Climate Confident
Climate Confident is the podcast for business leaders, policy-makers, and climate tech professionals who want real, practical strategies for slashing emissions, fast.
Every Wednesday at 7am CET, I sit down with the people doing the work, executives, engineers, scientists, innovators, to unpack how they’re driving measurable climate action across industries, from energy and transport to supply chains, agriculture, and beyond.
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Climate Confident
AI Energy Demand, Grid Constraints & Decarbonisation
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AI’s energy demand isn’t a future problem. It’s straining grids today. And most companies aren’t ready.
In this episode, I’m joined by Beatrice Clark, Vice President of Sustainability and Social Impact at Turtle and Hughes, a North American electrical distributor and systems integrator working at the sharp edge of the energy transition. We unpack what surging AI and data centre growth means for infrastructure, resilience, and real-world decarbonisation - not in theory, but on the ground.
You’ll hear why energy demand from AI is now “on the tip of everybody’s tongue”, and how utilities and independent producers are scrambling to keep up. We dig into the tension between diesel reliability and microgrid ambition, and why hybrid redundancy may be the uncomfortable truth of the transition. You might be surprised to learn how fleet electrification looks when you’re moving heavy loads across unpredictable routes. It’s not ideology. It’s maths, logistics, and physics.
We also explore double materiality, Scope 3 collaboration, and why sustainability only works when it strengthens operational performance. Net zero isn’t achieved in PowerPoint. It’s delivered through infrastructure, policy, and accountability across the value chain.
If you care about climate tech, grid transformation, emissions reduction, and what decarbonisation actually looks like inside energy-intensive businesses, this conversation cuts through the noise.
Listen now to hear how Beatrice Clark and Turtle and Hughes are navigating the hard realities of the energy transition.
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Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper
The thing on the tip of everybody's tongue is the energy demand that AI computing is demanding Everyone is trying to generate more and do so with as little negative impact as possible environmentally. Even those who don't necessarily care about sustainability Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 260 of the Climate Confident Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. That idea you just heard that "the thing on the tip of everybody's tongue is the energy demand that AI computing is demanding" is the quiet panic behind a lot of boardroom conversations right now. Because everyone wants more power, more resilience, and more capacity, and they want it fast. But grids are aging, infrastructure is slow to change, and there's no perfect solution that makes every stakeholder happy. My guest today is Beatrice Clark, Vice President of Sustainability and Social Impact at Turtle and Hughes, popularly known as Turtle. Turtle is a North American electrical distributor, automation and technology integrator, and Beatrice spends her days in the messy middle where sustainability meets real world delivery. Energy efficiency, emissions monitoring, resilience, and the practical constraints that show up when the rubber hits the road. We talk about what customers are actually asking for right now, why microgrids are rising again, and why sustainability only works when the business case is real. Beatrice, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Thank you so much for having me, Tom. My name is Beatrice Clark. I'm the Vice President of Sustainability and Social Impact at Turtle and Hughes, or popularly known as Turtle. We are a North American electrical distributor, automations and technology integrator, and I'm thrilled to be having this conversation with you today. Super. And before we kick off, Beatrice, I gotta ask Turtle, where does the name come from? I know people really expect us to be in the conservation nonprofit space, which we are active in from a philanthropic perspective. But the company was founded in 1923 by my great, great grandfather, Morton Berry Turtle, in lower Manhattan. So that surname, that family name is what we still hold onto and it's definitely a conversation starter for sure. I am fifth generation and my mother Jayne Millard, fourth generation, has been at the helm for almost 20 years. She's currently co CEO and executive chair. Her co CEO is Luis Valls. They have a really lovely co CEO dynamic. Okay, and your just recently joined the company as far as I understand it. So you, it wasn't that you came straight outta college and landed a job in the company. Tell me that story. I have been now firmly internal for two and a half years, and I really appreciate that there was never any pressure put on me to be involved in the family business. Speaking with the next generation of other family businesses, that seems to be the theme of successfully getting your kids interested is to let them find their own way and force, forge their own path. My first career was in a very different industry and what brought me to finally being interested in joining the business was through the lens of sustainability because I had heard all of the ongoings of the energy sector during family dinners always having an ear to what was going on in the business. And as the industry evolved, my interest through sustainability management studies came back to renewable energy adoption, energy infrastructure modernisation, how the next generation of computing is affecting that industry. So it became time a few years ago to say with my skills and with the trajectory that Turtle was already on, really prioritising sustainability. And as VP of Sustainability and Social Impact at Turtle, what do you actually spend your time doing? What's your day to day look like? My day-to-day is always very different. I'm very lucky that I have a team around me that works very well cross divisionally and cross departmentally. So we do a lot of work with our marketing and communications folks of course, because embedding sustainability into not just our internal operations, as well as our customer and our partner relationships, but also to our external communications strategy is really important to us. We're constantly in the midst of some stage of our own, either GHG inventory or resource consumption or efficiency building audits internally at the facility level, at the fleet level, the supply chain level. We're talking to vendors, our manufacturing partners about their product, the climate data that they're generating for their product, how they would like that climate data communicated down to our customers and end users. I'm talking with new suppliers, new, exciting, cutting edge technology that we can try to go to market together with. We're also very lucky in that one of the newer developments in the past couple of years since I've joined Turtle is something called Tomorrow Lab, which is a kind of co-creation innovation space where we bring in customers as well as our manufacturing partners to try to address some of these heady, very large systemic issues and understand how we can come to a solution together and bring that to market. There's a lot of interesting conversations being had, especially around, as I mentioned next generation computing and how we're solving for providing for that energy demand. And so many of those conversations, whether it's around the VPP space or energy demand moderation, peak shaving, next generation of actual management flow through transmission sources or energy independence, resilience. We have a lot of wicked problems to solve here. And so this innovation space provides the generation of a lot of pilot projects that we can test in the market. And I'm very lucky to be involved with a lot of those as well. So it's quite a spread. And as VP Sustainability, how much of your role is dedicated to internal sustainability projects for Turtle versus external ones for your customers and helping them get their emissions down. What I'm trying to do is to arm our salespeople and our project managers as much as possible with the skills to be able to do that external sustainability management themselves. We are a few years away from that, of course, because it's a lot of curriculum and upskilling in order to provide them and have them feel confident to be able to do that. So right now, I am very much being brought in to do that, whether it's, initial conversations around sustainability with customers or the bringing together of different suppliers and partners necessary in order to have the sustainable impact that we need on a project. But the wonderful thing about Turtle is that We have been doing a lot of energy efficiency lighting, energy retrofits, emissions monitoring, energy independence building and resilience building without necessarily calling it. We've been doing it for decades, so it's less that we are starting from scratch there and more that we are just trying to help our sales and our customer facing teams slightly tweak that language, add in some supplementary skills so that I can be the liaison rather than the hands-on person. I really firmly believe that you have to be able to walk the talk and having simply commitments, sustainability commitments is not enough. So we are at the point where we're still internally very focused on making sure that we are from a fleet, a facility, a logistics, a supply chain, a office supplies level, being extremely conscious about the initiatives that are low hanging fruit and can be done with quick ROI, and really capture that impact as well as the longer term more strategic and ultimately sometimes more expensive projects. Because it's a matter of yes, having a firm active commitment and showing that you are actionable to those commitments, but it is also about showing our customers that we are learning so that we can help them do the same. So it's very much a, we're all in this together and we wanna put our money where our mouth is and show that this is truly a value, but that it is also operationally it makes good business sense. We're never wanting to make a decision for the sake of saying we're sustainable, but it is actually less efficient or far more expensive than really our operational budget should be allowing, we want to prove the business case for sustainability. So we're trying to do it as thoughtfully as possible. And so my balance of those two is absolutely bring me in for those customer conversations. I wanna help build those sustainable solutions as projects, but we have to be able to say we're doing it ourselves first. So I would say I'm skewed a little bit more internal currently, and excited to upskill all of us so that our customer facing folks can be the ones to push it just as much as I am. And what are the main challenges your customers are telling you they're having right now? It is all about the energy demand. Everyone is worried about the cost of energy, the aging energy infrastructure, and what is the best way to actually be, become energy resilient and what are the backup power methods available given your budget, given your infrastructure limitations. It obviously in the US depends largely on what municipality, what city, what state you're in. But it's an interesting landscape to be navigating right now. And the thing on the tip of everybody's tongue is the energy demand that AI computing is demanding of both municipal utility as well as potential independent energy producers. And we're seeing that there is a consistent across the board need for not just increased production, but these truly resilient gap systems. So, being able to provide bridge power is a huge concern for our customers, whether we're talking to an electrical contractor, whether we're talking to a big developer, whether we're talking to a, you know, VPP. Everyone is trying to generate more and do so with as little negative impact as possible environmentally. Even those who don't necessarily care about sustainability, they're coming into communities, whether they're building data centers with on-prem power production, or they're looking to build out community solar or, the latest topic of wind, of course, is rife once again, but there is no perfect solution that everybody is happy with. And so being able to take these tricky multi-stakeholder situations and come together to find a strategy that's going to provide resilience and have a sustainable stakeholder buy-in is really what we're hearing from all ends, no matter the industry. The narrative that infrastructure is slow to change, but we're seeing huge changes in things like the economics around energy infrastructure. How do you square that circle? Is it, is it, are people jumping on board? Are people risk averse? Is it somewhere in the middle? What are you seeing there? I hate to use it's somewhere in the middle as a cop out, but it truly, It truly does feel both regionally as well as depending on which grid you're looking at, depending on the demand on that grid, as well as technologically what the resource wise is able to be invested in modernisation. There is an enormous amount of bureaucracy still at play, correct? Like no matter where you are, you're going to have to deal with the utility stakeholder. We for almost 10 years in the Northeast have been providing IT/OT services to help with predictive analytics, to minimise outages, to upgrade any transmission efficiency possible. Really like creating digital twins has become a huge game changer for us in terms of our grid modernisation business because that is providing utilities, not just transparency into how the grid is actually performing and how their customer's energy consumption is changing. The more we electrify, the more we bring electric vehicles online and even leaving the data center question out for a moment, how are on-prem versus co-location computing needs, shifting things as we move more and more into the cloud. So I am fascinated by the gap of infrastructures aging. You can't turn a grid off for six months and replace everything. So how do you bridge between now and then. And and what are those upgrades that are possible? So I am very heartened by some of the utility work that we do around specifically the IT/OT, the digitalisation of transmission information. But there's still a ton of work to do, and not all of those insights can necessarily compensate for the rapid increase in capacity, need, and the demand that has just exploded. So what we are trying to help, customers do specifically from the utility perspective is continue to help them add through a renewables mix in addition to micro gridding. And so microgrids we've been doing But just in specifically high demand areas where, it might be a very densely populated urban area. It might be a region where a lot of electric vehicles, a lot of electric buses are coming online where infrastructure has higher demand. We're trying to help integrate microgrid backup as well as battery energy storage systems for peak shaving needs in order to keep transmission as consistent as possible and put as little stress on those grids as possible. And I, I gotta think, I know you say you've been doing it for 10 years, but the microgrids are relatively speaking new as in, well, I guess if you go back a hundred and whatever years, it was all microgrids until we started connecting them. But are we going back to an increase in, in more microgrids now and, and why? Yeah, so I think it's interesting because so many people are focused understandably on energy independence, and having battery backup is a phenomenal way to achieve that. Of course, if you have, any energy production, ideally to have a and battery storage pairing is phenomenal. But to be able to store any form of energy and have backup is fantastic. What we see as groundbreaking and we had been doing, microgrids prior to this, but our largest microgrid that we helped design, engineer and provide product for was the Hudson Yards microgrid in the west twenties in Manhattan. We've done hospitals as well. A few in New York as well as outside. But the biggest game changer is the, ability for folks to have that immediate backup, turn back on no matter what happens, whether it is stress on the grid, whether it's a natural disaster. People are starting to think about how microgrids can be grid connected without adding additional stress to the grid, whereas previously there was grid integration that didn't necessarily benefit the grid or complete isolation and independence, a microgrid island. So I do think that as we were talking about the aging infrastructure and the modernisation, I think we're absolutely going to see an increase in microgrids. We talk about them more and more every day, but I also feel it's important to signal that microgrids do not replace the needed infrastructure updates that our municipal grids inevitably need and, and are going to require. For a while it seemed like there was some relief and microgrids could put off doing some of those upgrades for a while, but it, it does need to happen in tandem and that is the only way that we're going to achieve true resilience. Devil's advocate, what's the advantage of a microgrid over a diesel gen set? Funny you should ask, the diesel gen sets have their place of course. Right? I mean, if we're comparing a renewables fueled microgrid versus the diesel gen set, there could be, climate pattern change arguments made for why those renewables are going to be less preferable. I understand where the arguments are coming from. Diesel is still what I think gives us a lot of comfort as a society, though I, I know our use of diesel is in slight decline and is projected to be increasingly declined in the next 10, 15 years. It does still feel what is safest and most reliable, I think unanimously the world. I however, am heartened that there are solutions that can be both, and I'm less inclined to talk about the either or and more of the can we have a dual source backup system? Those are some of the conversations being had around energy independence, specifically in the data center space, which I think is really fascinating. Because those hyperscalers recognise that they need power tomorrow. They want of course to do things as quickly possible in order to be the first online and, and be able to provide that computing power. But they also understand that long term there's going to have to be an integration of both. So I'm inclined to say, it's not an either or conversation, unfortunately. Changing topics for a minute. If we talk about things like double materiality, which often fails not on data, but internal ownership, for example, what does running a serious double materiality process actually demand from an organisation? Governance, governance, governance is my answer. This is another phenomenal example of how from an internal perspective, both ownership of topics and initiatives as well as ownership of education, this was a huge eye-opener for me. We started our double materiality assessment process about a year into my being at Turtle and I was still very much reverse engineering my learning of the business through the sustainability lens and I would recommend this process to anyone and everyone who of course, can prioritise it and, and argue for the budgetary space for it, because I received a new depth of understanding of the scope of influence that different people, different roles have within the organisation. The actual processes by which change is managed in the organisation, as well as how our external stakeholders, whether it be our customers, our partners, our supply chain, management third parties view us as an organisation and how we can help them on their own sustainability journey, as well as just how do we make their lives easier. Not necessarily do more business together, but do better and smarter business together. The issue of ownership is very real and having to negotiate how we insert and embed sustainability across all departments and what that governance looks like has been an evolving journey. We're trying a new methodology now, which is going well, but as we evolve, inevitably things will need to change. I have been really heartened and overjoyed by the reception throughout the organisation that people want to be involved even if they work back office and they, don't necessarily see a direct connection to making sustainable impact. And Turtle is very lucky that we have always had a people centered culture and everybody is very invested in keeping Turtle special and unique and agile. So once it came to educating all employees as well as providing specialty education to operations, or sales or finance we were able to receive a lot more readiness to help and readiness to own new topics than I expected. The thing that I will say around the treatment, and use of a double materiality assessment on an ongoing basis is I use it to build out my strategic roadmap and my KPIs for the year. There are always things that tie back to the double materiality assessment, even if, if it feels like, the original suggestion that box has been checked, what's the next level of maturity and addressing that issue or broadening our scope of responsibility internally or externally that we can get to. And it's something that we use from a management level, a day-to-day level, up to our board of directors. Our board of directors have oversight of it, and it is something that I report against to them as well. So it's been a big game changer and I think has given us a united sense of direction. And how would you advise your customers or anyone who's listening to this to follow in your steps on double materiality? The thing that is the biggest blocker to folks, is the budgetary constraint, and I think that's absolutely understandable. What I would advise to consultancies is to have more of a consideration for small and medium sized enterprises that are interested in this work because they wanna understand that organisation outward impact. They don't know where to start. They might think, oh, we need to think about, water and emissions and waste and circularity, but they don't necessarily have the tools to fully grasp how their specific role in an industry, in a municipality, in an ecosystem where they're set up to have the most influence and deliver the most positive impact and minimise the most negative impact. So that's my first call out is, having smaller scale version of a full double materiality assessment available to those folks who wanna get going on the journey. But it's just not in the budget today. But to our customers to our partners who are interested in this work, I would say open up a conversation with their own customers and partners as early as possible because they'll be amazed by what they learn. And is true of our experience in the double materiality assessment and our external stakeholder interviews were conducted by a third party. But it also translates into how are we moving forward together along our entire sustainability journey, decarbonisation as an industry, as a value chain. Scope 3, handling as a value chain. How are managing the unbelievable amount of climate data we need to manage? What circularity pilots can we try out together that, might be actually a lift than we, than we originally might have thought. So the fear of not doing it right, I think is what holds folks back the most. And I'll admit it was, a big hurdle for me to start climbing over myself as well, because I as I mentioned, this is second career for me, so this was going back to school and learning new skills and upskilling quickly and wanting to do it right. And the truth is, we are all figuring it out together. Of Learning together as a value chain finding those pieces of where you intersect with your customers or your partners and collaborating together, it makes those relationships stronger. And there's so much to learn that just wouldn't even necessarily have, crossed your mind prior. What was harder than expected? It's one of Turtle's strengths, but it can also add complexity. We are a very diversified business, so one of the hardest parts was determining the scope because we are lucky enough to have a long history. And our arguably, original core business was electrical distribution. Eventually moved into automation, into supply chain services, MRO, supply, technology services integration. Those are a lot of different business functions that can theoretically have different impacts when you're looking at the enterprise's impact externally and then the outside world's impact in. So setting the scope was a process of compromise of where are the common denominators between all of our divisions, all of our business functions. Where we think that we have the most leverage for inspiring and enacting and enabling positive change in each of those slightly different value chains? And once had come to a place where we felt we were covering enough of each business vertical's scope of influence and incorporating enough of what the external world, especially the market trends were having on those separate divisions, then we were kind of off to the races. But I will say by defining that scope, you're also having to negotiate with which stakeholders to bring in and give a louder voice to especially internally. So figuring out who had the capacity to be more involved, given those different business verticals and who is going to stick it out with us despite it sometimes feeling like, oh, this, this business vertical, this division's getting a little bit more attention. Where do I come in? How is this relevant to me? Really sticking it out with us and finding the plug in and, and that being the mechanism that ultimately won their ownership. That I would all say was the hardest, but incredibly rewarding. And, and now that has created immense stickiness, I would say. Those are the people who are most responsive to me still, who are most willing to collaborate and ideate on new initiatives. And I consider myself very lucky for that. And obviously sustainability shows up first in relationships, not emissions curves as you're alluding to there. So what changes first when sustainability starts influencing real decisions? Oh, good question. The biggest piece is making sure the right team members, internally and externally are in place to take that strategy that has now been approved, and actually get into the tactical weeds with it. Because having an exciting idea for an initiative or a partnership or a pilot is one thing, but making it real and making sure you have people with the right skills in place to make it real is really essential. I can definitely point to a few instances of, okay go ahead on strategy, let's do it. And there's a little bit of buffering time of, oh, okay, well we thought we could count on X, Y, or Z. And it turns out that when you, the rubber hits the road, it's not quite what we thought. I am very lucky that I get a lot of thumbs up strategically, and I know that that's because as a company we have a deep understanding that sustainable business is not just responsible business, but it's good business. The ROIs can be very clearly proven, but it is also a core value of the family. And we believe that it's our responsibility to help the business, help the industry at large, help the industrial sector at large, be good stewards of the Earth and of communities. So making sure that we have the right people in place and actually feasible strategy has been essential. I'm very lucky that I'm not just supported with a great team around me, but we also have extensive sustainability experience from other leadership team members as well as on our board of directors. So I'm very well insulated with a lot of big, brilliant brains who can help me get tactical fairly quickly, and that has been a massive game changer that I'm not sure. Other companies would necessarily have had the benefit of at our size and, in terms of the number of years that I've been around. Anything that didn't work the way you expected, or anything turned out messier in reality than in theory? Ooh, my favorite topic. As sustainability professionals and as those studied sustainability, we are committed. We are impassioned. We've learned about all these methodologies of decarbonising and how can operations be more streamlined and have a more positive impact. And all of those things are still true. The goals are still the same, but as you said, what's a little messier in reality? What are the functional limitations that keep a business from being able to go full throttle? So if budget wasn't an issue at all, in an ideal world, oh, it turns out there are still some realities that keep you needing to spin your wheels a little, a little longer, and I'll use wheels as a jumping off point. I would say the biggest lesson for me in this has been the fleet electrification process. And this is a fascinating double-sided journey for us because we started an EV Charging Infrastructure division at Turtle a few years ago and have been having great success there. We're, really lucky in that we get to work with a lot of our existing customers, a lot of our utility partners, a lot of different municipalities that we've worked with in other ways. We've helped small businesses, medium sized businesses, as well as post office fleets and, a lot of different applications have come about, and it's been invigorating because we get to, in some instances, combine all the things that we do really well, which is the actual power distribution infrastructure sure, the chargers, then we have microgrids embedded in some of these projects. We have renewables in addition on some of these projects, depending on the fleet size. And so it's a, it's a really nice way in which a lot of our departments get to work together. The go to market on EV and ev charging infrastructure and making sure it's not too much of a strain on the grid. Great. Our own fleet, however, is trickier. Our vehicles are not little mail trucks or nice very easily rechargeable, just human carrying fleet vehicles. Our, our fleet vehicles have to deliver product. We have to deliver actual inventory, sometimes very heavy, sometimes massive volumes to customers who need it yesterday. So the gift of getting into the weeds and learning the actual operational limitations of how many trucks do we have first of all? How big are our trucks? What loads on average do they require? What fleet optimisation software are we already using? What range of a trip does a truck usually take some days it's 80 and sure you can have an EV truck go 80 miles, but the next day it's going 450. So what do you do then? And that's been a process of learning that though we are always on top of and have really great relationships with a lot of the commercial fleet EV manufacturers, the technology is not where it needs to be yet for us personally to be able to adopt at scale. We have had EVs in our fleets for almost 10 years. We add where we can, we're constantly analyzing where we can add more, but it is a frustrating limitation of the reality of where those OEMs are today and what products are available for us to lease that we can't do a hundred percent adoption and for a sustainability professional to have to hold that reality versus the I want to, I believe in the decarb. And sometimes it does make better business sense to go for the electric truck or van. It can't always fulfill the reality of what we need to do to deliver to our customers, as a business. And so holding those two truths has been an enormous learning lesson and, my fleet guys are very patient. They, they will crunch the numbers of me all day long. God bless 'em. And we have a brilliant fleet consultant who is always on the cutting edge of what the manufacturers are doing. And this startup is the next, frontier of hope. We never tire, we, we don't consider the say, oh, we can't do it. So this just doesn't apply to us. It's a constant what can we do next within the scope of what is feasible for us operationally? If listeners were to take one shift in perspective from this conversation, what do you think it should be? I think especially if you're in North America right now. Over the past year there has been a feeling of, defeat and, a sense that we are up against an immovable force and the hope that has been really invigorating to me has been leaning into those human relationships that are maybe the sustainability departments of customers or of suppliers or other sustainability professionals in the field, perhaps even at unrelated businesses. But it has been finding the commonality in what we are all dealing with on a regulatory level and understanding that there is so much more still going on than people are necessarily talking about. And the good work has not ended. There are certainly some more hurdles in the way but people are, I think, working even more diligently to make progress and really move the needle in a period where perhaps some are talking about it a little less loudly. I will also say that in my experience, the most innovative conversations and the closest partnerships are coming out of admitting when you can't quite get somewhere yet. I'll take an example of a fortune 500 customer of ours who we have been lucky enough to do business with for over a decade. They have incredible sustainability commitments. They're aggressive in how they meet them. And due to our budgetary constraints due to our size we cannot get where they expect the majority of their suppliers to be. We need a little bit of room. We need to, tell you that we are making iterative progress and we are thrilled to build out a relationship where we can on a regular basis, show you our progress, but we can't allocate the millions and millions and millions that other suppliers of yours can, to just get it done. We're getting our validation and will you go on this journey with us? Will you allow us to be, a little slower than some of your other folks? But we're smaller, but we're, really taking it seriously and we have received so much understanding, so much grace, so much education and so many resources and specifically around the topic of Scope three data and everyone trying to get higher quality data, more insight rather than estimation. This is a true magic maker, and it's not to just get around deadlines. It is truly because those relationships, those Fortune 500 companies with the massive sustainability budgets, they do wanna share. They want knowledge transfer, they wanna help upskill their suppliers because it helps their own reporting and their own data transparency. But it also creates a coalition effect that I think is so powerful. We have experienced it time and time again where folks just want to help all boats rise together. And so I think the power in that cannot be understated no matter what is happening or being set on a regulatory level. Everyone is still committed. And I am heartened by it because it has proven to not simply be a, a, Box ticking. Thank you. Thank you. Even though perhaps a piece of it comes from, and some people's journeys start from simply a, a box ticking perspective. The amount of growth that can come from being human, asking for a call rather than just sending that questionnaire back has been pretty groundbreaking for us. So lean into the humanness. Brings me nicely into my next question. and it's a left field question, if you could have any person or a character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for sustainable infrastructure, who would it be and why? Oh, great question. One of the most inspiring people to me is, Nikola Tesla and I was recently over the holidays in Colorado where some of the very first streetlights and the very first hydro plants in the country were installed engineered by Tesla. And I think there's obviously so much innovation that, was happening for the very first time back in Nikolai Tesla's day. But the excitement around power. The cultural movement that power brought, I think is something that we take for granted in today's age because everyone has dozens of devices and our whole lives are powered by whether it's electricity or natural gas or renewables. It is a, unifying fact of global development that if you are able to provide power, education, safety, healthcare, community cohesion, all follows. And so I think he would be probably the best possible mouthpiece for not just modernising, but, boosting the resilience of electrical infrastructure for tomorrow and the next 500 years. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Beatrice. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? One of the things that we are really proud of and is a central piece of how we conduct our business, internally how we operate as a company, as well as how we show up for our customers and our partners is really around the human element. And I think in this age of massive AI adoption making sure that we use these tools as a means of clearing space for the deepening of the human connection and not letting it take over and, and replace that is so essential in work, in change management, in innovation. How are we thinking creatively as humans? We have to hold space for that. And remember that that's how we got here in the first place. It cannot go away. And my hope is that, all innovation and creativity thrives under constraint, that the hyper scaling, the massive computing needs and our shared want to do so sustainably to, to reach those levels sustainably. I'm hoping those constraints really provide a lot of space for humans to get into the muck and do the messy human to human thinking creativity and innovation together, and really leave room for the humanness. Beatrice, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? LinkedIn is great. You can also find me at beatrice.Clark@Turtle.com. I always love to hear from folks, but Turtle.com is our website and there's lots to learn on there. You can find sustainability reporting, information case studies of our projects as well as just more about the history of the business, which I biasly think is pretty interesting. But Tom, thank you so much for having me. Thanks a million Beatrice. That's been really, really interesting. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.
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