Energy Empire

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