it emits? But that question, while important, isn’t the right one for policymakers and investors to ask. The more instructive questions are: For a given amount of money, which technology delivers the greatest public health and climate benefit?
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The climate messaging war is back. Does it matter if we can’t build?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change? It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing that Democrats should avoid talking about climate change. His case: climate carries far too much political baggage for working class voters that Democrats are trying to win back.
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Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It’s now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US. And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man. Now consider crypto. A few years ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best.
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Can data centers regain their social license?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development. That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into their backyards. Permits are being denied and projects are stalling.
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Utilities are in the crosshairs of the data center backlash

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Data center opposition is now being called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” In Indiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, voters across the political spectrum are turning sharply against the large campuses powering AI. At least 28 of the 38 states that currently offer tax incentives are weighing whether to roll them back. On this episode of Open Circuit, we dig into what’s actually driving the revolt, and why it’s more complicated than simple NIMBYism.
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As oil rationing spreads, what comes next? Plus, Fermi America’s collapse

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
As the oil crisis persists, the world is running on borrowed time and borrowed oil. Inventories are draining, and the pain that started in Asian petrochemical plants and Indian cooking fuel shipments is now spreading west. Now, the traders who move the world’s oil are saying there’s a reckoning coming for the rest of the world. This week, we dive into what happens if this keeps going. Does a shock this big finally weaken the world’s oil addiction? Or do we just go right back to where we started?
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A reckoning for the ‘electro-bros’

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: With electricity now the limiting factor in the race to build superintelligence, the tech industry’s response has been very Silicon Valley: move fast, break things, and relentlessly scale. The result? An overtaxed grid, a wave of community pushback, and an obsession with jet engines, ship turbines, and small modular reactors that don’t solve today’s problems.
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CPower and Vertiv collaborate to help data centers accelerate interconnection and unlock value from energy assets

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By Catherine Boudreau Verified, Stephen Lacey Verified, Elizabeth Whitney
| Latitude Media
PRESS RELEASE: Today at Transition-AI 2026, Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, and CPower Energy (“CPower“), a leading Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform, announced a new collaboration to help data centers in the United States accelerate speed-to-power and improve grid capacity by turning battery energy storage systems (BESS) and other behind-the-meter energy assets into grid resources.
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The natural gas ‘bridge’ becomes a highway

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
For a long time, fossil gas was considered a bridge fuel. Even the gas industry called it a bridge, working hand in hand with environmental groups to push coal off the grid. Then came the pushback over methane leaks, air quality in homes, and residential gas connections. The industry got so rattled it started hiring influencers to win back public opinion. Well, all that has changed radically. Who needs influencers when you have the tech companies who run the platforms?
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Don't get caught saying 'I'll get to it later' regarding an estate plan

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Yahoo Finance Verified
It’s one of the most common things we hear: “I know I need an estate plan — I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” When someone passes away without a will in Florida, the state steps in to decide who gets what. This process is entirely dictated by statute and rarely aligns perfectly with what someone would have wanted. While the law follows a general order of priority (spouse, children, and so on), it doesn’t account for the nuances of real life. Blended families are a common example.
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Have we run out of big ideas to fix the grid?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
America’s grid problems are often framed as physical constraints: equipment shortages, interconnection backlogs, and a lack of powered land. But are we missing an opportunity to bring bigger ideas to the table as we reindustrialize and electrify the economy? This week, Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, joins the show to talk about why our biggest constraint is an inability to plan, coordinate, and build at the scale this moment demands.
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Grid utilization vs expansion: The 100 GW debate

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: We’re entering an electricity supercycle that is reshaping how power gets built, where it gets built, and who controls it. Across the U.S., developers are scrambling to lock up land with access to electricity. And the century-old grid is being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for. It’s also sparking a new debate about how exactly to modernize the grid. For all the talk of capacity scarcity, the system sits idle for much of the time.
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When Learning Gets Expensive: Exploring Placement Poverty in Medical Radiation Science (MRS) Students

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By G. Byrne, Min Ku, Stephen Lacey Verified
| Wiley Online Library Verified
1 Introduction The Australian Society of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy (ASMIRT) is the leading professional body representing medical radiation practitioners in Australia. We are dedicated to upholding the highest standards of practice and advancing excellence in medical radiation science. ASMIRT empowers practitioners to deliver outstanding patient care through leadership in advocacy, education, professional standards, and research & innovation.
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State of the transition: Oil shocks, power prices, and grid bottlenecks

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Everyone has a strong opinion on energy right now. If you’ve followed energy for a while, none of this is new. There have always been strong opinions — renewables versus fossil fuels, subsidies versus markets, activists versus infrastructure. But the intensity feels different right now.
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Emerald AI integrates with NVIDIA DSX Flex to unlock up to 100 GW of grid capacity for next-generation AI factories

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By Stephen Lacey Verified, Bianca Giacobone, Nick Zenkin
| Latitude Media
PRESS RELEASE: Emerald AI today announced a newly completed demonstration in Hillsboro, Oregon, in collaboration with NVIDIA, Portland General Electric, and EPRI, that shows how AI factories can respond precisely to utility signals, while maximizing the performance of priority AI workloads.
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Iran, energy shocks, and the case for distributed power

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
President Trump’s war with Iran has rattled global energy markets. Oil prices have surged, LNG markets are tightening, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply — has been severely disrupted. Tankers are stalled, shipping costs are soaring, and energy markets are bracing for one of the largest oil supply disruptions in history.
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The White House AI power pledge: Political theater or policy?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
The politics of AI and electricity came to the White House this week. On Wednesday, the biggest tech companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle — gathered in Washington to sign what the administration is calling a “ratepayer protection pledge.” The promise: data centers will pay for their own power and grid integration costs. But is anything actually changing? Or is it just political theater?
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Clean energy didn’t collapse in 2025. It adapted

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: When President Trump kicked off an aggressive trade war, a lot of people predicted economic doom. But it didn’t happen. We’re seeing something similar in clean energy right now with ever-shifting tariffs, half-written rules on foreign sourcing, and the weaponization of permitting. But capital hasn’t fled. In fact, it increased last year. So what is happening here?
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Are investors losing faith in the AI infrastructure frenzy?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
This year alone, the biggest tech companies plan to spend more than $600 billion on physical infrastructure — eclipsing the railroad boom, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo space program. But are investors starting to flinch? This week, we examine the negative market reaction to tech earnings. Is Wall Street reacting to the infrastructure bottlenecks that stand in the way of building at that scale? Or are they worried about the tech industry’s approach to solving them?
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EPRI, NVIDIA, Prologis, and InfraPartners announce collaboration to produce smaller data centers for the AI era

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By Catherine Boudreau Verified, Stephen Lacey Verified, Lisa Jenkins
| Latitude Media
RESS RELEASE: EPRI today announced a collaboration with Prologis, NVIDIA, and InfraPartners to study smaller-scale data centers designed for distributed inference, a form of real-time data processing used across sectors including logistics, health care, finance, and public services. The announcement was made today at DTECH.
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Could Fervo Energy's IPO finally be a breakout moment for geothermal? That’s what we tackled on Open Circuit this week. As the company prepares to go public, it's a moment of price discovery for… | Stephen Lacey

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By Stephen Lacey Verified, Laurent Segalen, Nurai Shalabayeva
| LinkedIn
Play Video PlayBack to start Show CaptionsFullscreen Could Fervo Energy's IPO finally be a breakout moment for geothermal? That’s what we tackled on Open Circuit this week. As the company prepares to go public, it's a moment of price discovery for investors at a time when everyone agrees that we need a lot more clean, firm power.
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Is this geothermal’s breakout moment?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
2026 could be the year of the mega-IPO, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic all rumored to be eyeing public markets. But for energy nerds and hot-rock lovers, there’s another IPO to watch: Fervo Energy. With Fervopreparing for a long-anticipated IPO, the geothermal sector is heading into a moment of price discovery. It’s a test of whether next-generation geothermal has finally crossed a new commercialization threshold and becoming bankable, repeatable infrastructure.
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From PJM reform to VPPs: The politics of making electricity cheaper

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Electricity affordability has become the defining energy issue of 2026.As policymakers scramble for solutions, two very different playbooks are taking shape. On one side, a blunt-force federal approach led by the Trump Administration that treats affordability like an emergency. Keep coal plants open. Force markets to change. Make large power users pay directly for new power plants through market interventions.
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A five-alarm fire for the grid?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: It’s been nearly a year since a national energy emergency was declared, with big promises on prices and reliability. So we’re asking a simple question: how’s that going? In this live episode of Open Circuit, recorded at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, we take stock of a power system under growing strain.
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Inside Meta’s massive nuclear push

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Meta just unveiled the biggest-ever corporate deal for nuclear power. It’s a sprawling set of contracts for both existing plants and next-generation reactors that totals 6.6 gigawatts. Just a few years ago, the conversation in the U.S. was about which nuclear plants were going to shut down next. Now, some of the world’s largest technology companies are trying to lock them up under long-term contracts, while building new ones.
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Who controls power in the AI era?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: This is an episode with a lot of firsts: the first show of the year, the first full show on video, and the first with our new co-host, Caroline Golin. In 2026, we’re launching a new chapter for Open Circuit as we sharpen our focus on the physical constraints shaping the energy transition — exploding power demand, grids that can’t keep up, tech companies reshaping electricity markets in real time, and investors trying to figure it all out.
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Katherine’s final episode

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: After more than 40 years in the energy industry, Katherine Hamilton is retiring. And that means she’s also retiring from the podcast after a decade behind the microphone. In this farewell episode, Katherine shares insights into a career that spanned one of the most transformative periods in energy history.
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The 2025 twists, villains, and breakout stars in energy

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: This year, the energy industry changed faster than we could talk about it. We collectively said more than 225,000 words on this show — some of them were informed takes, some speculation. So how did they age? This week, Stephen reaches into a stocking stuffed with quotes from past episodes, and Jigar and Katherine must decide to defend, update, or disown their own words. Then, we honor the storylines and surprises that defined the year.
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Three years on, AI’s vibes come up against grid realities

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
It’s been three years since ChatGPT kicked off a frantic sprint to build the physical infrastructure for a new species of intelligent machines. Seeing the race as zero-sum, the top tech companies have collectively teed up more than a trillion dollars in capital expenditures to expand computing power.
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The tension at the heart of the AI-energy nexus

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Three years after ChatGPT ignited the AI race, the assumptions driving the trillion-dollar data-center boom are starting to shift.The belief that endlessly scaling large language models will unlock AGI — and justify unprecedented growth in electricity demand — is now being questioned by some of the field’s most influential voices.
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A feast of hot takes: The defining stories of 2025

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: This year in energy has had the vibes of a dysfunctional family gathering: everyone showed up with big feelings, and no one agreed on the menu. To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re processing the chaos right at the dinner table. In this holiday special, the team matches classic Thanksgiving guest archetypes with the biggest energy storylines of 2025. Who is the drunk uncle sucking up all the oxygen in the room? Who is the pragmatic parent holding the family together?
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The grid resilience dilemma

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Utilities are facing a collision of pressures: extreme weather, rising load, affordability concerns, and growing regulatory friction. Everyone agrees the grid needs to be hardened. But the real question is: how much resilience should we pay for? On one side, utilities are confronting unprecedented stress from storms, wildfires, flooding, and heat.
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Why is Bill Gates stuck on the tired innovation vs. deployment debate?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: After Bill Gates dropped a new climate manifesto, the internet did what it always does: lost its mind. Conservatives claimed victory, progressives accused him of selling out, and somewhere in the middle was a real debate about how the energy transition actually happens. This week, in our episode recorded live at Greentown Labs, we’re jumping into the fray. What does the debate say about the state of climate tech in 2025?
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If large loads lower rates, how can data centers do the same?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Here’s something surprising: in states like North Dakota and Texas, the surge of new industrial and data center load has actually moderated electricity prices. The very thing many people blame for higher power bills has, in some cases, had the opposite effect. According to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, load growth has slightly lowered retail electricity prices on average over the past five years. So what’s really driving them up?
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The AI race is really an electro-industrial race, led by China

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: After years of U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors, Beijing is fighting back by cutting off exports of the raw materials that make those chips possible: rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium — the invisible ingredients inside motors, power electronics, defense systems, and data centers. The move caught Washington off guard.
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How do we know if we’re in an AI bubble?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: The AI economy isn’t coming. It’s already here. In the first half of 2025, investment in AI infrastructure outpaced all U.S. consumer spending. Tech companies are now building the equivalent of an Apollo program every ten months, while data centers are drawing capital away from nearly every other sector. As money floods into chips, servers, and substations, the “B word” is suddenly on everyone’s lips: bubble.
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Is this moment for distributed energy different?

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: Distributed energy resources have never looked stronger. Fleets of batteries are now performing like gas plants, virtual power plants are dispatched daily, and hyperscalers are supporting new models to finance capacity around their data centers. But investor-owned utilities?
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On this week's Open Circuit, Jigar Shah offers his blunt take on how he would cut rates 20% by 2030. Here's how he would put flexibility first, make every device useful, and stop overbuilding the… | Stephen Lacey

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| LinkedIn
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Building an AI power strategy that lasts

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By Stephen Lacey Verified, KR Sridhar
| Latitude Media
Join us for an intimate conversation between Stephen Lacey, executive editor of Latitude Media, and KR Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy, as they tackle the most pressing question facing the tech and energy industries today: what is the winning power strategy for the AI revolution? The data center industry is investing trillions in infrastructure while racing against permitting timelines and grid constraints.
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America’s building bottleneck threatens the energy transition

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: America is choosing obstruction over abundance. While AI, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing require massive infrastructure investments, we’re trapped in a permitting system designed for a different era — and a political system that rewards blocking over building.
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Pain, resilience, and bargain hunting for climate tech investors

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: The climate tech investment landscape is undergoing a major recalibration. After a period of rapid growth and inflated valuations, investors and startups are now navigating a complex environment shaped by tariffs, shifting incentives, and economic clouds. In this episode of Open Circuit, we examine the latest data and investor sentiment trends with Kim Zou, CEO of Sightline Climate.
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Tesla’s fork in the road

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
When Elon Musk canceled Tesla’s affordable Model 2 last year to go all-in on Robotaxis, he may have made the most consequential decision in the company’s history. As Chinese automaker BYD captures global market share with lower-cost vehicles and superior charging technology, has Tesla prematurely surrendered the market it created?
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Fear and loathing at the Department of Energy

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
The Department of Energy is losing talent at an alarming rate. Described by insiders as a “hostile takeover,” the agency’s transformation under Trump has pushed out thousands of scientists, engineers, and policy experts. What’s left behind are gutted offices, stalled infrastructure projects, and billions in funding commitments thrown into question. This isn’t a typical government transition — it’s a systematic dismantling of America’s energy brain trust.
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Tariffs, delays, high costs: The harsh realities facing the energy transition

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By Stephen Lacey Verified
| Latitude Media
Listen to the episode on: This week, we’re asking the central question of the energy transition: How fast are we going? Clean energy is bringing in $2 trillion of investment annually. Wind and solar now account for the vast majority of new electricity capacity globally. And we may already be at “peak trade” of fossil fuels. And yet, when we look at the share of renewables in final energy consumption, they’re increasing only incrementally around the world.
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