Energy Transition – The Nuclear Renaissance Is Here
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing The long-anticipated nuclear renaissance is taking shape. A combination of insatiable power demand, supportive tax and regulatory frameworks, the drive to decarbonize, and advancements in technology is driving a new wave of nuclear development in the US. Nuclear generation, like geothermal, represents clean baseload power with […]
Geothermal – A Hot Topic in Power Markets
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing As the Iran conflict grabs attention, with related supply chain dislocations and spiking commodity prices, in the background, the structural growth in demand for power from electrification and AI datacenters continues apace. The conflict is a vivid reminder that the traditional energy system is rooted in […]
Sustainable Investing: Water – Are You Thirsty?
By Andrew Wetzel, CFA, Principal, Managing Director of Sustainable Investments Unfortunately, for many people the answer to the question in the title above is yes. This is also true for many companies, particularly those in semiconductor manufacturing and data centers, where water use is critical to operations. Although water appears abundant on Earth, readily available […]
Sustainable Investing: In the Trump 2.0 Era
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing As we head into 2025 and a new administration in Washington, the levels of concern, and even fear, are elevated across the sustainability ecosystem. There is no doubt that the operating environment will change, and perhaps materially in certain areas. While some of this concern is […]
Sustainable Investing Spotlight: Corporate Decarbonization – Creating System Scale Through Bankability
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing The tension is palpable. Are large tech companies and their cloud/AI spending compounding climate change, or are they part of the solution? Investors are increasingly asking this question. Picking up from our newsletter last quarter on powering GenAI, this quarter we are digging deeper into corporate […]
Sustainable Investing Spotlight: Powering GenAI – Climate Consequences
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing We are living through a major transformation in how computing works, with the shift from serial processing to parallel processing and from CPUs (central processing units) to GPUs (graphics processing units), both types of microprocessors. GPU chips, which can run trillions of operations per second, have […]
Sustainable Investing: EVS – A Bumpy Ride on The Adoption Curve
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing News headlines in the US related to electric vehicles (EVs) have been broadly negative over the last six months as a number of headwinds have emerged to take the shine off of EV enthusiasm. While the near-term outlook remains somewhat uncertain, the reality is that all […]
Sustainable Investing: Review and Outlook
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing As we look back on the sustainable investing market in 2023, it is easy to recount challenges such as the politicization of ESG and valuation compression in clean-tech companies, but there were also a few positive structural developments that should provide a more stable foundation going […]
Sustainable Investing: IRA, One Year In A Tale of Two Markets
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. This classic Dickens line captures the stark divide between clean-tech fixed asset investment in the private sector and sentiment in the clean-tech corner of the public equity market. At the center of this conflict […]
Sustainable Investing: Natural Capital – Broadening Beyond Climate
By Andrew Wetzlel, CFA®, Managing Director of Sustainable Investing In the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report released earlier this year, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse ranked 4th in severity on the top-10 risks over a 10-year period, behind only climate-related risks. Economists, investors, regulators, and other stakeholder groups are all increasingly focusing […]