Latitude Media’s Open Circuit podcast is a reboot of the old Energy Gang pod, with Stephen Lacey, Katherine Hamilton, and one of the all time smartest people I’ve ever met, Jigar Shah, a long time solar industry pro, and until recently head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (LPO) under Joe Biden.
The recent episode had a recap of 2025, with some surprisingly upbeat takes.
I mean, look, I think that he’s not a good climate president in the sense that he believes in climate change, but in terms of capital formation, he has shaken everybody, and forced them to look at their priors, and then recommit to this moment, and everyone did. I mean, you just saw major announcements this week between NextEra, and Google, and Meta buying more gigawatts, and then the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance announcing that this has been a record year for long-term contracts of renewable energy, right? Battery storage has been on a tear, right? I mean, I just think that… Do I think that this president is good for capital formation? No, not at all. But do I think that this president has forced people to reconsider whether they’re really buying these technologies, because they’re superior to their fossil counterparts, or whether they’re actually being subsidized? Yes. And in almost all cases, they’re like, these are superior solutions to their fossil counterparts. We’re buying them because they’re better for us.
Katherine Hamilton: I think Bill Gates, you would consider the outlier in that, right?
Jigar Shah: Oh, my God. Don’t get me started, Katherine.
Katherine Hamilton: Trigger word.
Jigar Shah: You’re just bating me, Katherine.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, have you seen states step up more than they otherwise would have, or have they suffered because of the drawback of federal funds, and…
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, so I think that both can be true. So, a lot of these solar for all program was completely cut after funding had already gone out to the state. So, the states was just at an event in Michigan this week, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re like setting up all the instruments we need to continue to do the program regardless. We already had all the systems in place. We had the communities gathered. Let’s do it.” So, I think it’s a little bit of trying to get things done in spite of what’s happened.
Katherine Hamilton: Unlike the parrot in Monty Python, solar is not dead yet. And I think that there was just a lot of, as we have talked about before, pro clutching about solar. But globally, for the first time ever, global electricity generation from renewables, which is solar, and wind mostly, unmarked a major turning point of producing five terawatt hours of power as opposed to Kohl’s 4.8 terawatts of power, terawatt hours of power. So, there is already an increase globally of solar.
And then in their latest Woodmac report for SEA, the US solar industry in Q3 installed almost 12 gigawatts of capacity of solar, which was a 20% increase from 2024 at the same time, a 50% increase from Q2. 58% of all new generating capacity added to the grid through the third quarter of 2025 was solar, and then solar, and storage combined accounted for 85% of the new capacity in the same timeframe. And granted, people are trying to get things done quickly before the tax credits expire, but it also shows that everybody is full steam ahead. And I don’t think that’s going to slow down, because I think those with good fundamentals are going to continue to move a pace. It’s the cheapest form of energy, and paired with batteries, solar is going to be what we need.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, does it feel like an I told you so moment?
Jigar Shah: Oh, yeah. We’ve been telling you so. So, I think it’s fantastic. I think the other thing that people don’t understand is if you take all of the dispatchable natural gas manufacturing capacity in the entire world, fuel cells, recip engines, everything together, it’s less than 100 gigawatts a year. So, it doesn’t matter how much you pray. There’s only so much capacity that you could add through natural gas.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, who’s your villain of the year?
Jigar Shah: Well, the thing about villains is that they have to have super secret laboratories that are super cool to look at. So, I’m thinking that this year’s prize goes to the data center companies. I haven’t met an organization so politically inept that they had two gubernatorial races that were basically defined by everyone in the entire state hating data centers to the point where now you’ve got both the like Bernie Bros, and the MAGA people who hate data centers. You have the Bulwark hating data centers. I mean, at some point, how can you piss off more people than they have off in this year? It is truly breathtaking at the extraordinary ability they’ve had to piss off everybody.
Stephen Lacey: And what do you think is behind it? Is it just because we’ve been pissed off at the tech companies for the last decade, or so, and that this is an extension of that frustration with their role in political discourse, and getting people addicted to their platforms? Or is it like about the data centers themselves? What do you think is driving it?
Jigar Shah: No, it’s about the data centers themselves, right? Remember, the way that the data center companies generally work is you send out a price signal, you have a whole bunch of people using private sector capital developing data centers in secret with all sorts of fancy sort of SPVs, and LLCs, and they’re hiding behind this, and that, and whatever. And then in the end, they sell that powered land to Microsoft, or Google, or whatever else, right? And so all of the sins of the developer are then absorbed by the tech companies, right? And so if they negotiate a deal where they can like use coal power at a cheaper price, and then Google’s like, “Well, I didn’t know it was coal power, but I just wanted power land.” And so what you found was that in general, I think that the tech companies are doing as good a job as they can, frankly, right now, to try to dig themselves out of a hole, but they allowed the hole to get very, very deep before they realized that they had a problem.