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Jigar Shah

Co-managing Partner, Multiplier; Senior Fellow, WRI Polsky Center; formerly Director, Loan Programs Office, U.S. DOE, Multiplier

Search every verified Jigar Shah interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jigar Shah, co-managing partner at Multiplier and senior fellow at WRI Polsky Center, recently discussed his work in clean energy financing and his tenure as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. In a September 2026 interview, he described the office’s operations, noting it had deployed over $30 billion in capital, with a loan loss rate of roughly 3.3%, which he said aligns with commercial bank performance. He also cited the office’s support for scaling Tesla and converting the Intermountain Power Plant from coal to hydrogen, and mentioned increased funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. Shah also reflected on his earlier career, including founding Sun Edison and repurposing energy savings agreements into the power purchase agreement model for solar. He discussed a school district project involving solar, storage, microgrid controls, and electric buses, describing it as a potential model for community emergency response centers. He expressed interest in financing longer-duration battery storage for resilience and emphasized that the energy transition is driven by superior technology and consumer preference rather than regulation, citing low-cost renewables, battery storage, and electric vehicles as examples.

Recent appearances

  • Jigar Shah on Financing Sustainable Infrastructure

    September 17, 2026 · 📺 EcoMotion

    Ted Flanigan interviews Jigar Shah, one of the solar industry’s luminaries and the founder of the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). He also founded and managed Sun Edison, at one time the world’s largest solar company. He then teamed up with Sir. Richard Branson to manage the Carbon War Room. Until his recent announcement at the US Department of Energy, heading up the Loans Program Office, Jigar Shah ran Generate Capital, a specialty finance company that builds, owns, operates, and finances infrastructure assets involving the world’s critical resources: energy, water, agriculture and basic mat…

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  • Jigar Shah on Using Federal Funds to Advance Clean Energy Technologies

    September 17, 2026 · 📺 EcoMotion

    In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Jigar Shah, Director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Jigar discusses how the Loan Programs Office operates in terms of lending and taking risks to achieve its goals. He gives the example of how it helped Tesla scale up, and how they are now working to support the conversion of the Intermountain Power Plant from coal to hydrogen. Jigar demonstrates the incredibly broad reach of the Loan Programs Office, especially now that they have significantly more funding since the passage of the Inflation Reduction A…

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  • Who Is Jigar Shah? (Part 3): Taking Over the Office He Called "Irredeemable"

    August 20, 2026 · 📺 Energy Empire

    On a podcast in 2020, Jigar called the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office "irredeemable" and said it could never be trusted again. A few weeks later, the Biden transition team called, asking him to become the next Director of that exact office. The chair of his board at Generate Capital didn't want him to take the job, so he wrote a memo laying out the conditions that had to change for him to accept, thinking they'd never agree. To his surprise, they accepted all of his demands. A couple of months later, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appointed him Director of the Loan Programs O…

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  • #CCL2026 Keynote Speaker: Jigar Shah on Building at the Speed of the Moment

    August 14, 2026 · 📺 Citizens' Climate Lobby

    How do we accelerate the clean energy needed to strengthen the economy, support the grid and meet today’s climate challenges? Join us for a keynote conversation with Jigar Shah, one of the most influential voices in clean energy finance and deployment. As former Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, Shah helped reshape the federal government’s approach to investing in energy infrastructure, overseeing a major expansion in lending authority and supporting projects across the country. Throughout his career, Shah has focused on breaking down the financial and structural…

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  • Ep. 61: Jigar Shah – United States Department of Energy

    June 13, 2026 · 📺 NACFE

    Jigar Shah, director of the loan program office at the United States Department of Energy, explains what’s happened over the last 10 years with decarbonization, the need to crack the code to deploy technologies faster, getting people past the valley of inertia, the history and goals of the DOE’s loan program and measuring the program’s success. He also encourages the industry to be more vocal about what it needs from the DOE.

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  • "Nobody Cared About Deployment" — Who is Jigar Shah? (Part 2)

    April 30, 2026 · 📺 Energy Empire

    In 2013, Jigar wrote a book arguing climate didn't have a technology problem. It had a deployment problem. The breakthrough-tech crowd called him naive. A year later, he co-founded Generate Capital to prove it — a C-corp, not a fund, because seven-year fund lives kill infrastructure deals before they work. First close: $55 million. People were whispering "vanity project." By 2024, Generate had raised $10 billion and built 2,000 assets. Part 2 of the biography series. Jamie and Jigar revisit the argument with Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla over what was actually broken in clean energy, the C-cor…

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  • Data Center Debate: Are Energy Bills About To Explode?

    April 29, 2026 · 📺 Prof G Markets

    Ed Elson speaks with Jigar Shah and Jon Parrella about whether the AI data-center buildout can really happen at the scale Big Tech and investors expect. They discuss why power is becoming the biggest bottleneck for AI, and propose solutions to ensure that America can build and manage the necessary power infrastructure. Jigar Shah is the former director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Jon Parrella is the CEO of Terraflow Energy. Timestamps 00:00 Today's Number 00:25 Market Vitals 01:14 AI Buildout Panel (ft. Jigar Shah & Jon Parrella) 14:37 Break 15:03 AI Buildou…

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  • Who is Jigar Shah?

    February 18, 2026 · 📺 Energy Empire

    He’s helped finance billions in clean energy and served as one of the U.S. government’s top energy officials—but Jigar Shah rarely talks about himself. In this episode, Phil Radford, CEO of Consumer Reports & Jigar's best friend, joins to change that. Jigar shares the personal story behind SunEdison, the early days of third-party solar finance, and the setbacks that came with building companies in a then-nascent industry. From watching his hometown lose major employers to putting SunEdison’s first projects on his own credit card, Jigar reflects on the early risks, personal losses, and unlik…

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  • Former DOE Official Breaks Down Your Soaring Electric Bill | Plugged In: The Full Conversation

    January 23, 2026 · 📺 EnergySage

    Your electricity bill keeps climbing, and this energy entrepreneur has the perfect solution to fix it—if only utility companies would listen. In this episode of Plugged In: The Full Conversation, host Kristina Zagame and EnergySage’s Emily Walker sit down with Jigar Shah, Former U.S. Department of Energy official and current co-host of the Open Circuit podcast. Jigar doesn't hold back: He says utilities are operating under outdated rules, and the residential solar industry has the solutions to fix America's energy affordability crisis. From explaining why distribution costs now make up 50% o…

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  • What Clean-Tech Founders Need to Know About Financing and Scaling

    November 17, 2025 · 📺 EcoMotion

    What Clean-Tech Founders Need to Know About Financing and Scaling Jigar Shah is the first person to be on Flanigan's Eco-Logic three times. Ted digs right into his current work at Multiplier, his new firm focused on advising clean energy startups to navigate financing and operational challenges. Jigar talks about "exits" and helping entrepreneurs determine the best time and way to sell their companies so that their innovations can scale. The clean tech sector has never been more relevant, he notes. The solutions that entrepreneurs are creating are meeting needs of the country; but not the fi…

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  • Jigar Shah's message for utilities? Take the lead—or take the blame

    October 14, 2025 · 📺 Energy Central

    Jigar Shah is one of the most influential voices in clean energy and grid modernization. From his many entrepreneurial pursuits to his tenure leading DOE’s Loan Programs Office, Jigar has seen just about everything in the energy transition. So in his view, what’s priority No. 1 for utilities hoping to rise to the occasion as demand spikes from AI, data centers, and electrification—and energy dominates conversations from the boardroom to the dinner table? It’s past time to start getting more out of what we’ve already paid for (because the only alternative is a 10% rate increase every year—and…

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  • Deploy! Unlocking America's Energy and Economic Potential with Jigar Shah

    May 08, 2025 · 📺 Texas Energy & Power

    Full Post and Resources: https://www.douglewin.com/p/149029717 Today's episode is a special recording of my live interview on September 6th in Austin with *Jigar Shah, Director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO)*. Previous to LPO, Jigar founded SunEdison and served as president of Generate Capital. He also wrote a book called “Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy,” and many of the book’s themes come up in this interview. Jigar also previously hosted the Energy Gang Podcast, which I learned a lot from, and recommend to folks to this day. I loved this conversati…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think that the solar industry has gotten itself into a frame of mind, which is probably unhealthy, right? The bottom line is that solar industry can get a lot of money to school districts that don't have a lot of cash in their budget. Right. And the frame that we've given people is that well, you need to save 20% of your electricity bill to make this pencil or worth doing. Right. And the bottom line is that for a s”

“We put out about a little over 30 billion dollars worth of capital out the door and as you suggested we've already been repaid a lot of that money. We've made money, but the thing people don't know is we put aside $5 billion in first loss capital into what amounts to a loan loss reserve at the US Treasury. We've lost roughly $1.1 billion throughout our history, which is about 3.3% and basically the same as what a com”

“We're not transitioning our energy system based on regulation, we're transitioning our energy system based on superior technology. People really like low-cost electricity from renewable energy. They really like battery storage in their garage. They really love electric vehicles. They really love all these technologies. And so I mean even heat pumps I find it's fascinating everyone's commenting on gas bands and these ”

“the definition of innovation like was a really important one, right? that we needed to make sure that we weren't required to take real technology risk because like that's really I think what set us back on some of the failures in the program before like LPO should not be taking will it work won't it work risk so we needed to take more mature projects that wouldn't get commercial debt so I think that was point number ”

“The electric utility industry runs on an N minus one structure. What that means is you still need to be able to get power if any one element around your power system fails. That's a very conservative standard, and as a result we use our electricity system only about 40 to 45% of the time. The other 55% of the time is safety margin, headroom, whatever you want to call it. That's why it's really expensive, and that's w”

“I just want to make sure that everyone really understands that 94% of everything we added to the grid last year was clean. And the state that led the way with all of that was Texas. And I want to make sure that people really understand this because I feel like sometimes we get wrapped up in our own narrative and don't quite understand other people's narratives. The state of Texas had a catastrophic event with winter ”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →