Jigar Shah

Jigar Shah

Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
SunEdison

"I'm a fiscal conservative. I don't want to see a massive underpinning of renewable energy like in Europe. I not a big fan of the $150 billion Obama has put forward for venture-capital money for clean energy. There is already a vast amount of venture capital. The venture-capital funds have only put out 15% of the money they have. And I don't think, given the handicaps of the next President, that we should be adding another $150 billion to the deficit.

I do want government to lead by example. The next Administration could very easily implement energy efficiency, solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternatives for federal energy usage. The federal government is the country's largest energy user. So this alone would provide an extraordinary stimulus to the renewable industry and the country. My guess is that the incremental cost of doing this would be less than $5 billion, which would be more than paid for by increases in jobs and tax receipts. And when you add in the energy savings, the net cost to the federal government could be zero, it will save so much energy.

That's the No. 1 thing. The second thing is to encourage strongly that states piggyback on this effort. The third thing is to fully fund job training, and make sure that renewable energy is eligible for those job training grants. We will be hiring 5 million people in 'clean' jobs over the next eight years, and they will need tons of training. $125 million could do that in the stimulus bill.

We need job creation. I was with the chief economist of JPMorgan who said their own internal predictions were that employment would exceed 8%, a level not seen since the recession in the early 1980s. The beauty of solar is that people can do it with six months of training. And renewable energy technology on average generates five times more jobs per dollar spent than 20th century technology. And solar generates 10 times more jobs per dollar spent.

There are others pushing more government spending, but I think we do not need more government spending. We need to take the spending we are doing and make sure we are investing in 21st century technology and more job creation, so we will get more leverage out of the money we are spending."