The solar PPA pioneer and “infrastructure-as-a-service” investor has been selected to revive the program that boosted Tesla and utility-scale renewables.
Jigar Shah has decades of experience bringing clean energy technologies to commercial scale. As CEO and co-founder of SunEdison, he helped pioneer the solar power-purchase agreement (PPA) model now central to the industry. As president and co-founder of Generate Capital, he’s applied similar expertise to commercializing new generations of clean energy and decarbonization technologies.
Now the clean-energy entrepreneur, well known to Greentech Media fans as a co-host of The Energy Gang podcast, is taking his acumen to the public sector. This week, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm named Shah as the head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office and affirmed that the agency’s more than $40 billion in loan guarantee authority will play an important role in the DOE’s push to commercialize technologies to help meet the Biden administration’s aggressive decarbonization goals.
“I’m not kidding when I say I’m more terrified than excited” at the responsibility of managing the program, Shah said in his final episode of The Energy Gang this week. But he also laid out some of the principles he intends to follow in reviving a program that helped boost now-successful companies like Tesla before it was sidelined by the Trump administration.
Source: greentechmedia
