Episode Details

Alan Cooper is co-founder and CEO of ON.energy, a Miami-based company building battery-backed power systems for AI data centers. Its flagship product, AI UPS, sits between the grid and a data center, creating a buffer that isolates the grid from the massive volatility of AI workloads while providing uninterrupted power to the entire campus.

In this episode of Inevitable, Cooper explains how a career spanning oil and gas, geothermal, battery storage, and grid services ultimately led to ON.energy's focus on AI infrastructure. He breaks down why gigawatt-scale AI data centers create a fundamentally different challenge for the grid, and how ON.energy's series-connected battery architecture can act as an electrical "firewall" between the grid, onsite generation, and the data center.

The conversation explores ON.energy's evolution from a battery storage project developer into a technology company, its proprietary hardware and software stack, and the role of power controls in making massive data center projects more resilient and easier to interconnect. Cooper also discusses the company's path to market, extensive technical validation, business model, and largely bootstrapped approach to growth.

Finally, Cooper argues that data centers don't have to be a liability for the grid. With the right infrastructure and regulatory framework, he believes they can become active grid participants—and potentially make the energy system more robust.

Episode recorded on August 26, 2026 (Published on September 8, 2026).

In this episode, we cover: 

• (0:00) An overview of ON.energy
• (2:24) Alan's background in oil and gas, geothermal, and battery storage
• (5:57) Alan's perspective on Venezuela and enhanced oil recovery
• (10:35) How the 2014 oil crash led to ON.energy
• (12:25) ON.energy's evolution from battery storage developer to technology company
• (15:32) Traditional BESS vs. AI UPS
• (16:15) How AI UPS creates a buffer between the grid and data centers
• (17:20) Why AI data centers create unique challenges for the grid
• (20:16) Using AI UPS with onsite generation and off-grid power
• (21:41) How ON.energy can simplify data center interconnection
• (23:14) ON.command and the importance of software controls
• (24:15) ON.energy's proprietary hardware architecture
• (25:35) Building supply-chain certainty at massive scale
• (27:25) ON.energy's path from resiliency projects to AI infrastructure
• (29:03) Battery storage as the "Swiss army knife" of the electric sector
• (30:01) Technical validation at the Department of Energy's Flatirons Campus
• (31:56) ON.energy's business model
• (34:31) Why AI's large-load problem is here to stay
• (35:52) AI training vs. inference and the future of data center infrastructure
• (38:12) Why AI infrastructure can create American jobs
• (39:27) Building ON.energy through bootstrapping and disciplined capital allocation
• (41:48) Turning data centers into grid assets

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