Keeping the Lights On

In January 2024, winter storm Gerri swept across the Midwest, bringing subzero temperatures with it. In Omaha, Nebraska, just as everyone was turning up the heat, the city’s four thermal power plants went offline. 

Tim McAreavey is the VP of Customer Service at Omaha Public Power District. As the freeze gripped Nebraska, Tim and his team began an all-out effort to enlist the help of their biggest customers to reduce energy demand – including a Google data center.

In this episode, we have three stories about how data centers are helping decarbonize the energy system – and how to manage the growing energy needs of AI. Plus we learn about Tapestry's mission to make everything on the grid visible by using data science and AI to plan, predict, and monitor assets across the network.

And we ask how data centers and the tools they enable are helping communities accelerate clean energy while making the electric grid more resilient, literally keeping the lights on for homeowners, businesses, schools, and hospitals.

Guests:

• Page Crahan, Tapestry team lead at X, the moonshot factory
• Savannah Goodman, data and software climate solutions lead at Google
• Urs Hölze, Google fellow and former senior VP for engineering at Google
• Alexina Jackson, vice president of strategic development, AES
• Tim McAreavey, vice president of customer service, Omaha Public Power District
• Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at X, the moonshot factory

Watch our complementary documentary about how AI-assisted tools like Alphabet’s Tapestry are helping accelerate clean energy while making the electric grid more resilient—literally keeping the lights on for homeowners, businesses, schools, and hospitals.