Energy Gang

The world changed forever on February 28th, 2026. The consequences of the Iran war will take many years to play out. But one fact already seems clear: we are not going back to the world that existed before the conflict began.
To assess what the war means for the future of oil, gas and power, host Ed Crooks is joined by three of the most experienced voices in the geopolitics of energy. Regular guest Amy Myers Jaffe is the Director of NYU's Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab. Samantha Gross, returning to the show, is the Director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. And Amos Hochstein, appearing for the first time, is a Managing Partner at TWG Global and former senior energy advisor to President Biden and the US State Department.
Their conclusion is stark: this is the worst energy crisis the world has ever seen. The shared view is that the disruption we are seeing now is more serious than the oil shocks of the 1970s, and broader in its reach than anything markets have had to price in living memory.
The loss of global oil supply from the near-complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz is bad enough, but the effects do not end there. As well as 10-12 million barrels a day of crude supply, the world has lost 20% of its LNG supply and about 30% of its urea, used for fertilizer. We are seeing cascading shortages of products that you might never have connected to the Gulf region, from hospital gloves to semiconductor-grade helium.
So why haven’t prices yet reflected the full scale of the shock? Amos Hochstein draws a distinction between a risk environment and a disruption environment. Markets know how to price risk, he says, but they do not know how to price physical shortages. Meanwhile, the belief that President Trump can end the war on his own timeline is creating a dangerous feedback loop: markets stay calm because they think the president will intervene; the president sees calm markets and feels no urgency to act. But Samantha Gross argues that President Trump doesn't get to decide when this ends. The Iranians do.
The disruption is already hitting unevenly. Sri Lanka has moved to a four-day working week. Thailand has asked workers to stay home. Airports across Asia are shutting down, not because jet fuel is expensive, but because they don’t have any. As Amos Hochstein warns, the impact isn't growing in a straight line: it's exponential. Poorer nations are absorbing it first, but the consequences will continue to spread.
The episode also looks beyond the immediate crisis to the longer-term implications. Amy Myers Jaffe predicts an acceleration of investment in new energy technologies, including nuclear fusion. Amos Hochstein maps out the infrastructure changes that he thinks will be needed, including investment in new pipelines so that oil and gas exports from the Gulf can bypass the Strait of Hormuz completely. Building all that new infrastructure would be a massive undertaking, but he thinks the world will come together to back it, because it relies on energy from the Gulf for so much. A fundamental rethinking of supply security is under way.
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Energy bills are rising, data centers are multiplying, and the grid is straining to keep up. What happens next?
For two decades, electricity prices in the United States barely moved. Demand was flat, natural gas was cheap, and the system was largely stable. That era is over. A surge in data center construction, accelerating electrification, and the legacy of years of underinvestment in energy infrastructure have collided to create a system under strain.
Nowhere is that more visible than in PJM, the largest wholesale power market in the US, stretching from Illinois to North Carolina, and home to some of the world's most active hot spots for data center development. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Paul Segal, CEO of LS Power, and Melissa Lott, Partner for Energy Technologies at Microsoft, to assess how the system can meet the new challenges it faces.
LS Power is a leading developer and operator of electricity generation and transmission, so Paul is right at the heart of these questions. He is making multi-billion dollar decisions that shape the ways that America’s electricity gets supplied.
He makes the case that competitive markets, given the right rules and durable signals, can deliver the solutions the grid needs. LS Power is pursuing demand response, battery storage, renewable projects, and gas generation simultaneously. And he warns that political interventions, such as price caps, risk weakening the signals that drive investment.
The question of who pays is at the heart of the debate. A bipartisan group of state governors got together with the Trump administration to call for emergency procurement of new generation capacity in PJM, with data centers expected to bear the cost. Paul argues this is inevitable. For hyperscalers to maintain a social license to keep building, he says, households cannot be left to pick up the bill for load growth created by data centers. Melissa brings the consumer perspective, noting that US household electricity prices rose 26% between 2019 and 2024, outpacing income growth and falling hardest on the most energy-vulnerable families.
The episode also looks at longer-term structural solutions, including the case for more competition in transmission planning and the lessons from Texas's wildly successful CREZ program to build out grid infrastructure.
It closes with a discussion of another issue that is high on Paul’s agenda: mentorship and training. He believes industry leaders have a responsibility to create opportunities for the next generation, despite the threat to entry-level roles created by AI. There is a huge task in front of us to build the grid of the future, and we need skilled and experienced people to do it.
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Tanker traffic dries up, oil, gas and fertilizer prices soar, and the world holds its breath

The Strait of Hormuz has long been discussed as one of the single greatest vulnerabilities in global energy supply. Now the risk has become reality. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers Jaffe, Director of NYU's Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab, and Chris Aversano, Director of Maritime Partnerships at Wood Mackenzie, to assess what the disruption means for energy markets, supply chains, and the people at the centre of it all.
Oil prices briefly spiked to around $119 a barrel before falling back. European natural gas prices have nearly doubled. But those numbers only tell part of the story. In normal times, between 150 and 175 ships would pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Since the war began, that has fallen to perhaps 10 to 12 a day. The Strait is a vital artery for the world’s energy and fertilizer supplies. If it is blocked for long, the results could be catastrophic.
Amy puts the market's reaction in context. She has been studying the Strait of Hormuz since the 1990s, and says that although the geography is still the same, the technology is different. The threat from drones, drone boats, and other weapons of asymmetric warfare may be harder to neutralise than the weapons that shaped earlier thinking. As she puts it, modern threats to shipping are “not your father's Oldsmobile”.
Chris highlights the human dimension of the conflict. An estimated 20,000 seafarers are currently trapped inside the war zone, alongside a further 15,000 people on cruise ships and ferries. Seven merchant mariners have been killed so far, in 13 confirmed or suspected attacks. These are civilians, Chris reminds us: workers sending money home to countries such as the Philippines, Bangladesh and India, or in Eastern Europe, who never expected to find themselves victims of an armed conflict.
The discussion also gets into the practicalities of what it would take to restore flows through the Strait. The US government has announced a $20 billion insurance facility to cover hull, machinery and cargo for ships in the Gulf. As Chris explains, that still leaves indemnity insurance, covering liability for spills and other damage, entirely unaddressed. A fully-laden VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) tanker and its cargo is worth upwards of $300 million. Cleaning up a spill of its cargo of 2 million barrels of oil could cost multiples of that.
Routes to bypass the Strait of Hormuz are already being activated. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline to Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast, has seen throughput surge from around 730,000 barrels a day to as much as 2.5 million b/d. The UAE pipeline to Fujairah offers additional relief. But as Amy makes clear, these routes cannot come close to replacing the Strait of Hormuz in full. They do not help Iraq or Kuwait. They carry no LNG. And for refined products, there is no pipeline alternative at all.
The episode closes with a broader look at what this crisis means for the future of energy. Amy argues that it reinforces the case for clean technology: when an oil price shock arrives, investment in renewables, EVs, and energy storage tends to follow. Ed points to Europe, now seeing its gas prices spike for the second time in four years, as a place where the arguments for renewables, nuclear, transmission, and demand response are becoming even harder to ignore. Green hydrogen could also benefit, thanks to potential for replacing natural gas in fertilizer supply chains.
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VPPs – virtual power plants – continue to spark heated debate. Are they genuinely a fast, affordable way to add capacity to the grid? Or are they an overhyped concept that falls apart when electricity systems are under stress? To find out, host Ed Crooks welcomes Colby Hastings, the senior director for residential energy at Tesla, to unpack what VPPs can and can’t do for the grid.
Colby explains how storage-based VPPs can behave very differently from the classic demand response that relies on consumers changing their behaviour. She sets out Tesla’s thinking on VPPs, including its strategies for customer participation, reliability, and pay-for-performance. Tesla’s model includes opt-outs, backup reserve settings, and transparency via an app. Customer choice is an important principle.
Regular guest Amy Myers Jaffy also joins the show, and she debates what’s holding VPPs back from scaling everywhere. Electricity market design can be critical for determining how fast VPPs are adopted. Other issues, including concerns about “double compensation” under net metering systems, are also important. Some regions are moving faster than others.
Finally, Colby tells us what’s coming next from Tesla and in the industry. Tesla’s vehicle-to-grid plans are starting to take shape. A pilot, starting with the Cybertruck, was launched last month. And she explains why Puerto Rico is one of the clearest case studies for demonstrating the value of VPPs as critical infrastructure.
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New analysis from Wood Mackenzie shows that 220 gigawatts of additional power demand from data centers is in the pipeline in the US, and 183 GW of that is already backed by firm commercial commitments. That is a huge amount to add in just a few years: it’s equal to about 22% of US peak demand in 2025. The big question is whether the US electricity industry going to be able to meet that additional demand. And if so, how?
On the second day of ACORE’s 2026 Policy Forum in Washington, host Ed Crooks talks to industry leaders and experts about the answers to those questions. First he talks to Wood Mackenzie’s Anna Shpitsberg, who is global head of power and renewables research. She breaks down the numbers on electricity demand from new data centers, and discusses some of the implications for the industry.
Next up is someone whose role is right at the heart of the data center boom. Arthur Haubenstock is senior counsel at Equinix, which is one of the world’s largest developers, owners and operators. He talks about what data centers actually need in terms of electricity supply, and gives his perspective on some of the controversies currently raging around the industry.
A key issue for him is how data center developers can benefit local communities by cutting their electricity bills and strengthening the stability of the grid. He talks about the reality behind popular ideas such as BYOP (bring your own power) and BYONCE (bring your own new clean energy). And he explains why data centers often cannot be flexible loads on the grid, the constraints on backup generation, and why power grids matter.
Ray Long, President and CEO of ACORE, then joins the show to talk about his key takeaways from the event. He says the AI-driven data center boom is creating great opportunities for all kinds of energy, including renewables and other low-carbon technologies. But progress is being slowed by three critical challenges: permitting delays, trade policy uncertainty, and regulatory bottlenecks.
With electricity demand surging, he says, tackling those policy barriers is essential. Governments and the power industry need to find ways to stop electricity bills soaring and the grid becoming unstable, while enabling the infrastructure buildout required for AI.
Finally, Ed talks to three entrepreneurs who are leading startup companies that aim to build the energy industry of the future. Kimberly Johnston of NextGen Energy, Saxon Metzger of Polaris Ecosystems, and Ebony Seymour of Ellement Group, explain the problems in energy that they are taking on, and talk about what they need to accelerate their growth.
This episode is brought to you by ACORE, the nonpartisan nonprofit organization uniquely operating at the intersection of energy affordability, reliability, and clean energy deployment. ACORE is focused on strengthening the electric grid and driving clean energy investment that delivers for the American people.
ACORE’s membership includes industry leaders across the clean energy economy. Nearly 80% of the booming utility-scale domestic clean energy growth was financed, developed, owned, equipped, or contracted by ACORE members. 
Visit www.acore.org to learn more about ACORE's work and upcoming events, like the ACORE Finance Forum on May 12-13 in New York City.
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