Podcast Of The Week: Jigar Shah On The DOE And Energy Policy In America

If you like business, if you’re interested in capitalism, incentives, and the overlap between public and private idea funding AND scaling… you’ll love this podcast episode and Jigar Shah. 

Listen to Jigar Shah on the Oddlots podcast, “Jigar Shah on the DOE’s Role In Accelerating The Energy Transition.” 

Change takes investment. Investment requires money. Money has an owner, and each owner has different rules and requirements for investing. Shah’s own private (and now public) experience in how this works, where it breaks down, and what we can do about it is educational and inspirational. 

Plus, if capital markets aren’t your thing, stay for the engineering discussion. He explains how we’ve built systems (like our electricity grid) that we optimize for cost per hour at the individual level. We have a problem where we’ve become overly focused on end-user costs. It’s resulted in us losing sight of system-wide costs. Turns out, how we collectively use these total assets can have a major difference in individual costs. All it requires is some better thinking and communication. So, so interesting. 

Pair this with last week’s Seth Godin interview.