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Rob and Jesse touch base with WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Rob and Jesse hang with Dig Energy co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
Rob debriefs with colleagues on the latest climate news.
In a special episode of Shift Key, Rob interviews Representative Sean Casten about his new energy price bill, plus Emerald AI’s Arushi Sharma Frank.
Artificial intelligence is helping to drive up electricity demand in America. Energy costs are rising, and utilities are struggling to adjust. How should policymakers — and companies — respond to this moment?
On this special episode of Shift Key, recorded live at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, Rob leads a conversation about some potential paths forward. He’s joined first by Representative Sean Casten, the coauthor of a new Democratic bill seeking to lower electricity costs for consumers. How should the grid change for this new moment, and what can Democrats do to become the party of cheap energy?
Then he’s joined by Arushi Sharma Frank, an adviser to Emerald AI, an Nvidia-seeded startup that helps data centers flexibly adjust their power consumption to better serve the grid. Sharma Frank has worked for utilities and tech companies — she helped stand up Tesla’s energy business in Texas — and she discusses what utilities, tech companies, and startups can learn from each other?
Congressman Casten represents Illinois’s 6th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a former clean energy entrepreneur and CEO, and he sits on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. He is also vice chair of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.
Arushi Sharma Frank is an adviser to She has previously worked in roles at Tesla, Exelon Constellation, the Electric Power Supply Association, and the American Gas Association. She is a non-resident expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Earlier you said something that I want to go back to, which was that our energy system doesn’t reward cheap energy, and it hasn’t been set up to reward cheap energy. What did you mean by that?
Representative Sean Casten: So at a high level, no market, left to its own devices, will reward cheap things. Because if I’m a buyer, I want to buy things for cheap. If you’re a seller, you want to sell things for a lot of money. I remember my dad, when I was a kid, had a little paperweight on his desk. It was an oil barrel, and on one side it said, “Relax, the price will go down,” and on the other side it said, “Relax, the price will go up.” And depending on which side of a negotiation you were on, that was how you pointed the oil barrel.
What’s happened in the energy sector that has made that hard is that, because it is such a highly regulated sector, we’ve vastly over-advantaged the producers in what would otherwise be an even negotiation. So, for example, if you as a consumer want to put a solar panel on the roof of your house, you have to get permission from your local utility, who’s going to lose the revenue, who can raise all sorts of technical objections and do that.
If you have a solar panel and you say, boy, there’s hours when I’m making more power than I want, or than I need, maybe my neighbor would like to have some of my excess — well, you’re not a regular utility. You’re not allowed to do that. Your neighbor can’t buy it from you. These are because of laws we’ve set up that says only that utility has the right to do it.
Outside of the electric space, there’s a law that’s been on the book since 1935, the Natural Gas Act, that says that you cannot build a gas export facilities in the United States unless it is in the national interest. Is it in the national interest to raise people’s price of gas? That was never specified in the act. And so when the Trump administration went through and approved all those assets — which by the way, the Biden administration had shut down in part because they said it’s in the national interest — they said, well, we think it’s in the national interest to look out for our gas producers.
Somewhat more recently than that, when the price of oil collapsed during COVID in April of 2020, Trump called the Saudis and said, we are going to withhold military aid from Saudi Arabia unless you raise the price of oil. The Saudis flinched and the price of oil went up, and he was praised on the cover of all the business magazines as saving our oil industry.
Why didn’t we do the same thing two years later when everybody was complaining about the price of oil being so high and we had a Democrat in the White House? We’ve always had this feeling, like, I need to look out for producers, because the producers have had more political clout. We’ve connected those things together, and you can be angry about that. You can be embarrassed about that. Or you can see it as an unbelievable opportunity to generate a tremendous amount of wealth to lower energy costs — and oh, by the way, cut a bunch of CO2 emissions.
Mentioned:
Democrats Bid to Become the Party of Cheap Energy
Heatmap’s Katie Brigham on Emerald AI, a.k.a. The Software That Could Save the Grid
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
Salesforce, presenting sponsor of Heatmap House at New York Climate Week 2025.
Rob and Jesse talk to Ember’s Kingsmill Bond about how electricity is reshaping global geopolitics.
A new stack of electricity technologies — including solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and power electronics — seem to be displacing fossil fuels across China and the developing world. Are we watching an irresistible technological revolution happen? Or is something weirder going on — something that has far more to do with China’s singular scale and policy goals than physics and economics?
Kingsmill Bond argues that a global electrotech revolution has already begun — and that it will soon sweep Europe and the United States, too. Bond is an energy strategist at Ember, a London-based electricity data think tank. He previously worked for more than 30 years as a financial market analyst and strategist, including at Deutsche Bank and Citibank.
On this week’s show, Rob and Jesse talk with Bond about what the electrotech revolution looks like worldwide in 2025, why electricity will win out against fossil fuels, and how American and European climate policy should respond to this moment — and if they can respond at all. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation.
Robinson Meyer: How do we know this is a true solar, battery, EV-led revolution — with the full electrotech, the full beautiful, zero-carbon electrotech stack — and not just the continued march of electrification, which is as happy to accept energy from giant coal plants as it is to accept energy from solar panels.
Kingsmill Bond: It is always fun to debate this, but the point I think you nearly said — countries don’t have solar, but they do have coal — that’s the whole point. Everyone’s got lots of solar today. Unless you’re talking about mine mouth coal and existing assets, solar also beats coal. And that’s why we are spending $400 billion a year on expanding our solar and $40 billion a year, whatever it is, on expanding coal in a very small number of locations.
This coal pathway to development was the China path up to 2000, but they’ve kind of opened up a new pathway that other countries can now take. The classic example now is India, which is clearly taking a very different pathway to that taken by China 20 or 25 years ago. And incidentally, it’s a similar story in the transport market.
Certainly until recently — and indeed, even now for those who haven’t got the memo — are still forecasting that the emerging markets will follow the U.S. development path and have 16 barrels of oil per person per day of demand. But actually, China’s peaked at two and is already falling, and you’re going to see other countries following that path simply because it’s a lot cheaper. Whether or not this was by genius or design or luck, but the Chinese happened to have stumbled into a very, very successful path of finding a cheaper energy source — or a better mousetrap, as it were. I think that that’s what’s now happening across the emerging markets.
If I may make one other point, let us not forget that the emerging markets are going down this path very quickly. And to give you a couple of stats on this, the classic one is the fact that from our calculations, two thirds of the emerging markets, by design, already have a higher share of solar in their electricity system than the United States, which is astonishing given that the United States is a global leader in so many other respects. In terms of electrification, it’s a quarter of the emerging markets, also, ahead of the U.S. — or Europe, actually, for that matter.
And so we are seeing here that the emerging markets are going down a new path, which was not expected. And if you contrast that with the internet, for example — after 2000, internet was a pretty clear, standard graph of the U.S. leads and then Japan follows — and Western Europe, and then China, and then the other markets. But this time around, these folks are streaming into these technologies much earlier than expected.
Mentioned:
Ember’s research on solar-plus-batteries
Oxford’s Doyne Farmer on how clean energy tech will get cheaper
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
