Introducing The New Industrialists

Building clean energy industries has become an industrial strategy problem as much as a climate one.

Batteries, steel, critical minerals, grid equipment. Someone has to build the factories, secure the materials and find the capital, usually in industries where another country already has a twenty-year head start.

The New Industrialists is an eight-part series from Energy Empire, made in partnership with the New Energy Industrial Strategy (NEIS) Center and hosted by Jigar Shah and Sarah Ladislaw.

Both were inside the US government while America tried this. Jigar ran the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office from 2021 to 2025. Sarah is the NEIS Center’s founding director and was senior director for climate and energy at the National Security Council.

In this episode:

• China’s winners in electric vehicles, batteries and solar, and why they still aren’t very profitable

  
  

• What separates green industrial strategy from what Sarah calls new energy industrial strategy

  
  

• Why some governments can’t negotiate a power contract settled in dollars, and what USAID has to do with it

  
  

• Silicon Valley investors who won’t back anything that touches government, and the sectors that can’t exist without it

  
  

• “You don’t get to... say, no thanks, I’ll sit that one out”

  
  

Links:

Energy Empire: https://energyempire.fm

The NEIS Center: https://neiscenter.org