He’s a renewable-power billionaire, not an environmentalist

livemint.com:

Michael Polsky is getting into fights all over the country. The Chicago billionaire, a Ukrainian immigrant who made his fortune through wind, solar and other renewable-energy projects, wants to build a lot more. And he also wants to build natural-gas-fired power plants.

At every turn, he says, he faces opposition from either the left or the right—illustrating his view that the country’s approach to energy has gone completely off the rails. “It’s crazy," said Polsky, who founded his company, Invenergy, in 2001. “Why if you build renewables you’ve got to be on the left, and if you build coal or gas you’ve got to be on the right? To me, you build what makes sense to build." At age 74, he is taking on a cornucopia of controversial, time-devouring projects that are among the most complex of his career.

They include a four-state transmission line, offshore wind on the East and West coasts and solar-panel manufacturing. Sean Klimczak, global head of infrastructure at Blackstone, which has invested $4 billion in Invenergy’s renewables business since 2021, estimates Invenergy has a pipeline of projects valued at about $150 billion. “A lot of this comes down to, do you have the ability to effectively and efficiently manage large-scale construction?" said Klimczak.

He called Polsky “an execution guru." The problem, Polsky says, is that these days the energy business is about politics as much as it is about engineering. The company dropped plans in November to build a second gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania, first proposed in 2016, in the face of community opposition. It is battling recent lawsuits in Michigan and Wisconsin over solar projects, as organized opposition to wind and solar installations grows.