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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. 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.fmSubmit 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

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 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

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. 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: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/inside-california-s-plan-to-fix-the-utility-business-model-with-senator-josh-becker NVIDIA on Whether AI Can Fix Its Own Power Problem: https://www.energyempire.fm/episodes/nvidia-on-whether-ai-can-fix-its-own-power-problem-recorded-live-at-climate-week-nyc Our merch store: https://energy-empire.bonfire.com/collection/all-products

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 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

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

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 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

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

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 hit Why NVIDIA is cooling its chips with 113°F coolant to cut water use Whether AI needs gigawatt-scale data centers, or GPUs on the side of a house How half a percent of flexibility could free up about 100 gigawatts on the US grid The cost of adding 12 hours of battery backup to a $125 million data center What it would take for a data center to lower its neighbors' power bills Learn more at energyempire.fm

Four senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act on September 30. One of them recorded this episode with Jigar the day before. The bill puts deadlines on federal environmental reviews, gives opponents 150 days to sue instead of five years, hands the federal government a backstop for interstate transmission, and, as Heinrich describes it, bars utilities from putting a data center's grid costs on anyone else's bill. Martin Heinrich is the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and negotiated the deal with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Republican chairs Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee. In this episode: Why Heinrich didn't wait for a Democratic Senate: "why don't you just wait until you have the gavel?" The difference between a "sternly worded letter" and a law when a hyperscaler wants to plug in The one-year clock a state gets before a transmission route goes to FERC Why a geothermal well is harder to permit than an oil well on the same acre of federal land What got "a little rocky" with the White House the week before the deal "If you're calling people ratepayers, you're probably making some mistakes" 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

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 coming The extra $5.77 a month on Arkansas power bills after the local utility refused to let Google pay for its own grid upgrades Promises 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 to Paying 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 bill Learn more at energyempire.fm

In Germany you pick up a solar panel at IKEA or the grocery store and plug it in at home. Here you order online, the cheapest kits can take four months to arrive, and in most states you still technically need your utility's permission to install it. Cora Stryker co-founded Bright Saver, a nonprofit that sells the kits at cost, $285 for a 180 watt system. They helped draft Utah's balcony solar bill, the first in the country, and have since worked with legislators in 35 states and DC. Nine have passed laws so far. In this episode: Why some states make you hire an electrician to plug in an appliance What a $285 panel takes off a monthly bill, and how fast it pays for itself The emails from PG&E that killed Bright Saver's first business model The for-profit company that rewrote one state's bill so only its own product would be legal Why balcony solar has bipartisan support When Cora thinks you'll be able to buy one at Walmart 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

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 power Oklahoma 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 true The $5,000 electricity bills from the Texas freeze, and why cheap power always comes with a catch A 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-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

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 oil Why a refinery that could make this fuel today makes diesel instead What the banks told Lauren they need before they will finance a plant, and why nobody is offering it Europe's rule where you miss the blend, pay the fine, and still owe the fuel Oscar the Grouch, United's first Chief Trash Officer, has retired Jigar's case for skipping ahead to hybrid planes 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

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 grazing The business model almost nobody knows exists, and how it turned a money-losing hobby farm into a real livestock operation The two stubborn brothers who sold Rebekah her hay, leased their land for solar, and changed her family's life The 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 array 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

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 images 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