Transcript
Second installment in the biography series with co-host Jamie Nolan.
Jigar Shah: Hi, my name is Jigar Shah. I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
Jamie Nolan: And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications consultant — and this is Energy Empire. Jigar, I'm super excited for today's episode, our second in the series on your biography. We're getting into who Jigar Shah is and what makes him who he is. Are you excited?
Jigar Shah: No. I'm not excited. I don't like talking about myself. I like learning about all the other extraordinary people we get to talk to.
Jamie Nolan: Well, I like it, because even doing the prep for these recordings I learn more about you and how you became the personality you are — the force of nature in our industry. So we're going to dig right in. In our first episode, we talked about the founding of SunEdison. Now we're moving on. You left Carbon War Room and then you wrote a book.
The Book
Jamie Nolan: I don't know if all our listeners know you're an author — I have a signed copy on the shelf behind me. You're a talker, a podcaster, a dealmaker. What made you feel like those ideas needed to exist in book form? Was there a frustration behind it? What was the story you felt you needed to tell?
Jigar Shah: Before I met you, I had this wonderful guy in my life, Rob Wise, who had helped me at SunEdison and at Carbon War Room. He thought we needed to write a book. He said, "You have all these great ideas." Remember, we'd just finished the Carbon War Room experience, and we created this whole series called Creating Climate Wealth.
Part of the underlying feeling was that at the time, people really thought they were going to change how large corporations operated. What we realized at the Carbon War Room was that change was going to come from entrepreneurs, innovators, new companies — and they were going to force large corporations to change because they were going to disrupt them. That's where the Creating Climate Wealth story came from.
I also had all these other disparate thoughts that needed to get put into a frame that made sense. For instance, I hated the word "impact investing" — as if investing in clean stuff is a sacrifice. I never thought investing in clean stuff was a sacrifice. I always thought it was good business. Some transactions take more time — you can't just download the documents on LegalZoom and invest, you have to actually think about things — but that's not the same as a sacrifice. I wove that into the book.
There were other things too — like the power of being available, which is a superpower I still have today. Nobody seemed to have business cards at the time. I always carried them. I don't anymore, because no one actually does anything with them. But I'm available on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it is. It's amazing to me how many people don't make themselves available, don't answer questions, don't figure out how to be helpful to the next generation. So I had a lot to say, and I said it.
Jamie Nolan: You are very accessible. You may or may not have made a comment that you were more accessible than a ham sandwich.
Jigar Shah: I loved how we owned Josh Hawley in that hearing.
Jamie Nolan: I recall that comment in a congressional hearing — and I also recall that you may or may not have dressed up as a ham sandwich for Halloween that year.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I probably took it too far. But it was so much fun.
Jamie Nolan: No, I thought it was great. I feel like we can safely recount that anecdote now.
The Writing Process
Jamie Nolan: Jigar, I've seen you fire off a thousand ideas in a single meeting — this is why I really do need recordings whenever you and I have a phone call, because otherwise I'm left trying to decipher. You can't get them out of you fast enough and I'm furiously taking notes. A book requires you to organize all of that into something more linear. Was that hard for you? What did the process look like as the book was coming together?
Jigar Shah: It was hard. I used a ghostwriter, which made my life a lot easier. Basically, it was about getting all your thoughts on a page and then figuring out how they relate to each other.
One of the things that came out of that effort was recognizing that the clean energy sector — like many sectors, but especially clean energy — wasn't going to get solved by five super-large corporations. It was really going to be a million companies doing $10 million of business every year. Or 100,000 companies doing $100 million of business every year. That's how we were going to get to the trillion-dollar impact we needed. Looking back today, that is exactly how we got here.
When you think about how many awesome entrepreneurs install solar in their communities, do EVs, do maintenance on equipment, help transition folks — it really has been an extraordinary industry. Every year, thousands of people join our industry in the United States, hundreds of thousands around the world. Today, thank God for them. With all the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and the conflict in Iran, they're stepping up in their countries to help people with solar panels, battery storage, wind power, electric vehicles.
So a lot of what I talked about was the power of entrepreneurship and small business. The other thing I talked a lot about was the power of finance and capital — figuring out how to tap into mainstream capital. One of the things I got so frustrated by was how many people thought we needed impact investing dollars and a way to get cheaper money than mainstream capital. Convincing people that pivoting toward mainstream capital is how you make big change — that was not common knowledge back then.
Deployment vs. Invention
Jamie Nolan: That's a really interesting point. You followed that thesis through to your work at LPO. A core idea in this book is that we need deployment, not invention — the argument that we don't need to invent new technology, we need to deploy what already exists using smarter business models. You've been saying the same thing for years. In 2013, that was really contrarian — most of the climate world was still obsessed with breakthrough tech. Did people push back? Did you get called naïve?
Jigar Shah: It's so funny. People obliquely refer to it as deployment versus innovation. I'm so tired of that. I look back and think, wait — I think they're talking about me. I guess they're talking about the fight that I started.
Who could be against innovation? It's not like I was ever against innovation. But what I found was that no one cared about deployment. People were like, "Well, if it happens, great. If it doesn't, it wasn't meant to be." And it was more sinister than that. When deployment didn't happen, people didn't try to identify the reasons. They'd say the technologies weren't good enough.
This is primarily my beef with Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla and some of those folks. If the technologies they were representing didn't immediately take off — like the internet, like computers, whatever they were involved in — they'd say, "Well, something must be wrong with the technology." Not that there are structural barriers to permitting, or that utilities aren't even allowing folks to connect these systems to the grid. It obviously couldn't be anything other than the technology being somehow flawed. That just irked me to no end.
What the Book Actually Changed
Jamie Nolan: And these are the same themes you're still talking about. You were pounding the pavement, trying to get people to realize the big challenge was business model innovation, not technology innovation. That's still a big focus of your core message. Did you find the book changed anything? Did deals happen because of it? Did it open doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise?
Jigar Shah: So many people have read the book. When I published it, I ended up self-publishing — I went to all the publishers and it just seemed like such a fiasco to work with them. So I worked with this group called Icosa. There are still a few videos on YouTube from when I had black hair and they had me writing on a whiteboard.
The way we sold all those books was I just said yes to every single keynote address that year. My speaking fee was basically: you had to buy enough books for half the audience for me to speak. Then I'd sit there and sign all of them. So many people got a book. Even today, people are like, "Look, see, I got a book from you at this conference, and you signed it."
I don't know of any specific deals that came out of it. But I have to say, so many things go my way that probably shouldn't or don't need to. I think it's because I've been accessible. People have seen my book, read my book, followed stuff I've said. As you suggested, I've been consistent. Everyone thinks I'm giving hot takes — but it's the same hot takes, just maybe said slightly differently, since 2013. Business has been really good. I think the book was positive. Even when I started Generate Capital, I remember we kept boxes of books and everyone who visited wanted one. That was another way we got a lot of books out the door.
Jigar Shah: This episode is supported by S2G Investments. If you've been listening to me, you know I'm done talking about R&D. We have the technology. The real question is, can we deploy it at scale? When I joined Sanjeev Krishnan on the S2G podcast, we skipped the hype and talked about what actually matters: affordability, fit-for-purpose capital, and getting real infrastructure built. S2G Investments is one of the only firms that brings that same deployment-first mindset to energy, agriculture, and the oceans, connecting the dots across the real economy. Listen to the S2G Podcast on your favorite podcast app now, and start with my episode on energy affordability.
The Birth of Generate Capital
Jamie Nolan: Love that so much. And that's a perfect segue into your next big gig — Generate Capital, co-founded in 2014 by you, Scott Jacobs, formerly of McKinsey, and Matan Friedman, from venture capital and resource finance. The core idea was infrastructure as a service: financing, building, owning, and operating sustainable infrastructure assets. You worked across energy, water, waste, transportation. Very broad remit. By 2024, Generate had raised more than $10 billion in total capital and built a portfolio of more than 2,000 sustainable infrastructure assets. That's incredible in 10 years. Talk to me about the origin story. How did you and your co-founders come together, and where did the concept come from?
Jigar Shah: Scott and I have known each other for years. He was on the Obama transition team, and he was the one who brought my name forward to Richard Branson to hire me for the Carbon War Room — I have him to thank for that. Scott and Matan overlapped at Harvard Business School. I always seem to start companies with people who went to Harvard Business School — SunEdison was the same. Scott brought Matan and me together, and it was fantastic. Scott was a master fundraiser, a big thinker about how capital markets work.
I, as we just talked about with my book, was talking about business model innovation. So many people were doing it — batteries as a service, solar hot water as a service, renewable natural gas as a service. A lot of people were doing the business model innovation I was talking about. And then when they went to raise money, there was nobody to raise it from. Everyone was like, "That was just in a book. We're not doing that."
So Generate Capital became the place people came to with these great ideas. We were the group that would spend time with them. If you remember my SunEdison story, we'd closed the first couple of deals at Whole Foods, Staples, IKEA. Then when I went to people I would have thought would have the project, they were like, "Solar's too weird. We're not going to be the first investor in solar — that seems too risky." So we wanted to be the place I could have come to when I was raising money for SunEdison project finance. And we were that place. We'd give everybody their three or four hours and let them fully explain their businesses. Sure, we had to pass on a lot of stuff — that was Matan's job. He was the no person. Someone had to be the no person. That's how you make money in this business.
It was so fantastic. We were the first $100 million into battery storage. The first $100 million into renewable natural gas. The first $100 million into behind-the-meter natural gas — which is so funny, because now everyone is doing it for data centers. We were cutting-edge in so many places. We started a whole new business model, too. We were a C-corp, not a fund. People bought shares of our corporation. We did all sorts of crazy things.
Why a C-Corp
Jamie Nolan: That part is really interesting to me. Generate didn't just write checks — you built, owned, and operated the assets. They're still doing that today. That is very different from a traditional fund. Why did you decide to structure it that way? What problem were you trying to solve that traditional finance was missing?
Jigar Shah: One thing we realized early on is that with a fund structure, you have a fund life. People give you money, but they expect it back in seven, eight, or nine years. What you realize with these companies is that you can't promise that.
When we invested in renewable natural gas — we put our first investment in around 2017 or 2018 — we had a lot of challenges. The first project didn't work right. We had to bring in an expert to help fix it. Generate Upcycle, which is what that company is called now, just put itself up for sale. They're doing a lot of stuff. This is 2026, so it's nine years later — and they finally got all the projects working beautifully. The returns are exactly what we thought they were going to be, just three or four years later than we expected. Everything's going well.
But you need permanent capital to make those kinds of investments. What happens a lot of times is, if you have to give your money back to an investor after seven years and the entrepreneur is on the cusp of getting it all right but you've run out of time, then you force them to do dumb things to give you your money back faster so you can return it to LPs. That doesn't align interests between investor and entrepreneur. We wanted to fully align interests between what we were doing and what they were doing. The C-corp was the only structure we could use.
Funny enough, Trump came into office, and when the Trump tax bill passed, they cut corporate taxes from 35% to 15%. Then everyone was like, "Jigar, you guys are so smart, I can't believe you figured that out, knew that was going to happen." Obviously, we had no idea it was going to happen — we completely did not predict that. But then a lot of other people started copying what we were doing.
Lessons from SunEdison
Jamie Nolan: One thing you referenced in our last episode is that when you sold SunEdison, you told the buyers exactly what not to do — do not use your own balance sheet, always use other people's money. Infamously, they did the opposite and ran it into the ground. So when you were building Generate, was that cautionary tale in the back of your mind? Did watching someone else destroy the prior company you had built shape how you structured this one?
Jigar Shah: In some ways. You partner with people you think are going to be awesome — although I had great partners at SunEdison, too. In general, every situation is different. You have to turn the page. I did that at SunEdison, and I did it at Generate Capital. Remember, in 2021, when I joined the Biden administration, they forced me to sell all my shares in Generate Capital. So I did. I didn't coordinate with Generate while I was in office.
I don't think that's what I was focused on. What I was focused on was figuring out how you actually unlocked these projects. One of the things we did at Generate was that we always expected our deals to go bad. We expected that the sponsor we were investing in was going to lose interest in the project or somehow not be able to manage it. So we hired people in-house who were experts in everything. Sometimes it took us two or three years after we made an investment to find the right people. But we always dedicated ourselves to doing that. And that made us better, because we were prepared to step in and operate the projects if something went wrong. We had to do that a lot, actually.
I don't mean that in a negative way. I don't mean the people we invested in were bad people. Sometimes things just don't go right. The assets themselves are fine — the batteries are fine, the renewable natural gas plants are fine, the generators are fine — but you have to lean in. So part of what we learned at Generate was not to be a financial investor, but to be a partner with these companies and really think through what we could do to help them succeed. That was a completely different point of view from the rest of the investment field.
Beyond Solar
Jamie Nolan: I love that. And what tremendous value for the companies — knowing you have that level of expertise inside your investor. It's similar to how things worked at LPO. We had subject matter experts in every single technology area, and it definitely is a huge value add. So at Generate, you expanded your technology areas — fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, battery storage, water infrastructure, EVs. You actually became one of the largest owners of renewable natural gas in the country. What was the first non-solar bet, and were you nervous about moving beyond what you knew so well?
Jigar Shah: The battery storage deals we did — which were the first deals we did — didn't cause any nervousness, because they felt very familiar to what we knew about solar.
The renewable natural gas stuff was terrifying. It was all new. You were working with waste management and the sanitation department to get food waste, or with large manufacturers like Unilever, who at the time were making ice cream. If they had a bad batch, they needed someone to take it off their hands and do something with it. So that was an entirely different set of feedstock providers.
Then the technology — everyone was like, "Yeah, it works fine, don't worry, just sign here and we'll build the project." Of course, it never worked well. We needed deep packaging systems, because sometimes the bad batch was already in bottles, so you needed to squeeze it out of the bottles. So there were machines for that. Then you had to digest it, and that was a science experiment — if the bacteria ever had a bad day, your natural gas production was off, and sometimes it all died. The level of expertise required was something I knew nothing about.
So we went out to find the experts. I remember going to the first RNG conference, and there were 97 people there. That was the total. It was such a small sector — 2015, 2016 — because we started looking at deals.
Jamie Nolan: What year was that?
Jigar Shah: We always looked at deals for two years before we pulled the trigger on our first deal. I'd meet people and think, "Wow, you're really talented" — or "Wow, you're a big talker, but you really don't know anything about what you're talking about." You could tell, just sizing people up.
But even the regulatory affairs stuff was different. At the California Public Utilities Commission, the team that worked on renewable natural gas was completely different from the team that worked on electricity. My entire network was useless when it came to RNG. I had to meet all new people on the regulatory side, all new people on the legislative side. Some of the ways we made money was through regulation — like the Low Carbon Fuel Standard program in California. So you're like, "What is the LCFS program and how does it work?" It was just so new.
But you'd look at it and go: these farmers are actually storing manure in pits — unlined pits that are clearly illegal under EPA. They don't want to do stuff that's illegal, but the legal stuff was just too expensive. They couldn't get milk to you if they had to do everything legally. So we did a big anaerobic digester with — do you know the Fairlife brand of milk? They had this massive facility in Indiana. We did them.
Jamie Nolan: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Just learning about what Fairlife did and how they made money. Did you know they made no money whatsoever on dairy? They didn't make any money on milk. They made money on the brand. When they built up Fairlife to be this big company — I forget who they sold it to, Coca-Cola or something — they sold it for like $4 billion. You're like, "Oh, they don't make money on cows. They actually make money on branding in the grocery store." So many new things to learn about. All of it was awesome.
Let's Do an RNG Episode
Jamie Nolan: I actually had a renewable natural gas client — shout out to Brightmark. They were one of my first clients when I went out on my own as a consultant, and they put so much faith in me. They were actually my longest-running. Still to this day, the longest place I've ever technically worked. I supported them for five years, and they did a lot of RNG projects with dairy farmers all across the country.
We've got to do an RNG episode, Jigar. It's such an interesting sector and it's such common sense. It makes so much sense when you actually learn about all the environmental problems it's solving. It creates another stream of income for folks in rural areas. It's a win-win-win all around. Particularly when we're facing all these fossil fuel insecurity issues, price issues, the conflict in Iran — let's do an RNG episode, since it's something we have in common. We've both worked in that sector, and it's really important. I don't think a lot of people know about it.
Jigar Shah: We should definitely do that. So many of our friends in the environmental movement have mixed feelings about it, because they think we're extending the life of the natural gas industry. I find — I totally agree, it won me over too — but the political part of it is complicated.
Jamie Nolan: It won me over too. We're here to break it all down for folks, so we'll have to get that on the books.
Dividing the Work
Jamie Nolan: But going back to your time at Generate — you've been honest, and we talked about this in the first episode, that you've always been a great hustler, but you weren't necessarily the best manager from the beginning. You mentioned Brian Robertson ran the board and did the fundraising at SunEdison. Then at Generate, you had Scott and Matan. How did the three of you divide up the work? Did you really feel like you had a good dynamic and the right team to complement one another's strengths?
Jigar Shah: It was fantastic. Scott raised all the money. Matan helped him do that, just because everybody wanted to meet the chief investment officer. They all wanted to meet me, too — wasn't like I was chopped liver — but I was less important than Scott and Matan. Scott really managed the board, although a lot of the folks on the board were good friends of mine. I definitely brought in almost all the business while I was there.
One really weird thing, though: Matan is such an investor's investor. He likes to say no a lot. Really dug in deep. One of the things I taught Matan was: you need to leave some money on the table. He always tried to get the very best deal on every single investment we made. I was like, "Matan, there are only 1,000 people who matter in the entire country. If you piss off one of them, that's 75 people who are going to hear about it and never do business with us. If you piss off another one, that's another 75. Yes, we could have made an 18% return there — but if we give on these two points, we'll make a 17.1% return. We should do that, leave more money in their pocket." He would grumble all the time. Then by the time we finished working with each other, he was like, "I see your perspective."
We developed a reputation for being a great place to get money from, because we were not overly harsh. We wouldn't take the letter of the contract and screw people over with it. We'd be reasonable. I think some of that changed after I left — but it was a real thing we did. It caused a lot of the best entrepreneurs, who could have gotten money from other people, to choose to get it from us.
Hiring a Coach
Jamie Nolan: I get it. You also mentioned that Generate was the moment in your career when you finally hired a coach — a leadership coach. What did that process teach you, and what was the biggest thing you got wrong about leadership earlier in your career?
Jigar Shah: The big thing I got wrong is that leadership takes work. It takes education, practice, role-playing — all the things that you'd think, "I'm just learning on the job, it's fine." It's not fine. You actually need somebody to go to and say, "I had this situation — what could I have done better? How could this work?" Or when you do those assessments and get your scores — am I an ENTJ or an ENTP, all those Myers-Briggs things? What does that mean? I'm an ENTP.
Jamie Nolan: Are you? I'm an ENTJ, which I don't think will surprise anyone.
Jigar Shah: Things like — I have a hard time really prioritizing the person in front of me over my own needs. So I work super hard at that. People find that surprising. They're like, "You always seem to be prioritizing the person in front of you." I'm like, "Well, that's leadership training. That's me practicing for a long time. Left to my own devices, I'm always trying to get the most out of the interaction that I wanted, not necessarily what they wanted." There are all these things you learn.
The other thing was that it was regular. A regular process. When you know something is coming up, it's like going to a trainer — when you know you have to do it, you're like, "Okay, I need to make sure I'm thinking about all the steps I'm taking between sessions. Am I doing the homework assignments he gave me?" I think it's super important. It's one of the reasons that, when I was at LPO, I found it shocking that the Department of Energy gave people free executive coaches and no one used them. So I made it my mission to force everyone to use the free executive coach function at the Department of Energy. Lexi was amazing. So glad we used her.
Advice for the Next Generation
Jamie Nolan: If someone's listening to this early in their career and they want to do what you've done — some version of that, build something in clean energy that actually changes the world — what's the one piece of advice you'd give them that you wish someone had given you?
Jigar Shah: Change happens really slowly — and then all at once.
A lot of people need this kind of feedback to keep motivating themselves. They need to see what they're working on actually working. They need to see that there's a response from customers or clients or whatever. In my whole career, it's really been: you are the one who has to have faith in your ideas. You have to be the one who actually believes that what you're doing is going to be true. You listen to investors, partners, employees, others — you take feedback and make your story better. But ultimately, you're the one who has to believe.
Sometimes it takes years. At Generate Capital, when we first went out to close money, people laughed at us and said, "There's no way I'm giving you money on the terms you're asking for." We closed $55 million total in our first close, and we thought we needed maybe $200 to $300 million. It was a disappointing first close. I didn't find it disappointing, but I was told later that it was probably disappointing. Then it started succeeding, and we got a few more people on board. We did a second close that was $133 million — about $80 million of additional money. Then we sort of had to wallow in the wilderness for two years. Finally, we got Alaska Permanent to put in $200 million two years later. So it took a long time for us to be successful.
There were a lot of people saying, "I don't think your model's working, Jigar. You should give up and do something else." Now everyone's like, "Oh, it's amazing — $10 billion raised and 2,000 assets." But while we were doing it, people really were whispering in the corner going, "I don't know about that vanity project Jigar's doing. I don't think that's working." We really had to stick with it.
Never a Doubt
Jamie Nolan: Did that make you have doubts? Or were you just so sure in your vision that you kept moving forward with confidence?
Jigar Shah: I appreciate the fake question, given that you've known me for a long time. No, I never had doubts. I don't think I'm a doubt person — but I appreciate that you had to ask the question.
It's just one of those things where I'm happy to be challenged all the time, and I relish it, because that's how I become better. But the notion that I was going to start a new company — it took me two years between Carbon War Room and starting Generate Capital, because I was looking for a good idea. I wasn't just going to jump into the next thing. Scott, Matan, and I planned it for a year with people, pressure-tested it: is there really a need for this? Once we determined we were going to do it, we were going to make it successful. So no, never had a doubt.
Jamie Nolan: I love that. As someone who's worked closely with you for a few years now, both inside and outside of government — we're both entrepreneurs. I own my own company, and now we're partnering here on this project with Energy Empire. I have leaned back on your confidence multiple times, and it's always there to catch me. It's a great quality you have as a leader, as a partner, as somebody who has partnered with you in a venture: you really do have that vision and you are very confident in it. I know it's something I appreciate, and I'm sure your other partners over the course of your career have also found is one of your best qualities.
What's Next
Jamie Nolan: Thanks so much for joining us — the second episode in our series about who Jigar Shah is and his whole journey. I'm loving these conversations. I'm getting to learn more about him, and I hope all of you are enjoying it as well.
Soon, we're going to have an opportunity for you to send in your questions for Jigar for the third part in this series, where we'll dig into his move over to the Loan Programs Office and the legacy of his work there. I'm very excited about that one, because luckily I was there to witness a lot of it.
Thank you so much for listening. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts — Spotify, Apple Podcasts. We're also on YouTube. Please rate, review, and subscribe — it really makes a huge difference. Leave us comments on our YouTube videos. We're really enjoying following along and seeing everyone's reactions to the episodes. And we've got to thank our sponsor, S2G Investments. Without them, none of this would be possible. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time.