This year, the energy industry changed faster than we could talk about it. We collectively said more than 225,000 words on this show — some of them were informed takes, some speculation. So how did they age?
This week, Stephen reaches into a stocking stuffed with quotes from past episodes, and Jigar and Katherine must decide to defend, update, or disown their own words.
Then, we honor the storylines and surprises that defined the year. The categories include:
- The biggest plot twist
- The breakout star
- The best villain
- The most underrated storyline
Finally, we look ahead and make one bold prediction for 2030. In a year of growth, uncertainty, and a bit of existential dread, join us for our recap of the last 12 months.
Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card!
Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.
Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com.
Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we’re creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.
Transcript
Stephen Lacey: Do you guys ever write reviews for things online?
Jigar Shah: Never.
Katherine Hamilton: I read them. I read them assiduously, though.
Jigar Shah: Yes.
Katherine Hamilton: And you can’t just read the first few because they’re always like, “Oh, this is awesome.” And then you go way down, and it’s like, this thing smells really weird, or it’s itchy, or the place that said it had a kitchen doesn’t actually have an oven. I mean, you got to read deep.
Jigar Shah: No, I have a system. You have to click on the three star reviews, right? Not the one stars because they’re just out for blood. But the three star reviews tell you all of that good stuff. And then I’ll probably make the purchase anyway, but it’s good to know what you’re walking into.
Stephen Lacey: Do you guys ever read the reviews for Open Circuit?
Jigar Shah: I think I did read the reviews for Energy Gang once, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the Open Circuit reviews.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, my God. I’m refreshing Apple like every other day seeing if there’s any reviews.
Jigar Shah: Do we have any good reviews?
Katherine Hamilton: Do people review us really?
Stephen Lacey: Oh, yeah. What do you think I’m asking for at the end of every show?
Jigar Shah: Rate and review. Oh, goodness.
Stephen Lacey: I mean, look, we ask it at the end of every show, but this year we’re asking for one gift from you all. If you want to help this show grow in 2026, go to Apple, and write us a review. Spend some time while you’re doing your Christmas shopping. Just pop on over there. Maybe you can give us a rating on Spotify, too. But the majority of you are on Apple, so go ahead, and do that, and I will force Jigar to read them.
Jigar Shah: Only if they’re three stars.
Stephen Lacey: No, no three star reviews, five star reviews.
Jigar Shah: Okay. Only five star reviews, but give us constructive feedback within your five star view.
Stephen Lacey: Constructive feedback is good, but yeah, preferably five stars. But hey, I’m not going to force you to do anything. Also, while you’re doing that, our listener survey is linked in the show notes. So, that’s going to help us understand a little bit more about who you are, and how we can structure content in 2026. And all entrants are going to be entered into a raffle for a $100 Amazon gift card.
Jigar Shah: I have to say, for whatever reason, I have been an insidious person that’s filling out surveys this year.
Stephen Lacey: Oh!
Jigar Shah: I get all these random surveys right after I go to a conference, and they’re like, “We’d like to improve your experience next year. Please fill out a survey.” And I’m like, “You know what? I will.”
Stephen Lacey: And how critical are you?
Katherine Hamilton: You know what? You can.
Jigar Shah: And I’ve got time.
Stephen Lacey: And? Are you really critical, or are you nice?
Jigar Shah: Yeah. I am very critical.
Stephen Lacey: That’s good.
Jigar Shah: I’m like, look, you wasted my time in these three things, and so you should fix that. And this thing didn’t work perfectly well, and these things were good. And I don’t know, I’ve gone to so many conferences now. I have strong opinions.
Stephen Lacey: Well, if I see like a really overwhelmingly positive survey response from like Shigar Jah, and I’ll know who to look to.
Jigar Shah: I put my name, and email on this. You will know.
Stephen Lacey: From Latitude Media, this is Open Circuit. It was almost exactly a year ago that the three of us reunited, and somehow in that time, the energy world changed faster than we could talk about it. So, as we barrel toward the end of the year, we’re doing something that feels appropriate for a 12-month period that never stops surprising us.
First, I’m going to make Jigar, and Katherine revisit their own words, and ask them to defend their takes, and observations from the year. Then in honor of award season, we’re handing out our own year-end honors, celebrating the twists, and characters, and storylines that define 2025 for better, or worse. And finally, we’ll look ahead with one big prediction for 2030. Our 2025 retrospective is coming right up.
Welcome to the show. I’m Stephen Lacey. I am executive editor at Latitude Media. Jigar Shaw, and Katherine Hamilton are here with me as always. And guys, this is our 40th episode. Did you know that?
Jigar Shah: Oh, for Open Circuit.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, for Open Circuit.
Jigar Shah: Because I start counting since like 2013.
Stephen Lacey: Okay.
Katherine Hamilton: It’s like the 400th episode.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, it is probably somewhere around the mid 400s for us. I can’t remember how many episodes we’ve recorded, but it’s been a year, or almost a year since we got back together. So, this is episode 40. It’s been therapeutic for me. I can tell you that.
Jigar Shah: Oh, totally cathartic. I mean, I have to yell into the microphone.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. Yeah. And I think everybody should start at the beginning of the series, and listen all the way through, or else you’ll miss some things.
Stephen Lacey: No. Jigar was just reminiscing about it like a 2016 episode, or something. And even then, it was a live show, so the audio quality was spotty, but things have changed radically since then.
Jigar Shah: But our takes have never been hotter.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine Hamilton is the co-founder, and chair of 38 North Solutions. How are we doing?
Katherine Hamilton: I am doing great. Thank you. We’re approaching the holidays quickly. So, I am in full on what am I going to bake, and what am I going to buy people mode?
Stephen Lacey: So, you’re not like journaling, and cleansing yourself mentally?
Katherine Hamilton: That’s what January is about.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, are you a resolution guy?
Jigar Shah: Oh, hell no.
Stephen Lacey: You just roll into the year.
Jigar Shah: I feel like if I need to make an improvement, you got to just make the improvement. You don’t wait until like a certain time of the year.
Stephen Lacey: Or if you have an improvement for Jigar, write it in the Apple comments. How about that?
Jigar Shah: Oh, gosh, yes, please. I would love to crowdsource improvements.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar Shah is the co-managing partner at Multiplayer. He’s the former director of the Energy Dominance Financing Office. How’s it going?
Jigar Shah: Oh, my God. I’m not the former director of the Energy Dominance Financing Office. We had a far more respectable name. And I actually have my vest that says LPO on it. But I am super excited about the fact that two of my old colleagues got promoted this week to co-chief investment officers. And so I think the office is continuing to operate.
Stephen Lacey: Do you guys ever listen back to the episodes that we publish?
Jigar Shah: Well, I just randomly listened to one from 2015.
Katherine Hamilton: I sometimes like to listen to see what got cut, and what stayed in. What was the storyline? Especially if I mentioned something, and somebody that I know might be interested, I’d like to refer back to it, and tell them when we talked about whatever the thing is, and it sometimes helps to know how that all kind of turned out when you edited it.
Stephen Lacey: Well, I hope you went back, and listened to a lot of episodes this year because it’s going to help you out a lot in our first segment, and I need to put my hat on for this one, wherever it is here. So, we’re…
Katherine Hamilton: Oh, I thought he was going to wear a Santa hat.
Stephen Lacey: It’s not a Santa hat.
Katherine Hamilton: It’s like a John Deere kind of hat.
Jigar Shah: Exactly. He’s like camouflaging himself for deer hunting.
Katherine Hamilton: You look like the guy that builds those structures on Instagram out of like bark, and wood, and…
Jigar Shah: Oh, God.
Katherine Hamilton: …mud.
Stephen Lacey: All right. So-
Jigar Shah: That’s New Hampshire coming back out.
Stephen Lacey: We collectively said 225,000 words this year, ranging from the informed to the wildly speculative. Got my stocking right here.
Jigar Shah: Oh, wow.
Stephen Lacey: And I have stuffed… Jigar, this is my stocking, and you’ve got your quotes, and my stocking.
Jigar Shah: Wow.
Stephen Lacey: I put a bunch of quotes from you both into separate stockings, and I am going to pull them out at random, and read them back to you, and you have to respond with three different options. You can either defend it. Yep, still right. You can update it. The world has changed. Here’s what I’d say now. Or you can disown it. I was wrong.
Katherine Hamilton: I never said that.
Jigar Shah: I never said that. That was AI slop.
Stephen Lacey: I am at peace with that. So, I’m holding Jigar’s stocking here. Let’s start here. Are you ready?
Jigar Shah: No.
Stephen Lacey: No one in their right mind is thinking about doubling down on manufacturing in the United States right now while all this uncertainty is occurring. So, that is Jigar talking about the broad policy chaos, and we were talking specifically about the Trump Administration’s trade war with China, the imposition of new tariffs, and Jigar was arguing that the re-industrialization was not going to happen under the current regime of the administration. So, Jigar, explain what you meant by that, and do you stand by it?
Jigar Shah: Yeah. I think I was talking more about the clean energy supply chain, and all the stuff that we were working on under the Biden Administration. So, maybe there’s a clarification there, but like I certainly think we’re manufacturing more natural gas components, and turbines right now than we have ever before. But I mean, I think I stick by it. I think in general, the rules by which you get paid back for manufacturing here in the United States have still not been clarified by the administration. I think a lot of the input costs still have tariffs on them. I think that like when you think about what some of the long-term policy might look like in the future, like it still is very unclear. And so it’s really hard to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into a new manufacturing facility right now.
Stephen Lacey: So, any thoughts on what you think the story of Trump’s tariff policies will be when we look back on 2025?
Jigar Shah: I mean, I don’t think anyone actually has seared it into their brain. And so my sense is if he rolls most of it back in ’26, they will have forgotten that we ever had them in ’25. Like that’s the weird thing about Trump is he just like can get away with completely changing the story, and then disowning the fact that he had any part in creating the conflict in the first place.
Katherine Hamilton: Well, and claiming that he fixed it.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. Right. Create the problem, get rid of the problem, and say you fixed it. All right. Katherine, over to you.
Katherine Hamilton: Uh-oh. Who’s stocking do I get?
Jigar Shah: Exactly.
Stephen Lacey: You get Sandy’s stocking.
Katherine Hamilton: Okay. All right. I’m all in. Sandy, thank you. I hope I do you proud.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. Here we go. I got a lot of quotes in here. I got a really big stocking full of paper. There are fewer EU companies wanting to come to the US. Now the US is much less attractive. So, I think this is kind of similar to the story we were just talking about. The policy uncertainty is now pushing a lot of US companies over to Europe. We’ve talked about that extensively in a handful of shows, and many European companies are deciding not to invest here. How has that story played out, Katherine? And do you stand by that observation?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I definitely stand by it. I mean, I just anecdotally, I’m an advisor to a fund, a North American fund, and they had sort of gone… They’re in Canada, so they had invested in Canadian companies, and they were really looking at US companies, and they still are to some degree, but they’re also like, “Let’s go to the EU.” The policies are more favorable right now. And I think a lot of this has to do with two things, policies, and then also just uncertainty of what’s happening. So, I would stand by it. My hope is just watching what some states are doing, that maybe some states will be luring companies back, and keeping companies here. But yeah, the overall gestalt is Europe might be a better venture right now.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, you were bouncing all around the world this year, talking to lots of different countries, people administering clean energy policy, trying to figure out how to lure these companies. So, how has that story shaped up as we close out the year?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, it’s been rough. I mean, I think part of the challenge in these other countries is that they don’t really have the attitude that is needed, I think, to attract a lot of these companies. Canada, for instance, has still not clarified whether they’re willing to take real risk, right? They’re like, “Well, we’ll give you a loan, but only if a commercial bank would give you a loan.” Or in the EU, the problem with the EU is it’s now a much bigger market in terms of population than the United States, but it’s still 27 member countries, right? So, getting something done in Germany does not mean that you could really make any money in France, or any of the other countries. And so the EU itself is not very powerful. And then Australia continues to just want to sell rocks. They keep talking about wanting to upgrade, and make finished goods in Australia, but then every time you pitch them an idea, they’re like, “Well, I don’t know.” “That seems like a lot of risk. Why don’t we just sell more rocks to China?” And so I think that I’m still waiting… I think that the ambition is there, but they haven’t yet figured out how to really show leadership such that a lot of these companies feel like they want to make big moves into their jurisdiction.
Stephen Lacey: All right. Let’s pull out Jigar’s stocking. Here we go. Let’s see if we can get a spicy one. So, far they’ve been a little tame.
Jigar Shah: What?
Katherine Hamilton: Everybody in blank, state, city, country is stupid, I believe would be one.
Jigar Shah: Yes. 100%.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, here’s a good one. I just have never met a better climate president than this one. That was during our live show in the spring, and you were reacting to news that Democratic states were vigorously defending their state climate laws against federal executive orders, and the president’s policies were driving people to do more. Do you stand by it? Do you defend it? Do you clarify it, or do you disown it?
Jigar Shah: Oh, no, I still defend it. I mean, look, I think that he’s not a good climate president in the sense that he believes in climate change, but in terms of capital formation, he has shaken everybody, and forced them to look at their priors, and then recommit to this moment, and everyone did. I mean, you just saw major announcements this week between NextEra, and Google, and Meta buying more gigawatts, and then the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance announcing that this has been a record year for long-term contracts of renewable energy, right? Battery storage has been on a tear, right? I mean, I just think that… Do I think that this president is good for capital formation? No, not at all. But do I think that this president has forced people to reconsider whether they’re really buying these technologies, because they’re superior to their fossil counterparts, or whether they’re actually being subsidized? Yes. And in almost all cases, they’re like, these are superior solutions to their fossil counterparts. We’re buying them because they’re better for us.
Katherine Hamilton: I think Bill Gates, you would consider the outlier in that, right?
Jigar Shah: Oh, my God. Don’t get me started, Katherine.
Katherine Hamilton: Trigger word.
Jigar Shah: You’re just bating me, Katherine.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, have you seen states step up more than they otherwise would have, or have they suffered because of the drawback of federal funds, and…
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, so I think that both can be true. So, a lot of these solar for all program was completely cut after funding had already gone out to the state. So, the states was just at an event in Michigan this week, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re like setting up all the instruments we need to continue to do the program regardless. We already had all the systems in place. We had the communities gathered. Let’s do it.” So, I think it’s a little bit of trying to get things done in spite of what’s happened.
Stephen Lacey: All right, Katherine, over to you.
Katherine Hamilton: Is it about…
Stephen Lacey: Does your heart beat when I do this?
Katherine Hamilton: I’m just like, is it about FERC? That’s all I can think of.
Stephen Lacey: There has to be pain felt about taking these votes when they wrote letters, and letters clutching their pearls, and saying, “Oh, we’ll never vote for a bill that does any harm to our constituents.” That was you talking about Republican members of Congress who you were calling for political accountability. You’re pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans who privately supported these clean energy tax credits, but then ultimately voted to repeal them anyway. So, what will we look back, and say about this Republican Congress when it came to the energy legislation?
Katherine Hamilton: Well, hopefully in the midterms, we’ll see some accountability for all the votes that they took, not just against clean energy, but against people’s pocketbooks. And I think you saw that in the sort of off year elections in Virginia, and New Jersey, and other places, and Georgia, the PSC. People are mad, and they’re mad about their energy costs, and what they took the vote on is definitely detrimental to all of that, and isn’t helpful. So, they haven’t been held to account yet, but I think they will be.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, what does accountability look like in the context of this story?
Jigar Shah: I mean, the problem with our industry is that the people who lead our industry do not actually understand what it means to go for the jugular, right? When someone wrongs you, like they sign a letter, and then they just say, “Oh, I’m never going to have consequences for voting against the letter.” What you do the next day is you basically find the most right wing Nazi you can find in their district, and you give them $100,000 to primary them, right? And you make them have to spend 10 times more to defend their seat in the primary, and say all sorts of unconscionable things that they don’t want to say on the record to defend their seat, and you embarrass the crap out of them. And then the next time you see them, you say, “Hey, next time you wrong our industry, I’m going to do that again.” And so like, don’t do it again, right? But we didn’t do that. So, in the end, they’re like, “Eh, I can make empty promises to the clean energy industry, and there’s no consequences to that.”
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. One of the more interesting interviews that I heard this year on that subject was between Lara Pierpoint, and Shamik Dutta of Overture VC, and they were talking about how to build political power in Washington. And he explicitly talked about the crypto industry’s playbook. They went for the jugular. They go after lawmakers specifically, they run campaigns, they spend a lot of money, and he said like, “We need more cajones in this industry.” I thought that was like a really interesting corollary.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. I’m going to dig in a little bit more to that later in the show about some of these numbers.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. All right, nice. All right, let’s do one more for each of you. Jigar. I’m going to pull a few out here. I want to get…
Jigar Shah: I have a really spicy one in there. I’m going to find it.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. First try, this one got a lot of spicy reactions. Residential solar has a bad product today. Put your big boy pants on, and fix your product. That was Jigar much earlier in the year talking about why… We were talking about the high cost of residential solar in the US compared to other countries, and how the industry needs to mature, and focus on a better experience for homeowners. Jigar, there are a lot of reactions to this online. Do you stand by it?
Jigar Shah: Of course I stand by it. Not only do I stand by it, I worked really hard to help them this year, and we got Tesla to issue that paper around how they can shave a third, or 40% of the cost of their project. We created a coalition at RE Plus of installers. There’s roughly 10% of all the installers in the country who have now committed to hitting $2.00 a watt installed by the end of ’26. We’ve gotten like all of the supply chain folks to agree that they have to figure out a way to like cut costs across the mechanism. We figured out AI tools that can help really reduce soft costs. We helped pass laws in Texas, and New Jersey to like actually make the permit more streamlined. And so, I mean, I still stand by it. I mean, people should not be fleeced at $4.00 a watt. And my God, if you’re being asked to pay $4.00 a watt for solar, please go tell them to go take a hike, and find somebody who will install it for $2.00 a watt. It is unconscionable that our industry continues to like take something that costs 90 cents a watt for the raw equipment. That’s what you can buy all the equipment for on Amazon direct ship to your house, and then get to $4.00 a watt for that.
Stephen Lacey: So, there were two pieces of the argument. One was like the financialization of solar has driven costs up in the US. And the other piece is advocating for solar as a benefit to utilities for grid services, paired with battery storage, changing the business model so that solar is a real resource for utilities. Have you seen the solar industry? Obviously battery attachment is like really high right now in the industry, but in terms of the types of services the solar industry is rallying around, have you seen much change?
Jigar Shah: No. I mean, I’m doing a lot of that work through a new nonprofit I created called Deploy Action, but when you ask SEIA, what is your official position around net metering? It’s crickets, right? We should be in the business right now of proving that behind the meter batteries are capacity, and that capacity should get compensated by the utilities. And if that is net net resulting in net metering, fantastic, right? But like you should not be getting net metering for solar without batteries in this moment. It is very obvious that capacity comes from batteries, right? That like there was a time when you could get some value from putting a little bit of solar on your house because of air conditioning peaks in the summertime, and all that stuff. But today there’s so much solar on the grid across the country that like a lot of regional wholesale power markets have lower costs now during the middle of the summer in the middle of the day, right? And so the capacity value comes from batteries. And the solar industry is the one who should be leading on that for no other reason than in their personal financial interests. The tax credit has been passed through 2034 for batteries. So, they are no longer the solar industry. They are now the battery industry.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. And I think a lot of groups are working on it. You’ve pointed to SEA, but like Solar United Neighbors has been working on distributed power plants for a long time. Illinois has been passing some good stuff. There are lots of things going on. I think they’re somewhat disaggregated at this point. And so groups like CommonCharge are going to try to help build some more capacity to get some of this done. And I think that’ll help everybody. And it’s not just about solar, and batteries, it’s also about efficiency, and all of the other pieces on the distributed asset side of the equation.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. Katherine, back into your festive stocking for the last choice. Here we go. These are not just faceless bureaucrats. These are people who had really important jobs, and wanted to do those jobs. That was Katherine talking about the impact of massive layoffs, and restructuring across the government. We were talking about the unforeseen consequences when laying off key people in the federal workforce. And of course, that was the big story of the beginning of the year when DOGE was sweeping through the government. Katherine, any updates to this story? Obviously I assume you stand by it, but how did that story play out as we headed toward the back half of the year?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. It just like stopped everything in its tracks, because all the people who made the trains run had been kicked off the train. And luckily, a lot of those folks have found really good jobs, or have created their own ecosystems, and are doing well. Others need new jobs. There’s just so much talent out there, and those folks are trying to pick up the slack from what they weren’t able to get done. Update, the laboratory that I worked for, National Renewable Energy Laboratory is, they took the words renewable, and energy out of the name, and now it’s just the National Laboratory of the Rockies. They’ve reorganized DOE. They do still have staff. So, there are program people who are in programs that are sort of favored programs by this administration, the ones that are priority programs. But yeah, I think they lost a lot of really good people. They lost a ton of scientists out of EPA. And so what that means is you don’t get a lot of scientists helping on the decision making process. It’s just become much more political, and continues to be so.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, what’s your read on this? So, I think that because the story is not front, and center in the news anymore, people might not be thinking about it first of all. And second of all, we haven’t had any like blackouts, or massive public safety problems, because of these layoffs. So, if someone were to ask you like, “What’s the big deal? What do these layoffs actually do? ” What would you say to them?
Jigar Shah: Do we still have a coherent policy on critical minerals, and rare earths in this country? Everyone keeps saying that we’re going to like streamline everything around nuclear power. Is that going to happen? Are we actually going to build new nuclear in this country between now, and 2030? I just think that when you think about what it takes to take an executive order that the president is going to sign, regardless of what it says, and then actually turn it into something that sends a signal to investors, and entrepreneurs to do something different, that last part is not happening, right? They’re just signing executive orders, and then the rest of us are going like, “Has something changed? Are we getting new signals? Is there like a new set of rules by which we’re supposed to operate?” And the answer is we’ll get to it when the three people who are left can actually get to it.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. Try getting a hydro license through. I mean, they were talking about like everything’s just going to be streamlined, and pay us a little bit more money to do it. And somebody’s like, “All right, well where do I pay the money because I need to get it done?” Nothing.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. Before we go into our awards, I’ve got a bonus round here. I pulled together some quotes from our guests over the last 11, or 12 months, and I want to see if you can guess who said what. “My professional policy analysis of this bill is it stinks.” Who was that?
Katherine Hamilton: Costa.
Stephen Lacey: That’s right. Costa Samaris.
Katherine Hamilton: That’s right. Jigar wasn’t on that day.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, yes, that’s right. It does sound like something Jigar would say, too. He was playing the part of Jigar. That was one of my best… That was one of my favorite takes.
Katherine Hamilton: I loved it. Yep, he was a good guest.
Stephen Lacey: We connect all loads, and all the grids today like they’re all Home Depots.
Katherine Hamilton: Arushi?
Stephen Lacey: That’s right. Arushi Sharma Frank. That was a good…
Jigar Shah: You are way better at this, Katherine.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, you’re doing really well, Katherine. Generally speaking, we’re politically naive. You guys know all our friends who run these companies, and they tend to be introverts who are sitting in front of AutoCAD just designing stuff. That was someone talking about the lack of political power.
Jigar Shah: Tim Hade
Stephen Lacey: That’s right, Tim Hade.
Jigar Shah: Wow.
Katherine Hamilton: Very good.
Jigar Shah: I got one.
Stephen Lacey: I think it’s possible that we look back 10 years from now, and we say, “Yeah, that was actually an interesting moment. That was a fulcrum moment” talking about this moment in 2025, and our ability to build things. Brian Dees.
Jigar Shah: Oh, man.
Stephen Lacey: And finally, my favorite, it’s up there with veterans benefits for ISIS.
Jigar Shah: Oh, my God.
Katherine Hamilton: …Tim?
Stephen Lacey: That was Michael Grunwald talking about pollsters who have polled putting taxes on meat.
Jigar Shah: Oh, my God.
Katherine Hamilton: Geez.
Jigar Shah: We talked to you about RFK, and his vaccine policy.
Katherine Hamilton: I must have just blanked on that one.
Stephen Lacey: I think Katherine won that round.
Jigar Shah: I mean, by a country mile.
Katherine Hamilton: And I got a country mile out here.
Stephen Lacey: All right. Let’s move on, and get into our awards. It wouldn’t be a year-end show without some kind of awards. And given the storylines that 2025 threw at us, we’ve got plenty to choose from. So, after a lengthy consultation with the judges, me, we’ve narrowed it down to four categories, and we’re going to present our winners for each. Those categories are the biggest plot twist of the year, the breakout star of the year, the best villain of the year, and the most underrated story of the year. Katherine, what is your plot twist of the year?
Katherine Hamilton: Unlike the parrot in Monty Python, solar is not dead yet. And I think that there was just a lot of, as we have talked about before, pro clutching about solar. But globally, for the first time ever, global electricity generation from renewables, which is solar, and wind mostly, unmarked a major turning point of producing five terawatt hours of power as opposed to Kohl’s 4.8 terawatts of power, terawatt hours of power. So, there is already an increase globally of solar.
And then in their latest Woodmac report for SEA, the US solar industry in Q3 installed almost 12 gigawatts of capacity of solar, which was a 20% increase from 2024 at the same time, a 50% increase from Q2. 58% of all new generating capacity added to the grid through the third quarter of 2025 was solar, and then solar, and storage combined accounted for 85% of the new capacity in the same timeframe. And granted, people are trying to get things done quickly before the tax credits expire, but it also shows that everybody is full steam ahead. And I don’t think that’s going to slow down, because I think those with good fundamentals are going to continue to move a pace. It’s the cheapest form of energy, and paired with batteries, solar is going to be what we need.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, does it feel like an I told you so moment?
Jigar Shah: Oh, yeah. We’ve been telling you so. So, I think it’s fantastic. I think the other thing that people don’t understand is if you take all of the dispatchable natural gas manufacturing capacity in the entire world, fuel cells, recip engines, everything together, it’s less than 100 gigawatts a year. So, it doesn’t matter how much you pray. There’s only so much capacity that you could add through natural gas.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, what was your plot twist of the year?
Jigar Shah: My plot twist was Chris Wright’s letter to FERC, demanding fast interconnection for data centers that accept flexibility.
Stephen Lacey: Yes, we had an extensive conversation on that. What was so twisted about it?
Jigar Shah: I just think that when we started the year, everyone was like, “Oh, there’s all this dispatchable power, and it can just be off grid, and we’re so amazing.” And now Chris Wright is using our talking points. I feel like he’s just listening to Open Circuit, and writing it down into a letter to FERC, basically saying 98% of the time the grid has plenty of capacity. It’s only that 2% that you actually need them to be flexible. And you can either do it with behind the meter natural gas, or probably behind the meter batteries. And I was like, “Oh, I don’t have to do this fighting anymore, Chris Wright will do the fighting for me.”
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. It’s this market based approach that is, in essence, very conservative. I wouldn’t say it’s free market because there’s no such thing as a free market, but market based is really important because you set the ground rules, and then everybody comes. Anybody who can provide that service comes, and you get paid for it. And what was so cool about that ANOPR, the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking that Chris Wright sent over is that there were hundreds, and hundreds of people who commented. The record is going to be very strong in this, and everybody has ideas about what should happen. And I think that’s really good, because it’s definitely given people something to focus on, and something that’s really important for the grid of the future.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. And I think it’s just a great example of there’s way more overlap than people think between conservative energy policy ideas, and what the clean energy industry wants.
My plot twist was something that we covered at the beginning of the year, and that is the rapid end to the net-zero ESG era. And I think that there’s been this defining narrative over the last decade that we needed this aspirational march toward net-zero emissions, and 2025 was the year that officially collapsed. We had Wall Street, and corporations abandoning their net-zero policies. The AI scramble, of course, has led many tech companies to reconsider their climate targets. The financial sector has retreated from explicit climate alliances. And I think that this kind of signals an end to a lot of the performative decarbonization, this aspirational decarbonization. And it is the rise of hard nose risk management, and profit seeking. And Laurent Segalen said it really well in our episode with him earlier in the year, earlier this summer. He said, “The 2010s was the era of the kumbaya, let’s go to cop, let’s decarbonize, let’s be friends.” And he said, “That’s done. It’s gone.” Of course, we talked about Jeff Curry from Carlisle, his report on the New Joule Order about how we’ve reached peak trade for fossil fuels, and countries are no longer asking necessarily how clean is our energy, but how secure is it? So, I think this is something that has played out over the last couple of years, particularly the erosion of ESG, but 2025 was the year when it all crystallized.
Jigar Shah: Yeah. I definitely think that this was a plot twist. I mean, I don’t know that I agree with your take in the sense that… I mean, ESG was always about governance, right? And so I think the governance still matters. And I think that when you think about the report that Kate Gordon wrote with Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer, and Hank Paulson on the risks around insurance, I mean, we’re seeing that in real time now, right? I mean, you can’t get insurance in places like Florida, or California. So, I think what I’m glad to see is that folks are rooted in data. What I’m not glad to see is that folks have their head in the sand when millions of Americans might lose the largest asset that they own today in their home, because people have overcorrected.
Katherine Hamilton: Did you see realtor.com is going to pull all the climate risk factors off of listings?
Jigar Shah: Zillow, right?
Stephen Lacey: Oh, wow.
Jigar Shah: I think it was Zillow?
Katherine Hamilton: Yes. Oh, maybe it’s Zillow. It’s nuts because it’s like, oh, because we’re not being able to sell our homes. Why would you be able to sell your home if it’s sitting on stilts in the water? I mean, come on y’all.
Jigar Shah: No, I know.
Stephen Lacey: No, I did not see that. But case in point, who’s your breakout star of the year, Katherine? Moving on.
Katherine Hamilton: So, I’m a big stan of geothermal, and there’s some big stories. One was Zanskar with their AI based discovery tool that can find new geothermal sources without having to be like a groundhog all over the place. And then, but the one that I work with that I truly am a fan of is Ever Geothermal. They just started up the first in the world closed loop commercial project. It’s in Garrett Street, Germany. It produces 8.2 megawatts of electricity, and 64 megawatts of heating to a town in Bavaria. And what’s so cool about this is that it’s closed loop, so it doesn’t require any stimulation, like no fracking. It requires very little water because you put these tubes down under the ground, you put like a swimming pool worth of water in, and it just keeps circulating. So, you don’t have to use a lot of water. You can put it literally anywhere. And Germany does not have great geothermal resources, not like the American West, and yet they were able to do this. And it’s really exciting. It’s something that has been behind on some, based on some of the other technologies like what Fervo is doing, but I also think that this has like a whole lot of use cases. And the heat use case to me is super interesting because in Germany, and throughout Europe, there’s just a ton of heat that’s used, and that’s coal based, and this could basically replace all of that. And I could see things like this in the US happening pretty quickly, too.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. Not only have we seen a lot of commercial progress, the industry has gotten a lot of love from the administration at a time when other renewables have become political pariahs.
Jigar Shah: Yeah. No, it’s frankly a fantastic thing to see. I will say that I think the lack of ambition in this industry is just shocking. When we wrote the liftoff report in geothermal, we had suggested they could easily have $40 billion worth of projects under construction by 2030. They’re not even close, and they’re not going to be there. They just don’t have the ambition to be there.
Katherine Hamilton: Well, part of it is that they’re not used to it. They don’t have the muscle that some of the other industries have because geothermal’s just been put down for so long, and now they finally are going to get some real money in the appropriation cycle this year. And I think they’re going to start stepping up. I’m looking forward to it.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. It’s just kind of a funky industry. Dawn Owens said it in last week’s pod in the panel that we posted. She was like, “It’s just a bunch of people who love rocks, and we haven’t really been good at political organizing. And there are a lot of like cowboy figures historically in the industry. A lot of people went into oil, and gas from geothermal in the kind of the early 2000s, 2010s, and so they lost a lot of talent. They just haven’t had any real organizing power, or passion to grow the industry.” But I think that I’m seeing some glimmers of change here.
Jigar Shah: Glimmers. Glimmers.
Katherine Hamilton: No, I’m all in.
Stephen Lacey: To sparkling rocks.
Katherine Hamilton: I’m all in. Yeah.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, who’s your breakout star?
Jigar Shah: So, I mean, the breakout star for me was the filing that Xcel Minnesota did on the distributed capacity procurement in Minnesota. It’s the first time in my lifetime that I’ve seen a utility company in a formal filing actually say that at entire territory scale, the distributed power could actually provide these essential services to accelerate interconnection, and get more out of the grid that we’ve already paid for. And I think once this becomes final, I think you’re going to see it send shockwaves across the country, because you’re not going to be able to put these solutions in the pilot. It only works in certain circumstances, which is where we’ve been for 10 years.
Stephen Lacey: And why was there pushback on this particular policy?
Jigar Shah: Well, in this case, Xcel Minnesota is rate basing the first, I think, 6%, or so of the deployment. And so I think there’s a lot of folks who are like, “We just don’t like utility ownership of batteries.”
Katherine Hamilton: A lot of people don’t want that. I think-
Jigar Shah: But they’re not going to get what they want unless there’s a compromise, I think.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. I think the devil’s in the details here because I think it’s a good idea. Of course, distributed assets should be part of the solution, and all utilities should open the doors to them, and allow virtual power plants, and aggregation. The issue is like, we got to let third parties come in. There are plenty of them, plenty of them to come in, and bring solutions. The utility needs to enable that.
Stephen Lacey: Does this push out third parties Jigar, this particular program?
Jigar Shah: No, this one actually has a separate third party track that’s in the Xcel Minnesota filing. So, the third party track is in place, the utility ownership track is in place. I think there’s just a lot of people who really hate the concept of utilities treating batteries as part of the distribution grid. They don’t want them to be able to rate base it, because remember in lots of states across the country, utilities are banned from owning generation. Today, batteries are defined as generation. They don’t want batteries redefined as distribution assets.
Katherine Hamilton: Also, if you have a regulated monopoly that is competing in essence against third parties, who’s going to win? This is what we need to be careful about, because the monopoly is going to absolutely win every time if they set it up that way.
Stephen Lacey: Well, I had a hard time choosing my breakout star. I had a few runner ups. One was geothermal, which as Katherine identified has seen a lot of commercial, and policy progress this year. My runner up was also utilities, utility stocks, specifically, which have surged over the last couple of years. They’ve dropped recently because data centers haven’t materialized on grids as quickly as investors expected, but I do think that there is this belief that we’re in a golden age of power. Flexible data centers were a runner up for me as well. Everybody’s talking about flexibility. We saw the emergence of companies like Emerald AI, Veris, Soluna, they were getting a lot of attention, but there’s not a whole lot of activity happening outside of like what Google has been doing with pilots for data demand response. So, I just think we’re going to have to wait, and see if these companies can actually execute, and that’s why I couldn’t really make it my top breakout star.
But my official pick is transformers. Transformers went from background equipment to the center of the story this year, and forever, nobody really thought about them. They were just part of the grid’s plumbing. But with load growth spiking, this scramble for power intensifying, lead time stretched considerably, and it became really clear how reliant we are on a concentrated global supply chain. Lead times went from months to three to five years. We saw the prices almost double since 2018. We saw a bunch of interesting impacts of the transformer shortage this year. So, there was that transformer fire that caused the power failure at Heathrow Airport. They couldn’t get the equipment that they needed to make that upgrade after the fire. There were housing delays. There was a Houston project that was delayed for 18 months solely because of a missing transformer. Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis had to beg other utilities for spare transformers. And then we saw new entrants like Heron Power led by Drew Baglino, a former Tesla exec finally starting to innovate around new tech like solid state transformers to bypass these choke points. So, I just thought it was a really interesting window into how challenging it is to build infrastructure right now.
Jigar Shah: Transformers, there’s more than meets the eye.
Katherine Hamilton: Exactly. I’m a huge fan of transformers.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, no, I mean, but this has been a long-running story, right? I mean, I think we saw a lot of this really crescendo sort of in 2022. I think one of the big challenges that I see is that there’s a whole bunch of people trying to solve this problem. And the big problem that you have is that there’s a real huge trust gap here. So, there are preferred suppliers, and people will not buy outside of preferred suppliers, even if they can get them faster. So, there are companies who are solving that trust gap, right? So, I think like a third of the transformer manufacturing capacity in India is unused. So, they’re bringing a bunch of transformers over from India then half the time. But a lot of those transformers haven’t been used in the US for a long time, and so people are mistrustful, right?] And so figuring out how you bridge that, I think is something that you’re seeing a lot of people do right now.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, who’s your villain of the year?
Jigar Shah: Well, the thing about villains is that they have to have super secret laboratories that are super cool to look at. So, I’m thinking that this year’s prize goes to the data center companies. I haven’t met an organization so politically inept that they had two gubernatorial races that were basically defined by everyone in the entire state hating data centers to the point where now you’ve got both the like Bernie Bros, and the MAGA people who hate data centers. You have the Bulwark hating data centers. I mean, at some point, how can you piss off more people than they have off in this year? It is truly breathtaking at the extraordinary ability they’ve had to piss off everybody.
Stephen Lacey: And what do you think is behind it? Is it just because we’ve been pissed off at the tech companies for the last decade, or so, and that this is an extension of that frustration with their role in political discourse, and getting people addicted to their platforms? Or is it like about the data centers themselves? What do you think is driving it?
Jigar Shah: No, it’s about the data centers themselves, right? Remember, the way that the data center companies generally work is you send out a price signal, you have a whole bunch of people using private sector capital developing data centers in secret with all sorts of fancy sort of SPVs, and LLCs, and they’re hiding behind this, and that, and whatever. And then in the end, they sell that powered land to Microsoft, or Google, or whatever else, right? And so all of the sins of the developer are then absorbed by the tech companies, right? And so if they negotiate a deal where they can like use coal power at a cheaper price, and then Google’s like, “Well, I didn’t know it was coal power, but I just wanted power land.” And so what you found was that in general, I think that the tech companies are doing as good a job as they can, frankly, right now, to try to dig themselves out of a hole, but they allowed the hole to get very, very deep before they realized that they had a problem.
Stephen Lacey: Well, this really seeped into popular culture this year too. Did you see the movie Eddington from director Ari Aster?
Jigar Shah: No.
Stephen Lacey: Oh, my gosh, you got to go see it. It’s about the sort of political, and social chaos in this small town in New Mexico during the pandemic, and a planned data center is a big piece of the story. So, highly recommend you go check it out.
Jigar Shah: There we go.
Stephen Lacey: It’s a dark comedy thriller, gets a little murderous. Katherine, who’s your villain?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, so it took me a little bit because there’s so many villains, and the person that I thought, well, this is the grinchiest of the Grinch is Lee Zeldin who leads EPA, which about the Grinch, you said the one speck of crumb he left in the house was a crumb that was even too small for a mouse. The thing about the Grinch is that his heart eventually got three sizes, or however many sizes too large. It was too small, and then it got big, and I don’t really see that happening right now. So, I dug into like, what is it that makes him such a villain, and how do we think about villains in a little bit bigger way? And one is that when he was in the house, he accepted over $400,000 from oil, and gas interests. His policy stances are very much pro oil, and gas. He has killed any programs at EPA that have anything to do that could possibly be against oil, and gas. And so in the end, what I really landed on was the oil, and gas industry.
And so the American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturing Association, the American Petroleum Institute, they’re all in cahoots together. They have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy our politicians, $219 million in direct contributions. And then really if you look at it in a larger way, it’s like $445 million, which is like lobbying, and ads, and direct political contributions. And we talked a little bit about accountability, but if you have someone who is funding your campaign that wants you to act in a way that supports the oil, and gas industry, that’s who you’re going to be really responsive to. And you think about in West Virginia, they even passed a law that made it a felony to protest oil, and gas. And so I think the oil, and gas folks are the biggest villain. Also, they fund the Heritage Foundation, which wrote Project 2025, which is the blueprint for everything that we’re seeing right now in the destruction of anything that has to do with clean energy, and climate in our country. That is really all about our economic growth. So, I’m going to say that the oil, and gas companies are the villain.
Jigar Shah: They also got everyone to love Billy Bob Thornton, and The Landman.
Stephen Lacey: Which I haven’t seen.
Jigar Shah: It’s actually a pretty good show even though his epic tirade against wind power is like full of wrong falsehoods, and written by, I guess, API behind the scenes within the script.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, he makes my crawl, so.
Jigar Shah: Yeah. But it was a very entertaining show.
Stephen Lacey: Well, I had many competitors for top villain. Russ Vogt, the guy in charge of dismantling government inside the Trump Administration. I think Sam Altman is really emerging as a Zuckerberg-like villain right now, possibly someone like WeWork’s Adam Newman, depending on how ChatGPT does over the next couple of years. I was going to consider Jada Centers, Jigar. I think that they’re easy to hate for people right now, but I came on uncertainty as my super villain of 2025.
It has to be uncertainty itself. It was one of the most disruptive forces of the year. We talked a lot about cancellations, and there was fresh data in the last week from clean view showing that there were 2,000 power projects canceled in 2025, totaling over 250 gigawatts of mostly clean capacity. Some cancellations were obviously the result of interconnection queue problems, equipment availability, but a huge share came down to real policy whiplash. So, new tariffs, unclear guidance, permitting freezes. That’s roughly one sixth of the country’s total generation capacity vanishing out of the pipeline in a year. And I’d be curious to hear what you think about this Jigar, how it compares to other years, but this is like not a normal market correction. And of course, capital hates ambiguity more than it hates risk. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Miriam Webster made uncertainty the word of the year this year.
Jigar Shah: Instead of six, seven? Which I still don’t understand. Look, I mean, no offense, Stephen, but I feel like uncertainty is a cop out. There’s a person behind the uncertainty.
Katherine Hamilton: It’s the results of something else.
Jigar Shah: And that person happens to be the 47th President of the United States.
Stephen Lacey: Sure, sure, sure. But I just felt like that was too easy.
Jigar Shah: I mean, I don’t think it’s too easy. I don’t think it gets blamed enough. I just think that when you think about just how terrible the situation is that we’re in right now around all sorts of uncertainty, I think you’re talking about investor uncertainty, right? Whether it’s in the manufacturing sector we talked about earlier in the episode, or whether it’s about offshore wind leases, or all sorts of things like that. But I mean, there’s also uncertainty around whether we’re going to have a fix for people’s healthcare subsidies between now, and the end of the year, right? I mean, literally millions of people are going to be kicked off healthcare financially, because they won’t be able to afford their premiums. And I think that the uncertainty is all around in ways that are just so intentionally painful to the people that we most love in our lives. And it is breathtaking to me how many people find the moment that we’re not just uncertain, but just outwardly cruel.
Stephen Lacey: Yes. Okay. Let’s go to the underrated story of the year to close out our awards. And Katherine we’ll go to you first on this one.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. I think something we haven’t talked that much about, but I think we’re going to talk more about next year is magnets. I mean, it’s like your whole thing about transformers, which seem kind of nerdy. I think magnets are kind of nerdy, too, but they’re super important. So, they’re crucial to power generation. So, going from kinetic to electrical energy, wind, hydro, fossil fuels, nukes, they all use kinetic to electrical energy with magnets. And then the opposite, electrical to kinetic energy, which is like in electric motors, storage uses magnets, smart grid uses magnets, EVs. All of these technologies use magnets, and a lot of them are based on rare earth, which China has a huge control over like 70%. And so I see this as, there’s a global piece of it about trade, and supply chain, but there’s also a need for a lot of innovation to make sure that we diversify, that we’re able to source differently, or locally, and that we come up with alternatives. I just think this is a story that, and I know we spend a lot of time on AI, but magnets are so crucial to everything working. And so I think that we’re going to need to see this story. This is an underplayed story that will be even bigger next year.
Stephen Lacey: Was there something that like grabbed your eye that made you think magnets, this is it. This is the story?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. I was just like, what is like underpinning everything? What’s causing all this uncertainty, not knowing where the magnets are coming from?
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I like that.
Jigar Shah: Well, I mean, but I think it’s also tied to the personnel story, right? I mean, there are just extraordinary experts in the US government that were let go during DOGE, et cetera, who were experts in critical minerals, and reverse, and magnets. And we should be picking companies based on their ability to solve this problem, not based on the fact that Donald Trump Jr. has some sort of like venture capital investment in the company, right? And so part of my concern in this moment is I totally agree with you, and I think that there’s actually remarkable companies that should be backed to help diversify that supply chain, but I just hope that we haven’t lost all of the expertise from the US government to be able to do it.
Stephen Lacey: All right, Jigar, story that was underrated this year?
Jigar Shah: All right. So, the story that I think we didn’t talk about either on our podcast, or the places is what I’m hearing from all of my friends is that they are now able to develop solar, and battery storage projects for 90% less than they did last year, right? So, when you have companies like CIR, and other companies who are doing everything from your studies to your land work to figuring out like how much it might cost to like interconnect to the transformer to all the other things, you have this ability to use agentic AI to reduce the cost of developing battery, and solar projects by 90%.
Stephen Lacey: That’s wild. So, you’re hearing that consistently. What does that mean for both the margins, and for the ultimate price for the consumer?
Jigar Shah: So, I think, paradoxically, I think what it’s going to end up doing is actually bringing the community solar developers up to like 30 megawatt projects, and bring the 100 megawatt project developers down to the 30 megawatt projects. Because the thing is, is that we have a lot of room in our grid for these smaller projects. We don’t have a lot of room in our grid for these 500 megawatt projects. And so I think as you reduce the cost of developing projects, it will be profitable again for people to be chasing smaller deals, which are easier to tuck into our existing utility grid.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. And on the grid, there are all these nodal issues that you solve. It’s not universal. You have to go very localized. I agree with that.
Stephen Lacey: Now, I distinctly remember you at Transition-AI all over me for being optimistic about AI, and the fact that I think it’s going to transform certain industries. And does this mean that you’ve come around?
Jigar Shah: No, no, no. That is not what you said, revisionist history, man. You said on net is AI good, or bad for the planet, and I still believe for sure 100x it’s bad for the planet from a resource perspective, et cetera. Like does it do some good things on the side? Sure. I absolutely think it could like help us get more out of the grid that we’ve already paid for. They could like reduce transmission studies from 22,000 hours from a GE, and Siemens group down to like four minutes. But no, I mean on balance, like having people create like superhero versions of themselves using like AI is bad for the planet.
Stephen Lacey: God, I wish there was a way to do this bet without destroying the planet potentially. Without having to create a superhuman race of machines, or potentially destroying the planet, wouldn’t it be nice?
Jigar Shah: Oh, gosh.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. Well, I had a bunch of underrated storylines that made my list. The vibe shift on AI itself actually was one of them. I hinted at it last week in my monologue. There’s of course increasing worry about bubble dynamics, more skepticism around LLMs, and how smart they can get. And then I think continued uncertainty around what load growth projections, how they’ll materialize. I also think just workforce constraints are so acute right now. We can’t find enough skilled workers, huge engineering shortages are plaguing everyone, and that was just a storyline that underlined everything. So, after deliberating on all of those, my final choice was the end of shared reality.
Jigar Shah: You’re going deep.
Katherine Hamilton: I agree.
Stephen Lacey: I think there’s a few things that are coming together. One is just about climate coverage specifically. So, if you remember not long ago, we measured the climate conversation based on how TV news covered it, and media matters, and other organizations would track it, and TV just isn’t the battlefield anymore. So, it’s the YouTube, and podcast giants. And those dominant voices are Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, now Alex Epstein, and these are creators that totally dominate the conversation right now in a mainstream way. And on these channels, what we’ve seen over the last couple of years, and in particular this year, was that the COVID skeptic universe, and the climate skeptic universe have fully merged.
What we’re hearing is, first of all, this distrust of institutions, but it’s not even necessarily that they’re saying that climate change isn’t real. What They’re saying is it’s a pseudo religion. It’s not really that bad. It’s this Marxist Trojan horse. And then we’re also seeing this narrative emerge that the solutions don’t work. This is part of Alex Epstein’s moral case for fossil fuels. This has become a huge part of mainstream discourse. Over the last decade, there was this feeling that clean energy solutions were gaining momentum. And now I think on a lot of these channels, what you hear is the talking points of Bjorn Lomberg, that renewables will never scale.
At the same time, what we’ve seen in the platforms is that they’ve completely abandoned all fact checking. I believe very strongly in free speech. So, this is a really tricky one to get right, how the platforms determine what should be on the platforms, or not. But I think you can’t ignore the facts that these platforms are so influential, and that because they have just pulled back completely, you’ve seen this explosion of climate misinformation, and the continued rise of outrage bait that favors arguments like solar panels cause cancer, and wind turbines catch fire, and they’re going to destroy your community. And these platforms in particular Facebook have been highly influential on a lot of the local opposition that has gained strength.
And then finally on top of all that, we have the rise of AI generated content that is starting to erase whatever guardrails on reality we had left. So, the release of SORA2, OpenAI’s video generator just created this scenario where I can’t trust half the videos on my feed. I go into a social media platform, particularly Facebook, and it’s like all a bunch of junk, and people are getting angry about it. You can actually see in the comments that people are already getting exhausted by this. But I think what it’s doing over time is teaching people to completely distrust anything that they see. And I think that that’s like a bad thing for discourse generally when we can create our own hyper customized versions of reality for ourselves, and then we also don’t trust what others are saying. So, I just feel like those three elements came together in a way that created a turning point in 2025.
Katherine Hamilton: Well, that’s why Open Circuit is so important, Stephen, and outlets like ours, where we just have honest conversations.
Stephen Lacey: For sure. And I think that we really take seriously. We’ve got this niche audience in the energy industry of tens of thousands of people, but we really take seriously sticking to reality. And we have our own opinions. We have takes that people don’t agree with, but I think it’s really important to take the idea of a common set of facts out in the world very seriously. And unfortunately, a lot of the highly influential media outlets just like don’t do that. That’s not how they operate.
Jigar Shah: Here’s the thing, right? Is that no matter what case people make, we always win, right? The electoral state always wins. The most fragile system in the entire world is the oil, and gas industry. That is why they’re so scared. Remember, like a fleet of drones from Ukraine has taken out all of the refineries in Russia, right? And so like it is very, very fragile to work in the oil, and gas industry. It is very robust, which is why all of Syria, when we got in there, was powered by solar, and battery storage. All of the Ukraine now is being powered by solar, and battery storage, because one drone can’t take it out. I just think that in general, if what you think is happening is that the world is going to become a more troubled place, and that people are going to trust institutions less, it goes towards more solar, and battery storage.
Stephen Lacey: All right. If all that can happen in one year, what about five more years? As we roll into 2026, we’re headed into the back half of the 2020s. So, let’s add one more opportunity for us to be accountable. If you had to bet your reputation on one long-term prediction for 2030, what would it be? Katherine?
Katherine Hamilton: All right. So, over Thanksgiving break, I drove my EV further into the mountains. Actually, we have even more mountains to go to. And I could have been in what you would call Dante’s Fifth Circle of Hell, which is the raft piece where everybody’s fighting it out in The River Styx. It’s all muddy, and everything. Because on route, there is only one charging station. In Lynchburg, Virginia, it actually has two places to charge, but one was broken. So, there was one charging station on all of Route 29 going from north to south. You could get recharged in Charlottesville, you could get recharged in Danville, Virginia, and there was one in Lynchburg.
And I had to wait two hours to get charged so I could actually get to Charlottesville to the next charging station. And what I found was a ton of people of all different kinds with EVs, and they were actually not fighting it out. Everybody was going like, “It’s got to be better than this.” And I said, “In five years, we will be laughing at this situation.” And so that’s where I am. In five years, we’re going to have charging stations everywhere. We’re going to have much more access to electric vehicles, because everybody there, whether they were renting cars, and there was one family that got towed there because their rental company didn’t tell them the only car they had left was an electric car, and they did not know they had to recharge it. So, they were towed to the charging station, and then they still did not hate their EV. They’re like, “Oh, we just didn’t know what we were supposed to do. So, now we’re going to plug in for an hour, and a half because we were just towed here.”
But there were people in SUVs, there were people in lightning trucks, there were people in all kinds of vehicles, and they were all happy because it was Thanksgiving, and full, but also just really into EVs, and they weren’t just Tesla people. They were people of all kinds. And so I think in five years, we’ll have charging stations everywhere because people will want them, and people will have EVs. I mean, there’s some data to back it up too. EVs are selling really well. They’re not in a hockey stick like they could have been, but they’re doing really well. And once you get one, you never go back. So, that’s my prediction for 2030.
Stephen Lacey: And what an opportunity it is to reinvent how we stop in rest stops, and experience places that we take breaks in from a dining experience to a shopping experience, and the way we go, and interact in convenience stores, and what we buy, like what a great opportunity to reinvent all of that. And it feels to me like someone will have figured that out in the next five years, or so.
Katherine Hamilton: I agree. It also spurred a great sense of community. It was just like we’re all in this together. We all really like our vehicles, and we’re not going to change that. It’s not like anybody said, “Oh, I wish I still had my gas vehicle.” They just said like, “I wish there were more charging stations in Lynchburg.”
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, what are you going to stake your reputation on?
Jigar Shah: So, in the first three quarters of this year, over 100% of all global electricity growth has come from solar, wind, and nuclear. And I think that will be the case for the next five years. And so coal, natural gas, all of it will be net neutral over the next five years. So, if we build new natural gas, we’ll retire the same amount of natural gas. If we build new coal, we’ll retire the same amount of coal, probably more. Some quarters will be up, some quarters will be down, but I think over the next five years, 100% of all new capacity globally will come from solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear.
Stephen Lacey: And when you make that prediction, are you looking at IEA numbers? What numbers tell you that?
Jigar Shah: Yeah. I mean, these numbers are IEA numbers that were made glossy by ember, but there’s a lot of data sources that show it. We are this year on track to, meaning for the first time in my lifetime, 100% of all new terawatt hours of growth are going to come from solar, wind, and nuclear. And I think that’ll be the case for the next five years.
Stephen Lacey: All right. My prediction is that by 2030, jobs in the trades, electricians, welders, HVAC techs, those jobs are going to be as coveted as coding jobs were in the 2010s. I think that they are going to be the jobs that young people chase, the jobs that parents brag about. Obviously, some of this is due to AI. I do think that AI will start to automate a big chunk of white collar work, not all of it, but enough to change the calculus for a lot of people entering the workforce. And if you’re choosing between a bachelor’s degree for a job that might be partially automated, or a two year technical program that leads to a career that AI can’t replace, I think the value proposition shifts. And of course, we just need a legion of skilled workers for this digital, and electrical build out that we talk a lot about. A lot of physical work, and the people who can do it are retiring faster than we are replacing them. So, my bet is by 2030, the trade jobs are the new prestige jobs we spent the 2010s telling people that they need to learn to code. The 2030s are going to be about learning to build.
Katherine Hamilton: I love it.
Jigar Shah: I hope so.
Katherine Hamilton: Yep. Love for the community colleges, and tech schools.
Stephen Lacey: Absolutely. And that is going to do it for this week.
Jigar Shah: It was great. It’s been a fantastic year.
Stephen Lacey: Sure has.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. It’s been awesome.
Stephen Lacey: And make sure you come back next week for our final installment of the year. And boy, is it going to be a doozy. We’ve got some big news to share, so make sure you listen.
Open Circuit is produced by Latitude Media, Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton. They are my co-host. I am Stephen Lacey. I am your host, and executive editor. The show is edited by me. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Ann Bailey is our senior podcast editor. Sign up for Latitude Media’s newsletters for stories on all the stuff that we cover on this show. And you can find Open Circuit anywhere you get podcasts, and transcripts are there as well. And please give us a rating, and review wherever you get your shows. Thank you so much. We will be back for our last episode of the year, next week, we’ll see you then.
