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by 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 to build it…everywhere. Energy Empire is a podcast about the people and ideas driving this transformation. We explore how abundant, affordable energy is reshaping the global economy, creating new industries, and unlocking what may be the greatest wealth-creation opportunity of our generation. Hosted by Jigar Shah — TIME100 honoree, serial entrepreneur, investor, and former U.S. Department of Energy leader — the show pulls back the curtain on the decisions, innovations, and power struggles shaping the future of energy. Whether you’re curious about where the economy is headed, how energy affects your daily life, or who’s really building the future behind the scenes, Energy Empire is your guide to what comes next.
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- 4 days ago49 min
Power Prices Have Barely Moved in 10 Years. So Why Is Your Bill Going Up?
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
- 1 weeks ago54 min
Will Sustainable Aviation Fuel Ever Take Off?
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 oilWhy a refinery that could make this fuel today makes diesel insteadWhat the banks told Lauren they need before they will finance a plant, and why nobody is offering itEurope's rule where you miss the blend, pay the fine, and still owe the fuelOscar the Grouch, United's first Chief Trash Officer, has retiredJigar's case for skipping ahead to hybrid planesSubmit 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
- 2 weeks ago54 min
1 in 50 American Sheep Now Works in the Energy Industry
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
- 3 weeks ago1h 3m
Why Are AI Companies So Obsessed With Gas?
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 imagesSubmit 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
- Aug 20, 20261h 23m
Who Is Jigar Shah? (Part 3): Taking Over the Office He Called "Irredeemable"
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
- Aug 20, 20268 min
Ask Jigar: Is a $20,000 used EV the cheapest home battery you can buy?
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 that470,000 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
- Aug 13, 20261h 7m
Five Months Into the Iran War, China Is Saving Its Oil for the Next One
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
- Aug 11, 202649 min
Introducing Grid 2.0, the Open Protocol for the American Grid (Bonus episode)
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.
About 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 to build it…everywhere. Energy Empire is a podcast about the people and ideas driving this transformation. We explore how abundant, affordable energy is reshaping the global economy, creating new industries, and unlocking what may be the greatest wealth-creation opportunity of our generation. Hosted by Jigar Shah — TIME100 honoree, serial entrepreneur, investor, and former U.S. Department of Energy leader — the show pulls back the curtain on the decisions, innovations, and power struggles shaping the future of energy. Whether you’re curious about where the economy is headed, how energy affects your daily life, or who’s really building the future behind the scenes, Energy Empire is your guide to what comes next.
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