The DOE loan officer in high demand

Nov 23, 2022 View in browser   By Debra Kahn VERBATIM Courtesy DOE Jigar Shah is a popular guy. He was mobbed at a Stanford University conference last month by companies interested in getting a crack at more than $100 billion in clean energy loans. He's in charge of the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, which got a huge boost this past year. Both its existing programs for advanced vehicle manufacturing, tribal energy projects and innovative clean energy projects, as well as new programs for energy infrastructure upgrades and carbon dioxide transportation infrastructure, are being majorly juiced by the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. But with great power comes great responsibility. Republicans are watching the money closely, getting ready to make political hay out of anything that goes south, like DOE's infamous $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra in 2009. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Compare the office to what it was under the Trump administration, both in terms of the amount of money you have to give out and in terms of the speed of the process. Will it be quick enough to make it worthwhile for people? In terms of comparing the program to previous administrations, what I'd say is that what this program really needed all along was confidence that it had the support of the broader government. You can imagine that there was just a lot of walking on eggshells that occurred post-Solyndra, etc. Now we're averaging at least $7 billion of new loan applications a month coming in. Let's call it roughly 200 applications that we know about that folks are in active dialogue with our office on. I would say today, people are very comfortable believing that we're going to be fair to their application, and that we'll get it processed in a timely fashion. Do you have specific plans to try to avoid another Solyndra? Or because there was only one failure, do you think DOE was too conservative and should have made more bad bets? There are a couple ways of answering that. In the first portfolio of projects that we approved from 2009-11, we have roughly $32 billion worth of loans that we put out the door, and we've lost roughly $1.07 billion. So in general, the loss rate has been less than 3.4 percent, which is in line with commercial banks. And we separately make $533 million a year in interest for U.S. taxpayers. The program is profitable today. So there's lots of people telling me that we're not taking enough risk. The second thing I'd say is that after Solyndra, there was an extraordinary amount of feedback provided to the Loan Programs Office. And we have implemented every one of those suggestions, to the point where we now are being told by internal folks that we now have risk management practices that are as good or better than every other lending agency in government. So as [DOE] secretary [Jennifer Granholm] suggests, we still have to take a lot of swings at bat. We will get loans wrong. There will be losses in some of the loans we provide, but if the losses are roughly 3.4 percent of the portfolio, we think that that is totally in line with expectations. What are some areas that you think you're really well suited to pick up that the private sector wouldn't? There are many coal plants and natural gas plants that are at the end of life. And ESG funds don't want to own those coal plants even for a week, even if what you're doing is converting a coal plant into solar plus storage or a nuclear plant or manufacturing facility. And so we have a unique ability to fund that conversion in this new 1706 program that we have. In general, our feeling is that all of this energy infrastructure that we've built over the last 100 years that is supporting a modern lifestyle for us all, almost all of it can be repurposed within the energy transition into providing additional resources and revenues for those local communities and for those workers. What kind of funding, either by technology or by type of funding, IRA or bipartisan infrastructure law, do you think that the public will notice first? I don't know that I'm qualified to answer the question politically, but what I would say is that for a long time, we've been told here in this country that we can't do big things, that we can't build big things, that we can't actually commercialize technology here. The goal of the Loan Programs Office, but also the broader DOE, with the resources that it received out of [the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] and [the Inflation Reduction Act], is to prove to mayors, to county commissioners, to decision-makers that America can do big things, that we can build here, that we can commercialize here, that we can create manufacturing jobs. And I do think that it takes time for people to get that level of confidence. We have, obviously, some success stories, but I think the more that you see these plants being constructed, that people are being hired, people are being trained into these high-skilled jobs, that you actually see a lot of this in your community, I think the more confidence people are going to have that we can really do big things here.   POLITICO APP USERS: UPGRADE YOUR APP BY DECEMBER 19! We recently upgraded the POLITICO app with a fresh look and improved features for easier access to POLITICO's scoops and groundbreaking reporting. 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