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Scaling Clean Podcast

Episode 46: Blake Nixon, CEO of Geronimo Power

July 22, 2025

 

Geronimo's Rebrand, Marketing, and the Importance of the Farmer-Founded Ethos to Winning Community Trust

My latest Scaling Clean guest is Blake Nixon, CEO of Geronimo Power, formerly known as National Grid Renewables. Blake discusses Geronimo’s rebrand and what it signals for the company’s future. He also shares the inspiring story of his mentor, Geronimo Power founder, Noel Rahn.

As a marketing and PR professional, I’m always curious to hear how different cleantech companies develop their marketing program. Blake had an interesting take (25:26): 

Melissa: At what point did you hire a full-time marketing person? 

Blake: 

“I'd say it was year five. We were probably 12 or 15 people. If you think about what we do, so much of it is building trust. It's not just customers, vendors, or construction partners that are building projects. It's really communities. 

That's your initial sale. 

That's why the first thing you should read every time you look up Geronimo Power is we're farmer-founded and we're community focused. Anybody will build you a project, anybody will sell you some commodities. Our core nexus – and I believe this is more important today than ever – is at that foundation and in the community. 

And I think it's the most overlooked part of our industry. It's to the peril of those who overlook it.”

I want to underscore the importance of his last point. My Tigercomm colleague, Ayelet Hines, leads our community engagement work that’s focused on helping developers apply a campaign mindset to win permits in rural communities. This task is increasingly difficult with shifting political tides, as well as resentment fueled by social media and anti-renewable interests.

A few more standout moments from our conversation:

1️⃣  6:20 - Be a risk taker. It doesn't get easier to take risks as you grow older. So take them young.

2️⃣ 7:43 - At any point in your career, you can choose how much you want to grow in your role. You can stick to a job description, or you can add your own ideas. You get to decide. 

3️⃣ 18:39 - Mistakes come with leading a company. It’s your job to experiment, push limits, and learn what works or doesn’t. Get comfortable with not knowing and needing to ask questions.

I want to acknowledge Blake’s praise for his PR and marketing team members - more than once in this conversation he gave them a shout out. 

Marketing communications and PR are 10 people’s jobs: PR, social media, website, SEO, advertising, copywriting, content creation, event planning, internal comms, and now SEO for AI. The list has variations, but you get the point. 

So much work goes into planning a community event or a ribbon cutting. Even more goes into executing a company rebrand. Blake said the spreadsheet of action items for the rebrand had over 500 items. Kudos again to Emily Morissette, Lindsay Drew Smith, and others on Blake’s team for “flipping the switch” so seamlessly. And thanks to Jennifer Haugen for helping us set up this interview. 

Thanks, Blake, for sharing your wisdom with the cleantech community. Congrats to Geronimo and their marketing team for completing the major rebrand!

Listen to our conversation at the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Also listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, and iHeart.

Overview

Introduction

Melissa Baldwin

My next guest isn't just building clean power, he's built a clean powerhouse. Blake Nixon is president and CEO of Geronimo Power, formerly National Grid Renewables. Blake led the company's transformation into a top-tier North American developer, managing projects from conception through construction and beyond. Prior to National Grid and Geronimo, Blake served as the principal at the Ron Group, where he managed venture capital and private equity.

With a degree from the University of Washington, Blake brings a unique blend of investor acumen and infrastructure grit to the clean energy transition. Blake, welcome to Scaling Clean.

Blake Nixon

Yeah, great to be here. Thank you.

Blake Nixon’s Journey: From Internship to Leading Geronimo Power

Melissa Baldwin

Excellent.

So I'm going to get into my questions, and we're going to start with your career journey and background. I want you to briefly describe the journey that landed you and the role that you are in today as CEO.

Blake Nixon

Yeah, I have a really unique and wonderful story. As you mentioned, my background and training were in investments, and I managed venture capital and private equity investing for a family office of my mentor, who became the founder of what is now Geronimo Power.

His name was Noel Rahn, and I was very fortunate as a young man to get to know Noel because he was the father of a friend of mine. I was lucky enough to ask him for an internship when I was a sophomore in college, which he was nice enough to give me at his investment firm. And I just sort of held on from there.

So I did two internships for him, and ended up joining him when he launched his family office. He let me do things that he probably shouldn't have, which landed a lot of opportunities for me to learn from doing. And over time, I ended up not only managing the private equity and venture capital business, but this startup business that he decided to launch back in 2004 to develop wind energy on his land, which is a really interesting story in its own right, which maybe we'll get to later.

But that entity inside the Rahn Group ultimately became Geronimo Wind Energy. It then became Geronimo Energy when we got into solar and other technologies, changed names when we were acquired by National Grid Renewables, and we've just rebranded as Geronimo Power recently.

So along the way, I earned the trust to run the company from Noel. And, you know, my journey is quite unique and different, but a wonderful one where I got to work day in and day out with a legend for 25 years, and over time, I got to run this company in this really exciting industry.

Melissa Baldwin

That's incredible. I didn't know that history, that it started with an internship.

Lessons from Mentor Noel Rahn: Optimism, Risk, and Trusting Your Instincts

Melissa Baldwin

Well, it sounds like Noel was a big influence on you. We normally ask our guests who they've learned from and who their mentors are, and what they learned from them. But I was looking on LinkedIn, and I saw that you sat down with your current interns. So there's a full circle story. And you quoted your mentor to them. I wanted you to share what you shared with the interns that you talked to, and also, separately, I'm curious to hear what you notice about this next generation of young folks coming into the workspace.

Blake Nixon

But first of all, we have a large and really involved internship program here, partly because of my love affair with the idea, because that was my sort of inception and Genesis story myself.

So this year we have 22 young people working with us in a 300-person company. So it's quite a large group for a relatively small company. But I really believe in it. I really believe in giving young people opportunities, seeing how they grab that opportunity, seeing what they're willing to show us, and seeing if they can earn a place on our team.

And I'm really proud that I'm not the only one who's risen quickly through the organization to provide leadership and really important contributions to this company. There are many directors and vice presidents in this company who started as interns. So it's a real opportunity for folks. And I invest personally in it because I see so much opportunity in it.

At those lunches, I'm sure I shared a lot of different quotes with them. One that I always share with young people is that the world belongs to the optimist. And I think it's really important for anybody, but young people in particular, because they're inundated with negativity so often, and they have been so often in their young lives, just because it's all around them all the time, you know, via technology.

That you really need to take an optimistic view on things. There's always the opportunity to be pessimistic or see the world as, you know, a negative place. It is a difficult place. You should be prudent. You should be a good assessor of risk and opportunity. But when you don't know what to be, be optimistic.

Melissa Baldwin

Yeah, I like that, and I liked your phrasing and when you don't know what to do, be an optimist. Very nice. Well, moving to the next question, and again, thinking about young people here, if you were able to go back in time and give advice to your younger self, what advice would you give?

Blake Nixon

I took some risks, but I'd take more. Be a risk taker. It doesn't get easier to take risks as you grow older. So take them young. Don't be afraid. The other thing is, even as a young person, your intuition is important.

Everybody says that wisdom, knowledge, age, experience, you know, gives you a different sense for things. And that's true. Experience gives you more confidence to listen to your internal self and your intuition. But I would have told myself to listen to my gut more. Often, your head gets in the way of what your gut is telling you to do.

The Name Geronimo Power: Why the Company Returned to It

Melissa Baldwin

That's such good advice. And in fact, it's uncanny because I literally just had this conversation, and I wrote down on my computer from a conversation yesterday: don't overanalyze. Think about how does this make me feel?

So I think it's easy to get caught up in pros and cons and just, you can worry and wonder and think about something and overanalyze it. But really, when it comes down to it, like, what's your gut feeling?

Blake Nixon

Well, and it's hard, right, because most of us start in a pretty tactical role. For me, it was an analyst. My first title was analyst.

And so when you're an analyst, your job is to provide data and analytics. And you can choose to self-limit yourself to just doing what the role says, or you can do that and add perspective and opinion and take it beyond that. And really, you're your own self-limiter.

Melissa Baldwin

That's great advice. Okay, so now I wanna talk more about your company. You all recently went through a rebrand. I wanna hear more about that. Tell us about it. Why now? And what do you want people to know about the new name? And it's an old name, right?

Blake Nixon

Yeah, it's all right. It's back to the future. So it's fun, and maybe I'll tell our inception story as Geronimo.

So, Noel, my mentor that I referenced before, grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota. As wonderful an opportunity as I had with him, and as much as he trusted me with important things, I never quite made his A-team because I didn't grow up on the farm. He said, you're just a city slicker and all that stuff, and you won't really know until you get down to the farm.

That's where his heart was. That's where he learned his core values as a person, and also in business. So even though he was this hugely successful Wall Street guy, investor, legend, that was home for him. And he took a lot of his earnings from his career and bought more and more farmland.

Which one day led to a call from a wind developer asking to lease his land to put up a wind farm. He said, well, what's this about? He hadn't heard about it. And he said, come on in, talk to us. And he listened.

And ultimately, he didn't like the opportunity. And he said, I don't like the way you're approaching the farmers. I don't think you're offering a fair deal. I think you're going to create fighting between neighbors, and I just don't like it. So, no thank you.

But then he turned to me and said, let's just do this ourselves. And I was, what do you mean? We know nothing about this business. But that was just kind of the guy he was. You know, I'm sure he had thought about stuff a lot in advance of that, but he had never said anything to me, and we worked together every day.

And so the next day, we drove down to the farms, and we were looking around at wires, and literally, we didn't know what we were looking at. We didn't know if the wires we were looking at were telephone wires or electric wires. We were so ignorant of the business that we were about to start. But he was undeterred. He said, let's do it. This one looks good. Let's put a wind farm here.

And three years later, there was a wind farm there called the Odin Wind Farm on his land. And as we were approaching sort of the key contracts that go around making an energy project, I walked into his office one Friday afternoon and I said, Noel, this is getting pretty serious. We're going to enter into all these contracts. Why don't we set up a separate legal entity to hold these assets, separate from the family office assets and things like that, just for legal sensibility?

And while we're at it, why don't we brand it something? Why don't we name it something, because I'm not sure the Rahn Group really means anything, and we're starting to do more of this business. So, what do you think?

He's like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And I said, well, let me know if you have any ideas on the brand. And he goes, we'll call it Geronimo. And I was like, Geronimo? He's like, yeah, I like that name. And that was it. Picked it on the spot.

And again, it was from something that had a lot of history for him. He was a voracious reader, loved history. His degree was in history. And in particular, he had a very strong affinity for Native American history and the story of the Native American people, and frankly felt like the Native American people had been mistreated. And he wanted to pay homage in that regard, number one.

Number two, he was always fascinated by the man Geronimo. Just the stories, the fierceness, the fact that people would jump out of helicopters and yell, Geronimo. It was just this singular name that evoked a feeling that he wanted us to have at the company. Let's go get it. So it had this dual purpose for him.

We lost that when we sold the company. We sold the company to a large energy company called National Grid, which is headquartered in London but runs utility companies in both the United Kingdom and in the northeastern part of the United States, New York and Massachusetts in particular. And they rebranded us as National Grid Renewables.

But our business was sold by National Grid to a large private equity business, Brookfield. And when we were talking about how to rebrand the company, I expressed that I would like to go back to our old brand, for all the reasons that we described, also to pay homage to our founder.

The Brookfield folks thought about it and did some checking around, and they found out that we had developed a really nice brand in the marketplace amongst investors and customers and, most importantly, communities. And they thought it was a great opportunity to reattach ourselves to that brand and continue to bring it forward.

So I was super excited. The team's really excited about it. It's like I said, it's a little bit of Back to the Future. But it means a little bit more than just a rebrand to us, given the history.

Farmer-Founded Principles: Building Community Trust the Right Way

Melissa Baldwin

And I want to ask more about that, and specificall,y actually touching on something that you mentioned in a question. You pointed out that Noel, when he was originally approached by that wind developer, felt that the approach wasn't fair to farmers. And Geronimo describes itself as a farmer-founded company. So how does that track? Like, what does that mean? How does that statement live through an execution?

Blake Nixon

So what I try to tell everybody that comes into this company is that they now represent us when they go to communities.

It's really interesting. When Noel made me the president of Geronimo, he had done a lot of things. He had had tons of success in everything he's done. He's made a lot of money. He didn't say, Blake, go make me more money. He said, Blake, don't let me go to any community without my head held high. That's what mattered to him.

He saw wind energy at the time, and all renewables now. He saw that as the first meaningful, positive economic development opportunity that he's seen in his lifetime for many rural towns.

And so what we did, which was interesting, was the first thing we did when we started what became Geronimo was we sat down with the leading lawyer in town and said, let's write our own lease, but let's start from logic and the ground up and do what's right by the farmers and the community.

So we set up a sharing arrangement where, if you were in the project, you shared, you participated. We split the payments between turbines going on land and just the general revenue share on a per-acre basis. So everybody played. Everybody had an economic incentive, and it wasn't one versus the other.

We put in things that were really quite nuanced that nobody had in their leases, but mattered to farmers. We made promises to put the black dirt back on the ground. Right, that's the vitality, right?

Some of these farms are generational farms. They have some century farms in their family. These are family members. The land is a family member. We're gonna put the black dirt back where we got it, right? We're gonna spread it. We're not putting it anywhere, not moving it anywhere, okay? It's gonna stay on the ground.

So we were really trying to be forward and fair with our landowners. We were trying to do the right thing, but we also ended up doing well by doing good, if you know what I mean, because the farmers appreciated that.

And farmers, in a lot of places, multiple developers will show up and try to sign up certain communities or individual farmers. And nine out of ten times, we would win that competition because we approached people the right way and we did things the right way. And when things went wrong, which they do, we made it right.

Handling Tough Conversations: Fast, Honest, and Kind

Melissa Baldwin

This is a big process. Is there anything that surprised you or that you learned, or just that you would share with other companies that might have to go through a rebrand?

Blake Nixon

I'm lucky because I've got a great marketing and communications team that made it really easy for me. I think the spreadsheet I saw of actions that needed to be taken was like 500.

We did look at a lot of names. We did consider new names. It is really quite interesting how many names are taken both in the industry and outside the industry, even made-up words and names that we came up with. We couldn't get a URL, or there was a competing or a similar enough organization that it made it confusing.

So just coming up with a name has become quite a chore in its own right. But the rebrand itself, noting how many different avenues there are for communication today, was a huge lift.

But we've just got such a professional and high-quality team. They made it easy on me. But I know it wasn't easy on them, and I'm really appreciative of them.

Melissa Baldwin

Kudos to Emily, Jennifer, and the rest of the team, and job well done there. I think it's coming across clearly from the channels I see. So well done.

Blake Nixon

Thank you.

Melissa Baldwin

All right, so I'm going to move on to the next question. This is about having tough conversations. So in business, we're required to do this. We have to have difficult conversations. It might be firing somebody or addressing a mistake. How do you handle those tough conversations? And do you have any advice for other people who have to face those?

Blake Nixon

Yeah, I like to handle it fast and with brutal honesty, one way or another. I'm an in-the-moment manager. I give immediate feedback. When I've made a mistake, I say, sorry, I made a mistake. Let's course-correct. Let's do it fast.

Let's understand what damage has been done, if it's something that's reputational, if it's something that's contractual, if it's physical, whatever the mistake was made, let's stop, assess, and quickly pivot and try to make it right in whatever way we can.

But I start by telling my team here, and hopefully it takes a little bit of the pressure off them, that nobody makes more mistakes here than me. And the quicker you can get comfortable with acknowledging that, also with acknowledging that you just don't know everything, and that's OK, there's power in that. There's power in being able to say, I don't know.

Melissa Baldwin

Yeah, I love your point about being an in-the-moment manager so that you don't let things kind of fester. You just hit it right ahead, right on.

Success Over Time: Learning When to Push Forward and When Not To

Melissa Baldwin

All right, my next question is a quick one. Have you found that success relies more on what the company chooses not to do or what it chooses to do?

Blake Nixon

I still think it's much more about what you choose to do, but that doesn't say that being disciplined and knowing what not to do is, I mean, that is still very important.

But I said, my favorite Noel line, the world belongs to the optimist. A lot of the things that I've spent a lot of time on, working out problems, have been me being a little bit over-optimistic and maybe not prudent or pragmatic. And it would have been better off if I had just said no sometimes.

I tend to say yes a lot, and I want to believe that we can do anything. And I kind of believe we can do anything with enough time. But sometimes that optimism turns into a decision where I might have put risk on the business that I shouldn't have.

So being able to prudently assess things that it's just better to say no to is a really important skill that you hone as you make mistakes along the way. And hopefully, sometimes I fall victim to this myself, the accumulation of things that have gone wrong in your life or in your business or whatever doesn't make you conservative, because I think that can happen.

Once you know all the problems of the world, it's like, I can just freeze and do nothing. And that's the worst thing. You have to keep moving forward. You have to keep doing things. You have to stay optimistic.

Building the Team: Why Culture Matters More as You Grow

Melissa Baldwin

Nice. Well, now I'm gonna move to the section on hiring and team management. Hiring is one of the toughest things that we do in a business. Can you share any advice on how you grew your business and advice on making new hires?

Blake Nixon

Yeah, so it sort of changed about when we got to 100 people. It used to be that I would interview every single person who came into the company.

I can't tell most of these people if they're any good at what they do. I don't know. They're experts. We've got amazing people out there doing amazing things that I don't fully understand. But I can get to know them. And I can try to make sure that only good people, who are made from the right stuff, who want to work hard and bring it every day, do what is ultimately a tough industry.

So, making sure you have people who understand that, who are okay with that, who want to work really hard to accomplish these goals.

I don't get to interview everybody anymore. We still have all-company retreats. Like, we're still old school like that. We have an all-company holiday party. It's the collection of those people that makes us who we are now.

Hard Decisions: When Letting Someone Go Is the Right Thing

Melissa Baldwin

Nice. Well, moving to another tough question on firing. So you'd mentioned you're not interviewing as much anymore, but I imagine in your life, you've had to fire people. So what advice do you have on that? How to fire people?

Blake Nixon

Once you know it needs to happen, do it fast. Do it quickly. Be decisive. Be kind, there's no need to be mean about it. Be kind, it's usually better for that person too.

Most of the time, the people who work here are good people who mean well. Most of my mistakes are believing it's going to turn around, or dragging my feet because I don't want to do it. It's not fun. It's hard.

AI in Renewables: Learning What It’s Good For and What It’s Not

Melissa Baldwin

I hear you. Now I'm going to move into another section. We're going to talk about marketing and AI. So I want to hear what your company's approach to AI is. Are you incorporating it into your business practices? Or are you even selling? Some of the clients we work with, AI is a component of a product. I know for you it's different as a developer, but what is your approach to AI?

Blake Nixon

Yeah, AI means a lot of things to a lot of people, and they're all different in how you define it.

So we've been using machine learning, and what I think people call AI, for a couple of years on things like preventative maintenance, watching markets, projecting markets, projecting weather, things that sort of go into our day-to-day activities in managing and operating a portfolio of renewable assets. So AI is really exciting for our business.

Primarily because it's a source of so much demand for our product. So Big Fan creates a lot of opportunities for people like us who make electricity.

From a user's perspective, I think it's clearly going to change the world. It's going to change how we do everything in life, and our business is going to be no different.

We have an internal program in our IT department looking at tools that can help us do what we do better, faster, at greater scale. But we're just scratching the surface.

Marketing: Building Trust with Communities from Day One

Melissa Baldwin

I want to talk now about marketing and your approach to marketing. And I'm specifically interested. So you're a company, you've really been with the company from its inception and seen its growth. So I'm curious at what point you invested in marketing? Right now, you have a fabulous marketing team. But I'm curious, in terms of the size of your company and your approach to marketing, when did you start hiring people to work full-time on marketing?

Blake Nixon

I'd say it was year five. We were probably 12 or 15 people when we hired our first marketing person.

So much of what we do is building trust with counterparties. Landowners and community, are you interested in hosting us and our renewable energy project for the next 30 to 50 years?

So the marketing around who we are, our brand, is to make sure that when we show up, when people Google us or whatever, you see what we care about. That's why the first thing you should read every time you read about Geronimo Power is that we're farmer-founded and we're community-focused.

And I think it's the most overlooked part of our industry, and it's to the peril of those who overlook it.

And I just hope that our industry does a good job because if somebody does a bad job, it paints the rest of the industry with the same brush. And I've seen that. We've had projects not succeed because other projects nearby were developed without that kind of community focus and lost the trust of the next-door community, which infected the area where we were trying to develop. Next thing you know, irrespective of anything we did, we've got an issue.

Learning, Leadership, and Staying Optimistic Through Uncertainty

Melissa Baldwin

Alright, so now we're going to go into professional development. And I want you to tell me, Blake, is there any professional training from your class, from your past? So, classes, books, podcasts, anything that shaped who you are today?

Blake Nixon

I have the Noel Rahn MBA, which is the best in the world, and I'm the only, I'm the sole member of the sole class. So he actually mentored a lot of people. And we lost Noel this spring. And if you saw the people that showed up to pay respects, it was an impressive set of people, obviously from the personal side, but from the professional side that he helped get started in their careers and progress their careers. A lot of people owe him a lot.

But I had a very unique education. To be able to work literally hand in hand, day in, day out, for 25 years with a legend is almost impossible to replicate. Anybody who has the opportunity to do that, do it.

Well, hey, the door's open. There are a lot of smart young people here, these interns that are here. They impressed me. I've become that sort of typical old guy who is, these kids don't get it. But I asked some questions, and they were on point. They were excited. They were self-aware. They were aware of their environment. They were aware of some of the things that have been kind of impeding progress for their generation.

So, back to answering your question about education. I think traditional education is being flipped upside down right now. And I have four children, and the world they're entering is totally different. Knowledge, because of AI, is becoming a commodity. And it's available to anybody with a computer or a phone with an internet connection. And it's instantaneous.

And some of the things that were a job for me when I was 22 and graduating from college are something AI will do automatically if you know how to ask the right question, and then the next follow-on question.

So I think that education needs to change. And young people coming up today, the advice I'm giving my kids is learn how to be a great human. Be more human. Interact. Look people in the eye. Shake hands firmly. Be fun. Be likable. That's a skill. Play sports. Play chess. Be interesting. Because as things go more and more to the computer, people want to interact with people and less with computers. I think we're going to see a full cycle of this stuff.

You can rely on the computer to give you data, but ask the right questions, be a good critical thinker, always ask why, always challenge, and then synthesize the data. This is the real skill. You need to learn how to synthesize an enormous amount of data and develop an opinion of your own.

Because if you just take what the AI gives you, you're no better than every other person, because every other person gets the same data from the AI. What do you do with it?

So I'm kind of an odd duck in this regard. I don't read management books because I don't think management books work. Because if they did, then everybody would be a great manager, because everybody can read the same book.

It's a learned experience. It's finding your own brand, your own way of thinking, your own path to being an authentic leader, an authentic manager. That's what people really respond to. People respond to people, not messages or a list or something like that. Do I like that person? Do I want to work with or for that person? Yes or no. It really comes down to the human element.

Melissa Baldwin

What do you do in your personal life to maintain your performance as a CEO? Let me ask you this way: what brings you joy?

Blake Nixon

So my dog, the first thing that brings me joy, I call her my sole source of unconditional love. So my dog is the best. I love time with my family.

I just got to celebrate Father's Day the other day. Played golf with my buddies, had a long lunch with my family and friends. For dinner, I just grilled and sat around with my family. There's nothing better than that, particularly when you've got one that's just launched into college, and she's back for probably her last summer. So I'm really grasping on to those days.

Seeing my kids accomplish things brings me joy. Those are my biggest things in life today.

But I do love winning in business. I do. I'm incredibly proud of what Geronimo is. I'm proud that I was here at inception. I'm proud that my mentor was proud of what we're accomplishing.

The week he passed away was the week we announced that Brookfield was acquiring the company. And he didn't know that we were renaming it Geronimo, but I said that I was going to try. And he was so excited, and he was so proud.

And yeah, this is my life's work. And I'm very proud of what this company is. I'm proud of what we do, and I'm proud of how we do it. So I do get joy from work. I feel very fortunate to be able to say that.

Melissa Baldwin

Nice. So how do you keep your team motivated when things are tough? And I gotta say, right now is one of those times. I'm sure you're like most everyone of my clients is looking at that Senate bill, looking at the legislation. How do you keep the team motivated?

Blake Nixon

So the first thing I tell them in tough moments like this is we've been through it before. And not only have we survived, but we've thrived. So I believe, particularly from a leader's perspective, these are the times we make pay. This is when I earn whatever I get paid, to not only keep things on the rails but look for the opportunities.

It also sharpens people. I think the industry kind of needs to get a little bit sharper. I don't think we've been as sharp as we can be as an industry. Our cost control is really bad in this industry.

I look at what we're offering to our customers. We're charging our customers twice as much for power as we did pre-IRA. That's not right. The IRA should help us deliver low-cost power to our customers.

Now, everybody else is also two to three times as expensive, right? It's really hard to get a gas turbine. It's really expensive to build a gas plant. If you can build a Duke plant, it takes a very long time and a ton of money. So it's not like we are unique in that.

There's been tremendous inflation, not just in eggs. Everybody talks about eggs. You look at the number one product from a cost inflation standpoint, according to Michael Cembalest, J.P. Morgan, is main power transformers for the electric system. The number one product in the whole economy. Look across the whole economy, that was the number one thing.

Melissa Baldwin

And gosh, do we need those, right?

Blake Nixon

We do. I'm pleased that my team was smart enough to order a whole bunch of them, breakers, and other things. We're well-positioned for this. We saw it coming, anticipated it, didn't anticipate some of the policy stuff, but we're ready for it. And I think we'll come out of it stronger.

But the industry really does need to get tighter on how we do things. Because we have to deliver for the country. We're a major part of us, winning from a geopolitical perspective.

Melissa Baldwin

Excellent. Well, Blake, this has been terrific. I just really enjoyed getting to know you. I love your perspective. I feel like I've gotten to know Noel Rahn as well, talking to you. And I just got to compliment you again on the way that you're running Geronimo.

Are there any closing remarks that you'd like to make for our listeners?

Closing Thoughts: Why the Future of Power Is Worth Building

Blake Nixon

If you're listening to this podcast, you're interested in clean energy.

I feel great to be a part of this industry because we have a true bottom line, a double bottom line, that we get to do good things, and some of us also get to do well by doing good. This is a great career. It's a great place to be. It's not easy. There are a lot of challenges. There are more challenges today than ever, but the opportunity set is bigger than ever as well.

So, for those who have the right mindset and are willing to go out and try new things, take some risks, I think there's a great future ahead for this industry and for individuals who lean in and go for it.

So thanks for the time. I really appreciate it. It was fun chatting with you, and hope we get to do it again.