Thom Tillis on energy, China, and leaving the Senate

About the episode

Energy policy has become increasingly polarized just as the US faces record electricity demand, a rapidly expanding AI economy, and growing competition from China. 

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis about why the country's biggest energy challenge is the inability to build durable, bipartisan policy that survives changes in political leadership. 

Drawing on more than a decade in the Senate, Tillis argues for an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that embraces renewables, natural gas, nuclear, and other generation sources rather than treating them as competing ideologies. He discusses the economic consequences of abruptly cancelling energy projects, the need for stable investment signals, and why rising electricity demand requires policymakers to focus on practical solutions instead of partisan rhetoric. He also discusses domestic manufacturing, critical minerals, AI governance, and the importance of strengthening America's energy supply chains while remaining globally competitive. 

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

Episode transcript

Thom Tillis: This crap of "drill, baby, drill," or "if it ain't from the sun , it ain't cool," that's just gotta go. That is, to me, foundational. Then that creates the basis to say, "Okay, now that we've got that over, none of this stuff is evil. All of it is necessary."

Alfred Johnson: Energy has become one of the defining political battlegrounds of our time. Meeting surging electricity demand, strengthening domestic manufacturing, and modernizing the grid all require practical, multi-technology solutions, but they often get swept up in ideological fights. Every election brings a new vision for America's energy future. One administration accelerates investments, and the next reverses course. Billion-dollar projects are approved, then abandoned.

The reality is that meeting this moment requires long-term thinking in a political system increasingly focused on the next election instead of the next decade.

Thom Tillis: What we need is a way to mobilize the middle, not on ideological grounds, but on behavioral grounds, just go there and get shit done.

Alfred Johnson: This is Critical Capital. I'm Alfred Johnson, the CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. My guest is Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who regularly bucks the party line in favor of pragmatism and who puts solutions ahead of politics. During more than a decade in the United States Senate, he's helped shape policy on everything from renewable energy and domestic manufacturing to AI, critical minerals, and the future of the grid. Senator Tillis argues that America's greatest obstacle isn't a lack of technology or capital, but our inability to build durable policy for the long term.

And the urgency is only growing. Electricity demand is rising at the fastest pace in decades. Utilities are struggling to add generation and transmission fast enough to keep up, and global supply disruptions have heightened the national security imperative.

I talked to Senator Tillis about how he brings his blunt and pragmatic approach to energy.

Senator Tillis, it is a unique pleasure to have you on Critical Capital. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thom Tillis: My pleasure

Alfred Johnson: I wanted to jump into the unique position that you sit in today. You joined the Senate 11 years ago. How have you seen the body change over the decade-plus that you've been in the seat?

Thom Tillis: I think we've seen populism come into government and likely to be here to stay. The populist eras of this country in the past were all really defined by a personality, and they lasted about as long as maybe one or two administrations. But here, I think what we've seen with Obama kind of really creating modern-day populism at the same time that social media was coming about, the way we get our news, podcasts, all that stuff. So I believe that we have entered a permanent populist stage in this country, and I think that social media is the amplifier and the sustainer.

That is the biggest difference. Even back when I was in the legislature for eight years, vastly different. I mean, the social media and pundits and talking heads can get inside decision cycles and really create a lot of friction to decision-making, and a lot of people just jumping into the safe spot of going into their partisan corners, and so it has changed measurably, I think, in the last 11 years.

Alfred Johnson: How does it feel in the room if that is the backdrop? How is the dynamic with your colleagues different?

Thom Tillis: Well, it's different in that it's very difficult to create sustaining coalitions. Now everything's transactional. You don't have this general group of people that ideologically you have some alignment with, you wanna get things done. I think that bench differs now.

Everything's become highly transactional, and you have to do the work to figure out how do you get to the person's conscience or get to their constituents and get them to part with their conference, uquite honestly — the three C's, I call, of vote decision-making.

Alfred Johnson: Senator, you use this word conscience, which is also, I think, the word that you used when you put out the notification that you wouldn't be running again around the time of the tax legislation last year. What has it felt like to be in this stage after announcing that you're not going to seek re-election?

How do you relate to the position differently than you did before?

Thom Tillis: I think it's only incrementally different. What really annoys me from time to time are lazy journalists. If people look at me and think that somehow I became outspoken and free June 29 of last year, where the hell were you when I challenged a two-term Republican incumbent, the fair-haired child of the state legislature, to take my first legislative seat? I was a leper among Republicans for challenging this wonderful guy. So I entered politics bucking my party and expecting more out of it.

And then when Trump won, I had a lot of differences with his words — I supported most of his policies — and we had a couple of dust-ups. I think if people are fair in their assessment, I have been generally independent, but I don't pick a fight just for a fight's sake, and I support the vast majority of the "what". It's the "how" and the "who" that I usually have a problem with this administration.

I have become unfiltered as of July 29 last year for a simple reason. People go, "Well, you're speaking more freely." I said, "Because I don't have to go through the cost-benefit." I no longer have to think about, "Well, I have to choose my words carefully because this could come up in a debate, or they could run an ad against me." I don't have to deal with that. So I get to use the language I like to use at the time that I wanna use it, and I try to still show people respect. I'm unabashedly a conservative. I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm a Republican anymore based on this less than laissez-faire attitude we have to market.

But I can just speak freely, and if people don't like it, don't listen.

Alfred Johnson: I love it. So one particular analogy that you used earlier was people being in their corners. I was watching your questioning of AG Blanche recently, and you talked about how people are wearing their jerseys. The Democrats view things in their blue jersey, and the Republicans in their red jersey.

Energy is a really interesting space, right, because we need it in order to survive, and the landscape around it is only getting more complicated, and yet people are still in their jerseys. How do you see the energy complex today as a legislator, and what do we need to do from a policy perspective to have smart energy policy?

Thom Tillis: I'm so glad you brought that up. I wasn't 90 or 120 days into my tenure as a freshman in the perpetual minority when I approached the Democrats and said, "You're about to make a massive mistake with a renewable portfolio standard modeled after California. You're gonna be the first in the South." I'd worked with the investor on utilities as a partner at Price Waterhouse and said, "This won't work." I said, "Would you be willing to get in a room, negotiate, and I'll see if I can go back and convince some of these people?" Almost all of them, with the exception of maybe seven, had been there before me, convinced some of the Republicans to vote for it.

They did, and we got a very successful RPS. I was trying to do what we need to do now. You need to recognize that we are in a transition, and this bullshit of "it's gotta be green" and "drill, baby, drill" is the problem. Both have a place. And what was interesting, when we negotiated that renewable portfolio standard in the first legislature that I sat in, at that time, I remember the environmentalists loving natural gas.

Okay, when we're doing all the renewable energy credits and getting the RPS right, and they love natural gas until they found out we had a shit ton of it, and then they didn't want it anymore. Instead of recognizing it's a fraction of the carbon footprint of other hydrocarbons, and it should be a part of the transition that ultimately gets us to a fully renewable portfolio, then they just start, "Oh, fracking, that's crazy stuff." I mean, just...

So, the point is we've got to start all of the above, and we've got to understand the devastating economic consequences of this administration and their attack on wind and solar in particular. I was already at a place where you could convince me to ramp down solar tax credit.

Back when I was negotiating the RPS and doing work back in, gosh, 2007, people were saying, "Well, we just need it until the mid-teens or then, 10 years. Well, we just need it til 2021." It's time for solar subsidies to find a sunset. The problem is they did it too soon, and they did it in a precipitous manner, and there are a lot of collateral damage as a result. Just like some of these wind projects that they've canceled that are 70%, 80%, 90% complete, it's sending a horrible signal. It's sending stranded costs.

But let's keep in mind when everybody goes, "Yeah, rock on, Thom. You're right. That Orsted project, shame on them for canceling it." Where were you when Biden absolutely destroyed XL Pipeline and $2 billion of capital came out of the ground as a result of that? Both parties are responsible for where we are, and we are out of our minds if we wanna lose the strategic advantage of getting this right as the most powerful and most successful economy on the face of the planet.

Alfred Johnson: Yeah, and it exists within this broader construct where energy demand is rising for the first time in a long time, and we just need shitloads more power.

Thom Tillis: Yeah.

Alfred Johnson: So in that dynamic, how can we take away support for the energy complex?

Thom Tillis: Look, we can get our geek on here for a little bit, okay? Now let's go back and take a look at all these cancellations over the last year, in the first year of the administration when they started hitting all these policies. There are a lot of people here who apparently they've never been in business, and so they don't necessarily understand the second-, third-order impacts, okay? So I seriously doubt that anybody before they canceled, or have attempted to cancel, several projects, said, "Let's find out more about the power purchase agreements that are actually forward agreements that expect these electrons to come to them, and how many of those power purchase agreements have been — now that those electrons aren't coming, that's a part of aggregate demand that has to be satisfied while we're now getting all of this other demand that can't possibly be serviced just by traditional generation methods. How are we gonna do that?"

Just asking basic questions like that, guys. I mean, if you're taking a definitive stand on power policy and you don't understand something as basic as the power purchase agreements that drive it, then you're not qualified to have that discussion, respectfully.

Alfred Johnson: Yes. And again, it's playing through into the way that consumers and businesses pay for their energy. One of the things you warned when you came out to advocate for a longer winddown period on wind and solar was that it would play out in utility prices. We're seeing some of that.

Thom Tillis: And now that the demand's going up, what we need to do if we can't get these projects back online, I do want people to understand why some of these rates have spiked, and they will have spiked because this administration decided to take those generation assets offline.

Alfred Johnson: Okay, let's talk about China. So, the other big, clear threat that we have — energy prices are going up. We're in a different dynamic geopolitically and globally than we've been in before, and there's increasingly competition that's coming from China on all aspects of the energy supply chain, including manufacturing, where North Carolina has been a real leader.

How do you see the imperative that we have today to make sure that domestic manufacturing for components, minerals, rare earths, all these things, is sustainable and strong here in the United States?

Thom Tillis: You know, I think it's one area where I'll give — I'm not here just to bash the current administration. I'm a Republican. I voted for the president. Like I said, I support the majority of the policies they're doing. It's the methodology and their priorities that I have a problem with. If we're going to deal with China and we're gonna deal with onshoring manufacturing in the US, I think we're making a mistake by saying the way we counter China is to manufacture all of it here. I don't think that that's sustainable over time. Not with the highly developed economy that we have.

I think that we have to build a universe of supply chain links that are near-shore or closer to our shores that we can build relationships with that benefit the neighborhood back here, maybe back in this hemisphere. I think if we spend a lot of time just by sheer brute force of getting industries back here, then we're gonna lose them over time because you'd have to have the same administration to maintain the same priorities over time. A Democratic administration's probably gonna take it a little bit differently.

Now, one thing I will tell you is we should press our foot on the accelerator around any sort of minerals, rare earth, any kind of mineable inputs. I think we've got to get serious about it here in the US. I've worked hard for years to get a permit for one of the largest deposits of lithium spodumene in North America, which is only about 45 minutes outside of Charlotte. We got permits there. What we don't have are prices that make sense to go ahead and drive the project now.

But even when we do, we've got to deal with the “not in my backyard” people. Ironically, here, these are all a bunch of China-hating conservatives that for some reason don't like the idea of lithium being mined, in spite of the fact it would be one of the most sophisticated electric-driven mining operations that ever existed.

So we gotta overcome that stuff and make sure that we have our minerals-extraction strategy in a good place, environmentally sustainable, but indigenous. That is critically important. That is a part of the supply chain we need here. Now, do we have to send it out to process? In the case of this lithium mine, we won't. We'll have on-site processing. But we'll have to deal with processing and other things that may allow us to create economic relationships with other players.

I just think “Fortress America,” and “bring it all back home” is unsustainable. It's also not strategic with respect to geopolitical considerations. But we're gonna have to have an administration that gets it. This administration won't budge on that.

Alfred Johnson: Yeah, the question is really what things, right? What things do we need to have here? What things can we afford to be in a nearshore ally? And I think lithium is a really interesting case 'cause we saw the 45X tax credit go into place on lithium. But then in that same period, China tanked the market on lithium prices, which made a bunch of the emerging projects less economic.

Thom Tillis: That's exactly the posture we're in now with the project in North Carolina.

Alfred Johnson: And so we're in this place where Democrats look at that and they say, "We need lithium for batteries and the secure, clean supply chain." Republicans look at that and say, "We need it for domestic security and energy security and all these things." Is that a place where you could see some more productive policy?

Thom Tillis: Yeah, I do. But that's a longer-term play. I mean, look, in this Congress, we got 172 days left. Of those 172 days, we have fewer than 55 scheduled legislative days. So that's something we should be talking about now and doing something about in the next Congress. I just don't see it as realistic, and it's just a function of the capacity of this Congress and the fact that it's an election year. So, I just think if I were advising a client on it, I just don't see, other than doing the missionary work and getting people bought into it, I just don't see it as being an outcome in this Congress.

Alfred Johnson: Yep, I agree with that. So talking about AI for a second, you used the example of colleagues and policymakers not knowing what a PPA is and then having a strong view on energy policy.

Thom Tillis: And most members don't know how to spell AI.

Alfred Johnson: It is hard. We've got this incredibly complex, important new development in technology. What do you think smart policy around AI can and should look like?

Thom Tillis: Well, I would give you one example where I was one against 99 in a vote on the Senate floor last year to place a moratorium on state-level AI regulations until we figured out a national framework. I thought other people, including the bill sponsor Ted Cruz, was gonna vote for it, but apparently he voted against it because I guess the states' rights people had convinced him and some of the other members that the Founding Fathers envisioned AI regulations to be imposed at the state level.

Alfred Johnson: They had strong views about that, I heard.

Thom Tillis: Apparently they did. I think we have to start by just saying, guys, number one, I've had to spend a lot of time talking with the industry as late as yesterday. The industry needs to coalesce around a governing framework and think of a ISO 9000 sort of standards or whatever. But they need to coalesce around industry standards, and then you're either certified or you're not. That is one way that you can point out the bad actors. And the markets are necessarily gonna go to a standards-based sort of consortium of providers. I believe that that's something that they need to work on.

We're on the brink of committing the same mistake with AI that we did with data privacy, data breach. People are not even talking about GDPR and the European failure of data privacy, data breach. They had to go back and fix it. Now we've got several dozen states that are regulating this. They're gonna lift up and do the same thing to AI to our detriment, and it could create a real pacing threat for us in international competition.

So I think it's a matter of getting the industry together and say, "You've got ethics, execution, operation standards you can use. Let's create a standards body, and let's certify people around their behavior so that you've got a seal of approval on the good guys and the upstarts or the unprovens." That's a piece of it. We need to convince Congress that we need a light-handed approach, but time is of the essence.

There, there is not anyone who even thinks this AI stuff is not for them that are not touched by AI every day. They just don't know it. And so we need to figure out before something really bad happens, something sympathetic, something for children or whatever, something that gets us so emotional that we end up passing a Dodd-Frank for AI that we will take years digging ourselves out of, and then our international competition gain the advantage on us. We've got to avoid that. The more we learn about AI, the more we can use its application for any of the ill wills of it.

Incidentally, I was doing AI R&D in 1986 at Wang Laboratories in Boston. So it's not new but for the languages and the processing capacity; the concept has always been there. At that time, though, it was just pattern recognition and voice-to-text translation, but that was considered AI. Languages have changed, processors have changed, large language models have been created. It's a different world. But I remember back then, well, my gosh, if you can do optical character recognition, what are all these typists gonna be doing? Well, something else.

Alfred Johnson: Yeah. Do you have a take on that? There's sort of this debate of is AI gonna take all the jobs?

Thom Tillis: You, you've got people saying now that, "Well, AI's gonna take all the jobs, but therefore AI needs to create a fund to pay people who will no longer have a job." That is absurd. I mean, the whole concept is absurd. Guys, we're gonna get through this. It's a massive increment in capability.

I was a partner at Price Waterhouse and if those firms have not already moved to AI and eliminated a lot of the brute force analytics — I don't know many of them have, I've seen some of the public report — they'd be out of their minds. I mean, why would you do that? My goodness. I can remember I had projects where I'd have a team of 5 or 10 people that I would ask to get me something by the end of the day or by the end of the following day that I can get at the end of 30 seconds now interacting with myself.

What I think these folks need to do, and you know, I'm the chairman of the Intellectual Property Subcommittee, and I brought this up the other day at one of our subcommittee hearings. I said, "I feel like there's gonna be an industry of copywriting questions. Do y'all agree with that in AI?" They said, "Absolutely."

So these people who are being displaced, let's think about those analysts, those PW analysts who may have lost their jobs — or PricewaterhouseCoopers now. I'd be telling them, "You already know fundamentally the questions. Now get smart on the questions that you need to ask AI to get the answers. That's your market, because you've already got the underlying skill. Master your ability to get AI to bend to your will. Come up with some of the most brilliant, complex questions that are almost copyrightable, they're so unique." Focus on that, folks. The world's not gonna end. I think we got a good 10, 15 years before the robots start eating everybody.

Alfred Johnson: That's a pretty optimistic take. Senator, you've been on both sides, right? You've been a businessman, you've been a partner at PwC, you've been a US senator. How do you think the relationship between business and industry and Senate and policymakers needs to improve as we deal with these very large challenges that we collectively face?

Thom Tillis: We gotta get out of the business of business. I mean, we're at this place now to where we've got equity stocks in 10 or so publicly traded corporations, a golden share that lets us veto board procedures for US Steel. We're micromanaging through tariffs and everything. That's what I don't want to do. I mean, we gotta get back to the fundamentals of lean government, laissez-faire politics, let the markets drive things, and government exists to make them fair, period. But now, you know, we've got an administration that's vastly different from the first Trump administration, which was more laissez-faire.

Let's lower taxes, lower regulations, let the industries go. And now in a year and a half, we've got equity stakes and billion-dollar equity stakes in high-tech companies, and I think that we're interacting and tinkering at a level that's reminiscent of the Hoover administration.

Alfred Johnson: Mm-hmm. So Senator, North Carolina has been such a leading state with respect to renewable energy, battery storage, all these different parts of the power complex. You're also a leading manufacturer of certain parts of the battery supply chain. What do you think that federally we can learn from the success in North Carolina?

Thom Tillis: I'm glad you ask because it kinda goes back to that first controversial thing that I did as a Republican to negotiate the renewable portfolio standard. And look, anybody that says I did something probably means, in Washington anyway, they didn't have much to do with it. But we ended up getting that portfolio standard done, and we laid the groundwork for a very successful solar industry, and we laid the groundwork for a great track record of low C&I rates, commercial and industrial rates. And that laid the basis for what most people believe between that tax regulatory policy, energy policy, I think that's why North Carolina hit the cover off the ball for 10 years from 2011 to today, really, so 15 years now. So I think it's that sort of getting that balance right.

Alfred Johnson: What perspective does it give you on the way that the grid needs to change in the next phase as we deal with all this demand growth and the need for all these different kinds of sources?

Thom Tillis: I really think that we need to incubate. There's a lot of smart people. NC State's a good example of a university that focuses on all aspects of energy, so generation, transmission, distribution, efficiency, et cetera. I just think we've got to just keep churning through regulatory policy and business policy that makes people be as creative on the transmission component of energy as they are on everything.

In my opinion, we keep on trying to incrementally improve the existing infrastructure, right? And there's a lot of promising technology out there. How do we create incubators, and how do we prioritize next-generation wire, if it's wire, or other forms of low resistance media that get more electrons from the generation asset to the user and eliminate loss?

Think about efficiency throughout the grid. One of the things I wanted to do in North Carolina, I just didn't have time — I was only speaker for four years — but I wanted to establish North Carolina as having the most resilient and hardened grid in the United States. Because if you're doing site selection, particularly today, I think even with the data centers and some of these high-tech manufacturing facilities, that's a differentiator. I've helped with site selection before, and I thought building a national reputation where you wanna make sure when that light switch comes on, the light's gonna come on, go to North Carolina, was a message I wanted.

Now, thinking nationally, we should be thinking about that. We have to think about distributed generation, resilient grids, new technologies for efficiency's sake so that some of your generation is just getting all those electrons that were generated ultimately being used at the end use point. Those are the sorts of things we need to be thinking about.

Alfred Johnson: Do you think, noting that it's not gonna happen in this Senate, do you think that there's policy potential on things like transmission, transformers, wiring, all this stuff that is holding up building up the grid of the future?

Thom Tillis: Yeah, I do. But I also think that there needs to be some stimulative money for next-generation thinking. I wanna build a short-term plan and an intermediate plan based on the technologies that exist today, or that you reasonably can expect will be there when you need them, when they come online.

But I wanna go a lot further than that. I want to Manhattan Project a kind of a capability that we're not even thinking about, and that's what I mean. You know, I came from research and development, so I'm saying, "How do we go out there and get some real brainiacs to think about something that maybe we can give them state or federal resources to be deployed so that we're jumping ahead?"

And there's a lot of opportunity out there, but we need to... All right, well, you don't wanna pick winners and losers. No, you don't. But I don't mind placing a bet and placing a few hedge bets on what look like to be the most promising next-generation, disruptive sort of capabilities as a way to fix it.

If we don't, I don't know how you get it all done. Man, you got so much demand for energy now, and we already know we've got a generation deficit. We don't have a grid that could possibly pump it all through, and so we've gotta do some planning to make sure that we don't have this one collective, "ugh," you know, a few years from now when all this stuff starts coming online and the lights start flickering.

Alfred Johnson: Yeah, so I could not agree with you more. And then I think about this point that you made of people residing in their partisan corners, and one administration does one thing and the next administration undoes it. If you think about how we could actually do something like that, like actually do something like the Manhattan Project for energy and grid infrastructure, what do you think that would need to look like in light of today's political reality?

Thom Tillis: I don't know. I think it's one where it's gonna be difficult to do until after we get through this crap of "drill, baby, drill," or "if it ain't from the sun, it ain't cool." That's just gotta go. Kind of reminds me of that old commercial — you may be too young to remember it — "Tastes great, less filling" beer commercial. Just an irrational argument, you know, it's goofy. Everybody laughed at it for that reason.

Well, I feel the same way about this irrational argument that these people are having at either end of the spectrum. That is, to me, foundational. Until you can get people to understand how unresponsive that is to the challenge ahead of us and how unprofessional it is from a business standpoint, purely ideological, then that creates the basis to say, "Okay, now that we've got that over, we're gonna allow a modicum and we'll have to tiles the tomb, but none of this stuff is evil. All of it is necessary."

That lays the groundwork for then having the discussion, "Okay, now that we're a going concern, let's talk about how we can take this public, how we can get the multiple." But I think that that's a finished, in a project management parlance, that's a finish to start relationship before you can start that other piece we're talking about.

Alfred Johnson: Yep. So, as you think about departing, what advice do you wanna impart on your remaining colleagues, and how do you think the body can move forward from here?

Thom Tillis: My advice to the folks up here, don't let this place trick you into thinking what you do is who you are. Because if you are, you will invariably make decisions that could be only here to preserve your identity, because this is who you think you are. And don't forget where you got elected. Don't forget what your priorities were. And don't give a shit about threats from anybody, because this is just another job, and if you're worth anything, you can find the next one.

Alfred Johnson: Senator, what a great place to leave it. I think the principle feeling that I have as we end the conversation is a profound sense of loss that you will not be in that chamber anymore, but I'm excited to see whatever it is you do next because I imagine that there's gonna be some bullies that are punched in the face and a lot of shit that gets done.

Thom Tillis: If I have my way, that's exactly right. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, man.

Alfred Johnson: Thom Tillis is a United States senator from North Carolina. Critical Capital is co-produced by Crux and Latitude Media. Our production team includes John Sheehan, Jenna Herzog, Anne Bailey, Stephen Lacy, and Shawn Marquand. Matthew Miller mixes the show. Additional production by Emily Hughes and the excellent team at Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. You can find Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Alfred Johnson. Thanks for listening