Latest / Factor This / This Week in Cleantech (09/04/2026) - Why is a Trump donor profiting from offshore wind cancellations?

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This Week in Cleantech (09/04/2026) - Why is a Trump donor profiting from offshore wind cancellations? · Factor This

• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody and welcome to this week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute-ish roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Today is Friday, September 4th, 2026.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: We have got a returning guest in waiting, Evan Halper, will be joining the show shortly.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't know me, I'm Factor this content director Paul Gurky, joined as always on the program by Cleantech commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Before we begin, Mike, I encountered one of the best dad jokes I've heard in a long time this morning.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Gotta share it with you.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, tell me I col I collect those bad boys.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I got one for your collection.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I bought a vinyl record yesterday.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Sounds Wasps Make.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: When I got home and played it, I said to myself, this doesn't sound anything like wasps.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Turns out I was on the B side.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you around like a donut.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: How's that?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: How are we doing, Mike?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing well.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was pushing to get us to cover the uh story about Aptera.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the major pubs went down and did a test drive of Aptera's new vehicle.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I want one of those things so bad.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then I found out that Claire Queerin and Brian Mendez secretly memoed Paul Daniel.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: They want they want Claring to buy them each an Ap Terra with each of them, this week in Clean Tech, produced by Brian Mendez or produced by Claire Queerin.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they just want like the hosted by Mike Casey, Paul Gurky, and a little bumper sticker at the bottom.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: These guys are out to take our jobs.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you, it this is a coup in the making.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm calling it right now.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is such a hard pivot into your weird, false realities.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Mendez, how long do we let him do this before we like call a doctor about it?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because the delusions get a little longer each time.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be like a 15-second joke about a private jet or a green room.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And now he's talking to my boss in these fantasies.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, man.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like it's so pretty slow.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Self-deprecating humor is a source of confidence.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Go with the program.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Scott Amaduri just talked to him two hours ago, president of Analogics.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he said he's a regular listener.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Also, thanks to Michael Perone for a massive shout-out on LinkedIn for our last episode, man.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Big thanks to Michael.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh even Paul Daniel got in the game and posted on that one.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, hey, I'll take it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Daniel's my boss, if you guys don't know.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess if you want to complain about me, he's the guy to look up.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Mr.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Clarion to you.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to hear from you guys that uh participate in the program.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: It really does make it worthwhile.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we'd love to hear what you have to say, even if you think we're a couple of blowhards, because you're not wrong.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, you can email us TWIC Twick at tigercom with twoms.us, and it'll show up in our inboxes, and we may or may not write you back.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so we got five stories to get through this week.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's like every other week.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: We'll start with story number one.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: That makes the most sense.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is so beautiful it made me get a tissue when I read it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Meet the super PAC working to crush, crush Clean Energy's political foes, Paul Gurkey.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, Julian Spector over at Canary Media talked about the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition or ITC, not the tax credits, on previous episodes.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: The Pro Solar Super PAC is chaired by Tom Matsy that took down Andy Oggles.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: He's been targeting lawmakers who voted to gut the IRA.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: ITC has raised commitments for$20 million this cycle.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they've gone five for five in the Republican primaries with ogles.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is it ogles?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is that he's gone anyway.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: No one cares about him.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh anyway, along with Chip Roy and Ralph Norman after uh losing uh after ITC money came in against them.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, Tom Matsze said the industry needed to prove it's not an industry people can hurt without consequences.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh your thoughts, Mike.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so to be clear, I worked for this outfit, so I'm both cheerleader and informed commentator, but uh Tom Matsze is not claiming ITC's ads were the sole reason any one race broke the way it did.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is getting politicians to understand that raising all of our utility bills by attacking the lowest cost source of power is no longer like hitting a heavy bag at the gym.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's live sparring with someone who can hit you back.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Get used to it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Parallel effort underway too.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Clean tech investor Steve McBee, a friend of mine, in May, launched a group called AMP.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is focused on uh building out the industry's public case making ability.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, let's go to story number two because we are rolling to an under 20 minute finish time.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Go, man.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sincerely doubt it.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Second story this week.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Shane Snyder from Data Center Knowledge.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's titled Data Center Backlash Reaches the Ballot Box.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-oh, Mike, what's in it?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so at the risk of turning this into the egocentric episode, I know the story because I was asked to contribute to it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about you.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: The universe, according to Mike Casey, is the name of this show now.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead and change it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there are 18 incumbent office holders uh looking at the exit door over the past year because uh voters bounced them out of office uh because they supported data centers in local fights.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So Utah State President Stu Adams lost his primary.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: If we're getting a link to the Stratos Data Center project in Utah's Box Elder County, Commissioner Lee Perry said the data center voter vote is what cost him his race.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: In Missouri, it gets even tougher.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Four FESTA City Council members lost their seats over a six billion dollar data center project, three of whom voted yes and one who voted no.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I told data center knowledge that the big problem is that hyperscaling, by definition, is rapidly building out capacity.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: But hyperscale as a business model that relies on rapid permission from communities to build in their midst.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that seeking that permission is the opposite of going fast.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's listening based, it's retail politicking, it's one county at a time, and it's person-driven.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the real problem they've got on their hands is that um developers are using a playbook for a low friction permitting environment when what they're facing is a high friction permitting environment, and a lot of them are scrambling to build community engagement operations after the fact.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So for the rest of their lives, our lives, developers are going to have to campaign for projects.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, what do you think?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: You got to understand the sandpaper you're working with.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can't go with the fine grain when you need the real gritty stuff.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, developer Jeff Thrayman, he argues the fix isn't messaging, but rather building smaller.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: He says nobody cares about the one megawatt facility across 300 grid circuits, but everyone knows about the big stuff, the 300 megawatt or nine gigawatt or whatever astronomical figure you want to throw out there that gets dropped into town.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, those are a lot louder.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just say the governor is adjusting.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh duck uh Texas governor, for one, Greg Abbott, who used to promote this stuff pretty hard, is now pushing to slow projects down, put a moratorium on data centers.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about that on the show.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: We said those companies really dug their own grave, quote, by not winning over communities.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Mike, can you win our community back with story number three?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is electricity dimming oil's political power?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Writes Ben Starrow in Politico.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Man, this is an interesting piece, Paul.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hey, real quick, you said Box Elder County a second ago, and I resisted the urge to say, the county, you should see the bugs.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on a dad joke roll today.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to know that I kept that one to myself and didn't share it with the audience.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So now we can resume story three.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, we had the author Ben Star on the show in June.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: He did a story for E News back then.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it was just folded into politico.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Ben is now the lead writer of the newsletter Surge.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to Surge.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this story led its first edition.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Political fortunes used to rise and fall with the price of gasoline.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Ben makes the case that electricity is starting to take over that role.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's happening on both sides of the Atlantic.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: In the UK, new Prime Minister Andy Burnham killed a tax on electricity his first day in office.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Francis Marine Le Pen wants to slash power levies too and pull out of Europe's electricity market entirely, which is a whole nother conversation.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Here in the U.S., Governors Josh Shapiro and Greg Abbott, aforementioned, are now putting restrictions on data centers because voters are pretty upset.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Faith Burrell of the International Energy Agency said when people ask if energy is cheap, he quotes the price of oil, but will soon be quoting cents per kilowatt hour instead.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Your thoughts, Mr.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Casey.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think when the oil companies got into the gas business, they went from transportation to electrons, and the world changed a lot.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as one Washington lobbyist said in this piece, the gas pump tells you who to be mad at, sometimes wrongly, but the electricity bill makes you actually go figure it out.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was fairly savvy.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's shown up at the ballot box.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Progressive candidates pledging data center moratorium have won Democratic primaries in Colorado, Michigan, and Kansas.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Urcos says large customers, mostly data centers, want to add uh 474 gigawatts of gig demand to the grid, roughly five times that grid operator's current peak load.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: A Republican government who spent three terms courting that demand is now ordering electric utility regulators to audit the data centers before they can connect to the grid.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, our fourth story.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Story four this week.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Pippa Stevens at CNBC titled Fervo best big on geothermal energy.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Saw this one come across the wires, Mike, and recognized immediately this is a big deal.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Fervo is really burning it up, man.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh phase one of the company's Cape Station project in Utah will connect to the grid next month.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the company just signed a deal for Cape Station to supply 400 megawatts of electricity to Google.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fervo is using oil and gas drilling and fracking techniques with horizontal wells over a mile long, which can make geothermal work almost anywhere.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is the first enhanced geothermal system in the world to reach commercial operation.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the CEO Tim Latimer told Pippa that hyperscalers are going to be a big part of the enhanced geothermal opportunity environment moving forward.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they need 24-7 reliable electricity that can come online fast.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Paul?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Base load, brother.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Fervo, which drills down, their stock went the other way with this news, way up.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Big deal selling all those megawatts to Google for data centers, and uh the applications for geothermal outside of the places you might think you could get geothermal seem to be expanding by the day.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Fervo itself has big expansion plans.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: The cost, though, obviously a challenge.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Cape Station's first phase is about$7,000 per kilowatt, not great.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Phase two,$5,500 per kilowatt, still not great.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: The long-term goal,$3,000 per kilowatt, which Fervo says makes it competitive with other forms of generation, and depending on the context, I would agree.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, geothermal, less than 1% of the U.S.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: grid, though, accounts for about four gigawatts total.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: The DOE says that could grow to 100 gigawatts by 2050.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh okay.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a lot of that depends on the success of the Cape Station project.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: Mike, I know they could drill in a lot more places now.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think that number sounds even more pie in the sky than the offshore wind totals uh buffeted around uh a decade or so ago were, but I digress.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a guest in the waiting room.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: We do.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's returning Evan Halper, Washington Post.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we had taken a break from covering uh current administration skullduggery and corruption.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Was it like a one or two-story break we took?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was like a two-episode break.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, we did.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: The dark storm cloud, known as Evan Halper, came back on our horizon.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: We had to bring him back and put on our rain boots.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Halper, sincere welcome back.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: You have a piece.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: The$900 million dollars from a canceled win deal will benefit a Trump donor.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm shocked there's gambling going on here.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Halper, please uh break down the nature of this tawdry episode here.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great, great to be here with you guys.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yes, happy to bring in the um the stormy weather again.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we've been, you know, there's been story after story, and sometimes uh, you know, these stories, it's it's it's been hard to keep up because there's so many of these deals the administration's making with these offshore wind companies, basically with a gun to their head.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, they're doing everything to stop these projects from moving forward.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and uh they're telling these companies, uh, okay, we can make a settlement with you.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want to spend the money that you've invested in your offshore wind permits and give that permit up, and some more money we'll give you from this like settlement fund, the same settlement fund they use to pay the um the the the J6 plaintiffs, I think.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um we will give you this this large this large check.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you put it toward fossil fuel, what they call conventional energy projects, they mostly fossil fuel, it could also be nuclear.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we're satisfied with the project.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: So you put them in, we'll just write you a big Vat check.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so they've they've spent about four billion dollars so far on on this, giving these energy companies uh money for these fossil fuel projects so that they'll kill their um you know, their their wind projects, their offshore wind projects.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the last one was with RWE, you know, big German energy company.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: They had offshore leases in three states.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: California was one of them, I think New York, um forgetting the third one.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea was RWE looked at this and said, well, we don't see a path to get these things developed.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, code language for this administration is gonna do everything to stop this thing.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: We need to find some other way out.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the administration said, okay, we'll make a settlement with you.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: We will give you$1.2 billion for conventional energy projects.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, RWE then announced before the administration even did that they're gonna spend that they they made this$1.2 billion settlement, and$900 million of it is gonna go toward Louisiana LNG.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: So Louisiana LNG is a giant LNG export terminal that uh they're trying to build in Louisiana.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's an interesting project.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's a lot of these export terminals, LNG export terminals that they're trying to move forward.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: They're all kind of risky, as you guys have talked about on the show.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: This one's particularly interesting because normally before you move an LNG project forward, you would have contracts lined up to sell all the LNG.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, they don't have that many contracts lined up.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: So there are a lot of analysts have been writing, we don't know about this project.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is kind of strange.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: They they went forward, they made the final investment decision without having enough LNG to sell.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Big stake in the project owned by, this is where we get to the Trump donor, owned by a company called Stone Peak.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: Stone Peak is a private equity firm.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: They have a$5.7 billion stake in this Louisiana LNG.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Stone Peak was founded or co-founded by Michael Dorrell, dual Australian American citizen, more importantly, billionaire, even more importantly, a neighbor of Mar-a-Lago and a member of Mar-a-Lago, and most importantly, a million-dollar donor to the Trump inaugural fund.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, this guy, not even from Stone Peak, right out of his pocket, according to the campaign finance filings we looked at, gave a million dollars uh to the Trump Inaugural Fund.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the RWE settlement money um that they announced, 900 million of it, wound up going to Stone Peak for RWE to buy to basically take part of Stone Peak's stake in Louisiana LNG off Stone Peak's hands.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of moving parts here.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: But what's interesting about this is, you know, they they talk about this as we're not gonna build these wind projects and we're gonna bring other new energy in, but we don't see how this actually brought any new energy onto the table.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: You you've taken a billionaire who has a$5.7 billion investment in kind of a risky LNG project, and they've used$900 million of it to take part of his share off his hands and kind of de-risk or you know, limit his exposure sum.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a Trump donor.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the administration, you can see from the quotes in the story, they said we're we're fabricating things.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is, you know, the fake news stuff.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: They they said it's it's braze, it's audacious or brazen for us to be saying there's a conflict where there's none there.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Their argument is, you know, RWE did whatever they want with this money, it just was a coincidence that it wound up in Stone Peak.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and we laid out how what exactly happened.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: It is true.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: The administration did not directly give that money to Stone Peak, but you know, they gave it to RWE and then RWE turned around and gave it to Stone Peak, and there's your story.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: I can see the cork board and all of the lines drawn out to each pin very clearly.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that was actually well put considering it was uh off the cuff there.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there was a lot going on.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was complicated to tell the story.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: We got a lot of pushback for it, but we thought it was important um, you know, with this settlement money happening and these, you know, four billion dollars of settlements now over these wind projects they're trying to kill.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: With the administration out there saying, you know, that they're adding all this is all about electrons, right?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: Are we, are we, do we have a net addition of electrons here?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Are we adding more energy?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: They're talking about energy dominance and they're saying these wind projects were never going to happen.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, now we're adding more energy.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, obviously the proponents of the wind projects in the states, and the states are suing the administration over these deals, are saying, no, these wind projects aren't happening because you're because the president thinks wind is ugly and a scam and is going out of his way to stop them in ways the courts have said don't really work, but now these companies have gotten cold feet.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so the question becomes, are we really getting more energy um you know out of this investment in Louisiana LNG that had already been made but is just kind of changing hands?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or would we have gotten more energy out of keeping these wind leases in place?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Paul, don't just sit there stunned.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: You get the next question.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a lot to say.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I kind of teed him up for that last response, so I was gonna let you volley the next one, Mike.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, for me, I'd love to, I'd love to figure out what this means for everybody else, because I think I know what it means.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that if you've got one of these projects that you're trying to move along, you should have given up and taken the settlement by now and reinvested it somewhere smart, wink nod.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but does that just mean that offshore wind development is dead for the United States now?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Or will the next administration somehow be able to curry the favor of these same companies who took substantial risk to come and try these projects in the first place again?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, this is the problem we're seeing with every technology.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: There's no policy certainty in the US anymore.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, whether it's whether you're on the oil and gas side or you're on the renewable side, you're you're really looking at a lot of uncertainty.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And as you guys know, these are, you know, decades-long investments.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'd say it's going to be tough to bring offshore wind back to the US uh after this administration.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, what's interesting is like the oil and gas folks, they don't love seeing these things either because they know what comes around goes around.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, a big, a big player in the story uh was Jared Huffman, who's out there saying we are he's telling the CEOs of these energy companies I would not cash those settlement checks.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna call this basically theft of taxpayer funds.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna go after that money.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're talking about possibly uh the companies not having to just give back the money, but having to give back triple the money.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's hard to see how a court may, you know, will would necessarily go along with that because these companies are doing something that the administration blessed, but the whole thing is pretty sketchy.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's coming from the settlement fund.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's not clear that any of this is legal.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is this kind of thing has never been done before.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, the Democrats are, you know, they're they're on the warpath over this, and they may be coming for that money.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, I don't know what you do if you're you're an energy CEO right now, especially for one of these big companies like, you know, RWE does a lot of renewable energy, but they also do a lot of fossil energy.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, they're they're they've already spent this money, they gave it to Stone Peak.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: But what happens if somewhere down the line, you know, Congress looks at this, we have a different administration, and they start coming after that money again.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's kind of all bad for investment in the US, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's so much uncertainty, and investors in these massive infrastructure projects that just cost many billions of dollars and take many, many years are going to get cold feet um investing in anything.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um as the saying goes, if you put a clown in, you're gonna get a circus.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: With that, Paul Gurky, we need to go to our clean techner of the week.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the clown.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I this this is.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't say who the clown was.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I just I just noted all that is.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this week's clean tech of the week.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Drum roll, please, Emily McTear.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: McAtee.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: We'll do that again.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's not fair to Emily because I was I was making a different joke when we started it.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: This week's Clean Tecker of the Week is Emily McAteer, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey Energy Solutions.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: They just closed 74 million bucks to scale a platform that connects to more than 6,000 solar installers and EPCs across 50 plus countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, all these growing markets with financing and bulk equipment procurement.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: The company's already facilitated$3.6 billion in capital, unlocking 1.5 gigawatts of distributed solar projects with activity in India up more than 200% over the past year.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to Clean Techer of the Week, Emily McAteer.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're thanking Brian Mendez, our wonderful producer, and Claire Queer and Alex Peterson for gathering these stories.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and uh to you, the listener, for making it to the end.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what the final time was, but I don't think we hit whatever Mark Casey was a good thing.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're over, Gurky.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're over.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I fall.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was all Evan Helper with his excellent analysis about his article.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: You should go read it if you haven't yet.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Evan, thanks for coming back to the show.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Leave a little feedback, subscribe, share a story suggestion to the email we mentioned at the top if you like.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Don't forget, you can read every article we talk about each week.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where the sucker lives on factorthis.com.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, be good, people