on Powers: Governor, thanks so much for joining us here at Experts Only. Bill Ritter: Thank you, Jon. It’s really a pleasure to be with you. Jon Powers: You’ve done some really monumental stuff for Colorado and the country on clean energy, and I want to get into that. But before diving too deep in that, I read that you grew up on a farm with 11 brothers and sisters. Bill Ritter: That’s all right. Yes, East of Aurora. Jon Powers: Wow, what kind a farm? Bill Ritter: Well, we had a very small plot, five acres. My grandma had the five acres next to us. And then we farmed, we started with a section of ground, which was 640 acres that was wheat. We leased that land, so we never owned it. And it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme to lease a dry land farm in Eastern Colorado. So we did that. Jon Powers: By the way, farming’s not a get-rich scheme. My entire family or dairy farmers. Bill Ritter: We expanded it from a section to a section-and-a-half. And had, at various times, farmed different land out there. But it was all… Where now, it’s gun club in Mississippi, so east of Buckley, which at the time was an air base. We had our own labor pool, eight boys, girls, so we were able to keep busy on this farm. We had cows that we milked by hand. And we always had horses of one kind or another. And then we had pigs, and chickens, and rabbits, and goats. No, I don’t think we ever had goats, but we had just about everything else. Jon Powers: And you fall right smack in the middle? You’re six, kid six? Bill Ritter: Yes. I’m the sixth out of 12. Jon Powers: So my dad’s sister’s got nine kids and a farm here in upstate New York. And I fall in the middle of the group. But being a middle child, how did that help you go on to become a governor? Bill Ritter: Well, I think you become the negotiator in a lot of ways. And our family is pretty interesting. If you ever meet somebody from a really big family, there are usually dividing lines between what they call the big kids and the little kids. And so I was the youngest of the big kids. And my brother that’s just younger than me, 18 months younger than me, he was the oldest of the little kids. And still today we’ll refer sometimes to the little kids and the big kids when we’re talking about family gatherings. So I was a bridge between, in a lot of respects, two different parts of the family, but also I think just had the personality of a mediator, the personality to go between the different factions in our family. And that’s how it happened. Jon Powers: That’s amazing. I want to come back to that bridge concept more, because I feel like that iterates throughout your career. And before we get into what led you into the political side, I read you went to work at 14 in the construction space. Were you doing that while going to school and then went on to college? Bill Ritter: Yeah. Well first, when you’re on a farm, you’re working all the time… a pair of coveralls when I was in third grade. And one of the things that my brothers and I did was just take apart electric motors and garbage disposals or whatever for the copper wire and other kinds of minerals that were inside of it and sold it. So we were always working. But I went to work for a company when I was 14. And that was just the summers. When I was in college, I was at CSU in college, and we were on the quarter system. So I’d get out at Thanksgiving and I could work between Thanksgiving and the beginning of the school year, January. It was like six weeks. So it was like a half of a summer in addition to having worked the summer. I put myself through college. But because of work that I was able to do, I owed no debt when I got out of college. I had some grants, some scholarships. But I also worked construction from 14 until my second year of law school. Jon Powers: Amazing. And then what led you into law school? What pinged your interest for law school? Bill Ritter: That’s a good question. My father always used to say something about how… Because everybody else in my family is in construction. I have a brother that’s a civil engineer. I have a brother-in-law and sister, they own a big roofing company, and then they employ a bunch of my siblings. And so I don’t know, I always wanted to be a lawyer. A very good friend of mine, he says, “When we first met, we were freshman in college.” He’s like, “I never met anyone who was so certain about what they wanted to be.” And I think in high school I was a debater. I played sports, but I also really enjoyed debating. And for some reason I just had a talent there that I wanted to utilize as a lawyer. And didn’t really know a lot of lawyers. My aunt was a legal secretary. But I just decided very early on that’s what I wanted to do. And I worked really hard on construction. It was nice to think about a life where I didn’t necessarily have to work as hard as I had during the summertime and the winter times doing construction. I was a pipe layer. Jon Powers: I spent my summers tearing up old railroad tracks around the country. And every time I went back to school, I’m like, “Thank God I’m back here.” So I don’t want to dive in your political career too much. For folks that aren’t aware, you ended up going to the District Attorney’s Office and then that got you into politics. And later on you really did an amazing job as the Governor of Colorado. Where on that track did you first begin to get interested in, was it climate, was it the environment, was it energy? What was the trigger for you that you saw the opportunity that you talk about now in the new energy economy? Bill Ritter: The evolution’s pretty clear to me. So I became the District Attorney after I’d been in the office. Actually, I went and lived in Africa as a Catholic missionary for three years with my wife and with one of our sons. We had another son born there. When I came back, I was back, I was a federal prosecutor for a couple years then in the DA’s office in Denver. And my predecessor left. So the governor appoints and the governor appointed me. I applied, he appointed me. He loved the fact that I’d lived in Africa. I would not say at that juncture that I cared a lot about the environment. I think in Colorado you have many people with a real relationship with the land, with the water, with the air. But it wasn’t any kind of a focus for me while I was the District Attorney. I was DA for almost 12 years. I had been at the state capitol a lot while I was the DA. I testified for prosecutors up there. And I just thought, “This state is a different state. It has a promise to it that we’re not fully appreciating for people in government, people that were in charge.” So I started thinking about, “What would make this state a different place?” And it was really in that two-year period between leaving the DA’s office and running for governor that I began to really go to school on a variety of things, importantly, environment and energy. And I would say probably environment, climate change and energy were all of equal importance. So were education. So was housing. So was healthcare. This is before Obamacare when we had a real healthcare crisis around the country. And so we called it the Colorado Promise. What’s the promise of Colorado? And I used to talk about building an economy around new forms of energy. My first campaign commercial was at a wind farm. And I really began thinking, “This is about different energy,” because we were a fossil fuel state. It’s about an economy. It’s about the environment. It’s about equity. And we very early on said, “We’re not going to build an energy economy on the back of poor people, so we’re going to have to think about how we do this so all people have access to clean energy.” And there was a woman who was married to, at the time, my Communications Director. And she said, “What you’re talking about is what I would call a new energy economy.” So my Center that I run at CSU is called the Center for the New Energy Economy. That term was coined while I was a candidate. And what was really interesting about that is, I was running against a real reputable congressman, a good guy and a good candidate. He had won close elections before and everybody thought that he was going to be very, very formidable. And it turns out when we started running our campaign ad in a wind farm, talking about Colorado being the center of this new energy economy, it really, we took off and never looked back. We never trailed in that race. We had passed a renewable portfolio standard at the ballot in 2004 in Colorado. It was clear that the utility which had opposed it was going to have to build renewables pretty seriously. And then they began to understand even the promise of clean energy and had a leadership change. So they got on board. And they began to support the kinds of things that I was talking about, which was doubling the renewable portfolio standard and doing a variety of other things that would really give people access to clean energy. That was 2006 as a candidate. 2007 is when we went to work. And by the time I left office, we had tripled the renewable portfolio standard. We gave it a 2020 ending. That was the goal, 2020. It was a 30% renewable portfolio standard. And Jon, when 2020 rolled around, we had gone beyond the 30%. So something that all naysayers said could never happen. And as you know, all the prices were declining at the same time that we were building it out, building out this economy to scale. We attracted groups like Vestas Wind Systems, the biggest wind manufacturer in the world. And so we really did have an economy, an energy economy and a new energy economy. And I’m very proud that a group of us thought about this first as a candidate, but then while I was governor and the naysayers wind up being wrong about this. Jon Powers: I’m glad you put the timeframe on it, because I think folks think about all these great announcements we’re hearing almost regularly now, the state-by-states coming in. This is at the beginning of really the transformational decade we had last decade, but you guys were laying the groundwork and putting in place the key policies, the net metering or other things that were really critical in seeing Colorado move forward. We actually started as a private yield co, so only buying up operating assets. And Colorado’s a great market for us in time, because you guys were so early. So we were buying up assets that were coming out of their ITC hold and school districts and others in Colorado were key. Bill Ritter: We had inside the renewable portfolio standard, we had a set aside for solar just to make sure because big wind, hydro didn’t count then because there were a lot of people said, “You let a utility build hydro. That’s all they’ll build.” And that’s a very hard thing to do in the west, because mountains are pristine places and we’d had battles over that that would take years and years and really, even decades. And so instead of that, we said, “Okay, it’s just going to be clean energy that’s carbon free and we’re going to put these things in. And by the way, we want to make sure that solar has a place in this,” because at the time, as you know, it’s pretty expensive, much more expensive than wind. And the decline in cost had not happened yet. And so we said, “Let’s make sure that there is enough there to set the groundwork for solar to grow as an industry in Colorado.” And again, I had great advice from people that were helping me think about that. Then I put people on our utility commission who were, it’d be fair to say they understood what we were trying to do. And utility commissioners, they acted accordingly. I also had probably the best utility CEO in America for what we were trying to do with the clean energy economy. Jon Powers: Fascinating. So you come out of that experience and decide to launch the Center at CSU. Talk a little bit about what the Center does and your thought process into go into that effort. I ask that because we talk a lot on the show about 2030. And the last decade was about really setting the groundwork for the clean energy transition. We are now really transitioning and accelerating that transition. But it’s the work at places like the Center to help translate things like the Inflation Reduction Act so that policymakers, business owners and others can figure out how to utilize it. It’s just so critical. Bill Ritter: So thanks for that question. At the invitation of the President of CSU, he’s now the chancellor of the whole system, Tony Frank, I came to Clark State University. And just parenthetically here, Jon, I had cut higher ed’s budget during the Great Recession. We backfilled it all with our own money, so we held them harmless in terms of the net money. But it was a bad optic for me to go to a public university salary. So my commitment was to fund it all through foundations. But the vision was, because it was 2011 and I just watched how stalled Congress was on a variety of different kinds of clean energy pieces of legislation, Waxman-Markey passed the house, never got taken up in the Senate. And we would do things through the tax code and that was about it. And so states really is where the action was. And I also felt like there was less partisanship at the state level. Now that’s not always the case. It’s not always candy and flowers, but we have managed to work with Republican governors, Republican legislators on state policy. We did one big program or project for the Obama presidency that led up to a variety of things that agencies did that many people called the Obama overreach. But largely my intent. And it turns out to be what we’ve done, because it’s 12 years February 1st that I’ve been at the Center, we have worked with states, with governors and with state legislators, with utility commissioners. We’ve worked with people in the power sector, people in the built environment. And we’re a policy center, because I believe that policy provides a lever for transforming an economy. So you can look at that in any variety of economies, but transforming an energy economy at the same time you’re trying to address climate change, it’s really necessary to have supportive policies in place. And that was always our belief. And we started almost anecdotally picking off a state here and a state there, just one other guy and I. Then we’ve grown the shop and now we have a legislator academy. It’s called the Clean Energy Legislator Academy. We always have Republicans and Democrats. Right now, all the people who have signed up for our Legislator Academy are Republicans. We’re doing everything we can to ensure that we have this bipartisan conversation about the clean energy transition. We work with Conservative Energy Network, which is a national network of conservatives to try and make sure that that happens. And we’ve managed to have a lot of our alum from that Clean Energy Legislator Academy be primary sponsors on bills that have done some really big things in different states around the country. In 2019, it was a really big year, but it was our alum in Oregon, and Washington, and New Mexico, and Colorado, and Nevada were all legislators who passed big things. They were the primary sponsors in each of those states. Those are concentrated in the West, but it’s a good way to think about it. Each of those states had big things that happened in 2019. So we do that. We also looked at this- Jon Powers: By the way, I’m going to pause as minute. That is incredible work. As a firm, we operate in 28 different states right now. It’s literally 28 different policy fiefdoms and you have to understand how to operate in those fiefdoms. I come from a policy background, moved into finance. When you align policy in appropriate ways, the market and finance will follow because there’s efficiency, there’s certainty, and it’ll move. The more there’s shifting to that policy and uncertainty, the higher that any of this stuff is going to cost because you’re going to get more expensive, riskier capital doing it. And we’re just seeing this in Georgia today. You’ve got a Republican governor bringing QCELL Energy solar manufacturing, because they see the jobs, they see the manufacturing and the opportunity. He may not be a climate champion, but he sees the opportunity of this new clean energy economy for his constituents. That’s huge work. Bill Ritter: A lot of the conservatives will say, “Listen, when we’re in a conversation about the energy transition, we actually don’t talk much about climate. Or maybe sometimes we don’t talk at all about climate. We talk about the economic benefits, the economic advantage that you gain as a state.” So we do that. But we also realize in this transition, and I have a woman who is the Assistant Director here at the Center, her name is Dr. Suzanne Tegen. She was the one who came to me and said, “I’d really like to work in coal-dependent communities on the transition, because they were going away.” And so we have an Energy Transition Academy for coal-dependent communities in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. And we’re trying to be part of the conversation going forward. And as you know, there’s a variety of different tranches of money in the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act for coal-dependent communities. And we’re just trying to help those communities in this transition, because a lot of them, it’s going away, in 2030. And then we do some things, like we are working with New Mexico on the low-carbon fuel standard. We’ve worked around the country with what’s called a Convener’s Network where we bring states together and just have a conversation like, “What do you need?” And, “Oh, by the way, we have folks that we know in the White House and we can ensure that the White House is listening to states about what they need to be part of the transition. And states are listening to the White House kind of about what’s coming down.” So right now, this Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act, both of those are really big things. The Inflation Reduction Act is a very significant piece of legislation where clean energy, climate are concerned. And so making sure that states have the capacity to do all that’s necessary to get that money in the door, in the state, and then to spend it the right way, that’s something that a lot of people around this country care about. And we’re part of a network of institutions around the country that are trying to help states do that. Jon Powers: I don’t think people realize the marriage of those two bills and the opportunities to recreate our grid, to recreate our transportation system. For folks that haven’t been in government, oftentimes the local government, which is going to be the ones really implementing all of this, they don’t have a center of excellence. They don’t have the expertise in the Department of Energy to rely on to bring the expertise forward. And it’s the work of the Center and other folks that help educate people and show them the best work being done in other states, for instance, and how to bring that in. Bill Ritter: Well, I governed when the ARRA funding after the Great Recession, the Obama administration ARRA funding. It’s a small amount compared to the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, but at least I gained some experience about how important it was to think of capacity and building the capacity to do it. And that’s partly what we rely on. But we work with Duke University, the Nicholas Institute, and Georgetown and Harvard, a group in the Midwest called the Great Plains Institute, and then our Center. And this is the thesis that you just outlined about why that’s so important. That’s what these institutions do. We call ourselves, the Conveners Network, because of states. Again, we’re at a place where states are critical in our ability to make this transition. I watched the Rhodium Group. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at their- Jon Powers: I worked with a lot of those folks in the administration, actually. Bill Ritter: They have such good people. But the Rhodium Group had a report last year that said, “60% of the emissions that we need to cut to make our 2030 goal under the Paris target, 60% are in states without climate goals.” And so that’s why it’s important, for us at least, to work with states, to convene as many states as we can to get Republican administrations and democratic administrations in the door and get them in the door together. And begin to look at that 60% and say, “How do we do that, even if you don’t have a climate goal? What’s the kind of thing necessary to build an economy in your state that helps in this transition and it will also cut emissions over time?” Jon Powers: For folks that aren’t aware, the Bipartisan Bill really almost had a five-year window of cash flow. We’re just in the beginning of the planning. This year is going to be a lot about taking those plans and figuring out how to get them up. And then the money really starts to flow. So having those plans in place over this window is critical. And then you guys have, which I love, is the action ability of a legislative team who’s gone through your training that can help tweak the state level rules to make sure this cash is flowing the right way. How do you guys see that big picture? At the end of this five years, what do you see changing in our new energy economy? Bill Ritter: Well, a couple of things. It varies a bit from state to state. You’ll find states where the governor just wants control of everything coming in. And other states where the legislature’s very powerful and they want control. And then states where they share power. Colorado’s in the third category, where it’s a shared power. But what I see happening here, and I mean, you know this because you do so much in the solar business, but this is really where solar and batteries are concerned, to have the extension of a tax credit that many people thought was going away. Very worried about what would happen with solar. That gives it new life. Supply chain is still an issue on both solar and the battery side, but the tax credit gives it new life. And the tax credit transitions from the investment tax credit to, I think it’s called a new energy or clean energy tax credit. And it does not have a deadline. And that’s different than how we’ve managed this before. So it will have to be proactively ended in order for it to ever go away. That’s what you said earlier, Jon, that’s the kind of certainty that business people like a lot, where tax credits are concerned. So that’s big. And I think we’ll see that with wind. We’ll see it with solar. We were beginning to hear people being concerned about the tax credits going away. And I think the Inflation Reduction Act did something really important. The second thing that is really important, I mean, it’s American-made goods, so there’s an advantage to that. It’s prevailing wages. But Jon, I’ve never seen anything in my lifetime that thought about the justice end of economic development as much as the Inflation Reduction Act. So you get a 30% credit with one of these credits. But if you are using prevailing wages and American-made goods and doing this in communities that are defined as marginalized communities, it gets up to a 50% tax credit. You can actually do building retrofits in very poor neighborhoods and get a 50% tax credit. And it gives us the ability, those of us who are trying to build this energy transition, to really say to poor communities, “Hey, listen, I know you’ve been left behind or felt left behind in this energy transition that’s happening. That won’t happen again. That’s not going to happen. We have the ability to do something different than we ever have.” And then, I think, we’re going to see that kind of transformation in the power sector, the transportation sector and the building sector. And all of those matter so much to our emissions. And if we are able to curb emissions and at the same time think about this from a justice perspective and do these really important things in poor communities, it truly transforms the energy economy in a way that I think not many people felt was possible. Jon Powers: That’s wonderful. And thank you for the work you’re doing at the Center to do that and helping. And anything, both us to clean capital, but if there’s any asks to folks in the audience, our audience really consists of business leaders, others in the industry, folks in academia that they could be helpful with, do you have any asks for them to be helpful for the work that you’re doing? Bill Ritter: Well, I don’t have specific asks, but I would refer people to our Advanced Energy Legislation Tracker. We track every piece of legislation introduced at the state level for advanced energy. It’s aeltracker.org. And then also SPOT. It stands for State Policy Opportunity Tracker that says, “What do states still need to do?” And I think for the business community, if people go in and look and say, “Well, the state of X still has this left to do really, if it’s going to catch up with where other states are.” The business community’s a very important voice in this country. And I would love it if they’d use those two different, it’s called SPOT for cleanenergy.org and aeltracker.org, if they’d use those two tools to go to policymakers and say, “We could use this in our state,” I think it would help the transition in a lot of places. Jon Powers: I mean, one of the things we did in Oregon, actually, two years ago is there was a push against some of the positive momentum on some of the climate efforts there. And I wrote an op ed about the impact that would have on outside capital coming into the state. And I think using those type of messages, which I think will impact many lawmakers, was really important to get the job done. So I’m going to take you back to Aurora for a second and being on the farm. If you could go back and sit down with yourself, coming out of high school or coming out of college, and have a beer and give yourself any piece of advice, what would you say? Bill Ritter: Well, it is important to try and look around corners, to see around corners. In my life, I’ve been very, very blessed in so many respects. And I’ve been around people that I feel like they knew how to look around a corner. They knew how to see around a corner. And don’t trust naysayers just right off the bat. I mean, they’re people that can warn you against doing things that from a policy perspective may be the wrong thing. But even as the District Attorney for 12 years, then as the governor, and now, in this work that I’ve done, I’ve had the advantage of being around people who helped me see around corners and say, “This is what is coming.” And there are naysayers out there, but let’s try it. Let’s put safeguards in place. If we had done everything the naysayers told us to do, we would not be where we are today and I think the country wouldn’t be where it is. Jon Powers: That’s great advice. And thank you so much for the time this morning to be on our podcast. I’m going to thank Hannah Baer from your team for helping to put this together and our producer Colleen Young for all the work she does for these episodes. You can always get more episodes at cleancapital.com. And really look forward to continuing the conversation. Thanks so much, governor. Bill Ritter: Hey, thanks, Jon. It was a real pleasure.