Invest in Renewable Energy. Fight Climate Change. Mike Silvestrini of Energea

The hard part about conservation is you have to be successful for eternity for it to matter at all.

It only really matters if it works forever.

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Mike Silvestrini's life changed.

He joined up with the Peace Corps and spent time in Africa as a small enterprise development officer.

During his time in Africa, he observed the extreme need to protect precious ecosystems and wildlife.

He calls himself an enviro capitalist because he sees a need for big business, small business, you and me to invest in renewable energy around the world.

Mike Silvestrini welcome to the show.

Hey,

Catherine.

Thanks for having me.

You know, I think it started off, Catherine as a just a love affair with traveling and experiencing different cultures and hanging out with other travelers and, seeing different places, at a young age, it

And then those road trips became a multi-month adventures.

And then I moved to Colorado to do a snowboard season when I was 19 and then met an Australian girl there.

And then we wound up traveling around the world for some time, a couple of years.

Landed in Australia.

And it's sort of the, that sort of chain reaction of life events that occurred during your youth, during those, those 20s

was so impactful to me and I just wanted to keep it going and keep on exploring and keep seeing and learning.

And I tried to figure out ways that what types of lifestyles would allow me to professionalize my life as I grow and you know, want to eventually have a job and a family, but still

And that kind of forced me to think about international diplomacy, which is what I studied in grad school and led to basically starting the solar energy company because it was through my studies

Maybe we need to take a step back and look what are the current events in the world saying to us?

And we had the Nobel prize going to the scientific community who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that climate change was a significant concern for humanity.

We had two conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

and Iraq was certainly a, to no small degree related to fossil fuels.

And it just seemed that something needed to change in the way that we energize ourselves.

So I started off with this idea of traveling forever and somewhere along the way, discovered renewable energy as my life path.

And only now have I been able to circle back and connect the dots on those two, Energea where I'm able to travel and explore the world

and I do so in the capacity as an investment advisor for our clients who want to invest in renewable energy.

So I get the best of both worlds.

His philosophy on how he views the world is extraordinary.

He begins his Energea story with his schooling and how he uses his diplomacy background as an enviro capitalist in solar energy.

He is transitioning the planet forward in the investment and use of solar energy and other renewable energies worldwide.

A lot of schooling especially in grad school, in, what could be closely resembling a poly sci type of field of study, which is international relations.

I had a special concentration in African history and French.

So it's a lens that you're developing.

A lens through, which you can view the world

not exclusively as a white male born in Connecticut, but just as a member of history and a participant in a global society.

And I've always tried to get that lens, right.

And to balance my own views, which are obviously strong and cultural in myself.

But with, something closer to reality, which is a blended view and perspective of, of many different countries.

School helps you dive deep into that and write and read extensively on these cultures from a very academic perspective.

And it just accelerated my traveling experiences and there's nothing that can replace going there and eating the food and, touching the sand and like being part of

But, , you can certainly Also learn a lot from picking up a book and reading about the history of another country.

So I still, built my global framework from academics, but I complimented that with a lot of real life travel.

And I think those two things have made me a, a global businessperson and now I'm able to take those perspectives and apply them to an entrepreneurial journey

where for me, it was quite clear that renewable energy and wildlife conservation were going to be two industries that I wanted to be part of.

Two things that must thrive to have a longterm sustainable world and, and relationship with the world.

So, that became obvious to me because of those traveling and that synthesis of global perspectives.

On last week's episode, number 157, protecting and preserving wildlife in east Africa Mike shared his experience in Mali.

To continue the story here's a quick recap.

Republic du Mali.

It's a French speaking country.

Their main language is Bombora, but it was a French colony.

And it's an ancient culture.

It is an extremely poor country, but it is also one of the happiest places I've ever been, which was bizarre- what a juxtaposition of characteristics of a place simultaneously being the second or

, And just having a laughter based culture.

They have really strong communities and societies in Mali that I think was probably overlooked by whoever views it as just a scary poor place.

Mali does have farming, and I know that people in Africa are and this will bring us into climate change into Energia, your company.

People who live in these countries, their carbon footprint is so small yet they are reaping the unfortunate climate change

based on our decisions and our legislation in these Western world countries like United States.

Mali is suffering from desertification as the Sahara desert kind of extends its way southward into a region we call the Sahel, which is in-between

Uh, Even Mauritania, Senegal, Somalia, these countries are all along the strip we call the Sahel and there's increased pressure I don't know if I'm qualified to equate the increased desertification directly to climate

grow things sustainably and to harvest their natural resources sustainably and have themselves encouraged the acceleration of desertification, which has crippling effects on economy, which results in increased violence.

And um, it's been.

Uh, Shame to after returning from Mali to look back over the course of the last 15 years and watch it really descend into chaos where Islamification has extreme,

when I was last in Mali and to see that desertification increased poverty, you know, start to take its toll on, on the society.

So environment and the people who live there are inextricable forces and th that's kind of the message that I think is the most important takeaway from Mali is that,

Very profound words.

I think it was five, was with the committee, the, the oil and gas committee and bringing information to them

. And Mike, that was what, almost 15 years ago.

I don't know why it's taking so long.

Well, let's talk about you and Energia, and why you started this.

Well, I mean for, for one Catherine, I got some good news for you.

We would develop projects and sell the power produced from those projects to commercial and industrial customers, mostly big box retail customers like Walmart Target and Amazon who are our customers, as we would

We also did a number of landfill projects, which are some of my favorite projects we did in that company where we blanket landfills with solar panels to turn that real estate into a new use.

Colleges and universities, and even utilities were our customers and the reality is is that renewable energy very much is taking off.

It's not taking off at the scale and speed that we need it to, but it's actually somewhat remarkable.

Year over year now in the United States there is more renewable energy installed than any other type of fossil fuel installed.

There's more solar than there is natural gas, new capacity every year

now for several years in a row.

There's more wind and solar than all the fossil fuels combined.

There's almost no new coal.

There hasn't been a new coal plant I believe this is a true statement in maybe one of your listeners can fact check this, but I don't think there's been a new coal plant put online in the United States in 20 years.

So there, there's quite a bit of a transition going on.

We call that the energy transition and it's the industry that we're part of.

And it's getting there, but it's not fast enough, right?

So, how do we speed this thing up to give you some numbers?

You know, we believe that we need approximately one and a half trillion dollars a year of new wind and solar projects.

And right now there's currently about three to 400 billion a year.

So we're getting three to 400 billion out of our one and a half trillion dollar target actually mobilized.

And this is based off of the conversion rate necessary to energize the world in the way we currently live in it- in time to prevent two degrees of climate change.

Pre-industrial climate change.

So, we're not even close to on pace with what we need for these projects.

And I think also there's a lot of greenwashing out there and people will say, oh, we're investing.

There's big, huge commitments from banks and finance here is incorporates.

But they're buying Hocus Pocus sustainable products.

The only way to really do this is to build more solar and wind assets.

We need more of those things so that we can turn off the carbon emitting, fossil burning infrastructure that we currently rely on.

So it's really binary.

Energia we S we started thinking about this number one, there's a lot of projects around the world that were not getting financial nourishment.

We felt that there are some premium project opportunities in Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Places even like Europe, south Asia, and even certain markets in the United States that were considered unbankable by the very few select financeers who were engaged in the renewable energy investing space.

So we felt that there was a need for a new type of financial technology here where we could summon capital from the retail investor community.

Like what we just saw happen with Bitcoin You know, if we can see a trillion dollars move into Bitcoin, wouldn't it be great if we could move

We would like to see that.

And and we're testing the consciousness of our culture here and whether or not people are good at complaining about climate change, are they going to open up their wallets and, and invest?

So we made the investment minimum only a hundred dollars.

And then we started assembling projects from these undernourished segments of the renewable energy marketplace.

Everything from a school system in Connecticut, which would be too small of a project for Goldman Sachs to project with Anchor Foods, a food manufacturer

for example in our Africa portfolio.

It's a good customer.

It's a good project.

It needs to get built.

There is not an existing financeers for it so we created this new channel Energia, so that individuals can be the new source of capital for these projects.

Mike provides a short worldwide history, pros and cons on the investments of early and present day.

Renewable energy.

When I was doing my lobbying.

I did so much research and I found that Jimmy Carter had funded

I think it was a 20 year period of research and development in renewable energy.

Jimmy Carter did do quite a bit for specifically solar and he was a big fan of solar energy.

If you go to our US portfolio and watch our video, that explains the U S portfolio, we quote Jimmy Carter a couple of times.

He puts solar panels on them on the white house.

Reagan

took them down and then Reagan took them down.

And he also just kaboshed any, any uttering of the word renewables was not going to be his thing.

So I think that you can fairly say that the Reagan administration did not really support

2005 created what we now have in the United States is a solar energy industry by creating the investment tax credit which is still going strong today, which it did that all came under Bush.

And then another thing is a lot of the early technology and this was it, late seventies, early eighties.

And then all the way through through the last century to the end of the last century.

The vast majority of development work happening in renewable energy was being undertaken by the fossil fuel companies.

In fact one of my good friends and sort of a legend of our industry, and now the head of the department of renewable energy loan guarantee program in in Washington, his name is Jigar Shah.

Jigar learned about renewable energy while an executive at BP and BP for a very long time was the only game in town for people sincerely searching for ways of deploying solar energy technology.

Chevron was a major early investor in

solar energy technologies.

I didn't know if you were aware of that, but the fossil fuel industries they are the the first dynasty of renewable energy, R and D enterprises.

And only years later, did we start to see original private sector groups, you know, starting up in renewables like startups and stuff.

That period of time is when you no longer needed to be an executive at BP to have the resources in order to create a solar company, you could actually just create a solar company and there would be investors

uh, in the venture capital community who would help finance and fund those types of businesses.

Jimmy Carter funded R and D there was no legislation put in.

So you're saying that really, we need legislation around the world so that things can move forward, because it seems like the public won't move forward

if there is no legislation, is that what I'm hearing?

Yes and no.

I would say that in the United States we chose to use a policy of tax credits to move our deployment of renewable energy industry forward.

Now, this is completely separate from the R and D side and many good ideas tools that we use every day in the renewable energy industry were developed by the United States

We have the national renewable energy laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

It's a whole laboratory exclusively set up to figure out how to use renewable energy technologies responsibly and make those technologies bankable.

So huge props to those early initial advancements, courtesy of our tax dollars, but those were never really put in place to actually deploy the technology and to commercialize the technology.

For that we rely on the private sector.

And the private sector.

It's really simple.

We all like to be able to flip the switch and turn the light on, and we want the cheapest form of electricity to be on the other side of that bill, that electric bill.

And so for a little while there, solar was not the cheapest and we needed to subsidize it so that it could compete with fossil fuels.

And that made a lot of sense.

So we had multiple policies, usually state by state.

Every state was its own Rubik's cube of grants and tax credits and, and various configurations uh, feed-in-tariffs, renewable energy credits; all sorts of different types of things.

All those sat subordinate to a federal level policy called the ITC, the investment tax credit, which basically says, if you spend a million dollars

So that encouraged more investors to invest in these projects, which brought the cost down, which allowed it to compete with fossil fuels for energy customer base.

So that tax credit is what came in under EPact 05 was the name of the bill under George Bush 2.

And today is still the backbone of the U S policy.

But I can't say that I really a huge fan of it anymore because what's happened is because we had that tax credit.

It allowed us to go and adulterate the market by adding tariffs.

We actually charge a tremendous tariff at the port, when we import solar panels that are manufactured in, China.

Makes no sense to me.

We want to have more renewable energy, don't we?

Then let's buy the cheapest panels around, which are all coming from China.

We should tip our hats to the Chinese.

Thank them for making this critical technology

so darn cost-effective and by the ever living heck out of it instead we, you know, this these tariffs were put in place by Obama first and then continued in increased under Trump.

There are three or four different tariffs, and in fact, they just had big legislation for us, solar guys, the International trade commission decided to

And our industry was begging them to relieve it because if we got rid of the tariffs on the solar panels, then we wouldn't need the tax credit and we would just have a more

And that's all we need is just freedom to do that.

You go to places like Brazil and it's more famously avoid of renewable energy policy.

And it's, it's much more natural and we compete handedly.

We create projects called Community Solar.

So we'll build, you know, a 50 acre solar array, and then we'll sell that power to a hundred to a thousand different, small businesses that are geographically near that plant.

We love that.

That's the way to go.

And all of that really requires is for the government , should mandate that utility companies, which are mostly privately held throughout the world are obligated to allow for that.

They can't ban solar.

You have to be able to allow renewable energy to compete.

And other than that, stay the heck out of it.

And I think that that is the recipe for success.

And we're seeing it now in South Africa a major market starting to emerge where they realize that they are based off of coal.

It's one of the dirtiest energy mixes in the world of south Africa's Eskom utility.

They just, you know, kind of got embarrassed in Scotland and it's time for them to allow for a free market interruption of this coal monopoly with new

goodness.

What an historical interest here and hearing this from a business perspective.

Now what about Europe?

They don't have anywhere near as much capacity installed as we do.

Germany has a per capita success story going on where about 53% of their total electric mix comes from renewables.

So profound success there.

But as a whole, and you know, England did a very nice job.

Spain is kind of famous sort of, what not to do renewable energy story though.

I'll give you an example.

So what Europe did they moved first.

Long after Jimmy Carter in the research and the proof of the technology, the first country to really take a run at it was Germany.

Germany created a policy called a feed-in tariff.

And a feed-in-tariff basically says.

Anybody who installs solar panels can sell electricity from those solar panels to the utility company.

And the utility company is obligated to buy it at a certain rate.

They have to.

So you know that all of your electricity produces pre-sold before you even buy the solar panels and install them on your roof or on the ground or anywhere

And they would set the, the feed-in-tariff rate at a rate that, that the regulators felt would give an adequate return on investment for investors to start buying solar

Versus the current costs of the things and it was wildly expensive, but also wildly successful and really commercialized solar for the very first time of any scale.

It was really an amazing thing.

And that's what I was studying when I was getting into the industry in the early two thousands, those were the case studies, like what is Germany doing?

And then Spain decided to do it.

They created a feed-in-tariff, but Spain did the one thing you shall not do, which is five years or so after creating this feed-in-tariff policy, and after people had invested billions

Yeah.

We're not gonna do that.

And the investor said, well, I just bought a hundred million dollar solar energy project because you told me that you were going to buy all the power for a certain

So all those projects went bankrupt and they completely hammered the industry for many years.

I had to explain to banks and financeers with whom I was working to install projects in the United States about why I was so darn confident that Massachusetts wouldn't pull a

And at the end of the day, you know, there was nothing really preventing Massachusetts from doing that other than the fact that, good economies don't do that.

If you retrade on government promises, People will stop doing business in your country.

And to this day, I still see deals from Spain, come across my desk from time to time.

But I always have to think about, the old feed-in-tariff days and the days at which Spain, pulled the rug out underneath investors in renewables in the early days.

That's just some old industry stories.

If you're

interested.

Oh, I'm always interested in what's happening in the world.

Educates me because there are stories, obviously, that I'm not going to be able to pick up a book and read about.

I'm interested in solar and we did put up our solar panels many, many years ago.

Well, Mike Silvestrini, this has been so informative with all of the information that you have provided and I appreciate it.

You of course are helping with the acceleration of renewable energy development worldwide.

And that is commendable along with the preservation and conservation of wildlife and ecosystems.

So Mike Silverstein, if you could let people know where they can find you

thank you so much for having me, Catherine really appreciate the show and what you do here to spread these kinds of stories and to give experiences like mine mine a stage to be told.

And I'm easiest to find at my email address, which is mike@energea.com.

E N E R G E A.com.

And we hope that some of your listeners check out the website and for those who feel compelled to do so, maybe even make a, an investment into a renewable energy project that promises to pay dividends for decades to come.

Mike Silvestrini thank you so much for being here on your positive imprint,

Well, I'm a believer that we all need to do our part for the transition into renewable energy.

Well, next week's guests are from Australia and we're going to have a chat about the right to repair legislation in Australia and worldwide.

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