Wind & Solar — the good, the challenging and the hopeful

Intro: Welcome to The Energy Shift, a podcast series focusing on the rapidly evolving energy landscape with hosts Luisa Fuentes and James Wright.

James Wright: Well, hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Energy Shift. I’m joined today by Ines Sarrao, who is our Head of Renewable Energy for US Corporate Banking. Welcome Ines, thanks for joining us to talk about a very timely topic. How are doing?

Ines Serrao: Hey James, thank you for having me. I’m doing great and indeed I’m excited about this episode because it’s a very top important topic these days.

James Wright: Indeed, we have lot to get through. On today’s episode, we’re discussing the wind and energy industry. The good, the challenging and the hopeful is the way I think about it. At the time of recording, the big, beautiful budget bill, as it’s been known, is still working its way between the House and the Senate. But in the current drafts, there are some significant potential changes to the clean energy tax credit regime that we’ll get into a bit today. In addition, the industry is also still navigating some of the executive order stuff that happened earlier on this year, some of which require material for wind in particular. So our guest today to help us navigate all that is Michael Rucker. Michael’s the CEO of Scout Clean Energy. Welcome, Michael. Great to have you on the show.

Michael Rucker: Hi James and Ines, really happy to be here. It’s a pleasure to join you.

James Wright: Fantastic, you too. Thank you. All right, let’s get right into it. So Michael, what we love to do just to kick off is just hear a bit about you quickly, the background. So to help set the stage, could you share a bit about your personal background, how you found your way into the wind sector and your path to scout?

Michael Rucker: Yeah, I’m the founder and CEO of Scout Clean Energy, but that culminated a very long career really in our industry. entered renewables in the early 1990s, but I’ve done a diverse number of things in the industry, which set me up well effectively to become an entrepreneur ultimately. So I actually started out in policy. I worked for the Edison Electric Institute and then for the International Energy Agency in Europe, and I worked on the climate change negotiations in the energy technology office. So I worked on earlier renewable energy technologies and technology transfers to developing countries. But I like to build things. And I really wanted to exchange that long process around negotiating a climate agreement to actually getting iron in the ground effectively. So I got into power marketing and trading. ran the largest renewable energy certificate market in the world for a while, but that got me a launch into actually manufacturing at that point. So I worked for General Electric right after the acquisition of Enron Wind. So in the earliest days of really the large scale commercialization of wind in the US. Went back, joined some old colleagues, became a developer for Clipper Wind Power. So then I really shifted entirely into a development focus, which suited me very well. From Clipper, I ended up running a German company’s North American wind and services business. That was purely wind at that time. They withdrew from the market in 2013. So I started a company. What else would you do if you lose your job and have a good team behind you? So started out in operations, maintenance and construction management with a company called Harvest Energy Services, which grew very quickly, but you know, once you have development in your blood, if you’re like me, it’s kind of like an addiction. It’s like a chronic illness. So I couldn’t stay out of it. So I ended up raising private equity money, sponsored some projects in the earliest days of Scout as a concept, but was able after a success to spin Scout out of the services company right when the first long-term credit extension of the credits took place in 2016, which was with a phase out. Feeling more and more like the big beautiful bill you were talking about at this time. And from there, of hit good timing in terms of the opportunities in front of us with the first long-term extension, we needed a development pipeline. So I was able to build out a development pipeline, had General Electric Energy Financial Services actually invested in that pipeline and we targeted GE turbines and financings for it. Became a portfolio company of Quinnbrook Infrastructure Partners, which is a London-based fund manager. They were in their first fund. The time came for exit from that fund and in December of 22, sold Scout to Brookfield in their Brookfield Global Transition Fund 1 for $1.1 billion, and we’ve since been building out our pipelines, our operational assets and also adding some employees. We’re about 200 people based in Boulder, Colorado these days.

James Wright: That’s amazing Michael. That personal journey really kind of parallels well with the amazing journey this whole industry has been on the past couple of decades. That was fantastic. I will say on a side note as well, you definitely rank highest amongst my clients and friends in this industry who are the best travel people I know. So I always can tap you up for vacation recommendations when I need something in a pinch. So that was great. And Ines I’ll pass the mic to you.

Ines Serrao: Thank you. I agree with James, that was great, Michael. As you know, in my current role at CIBC, my main focus is wind, solar, and battery storage. And based on the description you just made and what we know, because we’re very happy to support you in a lot of your deals, Scouts roots are in the wind business. But you have also diversified across solar. How are you thinking about these strategic decisions? Are they based on pure economics and demand for off-takers? Or how do you make those plans?

Michael Rucker: Well, progressing from a wind-only company to a diversified solar and storage company as well was just a natural progression for it. And ultimately, it’s really driven by our customers’ needs for 24-7 clean, renewable energy, and not one of those technologies is going to achieve that on its own. We really need diversity in our clean energy mix, and the grid needs general diversity as well. So following that demand from our customers, we really couldn’t hit all those hours of the day just serving them with wind energy. So we added solar to hit the peak hours, the traditional peak hours, and storage is the natural addition to kind of work on the ramp periods in particular. So with all three, we provide a better product ultimately for our customers and for the grid generally. You just can’t ignore solar too. Solar’s Eclipse Wind is the most popular and widely installed renewable technology worldwide and that’s it. Solar is not going to be dethroned from its renewable energy king. It’s going to be the highest growth just simply given the ease of siding and the efficiency of mass producing panels. So we had to do solar in that respect too just to be able to reach the capacity addition targets that the markets are really requiring right now. In storage, it has a ways to go in terms of the commercialization of the product, really, the revenue models, in particular, in the US. But its costs have been coming down as of late, a little challenged by the tariffs, like most things in the economy. storage is just going to have an increasingly important role for it as well and hopefully down the road we can see longer-term duration storage technologies. Right now we just focus on lithium ion like most of the market.

Ines Serrao: And that’s very interesting and also a good topic for what I wanted to ask you next, which is about buyer demand. And this matches with what you were describing in terms of wind versus solar and what your buyers are looking for in the market, I guess. And so when you consider buyer demand, what trends do you see for utilities versus corporate off-takers? And within this, I have two specific questions. Are these region specifics? And in particularly when corporates are trying to enter into PPAs, are they trying to match their hourly demand for their projects or do they just want PPAs to meet their annual power usage?

Michael Rucker: Yeah, why don’t we start with the corporate side of the equation. Corporates increasingly are really, like I mentioned, looking for a 24-7 product, and a lot of that is driven by matching their hourly demand. Previously, when you could aggregate over long periods of time, perhaps a year, that gave you a lot of flexibility to, let’s say, just overly procure one technology, call it solar in this case. for the on-peak hours. But when you focus more on incremental hourly production, you need to find these profiles that actually serve those different hours of the day. So that creates an enhanced value for storage and wind energy in that case. Now, this is a trend that’s not entirely or universally accepted among all of them. I’d say the largest corporate off-takers. are really going in this direction, but you are seeing through the World Business Council, Sustainable Development, and the World Resources Institute efforts to create standards that will make that more widespread in the industry, and a lot of these large corporate buyers are basically anticipating that and already doing it. Another aspect of corporate buyers, which is much different to utilities, and we’ll get to the utilities in a moment, but they have a, although they might be looking at hourly compliance more and more, they’re looking at greenhouse gas and corporate goals, greenhouse gas reduction and corporate goals that are typically longer term. Let’s say, you know, large humps in 28 pushing into very large commitments for 2030. With all the disruption that you’re seeing in the market right now, corporates can afford to really take a breather until things sort out a little bit, and with the tariff issues in the US driving, and among other things, driving higher costs in the market, which is always EPC, refinancing costs, everything rolls up ultimately into the off take. Some corporates in some regions have just chosen to kind of either focus on regions where power is more affordable or just take a breather, so to speak. for us, we’re seeing that currently in the PJM region where some of the pricing that you would need for PPAs to make projects work these days are getting to the threshold that some buyers are just stepping back and waiting until things sort themselves out. So it is definitely regional in terms of where the impacts are being seen right now. But we are seeing impacts across the board. Now, utilities are kind of in the biggest pickle in a way, because most of them have RPS targets. They have perhaps corporate targets or they’re also just looking at fuel shifting still. They’re retiring coal plants, other fossil food resources that are reaching their end of life, but they’re also at the same time getting an immense number of load applications for data centers, just generally electrification of the economy is driving huge demands. The largest I’ve seen in my whole career for electricity in the near term and long term. Utilities feel that pinch today because they have to procure resources to meet their load and they have to do that in a timely fashion so they can have capacity available for when those load additions happen. So they can’t afford to take a breather and wait it out. The utilities are very consistent buyers and growing buyers right now simply because they’re seeing more demand than they’ve seen in decades.

James Wright: We’ll touch on that, Michael, actually in a bit because that kind of gets to heart of some of the challenges with this potential bill as well, which we’ll come back to in a second. But before we get there, I mean, one of the other, sort of staying on the technical side, just for one more moment, I’m curious to get your thoughts on would be just to touch on repowering. So one of the trends we’ve been seeing on our side of the desk has been more repowerings coming across the table. This is where project owners continue to use existing infrastructure and in a connection of proven wind sites, but wanting to put on newer equipment, bigger turbines with increased capacity factors that make more sense commercially. obviously, given Scouts are younger companies, you noted, and many of your assets probably aren’t quite yet right for repairing themselves. Nevertheless, thinking about your longer term history in industry, particularly about your Clipper days here, are you seeing repowering as a big theme for the market in the coming years?

Michael Rucker: Oh it is, definitely, and we’ll see another rush. There was a big one before 2020 for certain. We’ll see another big rush to repower. I would expect the next few years because a repowering is really address some of the challenges that we see in the market. To start with permitting the wait for queues to actually get an interconnection. Those are leading to extensive delays for projects. A repower, like you mentioned, all the major assets are there. You have a site, you probably have happy landowners who’ve been receiving royalties over the course of that project’s life. You have some infrastructure that can be reused, call it recycled. All those things are really valuable assets to have in place right now. It just removes a lot of the uncertainties with development; makes it easier to affect. But although some of the development aspects are easier with repower, some of the technical aspects are very challenging. You’re trying to take new technology, which is typically in wind, much larger, reuse existing components of the project, let’s say foundations. Those foundations might have been built, they were built for a different turbine. They may not be able to manage with or without extensive retrofits, the loads that you would see from a new turbine type. So that creates some challenges. You also have rotor diameter spacings that were tighter within those projects. And now when you put larger rotors on those machines, they’re going to have more weight losses that flow through the project. So sometimes reducing the efficiency or even the longevity and cost to operate the future project. There is a limitation in terms of what applicable technologies for some of those reasons I just mentioned you might be able to apply to the site the newest most efficient turbines just might be too big not have a retrofit that practically could use the foundation or the tower so you have to look at machines that and lot of the manufacturers have actual packages where they’ll have a machine that’s basically Built to replace another either one they designed or another one that’s in the market, and there are kits for that, but not for every technology replacement. Some of the older stuff just is torn down and rebuilt. For example, that Gonzaga project I talked about in California dated from 1986, and there was virtually nothing we could reuse at that site. So in terms of historical performance of those projects, it’s actually not as relevant as you might think since you’re replacing it with a new technology. But you would have had the opportunity to completely, if you’ve been maintaining those records correctly, maintaining and validating the original wind reports or the revised wind reports. you probably can get the wind really accurate in your repower, which of course helps. We would also, in trying to acquire these, and frankly, I would love to acquire more, but the owners are typically holding onto them these days. You know, you also need to look at what the existing power purchase agreement is and what the successor for that would be. And that can either be a blend and extend, which was very common with utility PPAs back in the early twenties. So that’s basically taking a project, extending the PPA life and then, you know, repricing it so that there’s an advantage with a more efficient project for the utility as well in the long term to reinvest in that with a new offtake agreement. Or you need to look at what would be the market for offtake if you, when that expires, have to go back to the market, and then you also look at some sites, it’s a coincidence in a way, but some of the earliest wind sites that were developed happened to be built out in areas where ultimately you saw a lot more wind deployed over time, and that’s created congestion basis. So sometimes when you step into one of these projects and you look at it, in today’s market, the congestion issues just might not have been there either when the project was first built or it went and had a bus bar PPA as opposed to what would be typical from a corporate industrial customer these days for hub settled PPA where in that style of contract here as the owner are going to be more exposed to basis and congestion issues going forward. So, repowers are great. They solve a lot of issues with the current market. You’re going to see a big rush to take advantage of these tax credits if the big beautiful bill restricts them or creates another phase out for it as currently, you know, recommended in the House version. So you’re going to see another rush to get as many repowers done as we can, I would imagine, at least between now and 2028.

James Wright: Yeah, I agree. actually, unpacking a lot of that, Michael, not only was that a great summary of repairing, I think there was a great sort of wind project development 101 buried in there as well. So was a great multifaceted answer. 

Ines Serrao: The other point, topic of the day, and we’ve all been spending a lot of time over the last few months navigating is tariff uncertainty, Michael, that you also mentioned earlier in this conversation. I’m very curious as to you and other wind companies, how are you dealing with tariff uncertainty, especially in the context of pipeline development and potential for higher construction costs? And then how are you sharing this across the industry? Are developers like you taking the risk? Are you seeing off takers willing to adjust their prices, suppliers willing to cost share? How do you insulate against the potential impacts in the future?

Michael Rucker: Well, it’s really, really difficult to insulate from that. You use the word insulate. I hadn’t thought of it this way. But you insulate your house to protect it from the cold. But in this case, the temperature is varying wildly day to day. So I don’t know what kind of insulation to use to protect us from this when it gets down to it. The tariff journey has been up down. We’ve seen three different versions of them in as many months. But they do have a very tangible impact on project economics. And even in wind, you mentioned, wind is actually one of the least exposed to the tariffs. Most of the wind supply chain is domestically manufactured in the US already. And we purchase wind turbines from domestic manufacturers. They qualify for domestic credits under the IRA. However, at the same time, everything is built with a supply chain these days. So even some of the sub-components of our domestically manufactured turbine are coming from abroad. So we’ve seen added costs even on domestically produced content for that reason. And there’s no good alternates really in any case for some of those supply chain components, or they take time to actually be put in place. In solar, we actually already have a largely domestic supply chain in solar as well, but there’s just not enough solar manufacturing, and this is partly through our parent Brookfield, those large scale procurements for portfolio companies and Scout participates in that and work to use those relationships to get better supply contracts for projects. We already had a largely domestic supply chain for solar. But there’s just not enough solar panels domestically produced to meet demand. So if we want to do more, it’s getting harder for us to find alternatives to that. And those panels are higher cost. And before, the tariffs actually, they looked out of market in many cases. Now, they’re certainly in market. But everything else has gone up in cost, too, at the same time. We’ve already seen the steel and aluminum tariffs take hold here. There are lot of BOP components that’s balanced and planned. So a lot of the components we use for construction are also from imported materials outside of aluminum and steel. We’re seeing long-term supply chain impacts, not necessarily driven by tariffs so much, but again, higher costs for main power transformers, breakers, high voltage equipment generally. So that’s been creating a lot of challenges for us too. So this is all over the board. We’re seeing fully contracted projects that are coming back with higher costs that in this case, we struggle to try to share with participants in the project. But we’re far enough along that I feel like I’m more asking for charity than anything else at this stage and slate and again. But for new contracts for projects that we’re planning, this is ultimately all these costs are passed through the off takers. So one way or the other, it’s just going to increase the cost of electricity. It’s going to create increased costs for consumers. But we, if we’re going to be able to finance these projects, need to get the revenues that, you know, obviously support the financing, the equity returns that we need to make this worth our time. So in some of those contracts, just to make them work, it’s really creating an atmosphere where we need to cooperate with off-takers and suppliers. So oftentimes we’ll have adjusters that try to manage general inflation, capex increases, some are specific for tariffs. We see that with suppliers. We see the same a little more of a limited basis, but usually have some flexibility and sharing of tariff exposure. But in almost all cases, there’s ultimately a cap for these. There’s just a certain point where not all the parties can go through. If costs just keep running through the roof, whether it’s what a PPA off-taker pays or, you know, what we pay for a wind turbine or a solar panel. you know, some of these cost swings have been so extreme, we’ve been hitting those caps, forcing us to come to the table and really look eye to eye with the participants in the projects and just say, do you really want to do this? And in some cases, we haven’t come to the final answer yet. But given how things are wildly shifting backwards and forwards, it’s driven a lot of people just to sit back and wait, know, to the extent you can and just see if this stabilizes. But that always comes to a point where you really have to decide whether you go forward under the current terms, renegotiated terms, or just cancel.

James Wright: You teed it up perfectly, Michael. I mean, I think we’re going back to where we started at the top of the episode talking about the beautiful bill. I mean, I think between the House and the Senate and, you know, obviously we could have some waiting time in the coming weeks that process to get done. Obviously, one of the biggest focuses for you and others in industry is the tax credit regime and what’s potentially happening there. None of us have a crystal ball, so not going to ask you to make any predictions, but I think I’m really interested in your view of just how you see the industry being prepared or not, as the case may be, to handle a world with no or very reduced tax credit support imminently, and segueing off that, how, if at all, do you plan for that world with the current uncertainties surrounding it? How do you think about that?

Michael Rucker: Well, I think you heard a little bit about my background. entered the industry when these technologies were nascent and people told me I was crazy to get involved with it. Now, since then, they’ve become the most competitive technologies that we can actually apply for energy production worldwide. And you’re seeing that with not only the cues in the United States, which are over 90 % renewables, but you’re seeing it worldwide as well, even in places where you don’t have a strong incentive for renewables. So, you know, I think ultimately without the credits, if they weren’t in place, we would do well. We would do just fine ultimately because the economic strength of renewables, there’s speed to deploy. That’s just always going to make them an excellent offer for us to meet our energy needs. There’s no doubt about it. However, I would like to see the corresponding larger and longer term subsidies for fossil fuels also reduced to zero. I just had to get that in there because every time this conversation comes up, no one says anything about what’s going on with fossil fuel. I would like to see more of an equal playing field than just renewables being targeted. But, you know, the IRA itself was a climate change bill, which people forget or just like to forget right now, just given the political orientation of the administration. It was really put in place not to subsidize per se these technologies, but to accelerate their deployment, and that’s what we have been seeing. Renewable energy is going to do just fine, ultimately, if the credits are reduced. Now, like anything in a heavy infrastructure business, which is what this is, everything we do is long-term. The development cycle for one of my projects is five to seven years now, if not longer. The projects we’re building are at Greenfield. We started, or at least got into the interconnection cues circa 2017, so a very long time ago. So everything we do requires long-term planning, and the supply chains that support us especially need long-term planning. They’re investing billions of dollars in plant equipment based on projections for demand years into the future as well. So when you have start-stop policy, it tends to be very disruptive in the short term. Those capital investments stop. Our developments slow down and stop as markets adjust, so we just wait to see what happens if it gets better. And that’s been a historical aspect of our industry all through my career. We’ve had one-year extensions, mostly of the PTC in the past, or just it going away for a period of time. And you’ve seen huge drop-offs in installations as a result. Now that always came back, either when the credits came back in place or now that we really have such a competitive renewable energy resource. It’s the markets that’s driving, it’s the market that’s driving that demand. But in the short term, it’s going to create a boom to take advantage of the credits as they expire. And then a bit of a bust most likely when the credits actually do expire. If we have just if we create a cliff to jump off of right in the medium term, you know, the markets will adjust. They always will. And I think we’ll be just fine in the long term. Renewables are going to predominate. It’s inevitable.

James Wright: I love the glasses half full Michael, I appreciate it.

Ines Serrao: That’s exactly what I was going to say. And that leads me to my next question, which I’m hoping is also a positive note in this conversation. In this new world of AI and growing power demand, what role do you see for all the different technologies? And you kind of touched on this a little bit as you were answering James’s previous question, but I’m interested in your view on how renewables, gas, and perhaps nuclear SMRs are all going to play together in the space.

Michael Rucker: Yeah, the forecasted demand for electricity worldwide and here in the United States is more than I’ve seen in terms of growth rates in my whole career. AI, like you mentioned, is probably the biggest single driver, but just general electrification of the economy. EVs in most markets, maybe the US will slow down a little bit, but that’s going to become the predominant transportation technology inevitably, as inevitable as solar down the road. So this is a trend that really isn’t going to stop. What technologies are going to fulfill that? Basically anything we can get our hands on, in the short period of time. You know, we really need an all above strategy, frankly, to meet our near term demand. And it’s foolish that we would deny any technology that’s cost effective and also environmentally sustainable in that period of time. It doesn’t make any sense in what we effectively have, an energy crisis to remove or disincentivize maybe our best technologies to apply to meet that demand in the short term. Like I mentioned, renewables are not only cost effective, but also the fastest to deploy. And also 90% of the queues, meaning the next five, seven years, it’s going to be renewables rolling out of the queues, nothing else. The alternatives, there’s space for them. I don’t think coal is a practical option for anyone right now. I’ll be curious to see if anyone takes the risk of investing in new coal because that effectively could become a stranded asset in a year and a half. It’ll probably never be built. Natural gas is a good, the original reasons that we looked at this in terms of energy transition, it is an excellent transition fuel. We should build it where we can, but the reality is the gas plants are not in the queues. They’re not planned. Combustion turbines are hard to come by. I used to work at General Electric. We sold in my region. had a natural gas fired CCGTs in my region, and it’s a long development cycle and very applications engineering intensive. Also, if you want to just step up and buy a CT right now, even if you knew what you’re going to buy, which takes years, you’re going to wait till the end of the decade. It’s going to be 2030 before you could get a large scale frame unit from GE, I would imagine currently. So what you do in the intervening time? Again, you should build everything you can. SMR is a nuclear. I’m one of these people who is so focused on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that a large scale, zero carbon emitting electricity technology, you got to take seriously. And it’s proven. Obviously, it’s had its faults. But the new designs, particularly coming from Westinghouse, which I have to caveat that is also owned by BGTF-1, fund. So we are part of a nuclear fund. But those are much safer designs than we’ve seen deployed historically. And I think they can have a place. For me, personally, my concern is just the cost and the time to deploy. We’ve had a horrible record in the United States. I wouldn’t even say cost effectively. Just effectively building this stuff cost overruns literally tenfold of what was planned and schedules that are twice as long as what were originally planned. Thankfully, cases where those extra costs were passed off utilities by public utilities commissions and everybody socialized those payments. Frankly if I’m planning a 1.1 gigawatt renewable energy power plant in the Pacific Northwest right now, wind, solar, storage, hybrid, effectively the size of a nuclear power plant. I can tell you. If I have a cost overrun, it’s me and my investors. There’s going to be no option to pass that cost off to the electrical consumers or the buyers. Nuclear has worked recently because it’s had that ability. But when it really comes down to have to compete commercially, it’s going to be real challenge. SMRs have a lot of positive things about them in terms of helping to meet this electricity demand over time, and I really hope that we are successful, because like I said, we need all of the zero emitting technologies we can build. But I’m somewhat skeptical on the cost and the time to deploy them. So in the meantime, we should be putting in as much wind, solar, and storage as we can build, and that’s what the market wants. And where we can, I’m not against using natural gas and getting that good base load and peaking capacity in at the same time.

James Wright: We could go on for hours on this topic. You’ve hit on some really great themes that Ines and I talk about a lot on the business side as well, on our side of the desk. So thank you, that was excellent. What we’ll do now as we sort of bring each episode to a wrap, we’d like to, just each of us, maybe mention something that shifted our week a bit. Pick whatever you want, something business or personal, whatever it might be. I’ll happily kick us off. I was thinking about what you were saying actually earlier and, you know, ahead of this conversation, you know, I’m picking up on that phrase again you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago about the acceleration of deployment needed in the US at the moment. I was thinking about just PJM as an example, right? And some of the statistics there are just mind blowing if you think about the demand that needs to be satisfied there in the coming years. And what struck me was I think, you the summer peak for PJM is about to be about 150 gigawatts this year. That’s looking to go up to about 180 gigawatts by 2030. So only five years from now, given all that data and AI growth demand we just we just touched on. So, know, that PJM the same that would need around 80 gigawatts of new renewable energy if you’re factoring in all the, all the retirements are going to happen in PGM during that time. So, you know, in that context, right, I think it feels to me on a very basic level, there’s a real disconnect between what the industry is saying is going to be needed to be built over the next few years versus some of the intended and potentially unintended consequences of this bill we’ve just been talking about. So I do really worry about that, you know, acceleration of deployment. piece you just mentioned, and how we’re going to meet that challenge in the next couple of years. So that’s what’s been shifting my brain the last couple of days. Ines, what about you next?

Ines Serrao: Okay. I’ll completely change the direction of this conversation, but this is all about our personal shifts of the week. And like James, I have been thinking about this a lot too. And that’s precisely where I’m going because we’ve been so focused on all of these changes on the impact of the changes having our business in our clients business and how we’re going to manage through it. I’m going to say something personal. so what shifted my was this weekend we did some backyard camping with friends and family which has become a Memorial Day tradition for our group and so it was fantastic to spend time outside, grill, do s’mores, do outdoor movie, have the kids all happy and sleep under the stars and now I’m recharged to tackle on these challenges again this week.

James Wright: Amazing. Hope you get portable solar by the tent, did you?

Ines Serrao: Next year I’ll work on that.

James Wright: I had to give a plug. Michael, what about you?

Michael Rucker: Well, I had one shift that shifted me way back when the reconciliation bill, the House version came out with somewhat manageable language around the tax credits, and then overnight, some deal was made in the back rooms in Washington, it came out much worse when it was actually signed, and that all happened like in one evening. So that set me back quite kind of bit. I got brought back and realized in terms of what are priorities when Scout Clean Energy here, we ran what’s called the Boulder Boulder. So that’s the U S is largest 10 K running race here. So 10K, 50,000 people, 20 bands, slip and slides, spraying water, and plus some professional racers to do a real time, but we just went out and had a great time and that’s a way to kind of refresh you and realize that in the long term, we’ll make it through this.

James Wright: Yeah, yeah, love it. That’s a great, great positive note to end this on. So thank you so much. That’s a wrap on this episode. Big thank you, Michael, for joining us on the show today and bringing your significant and long-standing expertise on these topics. That was really great. And Ines, same to you, some great discussion points you raised, so thank you again and see you next time.

Michael Rucker: Thank you, it was pleasure.

Outro: Please join us next time on The Energy Shift as we continue to tackle some of the hottest topics in the US energy transition landscape, providing fresh insights and viewpoints to help you shift your perspective.

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