The Energy Transition Deferred: Dr. Jesse Jenkins On The Race For More Power (In-Person)
The AI buildout has a bottleneck, and it isn't chips. It's power. Interconnection queues stretch for years, deals get signed under NDAs, and roughly 70% of Americans now oppose data centers in their own communities, with opposition crossing party lines. The energy transition everyone was promised keeps getting deferred by the race to feed the models.
Yet new Princeton research points to an escape hatch. A 500-megawatt data center able to flex its grid demand for less than 1% of the year can reach full operation three to five years sooner than one that can’t. Jesse Jenkins floated exactly that idea on Season One of Deep Tech LIVE, 18 months ago, when almost nobody was building that way. So is the real bottleneck electrons, or is it contracts and consent?
Dr. Jesse Jenkins leads Princeton's ZERO Lab and the REPEAT Project, and was profiled by the Wall Street Journal as ‘The Professor Helping Guide Billions in Climate Spending.’ He has since added another hat, co-founding Firma Power, where he serves as CTO, working on the challenge of supplying clean firm power to hyperscale data centers.
Jesse and moderator Duncan Turner (General Partner & Managing Director at SOSV HAX) will dig into what the analyst sees now that he is the one selling the power:
Why flexibility, not new generation, may be the fastest path to powering AI
Which new energy technologies are actually helping — from grid hardware and storage to geothermal and nuclear
The exploding opposition to data centers crossing party lines sending midterm candidates scrambling (is it NIMBYism, or something else?)
How “clean firm power” can be delivered to the right places at the right prices and, potentially, make hyperscalers and communities happy
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📍 Broadcast live from our SOSV NY event space, this is the next installment of SOSV Deep Tech LIVE, our video podcast series exploring the frontiers of deep tech with leading founders, researchers, and technologists.