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This transcript has been generated using machine learning technology. While this technology was trained with CIBC terminology, it may contain errors.
Tom Heintzman: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape. I&#8217;m your host, Tom Heintzman. Please join me as we explore today&#8217;s most pressing issues with special guests that will give you some new perspectives and help you make sense of what really matters.
Pull Quote (Jon Goldberg): The vast majority of the content during CERAWeek actually wasn&#8217;t about oil and gas. It was about artificial intelligence. It was about the power needs and the need for clean firm power from the market broadly. That was seen as the most interesting, complex, exciting, challenging investment opportunity.
Tom Heintzman: CERAWeek is one of the world&#8217;s leading energy conferences. This year&#8217;s 44th annual event took place in Houston, where it generally occurs, from March 23rd to 27th. It brings together global leaders to discuss the accelerating convergence of AI, technology, and energy. Critically, discussions also centered on the rising geopolitical risks amid a backdrop of significant disruptions to the global energy system from conflicts such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in Iran and Russia&#8217;s war on Ukraine. Energy security, supply chain resilience and energy diversification were top of the agenda. On today&#8217;s episode, we&#8217;ll dive deeper into key observations from CERAWeek 2026 and why CERAWeek reinforced convictions that the most compelling investment opportunities sit at the intersection of AI proliferation and energy efficiency. I&#8217;m delighted to introduce my guest, Jonathan Goldberg, founder and CEO of Carbon Direct. Jon is an energy and power expert with more than 20 years of upstream, downstream and power market experience. Jon is also the founder of Carbon Direct Capital, a New York based asset management firm investing in clean energy, decarbonization solutions and related technologies. Jon currently sits on the boards of Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy and Village Health Works. He is also an advisor to Lawrence Livermore National Lab on negative emissions. Good afternoon, Jon. Welcome and thank you for joining the show.
Jon Goldberg: Great to see you, thanks for having me.
Tom Heintzman: Jon, we typically start with providing our listeners with some context. We featured Carbon Director on the show in the past, primarily on themes involving carbon management. Can you provide an overview of Carbon Direct, especially as it relates to the asset management side of your business?
Jon Goldberg: Yeah, definitely, and thanks for having us back. There&#8217;s two things that we do at, at Carbon Direct. First is we have a full service consulting firm where we work with mostly Fortune 100 companies, but a large swath of companies, on their decarbonization and carbon management goals. So that&#8217;s everything from clean power, procurement, power accounting, grid systems, and carbon removal. And we also operate Carbon Direct Capital, which is a leading growth equity investor investing in and out of our commingled funds into areas like clean firm power and carbon management. Importantly, the sort of binding ties between the two organizations as we take a very science first approach to everything that we do &#8211; there&#8217;s about 70 scientists and engineers on our team &#8211; so we&#8217;re really focused on bringing that technical expertise, both to our consulting work at Carbon Direct Inc, and then also as we&#8217;re thinking through investment returns, making sure that we&#8217;re getting the best technical underwriting.
Tom Heintzman: Great, so you and your team were on the ground at CERAWeek as were thousands, not tens of thousands of others. It&#8217;s a big event. What were the top takeaways that you gleaned from the event and big thoughts and revelations over the course of the week?
Jon Goldberg: Yeah, it was a fascinating conference. And, as my background before Carbon Direct invested in upstream and downstream and traditional energy for a long time. So it was a really interesting sort of confluence of different worlds at CERAWeek. And honestly, the biggest takeaway was even in the middle of such a significant conflict in the Mideast and a conference that historically had been very focused on hydrocarbons, the geopolitics of energy, and of course, Dan Yergin’s work. The vast majority of the content during CERAWeek actually wasn&#8217;t about oil and gas, it was about artificial intelligence. It was about the power needs and the need for clean firm power. From the market broadly, that was seen as the most interesting, complex, exciting, challenging investment opportunity. And the other interesting thing, and again, this is, going back from my time as an oil and gas investor as well, is the hyperscalers really add a new dynamic to this conversation. One, the speed that they&#8217;re looking to move is really something very different from the industry has seen in the past. The need to get this magnitude of power, this amount of capex so quickly is very different. You&#8217;re now looking at capex from the hyperscalers that are exceeding or equaling oil and gas upstream, which is really, really remarkable change over the last few years. And again, that this speed is really challenging the industry to move very quickly and to try to address bottlenecks that have been in the power grid for a long period of time and are really being pressed both on getting more efficient power to the grid and getting more of it. And the industries, and sometimes these industries speak different languages, trying to figure this out in real time was the big takeaway from us, from CERAWeek.
Tom Heintzman: Jon, let&#8217;s pull on that a little bit. The first of all, it&#8217;s fascinating to have a new player in the room with the hyperscalers, both their capital, but also just the way they approach problems and the speed that they deal with that. On this program, we&#8217;ve talked about electrification a lot, and obviously data centers are going to add a lot to demand, as will electric vehicles, and changes in heating, et cetera. Power demand set to grow by, depending on who you talk to, more than 3.5 % per year on average for the rest of this decade with energy coming from more renewables, but also more natural gas and nuclear. How, in your view, do we meet this demand? What does it take on the supply side in order to build as fast as the data centers and all of the other users would have us build?
Jon Goldberg: I think it&#8217;s gonna be tricky. I would say from our conversations with our clients and what we&#8217;re seeing in the industry, the demand is very real. The demand for compute and for gigawatts of power is absolutely there. The challenge is going to be doing it within the system that we have today. And what hyperscalers and the ecosystem is doing is just about everything. So, the biggest challenge the industry is seeing today is really not insufficient demand. It&#8217;s the speed and time that people need to get power. So for us, a big takeaway from CERAWeek and what we see in our investment thesis as well, gas is really figuring most prominently as the practical, scalable near term power needs. It&#8217;s going to drive a meaningful share of capacity additions. Gas, I would say, is seen in a more favorable light from the hyperscalers than ever before because of the need for clean, firm power, where the power needs are growing so quickly and the need to have consistent baseload power is such a key element of the AI story that gas is clearly capturing most of the attention. What that means for carbon and the carbon element is complicated and multifold. We do see significant knock-on implications for carbon capture, for example, where because gas is quick, has significant capacity, carbon capture on natural gas, so blue electrons is an actionable pathway, really for the first time for a lot of the hyperscalers. And you&#8217;ve seen Google, for example, just signed a large power purchase agreement at a NAT GAS project in Illinois. You&#8217;re going to see some more of those coming down the pipeline as well. So that was really a big feature. Other areas that got a ton of attention, particularly at CERAWeek were in geothermal. That is something that maybe uniquely these days is quite bipartisan in the support. The administration&#8217;s done a lot of work on supporting geothermal, on getting money to enhance geothermal. And I would say that took a lot of the air time at CERA and for good reason. Nuclear and fusion is another interesting area that&#8217;s obviously gotten a lot of attention. I&#8217;d say there, there&#8217;s a little bit of a break between where the tech community sees that going, which is a very interesting 24/7 clean firm power option, but just where the realistic timeline to bring on significant amount of nuclear power are not exactly consistent with the timelines that are needed for the data center construction. So lots of different angles that people are trying to figure out.
Tom Heintzman: Jon, one combination you didn&#8217;t really mention was renewables plus storage. Any comment on that and whether it can compete with gas, particularly if you&#8217;re thinking about adding carbon capture on top of gas?
Jon Goldberg: Yeah, excellent point. Renewables and storage, obviously a significant amount and will continue to be a significant amount. I&#8217;d say the big questions from the audience were there&#8217;s been a lot of innovations in storage, battery technology, the duration of that storage, longevity of that storage, I&#8217;d say all else equal. And you can see this in recent announcements from Meta and from Microsoft, all else equal. Gas has been the preferred for large scale deployments. But that is not to diminish renewables as a significant driver. It is not, however, where we&#8217;ve seen these large scale deployments really focus these recent announcements.
Tom Heintzman: Interesting. Often it’s what you don&#8217;t hear that&#8217;s just as important as what you do here. Were there any notable topics that were absent from the discussions, perhaps that had been talked about in recent years, but are no longer in vogue? And if so, what were they and what&#8217;s your theory on why they were less emphasized this year?
Jon Goldberg: My background with CERAWeek is traditionally as a hydrocarbon conference, and then for a few years, there was, I&#8217;d say pretty intense focus on net zero decarbonization. On the main stage, you&#8217;d see the CEOs of the major oil and gas companies talk aggressively about net zero. The tone of that has changed. It has not gone away, but it&#8217;s a different conversation and I think it&#8217;s important to state that. So there was much less than in previous years on, for example, hydrogen, for example, sustainable aviation fuel, for example, carbon removal. I think what might be missed in this is although this is a global conference and brings together people from all over, heavy Mideast presence, for example, I found some of the conversations a little light on what actually is going on in Europe in particular around sustainable aviation fuel. Where there very much are binding mandates that are coming into play and are driving significant off takes in low carbon fuels. I think that was a little bit under discussed in the market context, but there was definitely a change in tone. You could even sort of observe it from the types of presentations and the naming in Agora, which is the sustainability area of CERAWeek.
Tom Heintzman: Last question, but it&#8217;s the one probably the listeners have been waiting for. How do you translate all of these ideas into investment theses and ways to make money? How are you planning on translating these insights into investment opportunities and the success of your current fund and future funds?
Jon Goldberg: We just led or co-led with Ormat, a publicly traded geothermal company, and invested into a company called Sage, which we think has the leading technology in enhanced geothermal. That continues to be a big focus of what we&#8217;re doing. This is 24/7, clean, firm, power partnerships with Meta. We think really well poised to grow. We&#8217;re looking at other opportunities within that space. I&#8217;d say the other thing that we&#8217;re really focused on is getting more out of each unit of power. So, if you cannot bring more power onto the grid, which is what everybody is trying to do, how you utilize the gigawatts, how you utilize the megawatts power that you actually receive in the most efficient way is super important. So we invested recently in a company called Nor Office. We did that deal with Microsoft where they actually use optical compute. It&#8217;s a way of getting about 50X in the early trials, more output per unit of input from much more highly efficient ways of computation. And all of the hyperscalers, including the ones that we partnered with on the deal, are incredibly focused on maximizing the amount of compute they can get from limited power streams. That has a cost benefit for the hyperscaler and it has the ability to just drive more. So those types of opportunities within data centers, both on the chip basis, but also on ways that energy efficiency and grid efficiency can be run are very important to us. A third area I&#8217;d highlight is in grid efficiency. So in ways that data centers, and we published on this recently, but the one way that you can get online quicker is if you work essentially as a way of driving efficiency onto the grid. So you agree to certain areas of demand curtailment, you have backup power, so you&#8217;re not losing capacity. And you do that because it allows you to get onto the grid more quickly. And there are some software companies that are really at the forefront of that. It&#8217;s something Carbon Direct Inc. does as well. Those are really interesting to us.
Tom Heintzman: Jon, just to build on that, our listeners have heard us talk in the past about demand response. And so the ability to call on data centers to basically dial down their load, dial down their usage at peak times, then utilities will often be able to allow them to come onto the grid more quickly because they have less concern about them being a capacity constraint on the grid.
Jon Goldberg: That&#8217;s right. And I&#8217;m happy to send it to your clients afterwards, but we&#8217;ve done a lot of work on this and just showing how much benefits there are from this type of load efficiency. Grid gets strained actually on very few occasions during the year when you force load shedding. So when you force businesses unexpectedly to shut down because power literally is not available. It is incredibly economically destructive. So the value of managing that type of capacity constraint is very high. So there&#8217;s a really compelling tradeoff for load management within the system. And we think that&#8217;s an important thesis moving forward.
Tom Heintzman: Well, thank you very much for your time, Jon. CERAWeek is a big event on the annual calendar. So, having your insight and conclusions from it is very helpful. So thanks for joining us and thanks to the listeners for tuning in.
Jon Goldberg: Pleasure. Thanks so much.
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CERAWeek insights: AI meets energy innovation

Tom Heintzman

MD & Vice-Chair, Energy Transition & Sustainability

CIBC Capital Markets

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