Podcast
Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive
Hosted by Vedeni Energy, LLC · EN
Vedeni Energy's Deep Dive provides a weekly, in-depth analysis of the most relevant and timely issues within the U.S. electric power industry.
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Data-Center Queue Reckoning Overtakes a Cooler Grid Week
4d ago00:22:23Tap to summarizeNorth American wholesale power markets entered August in a decidedly calmer operational posture than the record-setting stretch that closed July. Across the eastern and central grids the punishing heat that had driven late-July peaks receded, and no system operator reported a region-wide capacity emergency during the August 1-7 window. With weather backing off, the week's most consequential developments were structural rather than price-driven, and they clustered around a single theme: the collision between explosive data-center load growth and interconnection processes that were never built for it. In Texas that collision became the dominant national story, as ERCOT launched its Batch Zero large-load study on August 3 with roughly 205 GW across 326 projects, only to have Governor Greg Abbott order the process halted the next day pending a comprehensive audit of data-center applicants. State regulators elsewhere moved in parallel to insulate ordinary ratepayers from data-center costs, with the Virginia State Corporation Commission reordering Dominion's transmission cost allocation on August 3 and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approving AEP Ohio retail-rule changes on August 5. To read the full report: https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/080726_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf
Transcribe →The Turbine Bottleneck
4d ago00:23:45Tap to summarizeWhen historians of the American power system look back on this decade, they may conclude that the defining constraint was not a shortage of fuel, capital, or political will, but a shortage of machines. The clearest evidence arrived this week in the form of a quarterly earnings report. GE Vernova, the largest supplier of heavy-duty gas turbines in the United States, told investors that its reservations for new gas equipment had climbed to 116 gigawatts, up from 100 gigawatts only three months earlier, and that its total order backlog across all businesses had swelled to $176 billion. The company is now booking factory slots for turbines that will not be delivered until 2031. In a sector accustomed to measuring project timelines in months, a six-year wait for the single most important piece of equipment has become the new baseline, and it is quietly reshaping every assumption utilities, developers, and regulators bring to the table.
Transcribe →Quiet Cracking: The Slow Leak in Your Team You Can't See
6d ago00:24:05Tap to summarizeHere's the thing about the people who worry you least. They show up. They hit their numbers. They don't slam the laptop shut at 5:01 or vent in the all-hands. And that steadiness is exactly why you can miss what's happening to them. The person who is struggling in a way you can measure is easy to help. The one who is struggling quietly, behind a wall of decent output, is the one you won't notice until they've already checked out or handed in notice. There is a name for that slow, hidden erosion now, and it stuck because it fit what a lot of managers were already seeing: quiet cracking. If you run a team, or you run the people who run teams, this is the workplace story worth your attention this year, because it lives inside your best performers and your calmest-looking groups.
Transcribe →Federal Emergency Powers in SPP, a Capacity Backstop in PJM
2w ago00:23:28Tap to summarizeNorth American wholesale power markets were shaped this week less by the coasts than by a heat dome parked over the central United States and the Desert Southwest, and by the emergency and market-design responses it provoked. The most striking action came on July 26, when the U.S. Department of Energy invoked Federal Power Act Section 202(c) to issue an emergency order authorizing the Southwest Power Pool to dispatch specified units and tap backup and behind-the-meter generation ahead of a Level 3 energy emergency, an order that runs through August 3. Arizona utilities that transact through the Western Energy Imbalance Market set all-time peak-demand records on July 25 as Phoenix reached 117 degrees, with Salt River Project peaking near 9,072 MW and Arizona Public Service near 9,053 MW. ERCOT, meanwhile, moved through a record weekly-average load without issuing conservation appeals, helped by record solar output and heavy battery discharge, while California and the Northeast saw comparatively ordinary conditions as the most acute heat stayed inland. To read the full report: https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/073126_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf
Transcribe →PJM Makes Data Centers Bend
2w ago00:22:16Tap to summarizeThe largest power market in the United States has spent the better part of two years trying to reconcile an immovable object with an unstoppable force. The immovable object is a transmission grid whose ability to add firm generation is constrained by long interconnection queues, supply-chain delays, and the slow arithmetic of building large machines. The unstoppable force is the artificial-intelligence build-out, which has made data centers the fastest-growing category of electricity demand the country has seen in a generation.
Transcribe →White Paper: The Resource Adequacy Gap: Capacity Accreditation and Reliability in a High-Demand Era
2w ago00:22:07Tap to summarizeNorth America has entered a decisive decade for resource adequacy. NERC's most recent assessments warn that a growing share of the continent faces elevated reliability risk as electricity demand accelerates faster than dispatchable supply is added and thermal generators continue to retire. The central problem is no longer how much nameplate capacity exists, but how much firm, on-demand capability the system can count on at the moment of peak need especially during wide-area winter cold. This paper examines how capacity accreditation methodologies and capacity markets are being reformed to value a resource's true reliability contribution, the growing role of storage and demand-side resources, and the planning and market-design changes needed to close a widening gap between projected demand and available firm supply. To read the full White Paper: https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/072926-Resource_Adequacy_Gap_White_Paper_final-copy.pdf
Transcribe →When the Tools Showed Up and Morale Stayed Home
2w ago00:17:43Tap to summarizeHere is something that should bother anyone who runs a team: companies spent the past two years pouring money into artificial intelligence, handing out tools, and rewriting job descriptions around them. After all that, the number that measures whether people actually care about their work went down. Not sideways. Down. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report puts global employee engagement at 20 percent for 2025, the second straight year of decline and the lowest reading since 2020. The tools arrived, and the mood got worse. If you run a team, that gap between spending and sentiment is yours to solve, and it turns out you hold more of the controls than the headlines suggest.
Transcribe →Record Central-U.S. Heat and a Governance Reckoning for PJM
3w ago00:24:50Tap to summarizeTwo developments framed the week across North American wholesale power markets, and both traced back to the same underlying pressures of extreme summer heat and surging large-load demand. A Central-U.S. heat wave pushed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to consecutive all-time demand records, culminating in an unofficial peak near 91,308 MW on July 23, roughly 5,800 MW above the prior 2023 mark, while the grid held without conservation appeals as a record battery and solar fleet carried the evening net peak. Farther north, the same heat drove Southwest Power Pool's newly expanded West Balancing Authority Area into a Level 3 Energy Emergency Alert on July 20 after several generators tripped offline amid low wind output, prompting the U.S. Department of Energy to issue a Federal Power Act Section 202(c) emergency order authorizing SPP to dispatch reserve resources as needed through July 21. No rolling outages were ordered in either footprint, but the back-to-back events underscored how thin operating margins have become in the fast-growing central interior of the continent.
Transcribe →Heat, Hyperscale, and the Grid
3w ago00:19:49Tap to summarizeThe summer of 2026 has become a stress test the American electric system was not designed to pass gracefully. Across the eastern seaboard and deep into Texas, successive heat domes have pushed regional grids to demand levels planners once treated as distant, once-in-a-generation outliers. In early July, the PJM Interconnection—the largest grid operator in North America, serving roughly 67 million people from the Mid-Atlantic to the edge of the Midwest—came within reach of its all-time consumption record. Weeks later, in the third week of July, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shattered its own peak, drawing more than ninety gigawatts of load in a single afternoon. These were not isolated weather events. They were the visible surface of a deeper structural shift: record electricity demand is being driven not only by hotter summers but also by a new and voracious class of consumer—the hyperscale data center. Understanding what happened this summer, and why federal regulators reached for emergency authorities they rarely invoke, is essential to understanding where grid reliability is headed for the rest of the decade.
Transcribe →Job Hugging: When Nobody Quits, and That’s the Problem
3w ago00:22:25Tap to summarizePicture your team right now. Attrition is down. The people you worried about losing last year are still at their desks. On paper, that looks like a win. Turnover costs money, and a stable roster makes planning easier. But sit with it one second longer, and a second picture appears. Some of those people are not staying because they want to be there. They are staying because the door out looks frightening, and they have decided the safest move is no move at all. That is job hugging, and it may be the workforce story of 2026.
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