Why is clean electrification, the most exciting, dynamic, hopeful sector of the US economy, still such a 98-pound weakling in DC backroom fights? In this episode, I talk with investor and entrepreneur Steve McBee about Amped, his new effort to boost the industry’s political influence and give it a little swagger — by telling a more compelling story, getting better information to lawmakers, and pulling hundreds of billions of dollars in stranded capital off the sidelines.
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David Roberts
Greetings, salutations. This is Volts for May 29, 2026: “Giving clean electricity a political voice of its own.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
If you are the kind of person who listens to Volts, you know that we are living through an industrial miracle. Over and over and over again, clean electrification technologies have outstripped even the most optimistic predictions. Solar sets new records every year. Solar and wind comprise the vast majority of what is being built today in power systems worldwide, and almost the entirety of what developers want to build in the future. Virtually every country is moving toward clean electrification, even petrostates like Saudi Arabia. Every day the technologies involved become cheaper and more sophisticated, opening up even larger potential horizons.
It is wild — and if you simply trace the projections forward a decade or two, the implications are so enormous and overwhelming as to defy understanding.
This ought to be political dynamite. It’s economic growth! It’s lower costs for consumers! It’s cleaner air! It’s geopolitical advantage! It’s a win-win-win in an age where everything around us feels like losing.
And yet most Americans don’t know about it. Most economic and cultural elites don’t know about it. Most politicians don’t really know about it. Even the most powerful politicians, the ones most directly involved with these subjects, do not really get it, not the full extent of it.
Why is that? There are lots of things you could point to, including a diseased information environment, but the core reason, in my opinion, is that the clean electrification industry has simply amounted to less than the sum of its parts, politically and culturally. It has miserably failed to tell its own story. It has failed to wield political power to protect its interests. The main trade group representing it — the American Clean Power Association — has a membership almost half composed of fossil gas and spends its time scolding environmentalists and simpering about “all of the above.”
It’s pathetic. Clean electrification, the most dynamic and optimistic thing happening in the world today—and yes, I’ve heard about AI—is somehow a 98-pound weakling in the great American high school when it ought to be prom king.
I was recently approached by some folks who say they want to build something better. It is called Amped, and it is a somewhat disparate set of efforts designed to improve clean electricity’s ability to tell its story, improve relations with lawmakers, and speed deployment. After looking at what they sent me, I have my doubts about whether it is what I wish it were — but I feel pretty confident that it will be better than the status quo.
Today I'm talking with the guy at the center of it, Steve McBee. Currently he runs Huck Capital, a clean energy investment platform. But he has also managed large-scale clean energy businesses and served as a legislative aide in D.C., so he has a pretty broad view of this landscape and has witnessed clean energy’s political failures up close. I can’t wait to get into it with him.
With no further ado, Steve McBee, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Steve McBee
Dave, thank you so much for having me. And I look forward to quelling all your doubts.
David Roberts
That would be a first. Truly, truly a first.
Steve McBee
We have to be ambitious.
David Roberts
I think you might underestimate the vast universe of doubts with which I struggle. Before we get into what you’re doing, let’s start with a little diagnosis here. Tell us in your own words. Describe to us as you see it the failure of this industry to, I guess I don’t even want to say punch above its weight, to even punch at its weight. It is punching well below its weight. Tell us why.
Steve McBee
Look, I thought the way that you opened up this podcast, you ran a perfect marketing and commercial message for where the industry is and where the industry is going. I’ve been in the industry for 12 years as a company CEO, as an organizer of capital, and it’s a difficult moment. I am more optimistic about the energy transition and these markets than I have been at any time since I came into the market.
Our products and technologies, they’re awesome and they’re getting cheaper every day. They’re flying down the cost curve. We have incredible talent that has come into this industry doing capital formation and business building. There’s tons of innovation in this sector happening not just in the US but globally. And while there has been capital that has rotated out of this sector primarily because of the volatility and uncertainty, politically, there is plenty of capital in this space to do what needs to be done to get to the next phase of the energy transition. From a commercial perspective, I’m incredibly optimistic.
That optimism is tempered by the fact that I think we have not done a very good job as an industry of taking care of a couple of really important non-commercial responsibilities.
Responsibility number one is we are obviously not organized for power. I think the limits of our political infrastructure as an industry, particularly in Washington, have been badly exposed over the past year plus. Connected to that, Dave, given how important our industry is to the US economy, given how important it is to meeting power demand, not to mention how important it is to the planet, our social license should be locked in, but it’s not.
Our cultural identity is wobbly. And I think that is a function of us not doing a good job as an industry in talking to the people that we most need to be with us in ways that are landing. We talk down to people, we talk around people, we don’t speak to people based on their own lived experience or around a common set of values. As a result, we have really allowed the fossil fuel industry to easily appropriate the energy narrative in the United States.
David Roberts
Let me just insert here. They did have a century head start, and all the good news we’re talking about has really flourished in the last three years, five years. You can forgive us, you can forgive them for having more infrastructure in place.
Steve McBee
That’s a fair point. It’s also an excuse. We need to be excellent and we need to be urgent about it. We have not built infrastructure that has made their job very difficult. In fact, they have pushed us outside the cultural zeitgeist and we’re on the outside looking in, which is not a place where you want to be in a world where the number one most important political signal is cultural, and the most important market signals, unfortunately, are political.
I think it’s not enough as an industry to say, “Hey, we’re just going to keep our head down, we’re going to build great companies, we’re going to build great products, and we’re going to shut the noise off.” That’s not how it works. The way it works is you have to be commercially excellent, you have to organize and take care of your political power, and you have to fight it out every day for narrative and for your identity.
In a perfect world, we’d not only be excellent at those three things, but we would organize them in a cohesive way to create a flywheel for the industry. But we have not done that. I think this topic that we’re discussing today is so important.
In fact, I think the most important priority, the very top priority of our industry, needs to be being fiercely urgent about getting our political power organized and getting our cultural identity reestablished. If we do those things, these energy markets are going to transition themselves. For all the reasons that you talked about at the top of the show. The fundamentals are great, but if we don’t take care of those things, it is going to be lumpy.
David Roberts
I have my own thoughts about this. Obviously, before we started, I took a solemn vow to myself to remain calm throughout this, as from our previous discussions.
Steve McBee
Let’s see how that works.
David Roberts
I get worked up about this stuff. Tell us from your inside view, what lesson do you think these industries, the clean electrification industry — and I just want to, I should have clarified this up front, but I also want to say this. People have in their head energy as a big lump. I would like to distinguish from that. Clean energy, but that’s also a big lump. I would like to further distinguish from that. Clean electrification. Electrons, not molecules. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, etc. That’s what I’m talking about. That is the industry that I would like to have a distinct voice of its own in that industry. What lesson do you think it took from the 2024 election and how has it chosen to respond?
Steve McBee
I would go back to your opening comments at the top of the podcast. You talked about electrification exactly the way we should be talking about it. That is a way to talk about it that happens to represent the facts of where the industry is today. It also is a way to talk about it that will allow us to reach a broader cross section of people. When I think about people —
David Roberts
Before we get to how we should talk, I want to hear about what the industry is doing, what people are saying as a response to the 2024 election, what they learned in these back rooms, what strategies they are adopting?
Steve McBee
I think you might be giving the back rooms too much credit. One of the things that I have found surprising and that I’m very frustrated by is we obviously have a capabilities deficit in the clean energy influence ecosystem. The scoreboard would tell you, we’re down 53 to zip. We’re getting smoked. But we also have a cultural problem, I believe, in that ecosystem. The lessons that have been taken seem to be that we just need to keep doing what we’re doing and maybe do it a little better or spend a little more money or whatever.
I don’t see any — there is no meaningful conversation within the incumbent group of trade associations and associated firms in Washington about the need for a reboot, about a really critical look back. There is a lot of time spent resisting new ideas. There is a lot of time spent being territorial to new ideas. There is a huge amount of time spent by the people who have been charged with protecting and promoting the interests of the industry trying to convince, I guess, first themselves, but also the rest of it that the situation is much better than people like me and I think people like you think it is. I think survival, relevance, digging in, that’s what I’m seeing.
David Roberts
Here’s how I would put it, Steve. The election was Trump smacking the industry on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. The response has been to whine and cringe and beg for scraps. “Let’s keep our head down, let’s be safe, let’s not fight, let’s see if we can chisel away a little bit of extras on the side here. Let’s see if we can sneak our way onto the wagon with the rest of everybody.” I never see any self-confidence, any bravado. It just strikes me as an industry that’s so used to being on the rump that it has just accepted it and now decided to beg for table scraps. That is the much less flattering way that I would put it.
Steve McBee
That’s exactly what it is. When we talk about the cultural problem that this industry has, we have an identity problem. When I was trying to figure out after the IRA wipeout, what’s happening, what can I do, who can I help be better?
What I found, number one, is I couldn’t find anybody that I thought had the potential to be significantly better. The way that they were structured or the way they were being led or the way that they had identified their mission.
The other thing, equally alarming, getting to the point that you just made, is whether you’re talking to lawmakers, congressional staff, industry leaders, people in the capital markets, people in climate influence, there’s this defeatist attitude, this idea that we’re used to losing, we’re used to taking table scraps. We show up prepared to lose. When we do lose, we really talk about how unfair it is that the fossil fuel industry spends so much money and tells so many lies and they just don’t play fair and whatever. And we still show up and talk about ourselves like alternative energy —
David Roberts
Yes, it is so characteristic of our side to talk as though there is a referee listening who is going to blow his whistle and intervene. There is no referee.
Steve McBee
Nobody’s coming to help us. We have to help ourselves. The thing about it is we are the — when we talk about being the future, the alternative energy that will power the future — the future is fucking here — and we are the power source that’s going to power the US economy and hopefully a whole bunch of the world going forward. We need to show —
David Roberts
Yes, not 2050.
Steve McBee
No.
David Roberts
Not 2030.
Steve McBee
No.
David Roberts
It’s happening now.
Steve McBee
Yeah. Where is our swagger? Where is our presumptuousness? We need to figure out what we need to do politically, and we need to do whatever it takes to go take it, and we need to stop asking for permission to do that.
David Roberts
Yes. Here’s a point I would make just about human psychology. If you want to attract people to your side, there are two ways you can do it. You can go to them and flatter whatever it is they already think and try to weasel your way into that and get a little bit on the side. Or you can have some swagger, have some charisma, and attract them — make them come to you because you’re the thing. “Make them have to come to you because you’ve got all the rizz, you’ve got the aura, they want to come be part of your thing.”
No one in the industry, no one on our side, that doesn’t even seem to occur to them that that is a possibility, that that is even out there in the universe, that you could just swagger a little bit and then people would be attracted to someone who thinks they’re hot shit. That’s kind of how it works.
Steve McBee
That’s how it goes.
David Roberts
It’s something you said I want to follow up on. The space is full of groups. There are many acronyms. There’s the ACP, there’s SEIA, the Solar Trade Association, there’s ACORE, I forget what that stands for, there’s SEEC. There are an alphabet soup of groups in this space. You say you couldn’t find any of them that had the swagger that you’re looking for. What hole are you trying to fill here? What’s missing from all that alphabet soup?
Steve McBee
I think there are two things that need to be done. There are the things that we’re doing right now that need to be done way better, and then there are the things we’re not doing at all. What I’ve tried to do is focus on the gaps, the things that we’re not doing at all. Every day that goes by that we don’t start doing them, we’re taking deeper losses. We can talk more about that in this conversation. My priorities are better digital communication infrastructure and way better communication narrative and way more cohesion around how we do that.
Number two is your point on all this great stuff that’s happening in the clean energy industry. Nobody knows about it in Washington. What I see every day as an operator in the commercial marketplace and the perspectives that members of Congress have and senators have, even the ones that are way forward on our issues, there’s a huge gap in information and knowledge and context about what’s actually going on in the commercial market.
Third, very practically, we got to get more political money in the system because I spent a lot of time in Washington. Washington has always been very transactional. I’ve been gone for 12 years. I’m dipping my toe back in. One of the things —
David Roberts
It hasn’t gotten less transactional, Steve.
Steve McBee
So much more transactional. We’re not playing that game at all. Those are things that aren’t being meaningfully done in any kind of aggressive, disruptive, or intentional way. We also have to do the basic things that we are doing, that the trade associations are doing, that the green groups are doing. We gotta be better. But there’s so much that is not being done. There’s plenty of work to do there as a starting point. I hope that by bringing better solutions to those gaps in the market, we actually can help the trade associations and those other firms that you mentioned be better because we’re creating a better on-the-ground environment for them to do the things they do.
David Roberts
You make a point that I think is good to establish here at the outset too, which is that for all the investment that is flooding into this space, there is a lot more out there that is hesitant or waiting or uncertain about entering. Talk a little bit about that dynamic. What is out there and why is it waiting?
Steve McBee
I’m glad you brought that up. This is a thing that I get up in the middle of the night thinking about, unfortunately. Speaking from an investor perspective, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that want to come into this space that is not coming into this space because it cannot price political volatility, it cannot price electoral uncertainty. That capital does not feel like the policy signals that are in place at any given time are going to be reliably in place through the hold period of their invested assets.
As a result, that money is just stranded. One of the things that we need to do is we need not just better policies, but we need to make sure that when these rules get written, they stay written. If that happens, a lot of capital is going to come into this space. We are close, per your comments at the top of this podcast, to real domination in this industry. If we get a massive new infusion of capital that is deployed against a set of rules that can be counted on, we’re going to rip.
David Roberts
I try not to dwell on this, but I do think periodically about that capital and about what it would have done if the IRA had been in place for four more years. We would have seen wonders, I think. There’s a bunch of pieces of this, and I want to take them on one at a time, but I want to start — maybe one of the things you want to set up is a rapid response kind of media operation.
Before we talk about what that would look like, I want to talk about what it would say. I want to talk about the messaging and the polling, because this, I think, is where my doubts are concentrated.
Steve McBee
Okay, we go number one.
David Roberts
This is where I sometimes feel I’m going crazy because I rarely see my perspective on this reflected out there in the world. Let’s talk about it. You have this polling, some polling you’ve done about these issues. Before I shut up, just tell us what the polling says about the message, about what people are hearing, about what they want to hear, about their preferences, that kind of thing.
Steve McBee
You and I might disagree with the findings of this work that we’ve done. The way I read the research is that people are not against clean energy. People are quite a bit more supportive of clean energy than even I expected. But what people don’t like are binary choices put in front of them where they’re being forced to pick one thing versus the other thing or forced to take a side. That’s thing number one.
Thing number two is I wake up every morning and work as hard as I can on the things I’m working on because I am existentially concerned about a climate crisis. That is my motivation, and that is my North Star. I learned that that is not true of a lot of people. This research bears that out. People are not — it would be too severe to say that they are indifferent to climate change, but it just isn’t something that ever hits the top 10 things they wake up every day thinking about.
The way we talk about this, it was interesting. I was having dinner about a month and a half ago with four US Senators who are really awesome on these issues, and we were having this conversation, exactly what’s our message? In the room, there was a little bit of a different view between certain members who felt we should be climate forward and we should not give up talking about the moral imperative of climate change and the need to build this industry out to address that.
Then there were members who were saying, “We should never talk about climate again. It’s all about affordability.” This is a debate that is being had here inside the climate influence ecosystem. I think it’s a false choice. We have all of a sudden so many ways to talk about this issue separate from climate that can appeal to lots of different people.
Talk about it on the basis of price, talk about it on the basis of affordability, talk about it on the basis of reliability. Talk about it in terms of, “Hey, clean energy isn’t getting blocked, barricaded, or embargoed in the Middle East.”
David Roberts
Or how about as a solution to inflation?
Steve McBee
As a solution to inflation and high energy prices, 100%. As an industry and maybe as a movement, the facts on the ground have not caught up to the messages that we are communicating. I’ll be honest with you here. When I came into this industry 12 years ago, I came in as CEO of a company called NRG Home. It’s a big company, $6 billion company. We had 3 million customers, all on the residential side. About 2.5 million of those customers were retail energy customers. The other half of those customers were buying some combination of our green growth products.
As we were looking about how to drive out market share, how to build a customer funnel that could actually convert, the thing we were really left with 12 years ago is we gotta go target climate-forward homeowners who care about climate change and who are willing to pay a premium for our products because at the time they weren’t cheaper for the most part. They also didn’t always work as well as we wish that they would. There was really limited grid services and VPP programs in place that would allow you to go to a customer and say, “We can install these products in your home, we can flex those with grid operators and we create a shared savings model for you.” None of that stuff really existed then, so we went after climate-forward homeowners.
We are in a totally different place today where we have an abundance — almost an embarrassment — of riches about how we can talk about this industry. We should be able to touch every single human in the United States with a message that lands. Whether that human is sitting in the commercial marketplace as a consumer or sitting in the public square as a voter. We have something for everyone that is a feature. That’s not a bug, that’s an opportunity, that’s not a problem.
David Roberts
I think you have misidentified the source of my doubts, as many people do. I don’t give a damn whether anyone says the word climate or not. It’s absolutely not my thing. I’m not one of these people who insist on putting climate forward. I think this is quite obviously true that if your superiority as a product, as a solution is overdetermined — it’s economic superiority, it’s security superiority, it’s clean air superiority, it’s inflation —obviously you use whichever one of those arguments is compelling to the current audience you’re talking to. That seems obvious to me.
What bugs me is this idea that we poll and we find out that if you pose this as a choice, “Do you want these technologies to replace fossil fuels?” people get nervous because they aren’t certain whether these technologies are strong enough, big enough, manly enough to really do the full job. They like addition, they don’t like replacement. That’s what they tell you on polls. That’s the lesson.
The question is what you do with that, what you do with that fact. As someone who has followed issue polls for decades now, I feel people really misuse them. I’m fine using them for political purposes, but once you start taking them too seriously, I think you get misled because on any issue, if you just ask people, “Do you want more stuff?” they’ll say yes. If you say, “Do you want fewer things?” they’ll say no. They don’t know anything about anything. They don’t know any of the details, any of the technologies. They don’t have any idea. They’re just intuitively — more sounds better than less. More choices sound better than fewer choices. That’s what you’re going to get, but that is just puddle deep.
The question is, what do you do with that information? This is the analogy I was thinking about before we got on the call. If you work for Coca-Cola and you do polling and you find out, “Oh, the public thinks that both Pepsi and Coke are part of a balanced diet,” that’s fine. But you’re advertising Coke. Your job is to sell Coke. You don’t go out and in your commercial for Coke, start by saying, “Don’t worry, we’re not replacing Pepsi. Don’t worry, you can still have your Pepsi.”
Even if that’s true, that’s not your job to say that. Your job is to brag about how good Coke is. You’re supposed to make people want to come to Coke and leave Pepsi behind, not because they have to, but because they want to. To take this messaging and take the lesson to be, “We need to talk about all of the above. We need to be sure not to threaten fossil fuels. We need to say, ‘We can all fit on this wagon.’” That comes off as weak. I don’t think it cuts through. I don’t think it creates the kind of conflict that draws attention these days. I just don’t think it is effective. This, “Let us be a junior partner on your bandwagon” message. Never mind whether it’s accurate. I just don’t think it works. I don’t think it’s a good way of interpreting these findings.
Steve McBee
That’s a great analogy. We want to be Coke, right? At least I want to be Coke. I don’t want to be Pepsi.
David Roberts
Amen.
Steve McBee
First of all, I want to say one thing to the point you made at the top of this question. It’s obvious to you that we should be organizing our message to match certain audience cohorts. It may be obvious, but we’re not doing it. We’re not doing it. That’s thing number one. On your point, here’s how I look at the research. I look at the research saying that public sentiment doesn’t want to have binary choices, doesn’t want to be forced to choose between this versus that, doesn’t want to be doing things to demonize one side versus the other. They just want it to be easy, they want it to be cheap, they want it to be reliable, whatever.
The other thing that you see in that research and some other research that we have done, which specifically targeted consumers of energy, is they do not have a lot of information about our industry and about our products and why they are in fact cheaper, more reliable, and create more energy security for them and their families. The public opinion right now is not in a great place for clean energy and that is on us.
David Roberts
Again, fossil fuels have been spending billions of dollars for many decades, quite sophisticated operation, convincing people that fossil fuels are strong, manly, tough, steady, reliable, and that clean energy is flittery, kind of nice, kind of cute. “Sure, we’ll let some in, sure, we’ll put some on the edge, but it can’t be the main thing.” I guess what I would just say is you either accommodate your message to that or you try to change that. The way to change that is by convincing people that clean energy is strong and is reliable and is powerful and can do the job.
You don’t accommodate yourself to their misconceptions, you try to change their opinion. This is what never seems to occur to the whole Democratic side of the aisle, including the clean energy industry. Why don’t you try to change this? Rather than accommodating yourself to this current state of public opinion, why don’t you try to change it?
Steve McBee
Exactly right. One of the things I want to make sure as I try to quell your doubts is that you understand how I read this research. Our job is, in my view, not to look at where public sentiment is and just say, “Well, there’s only a certain level of tolerance for our stuff or whatever, so we just have to accept that and do the best we can.” Our job is to change the composition of public sentiment.
What the research tried to do was to say, “Where are people right now? Where are the opportunities and where are the barriers?” Because I see this as a two-step. On the Coke, Pepsi thing, I think step number one is we need to talk about Coke and its reliability and its affordability and the fact that it can get hooked up to the grid faster and the fact that it can allow consumers to have more agency over their power. We need to talk about Coke over and over every single day on these terms.
Once we have level set public sentiment, then we need to start drawing a really stark contrast with Pepsi and we need to be throwing them under the bus every single day in a very intentional, coordinated, cohesive way. The only thing maybe we differ about is I think we have to define Coke before we can define Coke versus Pepsi. We have not done a good job on that.
David Roberts
Yeah, I totally get that. Totally understand that. The reason my hackles are always up about this is because I have heard this, “Do XYZ and then we’ll fight,” message from this industry, from the political — and the fight never seems to come.
Steve McBee
We need some new leadership here because the people who are paid to fight have not fought.
David Roberts
They seem to define fighting — not just that they won’t fight, it’s that they are constantly filling the newspapers with scoldy op-eds telling everybody else not to fight. They seem to treat fighting as though it’s “you’re farting at the cocktail party” or something. It’s gauche, it’s in D.C. it’s just not done, it’s wild to me.
Steve McBee
That is 100% true in our industry and in the climate influence space. It’s true across the whole progressive movement. Not to be too obnoxious about this, but the people I’m working with on this and the way I’m thinking about it, not only do I hope that we can build a better playbook to go and take the fight to the fossil fuel industry and take the message to the people in ways that are going to land, but I hope that by doing that maybe we can hand that playbook over to some different parts of the progressive movement that could probably take a couple pages out of a more aggressive, intentional, and tenacious strategy to take on all the bullshit coming from the other side.
David Roberts
I would just like to see a plan that doesn’t have step one, publicly talk about your own weaknesses and shortcomings, acknowledge all your, concede all your opponents’ arguments, step one, step two, beg for scraps. Let’s talk about then one of the initiatives that’s coming out of this, called Signal — which is rapid response media. Anybody who listens to Volts or has ever read anything I’ve written for 20 plus years now knows that this is my personal obsession. The media imbalance, the toxic information environment, and the absolute passivity about it on the progressive side, on the side of clean energy, just this refusal to acknowledge the centrality of media in the information space in all of this.
I can’t tell you how many — give me a billion dollars and I’m just going to hire — never mind that, give me $100,000, I can hire an army of young people to go out on TikTok and YouTube and just say, “Clean electricity fricking rules. Look at this, look at how awesome this is.” That would be like a buck fifty for any of these philanthropists, any of these green groups, any of these investors. As you say, there’s money all over the place in this area, but they’re not spending on media. It drives me crazy. I was very happy to see this. What do you envision here?
Steve McBee
The only thing I would quarrel with is to say we are spending money on media, but we are spending money on the wrong media. You mentioned a scolding op-ed in the New York Times. There should be no op-ed in the New York Times. All of this centralized TV buying that the existing groups are doing — this is not — we are not talking to people in the places that they increasingly get their information in. We are not talking through the voices they trust to deliver it.
The thing that inspired this idea initially was — we could probably do a whole separate podcast on this. I have spent 10 years trying to blow up the residential clean energy model, which solar proxies for, which I think has been a disaster for consumers and trust and the industry and all the rest. In looking at different ways to reorganize those markets, one of the things in our research that we see is that, first of all, if you’re going to sell somebody solar, you shouldn’t be knocking on their door during dinner to sell it. But that’s how we sell it. When you knock on the door of most people, they are not even showing up open and neutral. That’s the best case scenario.
David Roberts
If I hear a knock on my door and I see somebody I don’t know at it, immediately I’m angry, resentful, and I want them to go away. It is unfathomable to me that this is not just a way of selling solar. It’s the way — the primary, the only way we have of selling solar. It’s like the 1950s called.
Steve McBee
It’s frustrating. That’s a whole separate topic. The point I was making to your question was when consumers are engaged in a selling moment with our industry, they either show up with no information, but more typically they show up with biases against our products.
Part of that is on us. We have made a difficult product to sell more difficult by the way that we have organized the market. The other thing, we started doing some more work on why people are showing up with all this misinformation about what this is.
What we realized is that there are at least — this was about 15 months ago — there are at least three, I call them air wars, being financed and prosecuted by the fossil fuel industry and their allies that are getting way up the funnel with customers into their digital and social channels with subtle and not so subtle messages about clean energy being weird and expensive and dangerous and unreliable.
David Roberts
And the chemicals, Steve. The chemicals and the spyware.
Steve McBee
Yeah. The panels are Chinese spyware. The fossil fuel industry, you have to give them credit because they are getting it done.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Steve McBee
Nobody is showing up going, “I’m really glad you’re at my door because I’ve heard solar is this incredible price and reliability driver and I’m really interested in talking about how I can put these on my home.” Said almost nobody that answers the door ever. The fossil fuel industry is playing the game.
I find it ironic and despairing that we are the cool kids in the energy industry, we’re the tech-forward part of the energy industry. Somehow the fossil fuel industry is smoking us in the new media environment and they’re smoking us as it relates to incepting consumers and they’re smoking us as it relates to incepting voters. We got to go take that on. Now we have no presence, not as an industry and not really as a climate movement in the digital space.
David Roberts
Concretely then, what does it look like to build this? Is it literally just giving money to people and telling them to go out and fight these? Practically, how do you build this?
Steve McBee
What I’m trying to do with this is fill gaps. I think there are three gaps here that Signal is trying to fill. Gap number one is the gap we’ve been talking about. We have no position in the digital and social media ecosystem. Number two, the industry voice is not meaningfully in the contest for narrative and facts anywhere. It’s not unified in any meaningful way when it does engage. Number three, the industry efforts to communicate its story, to the extent that they exist, are siloed from the messages and communications being run by our political allies about the policy advantages or the policy choices or the policy ideas to advance the industry. We’re not in the game, we’re not in the game digitally, and we’re not coordinating with our best allies.
What I’m trying to do — my partner on this, maybe a lot of your listeners know this group, it’s a C3 called Good Power. When I was looking for an execution partner for this, I looked at all the for-profit and all the nonprofit entities and I thought, Good Power is really getting it done. What I was most impressed by with them is the way they’ve used their portfolio of influencers to go into rural red parts of the United States where renewables projects were being held up because there was no community support for those projects or there was a lot of disinformation in those communities that was making it hard to get those projects approved.
They went out and they put influencers into those markets that looked like and sounded like and felt authentic to those communities. Teachers, priests, farmers, moms, whatever. They have really moved the needle. The way this is going to work — I won’t geek out too much on this — but we’re using an AI-enabled technology platform which, the best way to think about it is a little micro network that’s being dropped into this campaign. That network unifies and connects all of its participants on a common platform.
At the beginning of every week we’re going to find one or two things where we’re like, that’s a defining moment and we need to show up and show up on time and show up unified or this is a thing we’d like to make a defining moment, whatever.
David Roberts
Let me just emphasize both those — being opportunistic. This is the thing. I remember when I first heard about this, I was like, I’ve heard about these communications efforts. You remember, We Can Solve It. That was, I think, Al Gore’s, or Climate Power. We’ve had these narrative efforts before, but they tend to be so technocratic and top down and, as you say, mainstream media centered and just feel like they’re from a previous century. The main thing they’re missing is just being opportunistic, being there when things happen. That is what the right is really good at. Anything that happens, they can twist it and put it into their narrative overnight, everywhere, overnight. That’s the main thing.
The other thing is creating opportunities. This is to get back to our previous discussion. What many people in our world are nervous and frightened and timid about is creating conflict that draws attention. That is the coin of the realm these days. That is how you get attention. To have as a premise of your effort, “We’re not going to offend anybody or bother anybody or counteract or contradict anyone,” no one cares, no one listens, no one pays attention. On both those sides, the rapid response and the, “Where can we create fruitful conflict that will serve an educational purpose?” Both those we have been falling so far down on.
Steve McBee
Yeah. This is another one of those things that wakes me up and pisses me off in the middle of the night. The way we booted the IRA fight. We deserve to be in Siberia for 10 years. It could not have been executed any worse. Here we are with a huge do-over in the form of these defining opportunities that seem to show up every single week —
David Roberts
I know.
Steve McBee
— to message around. Yet, all our messaging is, again, to the extent it exists, siloed. It’s disparate. We take forever to pull it together —
David Roberts
And it’s cringy and it’s “ all of the above” and it’s “please give us table scraps.”
Steve McBee
Right?
David Roberts
Here’s another analogy. I had the Coke-Pepsi analogy, Steve. Then I had one other one I thought that I’m going to run by you. On immigration, Trump gets elected, all the elites on the left conclude, “Oh, no, immigration’s bad. Now we got to retreat, retreat, retreat.” On immigration, the public is not with us on immigration. Run, run. Let’s chase the right. We’ll be tough, too. We’ll be tough on the border, too. Chase, chase, chase. Instead of looking forward, just look up a little bit at the horizon. Look forward a few years to the very, very predictable thermostatic public opinion backlash against Trump.
Now, sure enough, immigration is polling better than it has in years. Support for immigration is higher than it has been in years. Our side could have gone to where the puck was going. We could have just stuck to our guns and then think how good we’d look now. We are serious about our values. We stuck with them. Now here you are, public, coming back to us, and we look good. Instead, we look like chiseling little weenies who have no courage of our convictions. We chase the right — and now we’re going to what, chase back left again? Now we just look like we have no spine.
I see the analogy here, too, which is Trump got elected. “Oh, no, climate and clean energy is bad. Now we got to cringe, we got to run away. We got to talk about all of the above. We got to talk about anything but what we are and our value advantages.” Here comes the Iran war, very predictably, Trump’s messing it all up and the public is, especially in other countries, but even here is like, “Gosh, it seems like fossil fuels cause lots of problems,” and they’re coming back our way.
If we had just stood here and not moved in the first place, we would be here to meet them. But instead, we’re chasing public opinion every time we get a new poll. It’s framed by DC consultants and the DC types and think tank types as that’s savvy. That’s smart politics. “You hippies have your head in the clouds. We’re the smart, savvy politics knowers.” But instead, if you follow their advice, you just constantly look like a weakling. You constantly look like you have no center, you have no spine. We should have just stuck with our guns in the first place, because, as you say, the world is now serving up one example after another that is telling our story for us.
Where are we? Where are we out spiking the ball? Where are we out saying, “We told you so.” Thank you for coming back. Here we are, we’re ready to go. That’s what worries me about the poll chasing. Always.
Steve McBee
Yeah.
David Roberts
It’s not even that savvy.
Steve McBee
We’re not spiking the ball. We’re not even getting to the line of scrimmage. I think it really hurts when you think about the jillions of words that have been written about Iran since this thing started, how few of those words have been devoted to crystallizing a choice. “We’re about to dial up a trillion and a half dollar defense budget. A 40% increase over last year’s defense budget, riding alongside a $200 billion supplemental to protect our interests in the Middle East, which is energy.”
Has anybody thought about taking 15% of that money and investing it in domestically sourced, low-cost, reliable energy that will allow us to compete against China? It’s not even in the conversation and that’s on us. I think your point is a really — I think you and I share snowboarding as a thing we do. You say you gotta go to where the puck is. When you’re snowboarding, you gotta pick a line. You pick a line, and then you go and you rip your line. You don’t come off of it because you hit a mogul or whatever. You hit your line.
David Roberts
I think that’s way better, that’s way cooler.
Steve McBee
At some point, we have to decide as an industry, what do we believe about ourselves and what do we stand for? We have to go out and articulate that. We need to do that. Again, I think we have to understand public opinion and understand the fight we are in and understand where our strengths and weaknesses are. We have to maneuver through that in the right way. I don’t see a difference between being smart and sophisticated about how we do that and being assertive in making the case for our stuff.
David Roberts
Let me ask a concrete question then about just that. Say you have this digital rapid response Signal, you’re calling it, set up. It’s running, and an IOU comes along, utility comes along and announces it’s building 2 gigawatts of new gas to serve data centers in its territory. Does Signal —
We dial it up.
— go for it, does it go after that? Does it fight against gas in that instance?
Steve McBee
Yeah, we dial it up. The thing about Signal that’s cool is it’s going to unite a bunch of different industry leaders onto this micro network and practically get to the speed and agility and velocity comments you made about how the digital media ecosystem works. This platform generates content for its users and, in the voice of their social media narratives, pushes it onto their channels. We push all that out in a unified way around the same message, and then we dip into an influencer pool of about 8,500 creators and validators, and we pick the validators and creators that are best suited to amplify that message, and they amplify it outside the media audiences of the participants. That’s how this works.
Not every industry in the scenario that you just laid out, not everybody on the channel is going to be down for a fight on gas. Part of what we’re doing, and look, everybody should just — what do you stand for? What do you believe? On the one hand, I’ve been a CEO. I understand fiduciary obligation. We don’t want these companies that are great to put them in a situation unnecessarily where they’re exposing themselves to a bunch of political bullshit.
But in any given messaging opportunity, I’m expecting we’ll get 70% participation from the industry participants on the platform. What we’re also going to do is we’re going to coordinate what we’re doing with what our elected representatives are doing separately. We’re going to try to both amplify their messages and also try to surround what they’re doing with our messages. It’s more cohesive because, right now, if we ever are in the game on a narrative contest or a defining moment, it’s like we have just cats and dogs running around all over the place doing little bits and bites. It doesn’t add up to anything.
The fossil fuel industry, those guys know how to line up and go get it done. We got to build permanent institutional capability that is equal to what we’re up against. We’re not going to build that in six months. This isn’t a Mars landing. We can build this in 18 months. We can build this so that it’s scaling and accelerating way before the next presidential election. Way before.
David Roberts
This is a good segue to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the capital table — the going after elites version of this. Here’s how I would preface this. I was debating where to say this, but I’ll just say it here. The fact of the matter is that fossil gas and clean electrification are alternatives to one another. If you are going to cleanly electrify everything, you are going to drive gas out of heating and cooling, you are going to drive gas out of industry, you are going to drive gas out of electricity generation. It is, in the end, a choice. You got to do one or the other.
The idea that the main trade association of which these companies are part is half gas causes me to lose consciousness when I think about it too much. It is the most ludicrous — I can’t believe it’s real. It is unbelievable to me that when we go approach lawmakers, when we go send people to testify before Congress, they can’t present that alternative. They are prevented by their own trade association, by their own institutional commitments. They’re prevented from saying, “Coke rules and it’s better than Pepsi, choose it instead of Pepsi.”
They literally can’t say that. In fact, they’re writing scoldy op-eds telling us not to say it. Talk about the capital table. Just the idea that clean electrification can just go speak for itself for once is, I think, a huge piece of this. Talk about how that’s structured and what it is.
Steve McBee
Yeah, man. First of all, I think it’s probably worth a minute on what you just raised. It’s very dispiriting. This isn’t personal against anybody. There’s a lot of people who are working really hard and trying to get things done. But there are structural challenges with some of the most important infrastructure we have in place that is prohibiting them from delivering and from getting what we need to get done, done.
I think there are two things. There’s the thing you raised, which is, look, ACP decided that — and look, I said this at the top of the podcast. One thing I am really focused on is building a broader base of support for our products and for our policy agenda so that we have the durability, particularly when it comes to the regulatory signals that we need to draw in the capital that’s required to scale these markets. I’m 100% for, I think it’s essential, building bipartisan support for the industry.
One of the really exciting things that I found over the past six months is there are some groups on the center-right that are really doing good work, that are really practical and that are really on it. I think that there is a moment here where we might be able to take the political toxicity out of this issue.
But I don’t believe the way to get bipartisan support is by adding a bunch of utilities and legacy energy companies so that you can get access to those members. The way you do it is by changing the way you talk about your product so that it draws those members and their constituents in. A really big challenge we have is the Trump administration. They have established a playing field where it’s a knife fight in a phone booth between gas and renewables, and the outcomes are binary. You have to pick a jersey. A reversible jersey does not work in this environment. The strategic and structural choices that have been made have compromised our ability to go pick the fights we need to pick and win the fights we need to win, and we have to deal with that.
The second thing is, trade associations — and this is not unique to ours necessarily, although I think ours certainly are not, we are not at an A plus, even relative to —
David Roberts
Steve, SEIA just elected Tim Pawlenty as their president. A paste, boring Republican who is not going to ruffle any feathers, not going to sell Coke, is going to lead with an “I’m friendly to Pepsi. I’m here from Coke, and I want to say, first of all, that I’m friendly to Pepsi.” It is unbelievably pathetic to me, our trade associations. I know you don’t want to say this and won’t say it and maybe even don’t think about it, but I just think they are pathetic. It is unbelievable how pathetic they are, failing the people in these companies. They’re failing the people who are on the ground fighting for this stuff.
Steve McBee
I think there is a structural problem we talked about in how you build your membership. But there is also a business model problem, which is, these trade associations generate most of their revenue from conferences. They hold a lot of conferences and white papers.
David Roberts
Maybe one more white paper?
Steve McBee
They put out a lot of white papers. They do fly-ins. It’s not that these things aren’t important, but putting all of the juice of your organization into holding conferences where you invite members out to sit on panels where they talk to each other and tell everybody that’s already converted what a great job we’re all doing and then go post it on their socials and go home and feel great about that. The conferences are valuable, the white papers can be valuable. The fly-ins can help. But those are things that are distinct and different from building political power.
David Roberts
Yes.
Steve McBee
And establishing cultural identity. In fact, I would say, and this is why I’m in the gaps here, I’m focused on political power and cultural identity. I think if we make those things better, all the things that those trade associations are trying to do will be easier for them because their success depends on our political power and our cultural buy-in.
David Roberts
But it would be helpful if they didn’t lead with the message, “Don’t worry, don’t be alarmed at us. We’re not trying to build any political power. We’re no threat to you. Everybody just calm down. We’re no threat.” That just, again, misreads what works, I think.
Steve McBee
Yeah. We can have an honest conversation here within this community about what’s working and what’s not working. We don’t have to make it personal, but we need to be honest about what’s working and what’s not working. We need to be urgent about disrupting or replacing the things that aren’t working with solutions that will work. We need not only some different organizations, but we need different business models, we need different revenue models, we need a different set of parameters that are tied to building our power, locking in our cultural identity.
That’s what needs to be done. I think we’re struggling to have that conversation because I think people aren’t being real about what we need to do here. Our goal as an industry, at least my goal as a person in the industry, is to replace fossil fuels with renewable power, if not entirely, heavy majority within 10 years. That is a really ambitious goal. That is one of the most ambitious things you could possibly dream up to do. It’s doable. But if we’re going to do that, we need to have the tools and capabilities in place that are equal to that objective.
If we’re not going to be willing to build what needs to be built to enable that goal, we should change it because we’re not going to hit it with what we have now. We’re not.
David Roberts
Okay, this capital table, the problem that you’ve diagnosed is that lawmakers, even the lawmakers who are friendly, are getting their information about what’s happening in this space via intermediaries who are not doing a very good job. One of those intermediaries, while we’re throwing elbows all over the place, is the big green groups. The default, I think, for a US Senator, if they’re saying, “What’s going on with solar and batteries these days?” is they call one of the big green groups or they call one of these weak-kneed trade associations. You want to solve that problem by getting them information direct. Talk about how that’s going to work.
Steve McBee
On the green groups, I’m sure there are things they could do better. There are things I’m sure they think they can do better. But I don’t really fault the green groups. I fault us, the industry, for forcing the green groups to pick up slack that really should be our responsibility.
David Roberts
Yes. They’re supposed to solve climate change, they’re supposed to advance this industry, they’re supposed to change public opinion. Maybe we could just let them just defend the environment and maybe have other groups do the other stuff.
Steve McBee
I think the green groups have a hugely important role to play here. There is a ton of stuff that they do that they just are excellent at. But in the IRA fight, we had green groups running around and talking to members of Congress about why batteries and solar and PJM make — that should not be their job. Because we have not done our job, they have had to pick it up.
What I am trying to do here with Amped is to say, “Hey, we as an industry need to own our lane.” We need to own it. We need to own the responsibility. We need to be excellent at it. We need to let the green groups go back into their lane where they’re excellent. Then these two lanes can coordinate and they can run concurrently and merge onto a superhighway that’ll propel the industry forward. I really don’t fault the green groups for this. I really put that on us, on the industry, on the people that represent the industry. We have to do better. The capital table is one way to do that.
The thing that motivated this is I had a group of investors, 10 or 12 investors or so, in New York at Climate Week with half a dozen members of Congress. It was a one-hour meeting. No intermediaries, no Washington people, no lobbyists. It was just principals talking to principals in an off-the-record Chatham House rules conversation.
I opened up the meeting and said, “We’ve got the people in this room that are setting the policy signals and we have the people in this room that are underwriting investments and allocating capital against those rules. We’re all trying to achieve the same thing here, which is a fast and orderly energy transition, but we’re in different lanes and we need to understand each other better so that we can work together more efficiently.” I just let the conversation roll. First of all, it was a one-hour meeting that went almost three hours —
David Roberts
Which is not — speaking of principals, these are busy people. They do not sit around for three-hour meetings unless they care.
Steve McBee
Yeah. Honestly, a lot of my investment friends I brought into this, I had to drag them in and then I had to drag them out, because it was rich. The thing that kept happening in that discussion was members kept saying, “I had no idea about that,” or “I did not know that. If I had known that, maybe we would have done this,” or “Maybe now knowing that I might go do that.” At one point one of the members of Congress who will go unnamed stood up and said, “Guys, where the fuck has all this information been?” He wasn’t critical, he was like, “We’re not getting this.”
David Roberts
That’s when the investors said, “Sir, have you heard of Volts?”
Steve McBee
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Why aren’t you listening to Volts? It’s a bit of a light bulb moment. This is, again, on us. We have not done — and look, I spent 10 years on Capitol Hill. I started and built one of the biggest lobbying firms in Washington. I understand as a person who has made policy and influenced policy that policy gets made all the time with insufficient information. That is, that’s how it goes —
David Roberts
To say the least.
Steve McBee
But I have been really alarmed at how thin the intelligence layer is, particularly in Washington when it comes to on-the-ground commercial dynamics in a marketplace, in our industry.
David Roberts
You know what I think is evidence of that. I wanted to make this point too. I think we’ve got a bunch of Democrats to say the words now that clean energy is cheaper. They’ll say the words. But as you say, their level of understanding and depth of knowledge is so shallow that if they run into any political backlash or any barrier, they immediately resort to stuff like freezing the gas tax or freezing electricity rates or just these sort of gimmicky, sloppy solutions that clearly reveal that they don’t really believe it. They don’t really know it in their gut. They don’t really believe it in their gut because they can be scared off it at the slightest rustle in the bushes.
Steve McBee
Part of that is because they’re not getting consistent, complete, comprehensive, data-driven information on the regular that can build that conviction in their gut. Maybe I’m just Pollyanna-ish about this. I know Washington is a very cynical place. It’s a very transactional place. But I believe ideas still matter and information still matters and has currency. It is not okay for us to complain about members being squishy on our issues or being opposed to our issues or whatever if we haven’t supplied them with the full complement of information. If we give them all the information and they look the other way, then we should be going after them in a very muscular way.
But until we have provided them with all of the data, it’s not fair to criticize them for not being with us. We gotta help them be with us by giving them the data and the information that builds conviction. We’re not doing that right now. This capital table, it’s designed to do that and it’s going to be bipartisan. We’re going to meet with both sides of the aisle. We’re going to meet with members of the House and the Senate. This is not lobbying. This will not be registered to lobby. There will be no lobbying done in these meetings.
This is about filling up the information bucket and getting the right framework and the right supporting information into the hands of the people that have to make these calls, policy-wise.
David Roberts
Who’s in that room? Is it CEOs, is it investors? Who’s at this table?
Steve McBee
It’s a mix, but I’m organizing it in a way that over-indexes to the capital markets, to the investors. I think the investor perspective here is really valuable and I think it’s been missing from the conversation. An investor who’s investing across the clean energy economy is going to have one — if you’re investing big green pools of capital, you’re investing in residential solar and you’re investing in green steel and you’re investing in climate SaaS. You have the benefit of looking across the whole market and it gives you incredible pattern recognition that allows you to provide a perspective that is different from a company CEO who’s sitting in one lane of one market.
Similarly, that CEO in one lane of one market, they’re going to come to Washington and they’re going to talk to members of Congress about the thing that impacts their business because that’s their job. If you’re an investor, back to what we talked about, what you really want is stability, predictability, consistency so that you can allocate capital and feel like you’ve got the political volatility and the regulatory variability properly risk-managed. That perspective is something that can be very enriching to this conversation. That voice has not really shown up so far.
We’re going to try to make sure we have a lot of that represented in the room, but we are going to have company CEOs as well.
David Roberts
I think you could probably understand how some people on the grassroots level, some clean energy activists, etc., can look slightly askance at the notion that capital is going to lead the communication effort with lawmakers because they can obviously give market information to lawmakers, but there are a lot of perspectives that they are not going to share.
One question is who gets in this room and are they paying to do so? Are there membership fees? Who is funding all this?
Steve McBee
Right now we’re just trying to open up the conversation. This isn’t the only conversation on these topics that are going to be held. Again, I’m looking at gaps. I just see a gap in the market. Investors and private equity guys are not the most sympathetic figures right now for really good reasons.
The people I work with in the capital markets who are building the energy transition marketplace, they’re trying to put a lot of capital to work. They’re trying to have conversations that get things structured in a way where they can deploy a lot of capital. We should be doing everything we can to make that as achievable for them as possible. It’s not a — maybe this is where it’s, to use the term you hate so much, all of the above. It’s all of the above. We need all the voices from the different parts of the market in the conversation. That’s business people, that’s investors, that’s Washington people. We all need to be supplying information and making sure people have what they need to make good decisions. This is really just designed to do that and to try to do that better.
David Roberts
Having gotten a little bit of a close-up look, as you say, the background level of knowledge among lawmakers about the burgeoning clean electrification market’s efforts is pretty low. Is it high anywhere? Is there anyone up there who is listening to Volts or the equivalent, who is tapped in to the day-to-day, who is communicating with their peers maybe in a helpful way? Are there champions?
Steve McBee
Yeah, there are. I’m not trying to —
David Roberts
Do you want to name some names?
Steve McBee
I know that you know Sean Casten very well and Sean Casten is excellent. I think Senator Heinrich is excellent. I think Senators Schatz and Whitehouse are excellent. I think Pete Welch is excellent. These are people who are very forward on our issues and they’re very tuned in. The thing about it is though, they have a lot of knowledge. They have more knowledge than most. They want more knowledge and more information.
That’s why I think there’s a gap here. As an industry, we have to play the cards that are available to us. We’re not going to build political power like crypto does because we don’t have $200 million to go drop into political races. We don’t have that and we’re not going to have that for a while.
David Roberts
But do we spend the money we do have —
Steve McBee
No, we don’t.
David Roberts
- on races? We could do more than we’re doing.
Steve McBee
We don’t need as much, but we just need enough. The point I was making is let’s lead with our strengths. One of our strengths is we can’t control the fact that we’re going to get outspent 30 to 1 or whatever. We can control how we spend the 1, but we can’t control what they’re going to spend. We can’t control what the other side’s going to say and the lies they’re going to tell and the distortions they’re going to put out there. But we can control how we respond to them and we can control being excellent at the things that we have big advantages on.
Going all the way back to the top of this conversation, one of our advantages is the facts.
David Roberts
Reality.
Steve McBee
Yes. The opportunities and the facts and the way our stuff solves for a lot of things that are politically vexing, like affordability, that are important for our country from a competitive perspective. We should be 100% A students in supplying those facts, that information, that perspective, that data to the people who we need to have it. We’re not 100%, we’re like 62%, so we should go be excellent at that. That’s the thing that we have a big advantage on and we’re not optimizing it.
David Roberts
There’s still one bucket we haven’t even touched on yet. This is the bucket — it raised my eyebrow a little bit. Don’t totally get how this fits with everything else, but maybe you can explain it. This is the finance play, the finance piece of this. Maybe I’ll just let you explain. What is that?
Steve McBee
One of the things that is frustrating to me, as an industry we have about a trillion dollars of capacity that’s either installed or that’s sitting in the queue waiting to be installed. That’s a lot of capacity, but we are not leveraging, we’re not organizing and leveraging the throw weight of our industry in ways that not only could be better deployed to build our political power, but I think could be brought in to solve market bottlenecks that are holding back the energy transition. One thing I’m trying — I’m really trying to think about, again, I don’t mean to keep coming back to our trade associations. They have a lot of members in those trade associations, they’re organizing them for their conferences and their fly-ins.
I think we could organize the industry on a whole range of public-private initiatives that happen outside of Washington that could really help speed things up. Transmission is the first area I’m starting on this. Everybody wants to build more transmission and everybody knows we’re not building transmission nearly fast enough. I’ve tried to do a lot of those deals and there are lots of problems with them. A common problem in every one of these projects is that the borrowing costs for transmission developers are super high because utilities cannot buy transmission capacity until those lines are energized.
It’s not like going and buying a 20-year PPA on a utility-scale solar project or whatever. The lines have to be energized before utilities can purchase the capacity on them. For developers, you’re holding all that merchant risk through the period of building those lines. Your borrowing costs are really high and it’s hard to make the cost of capital work through the project period.
David Roberts
There’s the risk — not to tell you something you already know and the audience probably already knows too — but there’s also the risk that there are 5,000 veto points. Every community, every state, every utility, anybody practically can sink the whole thing. That’s just an enormous amount of risk if you are deploying large amounts of capital.
Steve McBee
Yeah, that’s — it’s funny. I’m out here in Washington today. Just before I jumped on this podcast, I did a panel with Citi and Macquarie Capital and some other folks at the CRES annual conference on this exact topic. We were all just up there pleading for certainty and a fixed set of rules so that those things that you just mentioned wouldn’t happen. What I think is there are some cool things that could be done to help mitigate some of this. I have talked to some large green infrastructure funds about this idea.
We could go to a state that’s trying to build transmission and we could sit down with the governor and we could sit down with the utility leaders and we could bring in the capital providers and the transmission developer and say, “This capital provider is going to buy a billion dollars of capacity and it’s going to hold that capacity while the lines are being built and then it will sell that capacity at a markup to the hyperscalers and the utilities that want to buy it once the project is concluded,” which will allow you to get a cost of capital that makes these projects work and we can start building this stuff, really.
David Roberts
That sounds a little bit like the advanced market commitment that everybody’s —
Steve McBee
Yeah, Jane Flegal has a derivative of this idea that I think is really cool. At least my derivative of this idea is you say to those local officials, “The capital wants to do this, but holding that merchant risk starts to strain their investment parameters from a risk perspective. Help us just offset that risk a little bit.” The state could take 20% of the first-loss exposure.
The utilities could say, “All of the wires that are financed by this pool of capital, we’re going to give it a fast-track approval process so these projects get built as quickly as possible.” The utilities could also say, “We can’t contractually obligate ourselves to buying this capacity, but we can put an option on it that shows intent.” Then you start squeezing the risk down to a place where those infrastructure funds can play. If you did that, you’d lower the borrowing cost for the developers. The stuff would get built. The hyperscalers and the utilities that need it would get their power. You would create a new asset class for green infrastructure because you could replicate that across the country. For the local political leaders that helped cut that deal, they’re printing political equity because they’ve got fast, cheap, reliable green power flowing through the state or flowing through that region.
I think these are things — we have to get creative about how we put policy structures in place that can help this stuff move faster. Getting the industry organized to post up, because you could only cut that deal — and the reason I think Amped could cut that deal is it’s a nonprofit.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask, what’s — there are green infrastructure funds all over the place. There’s a lot of entities around in this space, what is the value add for —
Steve McBee
It’s hard to do the deal. I couldn’t go in there as Huck Capital. I could convene everybody. But because Huck Capital has a profit motive, it would be hard to do the deal. If you don’t have a profit motive and you’re just trying to get the deal done, you can get the deal done. In addition to having the right structure, you also need to have the industry standing behind you.
If I were to build a trade association, the models I would use? I like the NFL’s commissioner’s office, which until six or seven years ago was a C6 trade association. Those 32 NFL teams, they organized behind the commissioner’s office. Roger Goodell had the throw weight to sit down across the table and cut those TV deals, cut the branding and licensing deals. You look at AARP, an amazingly effective trade association. They have a commercial arm called AARP Commercial Services, which cuts all the deals for all those services that their members get at a discount. It generates billions of dollars for that trade association and it funds most of their operating capital.
There are really cool and innovative things that you can do if you can get the industry consolidated in a way that provides you a viable counterparty to make things like the transmission example happen. I’m excited about that. I think those are real opportunities. Given how dysfunctional the policymaking process is in Washington and how uncertain it is, we have to try to find ways to be more creative outside of Washington to use public mechanisms to get rid of some of these bottlenecks. I think there are a lot of different things you could do. The transmission example is just one of them.
David Roberts
Okay, those are the main pieces. There’s digital rapid response, there’s this elite-to-elite play, this capital table so that lawmakers can get intel directly from the source. Then there’s this effort to structure public-private partnerships to de-risk some of these big investments so that capital can get cheaper and more capital can come in. Is that the landscape thus far? That’s what Amped is doing thus far?
Steve McBee
Yeah, I think you’re not only a great marketer for the clean energy industry, but you’ve got the Amped talking points down here. That’s exactly right. That’s what it is. Those are the three areas we’re starting. Amped is — we have an LLC, we have a C3, we have a C6, we’re waiting on a C4. One of the things that I think is challenging about the way things are structured currently is, you lock into one of those things or the other and those are the things you can do or the things you want to do, you have to do in the construct of what one structure versus another allows. I think we need to be mission-forward, problem-solving focused first and then make sure that we have a structure that works best to go solve that problem as fast as possible.
David Roberts
Yes, I think what you’re implying here, but I’ll just surface, is that the standard here in the advocacy community is C3, which creates all kinds of, I think, perverse incentives and limitations, among other things. Among the things C3 can’t do is lawmaker comes along and says, “Screw you, clean electrification industry. I’m voting against you.” A C3 can’t then say, “All right, we’re going to come take your head off, we’re going to come beat you in a primary, we’re going to come make an example of you and scare the crap out of the other lawmakers.”
That very basic piece of political power and influence is just utterly missing from this space. I don’t think any lawmaker in any state, or federally, is scared of this industry.
Steve McBee
Yeah.
David Roberts
Are you going to try to make them scared? That’s what I’m —
Steve McBee
No fear is no respect, no respect is no leverage, and no leverage is no outcome. That’s another thing that is not being done well. To the point of what you were saying about the C3 and the limitations, I think you need the right tool. There are a lot of jobs, and you need the right tool for the job. You don’t want to be job-limited because you only have one tool.
One of the things that the fossil fuel industry does well, unfortunately, is they operate with an incredible amount of cohesion. They dial in their communications, they dial in their politics and their political power. They make themselves commercially felt, and then they organize those things in a way that is so well coordinated that you just feel like you’re sitting in surround sound from all the stuff that they’re doing. We need — the reason I’m building Amped this way is we need those kinds of flywheels that can coordinate across activities and get the leverage that comes from a more integrated approach to these things. That’s really missing from the market. I hope we have a better mousetrap here because we definitely need some better mousetraps.
David Roberts
Your model is, we need to build support for Coke before we explicitly go out and try to kill Pepsi. I guess I just want to know, when? Because this fight between clean electrification and gas, I feel like the ACP is out selling the notion that there is no such conflict. We can all win. We can all win together. It’s all growth, it’s all extra. No one has to fight, no one has to choose. But if you look at the physics of it, if you look at the market of it, if you want to decarbonize, yes, you do eventually have to choose.
Maybe it is the case that clean electrification does not currently have the political juice to take that fight on directly. But when will it? If you want to replace most gas in 10 years, 10 years is not a long time. When will we be able to really join that fight?
Steve McBee
I’ll answer that question and then ask you one back because I’d be interested when you think about this. This is a non-consensus view, I’m sure, and it could be wrong. I’m wrong all the time. What I feel here, in talking to lots of people in Washington, including, like I said at the top, some groups that are doing really good work from the center-right, what I feel is that at a moment that feels on the one hand like the most hyper-partisan and political moment ever on energy and where we’ve got the administration doing everything they can to wreck this industry and bury it, outside of the administration, I feel like there is maybe the best chance we’ve had in a decade.
David Roberts
As you say, the world is —
Steve McBee
Yeah.
David Roberts
— We’re not trying to tell our story, but the world is trying to do it for us.
Steve McBee
These members, they’re going home and they’re getting beaten on affordability and they’re getting beaten on affordability the grid being backed up. They’re getting beaten on Iran and all this stuff. The point I would make here is I think it would be a mistake to squander a moment, if we think that moment exists, to establish a center political coalition for these issues. I think the best way to do that, to take that shot, is to really hammer the benefits of Coke. If we come out and we start just talking about Coke versus Pepsi, people that want to come home, we might make it really hard for them to come home.
I’d like to leave a lot of green grass to bring conservatives to us on this issue. I think talking about Coke is the way to do that. If we are successful in doing that, Pepsi is going to flip out and they’re going to do the things they do. They’re going to spend money, they’re going to tell lies, they’re going to distort and all the rest, and we will have to really be on our shit if that happens, because that’s where the fight will be.
I really think we have such a great story to tell about this industry. I think it can appeal to a broader cross section of people who currently support this industry. If we could achieve that, it would be the most important thing we could do because we could get policies in place where the rules are fixed, they transcend our electoral volatility, we get the capital off the sidelines and we build the shit out of the energy transition. If we see a window to do that, I think we should take it. I see that window. I said, I could be wrong. I’d love to know what you think about that. But I think we get there by talking about Coke and then once we’ve got a broader coalition, we drop the Pepsi hammer.
David Roberts
I love that we’ve taken my analogy this far. I think that’s probably right. As much as the denizens of D.C. would like to dismiss all clean energy partisans like me as woolly-headed, unrealistic, unsavvy hippies, I’m not dumb. I get that most lawmakers, most centers of power currently do not get this, do not have confidence that clean electrification can do the job on its own. Not only that it could be as powerful and reliable, but that this is an upgrade to the grid. That’s the story. This is better, it is more reliable, it is cheaper. It’s better on every metric.
I do think, yes, we need swagger, we need people to want — instead of clutching their Pepsi to their chest out of fear that someone is going to take it from them, we need people to be voluntarily setting down the Pepsi and going to pick up a Coke because, “Damn, look how good Coke looks.”
Steve McBee
That was my — you articulated it much better than I could. That was my question. I was going to ask you, I have this view that we can widen the coalition. I have this view that we can do that by talking about our products on the basis of the facts about them and their price advantage, the reliability.
David Roberts
But I would say, we need to also be able — the things they’re doing on energy, this Iran war, even critics of the administration, I don’t think — it is genuinely difficult to wrap your head around how stupid it is. Even establishment Democrats, I think on some level are trying to generate justifications for this because they can’t wrap their head around how arbitrary and stupid it is. All the way down. It’s all negative effects all the way down. No one’s winning this except China. No one is benefiting from this.
But they are not paying the price they ought to be paying for that. They’re not. They’re still out on TV talking about — Doug Burgum’s still in front of Congress talking about — somebody, it’s a lawmaker challenged him, “China’s building 500 gigawatts of this, this and this.” He’s saying, “Well, baseload or variable?” It’s still the sun goes down at night stuff. Just the crudest sort of — they ought to be paying a price for that. They ought to be mocked in public.
People ought to be making the point that they are violating their own goals, they’re making things less reliable, more expensive, etc. They’re just not paying that price. In addition to boasting about Coke, somebody needs to be out with a shiv hurting people who do stuff like this. There’s got to be an enforcement arm. We need some thugs. We need some people who are going out and whacking people over the head. I don’t know if it’s all got to be the same group of people, but we need that side of things.
Steve McBee
Yeah. Maybe this is just too precious. You can call me on it, but I think you can do that 100%. This situation in Iran is a huge opportunity for us to redefine the stakes, and we’re not doing it. What was in that big, beautiful bill? It was the inverse of the policies that you would put in place if you were trying to achieve the goals the administration had laid out for it.
We were taking all of the cheapest, most ready power that’s sitting in the queue, ready to go. Instead of hooking that up, we took all the incentives away. We gave all these new incentives to gas and fossil fuels. We pushed that stuff to the back of the line. We cut the line with gas and, I guess, coal. All of a sudden, you’re not getting power that’s cheap or reliable or ready. There needs to be accountability for those choices. I think you can enforce accountability by contextualizing the case for Coke and not get it into a situation where it’s so overtly — it’s just the facts. The goals are not aligned to the policies.
We have an alternative with the policy. We all agree with the goals — more energy, faster energy, cheaper energy, energy for AI, energy to beat China — but we have to have policies that are synchronized to the goals and we don’t. That is not only something that is fair game, I think it is pretty essential that we just make the case. In the IRA fight, the thing that was really frustrating to me, we have three times as many batteries in the queue as we do gas projects.
David Roberts
I know, it’s wild.
Steve McBee
If we were organized, what we should have said, what we would have done in the IRA battle is to say, “Hey, this isn’t a tax — we’re not making tax policy, we’re making energy policy. We are resetting energy policy in ways that are going to make it harder to get cheap, reliable, and fast power onto the grid by these choices.” We never made that case. We never forced people to have a real choice there on, “Geez, do we really want policies that do this?” Maybe we need to think about this in a different way. We never presented an alternative. Never.
David Roberts
Okay, as I said, we could talk forever, but I should probably wrap it up. Think we tested people’s patience, maybe just — is this effort the kind of thing that the public can engage with at all? Or is this mostly an elite play? Which I don’t mean negatively at all, we desperately need elite plays. But I just wonder, is there a public participation? Can people follow along? Is there a public-facing part?
Steve McBee
There’s going to be. One of the things that I’m really aware of is back to what we talked about at the beginning, there’s a lot of resistance to new things. If you’re going to bring something new in, you need to make sure you can rock it. You got to make sure that you can prove it. I want to do things that get traction, to get proof points that create confidence. Then we’re going to — we have a very ambitious plan to scale this platform into something that I think can stand up and be heads up to API and the fossil fuel industry juggernaut. We’re going to do that in a linear way and not come in and get totally over our skis on day one and open ourselves up to all kinds of crazy criticism.
These things we’re doing on communications, on market making, on strengthening the intelligence layer — these things to me are super critical. We had our hands full doing that for the next four or five months. Yeah, there’s going to be a way for the public to engage on this in lots of different ways going forward. We’re going to try to start out here and try to be successful on the things that we think are really important right now and where we can do something about, and then we’ll go from there.
David Roberts
All right. Above all, thank you for recognizing the smoldering, embarrassing failure around you and not blowing smoke. If I hear another clean energy person try to tell me that the OBBB wasn’t really so bad because there’s this one tax credit on page 12 that didn’t totally get nuked, I’m just like, “Let’s be real with ourselves.” Thank you for being real and thank you for trying to build something and maybe we’ll reconvene in a year or two and see how it’s going.
Steve McBee
I hope so. I hope I quelled some of your doubts and I would just say, because you got a lot of really influential people that listen to your podcast, I want people to feel like we can be excellent and not settle. We can’t settle for a C. We need an A. We have everything we need to go do that. Let’s go be great. Let’s go be great.
David Roberts
Yeah, that’s when I’ll call my dad — if you go do it. All right.
Steve McBee
Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it and I would say thanks to you. This is such a killer podcast. You do just a ton of good on this podcast and it’s really a privilege to be on, I appreciate you having me.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
