Ask Jigar: Should You Cut the Cord on Your Utility?

The Utilities Want $1.4 Trillion. The Hyperscalers Want a Gigawatt. Nobody Did the Math.

Electric utilities are on track to spend $1.4 trillion on the power grid by 2030. Hyperscalers keep asking for gigawatt-scale data centers. Nobody is required to show the math. Katherine Blunt covered PG&E's bankruptcy and the Camp Fire for The Wall Street Journal and wrote California Burning, the book PG&E CEO Patti Poppe made mandatory reading for all her employees when she took over. Now, Blunt covers Alphabet, where she is watching the AI buildout collide with the same regulatory machinery that produced PG&E. Jigar and Katherine get into PJM's white paper conceding the market needs to be redesigned, what Google figured out in its Xcel Minnesota deal that other hyperscalers haven't, and what trust looks like when utilities ask for a record-setting decade of spending. Plus: the one thing Katherine would mandate if she could — and it isn't interruptible service. Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar [https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar] S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order [https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order] Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas [https://octopusenergy.com/faas]

Ask Jigar: Should You Cut the Cord on Your Utility?

Solar on the roof. Battery in the garage. You can run your house yourself now. The question is what that does to the grid we all share. This week on Ask Jigar: what local clean-energy leaders should do now that the feds have pulled back. Whether virtual power plants will hurt utility valuations. Why nuclear supporters should love cheap battery storage. And whether mass defection from the California grid is real — or if NEM 3.0 already changed the math. Four questions. One answer: use the grid we already paid for. Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar [https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar]

Inside California's Plan to Fix the Utility Business Model with Senator Josh Becker

California built the one of the cleanest grids in the country and wholesale prices have never been lower — but utility bills keep going up. One reason: utilities make more money by spending more. California State Senator Josh Becker is writing the bills to change that. Before politics, Becker was in venture capital — he seeded Opower and worked on EPA's first Clean Air Marketplace Conference in 1992. Now he runs much of California's energy policy from Sacramento. Jigar and Arnab Pal (in for Jamie) talk with Becker about tying utility executive bonuses to keeping rates down, the metrics regulators should use to measure utility performance, why your home battery should count toward grid reliability, and how to use the grid we've already paid for before building more. Along the way: why the grid is like a Walmart parking lot built for Christmas Eve, the plan to take wildfire costs off your electricity bill, and Becker's blunt verdict that "hope is not a strategy." Plus: listener questions on virtual power plants, nuclear, and what happens when everyone goes off the grid — in this week's Ask Jigar. Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar [https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar] S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order [https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order] Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas [https://octopusenergy.com/faas]

Ask Jigar: Where do you actually start when you want to electrify your life?

A lot of people are walking around with energy questions and not getting straight answers. That changes now. Ask Jigar is a new weekly segment on Energy Empire. Three listener questions per episode. Jigar answers them on air. No hedging, no "it depends" non-answers. Should you sign a long-term electricity contract? Is your utility actually serious about clean energy? What separates the startups that make it from the ones that don't? Send it in. In this teaser: where do you actually start when you want to electrify your life? Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar [https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar] Ask Jigar is supported by Octopus Energy.

What If Data Centers Paid You?

The backlash against data centers is, in many places, a backlash against rising electricity bills. Nick Chaset, CEO of Octopus Energy US, thinks the solution isn’t to stop building — it’s to change who benefits. In this episode, Nick explains why the way data centers currently connect to the American power system puts the costs on nearby communities while sending the upside elsewhere. He breaks down how Octopus Energy flipped that dynamic in the UK by giving communities a direct financial stake in local wind energy through discounted bills — and how the same model could reshape the data center boom now unfolding across the US. Jigar, Jamie, and Nick get into what virtual power plants actually are, why networks of home batteries, EVs, and smart thermostats can function like power plants, why Texas is moving faster than California on clean energy deployment, and what it would take for homeowners in places like Loudoun County to get paid instead of squeezed. Plus: whether 160 gigawatts of virtual power plant capacity by 2030 is realistic — or wildly optimistic. Links: Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar [https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar] S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order⁠ [https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order] Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas [https://octopusenergy.com/faas]