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

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. 

Polsky says more power is needed along with new transmission to improve grid reliability. Communities are concerned about changing landscapes as projects swell in size and debates over land use turn political.

“The problem with the United States is whenever we deal with infrastructure, whenever we touch the government, things come to a screeching halt," Polsky said.

Invenergy has built roughly one in every 10 U.S. wind or solar projects and has one of the largest solar farms operating and under construction in the U.S., bigger than Manhattan and unfolding across 18,000 acres in Northeast Texas.

Polsky likes that renewable energy production avoids carbon emissions and air pollution, but says he isn’t an environmentalist, he is a pragmatist. Gas-fired power generation is critical for reliability and to meet ballooning power demand, he says.

“This is needed," Polsky says, bouncing an index finger on an architectural model of a gas plant, kept under a glass display case in Invenergy’s sleek Chicago headquarters. “I cannot look at somebody with a straight face and say, ‘Oh we don’t need gas at this point at all.’"

Burning natural gas emits less carbon than using coal, but is still a major source of greenhouse gases, including through methane leaks. Many environmentalists say the world needs to phase out gas as a power source. In January, President Biden paused new approvals of U.S. liquefied gas exports, citing a need to study their environmental and economic impact.

Polsky says he wishes he could just focus on building projects. He is a fixture at Invenergy’s offices, where he recently axed a hybrid work-from-home policy, arguing in-person is needed for innovation and learning. 

He is so immersed in minutiae on the biggest projects that employees sometimes joke they wish he knew a bit less. A fierce critic of consultants, he once wrote his own legal contract instead of having his attorneys handle it during a dispute that had him particularly irritated.

He left Soviet Ukraine in 1976 through a refugee program when he was 26 years old. Polsky had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering but as a Jew who wouldn’t join the Communist Party saw few job prospects. He arrived in Detroit with $500.

Polsky combed directories of utilities and engineering companies and mailed hundreds of résumés. Despite limited English, he got his foot in the door at engineering giant Bechtel doing hydraulic system calculations and later worked at Fluor, a competitor.

As the power business deregulated in the 1980s, Polsky saw an opportunity to build and own power plants. He sold his second company, called SkyGen, to Calpine, one of the country’s largest power generators, in 2001 for around $500 million.

He held a Calpine board seat, but thought it was making strategic mistakes and misreading market changes as it continued expanding. In 2001, a frustrated Polsky bolted and invested $120 million to launch Invenergy along with co-founder and longtime right hand Jim Murphy and six others. Their initial strategy was to buy both new equipment and distressed gas assets, a move that proved prescient.

Calpine filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2005, undone by heavy borrowing to aggressively build more power plants.

“Michael has been able to see around the corner," said Gale Klappa, executive chairman of WEC Energy Group, which had invested in SkyGen and has partnered with Invenergy on renewables.

The next thing around the corner was wind. Polsky saw opportunity spurred by federal tax credits, state targets, new technology and what he thought would be less local opposition to renewable energy.

“People don’t want to see fossil fuels next door to them," Polsky said. “There [were] always difficulties to get permits and we thought wait a minute, if you can do something without polluting it seems to be much easier."

Invenergy’s first wind installation was in Tennessee in 2004 and a lesson in where not to place turbines as winds proved lackluster. Its next 116 projects were in gustier places such as Idaho and Montana.

Polsky’s wind projects were hugely profitable, but he was only partially right about renewables being easier to build. Invenergy is still fighting with communities nearly everywhere it goes, for nearly every kind of project it proposes.

About one in four counties in the U.S. have enacted ordinances restricting the siting of renewable-energy facilities, according to researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Nevada, Reno.

Invenergy’s Grain Belt Express would be the country’s second-longest transmission line, delivering 5,000 megawatts across more than 840 miles, through four states and three grid operators. But some farmers and other landowners in Missouri oppose letting the lines cross their properties.

Garrett Hawkins, president of the state’s Farm Bureau, an industry group, said he is concerned about eminent domain for transmission and told regulators that Invenergy “seeks to use Missouri as flyover country to fill the pockets of distant investors."

Smaller projects that a few years ago took two or three years can now take five or longer. Securing government permits at every level—city, county, state and federal—is a struggle. Plenty of landowners and communities welcome projects, but objections about project size, wildlife impacts and noise are common, too.

A change in the presidential administration could derail plans. While most industry experts think tax credits for wind, solar and storage projects approved under the Inflation Reduction Act are likely secure, the larger concern for Invenergy and its competitors is that a Trump White House could be slow to staff agencies or appoint people who would stall approval processes.

Polsky avoids talking about his own politics, though Invenergy has a growing lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. He has personally donated mostly to Democrats, but won’t commit to a party label.

Polsky calls the energy industry a problem-solving business, and shrugs off the idea that his problems are multiplying. “As we become a bigger company we get into bigger things and we get bigger problems," he said. “So I like to say it’s like 364 bad days for one good day."