Energy Empire

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. He funded the company in 2013 by selling shares in his own future income. Last year he got federal approval for CleanTrade, the first regulated exchange for wind and solar power, which now has 60 participants and $50 billion in bids. In this episode: The three buckets on your bill, and why the one that keeps growing has nothing to do with generating power Oklahoma gets 45% of its power from wind and prices haven't moved in a decade. West Virginia has almost none, and prices are up 50% California has some of the cheapest electricity in the country and the most expensive bills. Both are true The $5,000 electricity bills from the Texas freeze, and why cheap power always comes with a catch A 1,000-page application, DOGE, and 4 of 5 commissioners gone: getting a first-of-its-kind market through Washington "Tax credits were always a really blunt force way to get around the fact that we don't actually charge for carbon" 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

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