Show Notes
As the presidential inauguration loomed on the horizon in January this year, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Loan Programs Office (LPO) published a “year-in-review” article, highlighting accomplishments from 2024 and looking ahead to the future. It noted that the previous four years had been the most productive in the LPO’s history. “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Office has announced 53 deals totaling approximately $107.57 billion in committed project investment––approximately $46.95 billion for 28 active conditional commitments and approximately $60.62 billion for 25 closed loans and loan guarantees,” it said. Much of the funding for these investments came through the passing of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The LPO reported that U.S. clean energy investment more than doubled from $111 billion in 2020 to $236 billion in 2023, creating more than 400,000 clean energy jobs. The private sector notably led the way, enabled by U.S. government policy and partnerships. “There were 55 deals that we got across the finish line,” Jigar Shah, director of the LPO from March 2021 to January 2025, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast, while noting there were possibly 200 more projects that were nearly supported. “They needed to do more work on their end to improve their business,” he explained. That might have meant they needed to de-risk their feedstock agreement or their off-take agreement, for example, or get better quality contractors to do the construction of their project. “It was a lot of education work,” Shah said, “but I’m really proud of that work, because I think a lot of those companies, regardless of whether they used our office or not, were better for the interactions that they had with us.” A Framework for Success When asked about doling out funds, Shah viewed the term somewhat negatively. “As somebody who’s been an investor in my career, you don’t dole out money, because that’s how you lose money,” he explained. “What you do is you create a framework. And you tell people, ‘Hey, if you meet this framework, then we’ve got a loan for you, and if you don’t meet this framework, then we don’t have a loan for you.” Shah noted that the vast majority of the 400 to 500 companies that the LPO worked closely with during his tenure didn’t quite meet the framework. Still, most of those that did have progressed smoothly. “Everything that started construction is still under construction, and so, they’re all going to be completed,” said Shah. “I think all in all, the thesis worked. Certainly, there are many people who had a hard time raising equity or had a hard time getting to the finish line and final investment decision, but for those folks who got to final investment decision and started construction, I think they’re doing very well.” Notable Projects When asked which projects he was most excited about, Shah said, “All of them are equally exciting to me. I mean, that’s the beauty of the work I do.” He did, however, go on to mention several that stood out to him. Specifically, he pointed to the Wabash, Montana Renewables, EVgo, and Holtec Palisades projects, which were all supported under the LPO’s Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program, as particularly noteworthy. Perhaps the most important of the projects Shah mentioned from a power industry perspective, was the Holtec Palisades endeavor. Valued at $1.52 billion, the loan guarantee will allow upgrading and repowering of the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert, Michigan, a first in U.S. history, which has spurred others to bring retired nuclear plants back online. “[It’s] super exciting to see our first nuclear plant being restarted, and as a result, the Constellation folks have decided to restart a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, and NextEra has decided to restart a nuclear reactor in Iowa. So, it’s great to have that catalytic impact,” said Shah.
More from The POWER Podcast
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.