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.
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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
The Cheap Energy Act proposal
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.
