Shift Key with Robinson Meyer24 Apr 2024

How Jigar Shah Thinks About Risk

Jigar Shah might have more control over America’s new wave of industrial policy — not to mention its climate policy — than anyone not named Joe Biden. And he’s not even a Cabinet-level official. As director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which is akin to its in-house bank, Shah oversees how roughly $400 billion in lending authority will be spent. That money will help finance new EV factories, geothermal wells, carbon capture sites, and more.

On this week’s episode, Rob sits down with Shah to discuss the philosophy that he brings to his role. When financing new projects — many of which are the first of their kind — how does he think about cash flow, about technological innovation, about risk? Robinson Meyer is executive editor of Heatmap News; Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineering professor at Princeton, is off this week.

Mentioned:

The Loan Programs Office: Building a Bridge to Bankability

The Race to Spend the I.R.A.’s $100 Billion in Grants Has Begun

Ezra Klein’s theory of “everything-bagel liberalism”

Rob on the questions swirling at one-time LPO beneficiary Tesla

–

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…

KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power's technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com.

Watershed's climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(145)

Why This El Niño Looks Like a Monster

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal...

12 Aug 47min

The Big — But Fixable! — Problems in America’s R&D Ecosystem

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency.The Engine Ventures, which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is differ...

6 Aug 57min

Permitting Reform, Data Centers, and More With Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm

The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and ...

3 Aug 33min

What a Permitting Reform Deal Could Look Like

There’s really one one good thing that could happen this year in Congress for clean energy: permitting reform. If lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on the country’s permitting system, they could mak...

29 Jul 1h 18min

What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal

Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the greenhouse gas far from the at...

24 Jul 1h 3min

The Company That’s Raised $60 Million to Geoengineer the Planet

For more than 30 years, a heterodox group of scientists have proposed injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, thereby cooling the atmosphere and reversing...

15 Jul 1h 1min

The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks?Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most a...

6 Jul 49min

Why Meta’s Longtime CTO Is Investing in Climate Tech

It has been a hard few years for climate tech. But we recently got a bright spot: Earlier this month, Gigascale Capital announced it had raised $250 million to build the physical infrastructure drivin...

30 Jun 54min