A visionary leader in clean and renewable energy tells his incredible personal story and outlines a smart and sane way forward for meeting the world’s growing energy needs.
Michael Polsky is one of the most important figures in American clean energy—here, he tells the remarkable story of his rise from a penniless young Soviet émigré to leadership in this essential industry.
Only a decade ago, many thought that demand for electricity in America might never rise again. Today, AI, cryptocurrency, and electrification are fueling the largest surge in electricity demand in fifty years. Polsky has spent the past four decades building power plants, but even he never expected to see this kind of surge in demand. Most of the companies driving it want electricity produced by clean, sustainable renewable sources, mainly wind and solar power.
His journey in clean energy is America’s journey too. Inexhaustible intertwines his personal story—an immigrant who arrived in America from the Soviet Union with $500 in his pocket and a few phrases of broken English who, twenty-five years later, founded a multibillion dollar independent energy company—with the story of America’s energy evolution from coal and oil to wind and solar power.
Polsky’s career evolved from working on oil- and coal-powered plants, to generating power from nuclear and natural gas, to renewable energy. It was a natural progression that helped him form a distinct vision of the future, which guided him to what would be the next best way to develop projects and produce electricity. The United States is heading in the same direction, for a simple reason: not because we have all become environmental activists, but because renewable-energy technology just makes sense. It has the potential to create unlimited amounts of energy, and a low-cost, highly efficient, and reliable power system.
Polsky’s company, Invenergy, is now the biggest privately owned clean-energy business in the US. He was forward-thinking enough to have built a business with a focus on renewable energy. But the challenge Polsky sees for America is that we don’t have enough installed renewable-power generation, hooked up to the grid and ready to supply. Because demand for electricity is so unprecedented, the source of the energy is becoming somewhat secondary to the need itself. We’re burning more fossil fuels than ever before, reopening mothballed nuclear power stations, and betting on experimental technology.
We are entering an era of an “all of the above” approach to generating electricity, driven by the surge in demand and the realization that neither fossil fuels nor renewables alone can meet all our needs. As Polsky sees it, the danger is that our immediate appetites could blind us to the consequences of using all forms of energy: making climate change worse, slowing the energy transition, and the potentially disastrous results of a nuclear accident.
Polsky is far from a green warrior or an ecological activist. As a student in his native Kyiv, Ukraine, he was trained in the 1970s to design power plants that burned heavy oil or coal. When he emigrated to the United States in 1976, he worked on nuclear power plants, then on gas-powered plants, and then on power plants that burned coal, oil, and natural gas. The first company he started worked on coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants; his second company developed facilities that burned natural gas, tires, and wood.
Today, Polsky and Invenergy are in the renewable-energy business because it is an unprecedented industrial and financial opportunity, offering the chance to create unlimited amounts of energy efficiently, reliably, and at a low cost. It is highly scalable. It is the future toward which technology is taking us. Our choice is not whether or not to switch to renewable energy, but if we will grasp this opportunity or have it forced upon us by crises. As Polsky sees it, there is a smart and forward-looking way to the future, and this book charts what the smart way looks like, and urges us to seize the opportunity it offers.
