In today’s episode, I got to talk about something near and dear to my heart (nuclear waste reprocessing) with Carl Perez of Exodys Energy, a nuclear waste reprocessing company. Carl is a wealth of knowledge, as you’ll hear in the episode. We discuss the basics of waste reprocessing, the history of the industry, what makes Exodys stand out, and why getting waste reprocessing right will change the world.

Check out Exodys here.

Today I’m joined by Julie Kozeracki, the Chief Investment Officer of the Energy Dominance Financing Office, which serves as the Department of Energy’s bank. We talk about her admiration for Admiral Hyman Rickover, the nature of the EDF, financing large light water reactors and small modular reactors, why the EDF’s operations are vital to a nuclear renaissance in America, and more!

I felt really lucky to speak with Julie. I’m a huge fan of hers and a major supporter of the EDF’s work.

Read more about the EDF here!

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For this episode, my guest is Jeff Waksman, whose official title is Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment. That’s a long title. In brief, he’s trying to get microreactors built for the US Army via the Janus Program. We discussed the nature of the program, unforeseen challenges in hard tech, why the Army is pursuing microreactors, and more!

You can learn more about Janus here.

And you can follow Jeff Waksman on X—which I heartily recommend.

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Last week, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Energy Secretary Chris Wright at the Foundation for American Innovation’s American Innovation Gala. We discussed the lessons he’s learned in his move from Liberty Energy CEO to Energy Secretary, his vision for American energy dominance, and some of his biggest wins at DOE. Unsurprisingly, nuclear featured high on his list—especially nuclear financing.

Wright explained that the DOE’s bank, the Loans Program Office, has “a lot of money at low interest rates” ready to lend to “credit-worthy borrowers.”

I completely agree with Sec. Wright. In fact, FAI Non-Resident Senior Fellow Madi Hilly and I just published a white paper making the case for a fleet-scale build of AP-1000s via the LPO. We walk through the case for big reactors, the grisly history of the first AP-1000 builds, the financing available for fleet-scale AP-1000s, and additional policy levers we could pull to support the build.

For the record, the LPO is a highly efficient lender. It has over $200 billion to lend to new nuclear. President Trump, in one of his executive orders, tasked the DOE with “prioritiz[ing] work with the nuclear energy industry to . . . have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030” in “order to maximize the speed and scale of new nuclear capacity.” The LPO is the vehicle for achieving this goal.

Westinghouse’s AP-1000, which debuted at Vogtle in Georgia, is the only reactor that both meets those criteria and that America has experience building. We need to build more of them, especially since the AP-1000 boasts some serious technical advantages.

By repping out AP-1000s, we can drive down the construction times and costs through economies of repetition. With financing from the LPO and the Investment Tax Credit, there has never been a more conducive environment for large nuclear builds in America. But we can do more!

Here are three other levers to pull in order of importance:

1. Allow “Double Dipping.”

The LPO’s ability to lend is encumbered by the “denial of double benefits” clause in the Inflation Reduction Act. Essentially, the clause bars the LPO from lending to successive portions of a project—“for example, a long-lead-items loan followed by construction-stage project financing.” This inhibits the LPO’s efficiency as a lender.

In our new paper, we argue that Congress should “amend the IRA’s ‘denial of double benefits’ provision as it applies to Title XVII. At a minimum, Congress should clarify that (1) multiple LPO guarantees for distinct phases, tranches, or scopes of the same nuclear project are permissible so long as the aggregate guaranteed amount does not exceed 80 percent of eligible project costs and (2) the restriction does not apply to projects with federal offtake agreements below a specified share of the nameplate capacity of an individual project or project portfolio.”

2. Raise the Tennessee Valley Authority’s debt cap.

The TVA is the largest public power entity in America. It could become a powerhouse AP-1000 builder, but its debt cap has been set at $30 billion since the 1970s. As we write, “Pegging the TVA’s debt cap to even half of inflation would more than double its debt cap to $67 billion. The TVA, as an expression of the executive branch’s will, could then commit to an AP-1000 buildout.” To do this, Congress must lift its debt cap.

3. Establish Regional Consortia.

States could also play a role by forming consortia to welcome new AP-1000s. We write, “States could convene meetings with their respective utilities to iron out a preliminary agreement on the AP-1000 as a chosen reactor type, deployment queueing, offtake for power, and so on. Such an approach could be particularly helpful for regions with a less robust history of nuclear power operations, where siting and offtake opportunities are less established and thus less known.”

There’s more states can do, of course. My colleague at FAI, Sam Roland, has just updated our State Permitting Playbook to help states improve their permitting laws. He’s also working on a state nuclear playbook, which will come out soon.

America needs more Industrial Cathedrals. The suite of policy tools we have at hand are truly revolutionary. As Wright said at our gala, “I’ve heard about the nuclear renaissance for 20 years. We are all in to make it happen.”

Let’s build.

Read the full paper here.

One of the best parts of running this podcast is the chance to learn about aspects of the nuclear industry I know little about. Today’s guest, the President and CEO of United Clean Up Oak Ridge, taught me all about remediating nuclear sites. UCOR, the DOE’s contractor for the Oak Ridge Reservation, boasts an impressive suite of expertise and logistical acumen dedicated to turning over former Manhattan Project sites for civilian and government use. Ken broke down the steps of remediation and the heavy machinery needed (including robots!) to deliver on these projects. I really appreciated the beauty of his vision: remediating Manhattan project sites to spur the nuclear renaissance.

This episode brought out the little kid in me. A huge thank you to Ken for making the time for our discussion.

You can learn more about UCOR here.

Reed Clay, President of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, joined me today to talk about how Texas is gearing up for the nuclear renaissance. We discussed how he came to support nuclear by learning about waste, what has set Texas’s nuclear strategy apart from other states, how TNA’s annual summit is shaping the national nuclear landscape, and Reed’s advice for other states that want to become nuclear hubs.

Reed is a humble, hard-working guy and it was a pleasure to speak with him.

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Before you read this one, check out Part I, Part II, and Part III!

In 1926, Insull gave $160,000 to Illinois Republican Senate Candidate Frank Smith, who went on to win the party nomination in a hard-fought primary against Senator William McKinley. Before becoming a senator, Smith had served as the chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission, which regulated Insull’s utilities. Perhaps Insull justified the obvious conflict of interest by telling himself that buying a senator was a calculated risk—one that would exact revenge against a long-resented political opponent and business competitor. To the public, however, Insull simply denied the obvious, stating that the Illinois Commerce Commission had “never granted any of my companies anything they were not strictly entitled to.” While Smith had never been “Insull’s boy”—he had blocked all of Insull’s rate hikes during his tenure as chairman, in addition to approving rate cuts totaling $42 million—the picture looked ugly.

The Senate protected its reputation against corruption allegations by refusing to seat Smith, nullifying his election, and launching an investigation into campaign corruption. The investigation spanned two years, during which newspapers dragged Insull’s name through the dirt from coast to coast. (News magnate William Randolph Hearst was a friend of Insull’s who assured him it wasn’t personal; but Hearst, the leading purveyor of “yellow journalism,” was never one to let mere friendship get in the way of sales). When the Senate committee brought Insull in for questioning, he initially refused to divulge his campaign contributions for fear that the evidence would damage the other campaigns he was bankrolling in upcoming municipal elections. The Senate held him in contempt of Congress, the consequences of which Insull dodged by releasing the details of his contributions himself—after the municipal elections, when the evidence could no longer hurt him or his politicians. He displayed no remorse and repented not at all.

Insull got off, but his growing success, combined with the visibility of his hand in political affairs, began to draw the ire of Progressive holdovers, including Senator George Norris of Nebraska. Norris was a die hard public power activist who despised the utility industry’s baronial influence on American life, calling the entire industry a “gigantic trust that has fastened its fangs upon the people of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.” He spent the better part of the 1920s fending off private acquisitions of Muscle Shoals, a public hydropower dam in the Tennessee Valley, which had been built to power fertilizer production during WWI. The dam was finished after armistice, which left it mothballed. It was Norris who militated the Senate against seating Frank Smith. “God only knows how many Senatorial campaigns Mr. Insull has financed,” he said. When the investigation into Insull’s political influence in senatorial campaigns went belly-up, Norris turned his attention toward Insull’s other affairs. The Senate would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to begin what became a seven-year probe into the inner workings of the utility industry. Its results wouldn’t see the light of day until Insull was already on the brink of destruction.

But Insull simply couldn’t hear his political opponents gaining ground on him over the thunderous sound of his own success. He did, however, hear disturbing news about a man named Cyrus Eaton, a former Baptist minister turned savvy financier. Hailing from Ohio, Eaton had been in the utility business since the early 1900s, and, by the mid-1920s, had acquired two utility holding companies. Slowly and quietly, Eaton began buying up large portions of Insull’s Commonwealth Edison, Public Service, People’s Gas, and Middle West. In 1928, Insull was shocked to learn that Eaton’s portion of the pie was larger than his own. Insull had always kept an eye on the House of Morgan, but had never considered a local insurgent.

What did Eaton want? The man baffled Insull. Over and over again, Eaton relayed to Insull that he had no desire to control Insull’s empire; he just wanted a good return on capital invested. This rationale Insull could not understand. So, when Eaton offered Insull a sweet deal—Eaton would own, and Insull would operate exclusively—Insull didn’t trust it. He was an old dragon who preferred his hoard beneath him, whatever the cost.

Acting on his assumption that Eaton sought to take over his enterprises, Insull consolidated his entire empire into a single holding company: Insull Utility Investments. When IUI debuted on the stock market in January of 1929, it was worth $25 a share. In six months the frenzied market sent it to $150. At the same time, some of Insull’s subsidiary companies saw their stock double or better, which increased the prices IUI had to pay for those subsidiaries’ stock. To keep his financial grip on his empire, Insull formed an investment trust—the Corporation Securities Company of Chicago, or CORP—and then gave CORP and IUI partial ownership over each other. If Eaton wanted it, he’d have to buy it all. Insull felt well-fortified.

The Roaring Twenties closed with a smiling Insull featured for the third time on the cover of Time magazine. Months later, the stock market crashed. Insull met Black Friday—October 19, 1929—with hubris. “The stock market has not made the slightest difference to our policies,” he said. To prove it, he sank $200 million in capital-intensive projects, $80 million of which belonged to a natural gas pipeline that stretched from Texas to Chicago. He even advanced cash to his employees so that they could cover their brokerage accounts. Then, he enlisted his greatest ad man to promote an “everything is normal” campaign that would ease the public’s fears about Insull’s companies pulling their money out of the economy. This campaign, Insull explained at a December 1929 meeting of all the dons of the utility business, would mean going on the offense against pesky journalists, meddlesome politicians, and annoying citizens’ groups. A young man named Wendell Wilkie, who served as chief legal counsel for the largest utility in the South, Commonwealth & Southern, wondered aloud why the industry should have to take such an aggressive stance if their activities were all above board. “Mr. Wilkie,” Insull snarled, “when you are older, you will know more.” Wilkie would soon have to deal with the backlash against Insull’s tactics during the Great Depression.

Regardless, Insull’s companies saw their earnings jump by 15 percent in 1930. Power demand continued to rise as well despite the crash, which meant Insull had to keep expanding. In even better news, the crash made newly available vast sums of low-interest money. Insull went on a borrowing frenzy: $140 million in 1930. Securing such large loans without the need for New York financiers’ aid inspired a saber-rattling speech at the Chicago Stock Exchange. Insull called for a “war of financial liberation against Wall Street,” raising the ire of the money men already cankered by his insolence. Just a few years prior, Insull had acquired two enormous holding companies on the East Coast right under J.P. Morgan’s nose. These were men who commanded a fealty toward whom Insull refused to demonstrate, “and that made bad blood between them,” an industry insider reported at the time—“real bad blood.”

If Insull had marched East on horseback, he would return home in rags. His paranoia about Eaton persisted until he eventually bought Eaton out for $56 million at $350 a share, $40 above the market price. The lion’s share of the purchase came from money borrowed from his own companies, but $20 million of it had been secured from his enemies on Wall Street. The first half of 1931 delivered growth so robust, Insull was briefly rescued from his own appetite for risk: it vaporized his previous losses and brought his companies into alignment with their book value. Nevertheless, the kite string popped that September when England ditched the gold standard, lopping a third off the US stock market and $150 million off of Insull’s companies. From there, the beatings continued. Insull’s enemies in New York prosecuted a cutthroat campaign of rumor-mongering and subterfuge to nose dive Insull stocks, which spiraled downward to around $2 a share. The Wall Streeters then called in their debts. Insull’s recklessness had delivered his empire unto the hands of his foes.

Morgan and his allies brought in the accounting firm Arthur Andersen & Co. to straighten out Insull’s books. What Andersen found shocked him: sketchy inter-corporate loans and tricky bookkeeping had been keeping Insull’s empire afloat. These revelations, when made public, guttered Insull’s reputation and retroactively bankrupted Middle West Utilities overnight. The New Yorkers delivered their final blow in the summer of 1932, when they forced Insull into receivership and then out of his own companies. Insull summed up the cataclysm tidily enough: “I—my companies—spent money as though things were alright. We increased our floating debt and this eventually brought about our bankruptcy.” Insull had lost public stockholders $600 million and wiped out the savings of some 600,000 people. The public felt bamboozled, suckered into investments they little understood (disclosure laws were not then what they are now) and over which they exerted no real control—all thanks to Insull’s unceasing barrage of advertising.

And it was at this precise moment of weakness that the Federal Trade Commission began to publish its findings on the behavior of the utility industry. Every month, the commission published excerpts from the 80 volumes of research it had completed, all of which teemed with seedy business dealings and corporate abuse. The report exposed NELA’s aggressive efforts to encourage utility boosterism, promote preferred stock purchases, and suppress criticism through its 25 million pieces of literature and countless radio broadcasts and speeches—all for which it had charged consumers. NELA’s campaign, in the estimation of the FTC, was the greatest propaganda effort that had “ever been conducted except possibly by governments in wartime.” Insull’s “ownership society” of non-voting common stockholders now looked like a scam. The revelations looked so bad that NELA had to change its name to the Edison Electric Institute to spare its reputation, promising to “divest itself of all semblance of propaganda activities” and “assume an attitude of frankness and ready cooperation in its dealings with the public.”

Progressives like George Norris took the opportunity to gain the high ground and went on the attack, aided by their new champion, former New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had ridden into the Oval Office by taking aim at the utility industry at large and Samuel Insull in particular. In the fall of 1932, FDR started sharpening his knives against Insull and the utility industry on the presidential campaign trail. While speaking in Portland, Oregon, FDR spelled out his desire for regional public power entities that would serve as “a national yardstick to prevent extortion against the public and to encourage the wider use of that servant of the people—electric power.” Roosevelt knew the industry would marshal the whole of its forces to stop him. He threw down the gauntlet. “To the people of this country I have but one answer on this subject. Judge me by the enemies I have made. Judge me by the selfish purposes of these utility leaders who have talked of radicalism while they were selling watered stock to the people and using our schools to deceive the coming generation.” The crowd roared.

Two days later in California, Roosevelt took direct aim at Insull, saying, “Whenever in the pursuit of this objective the lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man's, declines to join in achieving an end recognized as being for the public welfare, and threatens to drag the industry back to a state of anarchy, the Government may properly be asked to apply restraint.” Roosevelt wanted Insull behind bars.

Insull got wind that he was wanted in court in Illinois. Seeing no reason to put his head in the lion’s mouth, as he put it, he fled to Paris. But Insull’s refuge in Europe couldn’t last. As soon as FDR took office, the president hounded the former utility kingpin throughout the Mediterranean, settling down in Greece. Finally, after threatening the Greek government with trade curtailments, Greek authorities surrendered Insull over to America in 1934. Roosevelt had personally signed the extradition request. Insull prepared his memoirs on the trip home. He earned a third cover of Time magazine that year, with his hat covering his face for shame as he clumsily exited his car on the way to court.

The jury set to decide Insull’s fate had a difficult time convicting him for fraud. The first obstacle was explaining the case, which involved complex financial structures in a cutting edge industry. Then there was Insull himself, by then fragile and aged, who came off as a kindly old man who had ridden to fame and success by virtue of his talents. In a fight between the prosecution’s emphasis on the nefarious latticework of holding company ownership structures and the defense’s retreat to the redoubt of Insull’s character, the man won. Besides, if he had been a conman, then he hadn’t been any good at it. Insull had done everything in his power to rescue his companies from bankruptcy, including bankrupting himself. The jury came back with its verdict: not guilty.

Insull booked a trip back to France to live out his remaining years. “If modesty permits, I would say that it has been my privilege […] to make some contributions toward the economic success” of the power industry, Insull wrote in his memoirs. “What those contributions really amount to must be left to posterity to decide if they should seem to the future students of these industries of sufficient consequence to claim attention.” This could only be false modesty. Insull had led his industry out of the desert of limited adoption and into the promised land of a mass consumer society that thrived on kilowatt-hours. He had created the regulatory compact that would hold for over a century, and his build-and-grow strategy would serve as the industry standard until the 1970s. Insull gave the whole of his life to his gospel of electric growth, and the country benefited greatly from hearing the good word. And yet, in 1938, Samuel Insull died alone at the age of 78 after his heart gave out on the Paris subway. He had 85 cents in his pocket. Seventeen mourners attended his funeral, with no family members among them. Papers circulated word of his death, portraying him as a failure.

Yet at that very moment, one of Roosevelt’s champions, a Hoosier lawyer named David Lilienthal, was proving Insull right all over again on the government’s behalf in the Tennessee Valley. But that’s a story for another time.

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Bibliography

• Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York, NY: Library of America, 1983).

• Mark Aldrich, The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800 - 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).

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• Jeremiah D. Lambert, Power Brokers: The Struggle to Shape and Control the Electric Power Industry (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2015).

• Jon K. Lauck, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800 - 1900 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2022).

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• Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2009).

• David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Wilkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order (New York, NY: Liveright, 2018).

• John Marini, Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2019).

• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).

• Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933 - 1939 (Philadelphia, PA: J.P. Lippingcott Company, 1971).

• Forrest McDonald, Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

• Richard Munson, From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005).

• John L. Neufeld, Selling Power: Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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• Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).

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• Daniel L. Wuebben, Power-Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

This episode is dedicated to all of the light water reactor fans out there. Especially if you like your LWRs in water. Listen to this conversation with the co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, Jake Jurewicz, and you’ll understand what I mean. Jake is a utility industry veteran with a lifetime of experience on construction sites, so our discussion about how his new company is going to site SMRs on waterways and ship them by barge gets into all kinds of deployment nitty gritty: management, permitting, financing, you name it.

Check out Blue Energy’s website, LinkedIn, and X account.

Craig Fuller comes from a legacy trucking family. He’s also the CEO and founder of Freightwaves, the Bloomberg of logistics. So, Craig’s the perfect guy to write an accessible primer on supply chains, which is exactly what he’s done. He came on the show to talk about the new book, Moving the World: How the Supply Chain’s Evolution Affects Us All (which you can pre-order here!). We dig into what the Covid crisis taught us about supply chains, why reshoring makes sense both economically and strategically, and how supply chains and the grid are similar.

Last week, I spent a couple days in the Salamander Hotel with over 600 energy, technology, and permitting reform enthusiasts for the Abundance Conference. The goal of this conference is to forge, per its mission statement, “a cross-partisan coalition committed to accelerating economic growth, reinforcing American leadership in science and technology, dismantling bureaucratic inertia, restoring effective governance, and reducing the cost of living.”

Depending on who you are, that sounds either like a good time or a Dantesque pitstop in the white collar necrosphere of Washington, DC.

What can I say? Your mileage may vary, but I had a blast.

I don’t need to tell you that politics feels contentious. Practical issues often fall by the wayside to salacious clickbait. The Abundance Conference, meanwhile, focused on kitchen table issues: energy prices, economic growth, housing costs, etc. And it boasted lawmakers from either side making concessions and talking compromise — at least rhetorically. This felt refreshing. Bipartisanship is a necessary ingredient in energy policy because without it, changes tend to lack durability. And without policy consistency, capital stays skittish and locked up.

And yet, despite all the grand gestures across the aisle, I couldn’t help but notice a few things.

I. What We Talk About When We Talk About Permitting Reform

Everyone wants to talk permitting reform because environmental law has made it prohibitive to build in this country. Conservatives have been rightfully griping about this for decades, and liberals, shocked at the contradictions within their own coalition, have finally started to internalize this problem. That’s good.

The natural area for overlap here concerns pipelines and transmission lines. In multiple conversations, I said I’d be fine with making it easier to build long transmission lines if, in exchange, we enabled natural gas pipelines to the same degree. After all, it costs twice as much to pay for the litigation involved in building a pipeline than building the pipeline itself.

Many of my colleagues across the aisle agreed that this made sense. But often (though not always!), as the conversations went on, it became clear that while I was discussing permitting reform, the person with whom I was speaking was not. Instead, they were describing a different trade: subsidizing transmission lines in exchange for alleviating the green tape around pipeline construction.

To this I say, as I imagine almost every conservative would, “No deal.” It’s apples to oranges. Moreover, wind and solar have been so subsidized that it’s hard for me to take seriously the argument that we must also subsidize the infrastructure that makes them viable.

My policy misgivings aside, I observed that the shift from permitting reform proper to transmission socialization went unnoticed by some of my conversants. I don’t believe this was intentional or manipulative. The discussions were all in good faith. Rather, this phenomena emerged as an artifact of differing political priors, thus revealing what makes compromise so difficult. So often in politics we talk past each other without realizing it. The permitting conversation is but a characteristic example of a frequent occurrence.

I think there are, if not remedies, then ways to mitigate this dynamic; hence the following points.

II. Location, Location, Location

As I mentioned above, it was nice to hear from policymakers from both parties. I felt that Abundance delivered on bipartisanship. Even more impressive, I met people from state and local governments while I was there. One of the best conversations I had involved a Democratic Colorado county commissioner who explained how she opened up her county to fracking. No doubt regulatory strictures were more burdensome than in Texas, but she had just approved a fracking pad in a blue area! And she was proud of it!

I want an abundance of this. Whenever I speak with companies, it’s not just federal issues on their mind. They’re worried about state and local laws. Having a bumper crop of state and local electeds in the mix (and on panels, on stage, etc.) is necessary for actually hashing out how to unleash more growth.

As the Abundance Conference grows, and I suspect it will, it has an incredible opportunity here to actually connect policy positions to policy actions — all this stuff is going to be built somewhere. And it could resolve some of the issues I mentioned above because more conversations would involve key decision-makers, ultimately grounding the conversation in political reality. But that’s codependent on the next point.

III. Release the Realitymongers

I enjoyed many of the panels I attended. It’s provocative to hear about the trade-offs between technocratic and lawyerly societies, to listen in as different philanthropic players explicate their modus operandi, or, in my personal case, have a fireside chat with Ted Nordhaus about nuclear large and small. Here’s a photo from our two-man panel:

However, as a think tanker, I sometimes weary of hearing from other think tankers. Don’t get me wrong: I love my job and it’s fun to play with policy ideas and get into the weeds. That’s important.

But if we’re going to talk about abundance, then we need to talk to the people who make it possible; the people whose responsibility it is to deliver molecules and megawatts day in and day out. In short, we need to hear from industry.

It’s hard to have strictly ideological conversation from first principles about energy policy when you’re speaking with someone who’s literally on the hook for keeping industrial modernity running. Having people from the fracking, pipelines, renewable, nuclear, and utility space would promote both a moderating and informing impact on attendees and panelists alike.

And let’s not forget private capital and labor: someone’s gotta finance all this stuff and then someone else has to build and maintain it.

The absence of these perspectives felt very palpable to me. But there’s good news in even that. Abundance had many more attendees than it did just last year. And it’s showing definite signs of scaling up. That means greater opportunity to get more of these voices in the mix. There is no progress without iteration.

One last thing: my think tank, the Foundation for American Innovation, was featured in a profile in Inc. They not only cover our work saving the Loans Program Office, but also this Substack. That’s all to say thank you, reader. I never take your time and attention for granted and remain grateful for both. You can read the profile here.

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Zeno Power, a cutting edge nuclear company, is making batteries powered with Strontium 90 for niche deployment cases: the moon, the arctic, and the seafloor. I got to pick Zeno cofounder and CEO Tyler Bernstein’s brain about their exciting new technology, why Zeno’s work is critical in our increasingly multipolar world, and the upsides of competing with China.

This was a fascinating discussion and I think you guys are going to love it.

Not long after we recorded this episode, Zeno added former NASA chief technologist AC Charania to its team as SVP of Space Business Development.

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Matt Loszak, the cofounder and CEO of Aalo Atomics, joined me to talk about Aalo’s progress rolling SMRs off the factory line. We get into Aalo’s test reactor at Idaho National Labs, a DOE path toward approving nuclear designs, how Trump’s nuclear executive orders have helped the industry, “zero power criticality,” and more.

Since we recorded this episode, Aalo has closed its $100 million Series B and has officially been selected by the DOE to test the Aalo-X reactor at INL by hitting zero power criticality. And then they broke ground on the project just a few days ago!

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There are so many exciting developments in the nuclear space, I can hardly keep up. And not just in the realm of reactors. Kurt Terrani, the CEO of Standard Nuclear, joined me to talk about his new company and its ambitions for TRISO fuel. For me, this was a major download on nuclear fuel types. Kurt’s a very knowledgable dude working with a highly experienced team.

Check out Standard Nuclear on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.

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Before you dive in, check out Part I and Part II of this series!

In the mid-17^th century, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote his magnum opus, Leviathan, in which he argues for a social contract between subjects to exit the violent state of nature by agreeing to give over the whole of their power to an omnipotent king. In the frontispiece of the book, an enormous king in a chainmail shirt gazes down on his lands. A discerning eye would notice that the chainmail shirt is actually a web of men; his body, and thus his authority, derive from the power his subjects vest in him. Insull, like Hobbes’s king, looked down upon a map of America; what appeared as a business suit would, on closer inspection, reveal itself as a weave of plant workers, customers, politicians, power lines, turbogenerators, coal mines, railroads, and regulatory statutes. His empire spread across the country, touching both coasts, and would grow north of 10 percent of America’s total electricity output. In scope and scale he was peerless. He stood as a Napoleon electric, industrial history on horseback, remaking American society in his image. And he did so with an astounding level of public consent.

None could deny electricity’s positive impact on everyday life, which grew more electrified by the day. Before electrification, women scalded themselves on hot irons heated in ovens, worked their hands to the bone sweeping and beating rugs, and hauled cold water into the home to be heated for laundry and bathing. Inventions like the electric iron, the electric vacuum, and electrified water heating systems shrank the drudgery and time these tasks required by orders of magnitude.

Electrification also raised hygienic standards by making it easier and more affordable for people to bathe or wash their clothes multiple times a week. For children, electric lighting improved educational opportunities. Electrified schools made reading easier, while at home, where gas systems proved dangerous to leave in a child’s control, electric lights made for a safer, easier-on-the-eyes option, further facilitating more reading. As Muncie, Indiana electrified, its library “loaned out eight times more books per inhabitant in 1925 than 1890.”

These changes were so palpable, utility ad copy from this period reads more like plain statements of fact than exaggerated PR. Insull’s Commonwealth Edison, for example, boasted, “For the modern household, Electricity is at once a servant, a source of heat and light and unfailing convenience that can be enjoyed every day in the year. In any house that is wired for Electric Light, these modern labor savers will be appreciated.” Electric appliances nearly sold themselves, though that didn’t stop the National Electric Light Association from pushing goods on every customer it could. Between 1915 and 1920, electrical appliance sales skyrocketed from $23 million to $83 million. In 1923, 75 to 85 percent of Chicago residents lit their homes with Insull’s currents. By 1926, 82.5 percent of Chicagoans used electric irons, 71 percent ran electric vacuums over their carpets, and over 30 percent of utility customers made breakfast with toasters and washed their clothes in electric washers.

Electrification also alleviated the sewage and horse-traffic congestion problems that had choked major cities like Chicago. Insull, with his commitment to electrified public transit, had been a prime mover in solving these issues; he consolidated and expanded the city’s transit system all the way out to Indiana. His domination meant increased scale, better management, cheaper fares, and overall rationalization. Electrified transit also helped solve the puzzle of spreading power load throughout the day. In 1893, dazzled Chicagoans rode an electric rail around the White City, cruised through the fair’s canals on battery-powered gondolas, and witnessed the wonders of a futuristic electrified home. It was a dream city that Insull had made real.

Electricity remodeled American home life, civic life, and work life in ways unimagined, inspiring a thrilling sense of vertigo as the nation scaled the snow-dusted peaks of technological improvement. Though technical knowledge of electricity was scarce among the general public, the people reckoned that this mysterious power source brought with it a bounty as common as it was novel. In a way, Henry Adams had been right in his reflections at the 1893 World’s Fair. While technological progress and massive economic development provoked great anxiety in some, by and large these changes were greeted with open arms. “Before long,” Adams had prophesied, “one began to pray to [the dynamo]; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.” He could sense “an absolute fiat in electricity” similar to religious faith.

Insull was one of the main beneficiaries of this new religious faith in applied science. If electricity meant a bountiful future of dizzying potential, Insull was the electricity industry’s face, its Leviathan, who received almost unmitigated control in exchange for the material fruits of progress.

But not everyone loved Insull or the utility industry, whatever their positive impact on the lives of Americans. A man doesn’t rise to Insull’s heights without making enemies, and his enemies spent the 1920s lying in wait. On one side stood the Wall Streeters such as J.P. Morgan, who resented that Insull managed to finance his entire enterprise without ever once coming to them for money. Thus his rise benefited them not at all, and they liked that about as much as they did his defiance. Every other industry titan genuflected before the kings of New York’s banking institutions, but not Insull. He had never forgotten what Morgan had done to Thomas Edison. On the other side stood a more radical band of Progressives, still clinging to their old faith in government intervention, who believed that the entire power industry should be a publicly owned utility. They saw the rise of Insull as auguring a new technological tyranny that threatened to capture the government. Their politics were out of season during the Roaring Twenties, but their moment would come soon enough.

Insull himself seemed blissfully unconcerned about his offstage enemies as they sharpened their knives. His wife Gladys had better instincts about such potentialities than he. An accomplished actress and autodidact in her own right, Gladys had become obsessed with the figure of Napoleon. After reading a series of biographies on his character and exploits, she noticed an uncanny similarity between the Corsican nobody who ascended to the throne of the French Empire and her ambitious husband. “Sam, you should learn about that man, and about what happened to him. If you don’t,” she repeatedly warned, “that’s what’s going to happen to you.” Insull brushed her warnings off as trouble brewed about him.

Meanwhile, Insull took his lessons from his war bond campaigns and applied them to the National Electric Light Association’s operations. In 1921, NELA’s national publicity-coordinating committee loosed a torrent of pro-utility propaganda: subsidizing teachers, reports, and school officials; putting on radio, church, club, school, and college programs hosted by utility spokesmen; ghost-writing news bulletins, editorials bylined by prominent citizens, pamphlets, textbooks, law reports, and circulars. NELA pursued every means of publicity, NELA’s publicity director remarked, “except skywriting.” Much of their material was disguised as objective evaluations from disinterested third parties. In Illinois, 75 percent of high schools used “industry-supported materials in their classrooms.”

In addition to the more anodyne, self-aggrandizing industry boosterism, NELA’s national campaign focused on discouraging the public from pursuing municipal or public power strategies (deemed “socialistic”) along with any strengthening of the regulatory regime. They believed their own efforts a great success in this regard. One NELA member noted, “We’d all be in a hell of a shape…Without this, I venture to say that State, municipal, and Government ownership would have been 100 percent ahead of what it is today.” When it came to NELA’s strategy, Insull presented a Janus face. On one side, he cautioned the national publicity committee against being too “one-sided” lest they be accused of propagandizing or molding public opinion. On the other side, Insull said, “The public is in no position to judge service and rates when it knows nothing about the multitude of details involved in furnishing service.”

None of these sometimes-multi-million dollar campaigns came cheap for customers. Utilities, both independently and through NELA, simply charged publicity expenses as operating costs, recouped by increasing customers’ bills. NELA’s managing director put it bluntly: “Don’t be afraid of the expense; the public pays the bills.” Such a credo cut against the cult of “service” upon which the industry had premised its good name; however, the public wasn’t aware that any of this was going on, and, moreover, rates stayed low. But where NELA made its worst misstep, and Insull with it, was in its ceaseless “customer ownership” campaigns that encouraged the acquisition of non-voting shares of utility stock (also known as “preferred stock”). Insull and his colleagues in the industry charged customers for propaganda that encouraged them to invest in the utility system—essentially, taking their money twice over.

To Insull, preferred stock served several purposes simultaneously. The country wanted more electrification, and everyone knew the utility industry was growing at a breakneck pace. Offering non-voting shares to customers let the public get in on the action, and the stock was both marketed and perceived as a kind of wealth redistribution through ownership. Customer ownership had a rhetorical genius to it. This tack catered to American cultural preferences for individual over public ownership and wedded well to the stock-crazed zeitgeist of the Jazz Age.

All of Insull’s stocks were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and everyone from blue-collar factory workers to big Chicago bankers saw Insull as an infallible genius with a Midas touch for business. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. “If we issued a piece of brown paper with a signature on it, we could raise all the money we wanted to,” Insull said, looking back on the Twenties. He grew rich along with his stock-owners, however mean their station, and it was this aspect that built a political wall around utilities, protecting them from any attacks. Insull wasn’t a greedy fat cat, many thought, because he was offering the little guy a way to get ahead. And because so many people from so many walks of life owned utility stock, they looked askance at political attempts to interfere with their investments. Would-be “hostile voters” blossomed into “utility stakeholders.” These two factors sufficed for Insull to insist that customer ownership was vital to the industry’s long-term success.

But common stock’s most vital function for Insull, and for the industry at large, solved a major difficulty in the utility industry’s growth. By the 1920s, the utility industry was no longer a local game. As power lines attempted to cross into different states to secure greater efficiency and economies of scale, it became increasingly difficult for legal teams and engineers to navigate the patchwork of legal and technical variables between states. This also posed a problem for investors. Though state regulation had de-risked utility investment to a large degree, cautious bankers hesitated to loan out money to regional system expansion projects liable to run into confusing regulatory challenges. Various government planning strategies meant to resolve these problems failed. Insull’s solution, the public utility holding company, elegantly weaved in between these obstacles and created a path forward for the industry.

A public utility holding company was a financial construct never before seen in America. Technically, it neither produced electricity nor served customers; “it controlled operating utilities that played that role,” yet there was “no clear threshold of the proportion of a company’s voting stock required for control or influence.” Thus, with less than $30 million invested, Insull could control over half a billion dollars in assets as well as most of the voting power. With a holding company, a utility could consolidate smaller, regional power and light companies under its control, which allowed holding companies to expand while skirting state regulation. For instance, a utility holding company headquartered in Illinois could own and operate a power and light company in Michigan, remaining answerable only to the Illinois state regulator. Holding companies sat at the top of pyramidal ownership structures—they were made from and controlled smaller companies. Holding companies thrived on preferred stock because it allowed utility companies to source capital and stabilize investments without having to respond to the wants and desires of preferred stock owners; their shares were non-voting.

The holding company strategy seemed to please everyone at once: utilities could grow without interference from stockowners or regulators; everyday people could get a financial leg up through wise investments in what were seen as stable companies with limitless potential; Insull himself could secure more capital without having to make a pilgrimage to New York. Predictably, common stock drove a second boom in the expansion of Insull’s domain. By the mid-1920s, Insull’s Middle West Utilities doubled in both size and sales, spreading its system into a third of the United States. In 1922, Commonwealth Edison was worth around $119 a share, but by 1929, the share price had leapt to $450. By mid-decade, utility bonds had grown into a billion-dollar-a-year-corner of the market. Insull could do no wrong, or so it appeared.

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On today’s episode, I spoke with Scott Lathrop, the Founder and Chief Executive Director of Native Nuclear. Like me, Scott sees nuclear power as a multi-generational infrastructure investment that serves as a sheet anchor for healthy communities and healthy economies. But he brings a distinctly native perspective to nuclear that subverts stereotypes, just like the educational work his organization is doing in tribal energy politics. I learned a lot from Scott during this interview and I know you guys are going to enjoy it!

Check out Native Nuclear on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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Click here to read Part I of this series.

Chicago wasn’t enough for Insull. With his wingspan too broad and his ambition too large, he began to pressure his entire industry to adopt his perspective on the nature of the utility business. Monopoly wasn’t just right for him; it was right for all of them. If they did as he said, they could grow their territories beyond neighborhoods and cities.

To the members of the National Electric Light Association (the major trade group at the time), Insull argued that utilities were “natural monopolies,” meaning the “best service at the lowest possible price can only be obtained […] by exclusive control of a given territory being placed in the hands of one undertaking.” Didn’t his success in Chicago prove it? He’d gotten rid of all that competition (and the waste and redundancy that came with it) and delivered low rates to even more people. Moreover, monopoly status would make it easier for them to get money from investors, who kept a tight grip on their money whenever they surveyed the chaotic, competitive world of electric power. It was a new industry; new meant risky; risky meant high borrowing costs for utilities.

Yet there was a curious twist in his argument: in order for “natural monopolies” to exist, the government had to formally recognize them as such and enshrine their status in law, which meant welcoming regulation with open arms. Insull’s vision of such a law would involve “a single operator be[ing] granted an exclusive franchise to provide electricity prices fixed by state commissions based on ‘cost plus reasonable profit.’” Competition would cease, customers would see their bills drop, and utility stocks and bonds would become enticing, unleashing a torrent of cheaper capital from banks. In exchange, utilities would bow to state-level regulatory commissions. At first, his peers scoffed. Welcoming regulation not only looked like bad business; it sounded downright un-American.

The current of the times flowed in Insull’s direction, however. At the turn of the century, a new political camp had emerged. The Progressive movement, under the imprimatur of which the contemporary activist still flies, stepped onto the scene. This band of elitist technocrats brought with them new and controversial assumptions about the nature of American politics. They lionized Abraham Lincoln, not as the Great Emancipator and defender of America’s founding principles, but as the founder of a centralized (white) nation-state. The Union Army’s victory, which relied on an increasingly centralized federal government, had disproven the Founding Fathers’ belief in the efficacy of limited government. Through scientific management and bureaucracy, a rational state could be born, one more able to handle the novel challenges of industrialization and urbanization. A combination of German philosophy, Social Darwinism, and faith in science welded together to form their worldview.

Progressives held many conflicting commitments. They supported such putatively egalitarian measures as income taxes, welfare, women’s suffrage, and the direct election of senators. At the same time, they harbored an hierarchical worldview marked with virulently racist ideas about eugenics. This anti-democratic streak also manifested in an almost religious faith in top-down scientific management and support for the prohibition of alcohol. On the whole, Progressives saw themselves as elite shepherds tasked with herding society through the harsh wilderness of laissez-faire capitalism and into the Edenic pasture of expert management and rational planning. Confronted with the new corporate behemoths of the industrial era, Progressives hoped the state could serve as a bulwark against the new rising challenge of unbridled corporate power that harvested private gain for the public good through government intervention.

“The aggrandizement of corporate and individual wealth,” wrote Progressive intellectual and co-founder of The New Republic, Herbert Croly, required “the regulation of commerce, the organization of labor, and the increasing control over property in the public interest” preferably by the government. Everyday people were not up to this task because the “average American individual” was “morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”

Progressive commitments to eliminating inefficiencies, “rationalizing” politics, and bolstering the government’s strength fit well with Insull’s vision of utilities as a natural, regulated monopoly. Especially because reducing the “waste” of competition complemented Progressives’ porto-environmentalist concerns about conserving natural resources. Insull worked with Progressive stalwart and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to publish a three-volume report on the utility industry and its regulatory framework. This 1907 report, largely funded by the utility industry, vindicated Insull’s regulated monopoly vision. Within months of its publication, it had inspired legislation that became law in Wisconsin and New York, establishing regulators in both states. Twenty-five other states followed suit, establishing their own utility commissions.

Once regulated, utilities were obligated to serve all within their fiefs without discrimination. This meant a tidal wave of new customers for kilowatts. To supply their demand, utilities could now avail themselves of the cheap capital needed to build newer, bigger power plants at “just and reasonable” rates that covered both operating costs and a return on their invested capital. Eminent domain and the legal eradication of competition were their rewards. Provided a utility could justify its asset purchases, it could recoup costs and turn a profit on them. In short, utilities got paid more to spend more.

But what did “just and reasonable” mean in practice? Who decided what constituted a fair return on fair value? The regulators who helmed the state power commissions, ostensibly. But discharging their regulatory duty proved no mean feat—discerning the “proper” rates often fell beyond the grasp of many state regulators because utility investments were so novel and complex. Two related problems arose: utilities’ well-heeled, savvy lawyers could undermine any state commission’s claims regarding the “unjustness” or “unfairness” of utilities' investments or rates; and, as utilities grew by expanding their territories beyond state borders, they escaped any one state’s full regulation. Regulatory capture and evasion became standard features of the new regime.

Regardless, state regulation did deliver the promised economies of scale, birthing a political-regulatory framework that would endure for nearly a century. Men like Insull claimed their crowns as they watched their monopoly kingdoms expand and their generation grow while competition faded. Eventually, nearly every single state had its own utility commission. After state-regulated monopolies became the norm, the industry consolidated rapidly: the number of privately owned utilities dropped by half, while the average generation owned by the surviving utilities nearly sextupled. The entire industry now reflected Insull’s vision.

No doubt, Insull’s star was rising, though his profile remained confined to the Midwestern region in which he headquartered his business. The outbreak of the Great War, however, would change all of that, vaulting him onto the national stage. Thanks to wartime production and wartime shortages, Insull would snatch up industrial customers impossible to sell power to before, exploding consumption of his product. And it was through his participation in the war effort that he learned the advertising and public relations skills that would help him cement his empire—and then raze it to rubble.

A fraught suture-work of alliances held Europe together in its imperial era. The logic of the continent’s international relations sought détente through these alliances: all knew a conflict between any of the major powers could foment into a global conflagration, the potential for which served as its own deterrent. Yet the imperial era had also inspired widespread nationalist movements within smaller countries that sought to regain their sovereignty and to retain their ethnic identities which the homogenizing pressure of empire now threatened. These nationalist movements hazarded the tense peace Europe had delicately maintained, then shattered it.

In June of 1914, a young member of a Serbian ultranationalist group assassinated the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg. A diplomatic crisis spilled over into the next month and eventually crested into war. As their western brethren fixed their bayonets, many Americans looked on in horror and aversion—why should they join Europe’s fight? Despite initial reluctance, the magnetic pull of Western conflict drew hundreds of thousands of American troops across the Atlantic and into the trenches.

Insull’s reputation positioned him to assume greater civic leadership when American entered the war in 1917. Upon America’s declaration of war, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden asked Insull to chair the state’s Council of Defense. President Woodrow Wilson envisioned each state forming a National Council of Defense dedicated to spying on German-Americans. Insull assumed the role in Illinois, but had no interest in violating the civil liberties of a large portion of his customer base. Since the mid-19^th century, Chicago, and the Midwest more generally, had been a bastion of German immigrants. Instead of targeting Germans in particular, Insell gathered together business and civic leaders to propagandize the war through public relations and the sale of Liberty bonds. His boosterism proved successful. Insull whipped up a bloodthirsty furor for war by creating one of the most organized, ruthless, and precise PR campaigns Americans had ever witnessed.

By the end of 1917, Insull had instantiated an hourly schedule of pro-war public gatherings in churches, public buildings, schools, and households in every single community across the state of Illinois to encourage the “appreciation of the ideals of true patriotism and love of country” and “proper war spirit.” His efforts even birthed a national agency called the “Four-Minute Men,” who turned out a slate of speakers to preach a four-minute pro-war gospel to theater audiences. This experiment soon gained national uptake once Insull’s compatriots learned of its success in Chicago, where Insull’s 2,000 speakers addressed 700,000 people a week. By war’s end, the national ranks of the Four-Minute Men had swelled to 75,000. Insull became America’s propagandist-in-chief.

On the material side, the tumult of war delivered to Insull a prize he had coveted for decades: factories. Heavy industry was a power-hungry business, a coal-hungry business. But factories jealously guarded their private power plants, not just because the plants were affordable, but because owning a private plant conferred greater control. Why surrender to an outside force that could affect the bottom line with unfavorable electricity rates, especially when coal was so cheap? But if the price of coal climbed to a steep enough peak, then heavy industry’s private power plants would be rendered uneconomical, since they were small and less efficient than those of the utility industry. Again, electricity was a game of scale.

During WWI, American manufacturing took off as US exports to Europe tripled. With the breakneck pace of production, coal prices tripled. The increasing price of coal made economies of scale undeniable. By 1918, Commonwealth Edison’s power plants could crank out a kilowatt-hour per every 2.5 pounds of coal, while the small private plants housed in factories needed about 9 pounds of coal to produce the same. In the face of skyrocketing demand and the tightness of supply, engineers, the press, and ultimately the American government adopted Insull’s view: factories had to forego their private plants and buy electricity from utilities. To pressure factories to make the switch, the federal government intervened in the market and prioritized allocating coal to utilities, delivering industrial customers directly into the hands of Insull.

The war ended in 1918, with Insull as one of its major victors. After the armistice, the Army, engineers, and industry insiders ratified the new consensus: electricity was best procured from vast, interconnected utilities. Insull explained to San Franciscans in 1918 that the “lightless nights” and “heatless days” of the war years had taught Americans that vertically integrated monopolies were an economic necessity. Insull was now the national face of the most revolutionary industry Americans had witnessed since the railroad.

Cultural and political shifts also moved in Insull’s favor as America put the war years behind them and entered the Roaring Twenties. Progressives, Insull’s allies in the push for regulation, received a huge blow to their credibility and the cause of government intervention, which many associated with the war effort. Then, the Soviet Revolution sparked a Red Scare in 1919, which provoked a wave of hostility to bureaucracy of all kinds, at the same time that post-war disillusionment was turning some reformers away from their old cause. The call for limited government grew louder, as did a personal animus toward the federal government when Prohibition, an elite project pursued by a small band of moral crusaders, served as many citizens’ first individual engagement with federal power. Prohibition caused a ripple effect that sharpened Americans’ suspicion of the government’s intentions. Better to distrust government, Americans reasoned, and place faith back in private hands.

Capitalizing on this swing in their favor, private enterprise boosted its public approval through an emphasis on “service.” Americans began to see these industries as benevolent providers of wealth. As President Calvin Coolidge put it, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there, worships there.” The people were inclined to agree. The country roared into the prosperity of the 1920s—a glamorous decade of jazz, flapper dresses, champagne, and stock market fever.

Insull’s war-won mastery of PR and advertising, his newly minted national profile, a booming market, and an ascendent public trust in private industry blew powerful gales that would send him sailing into terra incognita. He was sixty-three by war’s end and he still had new domains to conquer.

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Former navy nuke Ari Brown joined me to talk about his experience in the service. For me, his story offers profound insight into what it takes to institutionalize excellence.

Then we talk about his new company, Bellwether LLC, and how Ari is using his programming background and acoustic analysis skills to figure out how to fix machines in an innovative way.

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The great-souled man, who seeks a place worthy of his superiority, is not only generally unwelcome but also justly unwelcome and justly gotten rid of, at least according to a certain political justice.

—Robert Faulkner

Longtime subscribers know that I’ve been warning about American grid fragility for years. We’re short on spare capacity and long on increasing demand: a recipe for disaster. As we navigate these challenging waters, I think we should reflect on how the grid got built, who built it, and how they did it.

One man stands above all the others in our national annals—Samuel Insull. If you haven’t heard of him, don’t worry. This is the first in a several part series dedicated to telling the story of his achievements. At the end of the series, I’ll provide a bibliography of all the research material I used.

I’d like to thank the staff at the Chicago History Museum’s Abakanowicz Research Center who helped me find rare material published by Insull. I would also like to thank Daniel Lund, the Curator of Collections at the Elmhurst History Museum, who allowed me to see the historical documents concerning my home town’s experience with early electrification. Robert Bryce as well as Madi and Griffin Hilly provided invaluable feedback on earlier, more laborious drafts of this series. This series would be greatly impoverished without their insight. John Goodson, Canada Mike, and the Electricity Degenerates (you know who you are) offered crucial moral support during the laborious research process. I am also indebted to the editorial assistance of both my colleague at Foundation for American Innovation, Robert Bellafiore, and my patient and lovely wife.

What was Samuel Insull thinking? He was just 21 years old, and yet here he was explaining to his family and friends that he was about to move from England to America with no job lined up. But he had seen the future: electricity. Most of the world still lit the night only by fire—wood, lumps of coal, peat, whale oil. Electric power was mostly a luxury product with few uses, and yet Insull knew that it could change everything about humanity's future. And he knew that in order to lead that future, he had to work for Thomas Edison.

Insull had gotten his start working for the man at his London telephone company. Insull spent his days memorizing the contracts of every single one of Edison’s business contracts and his off hours hounding engineers to understand the technical in and outs of electricity. As a reward for his efforts, Insull was offered the opportunity to become Mr. Edison’s secretary. The details of such a position were not forthcoming—he’d have to move to America to discover what lay in store. With the unshakeable confidence in himself, appetite for risk, and feverish ambition that would carry him from office boy to the emperor of the America power system, Insull shrugged off his family’s warnings. In February of 1881, he boarded a ship bound for New York.

Upon stepping onto the pier in New York, Insull walked straight to Edison’s office. When they met, Insull and Edison discovered that they couldn’t understand what the other was saying. Edison's Ohio twang puzzled Insull; Insull's cockney brogue baffled Edison. Once they surmounted the “language barrier,” Edison explained that he needed Insull's help with something big: he wanted to ditch his European telephone businesses and commit himself in full to electric light, but he didn’t know how to go about it. He didn’t even know how his European businesses were structured. So Insull commenced to walk Edison through the exact nature of his European contracts in detail from memory into the wee hours of the morning. By the end of their first hours together—Insull's first hours in America—he had won his hero's confidence. Edison could now ditch his European interests and home in on a new American task: conquering darkness. After a few hours of sleep, Insull woke up to begin his "next day" of work, shepherding America into the Electric Age.

Over the course of the 1880s, Insull rose through the ranks at Edison General Electric. As the one man who could keep up with Edison’s grueling work pace, Insull established himself as the wizard’s perfect business partner. Their skills complemented each other: Insull could masterfully organize the businesses that spooled out of Edison’s quest to found the kingdom of electricity. Insull performed so well, he was soon tasked with running Edison’s utility business, where he traveled the country selling municipalities on the total Edison light system—power plants, transmission lines, and lamps. By the end of the decade, he had risen to the role of chief financial advisor and gained Edison’s power of attorney.

But even with Insull’s help, Edison's dream of an electrified America was not to be achieved by his own hand. His ego locked him out of his own destiny. By the end of the 1880s, Edison’s business model was failing. His major advance in electric power had been the direct current system. In such a system, a power generator pushed electrons along an expensive copper wire toward their destination. But the farther they traveled, the weaker they got, in a phenomenon called “line loss.” Because the uniform voltage of the power fatigued against resistance from the copper wire, if Edison wanted to serve more customers, he had to build more power plants and string up more copper wire. Even worse, he had to over-build to match supply and demand. If a lamp needed 80 volts of power, then the power plants had to crank out 90 volts of power to account for line loss. This made scaling up the power system more expensive for both Edison and his customers because it confined each power plant’s service area to a one-mile radius. Unfortunately for Edison, a man named George Westinghouse would disrupt the inventor’s entire business model.

Unlike Edison, Westinghouse recognized the economic shortcoming of direct current. He solved the problem by putting alternating current—a more powerful, though up until then, more dangerous form of electricity. Westinghouse’s company had developed something called a transformer, which allowed the voltage of electricity to be “stepped up” or stepped down.” In other words, in order to deliver power to that 80 volt lamp, Westinghouse could use a transformer to increase the voltage of power, thus moving it over a long stretch of line with less line loss, and then decrease that voltage to the exact amount the lamp needed. Using transformers to tame and manipulate alternating current allowed Westinghouse to serve more customers per power line and power plant over a larger geography. This meant capital costs for an AC system were lower; for Edison’s DC systems, the opposite was true.

And yet Edison clung to his DC system out of a stubborn amalgam of ego and spite. Who were these upstarts to challenge his dominion over the industry he had brought forth by the sweat of his brow? But the economics and the physics proved inexorable. DC was vastly inferior to AC; Edison’s empire slipped from his fingers. Insull didn’t share his master’s recalcitrance. He respected Westinghouse and, in hindsight, viewed the whole rivalry as “very ridiculous.”

Like Insull, the banking magnate J.P. Morgan, one of Edison's main financiers, saw clearly what Edison could not: Edison’s empire needed to be saved from its founder. In 1892, Morgan consolidated Edison General Electric with one of its competitors, Thomson-Houston, and renamed the company General Electric, stripping the great inventor’s name from the company he had founded. The birth of GE sounded the death knell of Edison’s role in the electricity industry.

Insull recognized that Edison’s untenable stance on AC had made his job of financing the company impossible, but to remove Edison’s name galled him; Morgan’s ruthlessness forever soured Insull on the New York banking set. In the aftermath, Insull found himself in a high-paying VP spot at GE, but with no route to the Olympian heights he sought. He had gotten a taste of greatness with Edison and his appetite for more had grown ravenous. Playing second fiddle at GE held no interest for him. Moreover, he didn't want to deal with any New York bankers like Morgan. Out of a sense of duty, he hung on at GE for a year to ease the transition, all the while contemplating his next move.

Opportunity blew in from the Windy City. Chicago Edison was putting feelers out for a new president and wanted to know if Insull was interested. At the time, Chicago was growing into one of America's largest cities. By virtue of its status as the “gateway to the West” through railroad connections and its burgeoning commodities market, Chicago had turned into one enormous boomtown. Chicago Edison needed an ambitious president to help the utility keep up with its host city. Was Insull interested? On the one hand, to take the position would mean a substantial pay cut and an equal reduction in prestige. On the other hand, hidden in this demotion lay an opportunity only Insull had eyes keen enough to see.

In his time as Edison’s second in command, Insull had become convinced that the utility business, not manufacturing, was the electricity sector's future. Sure, demand for power stations, electric traction, lightbulbs and all the rest would grow, but that also spelled vast growth in the demand for power itself. Just as he had risked it all to join Edison in America, Insull bet on himself as the man who would shape the world to come. He accepted the leadership position and became the firm’s president in July of 1892, a few months after GE officially incorporated in New York. It required a 66 percent pay cut, but Insull was “not looking to the amount of [his] remuneration” as he put it. He was looking at the size of the opportunity.

To celebrate his departure to the Midwest, Insull threw a dinner party at swank restaurant in New York. All the luminaries of the industry, including the leadership of GE, dined, drank, chattered, and joked until Insull stood up to speak and brought a hush to the room. Toasting himself, he forecasted that “[e]ventually Chicago Edison will probably equal or exceed the investment of the General Electric Company.” The prediction was hubristic, if not ridiculous: General Electric owned a large slice of the manufacturing oligopoly pie; Chicago Edison was a local utility sunk into a polluted American backwater. Yet no one dared laugh at Insull’s moxie, because they recognized the look in his eye when he spoke. Time would reveal that Insull belonged not to his guests' future, but they to his. He awoke the next morning and headed West, where he would pluck Edison’s crown from the gutter and place it upon his own head. Insull was thirty-two.

The year after Insull arrived, Chicago hosted the 1893 World’s Fair. Lit entirely by George Westinghouse, it was there that Americans bore witness to the glories that the electric dynamo brought to the world. Fairgoers could putter around in electric gondolas or ride the towering electric-power Ferris Wheel and survey all of Chicago, glittering in the night like a diamond. The White City, as the fairgrounds were called, stood on two square miles and contained 10 percent of the nation’s artificial light at the time. While Paris’s World’s Fair in 1889 had used 1,150 arc lights, 10,000 incandescent lamps, and generated a total of 3,000 horsepower, Chicago’s boasted 10 times more light and horsepower. The White City showed the country, which still lived in an agrarian mode, what an industrialized, urban future held for them—a future as incredible as it was near.

Henry Adams, grandson to former president John Quincy Adams, and great-grandson to founding father John Adams, ambled around the White City, dizzied with awe. As he made his way through the fair grounds, he found himself at the Electricity Building. He marveled at the whirring dynamos—what we now call power generators—within. Over the next few weeks, Adams would return again and again to these mechanical beasts of burden which set the White City aglow. What about these industrial wonders transfixed him? The dynamo represented an “abyssal fracture for a historian’s objects.” A new world was being born—rationalistic, capitalistic, mechanistic—and with it, a new, and thus unknown, America. “Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving,” wrote Adams. Insull seemed like one of the few men who truly knew.

Yet despite all this fanfare, not many in the power industry had high hopes for their future in the city. After the fair, a nation-wide economic depression settled in. On top of that, no one in the industry had yet discovered how to make decent money off electric power. Rate-making for customers was done by guesswork and approximation. With their capital costs high, margins slim, and opportunities thinning, a defeatist attitude overtook the young electricity business. With about 5,000 existing power customers, no one believed the ceiling for electric power users in Chicago sat higher than roughly 25,000. No one, that is, except Insull. He vowed to serve the whole city, whose growing population would add over a million residents by 1910.

The first hurdle to clear was cost. How could Insull take electricity—something only big city governments or the wealthy elite could afford—and turn it into something for everyday people? To do that, Insull would have to drive the price of power down below that of gas. Insull figured that to make power cheap, he had to make it abundant. And so he started to commission larger and larger power plants. Years before Henry Ford (who got his start working in an Edison utility) coined the phrase “mass production,” Insull called this approach the “massing of production,” driving down rates with bigger plants and more power output. To mass this production, Insull committed Chicago Edison to building the largest power plants in the world.

Insull pushed the envelope, routinely goading the engineers at General Electric to build power plants sometimes four times as large as any in existence. The construction of these reciprocating engines became too burdensome, with parts so large they could barely be moved let alone installed, and, once in operation, became so loud, smoky, and seismic in their motions that neighbors complained. Moreover, their efficiency topped once they grew to about 5,000 kilowatts of power output. The solution to this problem had been developed by British inventor Charles Parsons in 1884, when he created the turbine engine. While the reciprocating engine relied on cyclical motion (the up-and-down firing of a piston), Parsons’s turbine piped in high-pressure steam to spin a bladed shaft like a pinwheel, which was connected to a generator. This doubled the efficiency of power plants’ heat and motion to electricity conversion.

In 1901, on a European vacation, Insull discovered Parsons’s turbines and returned to Chicago envious. He wanted those turbines for himself, only larger, and began to pressure General Electric to build the biggest turbine in the world. General Electric, still new to turbine technology, doubted that it could fashion a regular-sized turbine, let alone one as big as Insull demanded. Insull wore them down. The company relented, on one condition: if GE was going to take all the manufacturing risk for this experimental 5,000 kW turbine, then Insull had to take on all the operating risks. We’ll build it, they said, but you deal with the consequences. At once, Insull commissioned Frederick Sargent, Chicago Edison’s consulting engineer, to design the largest power station America had ever seen to house the turbine. Insull felt that time was of the essence. “The opportunity to get this large power business was right at my threshold,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and I knew that unless I built the most economical power station possible, that opportunity would be lost.”

Chicago Edison built Sargent’s power station at Fisk Street in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Once GE installed the 5,000 kW turbine (the largest generator GE had built up to that point was 600 kW) in 1903, Sargent hesitated before flipping the switch. He turned to Insull and asked him to quit the building. The engineer worried that the whole thing might explode when he flipped the switch.

Insull resolved to stay. “If you are to be blown up, I would prefer to be blown up with you as, if the turbine should fail, I should be blown up anyway,” he told Sargent. Insull had bet it all on this technology; there was no backing out now.

The Fisk turbine jolted awake—and then purred. Success. Insull ordered two more units just like it immediately, then another in 1905, and then had them all replaced in 1911 with even larger 12,000 kW units. Insull’s effort at Fisk Street would morph into an official strategy that would eventually be dubbed “grow-and-build”: fattening demand through customer diversity and territorial expansion, which then secured more profits to be reinvested in larger power generators, which then allowed for huge rate cuts, which then circled back around to bring previously priced out customers into the fold—rinse, repeat. The “grow-and-build” method would go on to govern the entire utility industry's entire business model up until the 1970s.

But it was no use to provide all of this cheap, efficient power if Insull wasn’t getting paid for it. All those hulking power plants cost a lot of money. Unfortunately, Insull had no way to charge people for exactly the amount of power they used. The imprecision meant that his power plants ran at one sixth of their full potential; all that physical capital other idled without making money. Temperamentally, Insull loathed operating on such shaky premises. He craved precision and control—financially and emotionally.

The solution finally came to him on another vacation to Brighton Beach back in England. Strolling the boardwalk, Insull smiled to see the storefronts lit with electric lights, which had won even such hard customers as modest shops. How could these shops afford it? Then a dial housed in a glass shell caught his eye; it ticked away, precisely logging power usage. It was the world’s first power usage meter, like the kind that stick out on the sides of homes and apartment buildings today. Insull promptly tracked down the man who invented these newfangled meters and inked a licensing deal with Chicago Edison. Now he could create different rates for different customers: large users received discounts, while small users paid more—and each paid only for the power they used. A greater diversity of customers would mean a greater diversity of load patterns, because not all customers peaked their power consumption at the same time. Spreading out peak usage across the day disincentivized overbuilding power systems, while maximizing cash flow. Power plants would no longer sit idle, bleeding cash.

With hulking power plants and low, accurate rates, Insull was well on his way to dominating the power business in Chicago. To fully capture the city, he needed a monopoly, which he pursued by buying out his competition and screwing crooked Chicago politicians out of their local franchise rights. But monopoly didn't attract Insull because of his soul's longing for dominion, though that certainly spurred him on. It also made good business sense and, he argued, served customers better. If one larger power plant was more efficient than two smaller ones, then it stood to reason that one company owning the largest power plants possible would result in greater efficiency and lower rates than smaller plants owned by various companies vying for market share. After all, redundant infrastructure led to waste and mismanagement. Moreover, the physics of electric power favored scale; scale favored consolidation; consolidation favored monopoly; monopoly favored non-competition; non-competition favored investment; investment favored bigger power plants, which unlocked yet greater economies of scale. Insull saw this truth before any of his competitors. In pursuing it, he became the kingpin of the Chicago power business.

But this was just the beginning of his dominion. With Chicago as his home base, Insull would grow his fiefdom until it touched both coasts, remaking America in the process.

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For this episode, Joe Klecha, the Chief Nuclear Officer at The Nuclear Company, joined me to talk about his background as a navy nuke, his time working on the Vogtle build, and what it takes to pull off megaprojects. Then we discuss how TNC’s recent deal with Palantir is going to unleash fleets of new nuclear power plants.

I learned so much from this episode—Joe is a patriot, a leader, and a wealth of knowledge. I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did.

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In April, blackouts darkened Spain. Trains stopped, traffic lights blinked off, planes idled on runways. The Spanish government declared a national emergency.

I covered these events in a piece for Compact, which was then reprinted under a different title in .

And my diagnosis was wrong — or, half-wrong.

This was my (as I admitted at the time) educated guess about what caused the blackouts:

Simply put, the power grid is like a giant game of tug of war. On one side, there’s demand, and on the other there’s supply. Keeping the lights on involves making sure the rope between supply and demand remains taut. This tautness is called inertia.

Healthy inertia means healthy grid frequency, which in Europe means 50 Hertz (in the United States it’s 60 Hertz). The Portuguese grid operator claims that something along one of its power lines disrupted the even flow of power between generators on its grid, which messed with the frequency, which likely tripped off more wind and solar, which slackened the rope, which probably caused the blackouts.

I guessed that a lack of firm, dispatchable resources on Spain’s grid had created inertial precarity. As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas reported at the time, thermal generation in Spain was at a troubling low just before the blackouts.

As I originally said, we wouldn’t know until a real post-mortem had been conducted and then released.

That report is now about to come out and early coverage indicates that my guess was wrong:

It wasn’t inertia; it was voltage.

Don’t take it from me — take it from Spain’s Minister of Energy, Sara Aagesen: “The grid didn’t have enough capacity to control voltage dynamically [with thermal power stations].”

In other words, there was, as Aagesen confirmed, a surge in voltage that the grid could not handle.

More firm dispatchable power, or more inverters to help manage renewables, were needed to avert this catastrophe. Inverters flip direct current power into alternating current power, which allows generation from variable renewables to move around on the grid while stabilizing power flow. So-called “grid-forming inverters” enable “solar and other inverter-based energy sources to restart the grid independently.”

According to Xiao Wang,1 an engineer who’s been delving into what went wrong during the Spanish blackouts, told me that this failure is “more unforgivable because inverters actually can be pretty good at handling those issues.”

In essence, the technology exists to avoid these issues and the buck stops with those who, for whatever reason, did not deploy them in order to avoid this kind of disaster.

The Spanish government also blames “conventional power plants, such as nuclear and gas-fired plants,” because they “failed to help maintain an appropriate voltage level in the power system that day.”

But Wang rejects the idea that thermal generation is to blame. In a post on Blueksy, he writes, “Poor renewable management is inclusive of mistakes in dispatching the necessary amount of thermals for all the reactive services you need since they carry all of it.”

Here’s the TL;DR:

1. I was wrong about what caused the blackouts—it wasn’t inertia issues, but voltage issues.

2. I was right that the blackouts bespoke poor management of renewable energy and a reckless renewable energy policy.

And I stand by my original conclusion:

Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable. If the grid slides into mismanagement, the results hurt everyone. As one energy executive put it to me: “The grid is a synchronous system with no graceful failure mode.” It is the industrial commons of modern society.

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