Friday Wrap-Up: Nuclear, Batteries and Reflections from New York

Hi everyone, and welcome back to our Friday wrap up. I'm Silje Matuskaig. And I'm Nikola Tangin, and today from New York. So this week you spoke to John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, which you call the world's most valuable power company. So, for years, power demand in The US was flat. And now, Jan expected to grow sixfold by mid-2040s, driven by AI. NextEra is one of those companies who has profited greatly from this, right? It's very interesting, because the whole energy space was really a boring space in the past, flat as a pancake. And now, certainly because of increased demand for electricity and energy worldwide, these companies are growing really, really fast. And it's the grid, but it's also the energy generation. And NextEra is really one of the world leaders and a very, very strong company in The US. So super interesting to have him on. It's very fascinating. And also, when you look at the biggest tech companies, say alone plan to spend more than $600,000,000,000 of data centers and chips this year. And of course, a lot of money needs also power. How do you think about like kind of like a build up that big? The demand and the build up is huge. And this company is spending a billion dollars a week on building the infrastructure here. It is also interesting because it was a really important factor in the midterm election that we had this week. There's been a lot of protests against the data center build outs, because people don't want to have them in the neighborhoods. They lead to higher electricity prices for most people. And of course, also fear unemployment on the back of higher AI penetration. So it's really been an important part of election campaigns in many places. And now we'll see what's going to happen with licensing and permissions on the back of the election result. It's very interesting space. What we have seen is that some of the hyperscalers, some of the established players, their share prices went up because they already have secured quite a lot of energy supply going forward, while some of the new players, it will be more difficult for them. So the landscape here is really being redrawn. Yeah, it's super interesting. And also, when you look at data centers, they need power around the clock, right? So we need to think about how to produce electricity in a different way. Absolutely. So you just need a supply. And it means that nuclear is going to be more important because you have the base load. The small modular nuclear stations, you will see a build up of that. What is also interesting, I think, is that batteries are becoming more important because you basically produce energy from solar and so on at a different time than you actually need it. And so batteries are important. And we at EnbIM made our first investment into a battery platform …