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
  

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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

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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

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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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

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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

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