With the announcement of CIBC’s pledge to support tripling global energy 2050, hosts Ines Serrao and James Wright are joined by Stephen Comello, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Initiatives at Energy Futures Initiative, to discuss nuclear energy’s pivotal role in America’s clean energy transition, ambitious growth targets, and the key challenges and opportunities ahead for the industry.
Intro: Welcome to The Energy Shift, a podcast series focusing on the rapidly evolving energy landscape with hosts Ines Serrao and James Wright.
Ines Serrao: Hi, James. Hi, Steve. It's very nice to have you in the podcast today. We're going to talk about a very interesting theme. And so I'll just jump right into it. Nuclear power's role in the energy mix is expected to grow over the next decades to meet the exponential increasing power demand. Nuclear has the potential to provide the benefit of baseload power without the same emissions from traditional thermal power. And given the nuclear in the US has been largely stagnant, it's time we refresh our knowledge from a true expert. And so I'm very pleased to have Stephen Camello join us in the podcast to help us explore what will take for nuclear energy to play a central role in America's energy future. Steve is the Senior Vice-President of Strategic Initiatives at Energy Futures Initiative in Washington, DC. At EFI, Steve is also the Executive Director of Nuclear Scaling Initiative and Managing Director of the Energy Futures Finance Forum. Welcome, Steve. It's nice to have you on the podcast.
Steve Comello: Ines, happy to be here. Thanks so much for the opportunity.
James Wright: Yeah, likewise, Steve, great to see you. So let's get into it. This is a great topic from some of the stuff we've been talking about recently. And as Ines said, really, really newsworthy stuff given what's happening at the moment. I guess before we talk about, you know, the industry and what's going on. Let's just understand you a bit more, Steve. Tell us a bit about your background. It's great. You and I were chatting before this and you're not the typical developer, financier type person we have on this. So it's great to have someone from a bit of a more interesting background. Tell us about yourself.
Steve Comello: Sure, happy to. So as Ines mentioned, I'm at the EFI Foundation, a think tank based in DC. And essentially, we're all about delivering evidence-based pragmatic solutions for the world's energy challenges. Philanthropically funded, we were founded by and still run by former Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz. We do four things: thought leadership, rigorous analysis, convening, and education. I've been with EFI for about three and a half years now. And before that, I was a faculty member at Stanford Business School. I was there for about a dozen years. And I spent a lot of time focused on cost competitiveness of different energy and environmental technologies, thinking through the intersection of policy and finance and how you bring first of a kind technologies and make them nth of a kind industries. And I also spent a lot of time thinking about the management of innovation. How do organizations gain the capability to navigate the energy transition? I'm an engineer by training. I have a lot of experience in and around project finance, engineering, and just thinking about, how do you wrap all of that together to actually get deals done? Originally from Canada and now based in Washington DC.
James Wright: That's excellent. I'm already feeling intellectually inferior to you, Stephen, so we're going to have to try and sound smart up against you on this one. Okay, Ines, why don't you take it away?
Ines Serrao: Yeah, it also seems very appropriate to have a Canadian on this CIBC podcast. So I feel like we're all friends. Thanks, Steve. That's very interesting. To understand the nuclear industry as of today in the US, because it has been stagnant for such a long time, as I said, in the industry. Could you give us a little bit of a history lesson and explain to how we got where we are today in this industry in the US?
Steve Comello: Yeah, so we may be stagnant in terms of bills and hopefully that's not for long, but the US is the clear leader when it comes to civilian nuclear reactors. We're the world's leader in number of operating reactors right now. We got 94. Our net electrical capacity is 97 gigawatts. That's a lot. The next closest actually is about a tie between France and China, and they have about 61 each. China is building a lot right now. The US is not building anything at the moment, but the US has essentially been the leader in nuclear since the 1950s. There was a huge boom in the 60s and the 70s, and then right after Three Mile Island and some change in regulations, some change in market conditions, then the new build started to slow down. But we have an excellent operating fleet. Nuclear produces about 20% of US electricity and is 50% of all the non-emissions or clean electricity that is produced in the US. So it has a great legacy. There is great strength in new reactor design and in operations, there's still a little bit of work to be done in terms of project development and construction. But the belief is that once you start getting that underway, then just like any other skill set, any other industrial capacity, you'll be able to execute projects on time and on budget like other countries that are quite successful in this, like Russia, China, and South Korea.
Ines Serrao: That's very cool. It's good stats. I didn't appreciate how much of the nuclear is important on the clean energy space. And now the US has a goal to at least triple the current capacity by 2050 and maintain its global leadership position, as you just mentioned. How do we plan on achieving this goal? And how is the industry thinking about to get there?
Steve Comello: Yeah. And I would say it's even more ambitious than that. Recently, the administration signed a set of nuclear related executive orders around May of 2025. And one of them actually stated the goal of quadrupling current nuclear capacity in the US by mid-century. So if you think about that, that's an incremental anywhere from 250 to 270 gigawatts. So just to put that in perspective, the most recent build in the US with respect to new nuclear is Vogel 3 and 4 in Georgia. That was done by Southern Company and it's now being operated by its subsidiary, Georgia Power. Each of those is 1.1 gigawatts. So you're talking about building the equivalent of 200 of those and that is remarkable and if we're to do this say over the next 25 years, then if you just do the simple math, you're talking about doing quite a bit every year, for 25 years. I also want to put this in a greater context of what the world is trying to do If you think back to COP28 in Dubai, 22 nations then and now 31 have signed up to this pledge to triple nuclear globally. And if you think about that, that is about a terawatt or 1.2 terawatts, somewhere in between that. And that's anywhere between 50 and 60 gigawatts a year, every year for, until mid-century. What I like to illuminate with these statistics is we've never done this before. The high watermark for building nuclear globally was 1983, likely when none of us on this podcast were alive. Back then we built 33 gigawatts. That's the high watermark. Now globally, we need to build 50% more than we've ever done and do that every year for decades on end. So that's going to be an immense mobilization of capital, of talent, of supply chain to make this happen. Okay. Given that broader global context, now let's go focus back into the US. So the way that I think about the nuclear industry and getting ready to be able to achieve such an ambitious target of quadrupling nuclear in the next 25 years, I think of it as a layer cake. And here it's starting with the easiest stuff and then moving toward the more complicated or once it's going to take more effort. So there's four layers to this. The bottom layer is keeping the existing operating fleet running. They run like a top. Again, the US has world-class expertise in operations. On the whole, the nuclear fleet achieves a capacity factor, depending on the year, anywhere between 91 and 95%, which is incredible. Thinking about all the hours in the year that for these reactors at their capacity to be on for 95% of all the hours in a year is quite an achievement and it's taken about 40 years of experience to get that. So there's a lot of accumulated expertise that has gone into achieving that result. So keep those running. You already have about 100. You want to keep those 100. The next is start thinking about can you un-mothball or resurrect reactors that have been shut down, and not the ones that have been shut down because of technical issues or have been out of service for a very long time. There are about a handful of reactors that we think have shut down prematurely from an operational and technical perspective. They actually shut down due to economic reasons, that they were out of the money given the market forces and the willingness to pay at the time. When you think about the resurrection of Three Mile Island, when you think about Palisades, when you think about Dwayne Arnold, these are reactors that have a lot of good infrastructure components there. There's work to be done to bring them back online, but most of what you need is there, and you would be able to bring these reactors on in over a two to four year time span. Here they're quite cost competitive. You're thinking about if you're able to secure a PPA in about 110 to $120 a megawatt hour, then it makes sense to bring these back on. Total addressable market there is in the single digit gigawatts though. There's not many of these fallow reactors lying around. And I think at this stage, given hyperscaler demand for electricity for their data centers, that market is essentially tapped. There may be one or two more, but that's about it. Then you're going to hit the ceiling. Okay, that's layer two. Layer three is uprates. Now, uprates basically means for every reactor, it has a known capacity, a nameplate capacity. If you're able to change some of the components within that, you may be able to increase that nameplate capacity, changing some pumps, changing some other mechanical and electrical infrastructure, and you could get a boost anywhere between 5 and 20%. There's about 40 reactors in the US that would be eligible for this. And so if you think about that, you might be bringing on an extra 10 to 12 gigawatts overall. And again, the cost there, probably about $5,000 to $6,000 a kilowatt. It makes sense to do in those regions. And it is something that can be done fairly quickly at a reasonable cost. If you start doing the math, I've only gotten you to about 130, 140 gigawatts. Where are you going to get the extra 230 and 240? That's new builds. Basically, what happened at Vogel at scale. And here, the new builds, I'd like to break it down into different kinds of technologies and different form factors. So you have the Gen 3 Plus. So that's the light water reactors that we're pretty much familiar with that use typically low enriched uranium and they use water as a moderator and a coolant and a working fluid. The Gen 4 reactors basically use different fuel forms and different moderators. The fuel forms, some of the Gen 4 reactors, not all, but some of them use what's known as high assay low enriched uranium. So if we're thinking about the traditional reactors of 5% enriched uranium, some of these use up to 20%. That's the threshold. So these are the general technology types. The form factors are the big reactors, the large gigawatt scale like the AP1000s, the Wessinghouse AP1000s that you got in Vogel 3 and 4. There are Gen 3 plus small modular reactors. And those look like what is being built in Canada right now by OPG, the GE Itachi BWX300. Those are 300 megawatt. They still use the basic technology that we know works well and is proven over time. And then you have another Gen 4 kind of SMR. And think about an X-Energy or a Kairos. These are leading Gen 4 SMR reactors. And then you start getting smaller. They're XMRs. And there are a variety of firms that are playing in the 10 to 50 megawatt space, where there it's much less about building large reactors in the field and construction, and it's much more of a manufacturing base. So think about startups that are like Aalo, like Oklo, and [Taoris] and so forth. And then you have the micro reactors. And here you're thinking about like a nuclear battery, anything that is in the one to five megawatts. And there are a variety of startups. And in fact, the US army is really thinking about how to deploy these micro reactors in their bases to spur that market. So this kind of gives you a sense for the tapestry that we have. We have different kinds of technologies and we have different sizes of reactors and they may all find their way into the market over the next 25 years to fill up this remit of 250 more gigawatts of capacity.
James Wright: So Steve, that was really insightful. Again, that layer cake image, I think is very clear for everyone to follow. Just what I was thinking about when you were saying that though, is when we particularly talk about, as you said, those more exotic designs that are coming through now, if I think about, you know, the rest of the broader energy industry, obviously, CCGT design has not fundamentally changed much in a long time. The solar and wind worlds have pretty homogenous designs now in their respective sub-sectors, which kind of helps them deploy at scale pretty quickly. I can see one of the potential challenges with SMRs is that there seems to be a lot of potential designs out there right now. So how do you think about that in terms of accelerating speed of deployment in that space because obviously only a few of those are going to be winners and get licensed and make it through to, you know, kind of steel in the ground. So how do you think about that challenge?
Steve Comello: Yeah, it is a challenge, but it also is a great opportunity. You'll see competitive forces really take over. There's about 120 different reactor designs out there that are being pushed forward. And this is very similar to the automotive industry in the 1920s. You had something like 200 automotive manufacturers and designers back then. And by the end of the decade, you had something like the high teens. Anytime you have a new form of technology that is trying to navigate product market fit, you're going to have a variety of ideas on how to address that. I would say that there's going to be a number of down selections that naturally occur given what customers want, right? And at the intersection of what customer demands are and what is technically feasible, what the talent is available to provide, what is the availability of the supply chain, all of these will go into selecting what the right technologies and what the sequencing of those technologies would look like. There is a little bit of a tailwind that is provided by, at least in the US, the government. There is the ARDP, the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program that has put quite a bit of capital into advancing technologies. Two front runners within that, the most advanced, are two Gen 4 reactors, one being the XE100 coming out of XEnergy that is working with Dow Chemical to prove that technology out. And that technology has already entered into licensing. A licensing application has been put forward for it for a four-pack in Seadrift, Texas. And then you have the Natrium Reactor in Kemmer, Wyoming, put forward by TerraPower. These are two of the more advanced in terms of just the overall technology cycle, it's still to be proven what the ultimate economic case is. Another advanced technology would be Hermes reactor put forward by Kairos. These are some of the front runners there, but I would say that the Gen 4 are a little bit behind the Gen 3 plus simply because there are new technologies and the industry and the supply chain may not be completely ready for them and also the regulatory environment may not necessarily be ready for them at this very second. It's very close though. But if you think about what can be built right now, the AP1000, the large reactor that we know that we've just recently built, that's something that can be built right now. I would argue that you should go and build what you know. This is a massive industrial project to resurrect the nuclear development and construction industry in the US. A lot of the skills that will go into building what you know can then be recycled in building the next generation of reactors, which broadly includes SMRs. I do see a future where there's going to be a mix of large reactors, small modular reactors, XMRs and microreactors because there's many niches to be filled, both in providing electricity, but then one of the benefits of these Gen 4 reactors, some of these Gen 4 reactors, is they provide industrial heat. They may be able to aid in industrial decarbonization for those industries that are seeking that. I mean, that is one motivation why Dow Chemical is looking at XEnergy. The power is one thing, but it's actually the high quality heat that would be useful for their chemical synthesis processes.
James Wright: That's really interesting. So I guess maybe just to, in my simple parlance, think about what you just said then, to get where we need to get to in the short to medium term on the supply side, we kind of need to kind of maybe stick with the reliable minivan of the three plus. And then in parallel, we can keep developing the racing car Gen 4s. Is that the way to think about it?
Steve Comello: Yeah, and again, market forces will determine the winners here. But I say that there is enough market there. Even if you just do the simple math, we're talking about over the next 25 years globally, something like a 10 to 15 trillion dollar opportunity. If you think about who's winning that race right now, it's mainly China and Russia and South Korea. The US is not really seen in the development and construction space and especially in really pushing reactors exports overseas. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity in Africa and Southeast Asia and India and the Middle East that are essentially all up for grabs. Those markets are really looking for domestic deployments of technology providers, so that they would feel comfortable accepting these technologies on their land. I mean, this is one reason why the AP1000 is getting a lot of traction in Central and Eastern Europe. So I'd say that the market opportunity is huge. I think we're going to have multiple winners. Market forces will determine who those winners are, but get started on what you know now so that you actually have the industrial might and capability to build all the other reactor types that may come down after the fact.
Ines Serrao: Thank you. And I don't know if listeners are going to be offended by James's minivan comments, but I hope not. Minivans are great.
James Wright: Nothing against minivans, hey. They take our kids around the suburbs very reliably. They're great, great vehicles.
Steve Comello: Just because something is a Gen 3 versus a Gen 4, it doesn't mean that Gen 3 is somehow old and tired and not advanced. These are highly advanced. These are light years away from the reactors that you typically think about, that you would see on The Simpsons, for example. We're talking about immense achievements in efficiency, in operational ease, in passive safety systems. These are very advanced machines. And so don't get caught up that Gen 4 somehow is way more advanced than Gen 3. We're just talking about a technology difference rather than anything else.
James Wright: Yeah. Well said. Okay.
Ines Serrao: I'll switch topics a little bit and talk about the path to commercialization of new facilities. We've kind of touched on this, but building entirely new nuclear reactors is a major undertaking. And most recently, when Arai with Vogel, which made headlines for being seven years late and with costs being double the original. Realistically, if you had to guess, Steve, how long do you think it takes to bring a new nuclear facility, a large scale one, from project development start to operation? And what are the main factors influencing that timeline? And what lessons can the industry learn from Vogel?
Steve Comello: It's worth talking about Vogel. Indeed, given publicized original estimates and cost and original estimates and schedule, it came over budget and beyond schedule. Yes, absolutely. But a few things were at play there. Some of them are lessons learned that we can definitely ingest and do better next time. And others were actually idiosyncratic that actually, I believe, paint a darker picture on Vogel than would otherwise happen if you were going to go and rebuild such a project. So one thing that people need to remember is the two reactors within Vogel, that was actually part of a larger order book that was decided upon in the early 2010s. What happened then? Well, two things happened. One, you had the shale boom and given that you had immense cost reductions in natural gas plus market structure meant that bulk power became a lot cheaper and essentially nuclear couldn't necessarily compete under certain conditions. But I think the other issue is Fukushima. Fukushima cast a very icy bathwater all over the industry and there were many orders that were going to go forward that were rescinded. So essentially you had an order book of something like 12 AP1000s. Now that became four. Two were supposed to go into South Carolina and two into Georgia. Just think about what happens with the unit economics. You were going to spread a lot of this reactor cost over 12 units and now it's four, right? So immediately your cost goes up. Second is there was a new licensing scheme that was used instead of, it isn't necessarily, we don't need to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but instead of part 50, part 52 was used. And this was a new licensing approach, a combined operating and construction license, that was fairly new to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and those who are building reactors. Anytime something is new, you know that it's just going to take longer because you're going to figure out things as you go. So that's another factor. A factor on top of that is given certain incentives, reconstruction started with about 22% of the design completed. And if anyone has done any type of renovation in their house, if you have 22% of the design completed, you're going to make a lot of, let's call it changes in the field. And anytime you make a change, that costs money and that increases time. Then let's not forget about the pandemic. We had COVID. That put a tremendous pressure on the workforce that was there as well. That is something that I believe is quite idiosyncratic. I hope we don't have more pandemics that are overlaid with the construction of new nuclear. And then the final element is we had this huge boom in natural gas, as I mentioned before, and export terminals when it comes to liquefied natural gas. So a lot of the workforce that could be working, you know, pipe fitting and welding and so forth that could be working on nuclear plant, actually were poached to go to these other opportunities. Taken all together, it's actually a testament that the reactor did finish when it did and in the timeframe that it did. And with 2X the cost, I will also say that China also did the same thing. They built two reactors that was over schedule and over cost. The difference is that once they had those two reactors completed, similar, these were reactors that were based off of the AP1000, the Wessinghouse AP1000 design, they went and they ordered eight more. And so now you see China basically being able to, the estimates are they're able to finish these reactors in four and five year chunks, which is like any other industrial process, the uncertainty is much lower. You have a well-trained workforce. You have a robust supply chain. We could get there. The only difference is that after Vogel three and four, we thought, well, this was so expensive and this was so time consuming that maybe we shouldn't do that again. And there was a little bit of that that might've been true, but now you're seeing this immense hunger for clean, firm power, driven mainly by the hyperscalers now in the short term. But just think about overall electrification of the US economy, which means that nuclear will have its place. So we're being forced back into building these reactors. I would say one key lesson learned is just project management 101. Have your construction documents completely aligned. Bring in the workforce that has built these before. We already have some of that now given Vogel three and four. We could even think about focusing on supply chain readiness, there's a lot here where there's a higher confidence given that we've built these reactors where you can fix price more of these contracts, the overrun risk then starts to decrease. These are some of the lessons learned and this doesn't apply only to Vogel and the AP1000, but it can ramify to a number of different industries as well. The last thing I'd like to pick up upon is this is why it's really important to focus on restarts and uprates. Because restarts and uprates can start now. And a lot of the skill sets, a lot of the project management, a lot of the craft, engineering, welders, electricians, pipe fitters, all of that workforce can be deployed now and trained on those, bring nuclear reactor capacity up on those projects and then they can be folded over into new builds.
Ines Serrao: That's very interesting. also like with my banker hat on, it's quite interesting because it sounds exactly like any sort of project finance that we manage on our side. And so I cannot wait to start working on this. like, for example, the design that you mentioned, we typically never see a project start the financing without at least 60% of the design starting. So it's quite surprising to me to hear that they started that process with only 22%. And I'm sure there were many reasons to agree to that at the time, but in hindsight, this sounds like it caused a lot of trouble.
James Wright: Yeah, I agree, Ines. And also Steve, with everything you just ran through with some of those kind of headwinds that we've had the last few years, is it fair to summarize to say we've just lost a bit of the kind of national muscle memory in this industry? Like we've been a leader, we've obviously built a ton of this stuff going back in the 60s, 70s, etc. Now, then we stopped building a lot of that supply chain and institutional knowledge that's got kind of lost and atrophied. Now we've got to kind of get the muscle memory back. Is that a fair way of thinking about it?
Steve Comello: I think so. And you can get it back. There's no doubt. It's like any other skill. Look, before Vogel, we hadn't really built any new reactors for about 20 or 30 years. And if you haven't practiced in 30 years, you're not really going to be good at it. And we can learn a lot from our friends and our competitors. If you speak to, say, the CEO of KHNP, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power. Two things are evident when you speak with him. Number one is they've been building a reactor somewhere around the world since 1989, right? So they have that institutional knowledge just within the firm and they keep spreading that and they recycle that to get better and better at project management and project execution. The second is once key folks retire, they're immediately hired back as consultants just to make sure that that institutional knowledge doesn't atrophy during, let's call it, flabby parts in in the pipeline. And that is essentially what is needed. Overall, I think having the target that the US does, I think having the interest now and the capital that's starting to align on the sidelines for new nuclear, I think we can get there. We just need to get over a few humps that are preventing us to really get started on order books of new nuclear builds.
Ines Serrao: Thanks, Steve. That's super interesting. Again, shifting for another angle in this conversation, there seems to be some promising in the industry with some new technologies coming up. What technology risks would you highlight for new designs? And what risks from those designs would you highlight that the industry should be addressing right now?
Steve Comello: There's a lot of specific technologies that have their own wrinkles. I'd like to bring this to something that would probably touch upon multiple reactors, and that's fuel. Fuel is going to be a bottleneck in two dimensions, especially for the US. The first is, last year, there was a bill that was passed in Congress that bans Russian fuel from, or uranium products from entering the US. And the US fuel supply, 24% of that comes from Russia. So where are we going to get that from? In the US, we actually have very little domestic enrichment capacity. And enrichment is basically taking the uranium and enriching it to the right level so that it can be used in a nuclear reaction. Once you actually have the enriched uranium, then you have to go and put it, there's something called fuel fabrication, and I think we have enough capacity for that. But enrichment is something that we don't really have a sufficient amount for us to be, let's call it energy independent for that regard. We rely on Russia, we rely on our friends in Europe and elsewhere. So if 24% is going to come offline by 2028, where might we get this enriched fuel from? That is a really good question. There are new facilities that are being expanded in the US, but it takes some time and we still think there's going to be a gap there, especially if Europe goes in and bans Russian fuel as well. Then they're going to be searching for their own enrichment capacity and that will affect not just new builds but existing reactors as well. So that's just fuel overall and enrichment capacity. The second is HALU. So this is instead of 5%, this is now 20% and outside of Russia and China, there is no commercial capacity to produce 20% enriched uranium. And that is a key chicken and egg bottleneck when it comes to these advanced reactors that use, like the Gen 4 reactors that use HALU. There is not enough of a market signal to go and cause investment in the fuel. And because the fuel doesn't show up or the enriched uranium doesn't show up, then there's less of an appetite to invest in the reactor technologies. There is a HALU availability program within the US DOE. There's some wrinkle on that. And I would expect that some updates to what the US government can do to make that program a little bit better, to break that chicken and egg issue. I'm going to be looking forward to that. One final element is with some of these reactors, these Gen 4 reactors, they put the fuel in a form called Triso. It's like a ball. It looks like a big billiard ball. And it goes into what's known as a pebble bed reactor. It's a brilliant design. The issue that we think is everyone is coming up with their own standard for this Triso fuel. And so you could end up with a world where you have pretty expensive fuel because everyone has their own bespoke design. I would think over time as the reactor designs mature that we'll be able to get to some standardization, but we're not there yet.
Ines Serrao: Awesome. Thank you, Steve. That's all very cool. I would love to continue to talk about all of this. And perhaps we can bring you into the podcast again to talk more in depth about these topics. But I think we need to wrap this one up. And so this may be my favorite part of the podcast. So it would be great to know what shifted you guys this week. And so, James, I'll pass it on to you to ask what shifted your week this week.
James Wright: Okay. Well, all right. I'll kick off. I had a utility problem this week. So, I had a water leak in my basement and I had lost internet. You can guess which one of those stressed me out the most. It was, you know, I can just about deal with leaking pipes and puddles of water, but, you know, as you guys know, when the internet stops, life comes to a screeching halt. I mean, it's crazy, you know. The serious point actually did make me think on a very basic level, it reminded me how our entire lives are driven by data right now. It's either sending it or receiving it. And so in that sense, when I was thinking about the news today about some of the tech sell-offs, right? Yes, much like in the renewables world, we've learned to live through the whole, the solar coaster as we call it right, Ines? And maybe the data center world is going to see some of that as well going forward. But it really made me think that the fundamentals of underlying demand for doing things with data, I personally don't see changing anytime soon. So, bad week on the utility front, wet basement, no internet, but we're back up and running now. That's what shifted my week.
Ines Serrao: If we needed any data points as to whether the data is important is James's loss of internet. thank you. Appreciate it. Steve, you want to go next?
Steve Comello: Sure. So earlier this week, I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil for quote unquote, week zero of COP30 that is being held in Belém, Brazil. While I didn't make it to Belém, there was a lot of great conversations focusing on finance and industry. In Sao Paulo, I had an opportunity to speak with leaders of sovereign wealth funds, investment, industry of all stripes. And one thing that I really took away is that, yes, policy uncertainty is a key headwind when it comes to the energy transition. Technology and capital are really aligned on pushing forward the solutions that we need. One that struck me was wasn't even a technology, it was actually a standard. There is a big push by a group of industry to focus on carbon accounting. What does it look like to attribute at the product or service level accumulated carbon and how do you think about that as both a liability and an asset? And this is a approach by a business for business where they can really get into investment grade carbon accounting. And I think that is a really good sign that industry is taking this seriously. They're trying to figure out what are the right measures that holds themselves accountable. And with that, they can really make the change that I think we're all looking
Ines Serrao: That's very cool. We've had some many conversations about that internally as well. So I'm looking forward to talking more about that and understanding more what the industry is doing because it's a important problem. And I'll wrap it up with my shift of the week. I now have a broader expanded role within CIBC as co-head of US Project Finance and Infrastructure. And that has shifted my week in a great way. I now will no longer focus exclusively on renewables, but other sectors within project finance. And so I'm really looking forward to supporting our clients better in what everybody is expanding into other areas, into an all of the above energy policy. So I think that will help CIBC and myself have more important conversations with our clients and support them in different ways. And so I'm excited about that.
Steve Comello: It sounds like a promotion then. Congratulations.
Ines Serrao: Yes, thank you.
James Wright: That's why today's primer on nuclear was perfect. That was perfect timing. Now, Ines is thinking about all things outside renewables as well as inside renewables, right, Ines?
Ines Serrao: Exactly. Now it's all of the above, including nuclear. It will be great.
James Wright: Yeah. Thanks Steve. This is a great conversation. Really informative. Thanks for coming on.
Steve Comello: Thanks for having me, really appreciate it. Happy to be here.
Ines Serrao: Thank you all.
Outro: Please join us next time on The Energy Shift as we continue to tackle some of the hottest topics in the US energy transition landscape, providing fresh insights and viewpoints to help you shift your perspective.
Disclaimer: The materials disclosed on this podcast are for informational purposes only and subject to our Code of Conduct as well as applicable IIROC and FINRA rules. The information and data contained herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed to be reliable, without independent verification by CIBC Capital Markets and, to the extent that such information and data is based on sources outside CIBC Capital Markets, we do not represent or warrant that any such information or data is accurate, adequate or complete. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, CIBC World Markets Corp (and/or any affiliate thereof) shall not assume any responsibility or liability of any nature in connection with any of the contents of this communication. This communication is tailored for a particular audience and accordingly, this message is intended for such specific audience only. Any dissemination, re-distribution or other use of this message or the market commentary contained herein by any recipient is unauthorized. This communication should not be construed as a research report. The services, securities and investments discussed in this report may not be available to, nor suitable for, all investors. Nothing in this communication constitutes a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any specific investments discussed herein. Speakers on this podcast do not have any actual, implied or apparent authority to act on behalf of any issuer mentioned in this podcast. The commentary and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the individual speaker(s), except where the author expressly states them to be the opinions of CIBC World Markets Corp. The speaker(s) may provide short-term trading views or ideas on issuers, securities, commodities, currencies or other financial instruments but investors should not expect continuing analysis, views or discussion relating to those instruments discussed herein. Any information provided herein is not intended to represent an adequate basis for investors to make an informed investment decision and is subject to change without notice. CIBC Capital Markets is a trademark brand name under which Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (“CIBC”), its subsidiaries and affiliates provide products and services to our customers around the world. For more information about these legal entities, as well as the products and services offered by CIBC Capital Markets, please visit www.cibccm.com.