The Ledger, every show

“I would say that having done this nuclear stuff for the better part of three years, I don't know of a single project that was hurt in any material way by the NRC. Right? So I do see the NRC being a bottleneck where we're building 10 reactors a year, but we're …”

“You know, what amounts to, I think, 15% rate increases every year for the last four years for PG&E because of uncontrolled distribution grade investments, and it's not wildfire related. Let's just be crystal clear. People call it wildfire. Three to four percen…”

“The amount of load growth that we can handle, within the actual system that we've already paid for is gargantuan. It can easily take us through probably 2034, 20 35, right? Which, by which time we think nuclear will be more cost effective, enhanced geothermal …”

“I don't think any EPC contractor wants to wrap that thing and provide you a guarantee price, but whatever, you know.”

“Most of us who've been in the solar and wind industry have generated 36% annualized returns every single year since we were in there from 2007.”

“This is why we have a three-year backlog on distribution transformers. It's not because we have a shortage of distribution transformers in this country. It's because everybody wants to fix the problem using 19 eighties approaches instead of virtual power plant…”

“I don't think there's a single success story in hard tech not one in the energy space that didn't involve massive government involvement, right? Not one.”

“I think where we are today is that the clean energy industry in the United States, in all of its forms, invests roughly five hundred billion dollars a year but pays about two hundred million dollars a year in influence. The oil and gas industry invests about t…”

“But yet, I think that the actions that they're taking around freezing payments and some of the other things are going to lead to higher costs and a lot more uncertainty in the private sector, right?”

“I think turnaround is fair play. Like, I mean, I really do think that the wind and solar pauses at the Army Corps Engineers and Fish and Wildlife are, you know, retribution for a lot of the stuff that the Biden administration did, the oil and gas industry”

“I think they're going to be forced to pull it back too, just because it's 90% of everything that gets deployed in the grid, right? And so at some point, if none of that stuff gets deployed in the grid, we're going to have rolling blackouts.”

“There are platforms, for instance, that are for sale now. Yeah, that we don't have cash to make, make it through October, and we don't know what's going to happen, and we can't wait for certainty, and so we're selling out, right? So I think you're seeing the v…”

“During the Biden administration, there was a big crackdown by the IRS on the renewable energy sector for tax credit and tax equity policies. Around step up in basis and some of that stuff, and I think the Trump administration is continuing all of that work, an…”

“Today, you know, solar power installed is, you know, 30 dollars a megawatt hour. Without the tax credits, it's 50 dollars a megawatt hour. That's more expensive than 30 dollars a megawatt hour. I get that. But that's not out of the money. Right? New natural ga…”

“EVgo is now basically profitable because of, like, they've got huge increases in the use of their DC fast chargers”

“But like, for closed loans and loans that have obligated funds, I think they'll honor all those loans.”

“The only places that matter if you're going to get to two trillion is defense, social security, and Medicaid, and Medicare. That's the only places that matter. Like, the discretionary part of the budget is so small that it just doesn't matter. You could zero i…”

“I thought his memo was great. I thought it was well-balanced. I thought it was, you know, like, what you would have expected from a George W. Bush appointee. So, like, I think Chris Wright's a fantastic pick as the Secretary of Energy, and so I'm glad to see h…”

“Battery storage will be heralded as the savior of the grid a year from now, and we will deploy 10 times as much battery storage as we deploy natural gas.”

“It's important for this sector to stop acting like it's alternative. When you're 80% of everything being deployed every year, sometimes 90%, politics is part of this. So are regulations, so are lots of other things. Like, people have to make sure that they und…”

“People are so afraid of having anyone hate them that they're like, oh, I don't want to mention that we're a, we're an applicant to the loan programs office. I don't want to mention that we're, you know, applying for this grant or whatever else, right? That's n…”

“I don't think we're going to have seven percent load growth every year. I think it's probably more like two and a half percent, but it's still something that we don't have the tools to deal with right now.”

“When you think about the normal course of business for most utilities is to build more natural gas plants, Build more transmission and build more distribution. Today, that formula results in 10% rate increases every year. That is not workable.”

“And now, with all of the additional incentives, you can build a new nuclear reactor, as long as, you know, get some of the bonus credits, like energy communities, etc., at a hundred dollars a megawatt hour. Guess what else is a hundred dollars a megawatt hour?…”

“One, Everything needs to be opt out. This notion that we need to spend 700 dollars to, like, talk to people and beg them to opt into something is looney tunes. Like, when you hook up something, it's automatically opted into a VPP, and then we should give you a…”

“In order for this to be successful long-term though, they have to figure it out securitization. And that, I think, is the biggest challenge, because a lot of these folks like doing weird stuff, and if you do too much weird stuff, then that loan will sit on you…”

“I think we've always known that net metering has declining value beyond sort of five percent penetration, and, but when you get to five percent penetration, the solar industry has so much political power that they're able to keep things going.”

“They did the NEMM three point O piece, but there's no transparent way of getting paid for your battery piece.”

“The game of just putting dumb solar in people's houses, you know, providing them a loan, right? Making money on that loan, right? And it's a securitization story, right? So you get debt from Wall Street, and then you own the equity slice, and then you try real…”

“And so, and when you look at, you know, interconnection cues from utility-scale solar and that kind of stuff, it may actually end up being net-net cheaper to put solar on these four-acre warehouse rooftops than to put it in the middle of a field.”

“And so if you make a simplifying assumption, which is that no one is backfeeding anything into the grid. Right? Right? That the batteries you know, basically use case here is to make your home go off grid. Right? Sort of an energy efficiency play. So your home…”

“It is very clear from the reports that hydrogen and carbon management have already seen liftoff, right? There's 40 plus billion dollars worth of announcements on real projects, and we outlined that in the report.”

“It's also very clear that you don't have liftoff in nuclear or long-duration energy storage, right? That here are the challenges that we see.”

“And the goal, I think, is by 20, 25, 26, right, when OPG is in full construction for there to be 20 orders that come in, right, and I think I think once that happens, then I think all the electric utilities will come very quickly, because they have a huge amou…”

“By contrast, you have two other liftoff reports we have in there the advanced nuclear liftoff report, and then the long duration energy storage report, where we're probably only on track to maybe nine billion dollars worth of investment in long duration energy…”

“The sign of the long decline is when these large corporations say investing in, in really expensive R&D that takes 10 years to come To real fruition is no longer worth doing is, is really that sign you're looking for, and I think all of the majors, as well as …”

“So I believe that by 2030, we will have ten million tons of clean hydrogen in this country.”

“I would say they are less than 20% of the total capital that we're seeing going into each one of these sectors, which I don't know that I care about.”

“Even the solar and wind industry in the United States today hasn't saved a gigaton of carbon. Right? For all of the, like, you know, this is amazing, it's fully mature, it has not saved a gigaton of carbon.”

“When you look at the investment that's been made over the last 12 months in hydrogen, almost none of it is from the oil and gas industry.”

“The notion that we're going to be heating our homes with hydrogen coming through pipes, like, I mean, I think that is, that's never going to happen”

“And then the last thing I would say, it is very obvious to everyone that electric vehicles will break the current grid. It is not possible to do what we're currently doing, letting people just charge whenever they want, do whatever they want, whenever they wan…”

“That first commercial facility is a billion dollars. You tell me you're going to go out and raise a billion dollars of equity and then build that plant. No, you are not. You're going to have to use the loan programs office, but they're scared.”

“There are states that you think should be competent that aren't. Right. They are not applying for the money that we have. And we will literally say to them, here is the 14 step process you should follow to use this because you only have two hundred million dol…”

“How many cities have banned, you know, new natural gas hookups, right? But then the actual, like, implementation of figuring out how to help LMI customers with loans, right? Has fallen flat, and so LMI customers are paying an average of 30% interest when they …”

“You can reconductor all of the existing lines and get all of the existing, All the new transmission capacity that you need. We have reports out of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory that say that. We have, like, private sector and geo reports, et cetera, that say th…”

“Like, we should not allow any electric vehicle charging stations to be installed without co-locating batteries at that location. It literally makes no sense, because that, that use case needs batteries to be co-located to minimize grid impacts.”

“Such that you know, I think green ammonia, you know, today is quite profitable without any subsidies at all even at today's cost of hydrogen, right?”