Explore every episode of the podcast Energy Empire

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 make the fuel, the money and the policy just move too slowly. The harder limit is the cooking oil itself. The world is not going to fry more food to fill jet tanks, and the three other ways of making the fuel are years from scale.

The policy is not helping either. America cut its credit just as producers needed certainty, Europe mandated the fuel without doing anything to make more of it, and the banks Riley talks to want ten years of durability and are being offered two.

So the question in the title stays open. Riley expects the economics to arrive eventually. Jigar is putting his chips on hybrid planes instead.

In this episode:

• The four ways to make jet fuel without oil
  

• Why a refinery that could make this fuel today makes diesel instead
  

• What the banks told Lauren they need before they will finance a plant, and why nobody is offering it
  

• Europe's rule where you miss the blend, pay the fine, and still owe the fuel
  

• Oscar the Grouch, United's first Chief Trash Officer, has retired
  

• Jigar's case for skipping ahead to hybrid planes
  

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 upstate New York. Rebekah is a first-generation farmer, solar grazier, and author of Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food (Island Press).

With Jigar on vacation, Jamie is joined by guest co-host Lauren Glickman, VP of policy and communications at solar developer Encore Renewable Energy and a lifelong solar and agriculture enthusiast.

In this episode:

• Why Encore ditched its diesel mowing crews and committed its entire portfolio to grazing

• The business model almost nobody knows exists, and how it turned a money-losing hobby farm into a real livestock operation

• The two stubborn brothers who sold Rebekah her hay, leased their land for solar, and changed her family's life

• The prime-farmland myth: "Farmland isn't really useful if there's nobody who can afford to cultivate it"

• Why tomatoes, of all things, might grow better inside a solar array

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 are sold out into 2029, the power costs roughly three times what flexible alternatives do, and of the 90 gigawatts of do-it-yourself power plants announced, almost none has actually been built.

Nobody has better visibility into this race than Michael Thomas of Cleanview, who tracks every data center in the country, and who recently broke the news that Amazon is behind that desert project. He joins the show to walk through what he's found, and where the gas rush goes from here.

Jigar is on vacation this week, so Jamie is joined by "mini-Jigar" and friend of the pod, Tim Hade.

In this episode:

- Why Elon Musk's Colossus, the most famous off-grid data center, lasted barely ten weeks off the grid

- What happens when an off-grid turbine breaks and there are no spares

- What batteries and demand flexibility could do instead, and why companies keep saying no

- Michael's forecast for how much actually gets built by 2027

- "There is no off-grid data center, only an off-electric-grid data center."

- Fermi America's "world's largest data center," whose site sat empty on satellite images

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: ⁠https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar⁠

S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

⁠Octopus Energy: ⁠https://octopusenergy.com/faas⁠

Our merch store: ⁠https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 had to change for him to accept, thinking they'd never agree. To his surprise, they accepted all of his demands. A couple of months later, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appointed him Director of the Loan Programs Office. During his tenure, the office's lending authority would grow from $40 billion to $400 billion, making it what Jigar calls the largest provider of energy credit in the world.

To help tell the story of the first two years at LPO, Jigar and Jamie are joined by Chris Creed, who left Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where he co-ran a $75 billion mortgage-backed securities team, to rebuild LPO's underwriting.

In this episode:

• Day 1: headquarters closed for Covid, and nobody at the Department of Energy knew he was starting
• The ethics fight over his solar portfolio: "I could be a slumlord, but you won't let me own solar projects"
• "What is a Jigar Shah?" — the question Chris asked his headhunter before taking the call
• He called 300 CEOs asking them to apply for a loan. 7 said yes.
• The Covid backyard parties in Bethesda where Congress learned that $1 billion of loan authority costs the Treasury only about $10 million
• "I was not leaving 2021 without a deal"
• How Jamie got journalists to stop defining the office by its scandal, one breadcrumb at a time

Links:

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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"
• Everything else on the grid just makes steam. Solar doesn't.

Send in your question, and if Jigar answers it on the show, you get an Energy Empire hat: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

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 fifth time on Energy Empire and his darkest and sharpest appearance yet.

In this episode:

• "Nobody actually puts crude oil into their car": the widest refining margins ever recorded, and why they, not the price of oil, set what you pay at the pump

• The Justice Department is investigating price gouging. What James would say under subpoena.

• "You can't print molecules": America's central bank of oil, and the catch when the vault runs low

• China cut imports by 5.5 million barrels a day without touching its strategic reserve

• Europe's rearmament bill runs as high as €14 trillion, and "the best friend for Team Green is the guy in the uniform"

• The question nobody asked in four previous episodes: what does James Gutman get wrong?

  
  

Plus Ask Jigar: the solar super PAC that just beat a Trump endorsement, and the cleaner backup power hiding inside every hospital's budget.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

James Gutman's Substack: https://jgutman.substack.com/

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 connection. New digital load checks available capacity before activating. If capacity is available, load runs normally. If the grid is constrained, load queues proportionally and automatically, with no phone calls and no administrative intervention.

For the vast majority of hours nothing changes. The protocol only matters during peak. And a data center already runs sophisticated workload schedulers, so adding grid capacity as one more input is a software integration.

The playbook is the one that built the battery storage industry. Find a market that wants lower rates and keep proving it works until the naysayers stop arguing. Phase 0 is shadow mode: run the protocol, track what would have happened, prove the value while changing nothing. Five early adopters is enough to shift the conversation from whether it works to how fast to scale it.

This is G2TF Request for Comments #1, in the literal spirit of the Internet Engineering Task Force that built the internet.

Read the full paper at g2tf.org. Comment on it and share it with one person who should hear it.

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 bought his company when he was 29. Then came the Pluralsight IPO, a Christmas tree farm that could make its own power but couldn't store it, and a flywheel equation his sons worked out at home.

In this episode:

• The argument with a utility CEO that redirected the company: "You have no idea what you have."
• Why a GPU load looks like an EKG, and why a power plant 300 miles away can't keep up with it
• From 33 dispatches a year to 500: how one utility went from teacher to biggest customer
• The 33 gigawatts Nate says we could free up tomorrow, without building a single power plant
• Inside GigaOne, where new hires go from $22 an hour to six-figure programming jobs
• "We're the Sudafed of the grid"

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Energy Empire Merch: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Heather about what it actually takes to move a Republican member of Congress, why permitting reform still isn't law, why the tech giants building data centers keep losing to the utilities in Washington despite dwarfing them in market cap, and the bipartisan venture she wants to build next.

Along the way: why the repealed credits "were never theirs to begin with," how Chip Roy killed the compromise, the shot clock on utility political power, and the least productive Congress in history.

Plus: Jigar and Jamie spend an hour trying to get past a decade of media training and extract the real tea on why she left. Judge for yourself whether they succeed.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Energy Empire merch: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 million acres of existing oil and gas leases, land that's already disturbed, already roaded, already wired.

They get into why he sold the same bill as "all of the above energy" to Republicans and carbon reduction to Democrats, what the music industry knows about building superfans that clean energy still doesn't, and why he ran the same play on state land in case Washington stalls.

Along the way: buying strangers beers in Colorado bars, 1,000 petition signatures at a 109-degree Phoenix show, and a secret plan Adam asks the hosts not to repeat.

Plus: the case that the climate movement shouldn't exist, and a guest appearance from Jamie's daughter.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 debrief) about why the data center backlash is a trust problem, not a PR problem, and why $130 billion in projects sits blocked when the community benefits that would unblock them cost a rounding error.

Along the way: a rare NERC grid alert, the case that "everything is batteries," why gas gets called firm while solar gets called feminine, and what 36 governors' races this fall mean for anyone building anything on the grid.

Plus: why Texas gets 19% of its peak from batteries while PJM sits at 0.2%.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Check out our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 revenue while cutting its customers' diesel use, and the emissions that come with it, by up to 80%. The solution is simple. Instead of replacing the entire diesel generator with batteries, they added one: the battery carries the whole load, and the engine's only job is recharging it.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Alicia about how that idea is spreading through America's rental fleets, why data centers that can't wait for the grid are renting power instead, and how ANA got here on $700,000 of founder cash, reinvested profits, and exactly one outside check, for $50 million.

Along the way: 160,000 diesel generators, bridge power that customers want "loudly," and powering the Super Bowl without getting free tickets.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar
S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order
Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Get your merch: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 his power plants are more stabilizing than a nuclear reactor, the on-air rematch of the LinkedIn argument where Jigar and Sheldon go at it over off-grid data centers, and a rare, candid turn on mental health, leadership, and the strange grief of selling the company he built.

Links:

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 problem. The grid runs at only about a third of its capacity, and GridCARE uses AI to scan it the way an MRI scans a body, finding power utilities simply cannot see with planning tools built decades ago. The company has unlocked more than a gigawatt in the last six months and is actively analyzing over ten. Narayan's bet: 300 gigawatts are reachable on existing infrastructure within three to five years.

Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan dig into why the grid sits so underused, and the detail that captures the whole problem: hyperscalers are so power-starved they're eyeing data centers in space, when the power they need is already on the grid at home.

Links:

Get Energy Empire merch: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

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, two-term governor of Michigan and the 16th Secretary of Energy, who oversaw the largest expansion of energy manufacturing in a generation and now advises governors on this exact problem. Jigar and Jamie talk with her about the playbook every governor needs, the energy sovereignty lesson the world drew from the Strait of Hormuz, and who is actually driving up your electricity bill.

Along the way: why a data center should buy your neighborhood batteries and pay you to use them, the acronym BYONCE, the utility business model that rewards building things nobody needs, and the Puerto Rico story she can't shake.

Links:

Get Energy Empire merch: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Powering the AI Economy report from the Centre for Net Zero: https://poweringai.centrefornetzero.org

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 firms.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Daniel about how he built one of the quietest, most efficient operations in clean energy, why he refuses to charge what the market would pay, what AI is doing to the people who used to do this work, and the boxing-themed fundraiser he runs every year for the industry.

Along the way: how a Vermont team plus AI agents can deliver solar work for a tenth of what consulting firms charge. Why cheaper energy means more jobs, not fewer. And the new platform Daniel started to push back on what he refuses to call "misinformation."

Links:

Learn more about CIR: https://cleantechir.com/products 

Clean Tech Fact Check: https://cleantechfactcheck.org/factcheck

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: ⁠https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

⁠S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: ⁠https://octopusenergy.com/faas⁠

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 Sunshine State gets 75% of its electricity from gas, the Thriving Economy Project — the next climate bill, drafted before Democrats have the votes to pass it, with 1,200 policy proposals already in — and where permitting reform could move with Trump still in the White House.

Along the way: the congressman who entered a battery into the committee record, electric bills burned in a garbage can, and why MacDill Air Force Base relocates every time a storm approaches.

Plus, Ask Jigar: where one person's effort actually counts, whether AI changes the value of a college degree, the case for 50 climate tech IPOs, and which states pay you for the battery in your EV.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

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 capital is missing, why the returns are where they are, and what it actually means when electricity arrives somewhere it's never been before.

Along the way: why Mike has been skeptical about batteries for 20 years and still is. How he first heard of Jigar. 250,000 homes in Colombia with no electricity. And why he had to start quacking more like a duck to attract the right investors — and whether it cost him.

Learn more about Energea here: https://www.energea.com?utm_campaign=45660715-Energy%20Empire%20Podcast%202026&utm_source=energyempirepodcast&utm_medium=podcast

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

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 over. Now, Blunt covers Alphabet, where she is watching the AI buildout collide with the same regulatory machinery that produced PG&E.

Jigar and Katherine get into PJM's white paper conceding the market needs to be redesigned, what Google figured out in its Xcel Minnesota deal that other hyperscalers haven't, and what trust looks like when utilities ask for a record-setting decade of spending.

Plus: the one thing Katherine would mandate if she could — and it isn't interruptible service.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

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 California grid is real — or if NEM 3.0 already changed the math.

Four questions. One answer: use the grid we already paid for.

Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

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 in 1992. Now he runs much of California's energy policy from Sacramento.

Jigar and Arnab Pal (in for Jamie) talk with Becker about tying utility executive bonuses to keeping rates down, the metrics regulators should use to measure utility performance, why your home battery should count toward grid reliability, and how to use the grid we've already paid for before building more.

Along the way: why the grid is like a Walmart parking lot built for Christmas Eve, the plan to take wildfire costs off your electricity bill, and Becker's blunt verdict that "hope is not a strategy."

Plus: listener questions on virtual power plants, nuclear, and what happens when everyone goes off the grid — in this week's Ask Jigar.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments:

https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

A lot of people are walking around with energy questions and not getting straight answers. That changes now.

Ask Jigar is a new weekly segment on Energy Empire. Three listener questions per episode. Jigar answers them on air. No hedging, no "it depends" non-answers.

Should you sign a long-term electricity contract? Is your utility actually serious about clean energy? What separates the startups that make it from the ones that don't? Send it in.

In this teaser: where do you actually start when you want to electrify your life?

Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

Ask Jigar is supported by Octopus Energy.

The backlash against data centers is, in many places, a backlash against rising electricity bills. Nick Chaset, CEO of Octopus Energy US, thinks the solution isn’t to stop building — it’s to change who benefits.

In this episode, Nick explains why the way data centers currently connect to the American power system puts the costs on nearby communities while sending the upside elsewhere. He breaks down how Octopus Energy flipped that dynamic in the UK by giving communities a direct financial stake in local wind energy through discounted bills — and how the same model could reshape the data center boom now unfolding across the US.

Jigar, Jamie, and Nick get into what virtual power plants actually are, why networks of home batteries, EVs, and smart thermostats can function like power plants, why Texas is moving faster than California on clean energy deployment, and what it would take for homeowners in places like Loudoun County to get paid instead of squeezed. Plus: whether 160 gigawatts of virtual power plant capacity by 2030 is realistic — or wildly optimistic.

Links:

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order⁠

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Sandy Reisky started building wind farms in 2000, before it was an asset class. He founded Apex Clean Energy in Charlottesville, Virginia, scaled it into one of the country's largest independent wind developers, and in 2015 bought up distressed wind projects when the tax credit extension looked uncertain. Wind now generates around 12% of U.S. electricity — 30 to 50% across the Great Plains.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Sandy about how he scaled Apex, why community relations was a competitive advantage most developers skipped, what wind looks like in a hostile policy environment, and his new focus: Pearl Score, a home energy performance rating that gives sellers credit for efficiency upgrades at the point of sale.

Along the way: the power maps that helped Apex win over hostile communities, why fossil fuels have already lost the battle of physics, and Jamie's proposal to name an offshore wind farm after the president — and paint all the turbines gold.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Links:

S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order⁠Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

The Energy Empire logo has a two-prong plug. Apparently, that's a problem. Since launch, we've been getting called out on LinkedIn by people who are very concerned about electrical safety. So we brought in our designer, Rosie Jewell, to finally answer for it — is our brand unsafe?

What happens if Lady Liberty gets struck by lightning holding a janky appliance? What exactly is she plugging in? Does artistic license cover electrical code violations?

Jamie talks with Rosie about how the Energy Empire brand came together — the symbols they rejected (Roman architecture, the eagle, the flag, and yes, a lightning bolt), why Lady Liberty was the only image that worked, and what it took to get from pencil sketch to a mark that's already generating opinions on LinkedIn.

Along the way: why clean energy needs to put down the lightning bolt, what most energy brands get wrong about visual identity, and the one American symbol that hasn't been co-opted by either side.

Learn more about Rosie’s work at https://www.rosiejewell.com

Get in touch with us at energyempire.fm

In 2013, Jigar wrote a book arguing climate didn't have a technology problem. It had a deployment problem. The breakthrough-tech crowd called him naive. A year later, he co-founded Generate Capital to prove it — a C-corp, not a fund, because seven-year fund lives kill infrastructure deals before they work.

First close: $55 million. People were whispering "vanity project." By 2024, Generate had raised $10 billion and built 2,000 assets.

Part 2 of the biography series. Jamie and Jigar revisit the argument with Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla over what was actually broken in clean energy, the C-corp bet the Trump tax cut accidentally made look brilliant, and the first $100 million checks into batteries, RNG, and behind-the-meter gas.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

When COVID broke global logistics in 2020, Dan Shugar made a call most of his peers didn't. Nextpower absorbed over $100 million honoring existing contracts, then built the manufacturing it needed at home.

Today the company has 35+ US factories — including a former Bethlehem Steel mill in Pittsburgh now shipping hundreds of trucks a week — and a backlog north of $5 billion.

Jigar joins SunCast's Nico Johnson to talk with Dan about onshoring through the chaos, why solar and storage are no longer "alternative" energy when they made up 83% of new US power capacity last year, and how Nextpower's culture has kept its team intact across cycles.

Along the way: why the industry's biggest enemy is its own narrative, the $10 million bet ACP made to fix it, and the wedding-guest argument that turned into a video series.

Recorded at the UNC Clean Tech Summit.

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Michael Regan served as the 16th Administrator of the EPA under President Biden — the first Black man to hold the role — and before that ran North Carolina's Department of Environmental Quality, where he won the largest coal ash settlement in U.S. history against Duke Energy.

This is a special bonus episode from UNC Clean Tech Summit, recorded in collaboration with Nico Johnson's Suncast podcast. Jigar and Nico sit down with Regan to talk about why he considers the EPA a public health agency first, what he learned visiting 90 of North Carolina's 100 counties, how the current administration's retreat on enforcement is hitting red counties as hard as blue ones, and why communities are pushing back on data centers faster than the industry expected.

This is the second of three bonus episodes from UNC Clean Tech. The final conversation, with NextPower CEO Dan Shugar, drops next Tuesday.

Two additional interviews from the summit — with John Szoka from the Conservative Energy Network and investor Ahmad Chatila — are available on Suncast: https://www.suncast.media/

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

The Iran war is now the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Physical crude hit $150 a barrel. Futures markets are acting like a deal is around the corner. And James Gutman is back on Energy Empire to explain why those two numbers don't match — and what happens when they do.

This is James's fourth time on the show. He walks us through why the shock has already been absorbed but the real pain is still in the pipeline, why energy independence gave the US, Israel, Russia, and China each a permission structure to act more aggressively on the world stage, and why Europe — which didn't want this war — is now building a post-war security architecture for the Strait of Hormuz without the country that started it.

On the ground: 70% of American farmers can't afford fertilizer. Europe has six weeks of jet fuel left. The US can't deliver the weapons its NATO allies already paid for. And James makes the case that this war may bring us to peak oil demand — not because of any climate agreement, but because the world is making sure this never happens again.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

For two decades, Russell Gold covered the energy industry for The Wall Street Journal, breaking the Deepwater Horizon story and exposing PG&E's role in the Camp Fire. Now he's on the other side — running communications and strategy for T1 Energy, a company building a fully domestic solar supply chain across the United States.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Russell about why he left journalism, what the clean energy industry keeps getting wrong about its own story, and why he's stopped talking about carbon at work.

Along the way: the Landman problem, the case that solar is the most American energy, why the industry needs to stop "bringing a fan to a gunfight," and what a $5 gallon of gas means for the politics of clean energy.

Plus: what it actually takes to build a 5-gigawatt solar factory in Texas, and why Russell thinks localization — not carbon — is the argument that wins this decade.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Tom Fanning spent 43 years at Southern Company — 15 different jobs, 13 years as CEO — and oversaw the construction of the only new nuclear reactors built in America in a generation.

This is a special bonus episode recorded live at the UNC Clean Tech Summit in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in collaboration with Nico Johnson's Suncast podcast. Jigar and Nico sit down with Fanning to talk about what he learned building Plant Vogtle, why America has lost its ability to build big things, what utility leadership should look like in a moment of crisis, and why his answer to almost every problem is the same: get everybody in the boat.

This is the first of three bonus episodes from UNC Clean Tech. Conversations with former EPA Administrator Michael Regan and NextPower CEO Dan Shugar drop over the next two Tuesdays.

Two additional interviews from the summit — with John Szoka from the Conservative Energy Network and investor Ahmad Chatila — are available on Suncast: https://www.suncast.media/

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

Your electricity bill keeps going up. Utilities are spending billions on new infrastructure. But the grid we already have is running at a fraction of its capacity — and the technology to unlock it has existed for 20 years.

Vishal Kapadia knows this firsthand. At Walmart, he watched reliability decline and costs rise across thousands of stores. Now, as CEO of LineVision, he's deploying sensors that unlock 30 to 40% more capacity on existing transmission lines for major utilities.

Jigar Shah and co-host Arnab Pal sit down with Vishal to ask the obvious question: if the technology works, why hasn't anyone scaled it? They get into the slide rule problem, the $45 billion we spend on transmission every year, why Virginia just passed the first-in-the-nation grid utilization bill, and why proven solutions keep getting stuck in pilot programs while consumers pay the price.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Everyone is focused on oil prices. But oil isn't just fuel — it's feedstock. 92% of the world's sulfur comes from refining oil and gas. A third of global helium is offline. Half the world's food depends on fertilizer that flows through a 21-mile chokepoint. And your kid's birthday balloons? Those need helium too.

James Gutman returns to Energy Empire for a third time — and this time, the mood is different. On Day 31 of the war, the crisis is no longer theoretical. Pakistan is rationing fuel. Thailand is telling government workers to take the stairs. Hundreds of gas stations in Australia are running dry. Airlines are canceling flights across Southeast Asia. And as Gutman warns, the disruptions Americans will feel haven't even arrived yet — they're still in the pipeline.

Jigar Shah and co-host Arnab Pal dig into the humanitarian fallout, the supply chain cascades nobody is talking about, the political consequences heading into the midterms, and how Iran turned the most important waterway on earth into a toll road — with payments in Chinese yuan.

Plus: Is Trump still the accidental clean energy president? Is China becoming the new energy superpower?

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

After an accident totaled his Tesla, Philippe Dunsky forgot to remove it from the app. A year later, his 18-year-old daughter texted him: "Papa, what is Georgia doing in Ukraine?"

Their old car — named Georgia — was charging in a rural town in western Ukraine near the Polish border. Someone had salvaged the 90-kilowatt-hour battery and repurposed it to keep homes warm and lights on during Russian bombardments of the electricity grid.

In this episode, Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan sit down with Philippe Dunsky — one of Canada's top energy consultants — to follow Georgia's journey and ask a bigger question: why are millions of EV batteries sitting unused in American driveways when they could be powering homes, backing up the grid, and saving consumers money?

They dig into why utilities would rather spend $50 million upgrading a substation than give you $10,000 in free equipment, why bi-directional chargers are only now reaching the U.S. when other countries have had them for years, and what it would take to turn a million EVs a year into the largest distributed power plant the country has ever seen.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.

Electric semi trucks that go 500 miles on a single charge and fully recharge in 30 minutes. That's what the Tesla Semi is promising — and trucking companies are already placing orders by the hundreds.

In this episode, Jigar and Jamie sit down with Adam Browning to dig into what's actually happening with zero-emission freight — what he saw inside the massive Tesla Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada last week, why legacy truck manufacturers are falling behind, and what it takes to get real electric trucks on real roads today. They also tackle the hard questions: What does this mean for refrigerated trucks? What are the real economics? And how does a trucker who averages seven to eight miles per gallon on diesel feel about all of this?

Jamie brings questions directly from her dad — a working long-haul trucker — and the answers might surprise him.

Adam is a leader at Forum Mobility, the company building charging depots for electric freight. He previously founded Vote Solar, where he helped grow the U.S. solar industry over two decades. He sees the same playbook unfolding in trucking — and he's betting his trucker hat on it.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Trump promised to cut energy bills in half. Instead, he started a war that pushed oil past $100 a barrel, shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and sent every oil-importing nation on earth scrambling for solar panels and batteries — mostly from China.

James Gutman returns to Energy Empire with a provocative argument: Donald Trump has inadvertently done more to accelerate the global clean energy transition than any climate policy in history. Not because he wanted to — but because when you blow up the global energy order, countries don't wait around. They build something new.

Jigar Shah, Jamie Nolan, and Gutman trace how the Iran war is rewiring global energy in real time — from Pakistan's 41 GW solar boom to China's $250 billion clean energy Marshall Plan to the fertilizer plants shutting down because of gas prices.

Your utility bill keeps going up. But the problem isn't that we need to build more — it's that we're barely using what we already have.

Arnab Pal, founder of clean energy advocacy group Deploy Action and co-author of a new grid affordability playbook, joins Jigar and Jamie to make the case for grid utilization: the unglamorous, cost-cutting strategy that governors, regulators, and utilities are finally starting to pay attention to.

They get into why blue states like California and New York have struggled to actually build clean energy despite ambitious goals, what virtual power plants can do for your electricity bill, and why the debate over whether to say the word "climate" is more complicated than either side admits.

Read the white paper: Grid Growth, Utilization, and Affordability — A Playbook for States https://www.deploy-action.org/post/grid-growth-utilization-and-affordability-a-playbook-for-states

The US bombed Iran on Saturday. We threw out our planned episode and called James Gutman, Strategist & co-author of The New Joule Order at the Carlyle Group, to make sense of what comes next.

James explains why the US has no incentive to protect global energy supply chains, how Venezuela and Iran are reshaping China's energy calculus, and why every oil-importing nation on earth is now rethinking its energy strategy.

Plus, Jigar and Jamie break down what this means for American consumers — from gas prices to natural gas bills — and why the case for solar, batteries, and electrification just got a whole lot stronger.

Tim Hade, Air Force veteran and founder of Scale Microgrids, joins Jigar and Jamie to make the case that the rush to build off-grid data centers is solving the wrong problem. 

With 56 gigawatts of co-located data centers in the pipeline, Tim explains why most won't get built — and why the real answer is batteries, load flexibility, and making the grid work for data centers, not around them. From his journey building microgrids for cannabis facilities to pioneering distributed energy solutions, Tim breaks down the power electronics challenges that most developers are ignoring, why 10,000 batteries beat one giant power plant, and how communities can actually benefit from the data center boom instead of getting trampled by it.

Don't miss Tim Hade's new Substack and his must-read companion piece to this episode: "The Fastest Way to Ramp Compute Isn't a Power Plant Next to Every Data Center" — https://timhade.substack.com/p/the-fastest-way-to-ramp-compute-isnt

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

Oil shocks once defined the global economy. But even as conflict returns to major energy regions, prices remain relatively stable.

In this episode, Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan speak with Kevin Book about how electrification, energy efficiency, and avoided oil demand are reshaping global markets — and what it means for energy security in a world less dependent on the barrel. 

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

Abby Hopper spent nearly a decade as CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), representing one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S. economy at the center of Washington’s biggest political fights. 

In this episode of Energy Empire, she joins Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan to talk about what it’s really like to lead solar through culture wars, trade battles, and rising scrutiny from policymakers — even as it becomes the dominant source of new electricity.

They discuss the reputational risks facing rooftop solar, why the industry still struggles to build political power, and what the next CEO of SEIA will need to do differently as energy demand surges and projects stall.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

Dean Solon went from carrying his dad’s HVAC toolbox as a kid to building Shoals—and becoming one of solar’s rare self-made billionaires. 

Dean breaks down how he thinks, how he sells, and why he’s allergic to corporate nonsense. We talk tariffs, solar factories, microgrids, Disney, and the hard truth about what it takes to make clean energy in the U.S. without getting crushed.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

He’s helped finance billions in clean energy and served as one of the U.S. government’s top energy officials—but Jigar Shah rarely talks about himself. 

In this episode, Phil Radford, CEO of Consumer Reports and Jigar's best friend, joins to change that. Jigar shares the personal story behind SunEdison, the early days of third-party solar finance, and the setbacks that came with building companies in a then-nascent industry.

From watching his hometown lose major employers to putting SunEdison’s first projects on his own credit card, Jigar reflects on the early risks, personal losses, and unlikely breaks that shaped his path from solar entrepreneur to public servant. It’s an inside look at the experiences—and people—that influenced a career spent helping scale clean energy worldwide.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

Across the United States, clean energy now makes up more than 90% of new electricity added to the grid — not because of politics or ideology, but because these technologies simply work better. They’re cheaper to build, faster to deploy, and easier to scale than anything that came before.

The technology is ready. Now the race is on to build it…everywhere.

Energy Empire is a podcast about the people and ideas driving this transformation. We explore how abundant, affordable energy is reshaping the global economy, creating new industries, and unlocking what may be the greatest wealth-creation opportunity of our generation.

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm

A once-in-a-generation shift is underway in how the world is powered.

Across the United States, clean energy now makes up more than 90% of new electricity added to the grid — not because of politics or ideology, but because these technologies simply work better. They’re cheaper to build, faster to deploy, and easier to scale than anything that came before.

The technology is ready. Now the race is on to build it…everywhere.

Energy Empire is a podcast about the people and ideas driving this transformation. We explore how abundant, affordable energy is reshaping the global economy, creating new industries, and unlocking what may be the greatest wealth-creation opportunity of our generation.

Hosted by Jigar Shah — TIME100 honoree, serial entrepreneur, investor, and former U.S. Department of Energy leader — the show pulls back the curtain on the decisions, innovations, and power struggles shaping the future of energy.

Whether you’re curious about where the economy is headed, how energy affects your daily life, or who’s really building the future behind the scenes, Energy Empire is your guide to what comes next.

Listen to this teaser episode to hear what Energy Empire is all about—and where the show is headed.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy.

Learn more at EnergyEmpire.fm