Welcome to Powering Sustainable Ideas, a podcast series from RBC Capital Markets, where we speak to the leaders and companies powering the sustainable future.
Today we’re going to share some highlights from Climate Week in New York, at RBC’s CEO Summit, where we spoke with Jason Lond of TS Conductor, Graham Rihn of Roadrunner, Carl Hoiland of Zanskar, and Claude Létourneau of Svante. Together, they explore the future of energy transition—sharing how their companies are advancing carbon capture, next-generation transmission lines, sustainable waste solutions, and geothermal innovation.
Now let’s dive into the conversation.
I just want to welcome to the stage Ken Martin, Graham and Carl from Roadrunner and Zanskar respectively. With that, over to you, Ken.
Ken Martin
Well, thank you very much. Why don't each of you just talk a little bit about, what's the problem you're trying to solve, and as best you can kind of help contextualize that founding story. How did you guys identify the problem and jump into it? Graham, let's start with you first.
Graham Rihn
Sure, great to be here. I think it's safe in saying I'm the only former investment banking intern turned trash man in the room, and I wear that badge with pride. So the if you own the waste category in a business, it's a, it's a hard experience, negative NPS scores, it's a small budget line item for your business, but outsized effort constantly. And Roadrunner’s really honed in on that pain and delivered to that pain from our start. Roadrunner is a B2B marketplace, where our customers own the waste category of businesses, they outsource the management of their waste, recycling to Roadrunner. And ultimately, we use a marketplace where we don't own any assets, but tap into underutilized trucking assets in cities to perform the service. And then we have an aspect of our business which is AI hardware, so we're installing cameras into containers at customer sites to sell software back to them, all, back to the original thesis, to take away the pain of customers in the waste industry, but also increase their recycling.
Ken Martin
Carl, as we turn it over to you, it may also be helpful to level set the audience just around your industry. You know, kind of the differences between conventional versus enhanced geothermal. I think that would be helpful to also contextualize what makes your company special.
Carl Hoiland
Great. Thank you. When looking at the advantages that geothermal provided in terms of speed to market, scalability, the absence of geopolitical risk, the domestic nature of it, around the globe, we saw a lot of real advantages in geothermal, and an opportunity here to take those technologies to market. So, geothermal as a category now is broadly split into just like oil and gas, a conventionals and unconventionals industry. The conventional side is you're going to drill a well, you're going to tap into a pocket of steam. That steam will come out can drive a turbine. You re-inject it in the ground, and it will circulate indefinitely and often reheat on its way back. The unconventionals is where you have to do something else to modify it. So a piece of that equation is missing. Maybe there's not enough water in there, not enough natural permeability to flow the water through the rock. And so we've seen a lot of investment. In fact, probably 95% of the investment, the needy articles, all the attention geothermal is getting right now, is really on advances, and how can we stimulate rocks to create artificial reservoirs? How can we bring new drilling tech. And what has differentiated our work is we've gone back to those original assumptions about the conventional resource base, which today is by far the lowest cost type of geothermal. We just thought it was all tapped out. And we've shown that with AI, we can discover orders of magnitude more of these naturally occurring sites that you can take just conventional wells into and shown that it's not actually a small, 10s of gigawatts opportunity, it's potentially terawatt in scale, just in the United States, and a technology that comes with no first of a kind risk today, because we know how to operate conventional geothermal fields, we just need to know where they are. So our company is now about five, five and a half years old, and in just a short period of time, we went from this kind of basic concept, some early prototypes of technologies, to where we've now, in just the last three years, discovered more new hidden geothermal systems than the entire industry combined had done over the prior 30 years. We've also not just found new sites, we've gone to existing sites and shown that they can be much more productive and more profitable by applying better targeting and better drilling. And so as a company, we very much fit on that side of finding new world class, high quality conventional geothermal resources, which we think will continue to be a key part of solving this base load renewable shortage.
Ken Martin
Well, thank you both for that. So you guys know this. I'm a tech banker. I'm contractually obligated to talk about AI, so let's do that. Carl, why don't we stick with you?
Carl Hoiland
I really see it impacting us in three ways. One, it's fundamentally changed the market dynamics. Right? This demand for AI data centers has changed it to where, three or four years ago, to build a geothermal power plant, you were often talking about turning off a nat-gas or coal facility, where you were competing with the marginal cost of that. Now we're competing with new build, because capacity is the name of the game, and it almost doesn't matter that we're carbon free. They just need generation. That's been incredible from a demand point of view. And so we're seeing higher PPA prices, basically unlimited demand. In terms of AI as the solution to its own problem. It is allowing us to find resources at scale. And so the main application inside our company is the ability to discover new resources, de-risk them more quickly and efficiently. But we're also beginning to see ways to embed AI through our entire full stack development process, to streamlining permitting applications that we're drafting, to better understanding unstructured information throughout grid, publications and queues, so that we can not just optimize our subsurface element, but also optimize the topside development process to allow for cleaner, faster development. And so I think for us, kind of across that spectrum, AI has been a real game changer for geothermal.
Ken Martin
Great, and Graham, maybe over to you – same question, in terms of you guys have found some really interesting ways to deploy AI in your own company.
Graham Rihn
Yeah, so using that rugged camera that we manufacture and own, we install them into dumpsters. And we're using AI based off pixel data. So we're taking pictures all throughout the day. And the two use cases that I think everybody will understand very easily is with the lid on it, they're like black boxes. You have no idea how full it is. Yet, how often are trash trucks driving down New York City streets? All the time? It's because nobody knows how full they are. So we can tell real time fill rates using the image data all day, every day. The second use case or model that we've built, which is a huge problem in the U.S. and absolutely is the reason why we trail all most major countries in recycling raises contamination. So you may have a recycling stream at a building, but might be a paper stream that has three pizzas in it. Well, using image data, we can immediately flag that, you know, this stream is contaminated with something that's not paper and certainly shouldn't go to be recycled into cereal boxes. So those are two most applicable use cases. We take a black box totally offline, connect it and give insights that can add a ton of value to our customers.
Ken Martin
And maybe sticking with the topic for a second. Carl, your company has an interesting lens into just AI more broadly, right? You know, there's a huge energy requirement from Compute. There's other implications of AI across our economy. Just curious if you're having conversations related to that, if you have a perspective on just the overall impacts of AI, especially as it impacts energy needs.
Carl Hoiland
Yeah, I think it's interesting when you look at all of the uses that humanity has had over the years for how we use electricity and what the ROI on those investments are, I don't know that we've ever had a higher ROI for electricity than right now, when you can effectively manufacture intelligence, and I know we're at the early innings of this. Nobody really knows, but there are scenarios, whereas, as these AI models are not just useful for drafting language or in the LLM space, but as they move into that next layer of large world models, and the ability to do scientific AI and scientific discovery with AI, I think you start entering into well, with enough compute, we might be able to cure this disease. With enough compute, we can find this many more resources. In that scenario, you might actually get to what I think a lot of people had forecasted in the past, maybe crypto would do, or Bitcoin was, create a true floor on energy, because if anywhere there's energy available at a certain price, and you can turn that into intelligence and solve a real value problem, I think you might enter into a scenario where we really are energy limited for the next 10 or 20 years as we're building out this new generation.
Ken Martin
So let's shift gears a little bit. Each of your companies have had a lot of success raising capital in the past. Maybe Graham we'll go back to you. What are some of the best things that you've learned from investors over your course of fundraising?
Graham Rihn
I think Roadrunner’s biggest challenge to date, raising capital, has been giving investors the context of waste merged with technology, I think you have your classic Environmental Services funds that know the category, asset heavy, know the metrics that matter, and then you have your, call it vertical, SaaS slash marketplace investors that they know that vertical really well, and there are certain things in that box that matter, and so where we've had trouble over the years is investors that want to spend enough time to understand why Roadrunner’s a little bit of a hybrid. Both, yeah, we operate in the environmental services, but we are a tech business, and that's why we have R&D budget, and that's why we own no assets. Once they get there, they totally get it and understand it, because we have tech metrics. But it's really about the hurdle to take the time and spend the time to fully understand it. And then, in terms of like value add, I have found where I've gotten the most help over the years is when investors challenge me to use metrics that may be coming from another industry, i.e., let's say vertical SaaS, even though we're not a SaaS, but use those metrics and guide to really conservative, aggressive metrics to manage the team, knowing that if you come in under them, you'll still hit that board plan.
Carl Hoiland
So for us, we needed venture capital to build the technology that we have right? There’s this classic tech risk in building that out. But now that we're at the point of having proven that in multiple real world scenarios at commercial scale, it becomes increasingly important to bring in a more diversified set of capital solutions at the project level, development level, and so on. And so when we looked at the last big wave of climate tech investing 10-15, years ago, we saw that there were a lot of challenges in that handoff. A lot of companies that refused to kind of rethink about structure or control or financing at the asset level and beyond, and it made a lot of venture-backed technology companies struggle to get lift off and struggle to scale. So it's been important to us from the beginning to think about knowing that investors are going to be aligned on both sides of that and thinking about that handoff and transition, and how do we build the right capital stack for the company and understand that there will come times to kind of hand off some of that control and ownership over time as we do so.
Ken Martin
Great. Graham, maybe I'll start with you. We'd love to just hear how you guys have thought about M&A as a potential driver of the business.
Graham Rihn
We've really thought about two aspects. One is enhancing our technology product. So specifically there we're looking to buy, let's say, niche or technology products that are in the industry or near it that have struggled to scale. Compology was an example where we acquired those that rugged hardware company that was an example of that, a great deal, definitely the most transformational deal that we could do for Roadrunner. The second is, there are sort of, I would call it, like legacy players in the waste industry, which are non tech driven aggregators that that's more like an arbitrage opportunity, where you're buying a business that don't have the capabilities that we have, and you're paying for that, but then expanding those capabilities once they come onto the platform.
Ken Martin
And sticking with you, Graham, take us kind of inside the boardroom with some of those discussions. What are some of the dynamics? You know, is generally of the board, encouraging you to think about M&A. How do you think about new capital for M&A?
Graham Rihn
Yep, I think we are grounded by our unit economics. We grow organically. We have a large sales force. And the growth way, the arbitrage way, is not as efficient as our unit economics and growing organically. So the board is focused on investing in super profitable, organic growth. More recently, now with profitability cash, with a balance sheet which we never had, it's nice, we can start truly coming up with a different vertical of growth, which is inorganic, even though it's a little bit less efficient than the organic side.
Ken Martin
Ok Carl, well same question back to you.
Carl Hoiland
In the early days, it was less about acquiring companies or technologies and more about actually acquiring data sets through companies or data assets that would be key to building out our initial training advantage in the space. So we did that by tracking down a number of opportunities a few years back. But more recently, just last year, we ended up acquiring a full operating geothermal asset, the one I mentioned earlier, that was at risk of being shut down. It was underperforming for many years, and we saw, based on our models and our technology, that there was a real opportunity to come into this asset that we saw was significantly undervalued by the market. We acquired it, and within 12 months, we had fully repowered it back to initial capacity, and we're now breaking generation records every month. And so we have strong free cash flow at the asset level there, which allows us to then think about, how do we take some of that success and feed into additional growth opportunities.
Ken Martin
What are some of the constraints you face in terms of growing, right? And maybe put that also in the context of the macro environment, right? Are there regulatory forces recently that are either good or bad?
Carl Hoiland
It's changed over the years. In the early days, it was actually getting demand, and now demand is not a limitation. And then for a while it was also capital limitations. Geothermal was not on most investment groups’ radars, and that has changed even in the last 12 months. Increasingly, now it's very much long lead supply items, so everything from high voltage breakers that you can manage upgrades on the grid with and navigating the interconnection and transmission queue process, and so increasingly thinking about, how do we reform some of those processes as an industry to accelerate the right resources getting under the grid in the right places, so that we can accelerate the entire process where that ends up being the long pole.
Ken Martin
And Graham, same question back to you, what are some of the constraints you've faced, and have you noticed any shift in terms of the conversations you're having with customers in terms of the go to market?
Graham Rihn
The constraints we face, the classic one in a marketplace, is getting a marketplace at a scale where you're not funding it, so that in any new city that we launched for 23 in the US, there's a period where we're bringing on customers, and we have to build the demand of the marketplace. So that's always been our natural growth constraint to date. And how has customer sentiment changed? I think in 2022, 2023 ESG was top of mind, so, corporations and enterprises were racing to measure their emissions, and in the waste category, it's messy, and that was top of mind, and that's what they wanted to spend time on, and budget was available. That has completely changed. There are carbon goals that are out there, that they're driving forward long term, but certainly not the momentum or pace that it was two or three years ago.
Ken Martin
Well, sticking on this idea of growth, Carl Give us a little taste as to what's coming down the road. What are some of the growth plans going forward?
Carl Hoiland
Really where we see the most growth in geothermal is going to be through discovering and developing new geothermal resources that hadn't ever been on the map before. We're fortunate that our tools are working well and that we found many of those sites. And I'll clarify, pumpernickel is actually not operating yet, but it's the first of these Greenfield sites where we went to a site with no power plant, no previous development, which geothermal explorers had looked at before, and had come up empty every time and never found a commercially developable resource. And by taking some of that old data and then drilling into literally, drilling into the site deeper, with the insights that we had, we were able to confirm, just recently, a full commercial resource there that may be one of the largest geothermal discoveries confirmed in the last decade, and moving from that site to additional sites. We have active drill programs underway right now. Our crews are drilling and expecting to hit additional confirmation wells at multiple sites, and this pipeline of discoveries now is moving at a pace that it's never done before. And what we've shown now is a scalable platform that can go out and systematically find new sites by the dozen or by the hundreds. And so for us, that's where we're going to see a lot of growth.
Ken Martin
That's great. Well, well, that's a great place to leave it. Carl, Graham, thank you guys very much.
[MUSIC INTERLUDE]
Rob Nicholson
Well, thank you everyone. My name is Rob Nicholson. I run the Canadian practice of RBC’s power utility infrastructure business, and very pleased to be here today. Maybe I'm going to start off by, Claude, why don't you give us a quick overview of yourself first, and then the company and what you guys are trying to solve.
Claude Létourneau
I'm a chemical engineer by training. Worked on developing the first ever lithium polymer battery. So, I like to work on stuff that basically there's no market for, until people realize that there is a need for it. I thought I was done with startups, and I got called nine years ago to take on the reams of what is called Svante today. We're a pure play in carbon management. We’re basically offering an engineering solution working in tandem with nature to basically address the problem that is related to the extreme weather condition that we see. The root of the problem is simple. We emit too much CO2, basically, and we need to manage our CO2. So carbon management is similar to waste management. The problem is that you can smell rubbish, and it's in your way, so you're willing to pay, basically, for somebody managing your rubbish. In the case of CO2, you don't smell and you don't see CO2, and it takes a while to see the consequences of the CO2 on the environment. But we pay the price today. We spent $600 million to develop the technology because we felt that the incumbent technology to do this was known. It's a solvent-based system called Liquid amines, and there's 40 million tons being deployed over the years that does this, but there was environmental issue associated with the emission of the liquid amine when you do the capture. So we said, let's approach this thing with a solid state technology that we call a sorbent, similar to basically making lithium batteries. And we developed this solid state approach to do this thing which doesn't have any toxic emission or fugitive emission associated with liquids. But today, the problem is not cracking the code of technology, which we did, it's about cracking the code of monetization of CO2. Who's going to pay for this? So, there is hope that right now we have the carrot and the stick in different jurisdictions around the world. If I take the carrot that we have in United States, it's called 45q so the government gives you, for 12 years, $85 per ton to capture and store the CO2. That's not enough to get the 15% return investment minimum that you're looking for. So you need an additional revenue stack, and that revenue stack is coming from what people call the voluntary carbon market. So what is it? Some companies say I need to basically buy some of the CO2 to basically offset my CO2 emission as a company. And they're willing to do this thing only. With a particular type of CO2. It's called biogenic CO2. So we organized the company to commercialize into three business units. The first one is the OEM business, original equipment manufacturer, where we manufacture physically the filter and the machine that goes into it. A brand new manufacturing facility was built in the last year, we commissioned this one in May this year, invested $150 million us to build a manufacturing plant to make the filters with no purchase order. Build it and they'll come. This is how strong we believe that market will come.
Claude Létourneau 13:19
And then the second business unit is offering a complete turnkey solution, so wrapping up the process equipment that we have with a complete balance of plant, working with EPC to deliver a turnkey facility of a capture plan. These projects range between 300 to $500 million depending on the size of these plants. And the last business is one by necessity now that we have to do to stimulate the market, is we're now becoming a project developer, where we're putting capital at risk to develop projects with our customers, and moving into the stage of FID, and then putting up to 50% of equity as co-owner of the facility to help migrate the risk. So in a nutshell, that's what we do. So by the time we will be cash flow positive, by 2030, we will have spent $1 billion. That's what it takes to just move the needle.
Rob Nicholson
Thank you, Claude. Maybe Jason, I'll ask you the same question, just a little bit about yourself, and then what TS Conductor is doing?
Jason Lond
Thank you, Rob. I'm a composite material engineer by training, and I used to work in the aerospace side. I worked on pretty much all the major aircraft platforms, military or commercial. About 15 years ago, I made the decision to jump into advanced conductor space. In the last seven to eight years, I've been very blessed with a very exciting technology called TS. So if I put it in the greater context, whether we're looking at energy transition that Claude has mentioned about sufficiently, electrification of everything, or short term, we have load growth from AI and data center, and it seems like it's accelerating. You need to fix the grid. The bottlenecks of the grid is becoming the inhibitor of both. And we are still relying on a century-old technology, a conductor called ACSR that was developed in 1908. Keep that in mind. So what TS is focused on is to change that. So what is T and S? The T stands for Technology, materials technology. We have carbon fiber composite core, which is a black strength member, and then the aluminum. We use, the most conductive type of aluminum, the high purity, fully annealed. So why this material combination? When you think about the wires, the conductors between the towers, what do you want? Well, you want them to be strong enough to hang between the towers. You like it to be lightweight, and you don't like it to sag. All of that is provided by the carbon fiber composite core. Unlike steel, the carbon fiber composite, it is twice the strength of steel, it is 20% of the weight of steel, and it has virtually no sag or no summer expansion from heat. If you get just one out of those three properties being the best-in-class, you are already very successful. But having all three in one material platform, it is highly unusual. That's what you have in carbon fiber composite. And on the aluminum side, you have the most conductive type of aluminum, when you combine the two, that is the best material science today has to offer in building conductors. And I would make the bet this will continue to dominate our market in the coming decades, probably, you know, standard for the next 100 years, just like ACSR was for the past 100 years. What is the S in the name? It stands for safety,. If you go to a utility, I think the most memorable thing that you see is probably safety plattered everywhere, because the industry really care about that topic. How do we achieve that? The aluminum encapsulation protection for the carbon composite core. TS technology was able to completely protect the composite core, especially the polymer matrix, from day one in manufacturing all the way to the end of life. And that's why we have T and S in the name.
Rob Nicholson
I do want to make an observation, though. You've both come out of organizations that you've made an improvement on. Both of you have solved the technology problem. And so maybe Claude, I'd ask you, so what's the next biggest challenge? Is it market adoption for you at this point in time?
Claude Létourneau
So, what we're moving toward now is to commercialize our solid sorbent, but we're also looking to package in the solution other types of technology, like cryogenic or maybe inorganic solvent instead of organic one. So we're trying to be a one-stop-shop first of all. So, the focus is about commercialization. But when you look at this, it's now we need to crack the code of monetization of CO2. So I'm focusing on the capital stack. So when people say, what's the dollar bit, Jon, I said, That's not the answer. The answer is, what's the return on investment? Yes. And so, you look at the capital stack. So we're trying to leverage in places where we can leverage the carrot, like the ITC for that we get in Canada, or 45q A bit that would address these things, or grants that you can get. And what is left is the equity. So that's the number we need to generate a return on it. And then the second part is the revenue stack. So the revenue stack is coming from 45q as an example. It could be coming from the low-carbon fuel standard and refinery where people are paying $300 per ton because they have to be compliant. So we're trying to increase the revenue stack so that, based on the operating cost, the profit divided by the equity gives you the return investment. We do this project by project. We have right now, 100 million ton identified around the world with specific customers, specific site, specific market segments, and we're now going after every one of them. So that's what we're focusing on. It's making sure we can commercialize and it's we need to convince the our customers that will be in business in the next 20 years. But that's the challenge, commercialization. Revenue, top line, bottom line.
Rob Nicholson
And Jason, can you talk a little bit about your stage of your commercialization and your market adoption?
Jason Lond
Yeah, thank you, Rob. We are a profitable company. We have a manufacturing facility in California that's almost full. We announced our expansion in South Carolina, we're in the middle of executing that capacity build-out. Where we are focused on is one, accelerate the technology adoption, not just in the U.S., but also around the world. We started to do that this year. You're going to see a much more expanded effort for international market next year, in addition to our additional investment into the U.S. market penetration. But the other part, in terms of managing the company from a startup to grown-up, it takes tremendous effort in terms of the team that you have, the company culture that you needed to evolve, and the ability, ultimately, to execute the ambitious expansion plan. Those are our priorities.
[OUTRO]
Thanks for listening to Powering Sustainable Ideas, brought to you by RBC Capital Markets. This episode was recorded on September 24, 2025. Please remember to subscribe to get more great content and be alerted about future episodes. If you'd like to learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, or continue the conversation, please visit rbccm.com/poweringsustainableideas, or contact your RBC representative. See you all next time.
[DISCLAIMER]
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