Inside America's Only Bank for Nuclear Energy — ft. Jigar Shah
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When did you first hear about rent choice voting? Like how did you .

become .

aware of IT before we left new york? I got to vote in the election for mayor atoms. There's a lot going .

on up there. Since election day.

we've gotten lots of questions about ring choice voting. Why don't we have IT? What IT change our politics, what even is IT that's this week on explain IT to me, find IT whereever you get your podcasts.

This week on property markets, we speak with giger shaw, director, the loan programme office at the department of energy. We discuss how much powers will need in the future, why nuclear energy is making a comeback and his personal philosophy on allocating government loans.

If you're innovative and you meet the standards that we've said, I want to give all of them loans, right? Because whether its carbon securest ration or whether it's like, you know, solar and wind or whether it's nuclear, to me, steel in the ground is red.

White and blue. You can find that conversation of many others exclusively on the property markets podcast feed. Today's number point one three percent that's cheko las acceptance rate for new franchise each year.

In other words, chick fully has a lower acceptance rate. And stanford, google and the secret service, speaking of school, that I got the best blow job of my life in junior high school. I love being a teacher. That has almost nothing to do with chick for I I couldn't find a chick for a joke. add.

And how are you now time for banter between me and and you?

What's going on? I'm very well, Scott. How's mexico?

It's wonderful. The lights beautiful. I love the food here. I think I could live in mexico. I'm not sure everything is like a six star resort in cobo in mexico, but um I I love mexico. I think it's the best I think that mexico is the best place to vacation in the world .

and looks looks very beautiful. Your background, i'm jealous. One thing I would love to get your reaction to because we've been getting all these questions from a listeners. Did you see your shout .

out on john to IT h remarked to me social justice issues and take a back seat when your son is in the basement vapor and playing video games and can't find a job.

I feel I got last I was really venting more about this son .

that's get you yeah what's your reaction?

First was a little rattled because it's like when Jimmy found and made fun of me when I was on CNN. This has been to me before. Yeah, Jimmy fan, in his opening dialogue, took the clip of me on c.

Nancy. I'd rather give my fifteen year old a pound of weed in a bottle of jack and social media. He just played IT instead of the audience.

And they are then not good. Only people love to that clip, I think was a great clip. Yeah, what was a joke? Just just have ridiculous .

that sounded. Ah, anyway, this a couple years ago, I think I think I was right. yeah.

This was at first a little rattled because I have a big eagle. But I was thinking about IT, when you got to cut comedians, a really wide birth. I say a lot of indignant, provocative thing. So, you know, i'm sticking my chin out there.

I deserved to be marked very Frankly, what was interesting as a couple of my friends who in media said, you need to record a response and that was bulshed and you have sons and and I said, I think I think this is a sign of that. We're having an impact. We it's hard to read the label from inside of the bottle.

Free ZARA was marked. I mean, they marked a bunch people. More impressive than this.

I was a good company. Yeah, I said, what goes insulting at all. I think he made a cogent point, which is that your analogies are hilariously specific and now is what he was making fun of you up, which is true.

I'm not insult to it's a lario. I thought I was great. D Better took simple.

I've i've got the approval of the twenty five years to pay. Um great.

You're the best.

You're the best engh of that. Today we're speaking with giga shot, director of the loans programs office at the department of energy. Um a almost positive. This is going to be more exciting than the title. I think this nowhere to go.

But up here whenever we have someone from a very anyone with the really borne title is usually pretty interest like a class is the most the best returns are in the boring shit. Um but anyways here with the news first is property analyst at elson and give us the headlines you you saw something make. At the time to buy, I hope you have plenty of the world reckon sixty .

million households tuned in to watch the jack poll versus might ties and fight on netflix. And despite some technical glitches on the live stream, the stocks rose three percent on monday. Following the match, president elect trump is seeking to ease restrictions on autonomous vehicles that needs and tested stock up by more than six percent.

Meanwhile, shares of uber and left dropped more than five percent. And finally, drugmaker stocks fell after trump p nominated R F, K, junior, a secretary of health and human services, or arac. Juna is widely known as a vaccine skeptic. He clarified that he does not intend to eliminate vaccines and to enhances transparency around their safety data. Scott, your thoughts starting with netflix rising after this boxing match between jack poll and might take him well.

first, I think it's important. And when we have some breaking news here who lew has will be announcing this afternoon, they are live streaming to fight between me and Jimmy Carter.

I mean, I D paid to see that. I would pay to see .

that hundred percent. There is a broken at here. And that is, if you take twenty million box to get ring with somebody, you have an obligation to the universe either kick the shoot out a person or have the SHE kicked out of you.

This was ridiculous. This wasn't even a fight. My fourteen enable some did up perfectly like dad, you could have done Better just um I was very disappointed in the fight but distinct to the fight itself let's move on, let's move on and set.

Mark twin said, how did he go bankrupt and IT was like slowly than suddenly the death of lenie TV is, was, was, is happening slowly and suddenly. And we're in the suddenly face. And they are kind of the modes around lennar and supported TV. We're essentially news and sports.

And when you see amazon doing live coverage of the election, and I thought they did a pretty good job and have antasari guess, i'd like to point um and you see now the last kind of basin of the last world to be breached with live sports. And what do you know the guys with the cheapest capital started buying the night football, right? Amazon started buying N B.

A. games. And the biggest, I think this was arguably the biggest sporting event of the year.

Yeah, behind, I think he is behind the super bowl. But other than that, number one.

I thought this was the most viewed, worst program .

in history.

had some bad with issues to me, that sort of unforgivable, how the fact they know how many people are going to show up. But anyways, and there are attack company. And if they can get this should right, who can? It's almost like anything I can imagine be worse. If you were microblog in platform, you couldn't pull off the presidential announcement on the side crash.

That was a problem that a lot of people focused on was the fact that they had these technical glitches. And I ve heard about IT from many people, including people who work at this company, that IT was buffering half the time, you know, they couldn't navigate the live function. So that was a problem netflix is response to.

That has been actually they didn't expect this many people to watch sixty million households. Um they said they were sort of blown away by the by how popular IT was. And so that's their excuse.

I I don't know if that's A A decent excuse, but honestly, i'm sort of with the market on this because the stock dropped a little bit on that glitch and then IT ripped back up. And I think the market is saying, okay, it's not great that they had that glitch. But let's not forget the fact that sixty million people tuned in.

And this was, get this started, Scott, the tenth most watched sporting event in history. So this was in the same league as I mentioned. It's not as big as the super bow, but it's it's certainly in the same league as the super bowl, as the champions league, as the NBA finals. This was definitely a blockbuster event, and i'm not sure .

management expected that, but that's IT. I'm going to do a mix martial arts match against clinias steward. It's time yeah exactly it's time.

IT doesn't something pretty incredible about whoever is told the programme at netflix because when I heard about this uh, twenty seven year old youtube of us fifty eight year old retired boxer, my reaction was, this is stupid and everyone is above this. But what netflix know is Better than us. That's totally wrong. They have their finger on the pulse. People want to see this.

I think you'd have to give IT to read hastings in the other costa, who his name I was forget, but is also very bright. This is arguably for the last ten years years. It's the most underestimated management team.

Not not that people don't respect them, but they are right up there with the you know nadella, the the purchase, the zuker berg in terms of shareholder growth and making just incredibly bold, smart decisions. These guys are right there. And this was one of them.

I thought I was ridiculous. And here at summit, well, you know, in between the programing are vertical farming and how to get Better sleep. And if you should be Polly or not, everybody stopped and went to the bar and watched. They watch.

Everybody watched. IT is also a good point about about the balls and restaurants, which I ve got to mention, which is like sixty million households tuned in. But that doesn't count the I think IT was six thousand balls.

And restaurants that also got access to this, I think for like A A one off event. So I think about all the other thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who are watching IT at bars and restaurants such as itself. This was just A A gigantic mega event, really incredible.

Let's move on to tesla in this new self driving regulation that come out from the trumpet administration. This is a report that trump is working or his team is working on a new plan for regulation. This is something we actually predicted a couple weeks ago and when as a loser, as episode.

Must might be able to advise on autonomous driving regulations. And that's one of the biggest hurdles for tesler and the robot taxi mission. So if elon mask has one foot in the White house and the other at tesla, IT could be that he'll be able to fast track his vision of the robot taxi fleet.

And that is certainly what investors are pricing in right now. So that's what's happened. And test is now six or seven percent .

on that news. Scott reaction, you know, my view is one of the great things, one of the things that amErica has done really well as we opt for the mavericks, the bureaucrat, and that, as we tend to be a little bit more alive, let our horses run, let to be the wild west. Now, when the wild west turns into west world and the robot start killing everybody, meta, we are all social media, all big tech we have under regulation.

But we tend the air on the side of two little regulation versus too much, and I would argue, versus europe. That is a big part of the reason that our GDP is exponentially greater than in europe. Europe's focused on a little bit on the bureaucratic state and what are the risks, what are the dangerous, what are the downsides, is opposed to the upsides.

So in favor, I don't like the fact that this is becoming you, whoever gives the president a hundred and fifty million box gets to dictate regulation, elect, or even around a specific sector. But in general, IT feels like autonomous. IT feels like some of the regulation around autonomists might be overly constructive.

I know that way. Mo, and the guys from google think that they really fucked up starting in san Francisco. And I also wondered them, curse, to get your thoughts here, how much of this is pure traditional auto who are way behind an autonomous are t calling their congress person and saying, we really do like this. We like the way things are right now.

I'll bet that's true. I mean, the part I don't like is the same thing that you don't like, which is that we're now in a place where you can just buy regulation in your favor. But to your point, and there's another peace I agree with you on, we do need federal regulation, autonomy, ving, because at the moment, we don't have any.

And all we have right now is this very patchwork state by state system. Whether state has very different rules, in some cases, those rules vague. The question for investors, I think they should also though, is how likely is IT really that this regulation is going to come definition because he needs to get through congress.

So that's one thing. You ve probably got all these traditional call companies who are going to be calling up the congressman saying, don't let this pass. And two, as we know about trump, he promises a lot of fucking things all the time, and a lot of them do not pan out.

So I think wall street might be a little too optimistic, as IT often is with tesla, that this is all going to go to plan. If IT does though, if we do have federal regulation on autonomous driving, I think would ultimately to be a pretty good thing for a country. So i'm not against this. We move on to R, F, K, his appointment as health secretary, and this decline in market values among all the drug stocks at the farmer stocks, A, K, A, the vaccine stocks, your reaction scope, R, K, as head of .

health and human services has me just fuck and free doubt, ted. And i'm trying to process IT. On the one hand, ark junior is outstanding, uncertain issues he's, he talks about, he summarizes the food industrial complex and the unholy alliance between the food industrial complex.

General fuses. McDonald, they want to get you. Pepco, they want to get you addicted to this sugary, shady food that is terrible for you, such that they can then wink when hand you over to the other part of the munday's fucker, do Opera.

And that is the industrial diabetes complex, where there are hospital systems, kin dialysis stats s diabetes medication, near and hirelings ever. That is literally worth trillions of dollars. No exaggeration.

This is the biggest industry in the united states, thirteen thousand dollars in health care for individual. But we live less long. We you know what? A lot of people are making a shit on the money.

I'm having to talk about the insurance industry, and this guy gets that. This guy is not afraid, and he goes after IT and then he says, if you see a new mother, the best thing you can do is walk up tour and whisper tour. Don't get a vaccinated what the actual fuck this person should be allowed in the fucking building, much less being being considered for this job.

So I find this incredibly upsetting. And art case is literally the definition of diwali, or contradiction, or you know, opposing forces colliding into each other. Because I think he's so good on so many things.

But this, his view on arches, is totally disqualifying. Just just some real quick a information. A twenty twenty one study found that exposure to cover one thousand nine vacation misinformation lowered once intend to get vacation, even for those who previously said they would definitely do so. Vaccines have saved one hundred and fifty four million lives over the past fifty years at six lives per minute.

So look now, as we go full clu B2Crd, everyone assumes that these individuals will Carry more power than they have in the past as they start to replace every thoughtful executive in the federal government, which is a fuck and lucky, and they they claim to have no respect for the ladue process. We'll to start issuing Mandates from from D C. So these stocks are flying up and down.

Um the food stocks, the process food stocks again to the above he gets a lot right are down. And the vaccine stocks to see these things, they crashed. They were off double digits.

The thing that I think people aren't talking about enough is the fact that he actually has openly said that he is not an anti vaca and he also openly said this year that he wasn't gna take anyone's vaccines away. And what he is really asked for what he is pushing for is to force the drug companies to just share more information about the vaccines. And you know, I don't see a real reason for that.

Personally, I trust the experts on the vaccines, but given the level of skepticism around vaccines in amErica today, and I I understand he may have contributed to that, but this is something has been around for years and years and years. I don't think that more information and more transparency is a bad thing. I think that's honest.

I think that's probably a good thing I just I wanted give you because he talks about the the food stocks and and the idea that he is pushing for getting rid of the food industrial complex, which I agree with, is something that I really like. I just want to give you a really crazy example I saw this weekend of how the media takes these very loose, generalized narratives about the people that they don't like, and then they run away with them in a way that is just very strange and distorted. So this was in the new york times this weekend, and they were reporting on his appointment to secretive health and specifically talking about his stand on food.

So just listen to this. I I couldn't believe this when I read this quote. Mister Kennedy singled out fruit loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the canada version has fewer than the U.

S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although canada has natural coLorings made from blue barriers and carrots, while the us. Product contains red by forty, yellow five and blue one, as well as beautiful ted high drug tula in or bhd, a lamm ID chemical that is used for freshness according to the ingredient label.

And quote, and this just make me so angry, because as you said, what R, F, K, junior is criticizing about processes in amErica is completely correct. This stuff is categorical, unhealthy. It's making us obese and it's killing us by the millions.

And so why are you, the new york times, defending fruit loops for using chemicals in their food? And why are you telling me, as the reader, with this very weird authorities of language, he was wrong that r fk. Junior is wrong for bringing this up. I think just this wild misunderstanding of what we should actually be talking about. And ultimately, I don't think they really realize this.

IT plays further into his hand because by defending fruit loops and say, no, no, it's okay that they're just using a couple of these chemicals and they are actually for freshness by saying that IT makes the new york times look like the liar trying to defend their friends at kilograms, and he makes him look like the freedom facit. And not to me, is exactly why people like him. And what the media outlets were a lot more focused on was the decline in the vaccine stocks and not the decline in the food stocks and shares in peppi co.

And coca cola and red general mills and lam western, which supplies food to mcDonald and chick fully, they all fail because the markets are predicting that this guy gonna crack down on the food industrial complex. And that, I think, is something that we can all get behind. So I just find him very fascinating the way the media is dealing with him, because they're deciding to basically portray everything he says. I totally waked job crazy when, in reality, some of the things he's saying pretty plainly that one .

of the first things I registered when I moved to the U. K. Was I me right away? Everything goes bad.

It's what the fox going on here. The fruit is rotten in two days, the orange goes bad. And then I realize, yes, oh, it's actual food because it's food. And despite despite the massive advances in treating cancer, you know the event manufacturer, which are clearly there's something up here you know people are getting I met a woman last night who has started a company called ask player or something and and it's it's not what you think IT is ask something. It's not what you think IT is.

I doubt it's called ask something .

like hot ask or ask something anyway. But SHE was diagnosed with color rectal cancer in authorities, and he got, and she's an full emission recovery. But SHE got fascinated in the number of people being diagnosed with colon cancer under the age of fifty has gone up dramatically.

IT used to be able to need to get a colon Oscar be until you're fifty. Other saying start getting a much earlier that has I mean, logically and i'm speculating here, uh, logically, that's probably something environmental. So again, it's like, well, if we can make money selling, you should even if he gives you colon cancer and then we can make money off the colon cancer.

Let's not address IT. Let's let's let IT run. And there's a lot of good people on the other side, universities and medical professionals trying to figure out away and also pharmacy al companies to fix IT. But IT really is it's not health care. It's sick care. And if you were to try and give kids great food from an early stage and helped develop a taste for good food, did you eat good food growing up? What was your doubt like growing up?

Yeah, I I pretty good food. I mean, I ate a fair amount of junk, but you know, what are you going to do? But I think now we know we all agree we should be eating organic food at a lower Price and making IT affordable for people.

Yeah so let me describe my childhood we had in the morning I had lucky charms um and tang because the astronaut riker so must be good for you.

What is time you don't remember? Hang I don't know .

what cheese crying that's IT i'm throwing myself out of the window into the baht and insula you don't know tank I feel one hundred years old IT was this drink IT was this powder. And, you know, it's got to be this awful for you. And they sent, they would give IT to the astronauts and astra aonadat space flights.

Man has been brought another step closer to the moon aboard these man Apollo flights, three astronauts, and with them, tang, tang, the energy breakfast drink. So, tang, lucky charms. And then if we was really dust for my mom, in that any time my mom was out of the house before even got out, I would take a pop tart and pop tarts.

No joke. Have a shelf life of like seventy years and can survive a nuclear holocaust. I mean, i'm not going to talk about the fact, but that my mom smoked and drank while he was pregnant.

But my child, that was basically lucky, charms pop tarts in two hours a day of I dream a gini. The fact that I am not that healthy and the sexist is entirely can be blamed on american culture in in the seventies. Anyways, I I like such shirt.

yeah. Now the only reason I eat well, to be blunt, it's because i'm rich to eat well, is so expensive people as summer, it's less expensive at home. No, it's not.

If you're going to eat well at home, oh my god, it's crazy. It's crazy expensive. So like everything else in our country, our food supply and our medical industrial complex is the best in the world.

You get amazing food if you're in the top ten percent. You get amazing health care if you're in the top ten percent. The whole our whole economy, the most prosperous economy in the world, is being optimize for the top test.

All in the bottom ninety percent are they are just to optimize for the top ten percent, whether it's keeping minimum wage low, whether it's cutting services is install. And the thing is it's about IT is we don't move against this, even the bottom ninety percent because americans are so you so optimistic. People are like, wow, when I get rich, I show guys like me. You know, it's it's this weird phenomenon aware everyone assumes their kid and their future is in the top ten percent. And I can prove every one of us, the ninety percent of us will not be in the top ten percent .

will be right back after the break for our clean energy conversation with gig shaw. If you're enjoying so so far and you haven't subscribed, be sure to get property markets to follow wherever you .

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Welcome back. Here is a conversation with gig shaw, director of the loan programs office at the department of energy. giga. Thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for heavenly.

So I just want to start out with a quick summary of who you are. So just for our listeners. So gig is first and former. As an entrepreneur he found in the successful solar energy company, which he eventually sold. He later wrote wrote a book about climate tech.

He started this nonprofit on business solutions to climate change, and now he has this position as director of the loans program office at the department of energy, which sounds pretty bureaucratic and a little bit unsex. Until you realize the gigas in charge of allocating more than four hundred billion dollars in loans to clean energy projects in america. So the way that I think of ja is that he's kind of the most influential climate VC that you don't know about.

He's not buying stakes and started ups, but is definitely steering the direction of this clean energy transition that has been building up in amErica for decades. So we're very happy to have you here. I'm going to talk with this question to you, giga. Um where are we in the clean energy transition? Are we so of in the middle, are we getting to the end or we just getting started?

I mean, we're pretty far along right when you think about the amount of money that's being driven towards climate solutions. The oil and gas sector, a globally does a about a billion dollars a day. The solar industry alone now does two billion dollars a day globally, right? And so then when you add wind and clean hydrogen and all the other sectors, um we're going way past that. So I think we're you know close to lift off.

So when I think about how clean energy is funded at the moment, IT feels like there are two main incentives. The first is just climate change, you know, we need to bring down the temperate of the planet. And the second that i've been seeing a lot more of is that we need just more energy.

And I feel like A I has been a big part of that because of the amount of energy that A I requires. I just like to get your perspective. How do you baLance those two incentives, which do you think is more pressing, more important? What would you say is driving strategy at the d say .

the question sightly differently, right? I mean, to me, when your developer, the way you make money is point meeting load growth in A I right? You don't make money by solving climate change.

And so you're generally making money by solving a problem for somebody. And the reason people are choosing clean energy is not because it's clean, it's because it's fast. So you have the ability to to install solar and battery storage in texas way faster than building new natural gas facilities. And that's why they're all going in batteries and solar, right? And the natural gas facilities are probably two years .

behind this on the energy needs themselves. How much power are we creating right now and how much more power you think we we're gonna need?

yes. So we we generally have about a thousand gigawatts of power generation around the country, right, a little bit more today than we had before because there's more solar, wind and we're onna need to double that um probably by you know the twenty forty time frame and maybe tripled by twenty and fifty IT. Really depends on how much of A I and you know some of those other things we need.

But also just to put things in perspective, the president's, uh, goals around the bay party infrastructure law chips and science and seta are really dwarfing AI load growth in terms of new loads in the next states, whether electric vehicles, a heat pumps, new manufacturing physicists. We have nine hundred new manufacturing facilities under construction here in the night states right now. And so um so the low growth is actually quite broad based.

Did you explain what low growth is?

So when you think about uh you know manufacturing uh, wire harnesses and Georgetown, texas is the selling or manufacture oned term blankets with a aspinet o gets in georgia. H these facilities need one. Meet three, Michael.

Z five meos of power to power robots or automation lines are the things to to to be able to manufacturer things, right? The same things true with electric vehicles. Your average house probably uses two kilowatts of load on a regular basis, your hair driers two kilowatts alone, and your electric vehicle is seven to nine kilowatts. And so it's a lot more than what your average, you know, home is using right now, and that's low growth.

A good thanks for your time. Can you stack rank the pluses and minus ses a wind, solar and nuclear?

Well, let me start by saying when the grid has gone down last four years, it's because natural gas power plants failed to supply power when we needed that, right. They froze up during winter storm mury. They had real chAllenges during the the crisis during the Christmas of twenty and twenty two.

And so nobody wants a seventy percent petrol k grid, and nobody wants a seventy percent solar plus battery storage grid. And so the real key is diversification, right? When you think about solar, IT was perfect for summer peaking loads, the air conditioning driven, because a lot of that is when solar is not very easy to get a hold of.

I think as you get more, more solar, you only have twenty five percent production in terms of capacity factor. So twenty five percent of the hours of the year is producing solar power. And the rest of the time, it's not with wind power.

You're probably closer to forty percent of the year you're getting wind power production and IT goes up and down depending on when its windy, where solar powers is probably more predictable. With nuclear power, you have the opposite problem. IT produced power ninety two percent of the time in the united states.

So you often get power that you don't need in the spring. In the fall, it's still producing power when no waneth using our conditioning and heating. So that's why we built all the pump t tyro facilities in the united states was to take all that extra nuclear power. So I would suggest that it's really more of a baLance that we need than more nuclear or more solar.

My sense is all of the sun is nuclear come back in vogue. And that I don't know if it's the motor feel of IT or what people see is the the most reliable, best bank of bug kind of power supply. Is your sense that nuclear is is making a pretty strong come back, I realized him putting words in amount, but feel free to .

disagree with me. I would say that the amount of competence in the solar wind industry is so high that they are likely to dominate. And at ninety percent of everything that great over the next five years.

Well, to fresh house there, you think ninety percent of the incremental energy capacity ad over the next several years will be from wind and solar .

for the last five years. It's been wind, solar and IT will likely be for the next five years. And so the nuclear energy industry has such a hard time getting off of the launch pad that they need the most help. And so I ve spent the Better part of the last four years figuring out exactly what was holding nuclear back, figure out exactly who has the solutions to those problems and figure out exactly how we can accelerate those folks to actually getting one hundred billion dollars worth of new projects announced in. We're not quite IT there yet, but the president announced a pretty .

bold gold last week. What was holding nuclear back.

There is nobody to develop nuclear plants, right? So the nuclear industry right now is set up with a bunch of people who own nuclear power plants, but none of them wanted construct new nuclear power plants. And then when you talk to the people who design nuclear power plants, there's sort of like architects.

You buy their designs for your new home. You don't actually he hire them to build the new home. So then you go to the the constructors you have back to.

You ve got a couple of other folks, but they're not willingly to give you a fixed Price. They're saying, uh, we're going to the tragedy cost plus I hoped that, that works for you. And so it's hard because people are like, well, what if IT goes double the budget that you ve reject IT? Well, you're going to have to pay IT.

Well, who actually pays IT. And so figuring out exactly how we build ten reactors because one reactor clearly um doesn't solve the problem and with ten reactors you can spread the risk across ten reactors. Build the supply change to all those things is hard because it's at least thirty five billion dollars to build ten small reactors and it's over a hundred billion dollars to build ten large reactor.

So we've been circling the problem between the existing owners, the hyper skill data centres that want to pay a premium for twenty four by seven power that they've listed on their website, which they still haven't walked away from, the utility companies who want to finish nuclear power plant but don't want to actually sign up to the cost over on risk on behalf of their ratepayers, right? And in all of the supply chain folks. And so getting all of them in the room having a productive conversation has taken this taking us the Better part of three and half years.

One thing I didn't hear you mention, you know previous nuclear disasters like chino, bo and three, my island and stuff like out. And our hypothesis of our theory has been that those events and sort of the hollywood fear of nuclear has been a large part of why we've seen A A big pullback from nuclear as a power source. I just like to get your take on that. Is that right? Do you think yeah .

the data doesn't support IT. So when you look at the one thousand thousand nine hundred and seventies, we had a lot of inflation. And as a result, nuclear power, which is a lot of capital, got expensive. And so people were already starting to pull back from nuclear before three my island occurred.

And then you know, when you think about what happened with, uh, the rena sant twenty thousand eight, the vocal nuclear planet started, but everyone else pulled back, not because of foochow ma, but just because there is no load growth. I mean, we had past these regulations to switch to L, D lights. And so we were actually getting a reduction in sales every single year.

And people were saying, well, without load growth, why would we build new nuclear? right? And so today, the reason you're seeing a renaissance because data centers are uniquely disruptive to the grid, you cannot add one thousand megawatts of load in one location without pairing IT with something like nuclear power. And so that's why you've got to run is on today.

your department seems pretty thoughtful and trying to find sources of energy that are economically viable but also recognize the emissions and extra ties. That sounds to me like something the trumpet administration would hate.

So the rotary c of the tram ministration from twenty sixteen. And then, of course, the success of the administration. In twenty twenty has been to do what we've always been talking about, right, which is that we need to ensure and resort back in this country. And now we are succeeding more than that. I'd say you know as somebody who's been entrepreneur for decades, um american innovators and entrepreneurs always thought that when they were ready to commercialize their technology, they had to go to asia or had to go to europe today they are now believing and their investors, more importantly, are believing they can do IT here. The long programs office functioning is essential for them to actually take that step.

And so my sense is that this program has more support than any other program for no other reason than IT doesn't really matter where you're innovating, whether it's nuclear power, blue ammonia, right using carbon registration and storage, you sustainable aviation fuels, he doesn't really matter what sector you care about without having access to bank dead right. You really can't build these billing our projects and the banks don't want to provide money for first of kind deployment ments and so that you're left with a loan programs office. And so well, there might be a pause when the new administration comes in for a few months. My sense is that there are so many entrepreneurs and innovators who want access to be able to do big things in this country. That is just something that you're not going able to stop.

I was surprised to hear you say that you don't think you are gna be affected permanently by this new administration specifically because a one I think trump has as a sort of anti clean energy bent to him. But two, he said he wants to appeal the inflation reductions act. From my understanding, you were a huge beneficiary of the inflation reductions act. Um so i'd like to hear more from you why you are feeling so optimistic. And going into the next four years.

I think IT goes to your first question right, which is, what is your driver? If your driver is climate, I totally understand, right? But if your driver is figuring out how to commercialize american innovations, right?

We're tired of inventing everything here in the united states and then shipping all those patterns over the asia or europe to be commercialized. We want to now take the technologies that we invent here, many of which happened to save carbon emissions. They're actually truly superior products, and we want to commercialize them here.

Those people are not often driven by climate. They're really driven by the fact that you've got kick as technology that they want to commercialize here and employed people here, right? And you've got a lot of folks who are tired of saying that like their best job if they don't graduate from college.

He's working at the local panera, which I ve I love. I love piano, but i'm just saying they want to actually work with their hands. They want to manufacturing things.

They want to construct things, right? And so I think when you look at what present bidness put in place, we're party five hundred thousand people down right now in the national building trades, right, if you like, go get trained. The nation building trades at sixteen years old, you can be making six digit salaries within six years.

I mean, it's a pretty amazing thing right now. If you're, if you don't want to go to college, you can get me know six fig, just by wanting to be good at your craft. That is something that we lost for forty years, and a lot of people want that back, whether or not they voted for the days of the arts.

Yeah, what I feel like one push back that you might receive from republicans or from this administration is that it's a lot of power that you have in that department. I mean, for understanding your loan authority after the I ra. Went from forty billion dollars to four hundred billion dollars.

And I could imagine that a criticism or a concern is that someone would say, well, why aren't we just letting the private markets fund these innovation projects? Why are we leaving IT to government to step in and accelerate clean energy? What would your responsibility that there are no .

criticisms that are like that? If you go to Apollo right now and say to them you have a hundred million dar platform for climate, name one loan that the loan programme office did, that you would rather do. instead. They're like none. We could never do risks, right?

If you go to tpg, if you go to K, K, R, if you go to the private credit markets, every one of these banks are saying we would love to get investment banking feed to help raise the equity to match your loan. But we would never, in a millions years, want to do that. First of a kind project that you did, I don't think i've ever heard of somebody saying, you know, bigger we would have done that loan. But for the fact that you compete with us, I don't think that ever .

happens because these are such risky investments that may may not pale. Well.

they're not risky from our perspective because we have ten thousand engineers, scientists and experts to work on the D V platform. But they're certainly risk y from J P. Morgan perspective because they don't have those experts on their platform, right? And generally speaking, those banks with bozzle three, they securitize their debt. They don't want to hold that long term of their ground. He could you imagine how much tear one capital the'd have to put against IT if they had a twenty year alone on their baLance sheet so they don't want to do that.

You speaks to some of the uh, economic impacts of some of these projects in terms of some of the main street economic economy like what what this will do to communities, into workforces when you've gone in there and funded some of these projects.

yeah, I think when you think about what we've done, there's direct impacts, right? So think about the four hundred and sixty five million are alone that we gave to tesla and then there's indirect impacts, right? Mean, who would have thought that the election c vehicle industry would be anything had we not given the loan to tesla right at the time at which they needed IT? And so the same thing true with the first five hundred mega solar farms that we ve funded in two thousand and ten two thousand eleven, at the time at which those were completed, the only buyer of those loans were mid american, which is a berger hathaway company.

Everyone knows that they make a lot of money so that wasn't they didn't get like they didn't um you know overpay for those assets by twenty and fifteen. Uh the soldiers, he was so frustrated by the banks that they created their own yield codes, which are like real state investment just in twenty and fifteen and IT wasn't until twenty nineteen. The bank of amErica said, yeah, you right.

These assets are acceptable. So when we provide these loans, yes, we have hundreds of thousands of direct jobs from construction and from Operations into these plants. But more importantly, were setting up a fly wheel that that will lead six, seven, eight, nine years later to the private sector being fully embracing of those technologies, many of which they are highly sceptical on today. But you know, the science from the ten thousand engineers, scientists and experts on the dv platform already validated that it's worked, that there is not there is no will at work or will at work risk. It's more than, you know, fifteen of you know, the bankers friends at the country club .

haven't done a delia. Do you have sort of A A code or a personal philosophy on which situations demand government intervention in terms of funding? Are you mention subsidies to tesla? I feel like we're now at a point at early there, there are questions over whether tesla really need subsidies.

I because it's it's so successful and now IT appears that you know some of talk through it's going to be repealed. Like do you have A A person of philosopher? Like when when should government provide subsidies? When should IT provide tax incentives? And when should I .

know when you think about infrastructure, the the frame that most people have is a dog com bubble of of the late nineties, right? So they think venture capital, they think, you know people taking advantage of an IPO in infrastructure, you never get a hundred x return, right?

Like every once in a while with the consumer product like tesla, you might but an infrastructure that's not how the game gets played, right? So what you want is every time there is new technology, Better technology, you want IT to be commercialized. why? Because IT keeps the folks who are doing the old stuff um on their toes right and saying, like you don't get a monopoly just because ur dian business and these new folks aren't in business, right.

But more importantly, you get more efficiency out of the resources that we have, right? All of this stuff takes critical minerals IT takes copper IT takes deal IT takes other things. These new technologies use those resources way more efficient than the old folks.

So for me, if somebody actually meets a ratio of innovation, and more importantly, i'm only providing them debt so they still have to raise equity if they can't successful ly raise equity, they don't get my dead right. And so if they can meet the formula who are mind to pick winner and losers as far as i'm concerned, if you're innovative and you meet the standards that we've said, I want to give all of them loans, right? Because whether it's carbon secur ration or whether it's like a solar and wind, or whether it's nuclear, to me, steal in the ground is red, White, blue.

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I hear you use the word entrepreneur below. You're an entrepreneur you understand I was not even to wear this for, but if you are at twenty five year old, super interest in energy, recognize that there's an economic opportunity here. What what are what are some examples of some great businesses you would be thinking about getting involved in, in the early stage or even starting yourself right now?

Yeah there are so many. So when you think about um the clean cement and clean steel industry, a lot of those folks are PHD students coming out of MIT that are saying we have figured out a way to dramatically reduce the carbon you know footprint of cement and there twenty eight years old right with the newly minted bhd and then they go through four, five, six rounds of capital racing, right to be able to prove their thesis and do something.

It's small scale. And then when they decide that they actually need to make cement at the scale, the state of california wants to buy IT or microsoft wants to buy IT, right, where they've recently made a commitment to supply me. Um it's a billion dollars.

It's always a billion dollars at the time at which boston metals or aspirin ero gel in um in georgia or selling in Georgetown, texas, who makes wire harnesses that makes wiring for electric vehicles ninety percent lighter than Normal wire, right? These are all a billion dollars. And so it's one of those things where it's you know four rounds of capital. But then at some point, when you actually want to be a relevant scale, you need a lot of money.

And then the question becomes, do you want to raise that money as hundred percent equity from the private markets? Or do you need dead to reduce your way average cost of capital in almost every case, whether its for sense, next generation conductors for transmission line, we have materials now that can Carry the two to three times as much power along the same exact right of way, of which thirty percent of all of our transmission lines are approaching the end of life and need to be required anyway, so we can get two to three times as much power through those wires. If we do next generation conductors, the the list of deals where american innovation is ready to serve is very long. We got to commercialize those technologies.

Are the only other industries that you think could benefit from a department like this, like a loans program office for anything else.

Yeah, look at housing, right? Everyone is talking about housing today. Our biggest problem with housing is that we still make housing like our grandparents did.

If you go to germany or sweet in other places, all of those houses are module their construction, right? You make them in a factory and you build them in three days on site. We have that industry now in the united states because of the A A D U market dixerat dwelling unit market in california.

There's twelve start of companies who do that, and many of them are now building their first of a kind factories where they can pump out one hundred thousand units a year just like cars robot did with the serious crash man home after world war two. We are at a point right now where you could make homes consistently and reliably with much higher um quality for two hundred thousand dollars a unit out of these factories. My senses we could do and if it's in that zero home, but there should be some other part of the of the federal system that that should help those guys pretty those modular homes at scale.

As we wrap up your digger, you always have a very successful guy, have a lot of options and you decided to go to work um in government IT gives us your best pitch for why someone my Young talent to person with a lot of option should should serve or go to work in uh D C, A for a government agency.

I think one of the biggest chAllenges of my career has been the denied states has been terrible at public private partnerships, right? I mean, just terrible. We're amazing and innovation.

But that when IT comes to manufacturing solar panels, all chinese solar pills, to be clear, all of that technology was invented in the united states, right? Cats know l. fp.

Technology was invented by john, good enough at U. T. Austin, right? All of this technology that we say that other people are good at was all invented here, right? And i'm tired to the fact that that happens because the U.

S. Government doesn't know how to do a public, private partnership. I think president buying decided to double down and figuring that out.

And he attracted people like me, and obviously the secretary of energy and others to say, I want you to do the hard thing, right? And when you look at the lift off reports that we put out, that's two thousand companies. They gave us their best ideas and proprietary secrets to create a fact base across ten different sectors.

What we're saying, what do you have to believe to believe that it's actually profitable to do things here? And as a result, we've crowded in third of billions of dollars, right? And so I will go back to the private sector. I'm sure how to i'm done serving here.

But you know, I think that what we leave behind now is a group of people who actually now not only believe in the public private partnership, because we've talked about for years, but they now have been taught on how to do IT, right? And I think that unless you bring people in that have scar tissue like I do, who know how like we get hurt when you don't have a good partner in the photo government, you don't really know how to emphasize with the folks who you you're working with to how to best to be a good partner. And I am really proud of the fact that the federal government's a Better partner today.

there never has been having worked in private your entire career before. What surprised to you about working in the government, and especially holding such an important job in the government that there .

is no government inefficiency, right? Not in the work that we're doing, right. You would have thought that there was all this government efficiency. The problem with the government is not inefficiency. The problem with the government is rise.

Taking right for a long time, they were told, if you do amazing things, we will give you a five hundred dollar bonus and if you do bad things, then you're going to get fired like if that's the, if that's the bid ask spread, you don't wanna do anything, right? And so having come in and given all these people air cover and said, hey, you are something was talented people have ever worked with. And truly, the people I work with, loan programs, office, many of whom came from the private sector, but also many that were already here, are truly the most gifted people have ever worked with my entire career.

They just need a permission to do the work. Ninety plus percent of them want to stay into the next administration, right? They love the work they're doing. And so I think demonizing, you know, government is something we need to do less of. And, you know, figuring out how we best support entrepreneurs and innovators in our great country is only we have to do a lot horror.

这个 shaw is the director of the loan program office of the department of energy。 He was previously the cofounder and president of generate capital, where he focused on helping entrepreneurs celery d carpentier ation solutions through low cost infrastructures of service financing.

He also founded sun Edison, a company that pioneer pays your safe solar financing, and served as the founding sea of the carbon war room, a global nonprofit helping entremets address climate change. Jagger was also featured in times list of the hundred most influential people in twenty twenty four. Jagger really enjoy this conversation and very much appreciate your service and good work.

Thank you very much. Thank you. This officer was reduced by cella and engineer by Benjamin penser association, produced as Alice on voice. mr.

Silver aria is a research lead, Jessica lying is our research associate, drew bar is is our technical director, and Kathy delon is our execute pretty. So thank you for listening to profit markets from the vox media podcast network. If you like what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on monday.