Energy Empire

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.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

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