Energy Empire
Energy Empire is a podcast about the shift to clean energy in the United States. Hosted by Jigar Shah, a TIME100 honoree and former U.S. Department of Energy leader, the show explores how abundant, affordable energy is reshaping the global economy. It covers the people, ideas, and innovations driving this transformation, and the wealth-creation opportunities it presents.
Episodes
Can a Climate Democrat Win a Trump District? — with Rep. Kathy Castor
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
Forget Solar Stocks. The Best Solar Returns Are Overseas.
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 cap
The Utilities Want $1.4 Trillion. The Hyperscalers Want a Gigawatt. Nobody Did the Math.
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.
Ask Jigar: Should You Cut the Cord on Your Utility?
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
Inside California's Plan to Fix the Utility Business Model with Senator Josh Becker
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
Ask Jigar: Where do you actually start when you want to electrify your life?
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 sta
What If Data Centers Paid You?
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 dow
The Guy Who Built American Wind — and What He’s Betting On Next
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.Jig
Bonus episode: Why Is Lady Liberty Holding a Power Cable?
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
"Nobody Cared About Deployment" — Who is Jigar Shah? (Part 2)
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, Gen
Bonus Episode: Dan Shugar on Reshoring Solar Manufacturing (recorded at UNC Clean Tech Summit)
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&
Bonus Episode: Former EPA Administrator Michael Regan on Data Centers and Public Health (Recorded at UNC Clean Tech Summit)
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 po
Trump's Iran War: Hubris, Blowback, and Peak Oil
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
Russell Gold on Leaving The Wall Street Journal for the Solar Industry
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 journalis
Bonus Episode: Tom Fanning on 43 Years at Southern Company (recorded at UNC Clean Tech Summit)
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 wha
We've Been Piloting Grid Solutions for 20 Years. It's Time to Deploy.
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 t
No Fertilizer. No Data Centers. No Birthday Balloons. The Iran War Is Not Just Impacting Oil.
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 E
How My Retired EV Ended Up Powering Homes in Ukraine
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 b
500 Miles on a Charge: Is This the End of the Diesel Semi?
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, Nev
Trump: The Accidental Clean Energy President
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 transitio
The Cheapest Grid Is the One We Already Paid For
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 util
Why the War in Iran Is Speeding Up the Clean Energy Transition
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 rethinki
The Case Against Off-Grid Data Centers with Tim Hade
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. Fr
Why Wars No Longer Move Oil Markets with Kevin Book
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
A Decade as Solar’s Top Lobbyist with Abby Hopper
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 fro
The American-Made Solar Billionaire with Dean Solon
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 we
Who is Jigar Shah?
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 compa
Energy Empire Trailer
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 a
Welcome to Energy Empire
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
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