Energy Empire

Gas is up more than a dollar a gallon since the Iran war began, and diesel set an all-time record in September. Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) says the president’s donors are profiting while everyone else pays more. Smith explains what voters should listen for when a candidate promises to bring energy costs down, and why she voted against a data center bill Republicans are now campaigning on. Part of Ener...

In the first half of this year, 86% of U.S. venture money went to AI. Climate venture funds have raised less than $1 billion, down from more than $10 billion in 2021. This week’s guest, Andrew Beebe, is more optimistic than those numbers suggest. The generalist funds that piled into climate a few years ago drove up the price of startups, and now they’ve left. The investors and founders still here...

About one in three homes and businesses in Australia have solar on the roof. The state governments there made it simple, with incentives, certified installers, and quick approvals. In the U.S., permits and inspections can add weeks or months before a system is switched on. This episode’s guest, Audrey Zibelman, has held top energy jobs in both countries. She chaired New York’s Public Service Commi...

Demand on ComEd’s grid barely moved from 2009 to 2022. Now the utility expects about 10 gigawatts of data centers to connect by around 2030, against an all-time peak of 23 gigawatts. ComEd’s CEO, Gil Quiniones, wants to connect those data centers without raising everyone else’s bills. Rooftop solar and batteries, which many utilities have fought, are part of his plan. Gil spent 16 years at Con Edi...

Ukraine has learned how to keep a power grid running while someone is trying to destroy it. Every country that imports oil now needs the same lessons. Last winter Russia blew up power plants and substations, and Kyiv lost power every day. The fixes were concrete bunkers that let a substation take a direct hit, home batteries, a nuclear fleet kept running, and new wind and solar built in the middle...

Northern Virginia is the biggest data center market in the world, and pushback is growing. So are power bills. A typical Dominion bill is now about $180 a month, $20 more than a year ago. Rising bills put energy on the ballot in Virginia’s 2025 governor’s race. Abigail Spanberger won it by 15 points, and now she wants data centers to pay for the grid built to serve them. Recorded live at the Virgi...

When a warehouse turns its freezers down for two hours, it looks to the grid like a power plant switching on. Voltus pays thousands of businesses to do exactly that, every day of the year. Voltus, the largest demand-flexibility company in North America, just announced a $225 million Series D led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. Today's guest, co-founder and CEO Dana Guernsey, plans t...

"Little Red Riding Hood is kind of a dumb story without the wolf." That's how Senator Sheldon Whitehouse thinks Democrats have been telling the climate story. His wolf is the fossil fuel industry, and it shows up on your electric bill. When the Trump administration blocks cheap clean power, the grid falls back on pricier fossil plants and families pay the difference. He calls it a "ginormous money...

AI data centers are straining the grid. NVIDIA and Phaidra say part of the fix is more AI: software that runs the cooling, data centers that ease off when demand peaks, and chips that do more with every watt. This episode was recorded live at The Nest Campus during Climate Week NYC. Jigar and Jamie talk with Josh Parker, head of sustainability at NVIDIA, and Jim Gao, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA-b...

Four senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act on September 30. One of them recorded this episode with Jigar the day before. The bill puts deadlines on federal environmental reviews, gives opponents 150 days to sue instead of five years, hands the federal government a backstop for interstate transmission, and, as Heinrich describes it, bars utilities from putting a dat...

Electricity bills are rising across America, and for the first time in years, they're a campaign issue. Candidates on the left and the right are promising to cut your power bill. But are they even the ones in charge? What gets decided in Washington, and what gets decided in your state capital? And how do you tell a real promise from an empty one? Those questions are what Energy on the Ballot i...

In Germany you pick up a solar panel at IKEA or the grocery store and plug it in at home. Here you order online, the cheapest kits can take four months to arrive, and in most states you still technically need your utility's permission to install it. Cora Stryker co-founded Bright Saver, a nonprofit that sells the kits at cost, $285 for a 180 watt system. They helped draft Utah's balcony solar bill...

In most of America, the cost of generating electricity has barely moved since 2015. But, over the same 10 years, residential rates are up 37% (EIA). Lee Taylor has spent 13 years pricing power in every corner of the country. He joins Energy Empire to explain what you're actually paying for, and why a windy day in Oklahoma never shows up on your bill. Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Resurety....

The jet fuel that could replace kerosene is made from used cooking oil. It costs two to six times more, and there isn't enough of it. This week's guest is Lauren Riley, Chief Sustainability Officer at United Airlines, which buys more sustainable aviation fuel than any other airline in America and still only gets 0.7% of its fuel that way. She calls that a pacing problem: we know how to mak...

Sheep are replacing lawnmowers on solar farms across America. They're quieter, cleaner, and in many cases cheaper. More than 113,000 of them now graze over 500 US solar sites — and for the farmers who run the flocks, the contracts are a new income that keeps their land and their business in agriculture. Today's guest is Rebekah Pierce, who runs a 300-sheep flock on 9 solar sites across ups...

Amazon is building a 7.65 gigawatt gas plant in the West Texas desert. Microsoft just signed a 20-year gas deal with Chevron, 30 miles away, and Meta, OpenAI, and xAI are all doing versions of the same thing. The case for going off-grid is speed and control: an AI data center takes 18 months to build, a grid connection can take seven years, and Texas just froze new hookups altogether. But turbines...

On a podcast in 2020, Jigar called the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office "irredeemable" and said it could never be trusted again. A few weeks later, the Biden transition team called, asking him to become the next Director of that exact office. The chair of his board at Generate Capital didn't want him to take the job, so he wrote a memo laying out the conditions that ha...

A used EV costs $200 a kilowatt hour. A Powerwall costs $900. In this episode: Unsubsidized rooftop solar at $2,100 a kilowatt, and why Australia does it for half that 470,000 megawatts of data center requests on a grid with a 91,000 megawatt peak: "It's crazy town" Why buying a $20,000 used EV means "you're getting the car for free just by buying the battery" Everythin...

Five months into the Iran war, the largest supply shock in oil market history has been managed into a strange calm. Exxon just made $14.5 billion in a quarter, gas is over $4 a gallon, and Washington is quietly running its oil reserve the way the Federal Reserve runs interest rates. James Gutman is the co-author of The New Joule Order, and the newly launched Substack Arcs & Angles. This is his...

This is a special bonus episode where Jigar sits down with Chris Shelton to launch Grid 2.0. If this gets adopted, it changes how every new data center and battery in America gets onto the grid. Grid 2.0 is a voluntary open protocol standard for how new electricity resources connect. It is modeled on TCP/IP, the shared rules that let the internet scale for decades without anyone approving each new...

AI data centers make power demand jump in milliseconds. The grid can't keep up, and ratepayers get the bill. Nate Walkingshaw, founder and CEO of Torus, has a fix already spinning: a multi-ton steel flywheel in a vacuum, one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024, now part of a 500-megawatt agreement with PacifiCorp. Nate was a paramedic making $7.14 an hour when he started inventing. Stryker b...

For nearly a decade, Heather Reams had one of the toughest jobs in Washington: selling Republicans on clean energy. As president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, she built the right's most prominent clean energy advocacy group, launched National Clean Energy Week, and got 21 House Republicans on record defending the clean energy tax credits. In June, she and CRES parted ways. Jiga...

Sting has the rainforest. Pierce Brosnan has the whales. Adam Met has permitting reform. The AJR pop star, who has more than 5 billion streams on Spotify and a PhD in sustainable development, joins Jigar and Jamie to make the case that permitting reform is energy's rare bipartisan opening. His answer is the Co-Location Energy Act: a bill that clears the way for solar and wind on top of 18 mill...

Dave Roberts spent years covering energy for Grist and Vox before building Volts into one of the most influential independent energy podcasts in the country. His last conversation with Jigar, on Volts, was about doing data centers the dumb way. The comments haven't stopped since. For this crossover, Jigar and Deploy Action's Arnab Pal talk with Dave (Jamie listened in and weighs in on the...

Every construction site, concert, film set, and hurricane recovery runs on temporary power. So does the Super Bowl, and so do data centers that can't wait years for a grid connection. Most people use it every day and never see it. Alicia Waineo became a registered nurse at 19, ran and sold a home healthcare company, then co-founded ANA in 2017. Today the company does roughly $400 million in revenu...