Transcript
Jigar Shah: Russell, I don't remember when we first met. I think it was when you were doing your book tour for Superpower, is that right?
Russell Gold: It could have been. I think we've been crossing paths for at least 10 years now. The energy world can be a small world.
Jigar Shah: It is a very small world — and unfortunately getting smaller. You spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal covering energy. Two-time Pulitzer finalist. You broke the Deepwater Horizon story, exposed PG&E's role in the California wildfires, wrote two books. For people who don't know your work, what's the story that defined you as a journalist?
Russell Gold: Oh God, that's like choosing between my children. The biggest story I've really been covering for 20 years and more is this: when I started covering the energy space in 2002, the United States was an importer. It was going to have to focus on shortage — that's how it was defined. Twenty years later, the United States is a massive energy exporter. We have lots of energy. That's been the big, giant story I've been wrestling with for a quarter century.
Now, the favorite story I ever worked on was probably toward the end of my reporting on PG&E and the Camp Fire. This was a reporting project for the Wall Street Journal with Katherine Blunt and the late Rebecca Smith. The whole Camp Fire started because there was a hook sitting out there in the Sierra Nevada that failed. It was holding up a transmission line, and when it failed, it arced, caused a fire, the fire ran out of control, and over 80 people died. We finally got a picture of the hook. There was just enough information on that picture that we could figure out when it was made and who made it. I went and found the manufacturer, and we found early 20th-century catalogs from that company. There was one place in the country that had those early 20th-century catalogs — the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana's library. I happened to have a cousin whose kid was getting an engineering degree there. I said, "Could you do me a favor and Xerox a couple of pages from a couple of different catalogs?"
Jigar Shah: Interlibrary loan.
Russell Gold: By figuring out exactly when the hooks being manufactured changed, we were able to definitively say that the hook had been out there for over a century, just sitting in the elements and weather. It was a small story in the grand scheme of things, but being able to connect the dots — that's what makes journalism fun.
Jamie Nolan: What a great research detail. In addition to the Camp Fire, you covered another one of the biggest energy disasters in American history — the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That one is really cemented in my memory. Both of those stories are about what happens when energy companies cut corners. What do those stories teach you about the relationship between energy companies and the public?
Russell Gold: Energy companies can do amazing things. The ability to build a network of power in the early 20th century to capture snowmelt and turn it into electricity for San Francisco. The ability to go into five miles of the Gulf of Mexico, miles and miles from shore, and build a floating drilling rig that will be dynamically positioned and sit there. All these things energy companies can do — they're absolutely amazing. Energy companies love talking about that with the public.
What I learned is that there are always these hidden risks. Sometimes they manifest after 100 years. Sometimes it's after two or three years. As much as we celebrate what energy companies can do in the quest to bring us the barrels and the megawatts we want and need, we — as the public — cannot take our eyes off the risks and who's keeping an eye on them to make sure they're doing what they should be doing.
Jigar Shah: On that point, who should be looking at what they're doing? On Deepwater Horizon, you had Louisiana, which played a big role. You had BP, a very large global energy company but UK-based. And then you had the federal government. How does this really get done in a way that balances everyone's needs?
Russell Gold: That's a great question. The federal government was the offshore regulator there. What BP and Transocean — the drilling rig company — were doing was so cutting-edge that I'm not sure the federal government had the necessary expertise to really oversee it. There was a lot of "trust us, we know what we're doing, and we certainly don't want to have a massive problem in five miles of water." The government trusted them. There was a certain amount of oversight and a certain amount of rules, but there was a lot of trust there with Deepwater Horizon and with all Gulf of Mexico offshore drilling.
At the end of the day, there was a blowout, which would have been bad enough. But the real crisis was that the blowout preventer did not work as expected, and nobody could get to it. It showed the limits of human and energy industry ingenuity.
Jigar Shah: I'm in awe of what the oil and gas industry — and the renewable energy industry, for that matter — do on a daily basis.
Russell Gold: And we should be. It is amazing stuff. But we cannot take that as gospel and say, "Well then, they're the cure-all."
Jamie Nolan: I'm so grateful that journalists like you go in and do real investigations after the fact to really dig into what went wrong. At this moment, when we are seeing renewed interest in domestic oil drilling — they just resumed drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, and I saw they delivered the first barrels from that site, and we're going to see increased drilling in the Gulf — what are the lessons we can carry forward? How do we avoid this happening? The stakes seem really high, and we're headed for another environmental disaster. It's just a matter of time.
Russell Gold: Hopefully not. I think the lesson is: imagine the worst-case scenario and be prepared for it. With Deepwater Horizon, that did not happen. Nobody imagined it could happen, and we weren't prepared for it. Then we were running around trying to figure out how to get machinery, how to basically clamp down on a blowout preventer that failed with an open pipe. As we continue to explore the Gulf of Mexico, as we restart Santa Barbara, someone needs to sit down and say: what's the worst-case scenario, and how can we prepare for it now? How can we have the tools and the boats prepared, so that if a worst-case scenario happens, we're not just sitting around watching it on CNN for four or five weeks until we can move on it?
Jamie Nolan: Let's hope the oil companies are doing that important planning right now, because I don't think we can count on the federal government to play a greater role in the regulation of that industry at this moment.
From Journalism to Solar
Jigar Shah: Probably not. Russell, my understanding is that there's a nasty rumor that after two decades as a journalist, you went to go work for a solar manufacturing company — and that I may have played an accidental role in that, based on something I said at a Generate Capital conference.
Russell Gold: I did. You're 100% correct. You reached out to me — it was on the sidelines of some conference in San Antonio, and you were gathering together some of your investors, or the companies you were funding, and you were looking for someone to do a lunch talk. You invited me and I went down there. My talk was basically: look, the renewable energy industry in this country was sort of born from a bunch of people getting together wearing Birkenstocks and sandals in a San Francisco ballroom. "Let's do something good." That small-is-beautiful era is over. You guys are not thinking — you've brought a fan to a gunfight. The fossil fuel industry is not going to take this lying down. They're coming after you. They're going to play bare-knuckles. And you guys have to do the same.
You gave me this venue, and I think you made some comments along those lines. I was sitting there talking to developers saying, "You guys have got to start taking this more seriously. You're becoming the dominant energy source, and you're pretending like you can't be involved in politics. You're pretending like you can't really be involved in lobbying, like you can ignore Washington. You guys are crazy." In the years after that, I kept thinking about it. I kept coming back to it and was like, "Yeah, that's sort of a good point." So when I had the opportunity, I just kind of went and did it myself.
Jamie Nolan: I love that. And I love that you and Jigar were both early adopters of the energy dominance messaging, it sounds like. Now that you're on the outside looking back, and major newsrooms have gutted their energy beats — including the Wall Street Journal, by the way, I've heard from my friends there — a lot of the best reporting is coming from independent journalists and Substacks, people who have left these major newsrooms. What do you think is missing in energy journalism right now, and where do you see this headed?
Russell Gold: Great question. First, a lot of great friends are still left at legacy newspapers — some of them who have left. As someone who handles comms and strategy for a renewable energy company, I have nothing but good things to say about all my friends who are still working in newspapers. I need them to write good stories about me. But legacy newspapers and legacy media don't have a monopoly anymore. The monopoly has been broken. That's not better or worse than what happened when we started breaking up electric monopolies. One of the things that happened when we started breaking up the electric monopolies is we had a lot of innovation, a lot of change, and a lot of new ideas — some good, some bad. We're going to see the same. That's what we're seeing with Substacks.
On a personal level, what I think is missing: I would love to see more energy polyglots — people who understand not just oil and nuclear but also electricity. There are too many people out there who understand their one slice. They understand it really, really well. They can write about it. Maybe they're adherents, or they're boosting nuclear or this or that. The energy industry right now feels like it's being smashed up and blown apart like the Hadron Collider. We need more people who can understand the different pieces of it — who can speak about geothermal and the pluses and minuses there just as well as they can speak about solar or natural gas.
Storytelling and Cultural Narratives
Jigar Shah: Well, I'm not sure I'm that person, but I certainly have been baptized by fire at the Loan Programs Office. I had to learn a lot about a lot of different technologies. I'm curious — you've spent—
Russell Gold: You're in the final cut, Jigar. You're in the final cut. We're taking a vote later today.
Jigar Shah: You've spent most of your career in Texas, right? The home of oil and gas. You and I grew up watching Dallas on TV. I feel like the oil and gas sector has always been better at storytelling — Red Adair, Landman, Deepwater Horizon the movie. All the way back to Dallas and Giant. They've owned the narrative of American energy for decades. How do you think this changes with clean energy?
Russell Gold: I was flipping around the television — you can still do that — and I came across an old Dallas playing somewhere. I watched it for five or 10 minutes. I think it was Bobby Ewing talking about "We need a diamond-tip drilling bit," and he was getting so enthusiastic. I was like, yeah — there are diamond tips.
Here's what I think is the key. When you talk about oil and gas — you mentioned Red Adair, flames going everywhere, "are they going to be able to put it out?" James Dean soaked with oil in Giant — there's just a natural dramatic narrative. We're drilling a well. Is it going to come in? Is it not going to come in? When it comes in, it goes spurting up the derrick, and it's exciting.
I'm going to let you guys in on something. Renewables are not nearly as dramatic. We're kind of boring. My company, T1 Energy — we're building a $400 million solar cell fab right now out in Rockdale, Texas. It's a printing press, more or less. We're taking silicon wafers and running them through a printing press. We're going to be doing thousands of them a day. It's just not dramatic. That natural drama of "oh my God, is the well going to come in?" But I don't think that's actually bad. We don't want our energy to be dramatic. We don't want to go through this period like, "Oh my God, is the Strait of Hormuz going to be open or closed? Are we going to be able to get our LNG?" We want energy to be abundant. We want it to be reliable. And that's why renewables might not get the movies, we might not get the exciting movie treatment — but that might not be the worst thing, because it means we're kind of boring and reliable.
Jamie Nolan: I don't know if boring is the brand we're going for, but I see what you're going for.
Russell Gold: We're dependable. Dependable.
Jamie Nolan: Let's talk about a more modern depiction of energy. Landman specifically — that show is really impressive from a production standpoint. I actually just got a Paramount+ subscription specifically so I could watch this show, because I've heard so much about it. But I know it also has some pretty pointed messaging against renewables. You've watched it — what's your reaction?
Russell Gold: Well, I've seen the first season and that was enough for me. I didn't go back for season two. Maybe I'll get around to it. I'm not a fan of it. There's the famous Billy Bob Thornton scene where they're out in the wind turbines, and he's talking about how much oil they need for lubrication, how much cement and steel — what is it, 20-year lifespan, they would never pay back the carbon footprint. I'm sorry, that's just not true. It's factually incorrect.
The other thing is: maybe they did it for dramatic effect, it's oil versus renewables, but we need it all. And it all has different — it's like the classic thing. When I go to my toolbox, sometimes I need a screwdriver, sometimes I need a hammer. Different fuels are good for different things. To say one is better and one needs the other — look, we two can play at that game, and I just don't think that kind of narrative, putting that kind of message out, is helping anything. We like oil and gas. I work with a whole bunch of former oil and gas people working in solar right now. There's nothing but love.
Jigar Shah: And there's actually a truth to it. Over 80% of electricity in Western ERCOT is renewable. The Permian Basin literally relies on renewable energy to stay competitive. When the Republican Party came after the solar and wind industry in 2025, the oil and gas industry were the ones who went to bat to save clean energy from those restrictive rules. The show pretends renewables are just a funny sideshow. How do you square that narrative?
Russell Gold: I don't really. Go back to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which I think is probably one of the most important pieces of energy legislation in my lifetime. Guess what? Both sides got something they wanted.
Jigar Shah: Sure. Dick Cheney.
Russell Gold: We ended the export ban, but we got a long-term extension for energy tax credits for renewables. Both sides got something they wanted, which really set up the energy abundance narrative that we're living through right now.
But going back to the Permian Basin — one of the first things I wrote at T1, right on our company's website, is a little case study we call "Permian Basin, We Got Your Back." We ran the numbers on an hour-by-hour basis. You're right — 80%-plus of the electricity out there is renewables. Wind — there's a lot of wind out there — and solar. If you want US oil to be globally competitive, you've got to keep your operating prices down. One of the ways to do that is inexpensive electricity. So we're more than happy to be working out there. We're glad they like our electricity.
We cannot forget the most important lesson Amory Lovins taught us. There are not that many lessons we should take from Amory Lovins, in my opinion, but there are some really important ones. One of the things he said was: people don't want barrels of oil. They don't want cubic feet of gas. They don't want megawatts. They want a cold beer — not warm beer, cold beer — and warm showers. People want what energy can provide for them. So let's stop arguing with each other. For the good of the country, for the good of consumers, we really have to stop arguing and trying to tear each other down. Right now we just need a little bit of everything, and we need it to work together.
Jamie Nolan: I think we agree that Landman needs better production consultants from the energy industry. They should feel free to reach out to the show if they would like our thoughts on that. We're happy to help. Oil and gas has, as we've just discussed, more than a century of cultural storytelling and this big cultural brand. What's the clean energy equivalent? What should the clean energy industry be doing that it currently isn't? This is a topic we come back to time and time again on this podcast — how to create that type of cultural relevancy that we continue to miss.
Russell Gold: Jamie, that's a great question. We're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of going back and celebrating great inventions. Let's talk about the fact that solar energy is American. Charles Fritts, back in the 1880s, putting the first selenium cells up on top of a rooftop in lower Manhattan — I think actually where the current Federal Reserve Bank of New York is. First time anyone put out solar cells. Silicon-based solar cells were invented at Bell Labs. Solar is as American as apple pie.
The other thing that's really important in recapturing the narrative: what solar gives you is freedom. What's more American than that? You want to be able to power your house? Great. Put some solar panels on top, stick some batteries in your garage, and you can get off the grid. You are free. You're generating your own. You're a pioneer. You're self-sufficient. Americans love freedom. Solar in particular, and batteries — solar plus storage — is really feeding into a very deeply American sentiment and value. I think we need to talk about that a lot more than we do right now.
Jamie Nolan: I love that so much. SEIA or ACP — one of those groups — I would love to see them do something around the 250th anniversary, around the legacy of innovation in this country and American ingenuity in terms of energy technology. I think that's brilliant. I would love to see that happen.
Russell Gold: Call me.
Wind, Messaging, and the Moment
Jamie Nolan: Moving along from that — your book Superpower was about Michael Skelly and his massive bet on wind power. Now we have solar kind of figuring out how to earn bipartisan support. Meanwhile, wind has been having — I think everyone would agree — a difficult time with the Trump administration. He so strongly opposes offshore wind. If you were running comms in the wind industry right now versus solar, what would you tell them about how to meet this moment?
Russell Gold: That's a really tough question. A good question. We used to always talk about solar plus wind — wind and solar. Now all you do is talk about solar and batteries. Wind is sort of being pushed to the side, even though it still generates a very good amount of electricity in this country.
I would start with the fact that there are some really amazing wind resources around the world. You go to a place like Oman — huge, great wind resource. The middle of the country, the Plains states all the way down into the Panhandle of Texas, is an amazing wind resource. We need to focus on that and maybe move away a little from offshore, where it's just very controversial and very difficult. The oil and gas industry has had to fight for years for the social license to do offshore drilling. Wind's not going to have any easier. My sense is: go where the good wind resources are, and don't rock the boat. Just keep pushing.
The other thing I would say, and I've said this with the solar industry as well: we want the right to build wind, the exact same rights someone has to drill an oil or gas well. If a rancher has the ability to lease out their land to do some oil and gas exploration, that's the exact same right we want for solar or for wind. No different rules, no different permits. Natural gas occurs somewhere, oil occurs somewhere, wind occurs somewhere — and people should have the right to pursue energy. The good news for solar is that it pretty much occurs everywhere. You don't really have those geographic limitations. Portland, Oregon, we can rule out — but almost everywhere else, it's always good, and you can generate good electricity.
Jigar Shah: One thing that's on everyone's mind, Russell — JP Morgan just said we're going to hit $5 a gallon for gasoline at the end of April because of the Iran conflict. Electricity bills, as you know, have been going up because of grid upgrades, mostly distribution. We have a unique window right now to make the case for clean energy to a mainstream audience. Do you agree? And who is actually targeting that audience? Who's trying to make that case?
Russell Gold: I do agree. Anytime not just prices go up, but the supply of energy becomes fragile and uncertain — that's a good time to be talking about the localization, the domestic manufacturing, of energy. This is the time, right now. Since I started this job about a year ago, I have been talking for the company about solar, and I've been talking a lot to the right wing and to Trump-aligned voters, because I feel like our story is very compelling. I don't talk about carbon. I go weeks without mentioning carbon in my job. Honestly, I don't even talk about renewable energy. We're just energy. We are low-cost, scalable, reliable energy.
People get that. That's the message we need to put out right now. Prices are going up, or expected to go up, because demand from hyperscalers and air conditioning and reshoring manufacturing is increasing. Great — we need a scalable energy resource. Printing press: solar. We need it to be reliable — pair solar with batteries, you've got reliability. Low-cost — it's no question that solar is the low-cost option on an LCOE basis. People understand that. We need to talk to them about power, about energy, and about what it can do for us and why it's important. For right now, talk less about carbon. Talk less about particulates and health. It's just about: look, we need energy. Let's figure out how we get it.
Jamie Nolan: You're speaking my language, Russell. I've been saying — we've discussed it on this podcast — we still have those benefits whether or not we are talking about them. Right now, in order to get ahead, we just need to adjust our messaging for this political moment. Our environmental benefits still stand, whether or not we are leading with those. I'm right there with you.
Russell Gold: Exactly.
T1 Energy and a Domestic Solar Supply Chain
Jamie Nolan: Let's talk a little bit more about your new company, T1 Energy. My understanding is that it's building something pretty ambitious — a fully domestic solar supply chain here in the United States. Can you tell us a little bit more about what T1 is actually doing?
Russell Gold: Absolutely. Happy to. A year ago, we set out and looked at the solar landscape. You basically had two choices. You could get American-made solar panels, but typically they were cadmium telluride — they were less efficient. Ninety-eight percent of the world has already moved over to silicon-based solar panels. That's where all the interesting research and development is. But if you wanted a silicon-based panel, you were probably going to have to deal with either a Chinese company or imported panels. So we said, let's create a company that is American, that is manufacturing in the United States, but gives you the good technology, the high-efficiency TOPCon. That's what we set out to build.
We started off — we bought a five-gigawatt factory that had been built but not commissioned. It had started running for two weeks when we bought it. Trina Solar built it; we purchased it from them. So we got modules. But let's start at the beginning of the solar panel. The beginning of a solar panel is polysilicon. We get that from Hemlock Semiconductor, in Hemlock, Michigan. About 95 to 97% of global polysilicon is from China or Chinese companies. We get ours from the United States. Corning is now taking that polysilicon and making it into wafers — a very complicated process — and slicing those wafers. That also happens in Michigan. We've got a contract with them.
The next step is solar cells. We are building, like I said, a $400 million facility in Rockdale, Texas, to make TOPCon solar cells. We started building it in December, so we're about four months in. It's pretty exciting what's going on out there. We're going to be putting a lot more stuff out on social media. Then you take the solar cells and you bring them to Wilmer, Texas, just outside of Dallas. It's between two pieces of glass, put some steel frames around them, and you've got a solar panel.
We are building all of that. When our solar cell fab is done, we will have a fully integrated domestic supply chain. We're getting steel panels that are made in America. We're still looking for junction boxes — if anyone out there knows of a good domestic glass manufacturer, give us a call. We're working on it. We're actually working with companies that want to build that, and we're stepping up and committing to a certain amount of offtake so they can get financing. That's what we're putting together. We did 2.8 gigawatts last year in our five-gigawatt factory, mostly just because at the beginning of the year we were just starting up. We've hit nameplate capacity. So it's a fun and exciting place to be. We're really creating something that has not existed ever before — a large-scale, multi-gigawatt American advanced silicon solar manufacturing business.
Jigar Shah: I've got a couple of questions for you, Russell. One of the things Elon Musk did when he started Tesla was he didn't manufacture the EV in Mexico — he manufactured it in California. That actually caused folks to really love the electric vehicle a little bit more because it was made in America. I'm curious whether you think this whole American story versus the old NAFTA, North American story really is a different story.
Russell Gold: I do. I actually do think so. We take people on tours — the factory, politicians — and when they're there looking at it and see not just 1,200 workers but advanced robotics and AI being utilized to figure out what cells might not be working, that we need to swap them out — they get excited. People really want more domestic manufacturing, really want to rebuild a manufacturing base in the United States, and they get excited. We had the state director for Senator Ted Cruz visit us the other day, and he just put up a couple days ago on LinkedIn how exciting it was to see it. People are getting excited — not the people you'd normally expect — and we love that. So yeah, I do think building it in Wilmer, Texas, and not Laos, makes a difference.
Jigar Shah: The other angle I hear from people is: look, it's one thing to build batteries here, because there are five more breakthrough technologies we might get in batteries. But solar panels — we're already sort of, you know, we went from 14% efficiency to 23% efficiency. We're never going to beat the Chinese on cost. What do you say to that when people give you that argument?
Russell Gold: Well, I mean, look. If we had a level playing field, and we didn't have to face dumping of over-capacity polysilicon — yeah, we probably would be able to compete with them. Our factory doesn't know where it is. The ABB robotic arms that are moving glass around and putting the cells onto the glass doesn't know if it's in Wilmer, Texas, or Malaysia.
Jigar Shah: Are you saying you don't have AGI robots? Is that what you're saying? They haven't reached general intelligence yet?
Russell Gold: I guess so. No, no, we're working on that. That's the next upgrade, Jigar. Maybe in a couple months. I'm kidding. Look, the Chinese have done a great job of iterating and figuring out how to do manufacturing of solar panels at a low cost. But if there's a level playing field, and anti-dumping and countervailing-duty tariffs are applied universally, we feel we can compete. And there's a lot of technology still coming out. What kind of tandem panels are we going to have? HJT is coming. Perovskites. We're not done innovating yet. We're still a new company, but I have no doubt we're going to start getting into more R&D and trying to understand what's coming next. Right now we're trying to figure out supply chain. We're trying to figure out manufacturing — we're getting that down. But the big lesson we've learned is that, with the right skilled workforce and the robots and AI, we feel we can compete with anyone around the world.
Industrial Strategy and Energy Independence
Jigar Shah: When you think about the Inflation Reduction Act, and really what that has set off — because Trump got elected in 2016 basically saying, "We need to manufacture stuff here." Obviously didn't pass any legislation to do that, but fine. And then you've got the Inflation Reduction Act, and you've got the 45X credits, which you guys are using — they're paid on every watt of solar you produce. And then you've got the domestic-content adders, so some of the people installing solar have an incentive to use domestically produced materials. There's a construct there. Some of that construct was preserved by the OBBBA when the Trump administration passed something there. From a policy standpoint, it does feel like we need industrial strategy to manufacture stuff in this country until we get good at it again — and maybe we don't need it anymore.
Russell Gold: What we need to avoid is what actually happened with the wind industry in the 2000s, where the policy was such a stop-and-start. You'd have your production tax credits for two years and then they'd go away, but they'd be retroactively applied for another year, and then they'd go away. That really made it difficult to finance any kind of manufacturing, any kind of industrial base. I agree with you — the IRA was certainly moving toward reindustrialization. What happened in the OBBBA was that the 45X tax credits, the manufacturing tax credits, remain. There is a bipartisan agreement that we want more of an industrial base. Now, you can call that an industrial strategy, but what we need is just consistency. Republicans and Democrats have both said they support more industrial development in the United States and more renewable energy being built here. We support that at T1. Call it a policy, call it a strategy, whatever you want — we just need a few years of consistent policy. You've already started to see large amounts of modules, solar modules, batteries being made here in the United States, and we're starting to move up and down the chain, solar cells. We're going to be able to do it. What we just don't want is the herky-jerky policy we've seen.
Jigar Shah: The reason I bring it up is this: I think what happened after the 1973 oil embargo was people said OPEC had too much power. We needed to diversify where we were getting our oil from. We needed to reduce their power. I'm not anti-Chinese. I think when you have a very essential technology — which solar panels clearly are today, as are batteries, as is wind, as are electric vehicles — we need to diversify the supply chain. In the same way we said Saudi Arabia is not evil in the OPEC piece, we just said we need them to have less power.
Part of what I'm trying to understand is: are we creating a model that we want everyone around the world to replicate? Because we want this diversification. Do we want Europe to do stuff like this? Do we want Brazil to do stuff like this? India, South Africa? Clearly the Chinese did some version of industrial strategy. They didn't just iterate. They got 1% interest loans and a lot of losses and all this other stuff for 20 years. That's how they got here.
Russell Gold: The way I think about it is this: if you look at the four main steps of making a solar panel — polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules — globally speaking, each of those steps is like 90 to 95% controlled by China or by Chinese companies. If we had 95% of global oil coming out of Saudi Arabia, I think people might say we need to diversify. So that's really the only argument we're making right now in the United States. Plus, we're bringing back jobs, creating economic growth. I think we're very much in alignment. There's nothing wrong with China and what China's done in manufacturing. They have done an incredible job. They're at, what, one terawatt of installed solar capacity? And they're not doing it for carbon reasons. They're doing it because they're creating an electro-state and they're supporting this industry and they're supporting economic growth. Good on them.
We need to be doing the same. We have to be careful. In the course of my career, from when I started covering energy in 2002 on, we gained energy independence, more or less — effective energy independence — in the United States. But we're at a point right now where, as solar and storage are so dominant — 80%-plus of installed capacity in the last two years from these two technologies — we're running the risk of going back to energy dependence on one country. We just need to be careful of that. And like I said, solar is an American technology. I met John Goodenough, the inventor of the lithium-ion battery, at the University of Texas before he passed away a couple years ago. These are technologies that have been made in the United States.
Remember Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair, getting up before Congress and saying, "We're running out of natural gas. We've got to import lots of natural gas." That was the conventional wisdom. Well, guess what? Now we're the world's number one exporter of natural gas. We've got more natural gas than we know what to do with. Why can't that also be true for solar? Why can't we be developing the next version that gets us to 26 or 27% efficiency in solar panels? We certainly can.
To get to your other question — if Brazil sees this and wants to copy it in other countries, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. I just came back from CERAWeek a couple weeks ago in Houston, and one of the things I was really struck with was that CERAWeek is a celebration of the global energy supply chains — the way oil and gas move around the world. That felt much more frayed than it has been, than I can remember. There's a fraying of global supply chains. I'm not saying they're going to end, but given what's going on in Iran, given the Strait of Hormuz, it just feels very frayed right now. I think we're going to see a lot of interest and movement toward localization. I know you guys have been talking about this with The New Joule Order a lot. From my perch, I see that happening, and I think it's going to continue.
Jigar Shah: Frankly, I think your last answer answered most of my question. But the final question is: summarize what you just said in terms of what the status is of energy in the United States. Not what we want it to be in the future, but what it is right now.
Russell Gold: I think energy in the United States is in great shape. We've got huge amounts of oil production, huge amounts of gas production. We've got growing battery and solar. We've got R&D coming down the pike in the next few years with geothermal and small modular reactors. We've got lots of great things going on with energy right now. But production's not everything. We're still, in some ways, living in a 20th-century world with transmission, transmission rules, utility rules. We need to update that and come into more of a 21st-century abundance mindset and change a lot of rules around energy. If we do that, I think we're going to be in great shape for the foreseeable future — which in the energy world is about five to 10 years. After that, I don't know.
Jigar Shah: With that, Russell — it was such a pleasure to have you on. Obviously, your grasp of these technologies and where energy has been, where it's going in the future and all the players, is really unmatched. So it's really exciting, frankly, to have you in the solar industry as a storyteller. Thanks for being here.
Russell Gold: Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast. I really enjoyed it.