This talk is based on a book that Jigar wrote (titled the same). I plan to read the book but for now these notes are derived from the talk – once I read the book I will update the notes found on this page.
- Since 1999, oil prices have gone from about $20 a barrel to over $100 a barrel today. The world is spending 2.5 trillion more dollars on Oil today than it did in 1999.
- Electricity costs have gone up by about 35% nationally since 1999. That’s an additional $200 billion that we spend on electricity today that we did not spend in 1999.
- Electric cars, car sharing, public transportation, all sorts of innovative solutions
- Economists: if we reduce oil consumption globally by 10%, it’ll reduce oil prices by 50%.
- In 1960s, government decided to push down responsibilities to utilities.
- We find it very difficult to deploy technologies at scale.
- Solar Industry: we have figured out how to get around our inability to deploy.
- SunEdison (that Jagir Shah founded): invented “no-money” down technique.
- Solar industry doing about $100 billion / yearly (that’s scale).
- In the Solar Industry, they figured out what mainstream capital wanted.
- Trust is garnered over time. When Jigar was at BP, they wouldn’t deploy any technology that wasn’t field tested for a minimum of over 100,000 hours (about 12 years).
- Credit worthy counterparty (fico score) (credit rating)
- PPA in Agriculture – buy produce on long term (7-10yr) contractual basis, and they (Jigar’s fund) build some type of greenhouse
- PPA model can be used with produce, with solar hot water, battery storage deal,
- Solar is slowly delving into mainstream finance. Last year, more money went into Solar than new coal or new nuclear
- Health Impacts: $120 billion each year that we spend on increased asthma and other diseases due to burning fossil fuels (such as coal, gasoline, diesel).
- Water: 50% of all freshwater withdrawals in the USA is to cool coal plants and nuclear plants.
- Why do we keep buying cars?
- Almost no one things their car is a good investment
- Energy management software companies like Building IQ, Ntouch etc
- Shipping industry: low friction paint,
- Shippingefficiency.org (shifted almost 4% of global shipping traffic)