AI could break the electricity grid. What do regulators and the industry need to do to keep the lights on?
Energy Gang
Wood Mackenzie
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when the surge in electricity demand comes faster than we can build the infrastructure to support it? Live in front of an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, host Ed Crooks leads a conversation on the future of the US energy grid, skyrocketing load from data centers and electrification, and why politics keeps getting in the way of practical solutions.
Neil Chatterjee, the former Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), has spent a long time working on the interaction of markets and policy in energy. He says: “America needs to take the politics out – or the lights go out.” Is overzealous federal regulation really undermining the reliability of the grid? How can we win support for realistic solutions that will keep the lights on and ChatGPT on line.
Joining Ed and Neil to discuss these questions is regular guest Amy Myers Jaffe, who is director of the Energy, Climate Justice & Sustainability Lab at NYU. She proposes that AI might not be the cause of both blackouts and a climate catastrophe. She argues that we might actually save more energy from using AI than we consume in powering the data centers that support it.
Debating the issues with Amy, Ed and Neil is Cecilio Velasco, managing director in infrastructure at KKR, a global investment firm that deploys capital in infrastructure. Cecilio brings the investor view on what it will take to unlock the trillions in capital needed for a reliable and resilient energy system in the age of AI.
The panel address the uncomfortable truth that the US may need every available electron – from wind and solar to batteries to nuclear power and gas – to meet its goals.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to The Energy Gang, a discussion show from Wood Mackenzie about the fast-changing world of energy. |
| 0:08.1 | I'm Ed Crooks. I'm welcoming you now to a special edition of The Energy Gang, recorded live in front of an invited audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. |
| 0:18.3 | Hello, everyone, in the audience today. We're going to be talking about |
| 0:22.6 | the reliability and resilience of the US energy system and about the grid in particular, |
| 0:28.8 | very pressing subject at the moment in particular, I think because of everything we've been |
| 0:33.6 | talking about in terms of rapid growth in electricity demand in the United States, |
| 0:39.4 | mostly because of AI, and also because of new tensions, strains on the grid that have been |
| 0:44.6 | created by changes in the generation mix, retirement of a lot of old generation, addition of a lot of |
| 0:50.7 | new generation, which in recent years has been very largely wind and solar being added to the grid. And that's creating a lot of new issues. And that's really what we're going to be talking about today. To do that, it's a great pleasure to welcome my old friend from the energy gang, Amy Myers-Jaffey, his director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at NYU. Hi, Amy. How are you? I'm great, Ed. Great to be like |
| 1:12.5 | launching off New York City Climate Week here at the Council of Foreign Relations. It's also a great |
| 1:18.3 | pleasure to welcome Neil Chattery. Neil is one of the big names, I think it's fair to say, in US energy |
| 1:23.3 | policy, had a number of different roles. You were previously chairman of FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory |
| 1:29.1 | Commission, and now you're wearing a number of different hats, aren't you? |
| 1:33.4 | Number of different hats, most significantly, energy gang podcast participant. I'm also the |
| 1:38.4 | chief government affairs officer at Palmetto, a clean tech company, industry advisor at KKR, |
| 1:46.0 | doing due diligence in the energy space. |
| 1:49.6 | I'm on a number of boards, and I may be breaking news here. |
| 1:53.5 | I'm soon to be a distinguished visiting fellow at Columbia. |
| 1:59.9 | So the singular throughput through all of my professional activities is that I'm a conservative who cares about decarbonization with an |
| 2:03.5 | emphasis on maintaining reliability and affordability, which I think will undergird our conversation |
| 2:08.5 | today. I'm very much looking forward to it. |
| 2:09.9 | Yeah, well, thanks very much for joining us today. Great to have you here. And it's also |
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