Concordia professor explores how finance is shaping the future of electrification
Walker is the primary author of a new volume examining how financial systems influence the pace and scale of electrification.
While electrification is often discussed in terms of technology and infrastructure, Concordia professor and Volt-Age Principal Investigator Thomas Walker focuses on a different driver of the energy transition: finance, and how it shapes what ultimately gets built.
Walker, a professor in the Department of Finance at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business, is the primary author of Wiring the Future: Financial Strategies, Challenges, and Opportunities in the Sustainable Energy Transition, a new volume co-developed with Aphrodite Salas, Moein Karami and Akram Sadati, examining how financial systems influence the pace and scale of electrification.
“Our goal is to better understand how financial systems can either enable or constrain large-scale electrification,” Walker says.
Why finance matters for electrification
The book brings together perspectives from finance, policy, engineering and the social sciences to explain a simple but important idea: even when clean energy technologies are technically ready, they do not advance unless the financial conditions are in place to support them.
Walker points to a key challenge: a gap between what the energy transition requires financially and how traditional financial systems are designed to operate.
"Electrification projects often need large upfront investments and lengthy timelines to deliver returns, while conventional investment approaches tend to favour shorter timelines, lower perceived risk and more predictable outcomes.”
As a result, some clean energy solutions that are prepared for deployment remain limited to pilot projects or small-scale use because they do not meet current investment criteria.
How Volt-Age supports this research
Walker’s research builds on the themes explored in his new volume and is closely tied to his work with Concordia’s Volt-Age program. Within Volt-Age, he leads an Impact Project on electrified and shared transportation that integrates financial, technical, and policy analysis to assess what it would take to move these systems beyond small-scale demonstrations toward broader adoption in Canadian cities.
Walker hopes that Wiring the Future will shift attention toward the financial foundations of the energy transition. “Electrification depends on aligning capital, policy, and risk in ways that match the realities of emerging technologies,” he explains.
A second volume is currently in development and will build on these themes, focusing on emerging risks, sustainable finance, and new financial and policy approaches across different sectors and regions.