Transcript
INTRO
Jamie Nolan: Jigar, I am excited. I am so excited.
Jigar Shah: I don't think you've actually hidden your excitement.
Jamie Nolan: Yes, I am fangirling for this episode. When you first asked me to be a co-host of Energy Empire, one of the reasons I said yes was so that we could record with today's guest, former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who is a personal hero of mine.
Jigar Shah: I obviously think the world of her. She was by far the best boss. I don't know if you know the backstory, but when they offered me the job to run the Loan Programs Office, I was told by my board at Generate Capital, we need to figure out a way to get out of this, because you don't want to take this job. So we wrote this long Word document that had all of these unreasonable requests. And then I got Secretary Granholm, Ali Zaidi, and Brian Deese on the phone, and they all said, okay, we'll give you everything you wanted, if you take the job. And I was like, damn it, now I gotta actually take it. But it was such a joy to work for her. I honestly can't imagine another secretary letting us get away with all of the things we were doing, because we were breaking the rules the whole time trying to figure out how to get this damn thing restarted. Her personality was probably the only one that would let us do that.
Jamie Nolan: We absolutely were breaking the rules in the best ways. I think she knew there was a method to our madness, and your leadership was so strong. She put so much trust in you and in the team. I served at the Department of Energy about nine years across three presidential administrations under four different secretaries of energy, and the culture at DOE was the strongest under her leadership, and the churn was much less. A big thing you'll see in federal agencies, particularly with political appointees, is that it's a grueling job. They burn out and tend to leave after 18 months to two years. The majority of her team stayed for all four years, which is incredibly rare, and it's a testament to her leadership. People were empowered by her vision. It is a delight for me to get 45 minutes to talk to her, and I will not apologize for my fangirling.
Jigar Shah: The reason I wanted her on the show is that we live in unprecedented times. She stewarded us through the Ukraine crisis and worked with all those energy ministers to figure out how to get Europe through it. I'm curious what her thoughts are on this current Strait of Hormuz crisis. She also used to be a two-term governor of Michigan, and as we've talked about, governors are really under fire, because their voters are asking, what are you doing to protect us from data center load growth and electricity inflation and utility rate increases? In this moment, her perspective is one I'm really curious about. And the last thing is industrial strategy. The Biden administration and her leadership are really known for kicking off this entire project, which allows the US to be more muscular about restarting battery manufacturing and solar manufacturing in this country. I was so giddy to hear that Hanwha Q Cells, which we provided a loan to in Georgia, is fully up and running now, manufacturing solar cells and modules. And Rivian just announced its R2 is fully launched, which we helped put the loan together for. I'd love for her to take a victory lap on some of that.
Jamie Nolan: Such a great point. It warms my heart knowing those facilities are out there creating thousands of good-paying, family-supporting jobs. Regardless of who's getting credit, we know we were there and we helped. I think her insights have never been more valuable than they are right now, and I'm so glad she's still so heavily involved. I know she's been advising New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, so I really want to talk to her about that, and what she would do if she were a governor today. I hope this episode filters through to some governor staffs. Can't wait to hear from Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who will always be the secretary in my heart.
INTERVIEW
SECRETARY FOREVER
Jigar Shah: So when do I stop using the formal phrase "secretary"? Is it something I can use forever? You've earned the honorific title.
Jennifer Granholm: Jigar, call me Jennifer.
Jamie Nolan: I have to tell you, Secretary, which I will be calling you. Jigar and I, when you come up in conversation and we say "the secretary," we're talking about you. I served 10 years at DOE. It's a huge deal to me to have you here. This is the episode I have been the most excited for since we launched the podcast.
Jennifer Granholm: Really? That's so nice. Well, good. I hope I don't screw it up.
Jamie Nolan: I am so excited and delighted that you are here.
Jennifer Granholm: Who cares about the protocol, really? It's all a bunch of bullshit anyway. But you call somebody by their highest office, and technically secretary is higher than governor, because it's a cabinet official.
Jamie Nolan: Secretary forever, as far as I'm concerned.
Jennifer Granholm: Well, it's the best job I ever had, so I like it.
ENERGY SOVEREIGNTY AND THE LESSON OF UKRAINE
Jigar Shah: It has been so crazy. I think we're on number 39 for the president announcing a deal with Iran, although this one seems more real than the rest. Putting the details to the side, you actually lived through the Ukraine conflict. You had to talk to all of your fellow energy ministers from around the world. I'm trying to understand how that's been happening, probably since February 28th. How does that actually work?
Jennifer Granholm: It all happens at the IEA. That's where we all gather and compare notes and freak out. I hope you get Fatih Birol on your podcast at some point, because he's such a peach of a human, and he's trying to navigate all of this, including the relationship with the United States, given that the IEA has historically, under his leadership, been championing the transition to clean energy. So what has happened? This is obviously Ukraine 2.0, and the energy ministers are in a slightly different phase than they were with the Ukraine war, because they learned their lesson. The lesson is that you can't rely on a single source for your energy supply. In that case it was Russia, so they turned to us. Now they realize they can't rely on the Middle East, or on transit through the strait, or any single choke point like that, nor can they rely on just one supplier. So they're not just going to rely on us either. In Ukraine, the freakout was about getting supply, but also making sure citizens didn't bear the cost. The EU and the UK ended up spending $870 billion to subsidize rates so that citizens didn't feel it. That's a huge amount of money in a short period of time, and it didn't have the impact on demand-side strategies, because if you're subsidizing it, people are going to continue to use it. So this time around, they're focused less on subsidies, because it was so expensive, and more on investing in domestic supply. You see this whole movement toward what's known as energy sovereignty. Despite the LNG deals the Trump administration announced, they really want homegrown energy, or at least a variety of suppliers. It's a challenging time for everybody. Who knows how long the latest deal will last, or whether it will bring down gas prices. But the lesson should be etched in stone by now: you do not have a single supplier. You must diversify, and you must grow your own.
THE WAR ON CLEAN ENERGY, AND THE BOOM ANYWAY
Jamie Nolan: How would you contrast that with how the Trump administration is reacting to this moment here in the United States? We've released 172 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is something you were responsible for when you were secretary. And meanwhile, the administration is waging this ideological war against wind and solar power. Stephen Miller had a tweet go viral about offshore wind, calling it a visual insult on God's creation, something very dramatic. Sitting on the sidelines, it must be tough. What's your thought about how they're approaching this domestically versus how other countries are handling it?
Jennifer Granholm: First of all, it's just unwise to cut off a major source of energy supply at a point when you have an energy dominance council, you want to be energy dominant, and you want to push AI. These AI companies have commitments to their shareholders to buy clean energy, and you're not allowing them to do that. You've cut off the ability to permit wind or solar on public lands, taking away a source of the cheapest form of energy. How counterproductive is that? And then the insanity of buying off offshore wind permits, not just not allowing them, but buying them off. It's so illogical if you really want to be energy dominant. The perverse outcome, and it makes me chuckle a little, is that we're seeing a huge expansion of solar. The private sector is jumping in with both feet. Maybe they're not waving their hands about it, but their heads are down, and you better believe they are deploying, deploying, deploying. Last year was a record year for deploying clean energy, almost 60 gigawatts. This year it's going to be 86 gigawatts added to the grid in the United States, despite all of it. It's a weird outcome. The perverse notion that you cut off all the tax credits for electric vehicles, and because of your action in the Strait of Hormuz you've had a 30% increase in the purchase of EV hybrids and used EVs. It's unusual, we'll just say that. So much of that is because of the cliff they added, which goes into effect next week. Your project has to be under construction by July, so all these developers got very busy very quickly to commit and move dirt, so they could still safe-harbor the tax credits. Despite the rhetoric, the action underneath it by the private sector has been amazing, and knock on wood, it will continue. I'll say one other thing: despite the cancellation of our LPO loans and grants, the courts have stepped in and said you can't just cancel the stuff that went to blue states. On the ground, you can't hold back the private sector. It's happening.
A WAR ON SOLAR WHILE SOLAR WINS
Jigar Shah: On that front, I want to ask you about the narrative. Last year, Ember said basically 100% of everything net added to the grid globally was solar, wind, and a little nuclear, from our friends at Vogtle as well as China. That's expected to continue over the next three or four years. And now, with the Strait of Hormuz, all the energy ministers are trying to figure out energy sovereignty, which leads you to a little coal, but mostly solar, wind, battery storage, and more nuclear. So how is it that on this side the narrative is that there's a war against solar, wind, and battery storage, and on this side, practically everything we're adding to the grid, even in the United States, is solar, wind, and battery storage? I don't understand how that narrative mismatch continues forever.
Jennifer Granholm: Jigar, you're assuming there has to be some logic behind it. They want to support fossil fuels. There are fossil fuels, there'll be fossil fuels, but the notion that you should force uneconomical coal plants to stay open at the same time as you're calling for a reduction in energy prices? Come on. I don't think anybody has dubbed this administration the most consistent ever. So this is another log on that fire.
ONLY THREE MILLION PEOPLE WATCH CABLE
Jamie Nolan: I think there's still so much misinformation. I want to see polling on what Americans would guess is the cheapest energy source, because I'm willing to bet it's certainly not solar, even though utility-scale solar is the cheapest electricity source on the face of the planet. I just don't think people get it. You're an incredible communicator, it's one of your biggest strengths, and as somebody who's worked in communications, it's endlessly frustrating, the amount of misinformation about what has become a mainstream energy source. There's this disconnect between the misinformation coming out of the White House and the reality on the ground, what's actually keeping utility rates at bay, which is putting more solar on the grid.
Jennifer Granholm: This is one of the big regrets I have from our administration. I was out there every day on CNN or MSNBC talking about what we were doing. But honestly, only three million people watch cable. There's a huge swath of social media we were on only a little. We need our team, team clean. We need a huge effort at comms that encompasses all forms of media with all forms of spokespeople, including everyday citizens who are saving money. I want to see their energy bills, how much they're saving because they have solar on their roofs. We did some of that. Our team would go to weatherization homes and compare energy bills before and after, with local media there. That was great, but we need a hundred times more of it. We didn't have that, and the industry hasn't been good about it either. Jigar, you've been great about tapping the industry to be more vocal and supportive of candidates who support clean energy. But we need the associations and the industry to invest more in telling their story in a compelling way, because people don't believe politicians anyway. We need to create permission for the politicians to support clean energy, and that happens if, bottom up, people are saying, yes, I want the cleanest form of energy. And by the way, that's solar. On a channel like this, we're talking to people who already know what we're talking about. Everyday folks probably aren't watching Energy Empire yet. Maybe they will be soon.
Jamie Nolan: We're trying to grow it in that direction, to bring this to a broader audience. On YouTube it's breaking through to folks who don't know very much about energy, so we're trying to make it more digestible, and we're working on our use of acronyms, because we've gotten some flak for that.
Jennifer Granholm: Exactly. I do a little work with an organization that assesses the social media landscape, Media Matters. After January 2025, the social media landscape, YouTube, TikTok, and so on, was 80% lean right and 20% lean left. And the candidates on the left, the Democrats, did not go on the red spaces, except maybe Pete Buttigieg, who would go on Fox and was great, but not many others would. So we have to tell our leaders to go into uncomfortable places and tell truths where they'll get pushback, but be confident in the facts, so you're not just preaching to the choir. We need to add more cultural bubbles that are open to having this kind of conversation.
BALCONY SOLAR AND TAKING ENERGY INTO YOUR OWN HANDS
Jigar Shah: Part of this, honestly, is just paying people. If you look at residential solar, the customer acquisition costs are about a billion dollars a year, of door-to-door salespeople who annoy you during dinner. If they spent one-tenth of that money paying right-wing influencers like Katie Miller to say nice things about the solar industry, which they all believe, because they all hate the utility as much as anybody else does. They all want a zero-dollar bill, they all want independence. They don't care that it's green. They just want to give somebody the middle finger. You pay them a thousand dollars a post and they post on it.
Jennifer Granholm: I don't know if pay-to-post works as well as getting people who truly understand the facts. Just the facts alone, you don't need to shade it. Tell the truth. And I think balcony solar will give us a better opportunity, because people will be able to take their energy destiny into their own hands, at least feel a little more empowered than just being stuck with a big bill.
Jamie Nolan: Balcony solar, so exciting. Jigar, can you tell folks what that is, if they've never heard of it?
Jigar Shah: Balcony solar. The way normal solar works is you put it on the roof or on the ground, and then you have to hire an electrician to wire it into your electrical panel, the one with the breakers. With balcony solar, you just hang the panel off a balcony and plug it into the outdoor outlet. Our friends at UL and others are making sure it's all safe. Anybody can do it. You order it on Amazon, have it shipped to your house, hang it yourself, and plug it in. There are no sales costs, no installation costs, none of that. There are over four million systems already installed in Germany, and lots of other countries are doing it. We've got Utah and Virginia that have already passed laws to say it's legal, five more states passing it as we speak, and ten more that have introduced legislation. It's going viral.
Jamie Nolan: It's very exciting. I have a hardwired solar array on my roof, but my neighbor has had a balcony solar system on his back porch for a while now. I'm seeing it in real life. It's really cool.
WHO TO BLAME WHEN THE BILL JUMPS
Jamie Nolan: I want to come around to electricity rates and energy affordability, specifically utility bills. The current administration made a lot of promises about lowering people's utility bills. Meanwhile, the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for the big utilities, is bragging that budgets are up 40% in the past year by their own estimates, because utilities are building so much new stuff, and that's how they earn their profits. Rates are climbing everywhere, in some places more than 15% in one year, which is unprecedented. You governed Michigan through a really difficult economic time. You know what an affordability crisis does to a family. You literally had a job where you met people in their homes and talked about these things. So when a utility bill jumps like that, who do voters blame, versus who they should blame?
Jennifer Granholm: The first entity they blame is the utility company, because it shows up on their bill. Then, with all this anti-data-center stuff, the second entity they blame is the data center, if they're in an area that has a lot of them, like in Virginia. And the third, or maybe the second, is the executive politician, not the legislature, but the governor, or the president. In this case they should blame the president, because of the actions the Trump administration has taken to keep us away from the cheapest form of energy. But clearly they ought to be blaming the fact that we've got a utility business model that rewards rate-basing expensive poles and wires when there's existing capacity on the grid. The utilities are doing what the model says they should do. But if the model were better, if utilities were rewarded for lowering costs, for using grid-enhancing technologies and advanced conductors, for demand response, for virtual power plants, for using the headroom on the grid that we know exists, because at any given time only 50% of the grid is in use. This is what governors have to do. They've got to appoint PUC members who understand this. You can do it through the regulatory side or through legislation. The problem is that governors in many places, because it's complicated, don't understand their power in appointing members of the regulatory body, members who could ensure the utility business model isn't simply rewarding rate-basing huge expenses, but instead rewarding investment, even in the opex that reduces capex.
THE NEW JERSEY PLAYBOOK
Jigar Shah: Let's go deeper into that. You were a governor running for office, and now Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey just ran for office and won. She ran on the fact that she was going to freeze rates, and a lot of governors have taken notice of her success and are thinking about using that same tagline. You served on her transition team to put together a plan, and now she's going into the state legislature to pass bills, and the Board of Public Utilities, their regulator, is nominating somebody who's a fine candidate. But this is hard. The utilities are usually the largest donor to local races.
Jennifer Granholm: Totally. But you've got to make it in their interest. You can share the savings with them. Right now it's not in their interest, but if you make it in their interest, they'd be on board. New Jersey is a great example. Mikie Sherrill campaigns on a rate freeze. The first executive order she does is essentially a rate freeze. And underneath that, she's calling on the Board of Public Utilities to open up an affordability docket, to review the business model so that they're supporting things like demand response, distributed energy resources, and virtual power plants. Then she appoints a new member who will be president of the Board of Public Utilities, Ben Hertz-Shargel. He's an expert in this very thing. He's going to drive this agenda from the regulatory side. She did all of that in the first six months. She lifted New Jersey's decades-old moratorium on nuclear, signed legislation for more battery use, utility-scale and home, and issued an executive order on increasing solar generation. My hope is that the BPU process results in maybe one of the first states that fully signs on, not just to a pilot virtual power plant, but to making that a real part of their regulatory process, with the utilities as partners in making it happen.
Jamie Nolan: That's impressive. When she announced that rate freeze as a policy position, Jigar, you were doubtful about it.
Jigar Shah: It sets you up. As everyone knows, the utility has the right to get a return on the investment it makes. When you do a rate freeze, it just delays the inevitable. If you don't solve the underlying business-model challenge, you end up having a 30% rate increase right when you're running for reelection in four years.
Jennifer Granholm: A hundred percent. That's exactly right, Jamie. I'm so happy it wasn't just a day-one executive order, take it or leave it, and then run away. The Board of Public Utilities had two appointees from the previous governor when she took office, so she didn't have a chance to fully remake it, but she's appointing this new person as president. Assuming he's confirmed, and given the directives she's given on what the BPU must look at, including this utility business-model question and distributed resources and demand response, it's heading in this direction. They're one meeting away from being able to take this on full bore. It's exciting.
DOE ALUMNI ARE TAKING OVER
Jennifer Granholm: Do you know who her energy advisor is? Elizabeth Noll, who worked at the Department of Energy. So there.
Jamie Nolan: We have a running joke, Secretary, that former DOE-ers are taking over the world. A lot of our friends have been placed in very influential positions where they're able to get incredible work done transforming the energy system in this country. There's another announcement dropping on LinkedIn every week. Leaving the Forrestal Building, the DOE headquarters, is always sad. Jigar and I walked out together on the last day. But it's so exciting to see where everyone has landed. You must be so proud to see that from your colleagues.
Jennifer Granholm: A hundred percent. They've created this great DOE alumni network, and it's exciting to see what people are doing and how energized they are about what might happen if there's another opportunity to enter back, or at least advise those coming into power. I love our DOE team so much, and I'm so happy people are landing in great spots to carry on the mission of deploy, deploy, deploy. Right, Jigar?
A DATA CENTER PLAYBOOK FOR GOVERNORS
Jamie Nolan: There are 36 governorships on the ballot this year, and data centers have become that rare thing in American politics that people on both ends of the spectrum, like Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders, can agree on. Candidates in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin are campaigning on data center guardrails, and polling shows nearly half of Americans expect data center energy costs to be a campaign issue. You have never lost an election. So if you were on a ballot this November, what would be your energy message, particularly around data centers?
Jennifer Granholm: I would definitely campaign on the energy bill being too damn high. We are going to fix the damn energy bill, the way Gretchen Whitmer campaigned on fixing the damn roads, and whoever else campaigned on the rent being too damn high. It is too high. But I would also be super clear that data centers, done right, can be an ally in bringing down your energy bills. We've seen the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab study and the Brattle Group study showing that for every gigawatt of new flexible power you add to the grid, you can reduce loads by one to two percent. But that doesn't resonate with people. So you have to say, look, I don't like AI either, but data centers can actually help bring down your load, and they can give the community an opportunity to say what they want. For example, in Louisiana there was just an announcement that teachers in an area where a big data center is located are getting a $50,000 bonus, because of the increase in sales and property tax that community had. In Loudoun County, Virginia, they learned the hard way. They didn't offer tax breaks for property taxes, they offered them for sales and use taxes. The difference is that property taxes really impact what your local officials can invest in, and the coffers of the municipality. So if you have a big load-bearing entity coming in paying huge property taxes, you can see your property taxes decrease, like in Loudoun County, where they had a 25% decrease. Now, if they'd had guardrails around the increases in their electricity prices, that would have been amazing. But they didn't, so they learned it the hard way, and that's why people are coming out with pitchforks and using Loudoun County as an example of energy bills going through the roof. This is why the guardrails have to be super clear. I'm running for governor, and I'm going to ensure that data centers pay their fair share. I'm going to ensure that you're not paying for the data center's power, and you're not paying for the upgrades needed to connect it to the grid. I'm going to ensure the data center actually brings value to the grid by becoming a component of reliability. So when the grid is full and it's the hottest day of the year, the data center agrees not to use as much power, or it's brought batteries to absorb that demand, or it's moving work to another part of the country. The data center itself becomes an asset. And the thing I would campaign on: if a data center's coming to town, that data center is going to have to buy batteries for everybody in the area. If you get a battery, you're not paying for it, the hyperscaler is. And you'll be compensated by the utility for using that battery, if you choose to opt in.
GIVE PEOPLE A BATTERY, NOT A PROMISE
Jigar Shah: There was a study just published by the Center for Net Zero, which is owned by Octopus Energy, that said exactly that. When you make financial promises, like lower property taxes, people don't believe you, because they don't view it as permanent. But if you get a piece of hardware, they view that as permanent. They think, if I have a battery in my garage and a solar system on my roof because of that data center, that feels permanent. Support went from about 20% in the scenario they proposed all the way to about 65% when you give people batteries and solar.
Jennifer Granholm: Or you subsidize their purchase of an electric vehicle, make the data center pay for the tax credits that were taken away by the Trump administration, so people can use a vehicle battery too. The kicker is they have to know, well, I don't want to give away my battery usage, what if I need it? But you say to them, you won't even notice. If you sign up, we'll do it at a time when it won't matter to you, like at night. And you're going to get, as Green Mountain Power in Vermont and others have proven, fifty to a hundred bucks a month. You could get a couple thousand dollars a year just by allowing the utility to use these batteries supplied by the hyperscaler. The Voltus deal that was just announced at PJM with Google is interesting, because that organization, like Octopus, is going to amass all these existing distributed energy resources, put them together, get to 100 megawatts, and bid that into the capacity auction at PJM. Google's not buying those resources, Voltus is going out to identify people willing to participate. I think the next step is that the hyperscalers actually offer to buy batteries for folks as part of a community benefit agreement, or as part of the capacity they bring.
BYONCE: BRING YOUR OWN NEW CLEAN ENERGY
Jamie Nolan: I'm such a nerd for this stuff. I got goosebumps when you started talking about it, because you're a politician and you really know how to sell it. You totally sold me. But I don't know if you know there's the most amazing acronym ever for this. It's Beyoncé. Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. Have you heard that?
Jennifer Granholm: I love it. And then you just play her song "Energy" in the background, right?
Jamie Nolan: Absolutely. A walkout song and a t-shirt and the whole thing. I can see it now.
Jennifer Granholm: We just want to make sure people understand that bringing extra capacity and additional generation are both needed, and the capacity-stack piece is a little more complicated. Jigar, I know you talk to these people all the time, and Jamie, you probably do too. The notion of getting it into their heads, that I have to go find 40,000 homes willing to participate, and how do you get them to agree. Octopus is a great example, because they know how to sell it, sign people up, enroll them, make it easy. We need a lot of Voltuses and Octopuses and Rewiring Americas, because I know Ari Matusiak is going to be doing the same thing. We need experts at it, because it's hard to explain. The data center companies, the tech companies, this isn't their area, so they may be skeptical, and certainly the utilities are skeptical, because they haven't done it before. It's a whole new wave. But if we can get consumers begging for it, consumers who are pissed off and coming with the pitchforks, saying, I'll let you use a battery, but you've got to pay me, I think that changes the game.
WHO DRIVES THIS WITHOUT WASHINGTON
Jigar Shah: I want to dig one layer deeper, because there are 36 governors' races and they all want to use the talking points you just gave them. But when we were running DOE, when you were running DOE, there was a leadership piece. You brought all the data center companies together, you talked to them, you did a little jawboning, and you got stuff done. I'm not sure that's happening here. Now you've got Governor Abbott mouthing off about how much he hates data centers, the governor of Wyoming mouthing off about how much he hates data centers, and so on. So how does one do this without federal government leadership really driving the governors, even though they regulate the utilities? I don't know that EPRI and their DC Flex is going to make it happen, or that nonprofit XYZ and their top-ten things you can do as a governor is going to make it happen. How do you get all this technical knowledge into the hands of these governors?
Jamie Nolan: You hire former DOE employees.
Jennifer Granholm: Yes, exactly. Hire Elizabeth Noll all across the country. Jigar, it's a great question, because obviously in two and a half years we'll hopefully have a chance at the federal level to have that leadership role, but it doesn't exist right now. I do know that the Democratic Governors Association and the National Governors Association have had a number of sessions on this topic, because governors understand that when a data center comes to town, if it's done right, it could be the golden ticket, even though the pitchforks are out, because citizens don't realize that. They want to get this right. A number of them are starting with guardrails for data centers, which is great. But that doesn't mean they're campaigning on a moratorium. Even though at the local level there have been over a hundred moratoria passed against data centers, no moratorium has been passed at the state level yet. There have been 15 bills introduced, but they haven't been signed, because governors know the economic effect of a cluster of data centers, the indirect employment, the jobs for building, the jobs inside, the services around it, is a nine-to-one multiplier effect. It's economic development. And if they're going to former coal plant sites or former industrial sites and filling in gaps, that's significant. But the guardrails have to be the first thing you talk about. I'm not going to let them in unless they have guardrails, that's probably the language you have to use. I'm going to be tough on data centers. They're not coming in here if you're paying for their power. You're not paying for their power, you're not paying for their upgrades. You order your public utility commission to ensure that data centers are not spreading the cost to everyday citizens. And we're going to get a community benefit agreement that really helps the citizens in that area. I was at a Chamber of Commerce event in Mackinac, in Michigan, and I said, if I were governor, I would ask my Michigan Economic Development Corporation to identify the full supply chain for data centers and make sure I got that supply chain in Michigan, not just the data center, but all the stuff feeding into it, the racks, the coolers, you name it. We're an industrial state. We should have that whole supply chain here, and that really does create a multiplier effect.
NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FACTORIES
Jigar Shah: On that topic, you presided over the largest expansion of manufacturing in the energy sector in my lifetime. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022, full of manufacturing incentives, you had 900 expansions, announcements, plants under construction. The One Big Beautiful Bill actually left almost all of it in place. Most of the 45X credits, a lot of the manufacturing credits, stayed in place. Some of the demand stuff was rescinded. But when you look back on that moment, what endured? I feel like Americans got a little of their groove back. They thought they could do big things again. We weren't giving people the business card of their Shanghai connection like we were doing before. What do you think came out of that period?
Jennifer Granholm: First of all, Jigar, it was 950 announcements, not 900. All of those bubbles on the map were people who were incentivized to manufacture clean energy equipment in the United States, moving here, expanding here, millions of jobs because of the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. This is so near and dear to my heart, as the former governor of Michigan, where we saw all these manufacturing jobs leave. This was the first industrial policy of America that actually said, yes, we have to partner with business to make them successful in a global economy in the United States. It made America irresistible for investment. When the new administration came in and decided to start dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act, the good news is we still have incentives for geothermal, for long-duration energy storage, amazingly for nuclear, for hydroelectric power. But of those 950 factories, 450 were for electric vehicles and the supply chain, which means batteries for EVs. So all those carmakers were trying to figure out, what if there's no demand, because the demand-side incentives for buying an electric vehicle have been taken away? Look how creative the private sector is. They decided to turn those EV battery factories into utility-scale battery factories. You see Ford's stock jumping because of that smart strategic shift. So the One Big Beautiful Bill was not the death knell. As I've heard you say, Jigar, if you took away the Inflation Reduction Act, it would still be the largest investment in clean energy in American history. That's true. Although I will say the loss and the lack of certainty around the tax credits for wind and solar, and the stupidity of canceling all these offshore wind projects, is ridiculous. But I'm excited that the private sector is still very busy getting all this clean energy on the grid and still manufacturing. The manufacturing tax credit still exists. The storage tax credit, which used to be solar-plus-storage and is now storage-plus-solar, it's the storage leading all this investment, and that's great, because we need it. So I look forward to restoration of some of this in a new administration.
PUERTO RICO AND THE PEOPLE LEFT BEHIND
Jamie Nolan: I want to talk about Puerto Rico, because I know during your time as secretary that was really important to you, and we all had a part in that work. What are some of the stories from the folks you met there that have stuck with you? And now that DOE has stepped back, and some would say abandoned a lot of that work on the island, what do you think is next?
Jennifer Granholm: It is almost criminal that they took away the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, the billion dollars Congress passed for rooftop solar for vulnerable people in Puerto Rico. Let me emphasize "vulnerable." We were tasked with deploying this billion dollars, and we did eleven town halls across the island. The Puerto Rican people really helped us design it in a way that responded to the intent of the legislation, that rooftop solar and storage would go to the most vulnerable. It was amazing the difference it made for real people on the ground. For them, it's not about climate, it's not about clean, it's about being able to turn the lights on. I visited one family, and it breaks my heart. This family in the middle of the island, in the mountains, are the last ones to get their power back on. We went into this home, an extremely poor family. There was a young man with cerebral palsy in the bed, on a ventilator. Without power, he would die, period. They had a backup diesel generator. They got accepted into the program, which was great. He has since passed away. The program was rescinded. They didn't get the benefit of being able to put solar and storage on the home. We heard stories about people who brought the equipment, were about to put it on the roof, and the grant got yanked. There are thousands of people who felt like they could sleep at night because they knew their power wasn't going to go off, that their children would be safe, especially if they needed medical equipment. The senior citizens who are so utterly poor, they'd be charged eleven dollars a month for security, and that just is a game changer if you're poor and don't otherwise have a lifeline. When 5,000 people were killed in Hurricane Maria and they didn't have this, the island said, we are going to insist upon a future that allows people the freedom to have rooftop solar and storage. These solar panels are designed to withstand hurricanes. These are serious efforts. I know there's a movement to sue over the pullback of these grants for the poorest people. The solar industry in Puerto Rico has put solar panels on the roofs of about 250,000 homes. It's a huge success. They've actually got a virtual power plant in Puerto Rico, thanks to some of our friends, Arushi and others, who are helping design it. But the fact that they've lost the opportunity to serve the most vulnerable is heartbreaking, and that was exactly the intent of the legislation Congress passed. So it is unlawful to undo it at the whim of an administration who just doesn't like solar. I'm hopeful this too will be taken to court and there will be a successful outcome.
Jamie Nolan: Do you still have hope for energy resiliency for Puerto Rico, even despite all that?
Jennifer Granholm: I do. Totally. I believe so strongly that between the Puerto Rican diaspora in Congress, who are very vocal and very powerful, and Bad Bunny, we will get resilience back to Puerto Rico.
BREAK EGGS, NOT LAWS
Jamie Nolan: I want to talk about DOE as it stands today, and the culture. I served 10 years across three administrations, so I've seen many different DOE cultures. Across all of it, there's a lot of intense pressure inside federal agencies around formality and rule-following, a lot of etiquette, a lot of "this is how it's always done." Jigar and I banged our heads against that a lot. I've been accused of being a bulldog, of running through walls, and Jigar got in plenty of trouble doing that too. But I look at this DOE and how they just flipped the tables, and in one regard I'm a little jealous, because they're intent on flooding the zone and questioning the way things are done. They've been extremely ruthless about execution, maybe not DOE specifically, but the Trump administration in general. Sometimes it's like, screw the rules, move fast, use every lever of executive power, don't let the process slow down the agenda. So I think we really need to reconsider, if and when we get to come back, how we're approaching that and building a new Department of Energy. When you see that, what do you think we should borrow from their playbook when we're lining up at the doors of the Forrestal Building, ready to march back in?
Jennifer Granholm: Jamie, I'm going to hire you first thing. I'd say to the next secretary, hire her first thing, because you're totally right, and you explained it so eloquently. We are good little rule-followers. There are decades of rules built up around process, you can't do this, you can't do that. Some of us were new, like me, and I'm thinking, does it have to take that long? So I think we have to completely borrow from that impatient playbook. We've got to flip the tables on the previous slowness, we've got to break eggs, not break laws, but break eggs to get things done. The interagency process took forever. If you recall the Treasury rules for any of the deployment strategies, whether it was hydrogen, you name it, it took forever. I would bust through all of that and assume we can do it unless we're sued. You don't want to court that, but in service to the agenda, knowing you have four years. If there's any lesson from ours, it took two years to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and another two years to finish writing the rules. That 950 number could have been well over that if we'd gotten the Inflation Reduction Act passed a year sooner and deployed two years sooner. We've got to realize all this has to happen in year one. We have to plow through it aggressively in year one. The one thing we don't want to borrow is firing all the capable staff, or getting them early buyouts, so there's no one there to answer the phone. If you want to move quickly, you have to have people answering the phone to get questions answered. If people can't even get a decision about whether their conditional loan is going to go forward 18 months later, that is not conducive to speed.
THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS
Jigar Shah: Building on that, what do you think would be the best thing to do in the first hundred days of a new administration? When you're breaking eggs, when you think about the Strait of Hormuz and data center load growth, we're in this magical time where the pressure on electric utilities actually does allow you to change their business model. You have the ability for data centers to pay for batteries and solar for the people who live around them. We have the technology today in a way that wasn't there in 2021 to solve all the problems in Puerto Rico. The cost of batteries has come down another 75% since 2021. So in that first hundred days, which eggs do you break first?
Jennifer Granholm: Assuming you have control of Congress, that you get a president and a Congress on the same page, I would push through Congress, very quickly, a cheap and clean power bill, where you reinstate the tax credits for solar and wind, and include an ITC on infrastructure, because we need transmission. Especially where we know we've got to move power, we don't want to force everyday citizens to pay for that. So who pays for it? You have to have an ITC to buy down the cost. You would launch a framework for virtual power plants across the country. Maybe you say, in 100 days, we are going to go to the states and incentivize 100 gigawatts of power through grid utilization, and by 2032 we're going to have 100 gigawatts of grid utilization through demand response and grid-enhancing technologies. You put a competition out there and incentivize the states to do it. You undo all the bad stuff they did, not just on the tax credits, but their refusal to permit on public lands. In fact, you accelerate permitting on public land. You grant speed permits, a six-month shot clock for clean energy on public lands. You use the Defense Production Act to shore up transmission, grid equipment, advanced conductors. You have a whole strategy around what's going to get us cheap, clean, reliable power. You have a battery strategy. This is why we have to have our own Project 2029.
Jigar Shah: If you're chairing it, I'm there. I just think the one thing the IRA missed, which we have to do better next time, is putting stuff in people's houses. A lot of it was 950 manufacturing facilities. But I don't think the weatherization program was large enough. I don't think the program for putting stuff in people's houses was large enough.
Jennifer Granholm: That is so true. That's another example of Jamie's point about slowness. We had this whole homes program weatherizing homes, but not all the states were quick to take it up. We've got to fix that, and not just do weatherization, but add heat pumps, and figure out as many ways as possible to put stuff in people's homes that ends up compensating them.
Jamie Nolan: And in contrast to what the Trump administration has done in pulling back grants from blue areas, I would say let's deploy our technology in red areas. Let's go into rural areas and change people's hearts and minds by deploying our technology among people who've been more hesitant, because they don't know what to believe.
Jigar Shah: Where you and I grew up.
Jamie Nolan: Yep. I'm proudly from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I just returned from there and was talking to some of my neighbors. I was telling them I was recording this podcast with you, because I was so excited. But I'm never sure what to say when I'm out there. These technologies have been politicized, and they shouldn't be. So I think going to some more doubtful groups and spreading them.
Jennifer Granholm: You're totally right, but remember that all of these factories, we had a huge amount in red country, in fact about 70% of the announcements. The kicker, going back to your original point, is that we didn't communicate it well enough. If stuff is going into people's homes, they'd better know where it came from and what it's going to do for them.
Jigar Shah: It better have the name right on the piece of equipment, brought to you by the Biden administration, right there.
Jennifer Granholm: Because they had no idea. I joke that, because of the slowness of the rollout, we had a lot of groundbreakings but not a lot of ribbon cuttings. The ribbon cuttings are what people will know, because people are starting to get hired. So yes, you're right about that.
THE FIRST REAL INDUSTRIAL POLICY
Jamie Nolan: So, Secretary, looking back on your time leading DOE, what are you most proud of?
Jennifer Granholm: I'm so proud of our team and the stuff we accomplished. We used to say that sometimes when you're in the middle of history, it's hard to know, because you're in the middle of it. We were in the middle of this historic period, and to Jigar's point, it's still a historic period. I'm so proud of the amount of clean energy manufacturing that came to the United States, and how much clean we were able to add to the grid, which is continuing. There's a lot more work to do. The deploy strategy was amazing. We had a second-to-none team. I'm still in awe of the people we hired to do this deployment, and of the work being done at the labs, the scientists, the technology. I will forever be proud of what we did, and I know we can build on it. So I look forward to helping whoever is elected, from the outside at least, encouraging folks to continue on that trajectory.
Jigar Shah: The one thing I'd say is that I can't underestimate how important it is to give people hope and confidence from the position you held. For a long time, and you gave this story all the time, it was the right decision to pull up roots and go to Mexico. It wasn't the right decision anymore, because of your leadership. We went to people and made the case to them and said, no, pick South Carolina, pick Georgia, pick Tennessee, pick Texas, find a state and go there. And then we went to the economic development boards of those states and said, do you know what's in this bill? We are matching your money ten to one. You should be more aggressive in attracting these people. I'm going to this Reindustrialize summit in Detroit tomorrow and the next day, and it's happening, because you gave people the confidence to believe we could do big things in this country again.
Jennifer Granholm: Thank you, Jigar, but it wasn't just me. We had this incredible tool, the Inflation Reduction Act. When you get a 30% transferable tax credit, you have a partner in the federal government. To break the mindset that only the private sector must do this, that you can't have government partnership, you can't have industrial strategy when every other country is engaged in industrial strategy, is insane. So having the leadership of the country say, yes, we are going to partner to make you successful in the United States, you get a 30% tax credit for your project, an additional 10% if you locate in a challenged community, an additional 10% if you use a domestic product, that's a 50% partnership. And it's not like we're taking ownership, we're giving you a tax credit to do it. Although I am interested in some of what the Trump administration has done on ownership positions, like in the critical mineral space, because it shows you that, right and left, people want to see the United States leading in these things. For the United States to lead, we have to manufacture it here. We have a lot of work to do on supply chains. If we want those supply chains here, we have to co-invest with the private sector to make it happen. That's what the Biden administration did in the Inflation Reduction Act, and that's why we've got to build on it going forward.
Jigar Shah: You haven't lost a single step. Thank you so much for being on.
Jamie Nolan: It has truly been a huge honor for me to get this time with you. Thank you so much for joining us. It was an honor to serve under you. Jigar and I have such tremendous respect for you, and I'm so excited to see what you do next, and so glad we still have all your brilliance contributing to the future of this country and our clean energy economy. Thank you so much.
Jennifer Granholm: Thank you so much, Jamie. Right back at you. I really appreciate you guys. So great to see you, and I'm so glad of the work you're doing on the outside. Jigar, slow down a little, will you?
DEBRIEF
Jigar Shah: My goodness, did we catch the secretary on a fiery day.
Jamie Nolan: I was so excited by how hyped she was. Very high energy. She cursed, that was exciting for me, I wasn't expecting it. She had hot takes for days, and honestly I think she was speaking truth to power multiple times during the interview.
Jigar Shah: We also talked a lot about communications.
Jamie Nolan: When we were at DOE, we found this little niche where we could slip these podcasts under the radar and get permission for you to do a lot of them, even though they weren't mainstream, because frankly people underestimated how important they were. That was only five years ago, but things have clearly changed. We know podcasts were such an important venue for the 2024 presidential election. So I think she sees it now. I'm grateful we worked so hard to have such an impact, and now here we are with our own show. I'll be honest, that was a little gratifying for me to hear, because we really were trying to push the envelope, and we were told no a lot.
Jigar Shah: The other thing that was amazing was that she didn't just answer our questions on the 36 governors and the Beyoncé work, she provided a very detailed script of exactly what every governor should say and how. Some of it was performative, saying, look, even if you think you're basically on the same page as the data centers, you need to say you're not, be fiery, tell the data centers you're going to impose restrictions and put them in their place, because that's what the voters want to hear. The other thing I thought was fascinating: consistent with the Octopus Energy research from the Center for Net Zero, you've got to give people free stuff. It's not enough to make them promises. You've got to actually give them a battery in their garage or a solar system on their roof.
Jamie Nolan: I feel like we just got an accounting of all the things that keep her up at night. It felt cathartic for her to rattle them all off. You can tell she's still got the DNA of a governor. She was just like, this is what I would do, one, two, three, four. It was a powerful playbook, and she was right every step of the way. It was great to hear her talk about community benefits plans, because that's something we really championed at DOE under the Biden administration. LPO worked hard with all our borrowers to develop very detailed community benefits plans in the communities where our projects were located. The hyperscalers need to take a page out of our playbook on that now.
Jigar Shah: It's so sad that she was born in Canada, because she is one of the most talented politicians I've ever been around.
Jamie Nolan: Truly. At one point I got chills, I was so inspired by what she was saying. And then there was a very sad moment, that poignant story about the family in Puerto Rico with the son with cerebral palsy who needed access to power they were hoping would come from the Puerto Rico Resilience Fund, and of course that project was canceled. The work she did at DOE was transformative.
Jigar Shah: Her pulling out the map was so quintessential Jennifer Granholm. On the Puerto Rico piece, I don't think I've ever told anybody this, but I was really constrained. People hated when I called the secretary, because she wanted to hear from political appointees and good ideas, and then it creates a lot of work for everybody else. So they'd say, don't call her. Maria is the big storm where a lot of people died, but then another storm hit Puerto Rico while we were serving, and they lost power again. I was on the road somewhere, and I pulled the car over as soon as I found out and called the secretary. I said, I can't believe no one has done anything to fix the situation in Puerto Rico, because part of the NPR news story I was listening to was that only about 4% of all the money allocated by Congress had been spent. This was 18 months into our term. The president then nominated her to lead this effort, and she said, well, you're the person who calls me during that period, so you're going to be on this task force too. It was an honor of a lifetime. I traveled to Puerto Rico several times with her. We had a dedicated team of people at LPO who worked on Puerto Rico. We got all those loans out the door. It was an honor of a lifetime to be part of the solution there, and such a shame that the current administration cares so little about the people of Puerto Rico that they didn't want to continue that good work.
Jamie Nolan: It is very sad. But that said, the systems that were deployed and the work that got done, it stands. That's what we were just saying about the 950 factories, several hundred of which went forward because of the work we all did together. So I walked away from the conversation still feeling encouraged and heartened. She mentioned that when you're making history, you don't realize it at the time. I still think our term was historic and what we achieved was very important. She's got me pumped up about what comes next. I've said a couple of times that I'd be ready to line up outside the Forrestal Building on day one.
Jigar Shah: She held you to it. She said she's going to tell the next secretary to call you, so you've already offered yourself up, and you can't take it back now.
Jamie Nolan: I love DOE. Working in government is not for everyone, but the most passionate, smartest, most devoted, caring, talented people I've ever worked with, I met working in government. So if you're interested, consider it as a future career. You can get really big things done, and even looking back, it still feels very fulfilling to me. I'm so grateful I had this time with Secretary Jennifer Granholm. It was everything I wanted it to be.
Jigar Shah: I'm glad we could make it happen for you.
ASK JIGAR
Jamie Nolan: Welcome to Ask Jigar, our weekly segment where Jigar answers your questions about energy and honestly anything you're wondering about. Huge thanks to our sponsor, Octopus Energy, for making this segment possible. Before we get into this week's questions, a bit of news. We have a brand new merch shop. Right now it's mostly Energy Empire merch, but we have plans to add the energy merch of your dreams, so if you have ideas, drop me a note. And to celebrate, anyone who sends in a question that Jigar answers on the show will get an Energy Empire hat. So send them all in.
GAS SUPPLY AND THE 8,760-HOUR PROBLEM
Jamie Nolan: Your first question is from Peter Sinclair. He says: Jigar, you've said some would-be hyperscalers haven't done their due diligence on whether gas supply is actually reliable across all 8,760 hours of the year, and you've pointed to pipeline capacity as a constraint. I'd add a wrinkle. In a lot of systems, home heating gets prioritized during peak events like a polar vortex, so that gas wouldn't even be available to keep a data center running at the 99.999% reliability these facilities demand. Can you get specific? Are there projects out there with unrealistic expectations of their gas supply, and what are the more reliable pathways you'd actually steer them toward?
Jigar Shah: This is a great question, and one I continue to struggle with. For those of us who remember, when we came into office at the Loan Programs Office, we had this horrific storm, Winter Storm Uri, that affected Texas. People died during that storm because it got so cold and folks lost power. One of the things you saw was that residential customers actually got priority on natural gas supply, and power plants had to shut down because of the way that order occurred. So a lot of us got educated about these issues. Now we're in a situation where people are building unprecedented amounts of natural gas generators. They want to run them 24/7 as a bridge to the grid getting turned on, and there's no firm supply available. The way firm supply works is you actually pay the pipeline company for a percentage of their pipeline capacity, and if too many people want that capacity, you still get yours. You can't even buy that firm capacity in some of these markets. One of the markets I'd recommend people look at is Ohio, where Meta put a data center with 31 different generators in one place, which the Williams company did all the engineering on. It's really hard to get firm capacity, and if you want it, they have to build new pipelines or upgrade the current ones, and that easily takes five to seven years, even with the streamlining this administration is doing. So part of my challenge is that people are saying the grid is unreliable, it's taking too long, I'm going to skip to the front of the line and go off grid. Well, that's no picnic. It's actually faster to work within the grid we have than to try to skip the line and do something more unreliable.
Jamie Nolan: Building a pipeline, oof. I hadn't thought about that in terms of the data center boom. Have you seen any pipelines proposed specifically related to it?
Jigar Shah: Yes. Every data center that has a pipeline specifically allocated to it, particularly in Ohio but also in Texas, has requested dedicated pipeline capacity be built for them. That has to go through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and get approved. Then you have to find contractors available to do the work, which is not easy. Everybody is working on building a data center right now and getting paid a lot of money to it. So there are a lot of bottlenecks in the system.
WHO PAYS FOR THE REGULATORS
Jamie Nolan: Our next question comes from Rudy Malphabon, and Rudy, if I've mispronounced your last name, I'm sorry. Rudy says: Jigar, here's something I don't hear discussed much, campaign finance reform as it applies to utility regulation. Across the country, a lot of utility and public service commissioners have their campaigns largely financed by the very utilities they regulate. To me that's a major problem. Do you agree it's an issue, and what do you hope gets done about it?
Jigar Shah: It's a very complicated conversation, and the episode we just did with Secretary Granholm touches on it, because the utilities are generally the biggest donors to governors and state legislators. Many of them view their customer base as just being the regulators, not the customers they serve, their board is really just the regulators they have to get past for rate increases. Many states have passed laws that no longer allow you to use ratepayer funds for this. For a while, people were funding it using customer bill money, and now you have to at least use shareholder money, from the umbrella company above the investor-owned utility. For many PACs, the utilities say, look, if you want to be an executive here, you have to put $7,500 into this PAC, otherwise we're going to limit your upward mobility. That's how they get all this PAC money, which they then use to elect the right state chairman for the committees that regulate them. The whole thing is ridiculous. And you don't see that happening with municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops, partly because they don't get paid as much, so they don't have all this slush-fund money to give around. But in the investor-owned utility space, it's a huge problem when people are paying to influence the people who regulate them.
BATTERY SWAPPING AND WHY THE US PASSED
Jamie Nolan: Our next question comes from Karam Dean. He says: Jigar, can battery swapping for electric vehicles play a role in grid management? In China, swap stations are running at scale, each one basically acts as energy storage, and across a network it becomes distributed storage the grid can lean on. I'd love your take on battery swapping generally, its potential for the grid, and why China has gone all in while the US never really took it seriously.
Jigar Shah: If you remember, there was a company called Project Better Place, built on battery swapping. It started in Israel, then went to Denmark, then the United States, then Australia, then too many markets. If they'd focused on Israel and Denmark, they probably would have been successful. We also have a company in the United States still trying to do it. It's hard, because it's custom hardware. It requires you to build something that looks like a car wash, the car goes through, it takes off the old battery pack, puts in a fresh one, sticks the old one on a shelf, and recharges it. Even in China, not all electric vehicles use battery swapping, it's only one or two brands, so they have two parallel systems. The reason people like it is that while the batteries are recharging, you can do virtual power plant stuff with them, discharge, charge, all sorts of grid services. Now, we can do the same thing. When you think about all the EV charging stations in the United States, a lot of them now come with batteries placed at the station, because the demand charges are so high that it's better, when people aren't using the chargers, to refuel that battery and use it as a buffer. It makes everything much better integrated into the grid, and that battery can provide the same grid-forming and grid services. So I think we do something similar. In general, we have an extraordinary grid in the United States, so being able to do level one chargers, which is just an extension cord into the wall that takes 30 hours, or a level two charger at eight to ten kilowatts that recharges a car in four to eight hours, or DC fast chargers, works for us. Even under this administration, we have a thousand plugs a week being installed across the country of DC fast charging. So I think what we're doing works. At some point maybe we'll do swapping, but it'll probably be for Ubers and Lyfts, things that need really fast charging and where every minute matters.
Jamie Nolan: A thousand fast chargers a week going in across the country. That's incredible. I think that number would really surprise people.
THE PRISTINE WHITE SNEAKERS
Jamie Nolan: Our last question is the good stuff, my personal favorite of the day, and it comes from Dana Whitfield. She says: Jigar, burning question. Every time I see you on stage, on a panel, wherever, you're in pristine white sneakers, always spotless somehow. What's the backstory? Why sneakers, and please tell me there's a brand deal in here somewhere.
Jigar Shah: Let me start by saying there is not a brand deal, but Energy Empire is definitely looking for one, so if anybody wants to do it, we will start. When I entered the Biden administration, I had just finished working at Generate Capital, which is based in San Francisco, so I was in the culture of never wear a suit, never wear a tie. Then we went into the administration during COVID, so we weren't going into the office every day. When I finally went in, I was asking people for fashion advice, because our friends on Twitter were talking about it. They told me I should wear sneakers, and I said, great, which ones? They gave me some brand that was $940 for a pair, and I said, that is definitely not happening. First of all, I'm cheap, but second of all, I'm a political appointee, I can't be wearing $960 sneakers. So I got Jordans, which were like $150. I got some special soap to clean sneakers with, because I was told scuffed-up sneakers are not good, so I try to keep them pristine and white.
Jamie Nolan: Who told you that?
Jigar Shah: Well, you did, but also, I was at a Latitude Media event and Caroline Golan was on me about how terrible my sneakers looked, so then I had to go buy another pair. Between you and Caroline, I think I've replaced half my wardrobe recently.
Jamie Nolan: I love the Stan Smiths, that's what I remember you wearing when we started at DOE. You have empowered me to also sometimes wear sneakers, because my feet hurt. Wearing sneakers is free, and I highly recommend it. The days of me suffering in stilettos are over. We are very open to sponsorships from sneaker companies. Please reach out.