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.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

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.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

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.

The Iran war is now the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Physical crude hit $150 a barrel. Futures markets are acting like a deal is around the corner. And James Gutman is back on Energy Empire to explain why those two numbers don't match — and what happens when they do.

This is James's fourth time on the show. He walks us through why the shock has already been absorbed but the real pain is still in the pipeline, why energy independence gave the US, Israel, Russia, and China each a permission structure to act more aggressively on the world stage, and why Europe — which didn't want this war — is now building a post-war security architecture for the Strait of Hormuz without the country that started it.

On the ground: 70% of American farmers can't afford fertilizer. Europe has six weeks of jet fuel left. The US can't deliver the weapons its NATO allies already paid for. And James makes the case that this war may bring us to peak oil demand — not because of any climate agreement, but because the world is making sure this never happens again.

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

For two decades, Russell Gold covered the energy industry for The Wall Street Journal, breaking the Deepwater Horizon story and exposing PG&E's role in the Camp Fire. Now he's on the other side — running communications and strategy for T1 Energy, a company building a fully domestic solar supply chain across the United States.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Russell about why he left journalism, what the clean energy industry keeps getting wrong about its own story, and why he's stopped talking about carbon at work.

Along the way: the Landman problem, the case that solar is the most American energy, why the industry needs to stop "bringing a fan to a gunfight," and what a $5 gallon of gas means for the politics of clean energy.

Plus: what it actually takes to build a 5-gigawatt solar factory in Texas, and why Russell thinks localization — not carbon — is the argument that wins this decade.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Tom Fanning spent 43 years at Southern Company — 15 different jobs, 13 years as CEO — and oversaw the construction of the only new nuclear reactors built in America in a generation.

This is a special bonus episode recorded live at the UNC Clean Tech Summit in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in collaboration with Nico Johnson's Suncast podcast. Jigar and Nico sit down with Fanning to talk about what he learned building Plant Vogtle, why America has lost its ability to build big things, what utility leadership should look like in a moment of crisis, and why his answer to almost every problem is the same: get everybody in the boat.

This is the first of three bonus episodes from UNC Clean Tech. Conversations with former EPA Administrator Michael Regan and NextPower CEO Dan Shugar drop over the next two Tuesdays.

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.

Your electricity bill keeps going up. Utilities are spending billions on new infrastructure. But the grid we already have is running at a fraction of its capacity — and the technology to unlock it has existed for 20 years.

Vishal Kapadia knows this firsthand. At Walmart, he watched reliability decline and costs rise across thousands of stores. Now, as CEO of LineVision, he's deploying sensors that unlock 30 to 40% more capacity on existing transmission lines for major utilities.

Jigar Shah and co-host Arnab Pal sit down with Vishal to ask the obvious question: if the technology works, why hasn't anyone scaled it? They get into the slide rule problem, the $45 billion we spend on transmission every year, why Virginia just passed the first-in-the-nation grid utilization bill, and why proven solutions keep getting stuck in pilot programs while consumers pay the price.

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

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Everyone is focused on oil prices. But oil isn't just fuel — it's feedstock. 92% of the world's sulfur comes from refining oil and gas. A third of global helium is offline. Half the world's food depends on fertilizer that flows through a 21-mile chokepoint. And your kid's birthday balloons? Those need helium too.

James Gutman returns to Energy Empire for a third time — and this time, the mood is different. On Day 31 of the war, the crisis is no longer theoretical. Pakistan is rationing fuel. Thailand is telling government workers to take the stairs. Hundreds of gas stations in Australia are running dry. Airlines are canceling flights across Southeast Asia. And as Gutman warns, the disruptions Americans will feel haven't even arrived yet — they're still in the pipeline.

Jigar Shah and co-host Arnab Pal dig into the humanitarian fallout, the supply chain cascades nobody is talking about, the political consequences heading into the midterms, and how Iran turned the most important waterway on earth into a toll road — with payments in Chinese yuan.

Plus: Is Trump still the accidental clean energy president? Is China becoming the new energy superpower?

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