Green Giants – Episode 64

Jim Boyle (01:34)

Well, for many initial years of my career, I struggled between an interest in public service and a love of business. For me, it really might best be explained by the influence of my father, who was an entrepreneur, the first in his family to go to college. He built a business from one part-time employee to a couple of hundred over the first 30 years of my life. And watching that firsthand was deeply impressive. His younger brother was thought to be the ostensibly more impressive brother, and then he was tall and athletic and a Jesuit priest and a really winsome personality who was glad in his vow of poverty, and just an intellectual who was different than my dad. And they were great friends, but he represented to me the ideal of just trying to serve others. And that’s clearly what he was always doing. And so, initially I did go down to Washington and try to just serve essentially, and I did find it, though exceedingly difficult to make any sort of personal contribution that was more meaningful than answering phones, which is, you know, worthy, but only could be done by me apparently for about a year before I really, didn’t like being yelled at by constituents.

So, I decided I needed to go to law school. So, I came back up to Massachusetts, went to law school, and served as a federal law clerk. And I did find all that intellectually very interesting. But of course, that put me in a great deal of debt. And so, then I sort of went back to my dad’s model of first, taking care of my own commercial life, and went to a large law firm. And although I found the large law firm also intellectually stimulating and wonderful people there, I really didn’t feel like I was doing anything for the public good. I was actually representing corporate environmental polluters. And although I acknowledged somebody has to do that in our adversarial system of justice, I didn’t want it to be me.

So, after a few years, I left and joined Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for president, which was just beginning. That was also super engaging. But again, I had almost no ability to make a personal contribution. I was running a field organization in New Hampshire, for instance. I didn’t need a law degree to do that. After the vice president prevailed in the election but lost in the Supreme Court, I was ready to go back to my father’s model and just go into business. And so, I did that. And that was terrific. And most of that time was spent with Trammell Crow Company, corporate advisory services. And I found it really interesting. The people were terrific. The transactions were interesting. But again, I didn’t think I was doing anything for the greater good, other than taking care of our clients who were doing pretty well anyway.

And so, that’s when I started the Progressive Business Leaders Network, and that was to bring together CEOs who shared a commitment to greater social and environmental justice. And in 2006, when I did that, that was a relatively unusual community. Many folks didn’t realize there were public company CEOs who really did think we could have a much more shared prosperity that was more sustainable.

The success and how that took off really impressed me. So, I had a client and friend who was running a management best practice service for colleges and universities. And we took that model into this nonprofit, into this progressive business leaders’ network, to identify and document how CEOs who had made a contribution to progressive public policy had done it. Because there are complexities with your board of directors and your shareholders and the press and the brand, and the employees, and it really worked. CEOs who were enormously in demand made time for this community because they really wanted to understand how their peers had done this.

That’s when I became enamored of the management best practice model, the membership-based best practice model. And two, I frankly gained the confidence that I could start a new venture successfully because that was very successful, even if it was, nonprofit. And so, two years later, I founded the Sustainability Roundtable Inc. to bring that management best practice model to specifically corporate sustainability. And although we got our start in the financial panic of 2009, outstanding company after outstanding company like Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, and a dozen others stepped forward to share information and share costs to ascertain what was working best in this move to more sustainable business. And so, we’ve been building ever since.

But it was seven years ago that we started the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers to help our member client companies come together and create new renewable energy at utility scale. And this has ended up enabling us to provide access to the utility-scale renewable energy market that most companies cannot otherwise access because they’re simply not big enough.

More than seven years ago, the market was completely dominated by the 10 largest electricity users in the world. They had sophisticated energy buying teams, and they could do sophisticated transactions. Most of our member clients wanted to do that, but just didn’t have the internal capability to do that. And so, we saw a wonderful opportunity for a shared cost service in that. And that is the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers.

Wes Ashworth (07:27)

Yeah, it’s incredible stuff and a really cool journey, and we’ll dig more into a lot of that as we go. And you covered a couple of things. One thing I was curious just what inspired you to launch Sustainably Round Table, and you covered that really well. You also mentioned, and I mentioned the intro, that you worked under John Kerry and Al Gore’s presidential campaign as well. How did those experiences influence your thinking and leadership style? Like, what are the takeaways that you still carry with you today?

Jim Boyle (07:50)

Well, one, I have a lot of respect and sympathy for folks in elected office. I mean, that is a brutal career choice. And I have been impressed by the ability of business leaders to contribute constructively to policy development as business leaders. And I really did observe that first when I was working for Senator Kerry and then working for Vice President Gore. There were business leaders making a material contribution, not just financing by any stretch, but actual and intellectual contribution to what would be the best policies that would work for business and for more broadly shared and sustainable prosperity. And so, I hadn’t frankly been aware of that model, which was sort of an intersection of the model I was describing as personified by my father and the model personified by my Jesuit uncle. There was an in-between.

The most compelling example of that were the CEOs who taught me about, between 2006 and 2008, triple bottom line business. I hadn’t really been educated to the reality that there were triple bottom line businesses that were out and performing. And that was the key because when I recognized that it existed, I saw an opportunity to integrate the two models that I’d been sort of struggling between. And that meant I could just vector a huge amount of energy into the main thing I was doing, which would be triple bottom line business. And so that’s the more sort of conceptual story of how Sustainability Roundtable Inc. got started.

Wes Ashworth (09:39)

Yeah, it’s fascinating to hear how your journey just shaped your perspective and how that all came to be. I want to shift a little bit from your personal path into the corporate world. You advise every day and talk about how companies are really approaching sustainability behind the scenes. So, you’ve worked with over 100 major corporations. What do you think most people misunderstand about how these companies approach sustainability?

Jim Boyle (10:00)

Well, that’s an important question, particularly now there’s this quote-unquote ESG backlash. When folks understand what corporate sustainability is, it’s the very rare person who maintains any opposition to it because it is very conservative, frankly, in that it’s about the sustainability of the corporate enterprise itself. The word sustainability is not ambiguous, but it’s often used without the requisite qualifiers, like corporate sustainability or environmental sustainability or sustainable development. In each instance, the phrase means a different thing.

If we’re talking about corporate sustainability, which is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about corporations becoming more sustainable, we are talking about fundamentally saving the enterprise in a world that increasingly needs saving.

It isn’t about itself saving the world. if you make it about saving the world, that’s when you get into greenwashing problems because critics are right. These individual companies are not going to save the world through their recycling program or even through their net zero decarbonization programs, they’re going to better position the enterprise and better collaborate with their world-class talent and their world-class investors and their world-class suppliers and their world-leading host communities if they develop a relationship to the environment that is something they can be proud of.

Wes Ashworth (11:40)

Yeah, and you made that distinction between corporate sustainability and activism. Can you explain just how that framing affects your work?

Jim Boyle (11:48)

We often, even in 2025, find that we need to have the sustainability teams at companies take a step back and make sure they have internally defined the function appropriately or most effectively. And a big aid in doing this is the fact that the corporate sustainability reporting directive for the EU is mandatory, and for companies with more than a thousand employees in the 27 nations of the European Union, it is required legally. And that is almost all of our member client companies.

So, the fact that there’s been this move to mandatory reporting that does specifically define corporate sustainability as about the long-term sustainability of the corporation, that’s really helped us clarify that it does need to be defined internally that way. And as you can suspect, that affects so many other things in the function, and so many other discussions, when everybody is involved in the discussion, come to recognize that we’re talking about corporate sustainability here, not global environmental sustainability itself.

Wes Ashworth (13:06)

Yeah, and you’ve also said you shared this a bit in the last question, but we’re in the business of saving the enterprise in a world that needs saving. I guess what exactly do you mean by that? And just explain that a little bit further for us.

Jim Boyle (13:17)

Well, I do think, although it’s not necessary in the definition of corporate sustainability, it’s a fact that folks who work in corporate sustainability are generally educated about climate science and deeply concerned about it. Because what they’ve discovered is that we have an accelerating crisis of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown, and it’s of shaping importance to global companies with global supply chains. Many of your viewers will know that the United States just had four once-in-a-thousand-year floods in just the last week.

Statistically, it’s almost impossible if we had a normal distribution curve, but we don’t. We’re in fat-tail risk here, as the modelers would say. We aren’t reverting back to mean. Our world has changed. Unfortunately, it’s changing in an accelerating way. Then the question for the business strategist is, well, in light of that, what is a for-profit business going to do? There are a lot of associated questions, and we’re only beginning to come up with answers that make a real difference.

Wes Ashworth (14:36)

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s some good, just kind of the groundwork for some of the foundation of the issue and how it all comes together. I do want to explore a little bit of just the skepticism and debate that’s swirling around in these conversations, and not everyone agrees on the role ESG should play in business today. But there’s a narrative in some circles that ESG has become more of a checkbox exercise, more branding than real substance. How do you confront that perception, and what’s the real story from what you’re seeing from these companies?

Jim Boyle (15:05)

Well, first, the attack on ESG per se is obviously an acronym, ES and G, standing for environmental, social, and governance. And it specifically came out of the investor community more than the operating executive community. And it was how investors would rate the non-financial management competence in that area of the company. So, how good was company X at the management of non-financial items related to the environment?

For instance, the company’s pollution which relates back to my initial work in corporate environmental defense. If they were polluting all over the place in an ungoverned way, that would have to give any intelligent investor pause because that can obviously destroy a great deal of commercial value and shareholder value specifically. The same is true with competence in managing non-financial social items like recruiting and retention, which is definitely part of ES &G.

For an investor not to care about an enterprise’s competence at recruiting and retention, for instance, is for an investor not to care about what is regularly a material item for an enterprise. And then the same is true for governance. Governance is a non-financial competence that has real, serious financial implications. And so why wouldn’t you be interested in the comparative competence of an enterprise you’re thinking of investing in? So, what I say sometimes a little flippantly is like, if you are against ESG, are you also against RBI’s in baseball? That’s an acronym standing for a scored metric.

What, are you gonna ban everybody from calculating RBIs? And how would you do that? Like, if they wanna score the RBI, obviously let them score the RBI. And you can pay attention to what you wanna pay attention to. And that’s the way I feel about ESG. I think it makes all the sense in the world to me to score the relative competence in environmental management and social management, and in governance itself. If somebody else doesn’t want to, they’re absolutely entitled not to score that.

Wes Ashworth (17:35)

Yeah, no, that’s fair. A lot of good points there. I love that parallel. Why do you think defining ESG accurately makes it harder to attack? And maybe anything there to add in terms of how you actually define it.

Jim Boyle (17:46)

Well, I do think if you recognize that it’s just an acronym about the competence and non-financial management, all in support of corporate sustainability, the ability of the enterprise, the corporate enterprise people are invested in or working for to succeed over time.

You have to be somebody who’s against corporations, and they do exist to be against it. But in general, we’re not hearing from people who are against corporations attacking the of quote unquote “wokeism” of ESG. It’s folks who say they’re very much for corporations. And I think it’s just getting too focused on the language and not enough on the substance.

Wes Ashworth (18:26)

Yeah, and that’s good stuff. And thanks for unpacking the ESG landscape so clearly. I feel like it’s something that doesn’t get done enough. I’d love to dive into one of the most innovative aspects of your work, and you touched on this earlier, but just how companies are actually getting new renewable projects built, and your unique approach with the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers.

So, with that, can you explain how the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers actually works and what makes it different from traditional energy procurement?

Jim Boyle (18:50)

Sure. Well, this is definitely one of the most exciting things that has happened at Sustainability Roundtable Inc. over the last 17 years. 17 years ago, we started the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers. And five years ago, I stood up in Oakland and made a commitment at Verge to help our member client companies cause a gigawatt of new utility-scale clean energy by 2025, before 2025. And at the time, my team was very concerned that we didn’t have a clear path to accomplishing that. But I was very confident that our clients wanted badly to figure out how to come together and do what they couldn’t do alone. And that is cause new utility-scale wind and solar with integrated batteries to happening.

And so, what we did was begin with the buyers. Too many people in this field and in this market have really begun with the sellers. And that’s understandable because they’re well-financed and they have marketing budgets and they want to sell. But as somebody who in corporate real estate had always represented the corporate tenants in their portfolio planning and their portfolio transaction strategies, it made abundant sense to us to just focus on the buyers because there was a whole new generation of buyers coming forward who weren’t among the largest energy users in the world and therefore didn’t have internal teams and really needed a different transaction structure because they weren’t doing this in part for financial hedging reasons, which the world’s largest energy users were definitely doing these transactions in part and maybe in main part for the financial hedge they provided.

We knew there was this new and building community of buyers, which actually represented more than 95 % of the potential market. And we knew they needed additional help, and they would really benefit from not only the economies of scale of coming together, but also the economies of intellect. know, without those internal teams, they would need social proof, you know, for their CFOs and for their general councils to be sure that these necessarily long-term commitments that would cause the new renewable energy to make sense for them and didn’t represent too much risk.

And so, we began at our Summit for Sustainability, Sustainable Business 6 in Washington, DC, in 2018 to bring together these companies to discuss how best to do this. And then over time, we systematized that into what became more than 30 different transactions involving more than 1.6 billion in transaction volume to cause multiple large projects throughout North America and also in Europe. And now that’s all been sped up. So, what we did over four years before 2025, we now hope to do just this year before our Summit for Sustainable Business 9 in Denver in March. And we see an to help organize the world’s high-credit offsite buyers.

Ultimately, all the buyers have to be organized; at least the high-credit, billion-plus revenue companies should be enabled to do this, since they want to do this. But as big as that sounds, they’re considered too small for this market of utility-scale clean energy.

Wes Ashworth (22:30)

Yeah, and thinking about too just the reverse auction model and why it’s effective, why is it so attractive to developers? I guess you can explain that a bit further as well?

Jim Boyle (22:39)

Yeah, well, that’s a great question because it’s not obvious that it is. And the fact of the matter is that at first, they were against it. And they said, if you were Alphabet, Google, you could tell us to do this, but you’re not. And our position was, if you want the rest of the market, if you want the 95 % that can’t do this alone, you have to respect the fact that we need to organize the buying requirement prior to the bid. So, we need to have you make the bid based on what our buyers have agreed to do before you got involved as a seller. And so, in a way, we were able to take the challenge or the vice of the complexity of an aggregated procurement and turn it into a virtue, where it explained to the developers why they should go along with this.

Simply, it’s too complicated otherwise. If they try to do a transaction with eight of our buyers, they have eight different negotiations, eight different contracts; it’s just untenable. But if they let us organize it first and have the buyers agree to the commodification of their shared requirement, then we can run a disciplined reverse auction that the developers can bid into. And yes, it’s based on all buyers’ terms, but they can, of course, increase the price. And our buyers recognize that and in fact aren’t only about price. There are many other things in these long-term contracts that they as corporate procurement executives need to ensure they get. For instance, fair labor and a host of ESG requirements in their procurement.

Over time, the developer community came to understand that we were always as good as our word in terms of when we said we had more than 100 megawatts of demand, we always had more than 100 megawatts of demand. And that demand was from high credit corporates, triple B plus or better. And so, it actually created a stronger credit profile because it was diversified across different industries. And so, yes, it is terrific to have Alphabet as your buyer, but that’s one company, and although it’s highly unlikely, it’s possible that one company would have some trouble someday. Whereas, if you have five companies as buyers and they all have excellent credit, it would be an extraordinary thing for all of them to have a credit problem.

So, it’s actually, from a credit perspective, a superior solution if you can deal with the complexity of multiple buyers, which if you allow us to do our job, we can take care of that and then present you with what we’d like you to bid on.

Wes Ashworth (25:31)

Yeah, it’s impressive how much complexity your team handles in orchestrating these deals, obviously, and why you’re well needed and valued, thinking about that complexity, I want to zoom in on the kinds of conversations you’re having with corporate decision makers as they consider these major commitments. So, what kind of questions or concerns do CFOs typically raise when they’re considering these long-term renewable energy deals?

Jim Boyle (25:50)

Yeah, such an important question. it changes with changing markets. So initially, the conversation went like this. A client would approach us about wanting to do one of these transactions, and we would explain to them that they would lose a tremendous amount of money because back in 2012, HP brought us in as a third-party advisor on one of their first virtual power purchase agreements in Texas, I believe it was 112 megawatts of wind. And back then, the minimum contract was offered at 25 years and was above the grid price. And so, it seemed clear they would lose money, but that wasn’t their only concern. They also wanted a hedge, and they would get a clean hedge from a capital project that wasn’t tied to capital markets. So, it would really operate as a great hedge to the cost volatility of electricity in their adjacent data centers.

That made sense for them, but it didn’t make sense for our more regular-sized member client companies. And so, for the first six years, our advice was, don’t do these transactions. And then it turned out that the ITC and PTC were extended back in 2018, and the price of deploying these big solar and wind projects had plummeted. And the result was they were offering them at well below the grid price and willing to commit to that for 15 years. And the market had sort of brought them down to 15 years. And that was so much more attractive. And so, when we did the modeling of that, the problem was actually the opposite. It looked too good to be true.

And so, all the CFOs were like, I’ve been in business too long to believe this could possibly be true. And we were like, sometimes in opaque markets without a great deal of liquidity, you do get a bargain. And we think in 2018, these are bargains. And if you go in at $19 a megawatt hour for 15 years, you’re likely to make a lot of money because these are contracts for difference pricing structures with monthly settlements based on the net over or under a minimum price. The minimum prices back in 2018 were exceptionally low.

It has turned out that the CFOs who decided to do it have made a great deal of money. And they did not go into these transactions to make a great deal of money because they’re software companies or healthcare companies. They’re not in the business of energy investing. But obviously, if they can have a cost-positive environmental strategy that secures the environmental attributes certificates they need to fairly claim they’ve caused new renewable energy, then they want to make money, not lose money.

And so those folks have been delighted. And that initial group of folks was really helpful in telling other people that this is real. We were having a monthly settlement, and sure enough, electricity no longer cost $19 a megawatt hour. It’s more like $35 a megawatt hour. So, we get the difference, and we get the environmental attributes certificates. So, these have been great transactions for them.

Now that, of course then started buyer competition because more people wanted to buy these things because they were making people money, and that drove up the minimum price that a developer would offer in a competitive procurement process. And so, the market is in other words, has been operating and is still operating. Whether it isn’t ridiculous now, by any chance, it’s actually that you have to work quite hard to have it be cost-positive.

It’s only in the most favorable markets. It’s only with the most disciplined reverse auction process. It’s only if you’re willing to give up on some other things that you can get the minimum price down and the term down, because we always try to lessen the term, because buyers generally don’t want to go beyond 10 years if they don’t have to.

Wes Ashworth (30:06)

Sure. Another thing you shared is that the model is really kind of like the opposite of software, and I thought that was intriguing. What makes it so hard to scale using traditional venture capital approaches, and tell us a little bit more about that topic in general?

Jim Boyle (30:19)

Well, I do think that’s why we’ve had a chance to lead as a small entrepreneurial firm. You know, we’re getting smaller every month, but we’re still small. And I do think it’s because it is very senior executive intensive, what we do. We really do have to visit one-on-one with assistant CFOs and assistant general counsels and then visit with their bosses. And so, it’s a process, and it’s a very human process. And I’m hugely enthusiastic about AI and agentic AI in particular, because it is particularly for smaller advisory firms, sort of a godsend, but not for the most important work, which is getting the CFO’s office to commit to what can be a $10 million or a $100 million, 10-plus-year commitment. That takes senior experts, and senior experts are expensive.

You don’t have venture capitalists excited about a plan that says, we’re going to hire a lot of senior experts. They like to hear about software.

Wes Ashworth (31:21)

Yeah, when people do respond with “if this is so good, why isn’t everyone doing it? And maybe they think it’s too good to be true, your direct response to that? What’s the first thing that you explain when that does come up?

Jim Boyle (31:33)

Well, first, we try to set the fundamental context here that this is a technology change. And there is a reason why we’ve had so much success with leading technology companies. They understand technology change. They understand learning rates. We’re moving in energy production from resource economics and fuel-based energy to manufacturing economics and product-based energy. And the difference is quite meaningful.

So, in resource economics, it’s fundamentally a scarcity paradigm. And in manufacturing economics, it’s an abundance paradigm. You create value. And in manufacturing economics, there are learning rates. So, for each doubling of adoption, you get a corresponding reduction in the cost of the deployed solution. And this has had profound effects.

And this is really what prompted us to commit our business to this seven years ago, and that is, clients like HP and Cisco really did see this as a move from resource economics to manufacturing economics, from fuel-based energy ultimately to product-based energy. And they wanted to participate in this product-based energy that they believed would get less and less expensive and more and more capable. And from 2012, when this first happened, to now, that has certainly happened. In fact, Duane Farmer at Oxford University as a team and has put out a peer-reviewed paper called the empirical evidence on the declining cost of solar.

And in particular, solar and batteries have been declining at 12 % for each doubling. And the doubling has gone from every two and a half years to now less than every year. And so just last calendar year, just 2024, the EAI came out saying that just recently that there was a 22 % drop in the cost of utility-scale solar, and I think it was a 24 % drop in the cost of utility-scale batteries. That is an enormous drop in a single calendar year for these huge products. And this is being driven primarily by China, which is not slowing down. They’re tripling down on becoming the world’s first electro-state superpower.

And as somebody who’s the son of a combat veteran, I am all for America’s energy dominance, but it’s got to include as the main part clean energy because clean energy was 94 % of the new generation of electricity in calendar year 2024 when the price of these big solutions went down 22%. And so, yes, the pullback of the 30 % subsidy is unfortunate and counterproductive, but there are bigger forces at work here, like 22 % annual drops in prices.

Wes Ashworth (34:44)

Yeah, those are some incredible stats there. And with just thinking about the ongoing debates around renewable energy credits and all that’s happening, but what’s the biggest misconception that people have from your point of view?

Jim Boyle (34:56)

Well, people often mention that solar and wind are intermittent. And if they reflected on it, they wouldn’t be surprised that most people who are in the business really understand that. And that’s where this has become a shaping, important issue, like Australia and Southern California, batteries have stepped forward, and they’ve stepped forward at the speed of business, which is to say they exceed all the models in terms of battery penetration. Because, of course, when it becomes enormously commercially compelling to do something, it’s done like lightning.

You know what I mean? Because people are making money, and the faster they move, the more money they make. So, if you’ve got the market set up even half right, and clearly Texas, for instance, has done that, then you have enormous gains in what you need, which is not just wind and solar, but the balancing of scaled storage. And there are a lot of different dimensions to that, including long-term duration storage in kinetic solutions like pumped hydro.

For instance, Scotland has been key. But also now in Massachusetts, district geothermal deployments that really demonstrate it. You can do geothermal now almost everywhere when you’re going down below 8,000 feet. It’s a clean, firm solution in itself that is wonderfully balancing of wind and solar because wind is best at the small hours of the night, and solar is obviously best in the middle of the day.

So, you need a full complement of solutions, but we do have them, and they are being deployed at the speed of business, particularly in China.

Wes Ashworth (36:45)

Yeah, as we get a little closer to time, I’d like to shift gears a little bit and talk about the mindset of companies that are leading the way and really what sets them apart from the rest. So what unites companies like Akamai, Biogen, and Cisco in their approach to sustainability?

Jim Boyle (36:58)

Well, I think they’re united by being inspired by science. They have, from the CEO level to the line employee, a respect for science. And in science, one of my favorite quotes is from Calvin Coolidge. And he said when he became president of the Senate here in Massachusetts, he gave a speech called, Faith in Massachusetts. And he offered the best line I’ve ever heard about politics and science. He said, “Don’t hesitate to be as radical as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as a multiplication table”. And I think science-inspired companies take that very seriously because science is radical. Akamai, for instance, is an Internet infrastructure company.

And so, I remember when I was working at that large law firm, we thought Akamai was going to become a world-leading firm with huge office buildings with Akamai on the banner on top, and that happened because when you’re an internet infrastructure company. That not only are you going to succeed, but you’re going to come to dominate your respective markets. And that happened. And then the same with Biogen. Biogen was the first life science company. When you start engineering genes so that we can have a better life, you’re interrogating the wonder of the creator for what we can make ourselves to improve our lives. And the amount of value created there is astonishing.

So, when firms like that turn their attention to how they can better align with the ecological systems that sustain our lives, they can come up with some pretty smart solutions. Now, their business is through and through, and they have to make a growing amount of money in a growing number of markets. And so, it has to be consistent with that, too. But that is only another design constraint that makes the people really think about, well, what’s the path here that’s going to grow our market share, grow our margin, and better align us with life?

Wes Ashworth (39:04)

Yeah, it’s good stuff. I love that there are a lot of those points. And as we get really close to time, I want to go back to something you shared with me with just about the growth. You know, solar deployment has really exploded. You mentioned one terawatt in 68 years, the next in 24 months, which is remarkable. What does that tell us about the pace of change, and just what are your sentiments all the way around that?

Jim Boyle (39:23)

Well, I want to be sober and acknowledge that the current trend lines do not look good in regard to our ecological crisis. Clearly, we’re transgressing tipping points across the ecological boundaries of our only planet. And so that is terrible. That’s a terrible, difficult reality. However, what gives me hope is that the trend lines don’t comprehend non-linear innovation improvements, which have always happened.

So, we’re modelers, right? Because we’ve gotten into this business of long-term energy, and so we spend our days modeling potential futures, and the models don’t have fusion, and they don’t have geothermal, and they don’t have iron batteries that have 100-hour retention. All these things are happening, and we know they’re happening. So, the zero value we get is not correct. We just don’t include them because we can’t quantify them.

So, things actually I do think will be better than we think in regard to technical innovation, because that’s always happened. And that can really rescue us in a quantifiable way, as it changes how we power our economy. And that changes the whole structure of power, political power, legal power, because the way energy is created and shared and used is changed.

So, I do think there are good changes happening and even more good changes than can be conventionally modeled.

Wes Ashworth (40:56)

Yeah, and one of those you mentioned, just with fusion energy, what excites you the most about the commercial potential of fusion energy and especially compared to nuclear fission?

Jim Boyle (41:13)

Well, I think people like me weren’t as aware that fusion is not just a hope for the future. It’s got Commonwealth Fusion and 40 other companies hard at work on commercial solutions. And they’ve got disciplined investors expecting a return. Commonwealth Fusion, in particular, has more than 1200 people working there. They’re building a plant in real time in Chesterfield, Virginia. Dominion has bought the commercial energy they’ll be producing beginning in 2032.

So, this timeline is similar to or superior to small module reactors that are still only in planning, right? So, everybody in the clean energy world is talking about small module reactors, and I understand why. They’re an important part of the solution. However, fewer people are speaking about fusion even though significantly fusion has much shorter permitting timelines, more like 18 months than 18 years, and costs more like $8 million, not $80 million. Just getting these things permitted and licensed to operate in the United States of America is a complicated legal and political situation, is not easy for these small nuclear reactors that people are so enthusiastic about. I mean, it’s one thing to say they’d be a terrific solution, and it’s another to deliver them in some physical place in the United States of America with all the legal constraints that actually probably make sense around really volatile compounds that have half-lives of a million years and also contribute to nuclear proliferation.

So, I’m not against nuclear, but it’s complicated. Fusion is less complicated. Fusion is less complicated. It’s definitely been a more remote innovation because we have progressed far less along the line to commercialization. However, it is inherently different and easier to license and easier to permit.

And now it’s approaching, in a time that we should be starting to bring into our modeling, because our modeling goes out regularly to 2040 and beyond. And clearly, by 2040, it’s going to be a non-zero part of our energy reality.

Wes Ashworth (43:46)

Yeah, absolutely. And speaking to that, just modeling out to 2040, 2045 with your clients, and this kind of like parting question, but what is a successful, sustainable future actually look like when you’re doing those models?

Jim Boyle (44:07)

For the enterprises we’re serving. It’s a future where they’re able to continue to attract the world’s best talent to do the world’s best work for the world’s best clients. And we’re super impressed by our clients and what they teach us. Clients like Takeda from Japan, who have been operating based on personal integrity for 254 years, have built through the decimation for them by World War II. With Merck Dramastadt from Germany, 353 years old, with a carefully developed and maintained culture of excellence in managing non-financial items. This ESG thing, or more specifically, this corporate sustainability thing, is not some new-fangled thing.

353-year-old firms were deep into it 100 years ago, because they weren’t fooling around. They wanted to build value over centuries, and they have. And so, for any firm that wants to create value and shared meaning over generations, they’ve got to do it deliberately. And that’s what corporate sustainability is all about. And we’ve never met the person who doesn’t feel like our businesses should be aligned with life, should be aligned not only with our personal lives and our emotional lives, but with the ecological life that sustains us all.

Basically, everyone I’ve ever met has said yes, business should be aligned with that, not misaligned with that. And then when we ask the further question, do you think it is currently aligned with it, we also haven’t come across the individual who really thinks yes, it’s already completely aligned with it.  There’s nothing to worry about here. There’s no more to do here. No, they mostly feel like, for whatever reason, business right now isn’t aligned with life. It’s something that’s seen as a part, and sometimes a contradiction to the imperatives of life.

So, that’s something that we can change because most everybody that we’ve come across, or everybody we’ve come across, would like it to change and acknowledge it needs to be changed. So, for those listening who are interested, we’d love your help in helping to change it.

Wes Ashworth (46:34)

Absolutely, great words to end on. And I’ll include some links in the show notes to go and check those out. But with that, we’ll wrap up today’s episode of Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy.

Jim, thank you so much for sharing your insights, your passion for making sustainability both practical and transformative. And thank you for the work that you and your company are doing. As always, to our listeners, thanks for tuning into Green Giants. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it, leave a review, and help us spread the word.

And with that, we will see you next time.