Sustainability In Your Ear: Peter Fusaro's Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition

"Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the Wall Street Green Summit, he's spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year's summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March 10 and 11 in New York."

"The energy transition's bottleneck isn't capital, it's infrastructure. The U.S. went from 110 investor-owned utilities in 1992 to just 40 today, and consolidation meant underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Data centers consumed 2% of U.S. energy demand in 2020; Peter sees that climbing to 10-12% by 2030. Blackouts and brownouts are inevitable, he says. Yet his message is pragmatic optimism: ignore Washington and watch the capital markets and blue states where climate policy is embedded in law."

"Many companies are "green hushing," quietly pursuing sustainability without public positioning. The energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles, making the current political moment a blip. "I've spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name," he says. "What I've learned is change takes decades." Peter argues that Wall Street has genuinely internalized climate as systemic risk-not because of ideology, but because of opportunity."

Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, growing despite intensified political headwinds. The Wall Street Green Summit convenes long-standing climate finance connections and signals ongoing private-sector engagement. The main constraint is physical infrastructure, not capital, after decades of utility consolidation and underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Rapid growth of AI data centers could push electricity demand to 10–12% by 2030, increasing blackout risk. Many companies pursue sustainability quietly. Wall Street views climate as systemic risk and sees arbitrage and trading opportunities, while reinsurance and carbon-credit funding have become significant market responses.

Read at Earth911