The POWER Podcast provides listeners with insight into the latest news and technology that is poised to affect the power industry. POWER’s Executive Editor Aaron Larson conducts interviews with leading industry experts and gets updates from insiders at power-related conferences and events held around the world.
Listen to episodes
60 recent
October 14, 202624 min
217. Beyond the Contract: How Rabigh Reinforcement Reached First Fire 14 Months After Award
In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, sales director with Siemens Energy Gas Services, and Naira Elsayed, a senior project manager with Elsewedy Electric Power Systems Projects (PSP), discuss the Rabigh Reinforcement Combined Cycle Power Plant, a finalist for a 2026 POWER Top Plant Award. The 1,179-MW plant sits on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, about 135 kilometers north of Jeddah, in a region that carries some of the Kingdom’s heaviest summer load. The project reached first fire in July 2025, roughly 14 months after the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract was awarded, and logged 12 million man-hours with no lost-time injuries. Gupta and Elsayed describe how early execution activities moved ahead while broader contractual arrangements were still being finalized, and what that took in trust and risk management among Siemens Energy, Elsewedy Electric PSP, and the Saudi Electricity Company. They explain how the team responded when Red Sea shipping disruptions made vessels hard to find, arranging a special voyage for the gas turbine generators and rerouting a 380-ton steam turbine generator around the Cape of Good Hope. They also cover recruiting and training skilled labor in a crowded market, building a safety culture around shared responsibility, the project’s F-class gas turbines and 3x1 multi-shaft configuration, Siemens Energy’s expanded EPC role, and the lessons they say other projects can take from Rabigh. For more on the project, read POWER’s article, “Beyond the Contract: How Rabigh Reinforcement Reached First Fire 14 Months After Award,” at https://www.powermag.com/beyond-the-contract-how-rabigh-reinforcement-reached-first-fire-14-months-after-award.
September 3, 202621 min
216. Energy Management Goes Beyond Monitoring to Decision-Making
Utilities and independent power producers have spent years adding sensors to their generating fleets and creating dashboards to view what they relay. But visibility into how a plant is operating isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it—and that gap is where Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Management System is increasingly shedding light, explained two of the company’s experts as guests on The POWER Podcast. “Monitoring is just telling you what’s happening,” said Sarah Dietrich-Smith, Siemens Energy’s commercialization manager for Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions, “and Energy Management is telling you what should happen next, and it helps you to execute that decision,” she explained. The distinction, she said, is the real difference between tracking a plant’s condition and actually optimizing it—moving “from just this visibility to true optimization that you can actually take action on, and optimization that’s based and tied to measurable business outcomes.” From Single Assets to Whole Fleets Katie Hanley, head of Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions team, framed Energy Management as fundamentally a question of business outcomes. Given a plant’s generation commitments, gas hedging position, and access to additional electricity markets, “What are the optimized economics for running your plant or your fleet?” she asked. “Historically, assets were managed individually. They really only cared about the question, ‘How can we get the single asset to perform better?’ ” Dietrich-Smith said. “We want to move into a fleet optimization mindset.” One plant might be constrained while another has more flexibility—sometimes for regional reasons, such as differing prices or curtailment risk in different markets. “This fleet-level approach is what’s going to help operators allocate flexibility, manage this risk, and ultimately optimize the commercial performance across the full portfolio,” she said, “instead of just making that isolated asset or site-level decision.” Dietrich-Smith also pushed back on a common assumption about where the value comes from. “I think the most common misconception is that the only value we’re bringing is efficiency improvement,” she said. Customers also see fewer penalties, more effective participation in electricity markets, and faster response to changing conditions—benefits she summed up simply: “Time is money.” Renewables Complicate the Math A growing share of that fleet-level complexity traces back to renewables, Hanley said, whether a customer operates a hybrid portfolio directly or simply competes in a market where renewable penetration is rising. She described thinking in terms of dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generation: as more renewables come online, dispatchable options become scarcer, making it harder to maintain grid stability—and more important to predict when instability might occur. That prediction problem pulls in weather and market data alike, from cloud cover and wind speeds at different altitudes to real-time electricity prices. For a hybrid site with battery storage, the same data informs decisions about when to charge from onsite generation versus the grid, and when to discharge—sometimes purely to arbitrage low prices rather than to support the site’s own generation. “These batteries are creating dispatchable flexibility when normally we would only be able to do that with some of our large gas assets,” Hanley said, adding that customers are increasingly weighing a battery discharge against ramping up a plant or duct burning, based on which is the better economic call in the moment. Hanley closed the conversation on a practical note for listeners still weighing where to start. “Everything is only getting more complex, so give us a call,” she said.
June 29, 202629 min
215. Public Power’s Affordability Edge Faces Its Hardest Test in Years
Public power utilities have long promised lower bills, reliable service, and decisions made close to home—and the data still backs that up. But holding that ground is getting harder. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), talks about the forces now testing the community-owned utility model. Corwin explains why resource adequacy, reliability, and affordability have converged into the defining challenge for APPA's roughly 2,000 member systems—a concern that once affected only certain regions but now stretches across nearly the entire membership. He breaks down the tools public power uses to keep rates down, including tax-exempt financing and elective pay credits, and why local control itself acts as a check on spending. The conversation also digs into the issues reshaping the sector: how smaller utilities are evaluating massive data center interconnection requests while protecting ratepayers; why Corwin describes public power's generation strategy as "any of the above" rather than "all of the above"; and the structural headwinds—permitting delays, an aging workforce, supply chain strain, and cybersecurity—that determine what utilities can build and how fast. Corwin closes with what he most wants policymakers to understand about community-owned utilities, and the value of 2,000 diverse communities speaking with one voice on affordability and reliability. Listen to the full conversation to hear how public power is navigating one of the most dynamic periods the industry has faced in years.
May 19, 202625 min
214. MD&A Positions Itself as Alternative Source for 7FA and 7EA Gas Turbine Rotor Life Extensions
A perfect storm is brewing across the U.S. power generation fleet. Between 600 and 700 GE 7FA gas turbines installed during the bubble of 2000–2004—plus roughly 900 7EA units worldwide—are simultaneously approaching the OEM's 144,000-hour, 5,000-start end-of-life threshold. Superalloy forgings carry multi-year lead times. Only a handful of shops worldwide can service these machines. And the data center boom is pushing utilization higher than anyone planned for. In this episode, we sit down with three MD&A leaders driving the company's push to become an independent alternative for 7FA and 7EA rotor life extensions: • Dave Fernandes — Gas Turbine Program Manager • Kevin Roy — Principal Engineer, Parts • Jason Wheeler — Gas Turbine Rotor Repairs General Manager We trace the story from MD&A's early-2010s strategic pivot out of steam turbines and into gas turbines under then-CEO John Vanderhoef, through the acquisition of two never-fired machines—a 7FA.03 and a 7EA—that became the foundation of the reverse engineering effort. Kevin Roy explains why zero-hour components were essential, and why CMM and blue-light scanning only get you so far: coatings, shot peening, and surface finishes demand hands-on expertise no laser can replicate. We dig into the global hunt for vendors capable of producing high-temperature alloy forgings and holding tolerances on turbine-section components—a niche capability MD&A continues to expand for supply chain redundancy. Jason Wheeler walks through the quality regime: first-article scrutiny that carries into every production batch, with inspection standards more rigorous than what these vendors typically face elsewhere. The conversation turns to MD&A's seed rotor exchange program—modeled on its successful 7FH2 generator program—designed to compress customer downtime to removal, swap, and reinstall, with returned rotors entering the refurbishment cycle for the next customer. We also unpack what Fernandes calls "the three prongs": fleet-wide timing, multi-year forging lead times, and limited shop capacity worldwide. The conclusion is uncomfortable for operators who haven't started planning—parts needed three to five years from now must enter production today. Finally, we cover the milestone currently in MD&A's St. Louis shop: the first 7FA.03 rotor purchased specifically for the seed rotor program to complete the full production cycle, with newly manufactured wheels stacking perfectly alongside original serviceable components. And we discuss the 2026 delivery of a life-extended 7FA.03 rotor to a leading U.S. power producer—a vote of confidence from a famously risk-averse industry. Whether you're a utility planner staring down rotor end-of-life on your 7FA fleet, an asset manager weighing OEM dependence against supply chain risk, or an industry watcher tracking how independents are reshaping heavy-duty gas turbine services, this episode lays out where the bottlenecks are, what's been done about them, and why the window to act is narrowing fast.
May 13, 202615 min
213. Duke Energy’s Nuclear Playbook: Three Horizons, One Strategy
Duke Energy operates 11 nuclear units across six sites in the Carolinas — a fleet that produces more than half of the region's electricity year in and year out. In 2025, that fleet posted its best capacity factor on record, north of 97%. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Steven Capps, Duke Energy's senior vice president and chief nuclear officer, walks through what's behind that performance and what comes next. Capps frames Duke Energy's nuclear strategy as "today, tomorrow, and the future," and the conversation moves through all three. Topics covered: • How Duke Energy pushed its fleet capacity factor above 97% in 2025, and the role of risk management alongside maintenance and capital investment. • The subsequent license renewal program now extending Oconee and Robinson to 80-year operating lives, with Brunswick next in line and the rest of the fleet to follow. • Capacity uprates underway at McGuire and Catawba that, combined with measurement-uncertainty-recapture work at Oconee and Brunswick, will deliver roughly 300 MW of additional nuclear capacity — what Capps describes as "the equivalent of a small modular reactor." • The mechanical reality of an uprate: increased thermal megawatt ratings, more highly enriched fuel, and the secondary-side components — feedwater heaters, moisture separator reheaters, large pumps and motors — that have to be replaced to accommodate the change. • Duke Energy's decision-making framework for new nuclear, tentatively reflected in the integrated resource plan in 2037, and why economics, not technology choice, is the gating factor. • Career advice for engineers considering nuclear, from someone who has held more than 10 different roles across his own engineering career. Capps grew up about 10 miles from Oconee Nuclear Station, earned a mechanical engineering degree at Clemson, and joined Duke Energy after graduation. Twenty years at Oconee, a decade at McGuire, and most recently roles in Duke Energy's corporate organization have shaped his view of where the fleet — and the industry — go from here.
May 5, 202621 min
212. The Many Shapes of Nuclear Power’s Revival
Nuclear energy is back — and this time, the momentum may be here to stay. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Executive Editor Aaron Larson sits down with Dagmar Thien, who manages conventional island equipment for nuclear power plants at Siemens Energy, to explore what's driving the industry's renewed optimism and how the company is positioning itself at the center of the action. Thien, a physicist with two decades at Siemens Energy, breaks down the forces fueling the nuclear resurgence: surging global electricity demand, the need for reliable baseload power to back up intermittent renewables, and nuclear's strong climate credentials as a low-lifecycle-emission energy source. The explosive growth of data centers, which require uninterrupted power around the clock, has added particular urgency. The conversation spans the full spectrum of reactor technology — from gigawatt-scale plants that benefit from economies of scale, to small modular reactors (SMRs) promising faster, cheaper deployment through factory standardization, to Generation IV designs like high-temperature gas-cooled and molten salt reactors that could unlock industrial heat applications beyond electricity. Thien explains how Siemens Energy's broad turbine portfolio allows it to support virtually any reactor type. She highlights the value of whole-system optimization — collaborating with reactor developers to find the best overall plant performance rather than optimizing each side independently. The episode also covers the critical but often overlooked work of lifetime extension and modernization. With some U.S. plants pursuing 80-year operating licenses, upgrading turbines, generators, and control systems is essential. Thien discusses the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station — a landmark example of a decommissioned plant being brought back online — and the complex process of managing obsolescence in safety-qualified instrumentation and control systems used in roughly 23% of the world's reactors. Regulatory challenges, international harmonization efforts between the U.S., UK, and Canada, and the growing role of nuclear heat for industrial decarbonization round out a wide-ranging discussion on where the industry is headed next.
April 23, 202635 min
211. How Corporate Energy Buyers Are Reshaping the U.S. Grid: CEBA CEO Rich Powell on Data Centers, Nuclear, and Permitting Reform
Corporate energy buyers have quietly become one of the most consequential forces shaping the U.S. electricity system. By the end of 2025, members of the Corporate Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) had procured more than 130 GW of carbon-free electricity in the U.S.—a footprint comparable to the combined generating capacity of California and Texas—and roughly double that globally. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, CEBA CEO Rich Powell joins POWER Executive Editor Aaron Larson for a wide-ranging conversation on how hyperscalers, manufacturers, retailers, and other large electricity users are responding to unprecedented demand growth and reshaping corporate procurement in the process. Topics covered include: • Why CEBA is "big tent" on clean technology, and how solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydro, gas with carbon capture, and even fusion PPAs all figure into the mix • How AI-driven data center growth—and the chip fabs supplying them—are layering onto existing trends in electrification and internet expansion • The four-pronged nuclear revival: reactor restarts, license renewals, uprates, and advanced reactor bets on X-energy, Kairos, TerraPower, Oklo, and light-water SMRs • The Ratepayer Protection Pledge and how large buyers are addressing concerns that data centers push costs onto residential customers • Why ERCOT remains CEBA's "North Star" market, and how hybrid deals combining firm capacity with clean energy attributes are changing PPA structures • The rise of flexibility as a corporate procurement category, including demand-side management, on-site storage, and virtual power plants • How rising tariffs and supply chain inflation are squeezing solar, wind, and gas project economics • Powell's top policy ask: fundamental, legislatively codified reform of federal permitting and transmission planning A candid look at where the corporate clean energy market stands today—and what it will take to keep pace with the AI era.
April 16, 202622 min
210. Rural Co-ops Navigate a New Era of Load Growth, Rising Costs, and Policy Pressure
After decades of flat electricity demand, the U.S. power sector is suddenly racing to keep up—and rural electric cooperatives are on the front lines. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), joins executive editor Aaron Larson to discuss how roughly 900 co-ops serving 42 million people across 48 states are navigating surging data center load, supply chain pressures, and a shifting regulatory landscape. Matheson explains what makes the co-op model distinctive—not-for-profit, consumer-owned, and locally governed—and why affordability isn't a talking point but an operational imperative for utilities that serve 92% of America's persistent poverty counties. He then digs into the generation debate, drawing a key distinction between always-available sources like coal, gas, and nuclear, and intermittent resources like wind and solar, and makes the case for local flexibility over federal one-size-fits-all mandates. Other topics covered in the conversation include: • Why Matheson believes viable power plants shouldn't be retired before replacement capacity is in place. • The long-term outlook for nuclear, the status of small modular reactors, and a notable Michigan plant restart driven by two co-ops. • Where energy storage fits today—and what a true long-duration breakthrough would unlock. • How global supply chain pressures and tariffs are driving up costs on everything from turbines to meters. • NRECA's 2026 policy priorities, including EPA rule rollbacks, permitting reform, raising the USDA Rural Utilities Service lending cap, and FEMA reform. • The contractual and operational complexity of onboarding hyperscale data center loads, and why existing consumers shouldn't subsidize them. • How roughly 200 co-ops are now bringing broadband to underserved rural areas—a modern echo of 1930s rural electrification. Whether you're tracking the AI-driven load boom, policy developments in Washington, or the unique role cooperatives play in the U.S. electric sector, this conversation offers a clear-eyed view from someone who represents member-owned utilities covering 54% of the nation's land mass.
April 9, 202623 min
209. Renewables Reenvisioned: How Linea Energy Built a 7-GW Renewable Pipeline in Under Two Years
Cassidy DeLine has spent more than 16 years developing renewable power plants. As the founder and CEO of Linea Energy, she's built an independent power producer with a pipeline exceeding 7 GW in roughly two years—a pace she calls "a bit unrivaled" for a company of its size and age. On this episode of The POWER Podcast, DeLine sits down with executive editor Aaron Larson to explain how Linea got there and where it's headed next. At the core of Linea's approach is a commitment to better information, earlier. Most developers don't get detailed site data, such as wetland boundaries, topography, and transmission characteristics, until after leases are signed and field teams are deployed. Linea has built proprietary simulations to surface that information before a single landowner conversation takes place, giving its team a sharper picture of risk before committing capital. That discipline extends to how the company handles offtake. Unlike most developers, Linea is comfortable advancing projects without a power purchase agreement (PPA) locked in. DeLine explains why signing a PPA too early can actually create risk, particularly in a market where tariff volatility and shifting capital costs have burned developers who fixed the revenue side before they had certainty on expenses. The conversation also covers Linea's growing role in the data center space. The company is doing bespoke energy development for data center operators and, in some cases, developing the data center itself. But DeLine is candid about the engineering challenges: artificial intelligence (AI) inference workloads cause demand to swing on a microsecond basis, which is fundamentally different from what the grid was built to handle. Linea has developed battery-and-inverter solutions to smooth those rapid fluctuations, guided by a simple principle: the lights have to stay on. DeLine shares her perspective on battery storage as a grid resource, the maturing but still incomplete renewable energy capital markets, the interconnection queue bottleneck, and what it means to commit to communities for a 40-year ownership horizon. She also discusses why Linea is evaluating small modular reactor technology—not because the economics work today, but because projects started now won't come online until the 2030s, and she wants to be ready for where the market is heading. Whether you're in development, finance, policy, or just following the energy transition, this is a conversation worth hearing.
April 2, 202631 min
208. The Genesis Mission: How AI Supercomputing Is About to Reshape American Science and Energy
After 22 years at IBM, where he rose to senior vice president and director of IBM Research, Dr. Dario Gil now leads one of the most ambitious science and technology initiatives in a generation. As the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Under Secretary for Science and director of the Genesis Mission, Gil is orchestrating a convergence of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing aimed at transforming how America does science and engineering. The Genesis Mission rests on a straightforward premise: a computing revolution is underway, and the U.S. should harness it to double the productivity of its trillion-dollar-a-year research and development engine within a decade. The initiative is built on three pillars: a platform for accelerating discovery anchored in high-performance computing, AI supercomputing, and quantum computing; a portfolio of national challenges in energy, physical sciences, and national security; and a university engagement effort to rethink how future scientists and engineers are educated in the age of AI. Gil offered fusion energy as a prime example of how AI can compress timelines. By training neural networks on validated simulation data, researchers can build surrogate models that run thousands to tens of thousands of times faster, allowing engineers to iterate on reactor designs in hours rather than months. AI is also being applied to real-time plasma control through collaborative work involving Google DeepMind and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. On the grid, Gil shared two striking examples. The DOE's Office of Electricity is developing AI agents to help developers fix deficient interconnection applications—which account for 80% to 90% of submissions—potentially accelerating studies by up to a year. Meanwhile, Brookhaven National Laboratory's Grid FM emulator can speed power flow calculations by 100x, compressing what would be 20 years of conventional analysis of the Texas transmission grid into roughly two months. Gil was candid about the tension between AI as an energy solution and AI as a source of surging electricity demand, noting that planned data centers now reach gigawatt scale. The path forward, he said, involves optimizing the existing grid, accelerating nuclear energy, investing in fusion, and driving major efficiency gains in AI hardware. New supercomputing infrastructure is already being built through the Genesis Consortium, a partnership of 27 industrial players. Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are each standing up large GPU clusters this year, with a 100,000-GPU system planned for Argonne in 2027—the largest science-oriented cluster in the world. Asked what success looks like, Gil pointed to the AlphaFold story: 50 years of work produced 200,000 protein structures, then AI predicted 200 million in two years. Success, he said, will mean 50 to 100 comparable breakthroughs across all domains of science within three to five years.
Is this your show?
Claim this listing to keep it up to date, reach guests who want to pitch you, and manage bookings with Guestify.
