Nuclear power contributes to nearly 20 percent of the electricity generated in America, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Enormous growth has occurred since the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which allocated more money towards climate, and green energy subsidies than any piece of legislation in American history. But a lot of work still remains. Jigar Shah is director of the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, a role in which he oversees investing and scaling carbon free energy. Before this position, he was a clean tech investor. He joins WITHpod to discuss recent inflection points, the future of nuclear, the importance of remembering that “big things” can be done and why he’s more hopeful now about the space more than ever.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Jigar Shah: I’ve never been more optimistic than I am now. I just think that when you think about where we were as a society, right, where we basically said fossil fuels are a necessary evil to a modern lifestyle. Anyone who decides to get off of fossil fuels, by definition, is choosing a low GDP growth path for their country, right? That’s really where we were in 2008, I’d say. Today it’s been fully decoupled.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
One of the themes on this program when we talk about climate, which we do a fair amount, is that it’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times in climate. There was just a day recorded where global temperatures on earth reached more than two degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial mean. And last year was the hottest year on record. The threshold boundary that we had been sort of shooting for was one and a half degrees of centigrade warming, two at the outmost, and we’re starting to bump up against that.
So when you look at what’s happening with the actual climate and the amount of fossil fuel we’ve already put in the air, the amount of carbon we’ve already put in the air, and what it’s doing, it’s terrifying.
And as terrifying and bad as it’s ever been, which makes sense, this is a cumulative process, and the longer things go, the more the planet warms. That’s the worst of times part of it. But the best of times part of it is the fact that in the 20 years that I’ve covered this issue, the last three years, I would say, three to five, but really the last three, has been the period where actual explosion in solutions, in actual green tech, carbon-free energy has been happening at a pace that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before, totally unmatched previously in the history of energy development on the planet.
And a lot of that has been spurred since the signing in 2021 of the Inflation Reduction Act. And the Inflation Reduction Act included more money towards climate, green energy subsidies, tax credits, and research and development than any piece of legislation ever in American history. It spurred a huge amount of clean tech investment. And there’s really interesting things happening all throughout the government and all throughout the private markets in this space.
And one of the places where this is happening is in the Energy Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy. They’re doing some really cool stuff, and there’s a guy that runs that office whose name is Jigar Shah, and I’ve known him for a long time. He was a clean tech investor. He ran a solar energy fund and has been in this space for many years and is right now in charge of this governmental office that’s kind of trying to facilitate, cultivate, invest in carbon-free energy and get it to scale and basically save us from doom.
And so I ran into Jigar at an event recently, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while. And so it’s my great pleasure to introduce Jigar Shah to “Why Is This Happening?”
Welcome to the program.
Jigar Shah: Thanks for having me, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Hayes: Before we get into what you’re doing now, just give me a little bit of your background before you had this job, because you’ve sort of been in this space for a long time.
Jigar Shah: Well, it’s funny. You know, I started the largest solar company in the world, a company called SunEdison, back in 2003. And I thought about it because this month, my very first 20-year power purchase agreement, which I signed with Whole Foods, is coming due. 20 years later, that first contract is completed. And I think what we really did was figure out how to bring institutional finance into the climate solution space.
And, you know, since we did that, it’s been a couple trillion dollars, I think, that’s gone into that financial model. And then in 2014, we started a company called Generate Capital, which took that model and then extended it to battery storage, electric vehicles, renewable natural gas, other sectors. And that’s what we have to do now. We have to get the next sort of 17, 18, you know, sectors to full commercialization.
Chris Hayes: Well, what do you mean by that model? My understanding is one of the innovations of SunEdison was figuring out a way to make solar. The problem from a financial standpoint, is a huge upfront cost and then pays for itself over time. People don’t have the cash up front. There’s also the sort of time value of money over time, right, the discount rate, which goes into the calculation of whether you want to spend money now or spend money later. And so to make it all pencil out, you got to figure out a way to sort of bring those benefits up front.
Jigar Shah: Yes, that’s right. So when you think about climate solutions broadly, what we’re doing is exchanging the use of fossil fuels, right? You know, that you have to go fill up your car every week, you know, with gasoline and figure out how to change that into capital.
So if you look at solar, it was the fuel is free, right? The sun is free, but the upfront cost was higher. And so you had to figure out how to get that financed. And then the net cost per kilowatt hour was half of what it was competing with. And so, you know, Whole Foods, Costco, Walmart, all these other companies saved money through the Power Purchase Agreement.
And you see that now with electric vehicles. It’s a little bit more expensive up front, but it’s 50% cheaper to operate on a cost per mile basis. So you’re starting to see Uber and Lyft drivers and others move that way because that’s how they make money. And so sector after sector after sector, it’s higher upfront costs, lower operating costs. And so you got to help people figure out how to cover that upfront cost. And then so we created this basically infrastructure as a service type model.
It got perfected in solar, wind, battery storage, but now it’s getting extended to all these other sectors.
Chris Hayes: I had a conversation with an Uber driver the other day who has an electric vehicle who is taking me through the math and it was a far bigger, just on the fuel standpoint, I don’t know about maintenance, and I don’t know if he was leasing it, what his monthly payment was, but just on the gas versus electricity, I think it was more like 10X. He was explaining to me that what he pays and he has a house in Queens where he has a driveway where he can plug in, which in New York City is, you know, relatively rare. It’s not that common necessarily, but he had a driveway in Queens. He plugs his vehicle in and he was just saying, yes, I mean, this is, I’m paying a 10th on my electricity bill for what I was paying in gas.
And it’s enormous to my margin. It’s like I’ve doubled my margin or tripled my margin just in this one change.
Jigar Shah: Well, and these advanced business models are critical because when you think about electric vehicles, the first early adopters are folks who, you know, thought it was cool and they just bought the first electric vehicles —
Chris Hayes: They had a lot of cash.
Jigar Shah: -- and had a lot of cash, right? But they drive 7,000 miles a year. So the emissions reductions there are pretty low, but these Uber drivers, I mean, they’re driving, some of them are 40,000 miles a year.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And it’s roughly 10% of Americans who drive over 20,000 miles a year. And they amount to, you know, 40%, 50% of all miles traveled in the country.
Chris Hayes: That’s such a good point.
Jigar Shah: So if you could figure out advanced business models, because for a lot of those folks, they have to drive for work, right? And so the upfront cost really does matter to them. So being able to rent these vehicles by the week is critical for them. And you’re starting to see tons of those models coming into the Loan Programs Office, coming into other places to help DoorDash, Instacart, Uber, Lyft drivers.
Chris Hayes: So you just mentioned the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy. What does the Loan Programs Office of the Department of Energy do?
Jigar Shah: So at the core of this, when I started SunEdison in 2003, we went to all of these folks and said, look, you know, the sun’s free. Maintenance is low. I’ve got this contract from Whole Foods or Staples. Will you give me a loan up front? And folks said, that solar stuff seems weird. There’s no chance we’re giving you a loan for that. I don’t have 10 other friends who’ve provided a loan for that. So we’re not going to do that.
Unfortunately, the Loan Programs Office didn’t exist when I started SunEdison. So we just had to like figure out how to like pass a hat around to get people to put money in.
Chris Hayes: Wait, this was loans for SunEdison the business, not individual customers who wanted to purchase the power. You’re saying to get the business itself?
Jigar Shah: No. I had a contract with Whole Foods that said they would buy the power for 20 years, but no one would lend me the money up front to build the solar system to then collect on that. Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: So the Loan Programs Office was charged by Congress to go first and be the first person to provide that loan. So by 2009, there were five very large 100 megawatt solar farms and every bank in the country said that’s just still too risky, even though SunEdison had been doing it since 2003, it’s still too risky. The Loan Programs Office provided a loan for each of those 500 megawatt farms.
At the time at which those were built, it was still hard to get people to invest in them, but we had provided the debt and then, you know, Warren Buffett bought the rest of them right through Berkshire Hathaway. And then it wasn’t until 2017, 2018 that the market was like, oh, wait a second, this solar stuff is actually pretty low risk, right?
And so when you think about what the Loan Programs Office does, it has been charged by Congress to go first. So every time we have this extraordinary technology that DOE has spent all this R&D money on to get it to the point where it’s mature, it works, it’s been demonstrated. Now you’ve got to commercialize that technology.
And for a lot of years, we kind of told people, we don’t want to do it here. You should go to Asia or Europe to do it. And now I think with the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and a super charged Loan Programs Office, we’re saying, no, we want to be first. We want you to commercialize that technology here. So we’re doing that across hydrogen transmission, carbon sequestration and storage, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: Yes. So let’s talk a little bit about this commercialization gap. This is a sort of an evergreen challenge, right, for new technologies. And there are different ways the gap is bridged, but you develop some new technology, you got it working, and now you have to not only have it work, but have it scale at a cost that can make money. And you need the upfront capital from someone to roll the dice on you.
That gap for green tech has been a huge obstacle in the past is what you’re saying. And your office is designed, been given the authority by Congress to bridge that gap.
Jigar Shah: Yes. So when you think about the acute nature of climate change and where we are right now, the solar, wind, battery storage markets have truly been extraordinary, right? You’re seeing like 90% reduction in cost in those sectors over that bridge to bankability, that commercialization effort.
Chris Hayes: Solar is wild. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I really can’t think of something else that has dropped by that much that quickly in the last say 10 years.
Jigar Shah: No, it’s extraordinary, right? But we have the ability and the necessity to do it 14 more times, right? So when you look at the secretary’s Earthshot initiative, right, whether it’s, you know, where we need the direct air capture to get to, where we need geothermal power to get to, where we need long duration energy storage to get to, right, we have to do this more.
And so the question really becomes, was the reduction in cost in solar, wind, and battery storage a fluke that cannot be replicated again, or is it a method of commercialization that we can actually follow a blueprint to actually replicate over and over again? And not only can we replicate it, can we do it faster?
So instead of it being 14 or 18 years to get it done, can we do it in seven years, right?
And I think that’s the challenge in front of us with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, right, is that we have been given the resources to say, like this week you had this extraordinary announcement by Fervo Energy to really get the cost of geothermal down, right?
But even with that breakthrough, they still need probably $5 billion worth of deployment to cross that bridge to bankability to actually get to full commercialization and the respect of Wall Street banks, right? And so we got to do that across all of these sectors, right?
And so when you think about commercialization, there’s really four big milestones. The first one is first of a kind deployment. That’s always the scariest. It’s never been done before. I’ve got a bunch of data from a supercomputer that was done at the National Laboratories, but like someone’s got to still build it at a billion dollars scale.
Chris Hayes: Right. Like the pilot, you’re going to be the business that is dependent on this long-term battery storage --
Jigar Shah: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: -- or your house is going to have this new geothermal installed. I have to say as someone who has geothermal motivated by my desire to get to net zero.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: We’re not on the very front edge. Actually geothermal is 50 years old as technology. But this specific version of it with a much smaller footprint of the drill and all this stuff, there were definitely questions of like, well, what’s that going to do underneath the ground? And is it going to do something to the wells?
And you know, when you’re out front past what other people you know have done, it is a little, it feels riskier, it feels scarier.
Jigar Shah: Yes. And so someone has to go first and that’s the Loan Programs Office. So we definitely have to go first.
Then you’ve got the second through six deployment, right, which is still kind of scary because they’re like, well, the first one worked. It was 50% over budget. It took an extra year longer than we thought it would to build it. But could we do it better now that we’ve done the first one? Can we do the second through six one better? Right?
Chris Hayes: What’s an example of that one you’re talking about?
Jigar Shah: So when you think about, you know, like the Vogtle nuclear plant, right --
Chris Hayes: What’s that? I don’t know that.
Jigar Shah: So this is the nuclear power plants down in Georgia that, you know, unit three just got completed last year and turned on. It was, you know, two and a half times what it originally, everyone thought it was going to cost. And it took 12, 13 years to complete, right? But it’s the AP 1000 and it’s super efficient. And it’s one of the reasons why Georgia, you know, has had so many new companies decide to locate theirs because this new nuclear power plant.
And then they just finished unit four and hit criticality this week. And they’re going to turn it on fully in the next 10, 12 weeks. And, you know, that unit was 30% cheaper than unit three, right, and faster. And so it’s one of those things where if you just built the first one —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: -- you’re like, well, that was crazy scary.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Right? But then you built the second one, you’re like, actually not as scary. And if they are able to get the political will to build the next one, it’ll probably be even cheaper and even faster to build because we have 13,000 new union construction workers that were trained during this process, right? We didn’t have that workforce before.
So in that second phase, what you find is workforce training, you know, getting the contractors comfortable with the risks, figuring out how to measure 37 times and cut once, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Like planning it properly, doing things a little bit smarter, right? That’s that second phase.
Chris Hayes: I mean, anyone who’s ever built anything, been around to building anything, renovation, like the notion of building a nuclear plant just seems like, how can it ever get done? How could it ever be done? It’s probably, you know, maybe sort of in competition, I would say with an aircraft carrier or nuclear sub --
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: -- right, the most complicated thing that a human can construct.
Jigar Shah: But we do it all the time. I mean, this is the thing, Chris, is, you know this.
Chris Hayes: Well, not all the time in the U.S. I mean, we don’t do it all the time in the U.S.
Jigar Shah: We have not. For 40 years, we decided to take all of our biggest, hardest things and said, why don’t you make it in China or make it in Europe and we’ll just import it back, right?
But it’s not that the United States doesn’t know how to do this. The muscles have atrophied a little bit. We need to like build them back up. But you know, like we put a man on the moon. We figured out how to like, you know, do all these big things, skyscrapers, the whole nine yards. It’s not that we can’t do it, but you’re right that we, for some reason, started betting against ourselves and saying, oh, this thing that happened with the big dig, or this thing went over budget or the Second Avenue subway or whatever it is. We just can’t do big, complicated things in this country. And I would suggest to you that there’s a formula for how to do big mega projects. And you’re right that there’s been 40 years of no one reading the manual before starting to build, you know, this big project.
But now I think you’ve got a ton of people who’ve said, you know what, we need to do integrated project delivery. We need to actually figure out how this stuff gets modeled into a digital twin within a supercomputer before we start construction.
We got to do all this stuff up front, which means you have to spend 10% of the entire budget up front planning before you start constructing. And we’re learning again. We know how to do that.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Well, it’s interesting because what you’re describing here in this space, right, is a kind of flywheel effect, right, which is if you’re only doing one-offs once in a while, every time you do it, you think, wow, that was kind of a disaster. It was massively over budget. It took forever. That sucked. Let’s not do that again.
If you’re doing them more often, you’re getting better at it. You’re sharing knowledge. You’re creating a workforce that knows what they’re doing when they’re doing, you know, when you’re not just doing the Second Avenue subway, what you’re building, you got people building big Metro transit projects all over the country. All of a sudden you’ve got expertise. That’s atrophied, so it sort of builds on itself to sort of reimagine a kind of real working kind of clean energy industrial core.
Jigar Shah: No, I think that’s exactly right. And you know where you have the most confidence in our country is in the oil, gas and chemical sector, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes, those people really know what they’re doing.
Jigar Shah: And they’ve got 200,000 applied engineers who are the smartest people in the world.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And that’s why we’re so bullish on geothermal right now is because next generation geothermal technology looks a lot like hydraulic fracturing.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right? It looks a lot like those experts. And a lot of those experts are saying, I don’t want to work in the oil and gas industry anymore. I want to do something cooler with my skills. And so that’s where Fervo and Sage and all these other geothermal companies are coming from.
Chris Hayes: Yes, the point about the technical acumen, sophistication, knowledge of the fossil fuel companies is such an important one, because sometimes you’ll see pictures of places they’ve built deep sea oil rigs. I’ve read articles of people that do maintenance on those things, they’re underwater welders or I’ve interviewed people who work in oil fields or in really remote places in very politically unstable spots. I mean, they don’t take no for an answer. If they can get fossil fuels out of the ground at a profit, whatever it takes, they will do. There is no like, eh, not for us.
Jigar Shah: Well, and that is where I think the president is now with these climate solutions. You know, like at COP, he said, we’re going to triple nuclear capacity in this country and we’re going to build another 200 gigawatts.
And it’s not because he loves nuclear, although he loves all the climate solutions. It’s because we need it. We got to do it. We have to do it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jigar Shah: We have the ability to do it. We certainly have 13,000 new trained workers out of the Vogtle nuclear plant that are waiting now for their next order to do their next big thing, right?
And so I think whether it’s clean hydrogen, whether it’s new transmission, whether it’s nuclear, America can do big things again. I think we’re starting to get our mojo back and saying, actually, of course we can do big things. You know, like, let’s do this. Right?
And I think the other thing that we’ve got going for us is a lot of the folks in the oil and gas sector are looking at their stock price and saying, wow, the Wall Street is saying our best days are behind us. And so we need to add energy transition into our mix.
And so you see like Oxy doing this big stuff on direct air capture. You see Devon Energy doing this big stuff on geothermal. And so now you’ve got access to the smartest people in our country looking to, you know, actually, you know, get into the energy transition.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That I think is such a crucial thing that I feel like we’ve reached the tipping point in terms of how markets at least understand the runway for fossil fuels.
I interrupted you. So you were talking about the four stages of commercialization. There’s the first one, then there’s two through six. Hopefully you see that the first one’s really scary. Two through six, you’re hoping that things come down in cost, they come down in time. You’ve got some practice, you know, a little bit more about planning upfront. You talked about that 10% of costs just upfront in the planning.
So then what are the next stages?
Jigar Shah: And then the next stage is the infamous learning curve that we all hear about, which is awesome. And that learning curve sounds like sort of simple. It’s like learning by doing, but it involves a ton of R&D.
So to give you an example on solar. So after we built first of a kind project and then two through six.
Chris Hayes: And these are these are solar farms that you were selling the energy to large commercial buyers like Whole Foods and --
Jigar Shah: Absolutely. Exactly, or utility scale.
Chris Hayes: Right. Not rooftop residential. These are big solar arrays.
Jigar Shah: Right. After we finished those two stages, right, the module efficiency of that module was 12%. 12% of the sunlight that had it got converted into electrons, right? Today’s technology, which is five generations from that one, is at 21% efficiency.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so that’s tons of new R&D that got put in during that learning curve. So I think a lot of folks are like, oh, you just keep doing it and doing it and doing it and it gets cheaper. Yes. And so that’s on the workforce side. But and, there’s a bunch of R&D that DOE does that actually like injects the next generation of technology, not unlike, you know, Moore’s law for semiconductors or other things. Right?
So part of the reason why solar got so cheap was because the solar panels today are way better than the ones you got 15 years ago.
Chris Hayes: Yes, they’re just way more efficient.
Jigar Shah: Right. And so that’s the learning curve phase.
And then the fourth phase, which people forget about, is Wall Street acceptance because anything that saves a gigaton of carbon comes with a T behind it, right? A gigaton of carbon is a trillion dollars. Full stop.
Chris Hayes: Wait, what do you mean by that? Why? What does that mean?
Jigar Shah: If you want to save a gigaton of carbon with solar panels, it’s a trillion dollars worth of solar projects to save a gigaton of carbon.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Jigar Shah: If you want to save a gigaton of carbon with wind, a trillion dollars. Right?
Chris Hayes: That’s just the cost of doing it?
Jigar Shah: That’s how much deployment it is. And we do $27 trillion a year of deployment around the world into infrastructure projects, whether it’s new roads and bridges or oil and gas or electric utilities or water or whatever.
So it’s not like a trillion dollars is a lot of money compared to what we already do every year, right? But I’m just saying --
Chris Hayes: That’s a lot.
Jigar Shah: -- that’s a lot of money, right? And so once the learning curve gets you to that 90 percent cost reduction and you’re like, this is fantastic. We’re, you know, more cost effective than natural gas power plants. Well, now you got to build a trillion dollars of it. Right?
And so you’re not going to go to your local bank.
Chris Hayes: Right. So that’s my question on solar. So solar is probably the most mature of these, I would say, or one of the most mature.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I keep having a thought. I said this on the podcast before, but let’s say you’re flying out West and you’re in a plane over Tucson or Southern California and over the years, you see more and more solar panels on brews, but nowhere near enough.
Jigar Shah: No.
Chris Hayes: It’s crazy that they’re not all covered. All of them. Like why isn’t every roof in the Phoenix metro area that gets 330 days of sun or whatever it is a year, why don’t they all have solar?
Jigar Shah: So let me answer that question within this third to fourth pillar.
So you got the learning curve and then you’ve got Wall Street acceptance. So let’s talk Wall Street acceptance. So when you look at all those warehouses that you’re flying over, when you go into the Phoenix airport, the vast majority of those warehouses are owned by bankruptable LLCs, right? So it’s an investor who owns that thing, right? They own that warehouse and when it’s rented out, they get paid when it’s vacant, they don’t get paid. Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And so, like, it’s not Walmart that’s guaranteeing that 20 year power purchase agreement. It’s a bankruptable LLC.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: So the way that Wall Street does that, it’s called the, you know, commercial mortgage backed security market. They plaster solar panels on all those roofs and they just assume that 20% of them are not going to pay on any given month. 20% of them are going to be vacant. But that goes back to asset backed securitization. That goes back to Wall Street acceptance. Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: So on the learning curve side, you’ve got Walmart and Costco and, you know, Macy’s and Whole Foods and, you know, Staples guaranteeing the thing. On the Wall Street side, you say you have planned losses. You say, well, we’re going to do all of this stuff, right, and some percentage of them are not going to pay up that particular month, but it’s okay because across the portfolio, it works. Right?
So that is exactly the phase we’re in now. And the Loan Programs Office is the first one to provide that financing because everyone’s saying, well, we don’t have 10 years of data that says that that’s going to work. We actually have 30 years of data at DOE that we’ve been collecting on how those assets perform.
So we’re willing to go first again on step four, right? And that’s how you cover every single warehouse roof with solar is by planning for 20% of it to not be paying at any one time.
Chris Hayes: So you guys are actually involved in some loans.
Jigar Shah: We’re doing that right now. We’ve got three big loans that have come in for exactly that purpose.
Chris Hayes: Wait. Explain that. The purpose is to deploy on warehouses of essentially LLC landlords.
Jigar Shah: Yes. Because, I mean, even big guys like Prologis, right, which is a huge company, right? Owns tons of warehouses, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: They’re saying we don’t want to double down on vacancy risk. So if the building is empty, I don’t want to have to pay for the solar power coming off the roof because the building’s empty. There’s no one using that power. That power is just going out to the utility.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: So if the utility is not going to pay for it, I’m not going to pay for it. So I want to be able to stop payment to you --
Chris Hayes: I see.
Jigar Shah: -- while that warehouse is empty. But on any given day, the vast majority of their portfolio is full.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so you got to look at it on a portfolio basis. So that is exactly the point that we’re at with solar. And that’s why over the next five to eight years, you’re going to see all of those warehouses get full of solar because Wall Street is innovating that piece in partnership with us at the Loan Programs Office now.
Chris Hayes: So it sounds like you think this sort of roadmap can be, there’s some sort of physics question, and, you know, I’ve talked to other people who caution if you say, wow, look at what we’ve been able to do in solar, wind to a certain extent, EVs, right? Solar and EVs, I think are the two real standout sort of technologies.
I’ve had people caution me even on this program who say, yes, the other ones are harder. They’re harder problems to solve that don’t think you can just map that trajectory onto other places.
Jigar Shah: Well, it depends on what they’re saying, right? So what I’m talking about is commercialization.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right. So that means full Wall Street acceptance, after you get through the four barriers, four pillars, right? So I’m not suggesting that each of the technologies has the ability to have a 90% cost reduction.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right. But that’s not required in all of the technology classes. Some of the technology classes might get a 40% cost reduction and that’s fine.
Chris Hayes: They still pencil out.
Jigar Shah: They pencil out and then you roll it out. I’ll give you an example. So when you look at biofuels broadly, you need sustainable aviation fuels to be able to power the long haul aircraft. You’re not going to be able to do that with electric airplanes.
And so there’s no technology that I know of that’s going to give me a 90% cost reduction in the production of biofuels.
Now where I’m at now, I think I can get a 40% cost reduction from where I’m at now to the end of the curve. We’re not going to get to a 90% cost reduction. Not that I’ve seen.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about biofuels and airplanes, because I think air travel is actually not that huge a part of the total.
Jigar Shah: Not yet. It’s 2%.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s a small part of the emissions picture and people, I think, for some reason, there’s a lot of focus on air travel in a way that doesn’t match.
Jigar Shah: Well, it’s the best way to shame people, which is completely and utterly ridiculous. But --
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean, I think that’s part of it, too. But people really don’t realize that it’s a really small sliver of global emissions.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it’s both an incredibly important part of the global economy and also a tough nut to crack in terms of electrification. Like we don’t think we’re going to get electric planes any time soon, maybe sometime in the future.
Jigar Shah: Not for the long haul ones. I mean, maybe the 400 mile segments.
Chris Hayes: So you’re going to have to have net zero fuels. So what are biofuels? What does that mean?
Jigar Shah: Well, so if you look at Fulcrum biofuels, which is ramping up right now in the western part of the United States, they’re using municipal solid waste and they’re actually just taking a lot of the sludge and turning it into biofuels.
You’re basically taking the molecular components, breaking it all down.
Chris Hayes: They’re just taking sewage to transform it into a thing you could put in an airplane?
Jigar Shah: Municipal solid waste. But yes, exactly. So like, there’s a lot of food waste in it.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jigar Shah: There’s a lot of other stuff in it. And they’re basically breaking down those hydrocarbon chains —
Chris Hayes: Really?
Jigar Shah: -- and then putting them back together and into a biofuel. And so I mean --
Chris Hayes: That’s pretty wild.
Jigar Shah: It’s pretty awesome.
Chris Hayes: That’s mind blowing.
Jigar Shah: Right? But it costs nine to $10 a gallon to do it. And you know, Avgas is $4 a gallon.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so then you got the Low Carbon Fuel Standard credit program and the renewable, you know, like credit program for RINs. And then you’ve got, you know, like the SAF Blenders fuel credit. And so you got to get these subsidies to make it work.
But, you know, they’ve only built one. And the other thing is that municipal solid waste is a problem. It’s not like we got landfills for days that we can fill up.
Chris Hayes: No, it’s a real win-win.
Jigar Shah: Yes. If you can divert it, that’s good.
So in general, there are these abilities to do it. But one thing I would suggest to you is that whether it’s that thing or whether it’s in nuclear, right, we all have to recognize that we’re not pitting technologies against each other.
We actually need all of them as soon as possible, as fast as we can get them. And so one of the things that frustrates me the most as a solar guy is how many renewables people are like, we don’t need nuclear. And I mean, nuclear people say that renewables aren’t going to get there. And when I look at where we are right now, Georgia Power just had their earnings call and Southern Companies had their earnings call. And they said one of the largest growth areas that they have, it’s like 6% in their territory down in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama is data centers, right?
So the impact of data centers on that sector is coming in at like $150 a megawatt hour, right? So all of us are paying more money because a big block of load went into there that’s running 24 by 7 to do AI.
Chris Hayes: That is so crazy.
Jigar Shah: Right. I want ChatGPT as much as the next guy. Maybe not. But I want that to be powered by nuclear.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: I want it to be matched with 24 by 7 power. And if the data center companies have to pay $99 a megawatt hour to do it, well, then that’s what they should pay because that’s the impact that they’re having on the grid right now.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so when you think about the mental model for why we need nuclear, it’s because for some of these loads that we’re going after, right, which is roughly 40% of our economy, these are things that really have to run 24 by 7. They really can’t be shut off, right? They have to do these things. People expect the cat video to come up on their phone when they decide to turn it on, right? And people are willing to pay for it.
Chris Hayes: It’s important for our civilization.
Jigar Shah: Right.
Chris Hayes: What are we as a people if you can’t have cat videos on demand?
Jigar Shah: Yes, you and I have children and we refuse to, like, delete photographs off our account for it. So then we got to pay the extra $2.99 a month for that storage.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Guilty.
Jigar Shah: Same thing.
And so it’s one of those things where they need it. And as you know, Microsoft and Google have pledged to be 24 by 7 matched with clean energy with their load by 2030. And so is the president with an executive order. And so to do that, you need what we call clean firm resources, right? Nuclear, hydro, geothermal.
And so when you think about like people saying, well, Jigar, do we really need to do carbon sequestration? Do we really need to do nuclear? I was like, we do. And we should build as much solar and wind as we can as fast as possible. So no one’s saying no, but we need this, too.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And it’s funny. I totally agree with you. The pitting that happens is tiresome. I want to stay on nuclear for a bit. It’s interesting to me how uniquely polarizing nuclear seems. People have very strong feelings on both sides. There’s probably some of you listening to this and maybe some of you have already emailed me who’s like the like nuclear obsessive who like every time that you talk about energy, emails you to be like, what about nuclear?
It’s just like a sort of type. I don’t know how to describe it. You’re laughing because you’ve encountered this.
Then there are other people on the other side. And I think, you know, both sides of these, I think make good points. I think the people who say you’re talking about solar and all these things, but for certain kinds of power, nothing can really deliver that without carbon other than nuclear.
And for people that are opposed to nuclear, they say there are real issues with waste and safety that have presented themselves through the years and also cost and insurance and things like this. And we have cheaper and better ways of dealing with it. And I wonder, where do you see the discussion on it? You talk a lot about nuclear. This administration is very nuclear forward in some ways. Where do you see the discussion of it? It doesn’t seem to me to be a front of mind issue among the public the way that it once was, obviously Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, things like that.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But where do you see it now?
Jigar Shah: Well, let’s start with why, right? I mean, I think, you know, I still want to see as much solar get installed as possible.
But when you look at all of the modeling that we’ve done to support the president’s 2035 goals of decarbonizing the grid, if you look at a transmission constrained model, which we are clearly in a transmission constrained world, no matter how much we unlock permitting.
Chris Hayes: Meaning you can’t just move power from one place in the grid to another frictionlessly.
Jigar Shah: Right. The only way to be at a super high penetration of solar and wind is to be able to power New York City with solar in Nevada.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Which is not happening by 2035.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: So then you need a higher percentage of clean firm generation sources. Now, if you max out hydro and max out geothermal, you still have a huge gap. That’s nuclear. Right?
So it’s got to be clear that there is no way to meet the president’s goals unless you do what he suggested at, you know, the last COP where he said, you know, we were going to triple the amount of nuclear in this country, right?
So he said that because we have to do it. The modeling shows we have to do it.
The next piece of it is what happens when you shut down a nuclear reactor, right? So when you look at Yankee and Vermont or you look at some of the other ones like Diablo Canyon in California,
Chris Hayes: Indian Point in --
Jigar Shah: Indian Point, 100 percent of it was replaced by gas. No one argues with that point.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Right? We wanted to do solar. 100 percent of it was replaced by gas.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: So, like, for the planet, we should have kept that nuclear reactor on --
Chris Hayes: Totally, absolutely.
Jigar Shah: -- instead of replacing it with gas, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: So I just want to make sure that people understand that when you don’t do nuclear plants, you get more gas.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Plain and simple. Right? This is not nuclear versus solar and wind. Yes, solar and wind. But like, if you want this stuff, then you need nuclear.
Then you say, well, what’s wrong with nuclear, right? You’ve got the high profile conversations that have been had, as you suggested. I would say they’re sensationalized. When you think about some of the other high profile disasters that I could describe for you in the hydro dam space, et cetera, you can’t easily name them off the top of your head. And I don’t want to because I don’t want anyone being afraid of hydro.
But like, I’m just saying that you’ve had these disasters in the past. For whatever reason, everyone’s memorized the nuclear ones, but nobody’s memorizing the other ones.
But when you look at the safety record of nuclear, it is by far the safest clean energy technology in the world. Bar none. Safer than solar, safer than wind, safer than hydro, safer than anything else.
Chris Hayes: How can it be safer than solar? What does that even mean? How can that--
Jigar Shah: People have died installing solar panels.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s right.
Jigar Shah: People have died installing wind.
Chris Hayes: Falling off the roofs. Yes.
Jigar Shah: Sure. I’m just saying it doesn’t happen very often.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: But it happens so rarely with nuclear.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: That it’s actually safer. I mean, 50% of all clean energy made in this country is still powered by nuclear.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so it is extraordinarily safe. And when you talk about waste, the total amount of waste nuclear power plants have created in its entirety since the 1950s all the way until today is a football field worth of waste 10 yards high, right?
To compare that to coal, that amount of material comes out of a coal plant, one coal plant every year in coal fly ash. So I’m just saying I get it. But when you’re more science-based, this is not that scary. And it really is the densest power that we have.
And then the last thing I would say is just from a justice standpoint, right, when you think about these coal communities, right, and a lot of these coal power plants generate 25% to 50% of the property taxes of that town, they’re all the union jobs in that town, some of the highest paying jobs in that town, right?
If you replace it with a solar plant with battery storage, there are no permanent jobs from a solar plant with battery storage. All of those towns want a nuclear plant. Every one of them.
And so I just think it’s important for everyone to recognize that like the amount of support for nuclear across the country is up 20 points under this administration.
Chris Hayes: You mean in polling?
Jigar Shah: In polling. Yes. But separately, right, like these specific places, which is what the president and the secretary, Secretary Granholm, talk about all the time, really want nuclear because they want those high paying union jobs in that town.
Chris Hayes: Just one more thing about this, right. And I think you’re right. I mean, it’s a little bit like the way we think about air safety versus car safety. So we just don’t tolerate airplane crashes. We have worked very hard to create an incredibly sophisticated set of regulations, some of which we’re seeing them fray at the seams with Boeing, that have made air travel just supremely safe.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And we tolerate tens of thousands of vehicular deaths every year. And we just have different mental models. Like if you mapped, you know, that death rate onto planes, which would be like a few crashes a year that killed a few hundred people, forget it. Commercial air would just grind to a halt. And I don’t know what that psychology is about. So, I agree with you, and this is particularly true when you look at the costs of air pollution from just coal generation and other forms of fossil fuel generation, it kills tens of thousands of people a year by our best estimates.
Jigar Shah: And they are located in places where people are poor.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Right. Deliberately.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: Right? And so just from a justice standpoint, we should care a lot more about this.
Chris Hayes: Wait, but let me just say one more thing. Because the other, the other part of this is the tail risk. And I think that’s why the notion that yes, someone could fall off a roof installing solar and that’s terrible and someone can be in all kinds of industrial accidents and coal mining is extremely, as we know, incredibly dangerous and it always has been.
The tail risk of nuclear disaster is just larger and looms larger and it’s perfectly rational to assess that differently would be the argument.
Jigar Shah: Right. But we actively manage it, right?
Remember, we’ve had the Price-Anderson Act in place for decades, right, where the U.S. government actually pays for that tail risk. And I think we’ve paid out less than several hundred million dollars total in the entire time that we’ve had it.
And we have an active nuclear regulatory commission that makes sure that these plants are run, you know, as safe as possible. Safer than any other power generation that we have in this country. So I think that we not only take that risk, but we manage it, you know, through a government agency with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So I think that’s there, but I think the last piece around nuclear is figuring out how we do it right. Now that we’ve built unit three and unit four at Vogtle, right, I think we’ve learned a lot, right? A lot of bad lessons, some good lessons, in terms of cost of runs, et cetera. But what we have now is a plan, right, where we actually know who’s going to pay a premium for 24 by 7 matched power. There’s a whole bunch of hyperscale data center owners who’ve said that if they can’t get nuclear or enhanced geothermal or advanced hydro, then they can’t continue to meet their a hundred percent clean energy goals, right?
And they definitely can’t do the 24 by 7 matching. So they’re willing to pay a premium for this power.
And then second, you now have a whole bunch of coal plants that are retiring right now and a bunch of grid operators saying, we need that clean, firm power if we’re going to be able to make it through these weather disasters that are much more common today, whether it’s heat waves or cold spells, right?
And so there is a desire by the utilities to build them. The desire by the hyperscale data center companies and others to pay for them. And so now we’ve got to actually say, America can do big things and let’s do it now.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I don’t want you to interpret this as a political question about the campaign or anything like that, so I just want to say that upfront. What I want to know is how much does continuity, like what’s the timeline for this kind of thing? How long do you need a Department of Energy and a Loan Program Office committed to this vision out into the future? What happens if that’s disrupted?
Jigar Shah: Well, look, I mean, it is very clearly the case that the Loan Programs Office needs to be an institution that people believe in, right, for a variety of reasons. When you think about what we need, we need people to invest in early stage companies, B rounds and C rounds, depending on the Loan Program Office being there five years from now, right?
If you’re saying I’m going to invest in your company right now, but in order to build your first of a kind project five years from now, you’re going to need a billion dollars. That’s going to come from the Loan Programs Office. I need it to be there, right? The continuity of our office is essential to making sure that innovators and entrepreneurs get the resources they need now at an earlier stage to get there, right? So it is very clearly the case that we need that continuity.
I think separately, it is also very clearly the case that when you look at these kinds of programs, they need to have broad constituencies. And that’s part of the reason why, you know, under this administration, we really have played it straight at the Loan Programs Office, right? Every single technology that qualifies for the Loan Programs Office is treated equally, whether it’s green chemicals or carbon sequestration and storage or transmission or hydrogen or nuclear, all of them have been played and treated exactly the same, right?
So we want to make sure that people believe that this is not a political office where we’re picking certain technologies over other technologies. We’re treating everybody the same as they come through.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about carbon sequestration, which you just mentioned. And the subtext of your answer there is that there are different ideological valences to different technologies, right?
Jigar Shah: Sure.
Chris Hayes: That certain are just sort of associated with different parts of the either political, partisan or ideological spectrum. And I think carbon sequestration, I think lots of climate activists have viewed it as a very cynical means fossil fuel companies have used to sort of hand wave at some distant technology that like, we’re going to keep burning coal, but then we’ll grab the carbon and we’ll put it in the ground. And then it never actually happens and hasn’t really happened at scale.
And so I think it’s given the notion of carbon sequestration, a really bad name in climate circles.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, is it a serious technology that could be deployed at scale that we should be thinking about?
Jigar Shah: Yes. Let me give you a different mental model. And then I think that answers the question more easily.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jigar Shah: So right now we actually have all sorts of things like 30% investment tax credits, production tax credits, these kinds of things, right? And when you back all of it out and you say, what’s the dollar per ton of CO2 that you’re paying to support solar or support whatever it is, right, there’s a certain number that you would expect us to be okay with. Let’s call it $200 a ton or lower.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Jigar Shah: If it’s $200 a ton or lower, we should figure out a way to support those technologies and get them across that bridge to bankability and get them to the other side.
Chris Hayes: Meaning that’s a good price. That’s a price we can make work.
Jigar Shah: Yes, exactly. We can make it work. And we are making work with the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.
But then there’s certain technologies where the number is going to be $800 a ton, right, and now the question becomes, should we keep subsidizing that at $800 a ton? Or should we just let them burn fossil fuels and just make them pay $200 a ton to take it back out of the air and stick it under the ground? That’s it.
And as technology gets better and better and better, everything will be below $200 a ton and you won’t need carbon sequestration. And at that point, you might need carbon sequestration because we’ve overshot 1.5 degrees and you need to suck more CO2 out of the air and stick it under the ground.
Chris Hayes: That I think is pretty clear that we’re going to need that.
Jigar Shah: For sure. But I just think that the notion that we’re going to extend the remit of the coal industry or the oil and gas industry, to me, doesn’t make any sense. This is really about end use cases and saying, like it could be the case that for air travel that you’re just never going to be able to make zero carbon liquid fuels for less than $800 a ton.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: If that’s the case and direct air capture or other types of carbon sequestration is $200 a ton, you’re like, why are we taxing all these people? Why don’t we just make them pay the $200 a ton and let them, like, you know, burn Avgas?
Chris Hayes: But I guess the question is that is reliant on the technology getting to scale and cost that we think that could happen. My first sort of question is, is it a serious technology that we think could get there?
Jigar Shah: I mean, in general, I’d say that we have plans, which we discussed in the first part of this podcast and we’ve outlined in these things called liftoff reports that we published out of the Department of Energy.
So we now have published exactly what percentage of the emissions in that sector in industrial decarbonization or in hydrogen or in nuclear or long duration energy storage, carbon management, we’re now coming out with geothermal and grid modernization. So we’re doing that work as we speak. And as the technology improves, we re-up the work, right?
So I think we’re getting there, right? But I believe, and I think everyone else who’s serious about this believes that there’s always going to be some portion of global energy use where it’s actually cheaper just to capture the carbon and put it into the ground.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And then there’s also part of it where, like as you suggested and, you know, I suggested, there’s this debt that we have that we’ve got to take out of the air and stick under the ground.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to go to one more technology because it’s crucial and then I won’t make you do all 13 or 15 you’re doing. But can we talk about hydrogen and why there’s so much —
Jigar Shah: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- hype around hydrogen, interest in hydrogen. There was a big fight that happened over hydrogen regulation, which I sort of understand, I guess, I kind of understood that there’s like this side wanted this and the other side wanted that. The industry wanted this and environmentalists wanted this, but I didn’t actually understand it. So, truth be told, I tried to, but I didn’t quite get it.
Why is hydrogen such an important and promising technology? And maybe you could talk me through that regulatory fight.
Jigar Shah: So again, I think the framing matters here. Let’s just assume that hydrogen is not the answer to all problems, but understand that we use 10 million tons of hydrogen a year in the United States already.
Chris Hayes: Meaning what? Go real basic. Like when you say use hydrogen, what does that mean?
Jigar Shah: So the number one use of hydrogen that we have is, you know, like making ammonia for a fertilizer.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Jigar Shah: We need hydrogen to make ammonia fertilizer. We also use hydrogen, now this is a temporary use, but we use hydrogen for desulfurizing fuel so we can have low carbon, low sulfur fuels for diesel, right? Eventually we’ll get off of diesel and then we won’t need that application. But there are industrial chemicals like hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, and others that we need hydrogen and then we combine it with the fluoride or the chlorine and we create these chemicals, right?
And so there is a use case for hydrogen that we already have in our country. So just converting those from gray hydrogen, which is basically just taking a steam and methane reformation of natural gas, right, where you split natural gas into, you know, carbon and hydrogen.
Chris Hayes: Right, and just to be clear, that produces a lot of emissions, right?
Jigar Shah: A lot of carbon dioxide, exactly.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: To something that’s called blue hydrogen, which is basically like capturing that CO2 and putting it under the ground, or like methane pyrolysis, which basically takes the natural gas and splits it with like a plasma torch into carbon black, which you use to make tires and hydrogen is actually free in that case, that you turn into fertilizer. And we’re doing that in Hallam, Nebraska with a company called Monolith Materials. Or you’ve got like pink hydrogen where, you know, nuclear plants have the opposite problem of solar, which is that you have to run them 24 by 7 all the time.
Chris Hayes: Yes, you can’t. Yes.
Jigar Shah: And sometimes that nuclear power is actually not worth much because we’re overproducing on the grid. Well, like some folks like Constellation have said, hey, why don’t we actually put electrolyzers behind the meter and we’ll just dump all that extra nuclear power into making hydrogen when, you know, the grid doesn’t use it, right?
Chris Hayes: That’s smart.
Jigar Shah: So you’ve got all these approaches to making hydrogen and folks are trying to figure out what the right thing is. But let’s just be clear that there’s a certain base amount of hydrogen that we need, that greening or cleaning that hydrogen is a good thing.
Then there’s other people who are saying we might be able to decarbonize the entire planet using hydrogen. I don’t know that I believe all those folks and they think we should use 10X the amount of hydrogen that we’re using today. Some of those applications are in the money. Some of those applications may never be in the money.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So this is exactly where I lose the thread on this. It’s the confusion between those two. There’s a huge amount of hydrogen that gets produced for industrial purposes and the way that it’s produced produces a lot of carbon emissions.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Chris Hayes: We want to figure out ways to produce that hydrogen necessary for industrial uses without producing a lot of emissions. That’s one use case.
But then there’s the notion of hydrogen as the sort of ultimate net zero fuel, right, that you can commercialize it and use it to replace fossil fuels as a thing that you power lots of things with if you can net zero produce it.
Jigar Shah: Right. And some of those are fanciful, right? So when you think about —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: -- folks who are like, hey, we’re going to make hydrogen and put them into the natural gas pipeline infrastructure and then my hot water heater is going to run on hydrogen. That never makes sense. Just get a heat pump water heater, like, that runs on electricity.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And we’ll power it with nuclear or solar or wind. We’re not going to put hydrogen in your pipelines and then power your water heater, your natural gas water heater with hydrogen. That’s not a great use case.
And then there’s some that are on the margin, right? So like heavy duty trucks, for instance, right? It’s not that efficient to move huge trucks with electricity, but it’s pretty efficient, right? But hydrogen could be more efficient to do that. But then, you’ve got to build out the entire infrastructure --
Chris Hayes: To produce a huge amount of net zero hydrogen.
Jigar Shah: Right, and that may never happen.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jigar Shah: And so that is playing out real time, right? Well, some folks want to do heavy trucks with hydrogen. Some folks want to do heavy trucks with electricity and may the best person, best ideas win. We’ll see where that goes.
Chris Hayes: One thing that I like about talking to you, and this has been true the times that we’ve talked through the years, is you’re a very optimistic person in a space that can sometimes be very clouded by doom. And just tell me about how you feel generally about the trajectory we’re on.
Jigar Shah: I’ve never been more optimistic than I am now. I just think that when you think about where we were as a society, right, where we basically said fossil fuels are a necessary evil to a modern lifestyle. Anyone who decides to get off of fossil fuels by definition is choosing a low GDP growth path for their country, right, that’s really where we were in 2008, I’d say.
Today, it’s been fully decoupled, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jigar Shah: People actually believe that they can have huge amounts of GDP growth and lower carbon emissions. Not only do people believe that, China and India believe that. They not only believe that, but they believe that it is the largest wealth creation opportunity that their countries can pursue. So you now see China building 28 new nuclear reactors.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jigar Shah: You see India doing the same. India is saying, we want to build all electric vehicles, right? When you think about the fact that countries are now competing to see how green they can be because they believe that this is the future of their economies, right, I mean, how could you not be optimistic, right?
Like the smartest people that are graduating from colleges today are saying, this is where I want to go. The smartest people who don’t want to go to college are saying, the way that I can make a six-figure income is by joining a union and actually going through the apprenticeship program and becoming a journeyman by the age of 26.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jigar Shah: It’s inspiring all the way around.
Chris Hayes: Jigar Shah is the director of the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office. And it’s a great, great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Jigar Shah: Thanks for having me on.
Chris Hayes: Well I found that inspiring. I hope you did as well. And huge thanks to Jigar Shah. Fascinating dude, man. I’ve known him for a while and I just come away with so many thoughts exploding my head every time I talk to him.
You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can email us withpod@gmail.com. There’s a bunch of social media networks that we’re on. If you search for WITHpod on TikTok or chrislhayes on TikTok, I’m over there. I’m also chrislhayes at Threads, Bluesky, and what used to be known as Twitter.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio.
You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?