Harnessing Corporate Power for Clean Energy, with Rich Powell

What if the best chance we have at creating a green energy future rests in the hands of the free markets?  Rich Powell is the CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), a group that consists of some of the largest buyers of electricity in the U.S. and across the globe. By leveraging the collective buying power of its members, CEBA is  creating low-cost, reliable, carbon emissions-free systems, and reshaping energy markets globally.  Powell joins host Inder Singh to discuss how capitalism can be wielded to fuel environmental progress, AI’s influence and impact on the acceleration of clean energy solutions, and the innovative levers CEBA is pulling to shift markets towards a more sustainable future.  The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. This interview was recorded in May 2025.   Episode Quotes: Capitalism lifts people from poverty and drives the path to a cleaner world 03:01: I am a capitalist and a proud capitalist. I don't think I have to spend a lot of time defending capitalism's record on lifting people out of poverty and making economies that are wealthy enough to start to really worry about the second-order problems of environmental quality and then the third-order problems. I've actually spent, through some of my previous experiences, a fair amount of time in post-Soviet situations, and I have seen the utter environmental devastation that centrally planned economies can wreak on their environments and on their populations. So, I've seen real environmental injustice in those places. And so, I do think that capitalism is the force that it has and continues to lift people around the world out of poverty. And that's going to enable us to afford the things we'll need to do to go all the rest of the way, to achieve a global economy that's ultimately clean. How corporate demand is driving clean energy innovation 38:15: You've got a situation now where electricity demand growth is being driven by a number of companies that are really interested in doing it with low-carbon or carbon-free power, that have strong commitments in that regard, and that have, obviously, for everything we just discussed, very large balance sheets and a willingness to kind of take on, in many cases, higher technology risk in supplying those operations than maybe your average, consumer-serving utility would be. And so, that's driving some really cool innovation in this space. From three companies to a nationwide clean energy movement 26:11: This is kind of wild to think, so only 13 years ago, only three companies had voluntarily transacted renewable electricity in the United States, and that was Walmart and Google, and General Motors…[27:05] And going from those three companies today, we've had 235 companies in the U.S. that have transacted some volume in some way of clean electricity. And we've gone from a couple dozen megawatts to now 100 gigawatts. So, that's like three orders of magnitude up from those early purchases, which is really exciting… [10:15]: And if you take that 100 gigawatts, so like what we've contracted for so far, and you were to compare that by capacity to U.S. states, we're the largest state. California, for example, that has a commitment to going 100% clean is a smaller total capacity than that figure. It's like we've created another state that's moving faster than the rest of the states and is actually growing. We're just getting started.   Show Links:  Clean Energy Buyers Association Enough Red Tape – We Need To Say Yes to Clean Energy | Rich Powell | TED Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.