Transcriber: Trang Phạm Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
I have great news about the energy transition.
Yes.
We have all the technology we need.
Done.
What we need now are more people
to make the right decisions to make it happen.
So I’m here today to make the case
that the single most important thing we can do
to accelerate the energy transition
is to change the way we train people in energy investing.
Now, this is actually our third energy transition
in all of human history.
For hundreds of years, we had farmers scooping up manure to burn,
and lumberjacks cutting down trees.
And then we transitioned over to coal miners
digging coal out of the ground
and putting it into this new invention called a steam turbine
during the Industrial Revolution.
And fast forward 150 years,
modern mapping and drilling technology
gave us oil and gas,
the ability to extract fossil resources from deep in the ground.
But this time,
instead of taking hundreds of years,
we're going to make this next transition to clean energy in under 20.
In each of these transitions,
there’s been a workforce of innovators and operators
learning how to use different tools to produce different types of energy.
And behind them there’s been another workforce of people in finance.
As our types of energy changed, our types of finance changed alongside it.
Investors learned how to evaluate coal mines and then oil fields,
and now must learn how to evaluate battery packs and screen hydrogen
and heat pumps and more.
This time, we need a different investment model.
It’s probably not surprising to you
that in the past, the people who were making investment decisions
were teams of dedicated finance professionals.
But if we’re looking to move at 10x the speed in this transition,
we require a different model,
one where scientists and engineers and others in the energy sector
will work together with traditional finance people.
And since we want to move this fast, we need to think really inclusively
bringing together a diversity of backgrounds and experience
because the more capable people we have at the table,
the faster we will accelerate.
Now, we need to bring the chemical engineer
who understands sustainable materials,
and the electrical engineer who really knows vehicle-to-grid technology
to the table
alongside traditional financial analysts.
I’m a materials engineer by training from MIT.
And looking around me,
I’m now working in clean energy investing
and not seeing that many people with similar backgrounds,
especially at the growth stage.
That’s a real challenge because in growth stage investing,
that’s really where most of the money is, in energy.
This is technology that is already commercial
and ready to be deployed at scale.
And we have investors investing tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is exactly where we need to bring more voices together.
So when we think about what our next step is
in the growth stage of investing,
we’re thinking about bringing together
all of these different perspectives and voices.
As an engineer,
I’m thinking about efficiency,
and I love efficiency.
I’m seeing how much more efficient it would be
to bring technology experts to the table
at the start
rather than bringing them in as piecemeal consultants
during the deal process.
This is truly the age of interdisciplinary investing.
So how are we going to get this done?
It might seem kind of daunting,
this idea of training hundreds, maybe thousands of people
to understand enough finance
that they can become productive voices in investing.
It might seem like it could slow us down even
rather than speed us up.
But actually, we’ve already shown that this is possible in another sector.
Take a look at the software revolution
where in under two decades we went from computer science PhDs
to four year degrees to this idea of a coding bootcamp in 2011.
Now you can learn to develop apps in a matter of weeks
and understand enough about computer science
to be part of ideating solutions.
I applied this idea to technology and finance personally.
I came out of my engineering degree
and went into this one week finance bootcamp
with these hard-core banking analysts.
I was the only engineer in the room.
And in just one week,
I really changed my perspective about how energy works,
how solutions get deployed.
Because I learned about things
like how the income statement drives company valuation,
like how you build the cash flows,
that there are lots of different types of finance,
there’s equity, there’s debt, there’s project finance,
all these different things
that make our solutions become a reality in energy.
So let’s start this conversation.
Could we apply the same idea that we did in software to energy investing:
have short courses in rooms full of engineers and scientists
and even policymakers learning how to build financial models
for energy companies and projects?
Can we start cross-training, really cross-pollinating,
building these multidisciplinary investing teams?
If you’re seeing the same opportunity or even starting a similar experiment,
come talk to me.
We can make the fastest transition in energy history happen
if we do it together.
(Applause)