Energy Empire

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...

In March, Google paid $4.75 billion to buy Intersect — the first time a Big Tech giant has bought a clean energy developer. Jigar and Jamie talk with Sheldon about why Google decided it had to own a power company, how the race to build data centers is reshaping the American grid, and what it actually takes to build gigawatt-scale energy next door to small Texas towns. Along the way: why he says hi...

The hyperscalers are racing to secure power, pouring billions into new plants, nuclear, even fusion. But interconnection queues still run for years. This week's guest can cut that wait to six to twelve months without building a single transmission line or power plant. Amit Narayan is the founder and CEO of GridCARE. His thesis: America doesn't have a power shortage, it has a visibility pro...

Data centers have become one of the most charged political issues in the country, and it cuts across both parties. Electricity bills are climbing, 36 states are electing governors who will have to answer for it, and the question is the same in red states and blue: how do you welcome the investment without handing residents the bill? Few people are better placed to answer than Jennifer Granholm, tw...

Four generations of Daniel Dus's family have worked in American energy. His great-grandfather was a coal-mine engineer who became president of Michigan Tech; his grandfather built power transformers at General Electric. Daniel pivoted into renewables — and now runs Cleantech Industry Resources, the company he founded after running the US arm of one of the world's largest renewable energy f...

Kathy Castor has represented Tampa in Congress for 20 years — four of them chairing the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, the policy engine behind the Inflation Reduction Act. Now Florida's new congressional map has carved her district into five pieces, turning a seat Democrats won by 12 into one Trump carried by 11. Jigar and Jamie talk with the congresswoman about why the Sunshin...

Brazil: 14% returns. South Africa: 9.8%. United States: 7.1%. That's not a typo. Mike Silvestrini has deployed $476 million in solar projects overseas and at home. The US is his riskiest market. Silvestrini is the co-founder of Energea — a platform that lets anyone invest directly in real solar projects, not solar stocks, for as little as $100. Jigar and Jamie talk with Mike about where the ca...

Electric utilities are on track to spend $1.4 trillion on the power grid by 2030. Hyperscalers keep asking for gigawatt-scale data centers. Nobody is required to show the math. Katherine Blunt covered PG&E's bankruptcy and the Camp Fire for The Wall Street Journal and wrote California Burning , the book PG&E CEO Patti Poppe made mandatory reading for all her employees when she took ove...

Solar on the roof. Battery in the garage. You can run your house yourself now. The question is what that does to the grid we all share. This week on Ask Jigar: what local clean-energy leaders should do now that the feds have pulled back. Whether virtual power plants will hurt utility valuations. Why nuclear supporters should love cheap battery storage. And whether mass defection from the Californi...

California built the one of the cleanest grids in the country and wholesale prices have never been lower — but utility bills keep going up. One reason: utilities make more money by spending more. California State Senator Josh Becker is writing the bills to change that. Before politics, Becker was in venture capital — he seeded Opower and worked on EPA's first Clean Air Marketplace Conference i...