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.
69episodes
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PJM’s Capacity Cap and the New Economics of Grid Scarcity
4w ago00:23:20Tap to summarizeWhen PJM Interconnection released the results of its latest capacity auction on July 14, 2026, the headline number looked almost reassuring. At $325 per megawatt-day, the clearing price for the 2028/2029 delivery year came in a few dollars below the $329.17 that cleared the two prior auctions. For anyone reading only the top line, the market appeared to be cooling. It was not. The price landed where it did because a regulator-imposed ceiling stopped it from rising higher — for the third consecutive time. Strip away the cap and the same auction would have cleared at roughly $555 per megawatt-day across the footprint, and closer to $777 in the Chicago-area ComEd zone. The story of PJM’s 2026 capacity auction is not one of prices retreating. It is the story of a market pressed so firmly against its own guardrail that the guardrail has become the price. Read the article at https://vedeni.energy/pjms-capacity-cap-and-the-new-economics-of-grid-scarcity/
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White Paper: Advanced Forecasting for Renewable-Dominated Power Systems
4w ago00:24:48Tap to summarizeThe modern electric grid is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Across the United States and around the world, the rapid buildout of wind and solar generation is reshaping not only the composition of the resource stack but also the operational and planning requirements that keep electricity flowing reliably. In the U.S., installed utility-scale solar capacity has grown from negligible levels a decade ago to more than 150 gigawatts today, while wind capacity exceeds 145 gigawatts—together representing a substantial and rapidly expanding share of national generation. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment projects that more than 122,000 megawatts of conventional dispatchable generation will retire over the next ten years, as variable, weather-dependent wind and solar resources dominate new capacity additions. Read the full white paper at https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/071626-Advanced-Forecasting-for-Renewable-Dominated-Power-Systems.pdf
Transcribe →The Coordination Tax at Work
4w ago00:22:48Tap to summarizeMost managers know the feeling: the strategy is clear, the goals have been announced, and people understand what they are supposed to accomplish. Yet the work still moves at half speed. A decision waits for three approvals. Two departments build separate versions of the same report. A project meeting ends with no named owner. Employees spend Friday afternoon preparing status updates about work they could have finished if they had not been preparing status updates. This is the coordination tax: the time, attention, and money lost while people organize work instead of completing it. The term gained renewed attention this past week after new workplace research highlighted the gap between understanding company priorities and being able to act on them. In that study, 83 percent of workers said they understood how their roles connected to business goals, but only 51 percent believed their organizations arranged work effectively around those priorities.
Transcribe →Heat Recedes, Grid Expansion Accelerates
Jul 1000:23:00Tap to summarizeNorth American wholesale power markets transitioned from the prior week’s extreme-heat stress to a more normalized but still summer-sensitive operating pattern during July 4-10. PJM’s emergency posture eased after record-level demand and elevated prices early in the period, while New York and New England continued to monitor reserve margins, weather-driven load, transmission availability, and real-time congestion. Across CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, and MISO, available operating reports did not identify a comparable system-wide emergency. Daily real-time peak prices generally followed the expected summer pattern: higher during late-afternoon load ramps and constrained intervals, lower overnight and during high-renewable periods, and more volatile where transmission limits or reserve conditions tightened. Read the full report at https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/071026-Weekly-Market-Report.pdf
Transcribe →White Paper: Electrifying Heavy Industry
Jul 1000:20:33Tap to summarizeFor more than a century, electricity demand in the United States grew in broadly steady and predictable patterns, punctuated by long plateaus. That era has ended. After nearly two decades of essentially flat consumption, the American power system is entering a period of demand expansion whose pace may rival the build-out of the mid-twentieth century. Three forces are driving this shift at once: the proliferation of artificial-intelligence data centers, the reshoring of domestic manufacturing, and a quieter but ultimately more structural transformation known as industrial electrification. This white paper focuses on that third force and its consequences for the grid. Read the full White Paper at https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/070426-Electrifying-Heavy-Industry-.pdf
Transcribe →Managing Through Rising Electric Bills
Jul 1000:23:14Tap to summarizeElectricity affordability has shifted from a customer-service issue to a management issue. The numbers are no longer easy to dismiss as a short-term fuel-price problem. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that average electricity revenue per kilowatt-hour across all sectors rose 6.0 percent in April 2026, year over year. Residential revenue per kilowatt-hour rose 7.3 percent. In February, the year-over-year increase across all sectors had reached 9.0 percent. Regulators and lawmakers are responding quickly: a July 2026 review reported more than 350 state actions on energy affordability during the first half of the year.
Transcribe →When Employees Stop Trusting Leadership
Jul 800:20:21Tap to summarizeA workplace can look healthy from the outside yet still run on fear. Meetings happen. Deadlines are met. Customers are served. The numbers may even look solid for a quarter or two. But inside the team, people may choose silence over honesty because they have learned that speaking up carries a cost. That concern has moved to the center of management discussions after iHire’s 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report found that 68.9% of U.S. workers have experienced a toxic workplace at some point in their careers. More than a third of employees who witnessed toxic behavior never reported it, and 45.1% said they doubted HR or leadership would take action.
Transcribe →Wholesale Markets Under Summer Load Pressure
Jul 300:17:49Tap to summarizeWholesale power markets entered the first week of July with summer reliability risk shifting from a planning concern to an operating condition, especially in the eastern United States. PJM faced the most acute stress, with hot-weather alerts, maximum-generation and load-management actions, low-voltage procedures, a Department of Energy emergency-order request, and materially elevated real-time price volatility during the heat event. NYISO also issued an Energy Watch on July 2 as operating reserves declined, while ISO New England continued to report day-ahead and real-time prices through normal market channels and maintained its summer preparedness posture. The week underscored that extreme heat, tight reserves, and transmission constraints remain primary drivers of marginal reliability risk in North American wholesale markets.
Transcribe →Time to Power Is the New Management Test
Jul 300:19:59Tap to summarizeThe power business has always rewarded patience. Big plants take years. Transmission takes even longer. Regulators move on their own clock. For decades, utility leadership could be judged by whether the plan made sense over ten or twenty years. That is still part of the job, but it is no longer enough. A clearer leadership test has emerged in the U.S. power sector: who can deliver real power to real load faster than everyone else. Regulators are acting on it. Grid operators warn that demand is arriving faster than the system can comfortably absorb. And the heat wave now bearing down on the eastern half of the country is showing what happens when growth, congestion, and thin margins converge.
Transcribe →Recognition Is Not a Perk. It Is a Management Discipline.
Jul 100:19:03Tap to summarizeOver the past week, one management theme kept surfacing in workplace coverage: recognition is increasingly treated not as a nice gesture but as a direct tool for employee engagement, retention, and day-to-day performance. SHRM’s upcoming webinar, The Recognition Edge: Activating the Most Underused Tool in Your Total Rewards Strategy, frames the issue clearly. Recognition is often treated as secondary to compensation and broader rewards, even though it shapes motivation, visibility, and momentum in daily work. That matters because many companies are still trying to solve engagement and retention with bigger, slower levers first. They focus on compensation, benefits, headcount plans, and systems. Those things matter. But they can also overlook a simpler fact: people decide whether work feels worth giving themselves to, one conversation at a time.
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