Jon Powers (00:02):

Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, jon Powers. I’m the co-founder of Clean Capital and serve as President Obama’s Chief Sustainability Officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation and finance. You can get more episodes@cleancapital.com. Welcome back to Experts, only having your host, jon Powers. And today we’re beginning a series of conversations around electricity prices in the midterms. I’m actually incredibly honored to have as my guest today, the former governor of Michigan and the 16th Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm. We talk a lot about both her experience and what got her into this space when she was the governor and got her interested in creation of jobs and the next generation economy and the work that she later did at the sector of energy and the work she’s doing now, as well as what we should be doing as an industry leading up to these midterms to really take action around the political conversation around electricity, prices to move, policies that we care about forward, and trying to drive more clean energy production and getting more projects in the ground and getting affordable prices for everyday Americans.

(01:18):

So as always, you can get more episodes@cleancapital.com, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us at Experts Only.

Jennifer Granholm (01:26):

You bet. Glad to be on.

Jon Powers (01:28):

I want to talk a little bit about your background and career. It’s, first of all, it’s incredible the work, obviously you did at Governor of Michigan and Secretary of Energy. But before we get into all of that, can you talk a little bit about what was your passion to get you into politics and even into the environmental energy space?

Jennifer Granholm (01:46):

Well, first of all, I never, I wasn’t raised to think I was going to be running for office at all, and I’m the first person in my family to graduate from college. We came from very humble background, so when I was accepted to law school, it was such a huge deal for my family, but I really got very interested in civil rights. And so in law school, I was the editor in chief of the Civil Rights Law Review. I was really focused on that. So I met my husband at law school and we decided we were going to move to Michigan. We thought that Michigan was a place that we could really, first of all, he was from Michigan, but that we could raise kids and it would be terrific. So moving to Michigan, I thought again that I was going to be doing civil rights law, et cetera, and I was working on political campaigns to help people get elected on the Democratic Party, and the head of the Democratic Party came to me when the Attorney General decided to step down and said, Hey, would you consider running for Attorney general? I had been a prosecutor, I had been running the county law department cetera, and I was like, are you kidding me? I thought, Dan, my husband would be running for office. And so when I told Dan this, he’s like, are you kidding? Go for it.

Jon Powers (03:11):

That’s amazing.

Jennifer Granholm (03:12):

Window only opens once. You should definitely take it. And we had, my youngest was 10 months old. Oh my gosh. Really? Yeah. Crazy, right? But Dan was like, for a

Jon Powers (03:23):

Statewide campaign, don’t

Jennifer Granholm (03:24):

This? Yeah. Well, the good thing about the attorney general race in Michigan is that it’s the pick of who’s on the ticket is a convention selection. It’s not you have to run for in the primary, you have to run in the general. So anyway, I won the attorney general spot. None of this had to do with energy. All of it was about helping the little guy in some way, shape or form. Then when I became governor, I mean, at that point, I was the only statewide elected Democrat in a statewide office, and so the party came and said, you got to run for governor. You’re in that trajectory. I was like, no, I love this job as being a attorney general. It’s such a great job. But anyway, I ran for governor and it was at a time when Michigan,

Jon Powers (04:11):

How old were your kids then, by the way?

Jennifer Granholm (04:13):

So, seven, nine, and by the time I ran for governor, three and a half. Yeah.

Jon Powers (04:20):

Oh my gosh.

Jennifer Granholm (04:21):

Yeah. But again, Dan, my husband, who is a saint, was able to keep us all together.

Jon Powers (04:31):

That’s amazing.

Jennifer Granholm (04:32):

At any rate, the time that I ran for governor was just, Michigan is a manufacturing state, an automotive state, and we began to see at the beginning of my first term, all of these trickles of globalization hitting and all these factories moving to low wage places, et cetera. And honestly, that drumbeat of loss of jobs continued to pound us. And then the bankruptcies in the auto industry under the Obama administration in which you served there was the bailout of the auto industry. They paid all those loans back, but there was a requirement that they moved to be more electric, better, fewer greenhouse gas emissions. And so there was all these battery grants that went that actually Joe Biden as vice president came and gave to Michigan to help us sort of move into the future on Car 2.0. That’s what really got me focused on clean technology, clean energy, and I felt like Michigan was in a really great position as a comparative advantage from an economic development strategy to move into CAR 2.0, the electric vehicle, but also to focus on wind and solar and building the products that would help to achieve net zero carbon emissions, et cetera.

(05:47):

All of that said that when we were competing against other nations who had much more aggressive federal strategy, because the state can’t compete against China, it was so clear to me that we needed federal policy to be able to be competitive and not lose all these manufacturing jobs in this country. And so that’s what it became an obsession for me. How can we compete in a global economy in America when our economic competitors are bringing a bazooka and we are bringing a knife to the fight? So that informed my work as governor. It informed my work post governor, I taught at Berkeley, had ran this American Jobs project, which was all focused on clean energy strategies, and I knew Joe Biden really well from having portrayed both Sarah Palin in the debate prep as well as all of the other women who were running for president when he ran for president. And so he asked me whether I would be interested in focusing on this issue, manufacturing and energy as the Secretary of Energy. So that’s a long,

Jon Powers (07:03):

Yeah, no, that’s interesting

Jennifer Granholm (07:05):

Trajectory, but that’s how I arrived,

Jon Powers (07:06):

And I want to get into that. You did completely change the trajectory from a manufacturing and jobs perspective, but to go back to Michigan, being here in Buffalo have a very similar story,

Jennifer Granholm (07:15):

Totally similar.

Jon Powers (07:16):

I love your view of bazooka to knife fight. Oftentimes, I look around Western New York and I think the same thing, even on national level. We are missing the boat on so many really key opportunities from a transition perspective and the foundation for what all of us do around the Great Lakes is so strong. So when you started working, especially around the sort of truly saving the auto industry with the post 2008 crash, when you were working with those leaders, is that when you really began to first see the EV and some of the technologies they were developing or what sort of hooked you there?

Jennifer Granholm (07:52):

Yeah, actually, I knew I had been to the GM battery, not factory, because I went to their tech center Warren to see, and they were bragging at that point that by 2018, the internal combustion engine and the electric vehicle would be on par. They were a little behind, a little

(08:16):

Optimistic, I’ll say. But yeah, I mean, I became super interested in all of that, and I went to chase the components of batteries from around the world to bring them to Michigan to have the full supply chain, the anode, the cathode, the separator material, the electrolyte. I went to Japan, I went to Germany. I went all over to try to get the pieces of the supply chain that we were missing to locate in Michigan, and we got a bunch of companies to come so that we could have that full value chain. Unfortunately, at the time, we sort of put the cart of supply before the horse of demand, and so we were a little bit ahead of our time in that, and some of those efforts didn’t end up, some of the companies were acquired by the Chinese 8 1 23. I’m thinking of some of them.

(09:04):

We had a similar thing on solar panels. So United Solar ovs, this was just such a sad story because this solar company, United Solar Robotics, they came and they replaced the loss of a refrigerator factory in this huge factory in a tiny town in Michigan. And it was like Greenville is going to be rise from its knees on solar powered factory, the factories that were building solar power, et cetera, and then they lost the big factory, the big refrigerator factory. Then we got this great solar factory, and then China came in and big footed us and purchased the,

(09:48):

Basically acquired United Solar Robotics. So that was twice hit by this one little community of 8,000 people. It seared my soul, this continuous effort to try to get manufacturing in the United States. So this is what, to me is so critical about the Inflation reduction Act and the success that it had in bringing and keeping and growing manufacturing in the United States. By the end of 2024, the Department of Energy counted just in the clean energy space, 950 factories had announced that they were coming to the United States or expanding in the United States to build these products. 950, that is just so big, all of these announcements. But as you know, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed two years into the Biden administration, and it takes time for people to realize what their tax credits are going to be, make the decision to expand, acquire property. So there were a lot of announcements, but not a lot of, and maybe some groundbreakings, but there weren’t a lot of ribbon cuttings because you can’t do it that quickly. So to me, the unfortunate aspect of the great success of the Inflation Reduction Act is that people really didn’t see it on the ground because people weren’t being fully hired yet.

Jon Powers (11:16):

Yeah. Well, so I’m going to come back to that a second and talk for a minute that, sorry to jump the gun on you. No, I love it. It’s so important, and I think what I hear from you, rich, I find interesting is you sort of had put together a playbook in Michigan around tracking supply chain and things like that. I think one of the really interesting shifts that happened in Trump won honestly, is when the federal leading up to that in the Obama administration, there was a lot of leadership by the federal government, a lot of leadership by the commercial sector for sure. But the federal government was truly, in many cases, leading on climate and energy. Trump pulls out of Paris, Paris negotiations, and Trump won, and all of a sudden all of these local leaders, state leaders, but more importantly, you had major funds and you had commercial leaders like Google and eBay and Microsoft and others stepping up saying, we are committing to the renewable energy regardless.

(12:08):

And they began to create that demand, which changed the game. So if you think about the way Google buys electricity today, when you were in Michigan and I was at the White House, they’d pay from, they’d pay the utility bill, they had an energy manager who took care of that. Most folks, they didn’t think about beyond paying the utility bill, and they maybe had a right deal with the utility. Now they have a sophisticated energy procurement shop with a policy team that’s shaping policy at the state level so they can bring more data centers in and get renewable energy. It’s such a game change in a decade, and when I think about the work you did really establishing reestablishing the US leadership in that window, that when you were at Department of Energy, that playbook you just described, Michigan seemed to be replayed in a way that was super productive and helped. I’ve said this in the podcast, but I say this because we use this fact a lot in Washington last year when we were pushing back on the big beautiful bill, as they call it, but we went from 14th in the world to third on solar manufacturing.

(13:10):

That shocked so many conservatives. They didn’t

Jennifer Granholm (13:12):

Understand a hundred percent, but what has happened, there’s been a pullback on all of that. I mean, granted, there’s still a manufacturing tax credit, which is really important. But what the beauty about the Inflation reduction Act is that it addressed both supply and demand. And so you had demand side tax credits and supply side tax credits, and it worked in harmony, and therefore you were able to pull forward the value chain and get suppliers in. It’s just of the 950 factories that I was describing, 450 were in the EV space, whether they were assembling EVs or batteries or the anode cathode, et cetera, and critical minerals as well. So getting that full value chain is critical, which is what’s so distressing about what has happened in the slashing of all of those tax credits is that we have seeded this territory back to China. I mean, China was thinking we were, the inflation reduction act was the biggest investment in clean energy in the world except for China. China. But China at least felt like we were on their heels and now chasing their tail. But now China is so, so happy. We have seeded it.

Jon Powers (14:32):

They’re running

Jennifer Granholm (14:32):

Circle. We’re saying basically, go ahead and we are pushing our allies into the arms of China. So you saw this deal that just happened with Canada and the lowering of the tariffs and the bringing in now by YD is going to be all over Canada, and what does that do for, I mean, not just the Canadian auto industry, but us too. It’s just very frustrating to see us not compete in so many days and so many years pass at some point. It’s difficult to get back off of your knees.

Jon Powers (15:03):

There’s an amazing time, Friedman New York Times podcast where he talks about coming back from China and it wasn’t talking about the hearts, the debate he was talking about having been in the vehicles over there and how game changing they were.

Jennifer Granholm (15:14):

Amazing

Jon Powers (15:15):

How people don’t recognize that here. And I feel like if you take the Inflation Reduction Act and you partner with bipartisan infrastructure Bill, all of those pieces drove a cohesive strategy that is non-existent anymore. But

Jennifer Granholm (15:27):

What’s including the Chicks and Science Act? There’s the three pieces which were really the legs of the economic development school.

Jon Powers (15:35):

That’s when we had a strategy. So I want to get to lay the foundation. I think we’ve talked a lot and folks in the industry know this. We were in a precipice of major change and scale happening. I think what shocked me coming out of July and the signing of the big beautiful Bill where I honestly was for a lack of a better term, depressed, having spent the last few months in Washington raising a bunch of money and fighting, we went out to the biggest renewable conference in the country in Las Vegas called RE plus, and it was in September, and I was expecting to walk into a funeral service,

Jennifer Granholm (16:15):

And

Jon Powers (16:16):

It was the opposite.

Jennifer Granholm (16:17):

People were feeling very bullish, right?

Jon Powers (16:20):

Yeah. People were frustrated, they were confused, but they had some certainty. And I think what has been a major misplay by this administration, and I would say Secretary Wright and the administration as a whole is the lack of understanding of the growth of demand that was coming, and everyone talks about it today, but even last summer, people were barely recognizing the growth of demand. And the reality is that growth is far outstripping supply, and the fastest supply right now is clean energy. The states know it, and that’s why you’re seeing certain states moving forward aggressively on it, but it’s leading to higher electricity prices.

Jennifer Granholm (17:00):

Well, what’s leading the higher electricity prices is the transmission and distribution side. It’s not the generation side. But yeah, the demand for additional, I mean, this is why, this is why, and I know we should talk about what’s happening with these elections and what these candidates and now governors have proposed in terms of how to address this, but the notion of being able to attract data centers and have that increased demand, and I was just at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference, and the number that they’re putting out there is that we’re going to need 137 gigawatts of clean firm power by 2030. When people say firm power, they often just assume it’s fossil fuels or maybe nuclear. Honestly, I put batteries and renewables in that category even though it’s intermittent because your batteries are good now and you can get long to reach energy storage, blah, blah, blah.

(18:02):

But the notion of attracting data centers, it’s got this two-edged sword thing. And I think every governor and every public utility commission and every utility has to look at the data center opportunity. And I’m an AI optimist, and I do think there’s an opportunity there, but there have to be a demand for three things. One is that they bring their own capacity, and whether it’s, I know there’s a lot of talk now about the increase in behind the meter data center stuff. Initially data centers were all like, oh, no, of course we’re going to connect to the grid, but the slowdown in interconnections and in permitting and the speed that they want to act at means that they may be looking for solutions behind the meter. So they should be looking for renewables and battery. That’s the quickest, whatever. But there was just a report out from, I want to get this right, I want to quote it to you. Yeah, please,

(18:53):

Clean view where, yeah, Michael Thomas just did is, and it was just out and they did an analysis of the data centers and what the builds look like by looking at what the supply chain is for what they have been contracting for. So he looked at 46 behind the media data centers, which accounts for about 30% of all the data centers. So 56 gigawatts of behind the meter power. And those 56 gigawatts are powered by natural gas, but not conventional meaning that they’re using because obviously it takes so long to get a new natural gas turbine, right? Five, six years. So they’re looking, they’re being powered. These data centers by mobile gas generators that are strapped maybe to semi-truck trucks. They’re aero derivative turbines that are originally designed for aircraft and warships. They’re acquiring refurbished turbines from industrial operations. They found one that was using a turbine from a cruise ship.

Jon Powers (19:58):

Oh my gosh.

Jennifer Granholm (19:59):

All because of speed to power. And so if that’s a large piece of what’s going on, even though it’s still more expensive, then solar and storage, they’re still doing it. And to me, this is so mind boggling because you can get solar and storage. You can, I mean, obviously there’s some timeline fast. You can get it fast with long duration because we’ve got to figure out who’s best equipped or which ones are going to work out between eight hours and a hundred hours and all of the various in between. But nonetheless, it is stunning to me that all of these data centers, they’re so hungry to get up and going so profitable

(20:40):

That they are willing to overlook a lot. Not everybody, but they’re willing to overlook a lot. So my point is that if you’re getting a data center to come in, you should ask that they bring their own capacity. You should ask that they pay for the upgrades that are necessary to connect so that you’re not socializing that across the rate base. And that’s what causes so much of the increase in utility bills and ask that they be flexible so that they become a grid asset and not something that’s just drawing from the grid. So during the points where the grid is at full capacity, which grid is normally at 50% capacity, but when they’re at full capacity and those extreme things, they agree to dial back their power usage. There’s that whole study. You probably have discussed this with folks on the podcast about that.

(21:27):

So to me, if you do those three things, then the data center, according to the Brattle group and a number of studies, the data centers can actually, for every gigawatt of data center power that you bring on, because you’re increasing the denominator of who pays for all of the transmission and distribution, you can lower rates by one to 2% for every gigawatt. You can lower rates by one to 2% according to the Brattle group. So they can be good, interesting. But the conditions around their arrival on the scene have to be really circumscribed by the governor slash

Jon Powers (22:00):

And

Jennifer Granholm (22:00):

The utilities.

Jon Powers (22:01):

And unfortunately, I think we’re seeing a lot of places that are not subscribing to that type of strategy and doing everything they can to bring ’em in, and now their rate base is paying for it.

Jon Powers (22:10):

Right.

Jon Powers (22:11):

So can we go back to something you said earlier about the distribution really driving the pricing. Could you just sort of walk through that a little more why you think that’s sort of critical to driving electricity pricing right now?

Jennifer Granholm (22:22):

Well, if you look at your bill, right? 50% of your bill is t and d. You’re paying for t and d, and the biggest chunk of that is distribution, not transmission. And all of it’s because we got this damn old system and we haven’t been paying for maintenance and all of that, and it needs to happen. So the question is how do you build back better on the transmission and distribution system? And this is why the PUCs have such an important role in shaping what the utility business model is. And this is why these new governors and governors all over should be instructing their PUCs to look at a different business model for utilities where they are rewarded for squeezing out efficiency of the existing system so that you don’t rate base everything and you don’t always go for the gold plating of everything. You squeeze more. So let’s reward them, for example, for choosing to do reconductoring or for a dynamic line rating or

Jon Powers (23:24):

Interconnect.

Jennifer Granholm (23:25):

Just

Jon Powers (23:25):

Interconnect projects. Exactly. There was a climate week, we held a forum at Climate Week with a bunch of investors, and I won’t not name the utility in Maryland, but there’s utility of Maryland that had 146 project backlog and was interconnecting two projects a year. Two

Jennifer Granholm (23:39):

Projects a year. Come on.

Jon Powers (23:40):

Come on. It’s crazy.

Jennifer Granholm (23:42):

It’s crazy. That to me is so insane. So we need carrots and sticks. We need to change both the utility business model, maybe the business model at the RTOs as well, push for quick interconnections. This is what I mean, I think it’s so interesting what Google is doing with tapestry at PJM because of the huge backlog. So Tapestry is out of Google DeepMind, I think, and they are going in, which is what they did in Chile, and they are taking interconnection cues from years to months. And so it hasn’t started, they haven’t pulled the switch on it yet at PJM, they’re getting it all figured out. But if they can do that, that really has AI solving some of the problems that AI is creating

Jon Powers (24:32):

Too. Amazing. So let’s get to the, I know you worked with Governor Cheryl’s team, New Jersey specifically, and I think what was really fascinating, I remember being in New York again for climate week actually, and the ads are running ahead of that election and electricity prices, electricity prices, electricity prices, Virginia, where SPAN Berger was just elected electricity prices and data centers we’re seeing here in Buffalo alone, 20% rate hikes are coming on this year. People are just beginning to understand and see those. And so the pressure of action is going to be across the country from a political perspective, what candidates, what should candidates be thinking about one, and then from, I would say from a policy or campaign perspective, what should the industry be doing to help provide them solutions that can get US project faster, cheaper, and more affordable for rate payers?

Jennifer Granholm (25:30):

Right. Well, when you say industry, and that’s a broad thing because the util may be in a different place than the developers, et cetera.

Jon Powers (25:38):

We’re a DG company. I’m going to start with that.

Jennifer Granholm (25:40):

So utilities are going to do their thing,

Jon Powers (25:43):

Do their thing.

Jennifer Granholm (25:44):

But number one, I think that I believe so much that the change has to be driven by the regulatory side in many, many ways. And that means that instead of just rewarding utilities for CapEx, there should be a rewarding of utilities for opex that drives down the need for investment in CapEx. And so by that of course, I mean utilities should be rewarded for investing in flexibility. They should be sharing savings if you’ve got a baseline that a utility makes, they can share savings by doing smarter, more efficient uses of existing infrastructure and share that savings with customers. This is what they do in other jurisdictions besides the United States, we are sort of backwards and just focusing on CapEx, which of course incentivizes the most expensive activity. So what governors need to do is to appoint PUC heads, and this is what Mikey Cheryl has the opportunity to do, at least to appoint a chair.

(26:56):

And what she has said, governor Cheryl has said, is she campaign on this freeze? So there is a temporary freeze in place as of day one, but the temporary freeze is not going to get you there. You have to change the guts, the scaffolding to make sure that you have a long-term strategy. So she has called for the public bureau of utilities to call an affordability docket and to take a look at these notions where you can change the utility business model to reward them for reducing rates. And how you might do that is you might give them an extra bump on their ROI if they in fact do things that lower rates for people. You can figure out what those structures are. So that’s number one is I just think that has to happen. They’re also Virginia. Everybody in the east, many 13 states in the east are part of PJM. And we know the capacity auction there has just been ridiculously wild expensive. And so both Virginia and New Jersey are looking for ways that they can build their power inside the state without having to rely upon PJM in addition to what these governors are doing in exhorting them to move up interconnection queue much more quickly, et cetera.

Jon Powers (28:17):

Yeah.

Jennifer Granholm (28:18):

But that regional transmission piece is definitely something that she’s been focused on too.

Jon Powers (28:25):

Yeah, interesting. I mean, one of the things we think about is on the policy side, a lot of the early policies were around to drive development, and many of ’em were short-term structures where a developer, which actually incentivize a lot of what we call build and flip developers would build it, get a bunch of incentives, flip it out to a long-term owner and didn’t really provide certainty. And so when you think about how to bring the best capital into these type of infrastructure investments, we’re trying to talk more about how to incentivize the long-term ownership piece. You, we are backed by a life insurance company, right? Man life strategy is they’re parking their money in these assets so that they can have your life insurance in 20 years when they need it. And so that is as low cost of capital, almost as low cost as you can get, but we need to be able to convince them regularly and the state level policies are there and not at risk.

(29:20):

And year 18, we’re going to retroactively go back and change a bunch of stuff. And so I don’t know, I struggle with how to convince the policy makers, and I would say rate makers and others, how to think through that lens a little bit. And it’s often it’s utility versus developer versus they often don’t think about the fighting lens. And so we’d love your thoughts on how we can start to bring that type of message into the leadership so they can, whether it be through a task force of different players so they can bring their voices into the table, or we’re really struggling on how to get an anchor of that message up.

Jennifer Granholm (29:59):

Yeah, I mean, it’s a really important point that industry needs to have a big voice in what the certainty of policy is going forward. It’s hard in a political environment when you change directions, right all the time, but it is not easy getting regulatory changes through. And once they’re through, they are, I won’t say fully likely to stick, but it’s difficult to undo them. Often you have to get the votes, undo something they vote. So getting industry comfortable with making the arguments and being comfortable in engaging with policymakers, and particularly maybe I’m governor centric, but I focus a lot on the governors because they drive, at least on the regulatory side, through the PUCs, they drive. They can drive, even though PUCs are technically independent, but many states have the chair of the PUC, for example, in the governor’s cabinet, there can be executive orders, that direct policy that is then implemented at the public utility commissions.

(31:07):

That’s all assuming that they have the regulatory legislative permission to make changes. And so that way engaging with the state legislators if there isn’t that permission structure already embedded in state law is really important. But industry voice is so utterly critical. Obviously, we’re not talking about climate anymore. That seems to be less of an issue than cost. And in cost, of course, renewables wins, renewables and storage. We win in that. If it’s just let the market decide, we win that argument, we should. We should. But I think that it’s really important for us to be educating. It’s such a complex area. It’s really important for us to be comfortable sitting down and educating legislators about both the cost benefits of moving to renewables and storage, and of course the economic benefits of it in terms of jobs, et cetera. And then you come from somebody who understands national security. The national security issues cannot be overstated of being able to have access to your own power, especially in an era where we’re not going to be able to count necessarily on our NATO allies who seem to feel slighted, et cetera. We have to think about that. I mean, it’s good for our economy for us to build all of that up, but also for our own national strength to be able to have the capability of serving our own needs from manufacturing in the United States, from processing in the United States, et cetera.

Jon Powers (32:44):

So I want to get to politics for one second and for two questions to you. On the PUC specifically, I think there has been a, first of all, I’ll ask you if you know of any organizations that are helping to bring up the next level of PUC leaders.

Jennifer Granholm (32:58):

I don’t think that’s a huge gap that needs to happen, that really needs to

Jon Powers (33:02):

Happen. I think about the Alec and the ALEC legislation side. They’re masters of that type of thought. We need to be thinking about how to train up those PUC leaders.

Jennifer Granholm (33:11):

There’s obviously some, there’s national associations of public utility regulators, but when you’re talking about identifying potential, both regulatory ideas that can be implemented, as well as bringing up people who might be interested in serving, who might not even be thinking about it, here’s a place for industry to think about serving, right? In some way, shape or form. Totally agree. Get that experience, that grounded experience on the commission so that you can really understand the impacts of any given piece of regulatory decisionmaking.

Jon Powers (33:50):

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think there’s a lack of understanding of folks in the, and I come from the political side, so many cases. I know how to get political appointments, but that’s a whole different space. How do you create that generation of that? And I was working with a group at one point trying to get rural utility boards elected members. Great. Having them have a playbook and how to implement things around the IRA would’ve been super beneficial. Totally. 80% of the landscape are these rural utilities.

Jennifer Granholm (34:18):

That is a genius idea. I mean, really, there’s all these groups that are focused on bringing up young politicians to serve in Congress, but as far as I know, I don’t know anybody who is really cultivating talent that they could then recommend to a governor who really wants to put governors point, people who may be aligned with them, but maybe who just don’t have the experience at all. So it’s a complicated area. So I think that’s a really smart idea.

Jon Powers (34:48):

You just saw, I mean, the Georgia PUC race recently, it was a

Jennifer Granholm (34:51):

Big

Jon Powers (34:51):

Fight, and I think that was one of the most sophisticated campaigns, but we need more of that nationwide, which leads, it’s the second piece with midterms coming up specifically, what does the political arm of the industry or even the Democratic party honestly need to be doing to begin to front load affordability solutions, but also really have these campaigns at the state level to start moving solutions forward that can be executed on?

Jennifer Granholm (35:18):

Yeah, I think that this issue of affordability and of costs is going to drive so much in this year, and therefore our industry should be seizing upon that to be able to drive elections in that way. So I think Spam Berger and Cheryl are a great example of them campaigning on this issue. And that means that the first executive orders and the first legislative proposals they put forward are on these issues. I mean, if you are a candidate and you’re not focused on costs, you are really whistling past the graveyard you’ve really got. And so this fits so nicely in with, I mean, there’s a panoply of other issues that are cost related, but this is such a huge one with the advent of data centers. And so I think the challenge is going to be not necessarily hating on all data centers

(36:23):

Because it’s easy to point at them as being the villain or hating on all utilities. Easy to point at them at feeling, but how do you get all of those pieces to help drive down costs? And the good guys, the good data centers, good utilities, I mean utilities, they don’t want to be blamed for rate increases, right? They want to drive down costs. So if there are candidates who are willing to learn this and to help use the energy system to drive down utility costs for rate payers, I think it’s just a huge moment. And this is where too industry has a role to play in helping to educate these candidates and putting forth model solutions that they can. The nice thing about calling for a rate freeze is it’s sexy. People understand it. Now, it may not be the perfect policy from just a policy point of view because it’s temporary and it doesn’t address the underlying issues. But at least I would campaign on a rate freeze, and then I would call on a PUC to open up an affordability docket to do all the things that we discussed just like Governor Cheryl’s doing.

(37:34):

And that to me, I think, gets us to where we want to be.

Jon Powers (37:39):

Well, it’s interesting you talk about that sort of panoply of affordability topics that are on people’s, in people’s dinner table right now. Electricity is actually something a governor can do something about, right? It’s hard to do something about grocery prices at a state

Jennifer Granholm (37:52):

Level.

Jon Powers (37:53):

So two more questions. One, I’ll end with just a fun one, which I’ll come back to you one. So I would never say there’s a different sector of energy. I would never ask you to go and say anything counter to what he’s saying today. But we talked a little bit about the dynamics of our message should be winning. But a much different message is coming out of Washington today between President Trumps of energy. They’re often attacking our industry and challenging us as the reason that prices are so high, and they’re literally saying this a national level. So when you were the secretary and there were folks that were coming after the policies you were putting forward, where were the ones that you found successful? What were the ones that frustrated you the most? So we can look and figure out how to replicate some of those tools that these what

Jennifer Granholm (38:41):

That frustrated me the most.

Jon Powers (38:42):

Think of it this way, if you were out talking, I imagine there were a lot of folks coming after you in the policies you were pursuing, right? Often funded by fossil fuel industries and others.

Jon Powers (38:51):

There

Jon Powers (38:51):

Were campaigns that were probably successful. I think we as an industry don’t do enough of the, I don’t want to say dirty work, but the hard work to push back on some of the things that we’re seeing, but what should we be trying to replicate so that we can undercut? What I would say, I’m not going to ask you to say this, but I would say are the misleading facts coming out of Washington right now?

Jennifer Granholm (39:13):

Yeah. I mean, really, we don’t need to put out misleading facts. We just have to put out facts because we are the cheapest, we are the opportunity to manufacture in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. I think

Jon Powers (39:27):

That I pause for a second though. We need just put ’em out there. We need to be hitting people on Facebook. We need to be putting them in a county meeting

Jennifer Granholm (39:33):

100%. Which is, I mean, that speaks to the communications strategy as well as the political support strategy. We have not, I mean, there are a lot of great groups who are clean energy groups that are supporting candidates here and there, but the amount of money that’s going into supporting the candidates who are fossil fuel supported versus clean energy supported, absolutely. I mean, it is a huge disparity. So we got to up our game on both recruiting and supporting from a political point of view and making sure that we communicate and push back on the nonsense. I mean, we had a malarkey corner on our do e website, but we just had a malarkey corner, like the whole thing about offshore wind killing whales and all of that stuff.

Jon Powers (40:20):

Oh my God.

Jennifer Granholm (40:22):

But it’s perpetual. The notion that they keep pushing that renewables may costs go up when in fact it is the opposite of it. We have random voices that are out there, but as a, we need a megaphone. You have to answer a tuba with a tuba. You don’t answer a tuba with a piccolo, and so let’s go with our tuba. Let’s get an army of them to be able to push back on the nonsense.

Jon Powers (40:50):

That is going to be a message you guys hear a lot about in the couple of weeks from us. I agree with you, and we need to be putting our money where our mouth is, investing in politics and communications in a way that we haven’t in the

Jennifer Granholm (41:01):

Past. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Jon Powers (41:03):

The last question is a fun one. I ask on every episode, if you can go back to graduating law school, for instance, and could sit down before your career really took off in the direction, which is amazing by the way, and could sit down and have a beer and give yourself one piece of advice, what would you say?

Jennifer Granholm (41:21):

I would say do not be afraid to have a fight to pick your battle, but to don’t I, it’s important to compromise. I totally agree with that. You’ve got to be, but there are points at which a lot of times people just, they don’t want to engage in the fight, so they sort of sit back. I mean, you look at what’s happening in a variety of areas where the administration is going after, whether it’s journalists or universities or law firms, et cetera. You have to be strong enough in your beliefs that you are willing to fight to take a stand. People appreciate that about folks, about leaders. They want to see it. When I was starting out, I’m a pleaser and I didn’t want to ruffle feathers and all of that, but honestly, I would inject a lot more steel into my backbone from an earlier age.

Jon Powers (42:20):

Oh, interesting. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for being a part of this conversation, and thank you for the incredible work you’ve done and continue to do.

Jennifer Granholm (42:29):

I back at you, jon, thank you so much. This has been totally great.

Jon Powers (42:33):

Absolutely. And I want to just thank our team at Clean Capital, Colleen Young, as our producer. You can always get more episodes@cleancapital.com, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.