Jigar Shah has 48 birthdays and a successful track record in solar energy entrepreneurship on his resume.
Now he's the director of the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office. Here's the website, for the curious:
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/loan-programs-officeI have excerpts from a newly published report in the New York Times.
Federal industrial policy goes "big time"| | | quote | As part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, Congress supersized the office’s authority to arrange loans to companies trying to bring emerging energy technologies to market, increasing it tenfold from $40 billion to more than $400 billion. That makes it potentially one of the biggest economic development loan programs in United States history.
Mr. Shah, 48, is the gatekeeper for that gusher of tax dollars. And the clock is ticking; he has roughly a year and a half to get the money out the door before the 2024 elections could mean changes in the White House that would curtail the program. |
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The shadow cast by the Solyndra bankruptcy| | | quote | The job comes with enormous expectations—and high stakes. Created in 2005 to help finance clean energy projects that commercial banks found too bewildering, the loan program bankrolled some of the country’s first large wind and solar farms, and seeded Tesla, the electric vehicle maker. But it also lent $535 million in 2009 to Solyndra, a solar firm that went bankrupt two years later, requiring taxpayers to absorb the loss. In Republican circles, Solyndra became shorthand for government boondoggle, and the Trump administration essentially froze the loan program.
Mr. Shah has focused on avoiding another Solyndra while reviving the office, hiring staff and persuading energy companies that the federal government is ready to lend again. |
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DOE's Loan Programs Office has evolved since Solyndra| | | quote | Mr. Shah says the loan program’s role is not to take a leap of faith on chancy projects but to back promising clean energy deals that can’t get conventional financing because commercial lenders lack the capability to vet them—scientific expertise that resides at the Department of Energy.
In a recent interview, Mr. Shah said today’s office bears little resemblance to the one that made a bad bet on Solyndra a decade ago. The staff has grown from 12 to 250, and has safeguards to weed out overly risky projects. Last month, the office reported that its overall loan portfolio has turned a profit, while suffering losses equal to just 3 percent of its loans—a performance in line with commercial banks. |
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A $250 billion pot of gold at the end of the Inflation Reduction Act "rainbow"| | | quote | | As part of its new [Inflation Reduction Act] windfall, Mr. Shah’s office has $250 billion to retool old fossil-fuel infrastructure—by far its biggest pot of money. While the office still needs to clarify how it intends to use this money, experts say it could, for instance, help fend off economic devastation in communities facing coal plant closures. |
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One person who's likely following this is Robinson Meyer, formerly a staff writer at The Atlantic. Before Cliff Pennock created this Politics & Religion section (if memory serves me) by splitting it from Totally O/T—as a botanist might create a new tree by cutting a tree branch and planting it to root—I was inspired to post about a 2021 Robinson Meyer article from The Atlantic; to wit:
"The Bill That Could Truly, Actually Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing (and help the climate, too)"Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic; August 18, 2021.
https://www.theatlantic.com...-corporation/619793/The article was a "plug" for a bill that was sponsored by some Democratic Party-affiliated Senators, led by Chris Coons of Delaware, to create a U.S. Industrial Finance Corporaton—a bank owned by the U.S. government that would fill in what Meyer described (in so many words) as an "innovation gap" in the commercial investment sector. This Robinson Meyer article described
why the Chris Coons-led bill (which has not become law) to create a new, U.S.-owned investment bank was called for and was not just socialism for the sake of socialism.
If this New York Times report is on target, it's clear that the DOE Loan Programs Office, with the backing of the Inflation Reduction Act and under the stewardship of Jigar Shah, is doing what can be done in the way of federal industrial policy,
absent the more permanent framework of a U.S. Industrial Finance Corporation as conceived in that Democrats-sponsored bill that did not move forward in Congress.
"A Swaggering Clean-Energy Pioneer, With $400 Billion to Hand Out"| | | quote | | Jigar Shah runs a federal program that suddenly has a gusher of money to lend before the next election. |
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Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman for the New York Times; May11, 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/202...h-climate-biden.html
Jigar Shah. (Aaron M. Sprecher—Bloomberg via Getty Images.)
