WASHINGTON — At a time marked by political disruptions and mounting losses from climate change-driven severe weather events, clean energy markets are adapting and repricing themselves, according to Nelson Switzer, the managing partner of sustainability solutions-focused growth equity fund Climate Innovation Capital.
Switzer’s comments came during the opening ceremony of DC Climate Week, the second annual climate conference to be held in the nation’s capital, drawing in over 5,500 registered attendees across over 250 events. Switzer — who co-founded Climate Impact Capital to search for companies that can reach a billion dollar valuation and remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide, or “gigacorns” — said the current era is one of “climate correction” at the event held on April 20.
He noted that the U.S. faced over $115 billion in insured losses in 2025 — according to a March report from Climate Central — and said uninsured losses tallied “a multiple greater.” The report found 23 weather and climate disasters that caused over $1 billion in damages and was the direct or indirect cause of 276 deaths. Switzer said the U.S. is paying a “growing global and security risk premium” in global energy markets.
However, the executive noted that there was a simultaneous increase in clean energy investments in 2025. Around $2.3 trillion was invested in clean energy globally last year, an 8% increase from 2024, according to BloombergNEF.
“That is a market repricing itself,” Switzer told attendees at the conference last week. “Some people don't see it yet. Others pretend it isn't there, but it surrounds us all the same.”
He noted that — despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cutting credits for electric vehicles, wind and solar — data centers purchased 40 gigawatts of energy last year, according to the International Energy Agency, which tallied $400 million in capital expenditures from just five large tech companies. The tech sector accounted for around 40% of all corporate renewable power purchase agreements in 2025, per the IEA.
“The market has already voted,” Switzer said. “While politics is busy making noise, [green] infrastructure, solar is making people money.”
In addition to writing a book about his hunt for “gigacorns” — climate tech companies that are capable of decreasing, avoiding, or capturing at least one gigaton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually while being profitable — Switzer’s career has included a range of sustainability-focused roles. These include serving as a vice president and chief sustainability officer for Nestlé, leading sustainable business solutions at PricewaterhouseCoopers and being the chief growth officer for sustainable plastic technology company Loop Industries, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Switzer said the adoption of climate change as a political plank “gave the energy transition a political identity it never should have had.”
“Climate change is not a religion. It is not a party platform. It is physics,” he added. “Molecules do not care what you believe. And yet, for nearly two decades, capital has treated this as a matter of tribal identity, rather than thermodynamics.”
Switzer said that after climate became a political marker, the term “ESG” was picked up by marketers and brought hype and, later, bad capital allocation to the sector. Failures of bad capital allocation, he said, became evidence for some that an energy transition was “impossible.”
However, he said that pushback did not ultimately affect the destination of the transition — as advancements in materials and energy systems continued — but it “altered who felt allowed to participate in the journey.”
He said large companies like Amazon and Microsoft have the power of customer and creator for innovative technologies, and investments in climate tech lead to cheaper operations that “power a moat that competitors cannot easily cross.”
“Decarbonization is not ESG, it's EBITDA,” Switzer said. “If we want those opportunities to keep showing up, if we want the next generation of geothermal, tidal, nuclear, long duration storage and beyond, we need more capital willing to take risks earlier. Capital that can underwrite technological and scaling risk the same way wind and solar once required until it didn't.”
