Jigar Shah

And it turns out that after Microsoft, Google, and Nucor did this massive request for information and they got, and they went through them all, that nuclear was one of the cheapest options that they could pursue to not pass costs on to the rest of the ratepayers.

Well, look, I think today when you look at how much new capacity we need to build, people are saying we need everything. There is no way for us to meet this just with solar, wind and battery storage. And we will do as much solar, wind and battery storage as we can. And we will still need nuclear and enhanced geothermal and other technologies.

But more importantly, I think the Department of Energy has done tons of modeling work, and it shows if you can maintain that 20% nuclear that we've had for many years... it is so much cheaper to run a decarbonized grid with all that nuclear. And so people are now starting to recognize that instead of thinking just about levelized costs of energy, you have to think about the entire system cost.

That also includes deploying technologies that we invented 20 years ago around grid modernization and dynamic line ratings and topology mapping and all the things that we need to do to get 50% more capacity out of the grid that we already paid for.

It also means that all of these smart appliances that we've had for three or four years now, where even my humidifier comes with an app on it, you can use that to connect it to demand flexibility programs, and you can give people a 20% discount on their bill to allow their demand to be more flexible. So your water heater doesn't have to heat up that water right after you finish your shower.

It can wait until electricity is cheap, right? And that also allows us to make more of what we've already paid for. And so I think where we are now is people didn't have to think differently for the last 20 years. Today, they have to think differently. If they don't, then we're not going to be able to have all this economic growth.

I don't think that American innovators and entrepreneurs have a political party. They want to take their technology, they want to work with their venture capitalists, their private equity firms, their growth capital companies, and they want to build big things. And I don't think any politician wants to send American companies packing and saying, sorry, we don't want you to scale up stuff here.

Because let's make no mistake, American innovators and entrepreneurs are an unstoppable force. You cannot say no to them. If you say no to them, they will go to another country and scale up their technologies there. They will not be stopped around their ambition. That's why we love them so much. They walk through walls, right? It is an extraordinary thing to see.

And I can't imagine any politician not wanting American entrepreneurs and innovators to win.

Look, I mean, I don't think people love the tweets. I don't think people love a lot of the rhetoric that's coming out of people's social media right now. But I think that they're working hard to do big things in this country. And they are going to play it out. They're going to work with governors. They're going to work with all of their champions.

And they're going to try to make sure that the policy here in the United States continues to allow them to raise equity. Because remember, we're private sector-led, government-enabled. And so the private sector still has to write that big check to build that facility in Nebraska or in Kansas or in Georgia or in Tennessee or in Kentucky.

And if they don't write that big check, then they're going to have to go to Plan B and Plan C. And so I just think that in general, these people are very practical people. They just want their technologies to be scaled up.

I don't know. I mean, look, I think that we are making commitments on behalf of the US government. When the government makes commitments to an outside party, that outside party expects the government to honor those commitments, right? I think in the past, all commitments have been honored. I expect in the future. all commitments will be honored, right?

I mean, this is the whole point of trust, right? And so if you're worried that after you get a loan commitment, that that commitment is not real, well, then why would you subject yourself to the process of getting a loan? If the government doesn't keep its promises, then it makes all applicants suffer, whether they're in the preferred sector or the not preferred sector.

So I can't imagine for a second that people of any stripe, want to hold back American innovators and entrepreneurs. They're going to fail. They're going to succeed. And frankly, we did not get a lot of blowback for the other loans that were done in a different way, like when they failed. So we're going to have a lot more failures. That is why the government is supposed to lean in.

But we're going to have so many successes. And I just think that that is something that we are so proud of, not just within the Biden administration, But the entire American public, they love bragging about how awesome we are at inventing new stuff. And pretty soon they're going to be bragging about how we've all scaled it up here.

So let me say this a different way. We have unprecedented load growth in the United States right now. The tools that got us here are not going to be able to solve this problem in front of us.

If we don't scale up new nuclear, if we don't figure out enhanced geothermal, if we don't figure out grid modernization, if we don't figure out virtual power plants, then we will not meet this moment and we will have to sacrifice economic growth. I do not think that anyone wants us to lose the AI race.

I don't think anyone wants us to lose these manufacturing plants because we cannot interconnect them. And before you say, don't worry, we're going to do it with natural gas, you build as much of that as possible. It's not enough. And building new natural gas pipelines to all those plants is not an insurmountable hurdle. And so we're going to need all these technologies to succeed.

We need it to be able to meet this moment. And I just think that I can't even fathom that any president would say, I'd rather us not grow economically.