Podcast | Making the Energy Transition Bankable – with Alyse Mauro Mason and Geneviève Piché

Alyse Mauro Mason: I am joined today by Geneviève Piché, former head of sustainable finance at Wells Fargo. Today, we are going to discuss ideas for making the energy transition more bankable. We are joining you today in our personal capacity to share our experience, expertise and insights with all of you. Genevieve, welcome to the Board Perspectives podcast.

Geneviève Piché: Thank you so much, Elise. I am excited to be here, and I appreciate the invitation to join you.

Alyse Mauro Mason: I’m looking forward to it. We will get to your 25 years at Wells Fargo, which is remarkable, throughout this conversation. Congratulations on such an incredible chapter in your story. I’d also like to take a moment to congratulate you on your recent appointment to the Clean Energy Fund of the Carolinas. That’s very exciting.

Geneviève Piché: I am excited. After spending years working at a super global level, it is so gratifying to be able to spend time in my own community. This is an awesome organisation bringing financing where it’s most needed. I’m excited to roll up my sleeves and help the organisation.

Alyse Mauro Mason: It’s going to be so much fun to watch you do that and what an incredible next chapter in your very long book and story of life and career. What I’d love for the audience to hear today is, aside from the Wells Fargo jersey you’ve worn over the last 25 years, what are some of those key memories and themes throughout your life and career that have brought you to where your feet are today?

Geneviève Piché: There have been a number of important nonprofessional moments that have brought me to where I am today. Where I find myself today is at this great juncture where I can use 25 years of financial knowledge and do something new with it.

I am a fairly recent entrant into the sustainability space. I’ve been in it for about five years. I have a very early formative memory of climate change in action. I must have been five years old. My father had taken an assignment in Melbourne, Australia. He was an engineer and was working for a company that was building a plant outside of Melbourne. He brought us down there, and we were there for several months. During the time we were there was an El Niño year, and the country was ravaged by incredible wildfires. The eucalyptus forests are eruptive and create so much damage when they burn. As a child, what I remember were the animals that had been impacted. We had the ability to join a community of people who were rescuing animals as they were fleeing the fires. One of them was a baby koala.

We were able to restore the health of this baby koala as part of a community initiative. For me, it brought it all together at a very early age — how climate change is having this palpable impact on people and on animals. It set me off for a lifetime of nagging and persistent malaise about the state of the planet and my equivalently nagging desire to help. With 25 years of finance and this belief that we can individually make a contribution, that’s shaped where I am today.

Alyse Mauro Mason: Five years old — that’s pretty early in your life to come to this full-circle moment where you are today of that being a through line throughout your life and career and that advocacy and action starting at such an early age and you’ve carried that forward.

Geneviève Piché: I also have my parents to attribute to this because I grew up in Quebec, in Canada. I am a French Canadian, and I developed a very early love of the outdoors. It was the perfect foundation for all this work.

Alyse Mauro Mason: I appreciate you sharing some of that with the audience today. I know I have enjoyed getting to know you and hearing about your life and your career over the last couple of years. It’s truly remarkable. We could have a whole series on you just in general. It’s special that you’re here today and sharing some of that with the audience.

We’re going to transition into our conversation about the energy transition and the investment it will require. I know we’re both excited about this conversation, so we’ll try to get through as much of the things that are on our minds as we can, but there’s always the opportunity to potentially come back for some more. To help ground us in the discussion, how are you thinking about the global energy transition?

Geneviève Piché: There are multiple layers to that question. Let me answer it by peeling back the onion. The first definition that comes to mind is that the energy transition is a transition to renewable energy and the electrification of everything, facilitated by incredible new technology that surpasses in many ways the technology we’ve been relying on for the last hundred years of industrialisation.

But when you peel back the onion a little bit further, you get another definition, which is that we are looking at a shift globally from a fossil fuel–extractive economy to a mineral-extractive economy. We can’t electrify everything. We can’t do all this renewable energy without pulling from another set of natural resources, which is the minerals. The third layer is that the energy transition is this grand journey of trade-offs. We have to be evaluating this technology versus that, the old versus the new: What are the consequences of shifting from one to the other? What are the costs to society, to business, to the planet? It is a set of trade-offs that society is having to make collectively as we transform the economy into a new way of doing things.

Alyse Mauro Mason: It’s almost like a constant evaluation of what’s happening with us, around us, to us, and what is the best fit for purpose in this moment, and then thinking, if we all had a crystal ball, thinking into the future, what those impacts will be.

Geneviève Piché: Exactly, and we got to where we are today in the industrial complex from technology that was pioneered at the beginning of the previous industrial revolution. In the late 1800s, the way things were created changed dramatically. Our access to fossil fuels provided incredible technology that grew wealth all over the planet. Since then, we’ve learned about the costs of burning that fossil fuel for the planet and simultaneously have developed technologies that are better than what we had 150 years ago. We have this great new technology platform of solutions we need to integrate, but those solutions have inputs and costs. In a way, the last — depending on when you picked up on some of these trends — five, 10, 20, 30 years, there is a trade-off and a cost to everything. Now, at least, we’ve been trained to think about that as we’re making those decisions, rather than just assuming burning the fossil fuel is the absolute best answer and it is the only answer.

Alyse Mauro Mason: And history on our side. Something you just mentioned is the industrial revolution. Are we in an industrial era 2.0? Are we in a new revolutionary period? Those are exciting things at the same time. What we experienced 150 years ago is very different than what we’re experiencing now, but there are some common themes. I love this idea of a revolution in a positive way. We’re transitioning into something that will sustain long-term growth and existence.

Geneviève Piché: It’s interesting because in some way, we’re going through a new industrial revolution that is also overlaid by an intelligence revolution driven by AI. I’m taking a course at Oxford so I get out of the Stone Age on AI. They do call it the fourth industrial revolution.

But in some way, we have already an industrial transformation underway. As of 2022, we’ve got generative AI that’s launched the world into this new stage of AI. Those two things are happening simultaneously and are colliding in all kinds of interesting ways. That’s a conversation for another day. But we are in a time of intense revolution, both from an intelligence and a learning standpoint, but also in the way we make things.

Alyse Mauro Mason: You brought up a great point: It doesn’t matter where we are in our life or our career — you are a continuous learner. You are putting yourself in a position to keep up with this revolutionary period of intelligence, of industrialisation, in the time we’re in today. That’s exciting and fun because there’s no world in which we can’t continue to learn. You are showing that in your own life, in your own career, and I can’t wait to hear about your studies at Oxford. That’s extremely exciting.

Geneviève Piché: One of the big reasons I’m now committed to this work around the energy transition and figuring out how we finance it is for my son, who is 11 years old. I want to have some role in securing a better place for him. But the AI is also the same. I need to learn so I can understand the world he’s living in and help guide him or inform him when he needs help. A lot of this we do for the next generation. It’s personal.

Alyse Mauro Mason: Absolutely. It’s personal. At the top of the conversation, you talked about how the individual can make an impact, and you’re doing that in your own familial element; you’re doing that in your life and in businesses you will advise and interact with and collaborate with. The individual does have a place in in this entire conversation.

In December 2025, the World Resources Institute published, “For the past 10 years, global spending on clean and renewable energy has been higher than investments in fossil fuels. While the pace of growth has shifted, slowing from a 17% year-on-year increase in 2022 to a 6% increase in 2025, overall energy investments still reached a record of $3.3 trillion in 2025, with $2.2 trillion of that directed toward clean energy.” From what you are seeing, what are the most effective financial mechanisms and investment models for accelerating the global energy transition?

Geneviève Piché: Such a big question. I think about this energy transition and what we’re financing. We can call it sustainable finance broadly. It’s not only renewable energy, it’s also the supply chain that supports it. We might also include circular economy and the reuse of materials. It might also include water and biodiversity. There’s this big ecosystem. But what is different about sustainable finance than other types of finance is that we are having to ascribe value to things that haven’t historically been valued. For example, we haven’t historically put a value on carbon. We haven’t placed a value on a coral reef. We haven’t put value on watersheds. We’re all of a sudden having to price value, ascribe value, where that doesn’t exist.

It also exists in new solutions. We’ve never underwritten a fleet of electric trucks in an asset-backed finance context. We have to learn how to value those types of assets. We have never had sustainable aviation fuel at scale until today, where we’re just starting to get enough of a liquid market that it becomes potentially tangible. Then you can start to de-risk. You have to be able to ascribe value where it hasn’t been ascribed to before. That’s a difficult, challenging process.

At the same time, we have to be able to understand risks that are inherent in this universe of sustainable finance that are esoteric and perhaps even emerging. They don’t necessarily exist in other forms of investments. For example, being able to assess the impacts of weather-related events on physical assets is something we’re just starting to figure out. The insurance community and the reinsurance community are trying to figure this out. There may also be risks in supply chains. Maybe you’re sourcing materials someplace that’s experiencing heavy drought, and you might be getting your cotton from there. All of a sudden, if you haven’t made that supply chain resilient, your business could be in trouble.

We have to be able to assess those risks. Fundamentally, that’s what finance is all about. It’s about value and risk to come up with a risk return that can be priced and understood. In order to do that with the complexity of the system we have today, we’re reinventing the way we do everything.

We have to use every possible lever available to us in the financial community, which is why this, in some ways, makes it hard. That is everything from philanthropic funding out of nonprofit organisations and foundations to government funding, development banks, government guarantees. Then we might want to get into the venture space, into private debt, and then on and on up the food chain to the ultimate large capital markets. It requires everybody.

There’s a term that gets thrown around quite a bit in this sector, which is blended finance. Blended finance is simply a way of saying that in order to finance this type of activity, we have to be extremely creative in the way we bring together all the respective financing parties — not just in a moment in time but also over time. These are dynamic businesses that require collaborative financing. That is the secret for us to get to the point where we have collaboration within the financial providers out there globally so we can create capital-formation strategies that last over time.

Alyse Mauro Mason: If we can ascribe a value and we can de-risk and we can be creative, do you believe that that’s what’s going to attract both public and private capital to this area?

Geneviève Piché: Yes, if you can successfully ascribe value and de-risk, you will definitely start to get some capital flowing in. Different capital will have different risk-return parameters. A particular quagmire we have in this space is these emerging companies. They’re usually in the growth stages. They are in this climate-tech energy-transition ecosystem, and they have a technology that is yet unproven. They know it works, but it’s not deployed at scale. They need to convince the rest of the world that it works.

They also have an infrastructure need because this is real-world technology. It’s not digital technology. It’s real-world technology that requires cement and steel in the ground. They find themselves in a no-man’s-land because the venture capital, which has traditionally funded these growth companies, is comfortable with technology risk but gets uncomfortable with that big CapEx component. Then the infrastructure firms are used to CapEx, but they’re not comfortable with that technology risk.

There is this interesting quagmire, which is, how do you ascribe value and assess the risk in those types of situations such that you are attracting both operating cashflow or operating financing and that big CapEx that you need to grow the business?

Alyse Mauro Mason: It’s a big math problem, but also, I just keep coming back to the word you use: creative. What does that mean in this context? How are we getting creative enough to attract it, to sustain it and to get us where we need to go? Is it the way it’s presented? Is it the way the return on investment is forecasted? How do we get creative?

Geneviève Piché: Back in my early days of learning how to underwrite credit when I was just a baby banker, being creative was actually not a good thing. You were not creative when you work for a bank, necessarily, back then because that’s how you got in trouble. But creativity in this context means many things. It starts with, for example, looking at business models and saying, are you as an entrepreneur or as a project developer thinking about the type of business model you need to be putting in place today for the financing you need in three years? If you go see a bank and you’re saying, “I need a loan” and you don’t have cash flow, you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure out how you get cash flow. Getting creative with business models is the first thing. Then, being creative in the partnerships you’re developing is part of it.

Finance can be a little bit of a greedy, egotistical space where everybody just wants to get their piece. But here, we have to break down the silos and say, “We’re going to bring partners into this equation that have a different value proposition than we do as a financing partner” — get more collaborative and break down your silos. A perfect example is a gigafactory where you make batteries: There is a mix of technology. You’ll have a technology company that’s involved. You’re going to have an energy need, and you might have an industrial company that’s involved that might be making some of the equipment. Then you have, ultimately, a giant real estate project with walls and a roof on it and all the infrastructure that’s needed. You’re now talking about, potentially, four types of expertise that need to get together in one. The creativity of bringing all that together is an example of what I mean by “We need to get creative, and we need to get collaborative.”

Alyse Mauro Mason: The collective is the creative catalyst.

Geneviève Piché: Yes, absolutely. That’s a good way to put it.

Alyse Mauro Mason: You just inspired me to come up with that. I love it. We just coined it together.

Thinking about the global investor mindset, what should global investors know about Africa’s renewable-energy potential and its role in the energy transition? If I’m remembering correctly, you recently spent some time in Africa as well.

Geneviève Piché: I did, and thank you for bringing that up because as I left Wells Fargo, I decided I would do a celebratory trip, a trip to detox, to clean the slate, to just reset myself after 25 years with a single employer. I took a lovely, beautiful, long trip to Namibia, which is on the southwestern coast of Africa, just north of South Africa. People ask me, “Why did you pick Namibia?” It had been on my list for a long time because it has some of the world’s largest national parks, including Namib-Naukluft, which is almost six times the size of Yellowstone. It is also sparsely populated and has, therefore, a very high ratio of nonhuman animal to human animal. We’ve got a beautiful natural ecosystem. I wanted to go this time because they have critical minerals. As I was mentioning at the outset of your definition of what the energy transition is, it’s that move from fossil fuel extraction to critical-minerals extraction.

I wanted to go to see what that looks like in the front lines. Part of the challenge for the U.S. economy is that the U.S. has wealth and riches in the form of fossil fuels, but less so on the mineral side. You can see, as the world propels forward in this renewables push, it changes the geopolitics very much so because it will change who has the inputs needed in this transformation.

Namibia happens to be one that is extremely mineral-rich in many ways. I was interested in going to see how it was happening. They have uranium, which as we know is necessary for nuclear power. They’re also the largest sodium producer in Africa. Sodium is now being used for batteries. It’s also being used in nuclear cooling and a wide range of other things. They have rare earth metals, like dysprosium, which is important for heavy magnets. It goes on and on and on. Being able to see what that looks like within an economy that historically has not experienced that big wealth boom was fascinating.

Alyse Mauro Mason: What about some of the other raw materials and minerals more commonly talked about — lithium and cobalt and copper?

Geneviève Piché: We call them critical minerals in some ways because they’re critical to the shift in renewable energy. They’re also creating geopolitical risk, and there is high demand for them, but we have big supply chain issues. We’re not yet capturing even more commonly known things like nickel or copper. Copper, for example, is something they do have in Namibia. Lithium is another thing we talk about all the time. But we need more of it. You have to find ways to shore up those supply chains, even for the most simple things or common things we have, like copper gutters. It’s important. We have to think about how we recycle existing materials so we can be less extractive over time and benefit from what we’ve already taken out of the Earth.

Alyse Mauro Mason: The life cycle of what we are thinking about today, and if we are going into a new region, what those impacts are and how we naturally and equitably enter those markets and think about their own economic development in these regions we’re entering for the worldwide benefit, is the hope.

I was reading — and I’m sure you saw this as well — the MUFG’s 2025 transition white paper they recently put out, and they mentioned, “In 2024, China accounted for about 60% of all newly installed renewable power capacity worldwide. Moreover, regions outside Europe and the U.S. accounted for around 80% of total global renewable installations.” What are you seeing as the biggest challenges and opportunities for making energy-transition projects bankable in emerging markets and regions like Africa?

Geneviève Piché: China has brilliantly figured out that they can make a lot of money producing the components needed for the energy transition and exporting it around the world. They were also brilliant in ensuring that they secured their supply chains far before many others did or tried to. China is in a position of strength overall in this market.

Africa has been at the center of a lot of their efforts around energy transition in both exporting materials to the continent but also extracting from the continent what they need to produce those materials. What I have often heard on my on my trips is — and you hear this from different people — in Africa, they want knowledge, but they don’t necessarily want external capital. I have a friend who is an economist, Jay Bryson. I was just speaking to him last week, and we were talking about this, and he said there is a fundamental challenge to this, which is, if you don’t have deposits as part of a financial system, you don’t have internal capital. You need to figure out how to get that flywheel turning so you can build deposits and therefore start to create wealth. It’s that virtuous cycle. This problem has bedeviled development economists for decades.

It is incredible what’s happening in Africa today. There are incredible, talented people trying to figure out how to get that flywheel going — how they build the knowledge, how they get the right kind of capital. But it’s a big, challenging thing. You need the institutions, and you need trust, and you need legal frameworks. There’s a ton of work going on there. It’s been a beautiful thing to see when you look at it in the big picture.

Alyse Mauro Mason: I love that you added the word beautiful, and trust is a major component in doing business in any region, in any market. Hopefully, we can see some increased activity from a trust perspective and an infrastructure perspective and not just a single point of entry. It’s about coming back to that word collective. What is the collective impact over time?

Geneviève Piché: Going back to the original conversation about trade-offs, it’s all about trade-offs.

Alyse Mauro Mason: I love that you’re using the word trade-offs over compromise. We’re talking about trade. We’re talking about something that, yes, there are business decisions being made, but there are also people and process and technology throughout this entire conversation. I purposely said “people” first because we as humans are directly impacted by all these decisions and strategy and emerging elements of where we are in the world today.

In December 2025, the ISS announced 2026 changes to its proxy-voting guidelines, impacting shareholder proposals by moving from a vote-for to a case-by-case approach. Climate change, along with greenhouse gas emissions disclosures, is one of the areas impacted or affected. What do you think the impact will be of moving to a case-by-case from a vote-for as it relates to climate change?

Geneviève Piché: It will force boards and management teams to get very specific about how climate change poses an opportunity or a risk. We started to have that conversation a few years ago. It wasn’t just because we wanted to have a good-looking report on decarbonisation and hit that net-zero target and check off the list of regulatory requirements. It was about identifying the value proposition for engaging in climate-related activities in a business. Does it make the business better? Is it financially sustainable?

Companies are going to have to think about whether they are missing a fundamental market opportunity or a chance to diversify a business and build financial resiliency by failing to do something, maybe developing a new product or creating a new solution for a new market where climate is part of the rationale for doing so. Is the company potentially failing to manage risks that would materially impact its supply chains, like we had mentioned, or physical locations, or that poses risks to employees, and fully understanding the consequences of not fully mitigating risks for the business, and then making a determination as to whether that is material for the company? I know material is a term that gets used all the time in this context, but it’s the essence of business decisioning. It’s looking and thinking critically and making sound decisions that are relevant to you and your universe of stakeholders. It pushes boards and management teams to ascribe value and assess risks, perhaps in ways they haven’t before.

Alyse Mauro Mason: What I’m hearing is, this is potentially a good thing.

Geneviève Piché: It is a good thing. This is a reflection on the moment we are in today. But as much as it’s been a challenging operating environment within the United States for sustainability and energy transition in the climate-tech sectors, it has regrounded us in a good place, which is, ultimately, we have to be able to build businesses and business models, finance them in a way that makes economic sense, because otherwise, they won’t be sustainable.

Alyse Mauro Mason: Very well said, and thinking about stakeholders in general — board members, finance professionals, policy makers, entrepreneurs — how can they work together to unlock the trillions that will continue to be needed for a just and equitable energy transition?

Geneviève Piché: The question you just posed before about the proxy comes down to this, which is assessing where value exists, and where do risks exist, and ensuring that as you’re figuring this out, you are bringing your entire range of stakeholders along.

It’s all case by case. We probably need a grand governing body on AI. We won’t have a grand governing body on how to ascribe value to certain things in many ways, because that’s the responsibility of companies and of parties around the system — nonprofits and community organisations — and these issues percolate.

You have to bring your stakeholders along. You can use lobbying to influence policy makers. You can work on how you ascribe value and manage risks so you can convince your capital providers to give you capital. You can then also start to think about what other pieces need to come together. Are you a company that requires offtakes in order to thrive? How do you get your offtakers on the hook? How do you get them to be part of the solution? Everything is going to be case by case, but it’s by doing that hard work of assessing that economic value that you unlock those trillions, trillions beyond the trillions, we’ve already deployed and keep moving things forward.

Alyse Mauro Mason: A remarkable amount of capital is still required for this to happen.

To close out our conversation today, what are three key takeaways you hope boards of directors around the world leave this conversation with?

Geneviève Piché: I have four takeaways. As companies evolve, boards need to ensure that they’re finding ways to generate cash flow as early as possible and identify assets with value to support that financing. That’s going to be an important piece of the financing element.

For boards, keep a super-keen focus on risks. That’s a critical part of being a board member — to ensure that there are appropriate processes for evaluating that risk. Supply chains are changing before our very eyes, and we need to keep global competitiveness in mind and keep our eyes wide open.

We are an interconnected global economy. The forces that exist within the United States are not the forces, necessarily, that exist outside of the country. Yet U.S. businesses are dependent on global markets. Global markets are dependent on American businesses. We need to think about these supply chains, about these interconnected pieces of our economy, and ensure that we’re not leaving competitiveness behind in this time. The dependence on the critical minerals is another important part of supply chains. The fourth is to make sure that business initiatives with environmental and social benefits drive value for the company in addition to having a positive impact. As we said, if they don’t, they won’t be sustainable.

Alyse Mauro Mason: I love the bonus takeaway, the three plus one — eyes wide open. Thank you so much for being with us today. I appreciate it, and I’m looking forward to having you back real soon. To our audience, thank you for being loyal listeners. We hope you enjoyed our discussion about the energy transition and the challenges and opportunities it brings. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at Protiviti and our friend Geneviève Piché. Until next time, take good care.

Geneviève Piché: Thank you.