Energy Empire

About one in three homes and businesses in Australia have solar on the roof. The state governments there made it simple, with incentives, certified installers, and quick approvals. In the U.S., permits and inspections can add weeks or months before a system is switched on.This episode’s guest, Audrey Zibelman, has held top energy jobs in both countries. She chaired New York’s Public Service Commission, then ran Australia’s power grid as CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator.Now she’s back in New York as its energy czar, chairing the board of NYSERDA, the state energy authority. The job comes with some of the highest home electricity prices in the country and a freeze on the biggest new data centers.In this episode:The conservative prime minister who backed Australia’s grid plan with three words: “Electrons don’t vote”How Australia got homeowners to trust a government website to find a solar installerThe adoption rate at which Australia’s government could stop pushing solarWhat Texas figured out about grid connections while other states keep running pilotsWhy utilities build the grid around its 25 worst hours a yearThe case for data centers small enough to fit on the gridLinks:Our website: https://www.energyempire.fmPew’s distributed energy playbook: https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2026/04/distributed-energy-can-unleash-the-resilient-affordable-grid-of-the-future.pdfNew York’s data center Community Investment Framework: https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-strongest-community-investment-framework-nation-protect-communitiesGov. Spanberger on Making Data Centers Pay Their Fair Share: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/gov-spanberger-on-making-data-centers-pay-their-fair-share-energy-on-the-ballotBalcony Solar Costs $285. Why Is It Still So Hard to Get?: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/balcony-solar-costs-285-why-is-it-still-so-hard-to-get

Ukraine has learned how to keep a power grid running while someone is trying to destroy it. Every country that imports oil now needs the same lessons.Last winter Russia blew up power plants and substations, and Kyiv lost power every day. The fixes were concrete bunkers that let a substation take a direct hit, home batteries, a nuclear fleet kept running, and new wind and solar built in the middle of a war.The Iran war has since shown every oil importer the same vulnerability. Countries won’t go back to sleep after this, and the map of who buys energy from whom is being redrawn.Tim McDonnell is Semafor’s climate and energy editor and writes Semafor Energy, its twice-weekly newsletter. He lives in Kyiv, where the sirens go off all the time and some nights are spent in the metro. Getting out to report starts with an overnight train to Poland, because Ukraine still has no working airport.The interview was recorded at Climate Week NYC on September 21. The intro and outro were recorded before the energy ceasefire Trump announced on October 11.In this episode:The sirens, the metro at night, and why the air war over Kyiv is back to early-2022 levelsHow a substation wrapped in concrete takes a cruise missile and keeps workingWhy the free flow of oil through Hormuz that existed before February is probably gone for goodThe case that oil importers won’t “go back to sleep” once the Iran war endsEgypt’s six-month sprint into wind and solar after Iran sent gas prices upThe “tourists” arriving in cleantech funding rounds, and whether that’s a bubbleSubmit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

When a warehouse turns its freezers down for two hours, it looks to the grid like a power plant switching on. Voltus pays thousands of businesses to do exactly that, every day of the year.Voltus, the largest demand-flexibility company in North America, just announced a $225 million Series D led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. Today's guest, co-founder and CEO Dana Guernsey, plans to use it to grow from 8.5 gigawatts of flexible capacity to 20 by 2030, a quarter of the Department of Energy's target for the whole country.Google is already a customer, paying Voltus to line up as much as 100 megawatts of that flexibility in PJM, the grid that runs from Illinois to Virginia, so its data centers can connect faster. It's the first deal of its kind, and Dana's argument is that "do no harm" is too low a bar for a company with Google's balance sheet; a data center can leave the grid better than it found it.In this episode:What a Walmart, a winery, a glass factory, and a sewage plant each do when Voltus callsThe church that stayed open and the factory that kept a whole shift, both because of Voltus checksFrom $25 a year for a thermostat to $11 million for a data center, who gets paid what for turning things downHow 50,000 homes become 100 megawatts, and the PJM rule that kept them out until AugustThe year governors and the White House learned what PJM isWhy Google is paying its neighbors to flex instead of building a gas plant that runs 25 hours a yearSubmit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

AI data centers are straining the grid. NVIDIA and Phaidra say part of the fix is more AI: software that runs the cooling, data centers that ease off when demand peaks, and chips that do more with every watt.This episode was recorded live at The Nest Campus during Climate Week NYC. Jigar and Jamie talk with Josh Parker, head of sustainability at NVIDIA, and Jim Gao, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA-backed Phaidra.In this episode:An AI agent that predicts heat spikes on CoreWeave's NVIDIA chips and stops them before they hitWhy NVIDIA is cooling its chips with 113°F coolant to cut water useWhether AI needs gigawatt-scale data centers, or GPUs on the side of a houseHow half a percent of flexibility could free up about 100 gigawatts on the US gridThe cost of adding 12 hours of battery backup to a $125 million data centerWhat it would take for a data center to lower its neighbors' power billsLearn more at energyempire.fm

Electricity bills are rising across America, and for the first time in years, they're a campaign issue. Candidates on the left and the right are promising to cut your power bill. But are they even the ones in charge? What gets decided in Washington, and what gets decided in your state capital? And how do you tell a real promise from an empty one?Those questions are what Energy on the Ballot is for: a new series from Energy Empire, released every Monday until Election Day.To kick it off, Jigar and Jamie sit down with Arnab Pal, co-founder and executive director of Deploy Action, who spends his days in state capitals pushing laws that make utilities use the grid they already have before they build more and bill you for it.Together they walk through the basics: what really makes a power bill go up, who signs off on it, and which of this year's promises to lower it can be kept. Recorded in person at the new Energy Empire studio in New York.In this episode:Why the backlash against data centers is really a backlash against AI, and why the tech companies didn't see it comingThe extra $5.77 a month on Arkansas power bills after the local utility refused to let Google pay for its own grid upgradesPromises made: Trump's pledge to halve energy bills in 12 months, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill's rate freeze that became a $25 credit, and a Big Tech pledge nobody can point a dollar toPaying people to use less power at peak times is 80% cheaper than building a new gas plant, so why aren't more utilities offering it?Why your state legislator matters more than your member of Congress when it comes to your power billLearn more at energyempire.fm

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 powerOklahoma 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 trueThe $5,000 electricity bills from the Texas freeze, and why cheap power always comes with a catchA 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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur 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 grazingThe business model almost nobody knows exists, and how it turned a money-losing hobby farm into a real livestock operationThe two stubborn brothers who sold Rebekah her hay, leased their land for solar, and changed her family's lifeThe 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 arraySubmit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur 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 startingThe 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 callHe 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 timeLinks: Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 pumpThe 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 lowChina cut imports by 5.5 million barrels a day without touching its strategic reserveEurope'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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasJames Gutman's Substack: https://jgutman.substack.com/Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 itFrom 33 dispatches a year to 500: how one utility went from teacher to biggest customerThe 33 gigawatts Nate says we could free up tomorrow, without building a single power plantInside 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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowdsOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasEnergy 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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-orderOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasOur 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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-orderOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faasGet your merch: 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-jigarS2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-orderOctopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas