Energy Empire

Afleveringen

1. Trump’s Former FERC Chair on the Midterms, Selling Ted Cruz on Solar, and Why He’s Nervous About the Permitting Bill | Energy on the Ballot

   2 november 2026 · 36 min

   Afspelen
   Election Day is tomorrow, and energy is on the ballot. Neil Chatterjee, who chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during President Trump’s first term, joins Jigar and Jamie for the final episode of our midterm series. Whatever happens tomorrow, he wants both parties to change course on energy. Lees meer

   For Neil, part of the fix is the Senate’s bipartisan permitting bill, which would help get more power onto the grid. It gets its first vote November 9, six days after the election. Republicans walked away from a permitting deal once they swept the 2024 election, and Neil worries Democrats could do the same if they have a big night.

   In this episode:

   Neil and Jigar predict who wins the Senate

   The Ohio Senate race Neil sees as the biggest test for data centers on the ballot

   What it would take to pass the permitting bill before January, and the House committee where a few departing hardliners could kill it

   What each party needs to accept after the election: natural gas for Democrats, more than “drill, baby, drill” for Republicans

   How Neil convinced Ted Cruz that rooftop solar tax credits were “an America First type policy”

   Links:

   Our website: https://www.energyempire.fm

   Neil and Michael Regan’s Fortune op-ed on regulating data centers: https://fortune.com/2026/10/23/data-center-mess-how-to-fix-bipartisan/

   The Senate permitting bill: https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/9/whitehouse-capito-heinrich-lee-introduce-bipartisan-american-affordability-and-jobs-act-of-2026

   Political Climate Podcast: https://www.politicalclimatepodcast.com

   Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

2. Turning America’s Waste Heat Into 15 Gigawatts of Power

   29 oktober 2026 · 33 min

   Afspelen
   Factories and gas pipelines vent heat into the air every day. Captured, that heat can produce clean electricity around the clock. Lees meer

   Today, the US gets less than 1 gigawatt of power from waste heat, but Department of Energy estimates put the potential at up to 15 gigawatts, enough to power more than 10 million homes. Other countries already put far more of their waste heat to work.

   On this episode, Jigar is joined by Janice Tran and Marisa Sweeney. Janice is CEO and co-founder of Kanin Energy, a developer of waste heat to power and other industrial efficiency projects. Marisa is a principal on the Structured Finance team at S2G Investments, which led Kanin’s latest funding round. Both worked with Jigar at Generate Capital.

   In this episode:

   How waste heat helped a university ride out a summer of sky-high power prices

   Why Europe has used its waste heat for decades while the US mostly vented it

   What kept American waste heat untapped long after the technology was proven

   Why banks would rather finance the 12th waste heat plant than the first

   The high school job at Walmart that came full circle for Janice

   “We have a goal to be the largest waste heat to power developer in the entire world.”

   Links:

   Our website: https://www.energyempire.fm

   “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” by Amory Lovins (Foreign Affairs, 1976): https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1976-10-01/energy-strategy-road-not-taken

   S2G Investments Structured Finance: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/strategy/structured-finance

   S2G Investments report: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

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

   Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

3. Who Benefits From $6 Diesel? Sen. Tina Smith Says Follow the Money | Energy on the Ballot

   26 oktober 2026 · 31 min

   Afspelen
   Gas is up more than a dollar a gallon since the Iran war began, and diesel set an all-time record in September. Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) says the president’s donors are profiting while everyone else pays more. Lees meer

   Smith explains what voters should listen for when a candidate promises to bring energy costs down, and why she voted against a data center bill Republicans are now campaigning on.

   Part of Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the 2026 midterms.

   In this episode:

   The heating aid program the White House wants to eliminate, and the St. Paul man it kept in his home

   “Don’t do data centers the dumb way,” and why nondisclosure agreements make neighbors so angry

   Why a senator from a mining state fought a Chilean-owned copper-nickel mine near the Boundary Waters

   What former Fed Chair Jerome Powell predicted about getting a mortgage in 10 or 15 years

   The campaign word Smith calls “a weird focus group word”

   Why Smith wants Democrats to show more “boldness” if they win back power

   Links:

   Our website: https://www.energyempire.fm

   Sen. Smith’s request for a cost estimate of the 2025 tax law’s data center breaks: https://www.smith.senate.gov/u-s-senator-tina-smith-requests-cost-estimate-of-big-beautiful-bills-data-center-tax-incentives/

   Sen. Smith’s report on the home insurance crisis: https://www.smith.senate.gov/u-s-senator-tina-smith-releases-new-report-on-solutions-to-the-home-insurance-crisis/

   The Klobuchar-Smith letter on heating aid: https://www.smith.senate.gov/u-s-senators-amy-klobuchar-tina-smith-push-the-trump-administration-to-release-heating-assistance-funds-before-winter/

   Gov. 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-ballot

4. Is Venture Capital the Wrong Tool for Clean Energy?

   22 oktober 2026 · 32 min

   Afspelen
   In the first half of this year, 86% of U.S. venture money went to AI. Climate venture funds have raised less than $1 billion, down from more than $10 billion in 2021. Lees meer

   This week’s guest, Andrew Beebe, is more optimistic than those numbers suggest. The generalist funds that piled into climate a few years ago drove up the price of startups, and now they’ve left. The investors and founders still here understand the market, and he thinks that makes this one of the best times yet to invest.

   Andrew is a managing director at Obvious Ventures, which Twitter co-founder Ev Williams helped start in 2014. The firm has raised more than $1.3 billion across five main funds. Before joining, Andrew spent more than a decade in solar: his team built the array at Google’s headquarters, and he went on to become chief commercial officer at Suntech, then the world’s largest solar manufacturer.

   In this episode:

   Andrew’s don’t-go-there list: battery chemistry, fusion, hydrogen, and sustainable aviation fuel

   Container ships that could cross the Pacific on battery alone, and how Maersk changed its mind

   Why a $200 million business is too small for a venture fund like Obvious

   What Andrew would have told Sheldon Kimber about Google’s offer for Intersect

   Solar robots that take a four-person crew from 200 panels a day to 900

   The board that told Andrew he was doing great when he asked to be replaced as CEO

   Links

   Our website: https://www.energyempire.fm
   Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar
   S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds
   Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas
   Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

5. A Third of Australian Homes Have Solar. Why Is the U.S. So Far Behind? | Energy on the Ballot

   19 oktober 2026 · 26 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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 installer

   The adoption rate at which Australia’s government could stop pushing solar

   What Texas figured out about grid connections while other states keep running pilots

   Why utilities build the grid around its 25 worst hours a year

   The case for data centers small enough to fit on the grid

   Links:

   Our website: https://www.energyempire.fm

   Pew’s distributed energy playbook: https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2026/04/distributed-energy-can-unleash-the-resilient-affordable-grid-of-the-future.pdf

   New York’s data center Community Investment Framework: https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-strongest-community-investment-framework-nation-protect-communities

   Gov. 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-ballot

   Balcony 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

6. The Utility CEO Who Wants to Cut Your Bill | Recorded Live at Future Currence

   18 oktober 2026 · 42 min

   Afspelen
   Demand on ComEd’s grid barely moved from 2009 to 2022. Now the utility expects about 10 gigawatts of data centers to connect by around 2030, against an all-time peak of 23 gigawatts. Lees meer

   ComEd’s CEO, Gil Quiniones, wants to connect those data centers without raising everyone else’s bills. Rooftop solar and batteries, which many utilities have fought, are part of his plan.

   Gil spent 16 years at Con Edison and more than a decade running the New York Power Authority. While he ran the Power Authority, he and Jigar worked on the state’s push to build the grid around energy that customers make and store at home.

   In Chicago, he’s starting with the families who can least afford their bills. A pilot this winter will put solar and batteries in about 50 of their homes with no money down.

   Gil thinks the setup could take about $70 off a monthly bill that typically runs $100 to $120.

   Recorded live at Future Currence during Climate Week NYC.

   In this episode:

   How deposits and letters of credit shrank ComEd’s list of serious data center requests from about 18 gigawatts to 10

   Why Jigar says a data center’s voluntary promise to power down in an emergency isn’t good enough

   What ComEd has to prove to regulators before it can build a new substation

   The 100 hours a year the grid is built for, and what using the rest of the year could do for bills

   Whether other utilities need a new state law to do what ComEd is doing

   Links:

   Future Currence: https://future.currence.ai

   ComEd: https://www.comed.com

   The Untapped Grid (Brattle Group): https://www.brattle.com/the-untapped-grid/

   Illinois Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act: https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/gov-pritzker-signs-historic-clean-and-reliable-grid-affordability-act

   More from Energy Empire:

   The Cheapest Grid Is the One We Already Paid For: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/the-cheapest-grid-is-the-one-we-already-paid-for

   Inside California’s Plan to Fix the Utility Business Model with Senator Josh Becker: …

7. Semafor’s Tim McDonnell on Covering Russia’s Energy War From Kyiv

   15 oktober 2026 · 37 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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 levels

   How a substation wrapped in concrete takes a cruise missile and keeps working

   Why the free flow of oil through Hormuz that existed before February is probably gone for good

   The case that oil importers won’t “go back to sleep” once the Iran war ends

   Egypt’s six-month sprint into wind and solar after Iran sent gas prices up

   The “tourists” arriving in cleantech funding rounds, and whether that’s a bubble

   Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

   S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

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

   Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

8. Gov. Spanberger on Making Data Centers Pay Their Fair Share | Energy on the Ballot

   12 oktober 2026 · 50 min

   Afspelen
   Northern Virginia is the biggest data center market in the world, and pushback is growing. Lees meer

   So are power bills. A typical Dominion bill is now about $180 a month, $20 more than a year ago.

   Rising bills put energy on the ballot in Virginia’s 2025 governor’s race. Abigail Spanberger won it by 15 points, and now she wants data centers to pay for the grid built to serve them.

   Recorded live at the Virginia Clean Energy Summit in Richmond for Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the midterms.

   In this episode:

   The breakfast in Norton, Virginia, where nearly everyone in the room wanted to talk about their power bill

   Why Virginia’s new energy plan puts a price on asthma and rising seas

   A proposal to make new data centers in Virginia face a local vote

   How everyone’s bill changes when data centers choose batteries over gas generators

   Virginia’s first-of-its-kind tax on data center electricity, and the case for the industry’s sales tax break

   What candidates should run on this November, and why state and federal races need different answers

   Links:

   https://energy.virginia.gov/connect/

   www.energyempire.fm

9. Voltus Just Raised $225 Million to Pay You to Use Less Electricity

   8 oktober 2026 · 49 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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 calls

   The church that stayed open and the factory that kept a whole shift, both because of Voltus checks

   From $25 a year for a thermostat to $11 million for a data center, who gets paid what for turning things down

   How 50,000 homes become 100 megawatts, and the PJM rule that kept them out until August

   The year governors and the White House learned what PJM is

   Why Google is paying its neighbors to flex instead of building a gas plant that runs 25 hours a year

   Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

   S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-illusion-of-crowds

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

   Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

10. Senator Whitehouse on Why Democrats Need a Climate Villain | Energy on the Ballot

    5 oktober 2026 · 24 min

    Afspelen
    "Little Red Riding Hood is kind of a dumb story without the wolf." Lees meer

    That's how Senator Sheldon Whitehouse thinks Democrats have been telling the climate story. His wolf is the fossil fuel industry, and it shows up on your electric bill.

    When the Trump administration blocks cheap clean power, the grid falls back on pricier fossil plants and families pay the difference. He calls it a "ginormous money pump."

    Whitehouse represents Rhode Island and is the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is also one of four senators behind the bipartisan permitting bill released shortly after this conversation was recorded.

    Part of Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the 2026 midterms.

    In this episode:

    The half-price offshore wind power for Rhode Island that drew two federal stop-work orders

    "Have you ever seen anything go from zero to everybody hates you faster than data centers?"

    Why he hates, loathes, and despises one stage of federal review, and his fix for it

    What a plumber in Orlando loses when nobody will insure their home

    Russia as "a gas station run by gangsters who have an army," and the sanctions law he wants the president to use

    The dark money bill he wants Democrats to pass and dare the president to veto

    Learn more at energyempire.fm

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