So, Andy, I was just talking with Mel a little bit about adaptation and resilience and ultimately, of course, AI came up and ultimately was curious to hear from you how climate-related adaptation is colliding with the build-out of AI data centers.

Sure.

So from the standpoint of where the building construction industry was headed over the next several years before AI, one of the biggest sectors of investment was really about resilience.

And that's to do with the fact that we have just a massive power outage problem in the U.S. that needs to be resolved if we're going to continue to grow our energy infrastructure.

So over the last 10 years, we've seen about $800 billion worth of economic activity disrupted by power outages.

And so companies, particularly in Florida and North Carolina and Texas and California, the utility sectors had to really focus on how to arrest this problem.

And especially in light of the fact that AI is coming down the pike, we actually have more need to address this problem quickly than The problem, of course, is that it's all reliant on a very, very active labor force in the construction industry and growing that labor force.

Curious to hear from you, what are some of the risks from this shift in severe weather from the Atlantic to the Pacific?

How do you define the climate economy?

Sure.

So the climate economy overall, obviously, this is something that happens not just in the United States, but globally.

The idea is that we're trying to track all the spending that goes around, goes on related to climate.

And people think, okay, well, there's a big storm event.

It's $100 billion.

That's sort of the end of it, you know, for the year.

And how about the low impact group then?

I'm curious to hear what role do you see renewables playing in meeting the rising U.S. power demand in 2026?

Thanks, Eric.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot going on in the AI power space.

Power demand is going up quite a bit in the United States, about 4% a year.

And prior to the administration's scaling back of subsidies for renewable power, a lot of that power would have gone to help fill that gap, the need to actually power these data centers and more going forward from here.

So the administration has certainly been trying pretty hard to rein in the renewables sector as a whole, but given the demands for not just AI-driven power, but power growth in general and kind of LNG as another power export from the United States, It's really going to be kind of an all-hands-on-deck operation beyond just the subsidies to fulfill the power needs of the open AIs, the Googles, the metas of the world.

So we think there's quite a bit of a possible upside surprise for some of these renewable energy companies going into next year across the board, really.

How have firms in BI's Prepare and Repair Index fared in the year 2025?

Can you tell us how President Trump's reconciliation bill is expected to impact renewable growth and maybe give examples of how it will impact the utility sector?

Sure, Eric.

So the Trump administration passed its reconciliation bill earlier this month, July 4th.

And in that bill, there were very strict provisions on how long the subsidies for renewables would persist.

So originally these renewable subsidies were expected to go out to 2034 and they've been reigned into basically a year from now, July of 2026.

You can still build beyond that, but you need to have had some foundations put in place for you to actually get the subsidies, which to remind the reviewers or listeners is about 30% of the total project costs.

So with this change, pretty aggressive change in how long those subsidies will persist, the market itself is expecting renewables to have a pretty poor showing for the next 10 years or so, cutting the amount of total capacity of roughly in half by about 350 gigawatts, and really reining in total power production by anywhere between 750 to 850 terawatt hours in the year 2035.

Obviously, you went through a lot, but is there anything else in the reconciliation bill that concerns you on the climate front?

But optimistically, in terms of the IRA, I think more of it, if we were to have this discussion next year, I think more of it still exists than not, just because of what Rob pointed out, that popularity of the IRA in those Trump

states.

And I'll chime in here.

This is Andy Stevenson.

Initially, if you look at what the market is expecting from some of this, so if you see companies like Constellation Energy is up 44% this year, clearly they don't think that they're going to lose their nuclear power credits in the next decade.

year or two, given that they're not actually building any new nuclear plants or anything apart from a possible merger that's going on.

But clearly the signal in the marketplace is that some of these things that have been set up and we need the power, especially in the power sector.

We've been talking about the government for obvious reasons, but does anyone have an opinion about the voice of the corporate sector and how and if they're weighing in and how much that might matter in this resolution?