I think you have to name it after him because the only thing
he responds to his plays to his vanity.
So I would name it the President Donald J Trump offshore wind
farm and I would paint all the wind turbines gold and he would
love it. That's.
All hello. My name is.
Jiggershaw and I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications executive.
And this is Energy Empire you're.
You're an executive. I know well a longer he dinged
me because he told me that he's been getting feedback that I am
underselling myself and not adequately describing my
expertise. So I'm working on that.
I'm just saying you're a baller. Thank you, I appreciate it.
We got to speak at Climate Week. That was so, so, so cool.
That was I don't do a lot of speaking engagements, so that
was really fun for me. Oh, for folks who missed it, we
had to improvise a session and I interviewed Jamie on stage about
all of her accomplishments and how she, you know, really
schemed to get the loan programs office back to its stellar
reputation that it deserves, which she did brilliantly.
And the audience ate it all up. They had never heard this type
of interview and they were like all about it.
Well, it was me alongside a lot of amazing colleagues at LPO.
It was definitely a joint effort, but it was fun because I
have been to so many conferences and trade shows with you.
And it's really funny because people will queue up to talk to
you, and Jigger will have like 10 people, like, standing in
line when he's like, on the trade show floor at a big
conference like Mari Plus. And we stepped off the stage
from Climate Week and people were queued up to talk to me.
So that was fun for me. And so thank you.
So much I had to be your body. Person I had to be like, you
need to wait in line like she's talking.
To somebody, it was like the roles were reversed.
It was hilarious. I really enjoyed it.
So thank you to the DC Climate Week organizers for inviting us
and looking forward to, to doing more things like that and seeing
the the climate and clean energy community in DC and how much
bigger it's gotten. And it's just cool that we can
support an event like that, a whole week of events.
So today I'm excited we are having our this is our first
episode that will be really focused on wind energy.
Wind energy has been the OG right, because it was cost
effective in the late 90s. It had its big heyday in the
late 70s with all those wind farms that were built out in
California and, you know, solar was sort of too expensive.
And so folks were focused on wind.
George W Bush famously had a wind mandate in Texas when he
was governor. And so he's been around and
people like Sandy Rice Key and, you know, Mike Hoss and you
know, Michael Skelly and all those folks come out of that
time and it's amazing to see what they've accomplished.
I think over 10% of all of the electricity in the United States
now comes from wind power. And when you look at the region
from North Dakota all the way down to the Panhandle of Texas,
it's like 30 to 50% of all of the power in those states.
And so it's massive. It really is.
I really, I don't know if people really have captured that.
I don't, I don't know if that's really understood.
You know, I think a lot of Americans, you know, you plug in
your toaster, you don't think about where the power is coming
from. You certainly, I think if you
were to pull Americans on their, their guess about where all that
power comes from, I bet they'd be surprised to find out that
wind makes up such a, a large portion.
I know I'm back when I started in this sector back in like
2010, wind dwarfed solar. I mean, solar was tiny.
We were all working to try and get wind projects built.
You know, one of my first big campaigns was working on the
offshore wind campaign in Maryland to just even set up the
policy mechanism so that offshore wind was just even a
power generation possibility for the state.
But it was really cool to talk to Sandy.
I'm really excited to share this interview and hear more from him
about what it took to to get the US wind power industry to where
it is today. Oh yeah, no, it it was a great
conversation. And it's one of those things
were not only did we really cover, you know, his wind power
days, but the fact that he was early to figuring out community
relations and marketing, I think was a super interesting thing.
And I think the other piece that I want to dive into and was
amazing was like, he really has been a fixture of the
Charlottesville community, right?
I mean, when you think about, you know, all the room energy
companies are from. Charlottesville, it's because.
Sandy was in Charlottesville. He attracted them all to work at
Apex and then they spun out of Apex and started awesome
companies. Let's talk to him.
Energy Empire is powered by octopus energy.
I hear it at every conference. We need more generation, more
transmission. You're saying we don't?
We do, but we're ignoring something faster.
Sitting in people's homes and EV is basically a 60 kWh battery
idle most of the day across the US.
That's gigawatts we're not using.
Utilities have pitched demand response for 20 years and it
still hasn't scaled. Why is this time different?
Because we're not asking customers to change behavior,
we're automating it. The grid treats customers like
demand. They're actually distributed
infrastructure. Connect those assets and you can
shift load overnight at scale. So the constraint isn't
technology, it's. Coordination the solutions
already deployed, we just need to use it.
Thanks, Natasha. That was Natasha Crowe, vice
president of marketing and comms for Octopus North America, if
that's the version of the Grid you want.
Check them out, the link is in the show notes.
Sandy, welcome. I'm not sure that I've ever
heard you on a podcast before. Is this your like first?
Not my first but I I have not done many.
OK. Well, I'm so glad to have
figured out a way to get you on. You have been building wind
projects, I don't know, since like 2000, maybe before
investors thought of it as an asset class.
Is that right? Is it 2000?
Yes. So when did you believe wind
power would actually become a business?
I was living in the Czech Republic for a couple of years
and living in Germany for a few years and the Eastern Europe
countries, the the snow can be sort of black.
You know, it can, the pollution is, is, is really you can, you
could feel it back then especially.
And the thought was if I could ever put my career in a way
where I could be sort of applying myself towards, you
know, pollution mitigation. That was the big, a big idea.
And you know, spooling forward in in the year 2000, there was a
death in the family and I sort of had a career, but I wanted to
step back and, you know, evaluate what to do next.
And I've been the CEO and CFO of a software company and didn't
really have any background in, in wind.
But I remembered, you know, sort of what, what would I really
want to focus my life on? Where, where would I want to
have impact? And I came upon, you know, clean
energy. It's clean energy would be a
place where, where I could really address the issue of
pollution. And so at the time, solar was
way too expensive, but when really presented itself as a
solution, it was competitive. And were you already in
Charlottesville? Yeah, I was in Charlottesville
at that time. OK, so you built Green Light
Energy, sold it, and then you started Apex Clean Energy and
scaled that up. So what did you learn the first
time around that made the second company scale faster?
It's it's about the team really. By the time we started Apex, we
really knew who to hire and we really invested in the team.
We recruited Mark Goodwin as the COO.
He came from EDPR and formerly Horizon and he really knew what
scaling a company looked like, right.
And, and so our, one of our key strategies was just bring all of
the key functions in house. So that's interconnection, GIS,
legal, financing, engineering, construction, everything.
And our, our other big strategy what, what we sort of figured
out was we wanted to invest in the energy resource.
So it was all about building value by understanding we are in
the energy business, not in the project development business.
And and so that that meant creating a portfolio of assets
that were as big enough and that you really put money behind it
such that you could be building consistently because that's the
only way to have a business is to have consistent revenue.
And this is an industry fraud with risk and, and are are real,
you know, core competency was was just squeezing down that
risk and, and figuring out how to how to survive in an
environment that was very, very challenging.
Yeah, I remember meeting Zelka and Mike Skelly way back in the
day because we were backed by Goldman Sachs.
And I remember, like, early wind power projects, you know,
required convincing land owners, electric utilities, banks,
regulators about the sector's potential all at once.
I mean, did you find any one of those parties harder than the
other? I mean, you can sit down with a
landowner, you can work with a utility.
The regulators have their processes, but I'd say banks are
where the big hurdle. Specifically, how do you
monetize the tax credits that Congress wanted to give you?
So if you think about it, you know, these transactions are
huge and you're getting all these credits and you're never
going to be able to use them all if you're if you're a developer.
So you bring in a bank and the bank takes the role of
essentially lending their balance sheet so that they can
absorb the tax credits and they pay for that upfront.
And that's how you use project financing to to get it built.
Well, here's a fun question. What is your favorite win
project you ever developed and where is it?
What makes it special? For example, when I was in
Hawaii over Christmas and my husband and I had just arrived
and we just rented a car and we're like driving over, you
know, through this mountain range and then suddenly there,
there's these wind turbines and they're huge.
And I was just like, like, sometimes like these, these
projects are really visually stunning and they, they really
just stick with you. Like obviously I was immediately
like taking pictures and I, I'm sure I, I actually didn't look
up what the project was, but it's beautiful on the island of
Oahu. So what's your favorite project?
Like make it real for our audience.
Like tell them where it is and what it's like and and what's
special about it. That's an easy question.
My first and favorite wind farm was Elk River Wind Farm.
It's the landowner we got to know right from the outset was
Pete Farrell was in Kansas and 150 MW project and and had had
many challenges took about five years.
And so I guess you you learn to love the things you work hardest
for. Is it still operating?
Yes. 150 megawatts was large at that time.
It was, yeah. I mean, today, I guess that's
probably on the smaller end of what folks work on, right.
But when you and I, I remember you and I talked a lot when I
was at Generate Capital, because in 2015, you bet the farm on
wind power when the tax credits had run out, right?
And Congress was deliberating as to whether they wanted to extend
the tax credit. And you really made a big bet,
right? You bought up other people's
development projects when they were less short, right?
And So what made you so confident to make those big bets
in 2015? It's a great question.
I mean, I think that there are so many positive attributes to
the, to the asset class and I just, I, I think that the
industry even at that point was, was too big to fail.
You know, GE was a player, GE is a picking, you know, U.S.
company. It's not as if I had any, you
know, anybody's ear in Congress and, and people were whispering,
but we certainly heard, you know, reassurances that, you
know, people working hard at it. And frankly, you know, it was a,
a calculated risk. We saw that a lot of our peers
and, and smaller players had run out of money and, and really
needed somebody to, to pick up the, the cost of carrying the
projects and, and pushing them forward.
And we were, you know, of the mindset that this was the right
thing to do. Certainly, you know, incredible
value and we got a lot of them built.
Yeah, you did. So far, listeners, you may not
be familiar with the stats around wind power.
What's the state of the industry today like?
How much power does the industry produce nationally, and how has
it grown since you first started out?
The growth has been near exponential.
I mean, it's, it's, it's a perfect S curve.
Recently wind hasn't been growing as fast.
And I'll say that's in in part because solar and batteries are
a little bit stealing the show. They are easier to develop and
faster and not quite cheaper. But when does is, you know, it's
really applicable in the best spots and and when it's when you
get those spots, it's unbeatable.
And it certainly has advantages in the winter time or obviously,
you know, it produces power 24/7.
But I think it's bigger than the solar industry.
I think solar is sort of approaching 8% of total
electricity production in the US and I think winds at like 12 or
13, right? Correct.
Yeah, from a market share standpoint and the two of them
together are bigger than coal. Yeah, super exciting.
Kind of a stock and a flow thing.
The, the, I think the flow of solar projects coming online is,
is bigger, you know, in any given year these days, then then
when. So when was once the leading
edge of clean energy? I know when I started working in
in this sector, that's what everyone was excited about then.
And solar was so tiny at the time.
This was in like 2010 or so, around the time they get started
today. Solar and batteries, as you
mentioned, often get more excitement.
They seem to have a lot of the political momentum and certainly
more capital attention. So what do you think has changed
that has led to that shift? It's economics, it's the cost
curves accelerating. And again, when does, if, if
you're going to be in the business of, you know, bringing
new power plants online when power takes longer and costs
quite a bit more and you need a lot more engineering.
And one of the big, you know, things you need to do is study
the wind for, for a couple of years in order to get a really
firm understanding of the wind resource and, and to underwrite
that resource. So, you know, it's consequently
solar is easier for folks to develop.
It's for the most part applicable more across the
country. And, and as such, you know, as
soon as it started becoming economic it it really got a big
lift. One of the things that you and I
talked about and then Mark Goodwin also I think talked
about was the fact that you guys really took community engagement
seriously early on, right? You put together big budgets for
each project. As soon as you knew this project
was likely to move forward, you got in early.
You met all the political folks there.
You put together ad campaigns, right?
Who championed that within Apex? And you know, and the follow up
question is like why did so much of the rest of the industry
treat that as optional? That's a great question.
I think, you know, we had been burned.
It's not as if we got it right immediately.
Maybe we we knew from from earlier years how, how tough it
could be. But the, the person who led that
effort at at Apex and ended up heading up a team of like 14
people was Davi Wilson. So she came from a background of
organizing, community organizing, and she brought a
lot of skills about understanding, you know, power
maps and who understand, you know, who across the community
is going to be the most influential and how to engage
early, you know, tell your story.
And, and she had a way, she, she had a map that that that showed
it was a really sophisticated way of assessing the risk that
any given community might really not like the idea of a wind farm
and not be interested in hosting 1.
And that helped us calibrate how we would invest in order to, you
know, try to match in most cases, the fossil fuel interests
who were who were spreading misinformation.
And, and it was a real political battle in many communities in
these days that's still going on.
Which brings us to our a great next point, which is that
President Trump famously hates wind power.
He is like, talk about community engagement.
Somebody in Scotland really needed to get to him.
They needed to power map that project and they needed to
neutralize him because no one hates wind power more than the
president. And he's even taking the
extraordinary measure of paying multiple companies now because
there were more headlines yesterday that he has now.
He's now paying off additional companies to stop developing
offshore wind in this country. So if you had two minutes to
sell him on wind power and try to change his mind, what would
you say? My I don't think you can reason
with his convictions. I believe he's dug in and it's
probably for more reasons than than Scotland.
Well, you know what I would say, I'd say, Mr. President, I just
bought that wind farm and put a bunch of dynamite at the, the,
you know, sort of foundations of each one of those towers.
If you push this button like, we'll blow this thing up and
then we'll like you just put your hatred for wind energy in
the rearview mirror. That would be the easiest $200
million I've ever spent. I think you have to name it
after him because the only thing he responds to his plays to his
vanity. So I would name it the President
Donald J Trump Offshore Wind Farm, and I would paint all the
wind turbines gold and he would love it.
That's all mine. Yeah, I guess on that front,
Sandy, like is the anti wind fervor mostly an American
problem or have you actually seen that in Europe and other
places? There's push back all over the
world, but I don't think it's nearly as strong as in this
country. I mean, I'm interested in your,
you know, your perspective. I I never really tried to
develop wind outside of North America.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think that in general, there
is a level of minority power in the United States that you don't
have in other places. So like here, 20 very vocal
people can shut down a project when 98% of the community
actually wants the property tax revenue and, you know, and all
the other revenue that comes in. And those 20 people can make it
feel like, you know, everybody's against the project.
And and I find that whole thing to be weird.
It's weird and they're really working against themselves,
right? Because these are power plants,
they have very little impact. You can farm all around them.
It's it's it's then the land owners really want to do it.
So often times there's 40 to 200 land owners that are ready to
start collecting royalty checks and, and then it gets ripped out
from under them, usually after years of work.
It's really a shame. And that, you know, the, the,
the schools, the fire trucks, the bridges that you know,
aren't going to be repaired because there's no big taxpayer
parachuting in. I mean the places that get these
wind farms they have and solar they, they really get
significant benefits and then millions of dollars, sometimes
10s of millions of dollars a year.
Well, though you've stepped back from the day-to-day at Apex and,
and you and I reconnected after I bought my house here in DC You
know, I got one of the first houses that I think got a Pearl
certification. And so that's when I realized
you were part of Pearl, another Charlottesville company, And it
was so informative. So for listeners ever heard
about it, what problem is Pearl solving?
Wow. I mean, there is just a massive
blind spot in the real estate industry.
If you think about buying a car, you go up and look at the window
sticker, you'll see the safety ratings, you'll understand what
comfort features it has and be all listed there for you.
You're going to understand about operating efficiency, right?
You know, miles per gallon. You're going to see like what
fuel it uses. You're going to understand the
energy that's powering it, right.
Is it is it gasoline or diesel or electric?
All of that's right there in front of you when you buy a
house, that information is there, but it's you often have
to look for it. It's not put in one place for
you. So Pearl actually moved away
from just certifying houses because we are only addressing a
very small part of the market when we are certifying the best
houses. But over like 9 years, Pearl
developed very, very sophisticated, you know, using
building science, just a way to score the performance of a home.
There's hundreds of data points about any home and Pearl has
collected all of them and has ranked homes and scored them by
their performance. So the Pearl has a product
called the Pearl Score and that's an acronym for, you know,
SCORE. So safety, comfort, operations,
resiliency and energy. And energy is not efficiency.
Energy is like, have you invested in energy assets?
Do you have solar panels? Do you have a home battery in
your basement? Is your house ready for for an
EV? All kinds of things related to
essentially a whole new asset class that that consumers can
choose and they are choosing real estate and industry hadn't
and still doesn't really have a way to to assess them.
While Apparel Score takes each one of those pillars and and
ranks your home based on those and then gives you an overall
number that's comparable across houses.
I love this concept so much. I sold my house.
I sold a house in DC eight years ago and had a solar array on the
roof and definitely did not feel a solar array that was paid off
and did not feel that I earned the value of that or you know,
solar system back. Now the solar incentives in DC
are so good that that system had already paid for itself because
the S RAC market was so strong plus the net metering and it
penciled out. But here in Virginia, where
Dominion is my utility company, that's not the case.
So essentially, I mean, I put the solar on my roof because
that follows my personal beliefs that I want that solar energy
system to exist. But I did so with the assumption
that I may not get that value back when I sell this home in
like, say, 10 years or so. And this is the experience for
so many homeowners. Like, homeowners could spend so
much money on insulation, solar, efficient HVAC, batteries, and
often get little to no credit when they're selling.
And you're trying to change that story.
So why do you think the market has been so slow to value
efficiency? The information is buried.
It's you know, the information about the investments you've
made in the efficiency is buried.
The energy audits and other contractor invoices, other
documentation you might have is sort of disconnected completely
from the transaction itself unless you hand somebody a
binder, and even then it's not part of the listing.
And also, I just want to say there's a very important nuance
that that Pearl's picking up here.
Efficiency is hard for people to understand or relate to.
It's abstract. It's hard to get people
interested in a concept. What people want to hear about
is the benefits. So safety, comfort, operations,
resiliency, and, and energy assets.
Yeah, I'd I'd like to learn about all of those.
Those are things I care about and I understand.
So that's what people value. And Earl takes those benefits
and and translates all the technical language and
everything into a scoring system.
And, and it's they worked with the Department of Energy and
National Renewable Energy Lab. They, you know, the appraisal
institute, the I Triple E building Performance Institute,
they've all come over 9 years and helped Pearl because Pearl
was trying to certify homes. And so when we, when we made the
pivot and we, we, you know, essentially raided every home in
America, that foundation, that block is, is the engine that,
that, that helps people see the performance.
And we need now like the next step is, is to get, you know,
Realtor and Zillow and all those people to list it as part of the
listing. You know, they like data and,
and this is very legitimate, you know, data on homes.
And the fascinating thing is we're not going to be totally
right, right with, with all the public data that we have.
And there are hundreds of data points.
We let the owner, homeowners look at their score, obviously
go to the registry and if something needs to be corrected,
they can, if, if they got a heat pump 6 months ago or something
that can be updated and their score will update.
And so it's a way to, you know, build transparency for
everybody. It's not kind of not like FICO.
So in a way we are scoring homes from a lot of different
directions. We also, the operations piece
does tell you how much it cost to, we know, we estimate how
much it cost to operate your home over a year's time.
The energy point does tell you, you know, what's the net present
value of your solar system or the energy assets you've added,
you know, that you've invested in.
And so there's a real financial impact to the value of the home
for sure. And, and, and, but the, you
know, across the, the myriad of things you're looking at when
you're buying a home, this, this is going to stand out.
And the executives at Pearl, we've, we've got people from
Rocket and Zillow and other of the, the very large industry
players who we've recruited, you know, working to bring this to
market. We're sort of an alpha stage
right now. You can go now on to the Pearl
score.com and put in your address and you'll see, you
know, you'll see your, your Pearl score and can can go to
the registry. I'm I'm very excited about this.
I actually just got an eco city home award from my the city of
Alexandria. I and I'm about to put my sign
in the front yard like I want my credit.
So I want my Pearl swore Sandy. So I'm going to go get that, but
I also want to know if if homes start being priced fairly on
energy performance, like I really do believe it's such an
important factor. Does Pearl have evidence or like
data to show that this will change consumer behavior in a
meaningful way? Please say yes.
We believe so, yes. The certification certainly did.
So when Jigger got his certification for his efficient
home, the research showed over the years we could, we could
demonstrate, you know, empirically that that homes that
had certification sold for more 5% more was the the figure.
And I think that again, since we're not focusing on the words
efficiency, we're really ranking homes based on the safety and
the comfort. And just to bring this home for
a second, if you haven't a gas stove, the safety of your home
is the, the rankings going to go down, right?
Because the air quality, you know, people are concerned about
air quality and they should be, if you don't have the
ventilation, right? That can really harm you and
your kids. 40% of homes that have gas stoves have children
with asthma or, or conditions of some type.
So this is a a really real thing that that we're capturing and it
and it, it spans all types of categories.
It would be great to get to a place where you know, this sort
of Pearl score is a fixed every home, just like you have square
footage or school district comps.
I wanted to transition to communications.
I mean, you've really argued that we should stop saying
energy transition and start saying a replacement, right?
What's the difference? I mean, not going to be militant
about it. I say transition all the time as
well, but I think it's sort of more direct if you think about
what's happening, the entire energy industry is going to
change and we are heading to a place where we're just not going
to be using fuels anymore. And so you think of everything
that that burns something like cars or furnaces or the whole
sector needs to to swap everything out.
And these are multi trillion dollar markets.
And, and there have been companies like Tesla and many
others who see the car market and they say we've got a better
type of car and they bring it to the consumers and put it in
front of consumers and consumers can make that choice.
Once a consumer chooses an electric car, they've kind of
replaced their car. They, they haven't transitioned
per say, you know, transition suggests that they're doing it
slowly. Just the, the speed of the
change as well is, is I think more along the lines of of
replacement. So if you think about who gets
to choose what our future will be, it's, it's not the demand
that people selling stuff, It's, it's the consumers, both
businesses and private individuals.
And they're all leaning in and the growth curves all show that,
you know, people are choosing electric cars and, and they're,
they're choosing solar for their homes.
And those two choices, you no longer need to ask permission,
right? Like 20 years ago, you could go
to your utility and say, boy, I wish you'd do some, some clean
energy, but you wouldn't get very far.
This is a totally different game.
It's, it's like moving from Blackberries to iPhones.
It can happen really fast. And, and I think obviously the,
the war that we're fighting now in Iran has a lot of people, you
know, sort of looking very closely at electric cars because
they are now the more predictable, you know, stable,
you know, source of, of transportation.
It's, it's, it's scary to see your gas prices, you know, going
up. It's, it's a real economic
hardship globally and electric cars now are just so much
better. And they're, they're at a point
where they're actually at par or cheaper than the, the upfront
cost of the ICE car. So you one hand you're paying
the same or less for the car, then the operating costs are
much lower and and you're not paying for fuel, right?
Especially if you've got solar panels on your on your roof.
Yep, I've never I've never appreciated my solar array more.
I just charged my car for free. I just drive around for free.
I like never. I forget about gas stations
except when I need a snack. Yeah, snack stations.
Sex papers exactly. That's what they are now in my
family. People ask me like, how long
does it take you to charge your, you know, your electric car?
And I'm like. I mean I.
Don't even think about it. I don't know what's in my
driveway. Plug it in like we don't.
I don't. Have time?
Charging in my in dominion in Virginia yet although please,
please add that I would love to have that.
I don't even think about it. I don't even think about it.
I can't even tell you how how like the Peace of Mind
associated with that. But Sandy, I love what you're
saying about like basically you're, you're suggesting that
the bottleneck for scaling all of these solutions is not the
technology, it's permission. And that's certainly something
that Jigger and I talk about all the time.
So can you talk a little bit about that where you see that
theme of, of permission being most valid?
Is it like in terms of permitting, politics, culture,
utility, incentives, all of the above?
Where are we on that topic? I mean, it's all of the above.
We've talked about permitting. There's a real like predatory
delay. You can credit Alex Stefan for
that quote for that terming. But the the fossil fuel industry
is making it hard to get permits.
The politics are absolutely challenging these days.
And culturally, you know, I think climate is bearing down on
the fossil fuel industry in the sense that every day we're all,
you know, the question is being presented to us, when are we
going to, you know, when are we going to respond to this?
And are we just going to drift? And I think that when society
decides to act on climate, it'll be a real paradigm shift.
And that's I think culturally what's what's needed, the
politics of today is, you know, it's noise, it's incumbents
resisting change. It's divisive politics, it's
denial, it's misinformation, it's chaotic and there's a lot
of uncertainty and that's stalling decisions, that's
keeping society from moving forward and seeing what really
needs to be done. And and so that discord and and
strife is holding us back. You know, the old script is
we've been, we've we've had a diet of bread and water, right?
The old script is we're dependent.
The problems too big futures, Grimm, there's clean energy
myths, climate denial. We need like a new narrative to
confront the doom and the gloom and the fact is and and not many
people know this unless you're in the energy industry.
We're making huge progress and we're dominating the like new
additions of clean energy globally.
You know, over 90% of what's new capacity coming online for
utility scale is solar or when 90%, you know, there are
solutions like EVs and and you know, huge public support.
And so the trends are favorable. I just say that the narrative
then if we're talking about politics and culture, the
narratives missing, we need people to understand that their
choices matter, that this is actually working.
The industries done decades of work and and the products are
here. Well, we're certainly in that
moment today. I mean, I just, I think with
what's happening in Iran, it is very clear to everybody around
the world that like we need to start scaling, right?
You saw that China, China's exports went up 21% just in the
month of March alone versus February.
And so I think they exported 2 and a half million cars last
year. They're going to export almost 7
million cars, electric vehicles this year, right?
And so I do think in the areas where it's obvious solar,
battery storage, EVs, you're going to see this massive scale
up this year. I wonder, though, what
advantages fossil fuels still have in your mind that the clean
energy people underestimate. Obviously you're not going to
power your Boeing 747 with solar panels right now.
Definitely not. And the advantages they have, I
think it's just goes back to influence.
It's the last, it's the last thing they have.
They've lost the the battle of physics, they've lost the battle
of economics, they're losing in the markets.
And at this point, you know, somebody should call the game.
They are losing market share and and it's time to stop, you know,
fighting progress, I would say, but they.
Well, China does feel like they're trying to call the game,
so it does feel like there's somebody in there.
You've got to admit it's like we've got the electron sorted,
but not the molecule, right? I mean, we still, like you
mentioned jet planes. That's where my mind immediately
goes. I mean, I know we were trying
really hard to get some work done on sustainable aviation
fuels back when we were at LPO, but that it just realistically
the technology it's, it's not there.
It hasn't scaled yet, right? And then the other thing is the
biggest accelerating use of fossil fuels is in the
production of plastics and it goes up and up and up every
year. So I mean, I think that we've
got electrons sorted. I think we have so much more to
do on the molecule. And So what do you say about
that, Sandy, in terms of what what needs to happen there?
What do you see as a trajectory in terms of replacement when
we're looking at that that kind of area specifically?
Those areas are tough. The products are coming, but
they're not as far along as the electric sector for sure.
And I and I think that it's not an area that I have a lot of
expertise. But the other type of energy
that we're all using a lot of is just food, how we feed ourselves
and the, the progress there is staggering fermentation and, and
cultured meats and all kinds of food products that in some cases
you're actually already consuming because they're,
they're not coming at you as a, as a consumer.
They're going into the supply chain.
And they're identical molecularity to other products,
other proteins that are, you know, might end up in your, I
don't know, condensed milk that you're drinking at Starbucks or,
you know, in your, your vitamin powders or, or that type of
thing. So, you know, there's a lot of
work to do there as well. And it's an area of incredible.
There's a lot of progress that that could be made and and
people that are working hard at it.
So Sandy, I, I wanted to finish out on just your experience in
building a clean energy ecosystem in Charlottesville,
right? Because not only did you start
Apex in Charlottesville, not Houston or San Francisco, but
you actually invested in a lot of, you know, companies locally.
So let's start with like, what's so special about Charlottesville
and what advantages did that give you?
It's in the water, right? It's, it's Jefferson.
It's the ghost of Jefferson. It's a great question.
I mean, it's a great place to live.
I was born and raised here. I have accumulated, you know, a
lot of capital over the years, building and starting and, and
selling companies. And I've always felt like it's
not really. It's, it's, it's the product of
the work of our teams and, and, and, and the, you know,
attractiveness of these products and, and how much success we've
had. These have been for the most
part, really profitable businesses.
And so there's, there's a lot to work with there, a lot of
resources. And I've been plowing it back
into, you know, climate solutions.
And so since I'm here, I'm like, looking around the solutions,
maybe, you know, people in Charlottesville are, you know,
knocking on my door and saying, Hey, you know, I've got an idea.
Well, when I started S Edison in the DC area, I mean, we were the
only major clean energy company you could work for on the East
Coast. And so like we really attracted
the best and brightest. And you know, most of the folks
who we were attracting, we're getting paid on the GS schedule
in the DC area. And so our salaries were a lot
more, you know, sort of reasonable, but also nobody
would, would be able to steal our folks, right, Because they
didn't want to move to California.
Their their grandparents who live nearby, like everybody was
here. So like, we was great for
retention. I mean, we, we really lucked out
and had, you know, the best people.
Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of people who have left Apex and
and started other companies in Charlottesville as well.
So the people are, you know, obviously key to that whole
ecosystem. We brought a lot of people in
town. A lot of people were really
thrilled to get out of the big cities.
They had young families, they were professionals starting out
on their career or, or pretty well advanced and it was, you
know, an easy choice. So Sandy, I mean, just to finish
this out, I mean, you've been building extraordinary companies
for, you know, 2 decades. You spotted wind energy early.
You have invested in, you know, sort of waved and title, you
know technologies, you've obviously invested in home
certification and seen that through.
I mean, that's been a bit of a journey, right?
What opportunities are smart people still underestimating
today? I.
Think smart people are investing and they believe, you know that
we're going to electrify everything.
The opportunity is so big, it's possibly more approachable, you
know, getting into utility scale, anything of getting into
the energy business at that scale is got more, potentially
more hurdles. But the fact is that solar is
modular and scalable and, and it's this sort of energy
democracy that's just flowing all around the world.
And so homes, the distributed energy, I think has all kinds of
innovation, you know, ahead of it and, and, and tons of
deployment. I mean, we're just a few
percentage points compared to, you know, Australia's like is it
40%? Oh, yeah, No, I I'd say my
answer is for as large as batteries have become, it's
still grossly underestimated. Like I feel like batteries are
just going to change the world. I mean, the notion that like, I
have an electric vehicle whose battery is so large that it
could power my house for a week, right.
And I think vehicle to grid technologies are going to come
out like next year for almost every electric vehicle.
And if you have a power outage, you could just plug your car
into the to the panel and flip a switch and just, you know, run
your house off your electric car.
It's just it's not how much more progress we have to deploying
batteries. Completely.
And the whole transportation sector is going to lift the
electricity sector. It's going to add so much
flexibility to the grid. There's, there's a river, Amazon
River, of course, coming into the market, all with these huge
batteries and and they can, they can provide services to the grid
that that, you know, individuals would be paid for and that's
like a self reinforcing loop right there.
It's it's. Really exciting.
Well, Sandy, I'm just so pleased that you were able to join us to
Share your story with us. It really has been an
extraordinary journey and one that frankly has resulted in the
fact that every state from North Dakota to the Panhandle of Texas
is, you know, dominated by wind power production right from your
first project in, you know, in Kansas to, you know, like the
fact that I think I was now over 50% wind powered.
And so just just extraordinary. Thank you for being with us.
Thanks for having me. It's been, it's been a pleasure.
It's been delightful. Energy Empire is supported by
S2G Investments. If you haven't checked out their
podcast, I highly recommend it. They have a great recent episode
on the long term effects of the Iran war and the blockade of the
Strait of Hormuz. In the episode, Sanjeev Krishna
and Franco Sullivan and Bala Nagarajan make a compelling case
that this disruption could be the most powerful accelerant for
renewable energy in a generation.
And in future episodes they'll be exploring how those forces
are reshaping our food systems and ocean intelligence.
Sound interesting? Go find the S2G podcast and
start with the global energy order has changed now what?
Wow, well I mean that didn't disappoint.
It is amazing how calm Sandy is for having basically started the
wind energy industry, the modern wind energy industry in the
United States. Calm.
Yeah, that definitely he was. I really, really wanted to hear
the details about his favorite projects.
That's my favorite thing. I love it when we make the
projects real and we can really describe like what it looks like
for and what it feels like and what it sounds like for people
who maybe don't live near one of these projects.
I love wind turbines. I am always delighted when I see
them in real life. And it's kind of like a nerdy
thing that I do that I will always take photos of them.
And it's, I'm like, oh, look, you know, I'm like excited.
My daughter's rolling her eyes in the back seat of the car.
So it was really fun talking to him because he's been personally
responsible for getting gigawatts.
Gigawatts and gigawats, Yeah, big.
Watts and big watts of wind turbines out into our landscape.
Yeah, my son makes fun of me now because he watched Back to the
Future and now he's like, hey, they said jigawatts.
The other thing that I loved about talking to Sandy is just
how excited he is about like the Pearl score and the work he's
doing in Charlottesville and all the other stuff he's doing.
And then it was just like, and then the detail that he went
through around the marketing and comms focus they had for each
project, like it is it crazy that everyone doesn't take that
stuff as seriously as he did? It's definitely refreshing
whenever you come across an executive who really gets it,
particularly on the community relations piece of how.
I mean, you can't skip it. The permission structure for
building a large industrial project is so fragile.
And I think we're seeing that now with data centers that you
really cannot skip that community relations component.
And he really understood that from the very beginning and
that's one of the reasons he was such a big success.
And then as you heard, I am very, very enthusiastic about
the Pearl score and I will be getting one soon.
Oh yeah, no, it's worth it. The reports really great.
One other thing I wanted to highlight was he talked about
the big bets he took in 2015 around the tax credit
expiration. I think what people don't
remember is this is the tax credit deal where Obama traded
oil exports for the extension of the wind and solar tax credits.
So it was a big deal. If you remember, during that
period of time, all of the environmental groups were
against extending the solar and wind tax credits in exchange for
the oil export ban being lifted, right?
And so it was touch and go like people really thought that we
were going to lose the tax credits.
And and it was in that like moment that Sandy went to all of
the wind developers that were desperate and saved their
projects and bought them all believing that the wind tax
credits were going to get extended.
And Apex has, you know, been spending the last, you know, 10
years building all those projects that he bought at the
time, but like living through that moment because he was
trying to borrow money from Generate Capital at the time.
And so I was in the middle of it, like, it was touch and go.
A lot of people were like, I don't know that this is going to
get extended because the environmental groups are all
against this, right? And so Obama, like, had to go
over the heads of the environmental groups and say,
we're going to cut this deal. Wow, that's, I mean, that's an
amazing lore. I mean, no risk, no reward, but
that's what makes him a visionary, right?
To like really have faith in that moment that that wind and
solar would win out in the end. Is is really extraordinary.
And then, you know, just connecting that political deal
back to where we are now. Imagine if we weren't exporting
oil and gas to the extent that we are now with the Strait of
Hormuz still closed and those exports have become really
important. And because of the actions of
President Obama, we have the domestic oil and gas industry
that we do, which is cushioning us from the worst impacts of
this crisis in Iran. Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, like, obviously everybody is crediting
President Trump for all this oil and gas production.
But I mean, a lot of the LNG was built under Obama.
Like Obama was like pretty pro. All the above, right?
And all that's below, as it were.
Yep, well, the Trump DOE is definitely trying to credit the
president for all of this, and I may or may not have left a
comment on a LinkedIn post and the.
Energy. Oh, Jamie, you could not help
yourself. Did this man, Obama did this?
We're not going to credit him for that.
Oh my God, you cannot help yourself, Jamie.
I can't help it. Well, listen, I like across a
couple of social media platforms, I had to hit the
unfollow because early on I was feeling very triggered.
But when I see things that are just patently untrue, there are
limits. OK, there are limits.
Yes, there really should be, but it doesn't appear that there are
limits right now. I feel like people just make
stuff up in whole cloth, but, you know, but it's, it's, it's
getting bad out there. I mean, like gasoline went up
twice in one day in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, to $5 a gallon.
And so it's it's getting bad. Wild.
But again, imagine if Obama was president.
Oh my God, he'd. Be freaking out.
Everybody would be freaking out at the the level of chill.
We're too chill. We're too chill.
We are too chill. And with that, thank you Sandy
Reisky, the Chill Wind Energy executive.
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