Kathy Castor has represented Tampa in Congress for 20 years — four of them chairing the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, the policy engine behind the Inflation Reduction Act. Now Florida's new congressional map has carved her district into five pieces, turning a seat Democrats won by 12 into one Trump carried by 11.

Jigar and Jamie talk with the congresswoman about why the Sunshine State gets 75% of its electricity from gas, the Thriving Economy Project — the next climate bill, drafted before Democrats have the votes to pass it, with 1,200 policy proposals already in — and where permitting reform could move with Trump still in the White House.

Along the way: the congressman who entered a battery into the committee record, electric bills burned in a garbage can, and why MacDill Air Force Base relocates every time a storm approaches.

Plus, Ask Jigar: where one person's effort actually counts, whether AI changes the value of a college degree, the case for 50 climate tech IPOs, and which states pay you for the battery in your EV.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Brazil: 14% returns. South Africa: 9.8%. United States: 7.1%. That's not a typo. Mike Silvestrini has deployed $476 million in solar projects overseas and at home. The US is his riskiest market.

Silvestrini is the co-founder of Energea — a platform that lets anyone invest directly in real solar projects, not solar stocks, for as little as $100.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Mike about where the capital is missing, why the returns are where they are, and what it actually means when electricity arrives somewhere it's never been before.

Along the way: why Mike has been skeptical about batteries for 20 years and still is. How he first heard of Jigar. 250,000 homes in Colombia with no electricity. And why he had to start quacking more like a duck to attract the right investors — and whether it cost him.

Learn more about Energea here: https://www.energea.com?utm_campaign=45660715-Energy%20Empire%20Podcast%202026&utm_source=energyempirepodcast&utm_medium=podcast

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Electric utilities are on track to spend $1.4 trillion on the power grid by 2030. Hyperscalers keep asking for gigawatt-scale data centers. Nobody is required to show the math.

Katherine Blunt covered PG&E's bankruptcy and the Camp Fire for The Wall Street Journal and wrote California Burning, the book PG&E CEO Patti Poppe made mandatory reading for all her employees when she took over. Now, Blunt covers Alphabet, where she is watching the AI buildout collide with the same regulatory machinery that produced PG&E.

Jigar and Katherine get into PJM's white paper conceding the market needs to be redesigned, what Google figured out in its Xcel Minnesota deal that other hyperscalers haven't, and what trust looks like when utilities ask for a record-setting decade of spending.

Plus: the one thing Katherine would mandate if she could — and it isn't interruptible service.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Solar on the roof. Battery in the garage. You can run your house yourself now. The question is what that does to the grid we all share.

This week on Ask Jigar: what local clean-energy leaders should do now that the feds have pulled back. Whether virtual power plants will hurt utility valuations. Why nuclear supporters should love cheap battery storage. And whether mass defection from the California grid is real — or if NEM 3.0 already changed the math.

Four questions. One answer: use the grid we already paid for.

Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

California built the one of the cleanest grids in the country and wholesale prices have never been lower — but utility bills keep going up. One reason: utilities make more money by spending more.

California State Senator Josh Becker is writing the bills to change that. Before politics, Becker was in venture capital — he seeded Opower and worked on EPA's first Clean Air Marketplace Conference in 1992. Now he runs much of California's energy policy from Sacramento.

Jigar and Arnab Pal (in for Jamie) talk with Becker about tying utility executive bonuses to keeping rates down, the metrics regulators should use to measure utility performance, why your home battery should count toward grid reliability, and how to use the grid we've already paid for before building more.

Along the way: why the grid is like a Walmart parking lot built for Christmas Eve, the plan to take wildfire costs off your electricity bill, and Becker's blunt verdict that "hope is not a strategy."

Plus: listener questions on virtual power plants, nuclear, and what happens when everyone goes off the grid — in this week's Ask Jigar.

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments:

https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

A lot of people are walking around with energy questions and not getting straight answers. That changes now.

Ask Jigar is a new weekly segment on Energy Empire. Three listener questions per episode. Jigar answers them on air. No hedging, no "it depends" non-answers.

Should you sign a long-term electricity contract? Is your utility actually serious about clean energy? What separates the startups that make it from the ones that don't? Send it in.

In this teaser: where do you actually start when you want to electrify your life?

Submit your question: octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

Ask Jigar is supported by Octopus Energy.

The backlash against data centers is, in many places, a backlash against rising electricity bills. Nick Chaset, CEO of Octopus Energy US, thinks the solution isn’t to stop building — it’s to change who benefits.

In this episode, Nick explains why the way data centers currently connect to the American power system puts the costs on nearby communities while sending the upside elsewhere. He breaks down how Octopus Energy flipped that dynamic in the UK by giving communities a direct financial stake in local wind energy through discounted bills — and how the same model could reshape the data center boom now unfolding across the US.

Jigar, Jamie, and Nick get into what virtual power plants actually are, why networks of home batteries, EVs, and smart thermostats can function like power plants, why Texas is moving faster than California on clean energy deployment, and what it would take for homeowners in places like Loudoun County to get paid instead of squeezed. Plus: whether 160 gigawatts of virtual power plant capacity by 2030 is realistic — or wildly optimistic.

Links:

Submit a question to Ask Jigar: https://octopusenergy.com/ask-jigar

S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order⁠

Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas

Sandy Reisky started building wind farms in 2000, before it was an asset class. He founded Apex Clean Energy in Charlottesville, Virginia, scaled it into one of the country's largest independent wind developers, and in 2015 bought up distressed wind projects when the tax credit extension looked uncertain. Wind now generates around 12% of U.S. electricity — 30 to 50% across the Great Plains.

Jigar and Jamie talk with Sandy about how he scaled Apex, why community relations was a competitive advantage most developers skipped, what wind looks like in a hostile policy environment, and his new focus: Pearl Score, a home energy performance rating that gives sellers credit for efficiency upgrades at the point of sale.

Along the way: the power maps that helped Apex win over hostile communities, why fossil fuels have already lost the battle of physics, and Jamie's proposal to name an offshore wind farm after the president — and paint all the turbines gold.

Learn more at energyempire.fm

Links:

S2G Investments: ⁠https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/podcast-global-energy-order⁠Octopus Energy: https://octopusenergy.com/faas