There were a lot of people going, "I don't think your model's working, Jigar. Like, I think you should give up and do something else." And like now everyone's like, "Oh, it's amazing and $10 billion raised and 2,000 assets." But like while we were doing it, people really were whispering in the corner going, "I don't know about that vanity project that Jigar's doing. Like, I don't think that's working, right?" We really had to stick with it.
Hi, my name is Jigar Shah. I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications consultant, and this is Energy Empire.
Jigar, I'm super excited for today's episode, our second in our series of your biography. We're getting into who is Jigar Shah and what makes him who he is.
No, I'm not excited. I don't like talking about myself. I like learning about all these other extraordinary people that we get to talk to.
Well, I like it because even in doing the prep for these recordings, I learn more about you and about, you know, how you became the personality that you are and the force of nature in our industry. So we are going to dig right in here. In our first segment in this series, we talked about the founding of SunEdison. That was a big focus of our interview. And so now we're moving on and we're talking about you left Carbon War Room and then you wrote a book. I don't know if all of our listeners know necessarily that you were an author. I have a signed copy behind me on the shelf. So, you sat down to write a book. You're a talker, you're a podcaster, you're a deal maker. What made you feel like those ideas needed to exist in book form? Was there a frustration behind it? What was the story you felt like you needed to tell specifically in that format?
Well, I think you know that before I met you, I had this wonderful guy in my life, Rob Wise, who had helped me at SunEdison and helped me at the Carbon War Room. And he thought we needed to write a book. He was like, you know what? You have all these great ideas. And remember, we had just finished the Carbon War Room experience, right? I had left Carbon War Room. And we created this whole series called the Creating Climate Wealth series, right? Because part of I think the underlying feeling was that at the time people really thought that they were going to change how large corporations operated. And what we realized at the Carbon War Room was you were really going to see the change from entrepreneurs, innovators, new companies, and they were going to force large corporations to change because they were going to disrupt them, right? And so that's really where the Creating Climate Wealth story came from.
I also, you know, had all these other disparate thoughts that needed to get put into a frame that made some sense. Like for instance, I hated the word impact investing, as if investing in clean stuff meant a sacrifice, which I never thought that investing in clean stuff was a sacrifice. I always thought it was good business, right? Like, obviously some transactions take more time. Like you can't just download the documents on LegalZoom and invest in it. And so you have to actually think about things, so it takes a little bit more time to do stuff. So I wove that into it. But then there were other things like just the power of being available, right? I mean, which is a superpower I still have today. But like, you know, the fact that nobody seemed to have business cards at the time. Like everyone, I mean, I always carried them. I don't anymore just because I find that no one actually does anything with them. But I'm available on like LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it is. Like I just feel like it's amazing to me how many people don't make themselves available and don't answer questions and don't figure out how to be helpful to the next generation of folks. And so like I had a lot to say and so I said it.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, you were very accessible. You may or may not have made a comment that you were more accessible than a ham sandwich.
I loved how we owned Josh Hawley in that interview. Or in that hearing. Call that comment in a congressional hearing. And then I also do recall that you may or may not have dressed up as a ham sandwich for Halloween that year.
Yeah, I probably took it too far, but it was so much fun.
I feel like we can safely recount that anecdote now. Oh my god.
Well, I mean, Jigar, I know I've seen you fire off a thousand ideas in a single meeting. This is why I really do need recordings whenever you and I have a phone call because otherwise later I'm left trying to decipher. You just can't get them out of you fast enough and I'm trying to furiously take notes. A book requires you to organize all of that into something more linear. So, was that hard for you? Like, what did the process look like as the book was coming together?
It was hard. I mean, I used a ghostwriter, which made my life a lot easier. And basically it was about just getting all of your thoughts on a page and then figuring out how they relate to each other. So, one of the things that came out of that effort was recognizing that the clean energy sector, like many sectors, but I think especially the clean energy sector, wasn't going to get solved by five super large corporations. It was really going to be a million companies that do, you know, like $10 million worth of business every year, right? Or 100,000 companies doing $100 million worth of business every year, right? That's how we were going to get to the trillion dollar impact that we needed to get to. And when looking back on it today, like that is exactly how we got here. When you think about how many awesome entrepreneurs, like, you know, install solar in their communities, sell electric vehicles, do maintenance on, you know, equipment, right? Like figure out how to help transition folks. It really has been an extraordinary industry and we've hired so many people. I think every year there are thousands and thousands of people who join our industry, not just in the United States, but hundreds of thousands of people around the world who've joined our industry. And today, thank God for them, right? I mean, with all of the disruption in the Straits of Hormuz and the conflict in Iran, like they're all stepping up in their specific countries to help people with solutions, with solar panels, with battery storage, with wind power, with electric vehicles.
I mean, and so a lot of what I talked about was the power of entrepreneurship and the power of small businesses. But the other thing that I talked a lot about was the power of finance and the power of capital, right? And figuring out how to tap into mainstream capital. One of the things that I got so frustrated by was how many people thought that we needed impact investing dollars and needed to figure out a way to get people to give us cheaper money than what mainstream capital cost, and convincing people that pivoting towards mainstream capital is how you make big change. And that was not common knowledge back in 2013.
Yeah, that's a really interesting point and that kind of follows you through to your work at LPO. Where, you know, kind of I would say like a core idea in this book is that we needed deployment, not invention. The core argument is that we don't need to invent new technology. We need to deploy what already exists using smarter business models. I mean, you've been saying the same thing for years now. In 2013, however, that was really contrarian and most of the climate world was still obsessed with breakthrough tech. So, did people push back and did you get called naive?
Yeah, it's so funny because like people obliquely referred to it as like deployment versus innovation. I'm so tired of that. And like I look back and I'm like, wait, I think they're talking about me. Like I guess they're talking about the fight that I started. But you know, like I mean, who could be against innovation? It's not like I was ever against innovation. But what I found was that no one cared about deployment. They were sort of like, well, if it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, well, it wasn't meant to be. And it was more sinister than that. Like when it didn't happen, people didn't try to identify the reasons why it didn't happen. They would say that the technologies weren't good enough. This is primarily what my beef is with like Bill Gates and, you know, Vinod Khosla and some of those folks is if the technologies that we're representing didn't immediately take off like the internet or computers or whatever it is that they were involved in, they were like, well, there must be something wrong with the technology. Not that like, oh, there's structural barriers to permitting or utilities aren't even allowing folks to have permission to connect these systems to the grid, right? Like it obviously couldn't be anything other than the technology is somehow flawed, is what they were saying.
Absolutely. I mean, and again, I think these are the same themes you're still talking about and you were pounding the pavement trying to get people to realize that the big challenge was business model innovation and not necessarily technology innovation back then. And I still, you know, think that's like a big focus of what your core message is. So, you know, did you find that the book changed anything? Like did deals happen because of it? Did it open doors that wouldn't have opened for you otherwise?
You know, it's one of those things where so many people have read the book, right? When I published it, I ended up self-publishing it just because I went to all of the publishers and it just seemed like such a fiasco to work with them. And so, I worked with this group called Icosa. There's still a few videos that they took of me on YouTube from when I had black hair and, you know, they had me like writing stuff on a whiteboard. And the way that we sold all these books was I just said yes to every single keynote address that people asked me to give to everything that year, right? Just said yes to everything. And my speaking fee was basically you had to buy enough books for half of the audience for me to speak. And then I would sit there and like sign all these books. And so many people got a book. It was crazy. Like even today people are like, "Look, see, I got a book from you at this conference and like you signed it."
And I don't know of any specific deals that came out of it, but I have to say that like so many things go my way that probably shouldn't or don't need to. And I think it's because I've been accessible. People have seen my book, they've read my book, they've like, you know, followed stuff that I've said. And as you suggested, like I've been consistent. Like I don't like, I feel like everyone thinks that I'm giving hot takes, but I feel like it's the same hot takes, just maybe said slightly differently since 2013. And so, no, business has been really good. And so, like I think it was positive. Even when I started Generate Capital, I remember we just kept like boxes of books and everyone who visited wanted a book. So then, that was another way we got a lot of books out the door.
This episode is supported by S2G Investments. If you've been listening to me, you know that I'm done talking about R&D. We have the technology, the real question is, can we deploy it at scale? When I joined Sanjeev Krishnan on the S2G podcast, we skipped the hype and talked about what actually matters: affordability, fit-for-purpose capital, and getting real infrastructure built. S2G Investments is one of the only firms who brings that same deployment-first mindset to energy, agriculture, and the oceans, connecting the dots across the real economy. Listen to the S2G podcast on your favorite podcast app now and start with my episode on energy affordability.
Love that so much. And that's a perfect segue into your next big gig, Generate Capital, co-founded in 2014 by you, Scott Jacobs, who was former McKinsey, and Matan Friedman, venture capital resource finance. And the core idea at Generate was infrastructure as a service, like financing, building, owning, and operating sustainable infrastructure assets. And you guys worked across energy, water, waste, transportation. It was very broad remit. And by 2024, Generate had raised more than $10 billion in total capital and built a portfolio of more than 2,000 sustainable infrastructure assets, which is just incredible in 10 years. So, talk to me a little bit about the origin story. How did you and your co-founders come together and kind of where did the concept come from?
So, Scott and I have known each other for years. He was on the Obama transition team. And he was the one who brought my name forward to Richard Branson to actually hire me for the Carbon War Room. So, I have him to thank for that as well. So, Scott and I knew each other for years. And then Scott and Matan overlapped at Harvard Business School. I always seem to start like companies with people who went to Harvard Business School. Like SunEdison was the same. And so they knew each other. And so, Scott brought Matan and I together. And it was fantastic. Like, I mean, Scott was just a master fundraiser, big thinker about how, you know, capital markets work. I, as we just talked about with my book, was talking about business model innovation. And so many people were doing it, right? So many people were like batteries as a service, solar hot water as a service, right? Like, you know, renewable natural gas as a service, right? So, like a lot of people were doing the business model innovation that I was talking about. And then, when they went to go raise money, there was nobody to raise money from. Right? Like, everyone was like, "That was just in a book. We're not doing that." And so, you know, like Generate Capital became the place that people came to for these great ideas.
And we were the group that would spend time with them. Like, if you remember my story at SunEdison, I mean, we had closed the first couple deals at like Whole Foods and Staples and IKEA and other places. And then when I went to people who I would have thought would fund the project, they were like, "Solar's too weird. I mean, there's no way we're going to be the first investor in solar, right? That seems too risky." So, we wanted to be that place that I could have come to, you know, when I was going out to raise money for SunEdison, right? For project finance. And we were that place. Like, we would give everybody their 3 hours or 4 hours and we would let them fully explain their businesses. And sure, we had to pass on a lot of stuff. That was Matan's job. He was like the no person. And like someone had to be the no person. That's how you make money in this business.
But it was so fantastic. Like, we were the first $100 million into battery storage. We were the first $100 million into renewable natural gas. We were the first $100 million into behind-the-meter natural gas, which is so funny because now everybody's like doing it for data centers. And so, like we were like cutting edge in so many places. And yeah, and then we started a whole new business model too, right? We were a C corp. We were not a fund. And so, we were a corporation and people bought shares of our corporation. We were not a fund. So, we did all sorts of crazy things.
That part of it is really interesting to me. And Generate didn't just write checks, they built, owned, operated the assets. They're still doing that today. And that is very different from a traditional fund. So, why did you guys decide to structure it that way? And, you know, what problem were you trying to solve that kind of traditional finance was really missing the boat on?
So, one of the things we realized early on is when you're a fund structure, you have a fund life, right? So, people give you money, but then they expect it back in like 7 years or 8 years or 9 years. And what you realize with these companies is that you can't promise that, right? Like when we invested in renewable natural gas, I think we probably put our first investment in like maybe 2017, 2018. We had a lot of challenges. Like, the first project didn't work right, right? We had to like bring in an expert to help fix it, etc., etc. Generate Upcycle, which is what that company is called now, has just put itself up for sale and they're doing a lot of stuff. This is 2026. So, this is like 9 years later. And they finally got all of the projects working beautifully. The returns are exactly what we thought they were going to be, just 3 or 4 years later than we expected. And everything's going well. But like, you need permanent capital to make those kinds of investments. Like, what happens a lot of times is if you have to give your money back to an investor after 7 years, but the entrepreneur is on the cusp of getting it all right, but you've just run out of time, then you sort of force them to do dumb things to be able to give you your money back faster so you can give it back to LPs, right? And so, that doesn't align interests between the investor and the entrepreneur. And we wanted to fully align interests between what we were doing and what they were doing. And the C corp was the only structure we could use. And then, funny enough, Trump came into office in 2016. And when the Trump tax bill passed, they cut corporate taxes from like 35% to 15%. So then everyone was like, "Jigar, you guys are so smart. I can't believe you guys figured that out, knew that was going to happen." And obviously, we had no idea that was going to happen. We completely did not predict that at all. But then, a lot of other people started copying what we were doing.
So, one thing that you referenced in our last episode is that when you sold SunEdison, you told the buyers exactly what not to do, which was do not use your own balance sheet, always use other people's money. And then, infamously, they did the opposite and they ran it into the ground. So, when you were building Generate, was that cautionary tale in the back of your mind? Like, did watching someone else destroy the prior company that you had built shape how you structured this one?
I mean, in some ways, right? You partner with people that you think are going to be awesome. Although, I had great partners at SunEdison. I think that in general, I find that every situation is different. So, you have to turn the page, and I did, like obviously at SunEdison. And I also turned the page at Generate Capital, right? Remember like in 2021 when I joined the Biden administration, they forced me to sell all my shares in Generate Capital. And so, I did. And so, you know, I didn't think about it at all. I didn't coordinate with Generate while I was in office, etc. So, I don't think that that's what I was focused on. But I think what I was focused on was figuring out how you actually unlocked these projects.
So, one of the things that we did when I was at Generate was we always expected our deals to go bad, right? We expected the sponsor, right, that we were investing in was going to lose interest in the project or somehow not be able to manage the project. So, we hired people in-house that were experts in everything. And sometimes it took us like 2 years or 3 years after we made an investment to find the right people. But, we always did it or dedicated ourselves to doing that and that made us better because we were prepared to step in and operate the projects if, you know, something went wrong. And we had to do that a lot, actually. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I don't mean that like in the sense that the people that we invested in were bad people. But, like sometimes things don't go right. And like the assets themselves are fine. The batteries are fine. The renewable natural gas plants are fine. The generators are fine. But, you have to lean in. And so, part of I think what we learned at Generate was just not to be a financial investor, but actually to be a partner with these companies and really think through what could we do to best help them succeed. And that, I think, was a completely different point of view than the rest of the investment field.
