From Google to the Grid: She's Orchestrating the Clean Energy Future

01/10/2025 51 min Episodio 62
From Google to the Grid: She's Orchestrating the Clean Energy Future

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Episode Synopsis


AI, electrification, decarbonization—they all hinge on how effectively the grid is orchestrated. Yet thousands of clean energy projects are stuck in U.S. interconnection queues. The backlog is twice the size of all the energy we use today. It’s not a cost problem. It’s the grid—the largest machine on earth—built last century for stability and missing the cloud-scale infrastructure to handle what’s ahead.Astrid Atkinson has run a machine like this before. At Google, she spent fifteen years in site reliability engineering, keeping Search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail online with 99.999% uptime. If google.com went down, her team got paged. Running one of the world’s largest critical infrastructure systems taught her a lesson: you don’t scale by adding infinite hardware. You scale with visibility, software, and flexibility.Now, as co-founder and CEO of Camus Energy, she’s applying that lesson to the grid. Camus builds a real-time data layer—linking past, present, and future—and turns it into signals utilities use to coordinate assets: charge later, ramp down, discharge when needed.With visibility and signals, utilities gain the control knobs they need—so projects connect in months instead of years and demand flexibility becomes part of the grid’s DNA.Show NotesGuest: Astrid Atkinson, co-founder and CEOCompany: Camus EnergyFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks that drive their adoption—subscribe or follow the podcast, plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* YouTube Channel* Supercool on LinkedIn and Instagram

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