How do we power the AI boom without blowing past climate goals and breaking the grid? Which approach is the market rewarding? Such questions were central to this year’s Columbia Climate Business and Investment Conference, a joint effort by the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change and Columbia Climate School.
In opening remarks, Bruce Usher, co-director of the Tamer Institute and professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School and Columbia Climate School, set the tone for the half-day event. Climate and business are no longer siloed topics, he said, and the stakes feel especially high when AI is driving a dramatic surge in power demand. “The challenge [of meeting demand] is not only an environmental one, but also an economic one and strategic one,” Usher said. “The race to power the next generation of growth will help shape industries, capital flows, competitiveness and long-term resilience across the global economy.”
Speakers from the featured companies kept circling back to a simple but urgent idea—the next wave of growth depends on electricity that is not only stable, but reliable, clean and fast to build.
Geothermal
The geothermal panel, featuring Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global energy and climate innovation editor at the Economist, and James Blake, head of capital markets of Fervo Energy, showed that enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) are moving from niche to serious contender status for AI infrastructure. EGS employs techniques like those used in oil and gas drilling to tap into underground reservoirs of steam and hot water to produce power. According to Blake, the U.S. has tapped only four gigawatts (GW) of geothermal power out of a potential 100 GW of clean, round-the-clock geothermal capacity. Investor interest is also strong, with $2.05 billion raised to date and an IPO roadshow launched on May 4 of this year. (Update: Fervo’s initial public offering netted the Houston-based company about $1.9 billion and valued it at roughly $7.7 billion.)
Hydrogen
By contrast, green hydrogen came across as the scrappier, more complicated cousin in the clean energy family. The discussion between Jacob Susman, former senior vice president of development at Electric Hydrogen, and moderator Dan Esposito, associate professor of chemical engineering at Columbia, highlighted both the promise and the frustration of green hydrogen. Electric Hydrogen makes proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers that are fast, flexible and meant to pair with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar. PEM’s quick response electrolyzer removes the need for large batteries by using excess renewable power to split water molecules and convert them into storable green hydrogen. The company has raised $778 million to date, according to Pitchbook. Unfortunately, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the construction deadline to qualify for the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean hydrogen production tax credit was dramatically shortened by five years—now January 1, 2028 instead of January 1, 2033.
Emerald AI
The Emerald AI demand response panel, moderated by Andrea Turner Moffitt (Columbia Business School ’07), founding partner at Future Heights Ventures, featured timely discussions around energy use and AI. Ayse Coskun, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Emerald AI (you can watch her Ted Talk here) explained how Emerald’s Conductor software platform can help dial back AI data center power demand at crunch times for the grid. The core idea was refreshingly simple: if data centers can shift or “flex” some computing load to periods of lower power demand, they can help utilities shave those demand peaks. Coskun made the case that flexibility is not a side benefit; it may be one of the fastest ways to unlock more compute without waiting years for new wires and plants. Emerald AI has raised $64.99 million since its founding in 2024, according to Pitchbook. Nvidia’s venture arm, NVentures, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Siemens, among others, participated in the latest financing round.
Clean Energy
The Scaling Clean Energy for AI panel was moderated by Gernot Wagner, senior lecturer at Columbia Business School and faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative at the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change. Chelle Izzi (Columbia Business School ’04), chief commercial officer at PG&E, one of the largest utility companies in the United States, and Heather McGeory (SIPA ’05), vice president of energy and sustainability at CoreWeave, which rents out cloud capacity specialized for AI computing, joined Nestor Andres Sepulveda, commercial lead for advanced energy investments and partnerships at Google, to reinforce the point that utilities are under pressure to serve rapidly growing large energy loads while also managing affordability, community expectations and decarbonization goals. CoreWeave and Google, for their part, are increasingly looking for “clean, firm” power. Jon Guidroz, senior vice president of commercialization and strategy at Aalo Atomics, which specializes in mass-manufactured compact nuclear power systems that are purpose-built for data centers, said Aalo is coming up the learning curve fast. The company, which is valued at just under $700 million dollars by Pitchbook, announced in early May that it is moving into the final safety check before testing its reactor technology with the Department of Energy, aiming for its first controlled nuclear reaction by July 4, 2026.
What tied the whole conference together was a sense of practical optimism. “What makes this moment especially exciting is that innovation is rapidly expanding,” said Usher. “Advances in clean energy, storage, green monetization and next-generation infrastructure are creating new pathways for growth.”
Nobody pretended the challenges are easy, but the panelists were all aligned on one message: The problem is huge, the timelines are tight, but the tools are already in the room.
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