Dispatch from NY Climate Week

We are officially at the end of New York Climate Week. If you were there, take a breath. It was packed with an estimated 100,000 people – more than doubling the expected size of COP29.?

Latitude’s executive editor Stephen Lacey sat down with one of those people: Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy. They talked about decarbonization challenges for data centers in the AI era. One of Freed’s takes? We’re thinking about the problem in the wrong ways .

Earlier in the week, Latitude editor Lisa Martine Jenkins moderated a panel hosted by David Energy and Union Square Ventures on what it will take to get the grid to 24/7 clean energy.

The discussion — between James McGinniss of David Energy, Kiran Bhatraju of Arcadia, James McWalter of Paces, and Darren Tan of Unigrid — largely centered around the data challenges in achieving round-the-clock clean energy , and how to overcome them.?

One technology that could bring much-needed grid flexibility? VPPs. There’s general consensus that VPPs can act as a powerful resource for the grid. The problem is: the power industry still can’t align on how exactly to define the term. Latitude reporter Maeve Allsup spoke with three industry stakeholders —?LPO director Jigar Shah; Chris Rauscher, who leads grid services at Sunrun; and Latitude Intelligence managing director Matt Casey — about their respective visions for the future of VPPs .

Meanwhile, the U.S. solar industry, already a primary driver of the domestic clean energy economy, continues to innovate and evolve. Becca Jones-Albertus, who leads the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, spoke with Latitude about the industry’s role to play in leveraging distributed assets in light of a new RMI report out this week.