In 2013, Jigar wrote a book arguing climate didn't have a technology problem. It had a deployment problem. The breakthrough-tech crowd called him naive. A year later, he co-founded Generate Capital to prove it — a C-corp, not a fund, because seven-year fund lives kill infrastructure deals before they work.

First close: $55 million. People were whispering "vanity project." By 2024, Generate had raised $10 billion and built 2,000 assets.

Part 2 of the biography series. Jamie and Jigar revisit the argument with Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla over what was actually broken in clean energy, the C-corp bet the Trump tax cut accidentally made look brilliant, and the first $100 million checks into batteries, RNG, and behind-the-meter gas.

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When COVID broke global logistics in 2020, Dan Shugar made a call most of his peers didn't. Nextpower absorbed over $100 million honoring existing contracts, then built the manufacturing it needed at home.

Today the company has 35+ US factories — including a former Bethlehem Steel mill in Pittsburgh now shipping hundreds of trucks a week — and a backlog north of $5 billion.

Jigar joins SunCast's Nico Johnson to talk with Dan about onshoring through the chaos, why solar and storage are no longer "alternative" energy when they made up 83% of new US power capacity last year, and how Nextpower's culture has kept its team intact across cycles.

Along the way: why the industry's biggest enemy is its own narrative, the $10 million bet ACP made to fix it, and the wedding-guest argument that turned into a video series.

Recorded at the UNC Clean Tech Summit.

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Michael Regan served as the 16th Administrator of the EPA under President Biden — the first Black man to hold the role — and before that ran North Carolina's Department of Environmental Quality, where he won the largest coal ash settlement in U.S. history against Duke Energy.

This is a special bonus episode from UNC Clean Tech Summit, recorded in collaboration with Nico Johnson's Suncast podcast. Jigar and Nico sit down with Regan to talk about why he considers the EPA a public health agency first, what he learned visiting 90 of North Carolina's 100 counties, how the current administration's retreat on enforcement is hitting red counties as hard as blue ones, and why communities are pushing back on data centers faster than the industry expected.

This is the second of three bonus episodes from UNC Clean Tech. The final conversation, with NextPower CEO Dan Shugar, drops next Tuesday.

Two additional interviews from the summit — with John Szoka from the Conservative Energy Network and investor Ahmad Chatila — are available on Suncast: https://www.suncast.media/

Energy Empire is a weekly podcast about the people, capital, and billion-dollar decisions shaping the future of energy. Learn more at energyempire.fm.