8 partners set to transform the future of energy consulting

BCG partner Jamie Webster has been at the center of many conversations about how AI is upending the energy world.

"What has been clear is that almost every organization has revised its belief about total energy demand," Webster told Business Insider. With that has come the recognition that the energy transition runs at different speeds depending on where you are in the world, he added.

Natural gas is now the center of attention as more data centers come online. The key question is whether natural gas can be delivered where it's needed, Webster said, noting that in the past the focus was simply on producing and transporting the fuel.

"That's the marginal fuel," he said. "That's the fuel that's kind of in the middle," he said.

As a consultant, the middle is where the "interesting questions" emerge — where something works in some cases but not in others, he said.

Webster, who is also the director of BCG's Center for Energy Impact — an internal think tank that's focused on the energy transition — told Business Insider that a big portion of his work centers on identifying the macro trends that drive the energy industry, and translating them into strategy recommendations for the firm's clients.

Webster typically advises large energy companies, providing recommendations to chief economists, strategy leaders, and high-ranking executives. He's also testified before Congress a handful of times and has advised presidential administrations and campaigns.

Jesse Noffsinger has typically split time between Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Europe — but more recently, the US has become a central priority.

The Seattle-based McKinsey partner has spent 15 years at the firm building tools, solutions, and intelligence around the energy sector, he told Business Insider in an interview.

Over the past two years, however, his attention has shifted to AI, data centers, and compute.

Noffsinger said the US accounts for about 15% of global power demand today but could account for 45% of global compute demand by 2030.

"It's punching above its weight in terms of compute need," he said. "We're not used to growing in the power sector. We're used to maintaining," he said.

Noffsinger's clients range from utilities companies and equipment manufacturers to investors and public sector entities.

The energy industry, he said, is not used to moving as quickly as the tech industry. They are grappling with whether power demand will persist, how reliable it is, and what the tech ecosystem needs most in terms of power.

In 2012, Sam Newell worked on a project that would help define his career in energy consulting, advising Texas policymakers on investment incentives to ensure grid reliability. Rather than advocating for a single solution, Newell said he laid out the full range of options and their trade-offs for policymakers and stakeholders.

His report became widely cited and sparked a wave of follow-up assignments, but it also taught him a key lesson he's carried through his career: The role of a consultant is not to prescribe answers, but to deliver rigorous, objective analysis that helps decision-makers navigate complex choices.

Now, Boston-based Newell is leading The Brattle Group's 65-person electricity practice, advising clients ranging from utilities and infrastructure investors to regulators, tech companies, and system operators.

The Brattle Group has around 500 employees globally and specializes in financial analysis and litigation support for businesses and policymakers.

Demand has surged since 2024, when big data center projects were announced, driving five times the demand seen over the past two decades, said Newell.

What clients want to know is how to provide enough generation and transmission capacity, and how to price it, he said: "What you'll hear is, how do you meet all this new load growth and do it reliably and keep electricity affordable for everybody?"

Much of his work now focuses on answering that question — from finding ways to get more out of existing grids using "grid-enhancing technologies" to advising large energy users on how to better integrate into the system.

Nuclear is also attracting growing interest, and The Brattle Group is working on a "nuclear master plan" for New York, tackling questions around how to expand nuclear and which financing structure to use, Newell said. There are "huge questions" about how to reduce the cost curve and which business structures will pay for nuclear plants, he said, adding that new nuclear capacity is unlikely to meaningfully add to US supply until around 2040.

Working in energy offers the chance to help build the infrastructure, commercial models, and regulatory frameworks needed to accommodate AI, said Newell.

"There's more room to innovate now than ever, and actually a lot of the innovations are coming from the younger people," he said.

Renewables have been central to the energy transition — but, as Vivian Lee sees it, they're not enough on their own.

Lee, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, advises utilities, and power and renewable companies navigating a system under increasing strain from AI.

That vantage point has made her especially focused on the limits of today's energy mix.

"The AI-driven surge in data center demand is exposing a gap between ambition and reality when it comes to clean power," Lee told Business Insider.

In her conversations with clients, renewables are still viewed as essential, but insufficient, particularly as demand for constant, large-scale power rises.

"What's shifting is the focus toward solutions that can actually deliver that reliability today," Lee said, pointing to growing interest in options like natural gas paired with carbon capture.

Her perspective is shaped in part by a nontraditional path: she began her career in law and public service before moving into energy strategy, where she now works closely with CEOs and senior leaders on decisions spanning infrastructure, investment, and technology. That lens also informs her perspective on the energy transition.

In the long-term, though, Lee believes AI can enable the transition by optimizing renewable generation, improving grid management, and reducing downtime.

"It's raising the bar on how quickly systems need to scale while also creating new tools to manage that complexity," she said.

Tom Harper, a partner at Baringa, has spent 14 years in energy. Now, his focus is the collision between AI's explosive growth and the global push to decarbonize.

Across regions, that tension is already reshaping investment. Even as policy uncertainty clouds the outlook, spending on new energy projects continues — driven in large part by AI's soaring power needs.

In the US, policy uncertainty slowed low-carbon infrastructure last year, but a surge in AI-driven demand offset the dip, Harper said. In Europe, political support for decarbonization remains broadly intact, but concerns about affordability are mounting. And in the Middle East, recent geopolitical tensions have heightened the urgency around energy security — reinforcing the case for expanding energy supply, including low-carbon sources.

The result is a paradox: AI is accelerating energy investment while making the transition to cleaner power more difficult.

"It will slow the transition simply because we are creating more demand to decarbonize," Harper said.

At the same time, interest in alternatives is growing — from restarting nuclear plants to exploring geothermal and long-duration storage. But these options remain years away from scaling enough to meet AI's immediate needs.

Much of the uncertainty around global energy markets comes back to AI, with one exception: the war in Iran. This is a "new uncertainty that is creating huge risk around affordability and security of supply concerns in the next 6-12+ months, particularly in Europe," Harper wrote.

Jason Liu took over Wood Mackenzie at a moment when energy has moved from a backwater industry to a central force shaping the global economy.

Energy was once a "sleepy industry," said Liu, who joined Wood Mackenzie as CEO in 2024. "Now it's all of a sudden front and center."

Wood Mackenzie, one of the largest research firms in the energy space, is known for its extensive proprietary dataset — including real-time tracking of global oil, gas, and shipping flows. The firm provides what Liu called an "unprecedented level of analysis and information across global energy markets."

Alongside its data platforms, around 20% of its business is strategy consulting, Liu said.

Liu joined the firm in 2024, drawn by what he described as "a super fascinating time" for energy and the opportunity to bring his data and technology expertise into a sector that has historically been slower to evolve its capabilities.

Alongside the demands from AI infrastructure in developed companies, much of the growth in demand will come from the Global South, where two billion people still use firewood as their primary energy source, he said.

In the short term, the uncertainty in markets and supply chain disruption caused by the Iran conflict has driven an "incredible increase" in demand, said Liu.

Energy is becoming central to national competitiveness, so much so that the phrase "knowledge equals power" has been flipped, said Liu: "The more a country can generate power, the more AI can be developed and the more intelligence they can bring to their countries."

That shift is broadening Wood Mackenzie's client base. Liu said that tech companies, retailers, and manufacturers are increasingly turning to Wood Mackenzie for insights into power markets as energy becomes a core input to their operations.

Clients want predictability, said Liu: "They want to be able to look out in the future and understand price, demand, and supply."

That transformation of their responsibilities means a lot of work for consultants, Wanner told Business Insider. Energy companies have to deliver more while simultaneously modernizing operations, decarbonizing, and maintaining affordability and reliability.

AI is compressing timelines on everything and raising the stakes by making reliability and resilience non‑negotiable, he said.

"The bright spot is that this pressure is driving innovation," he said.

Wanner said there is a growing opportunity for the next generation of talent entering the field. His advice is to build depth in a core area — like grid operations or power markets — while also understanding of how technology, regulation, capital, and talent intersect.

There's also a need for early-career professionals who can bridge traditional engineering and operations knowledge with AI capabilities, he said.

"The ability to translate data and analytics into operational decisions is becoming even more valuable in today's environment."

In the first thirty seconds of Larry Abramson's interview with Business Insider about the energy sector in 2026, he used the word "exciting" three times.

Abramson is PwC's US Energy, Utilities & Resources Advisory leader. He's also a lead client partner for Houston-based oil producer ConocoPhillips and a member of PwC's US advisory leadership team.

The whole sector is an "extremely exciting place right now" because integration between energy and growth and business is accelerating, and power itself is shaping major business decisions, he said.

Three main drivers are coming together to cause the global expansion of energy infrastructure: large-load growth (meaning the rise of data centers and other energy-intensive facilities), energy security, and energy diversity.

For those entering the field, Abramson said the complexity of the issues clients face offers both rapid growth and unusually broad career paths.

"It's a great place to have a career," he said, pointing to the "interesting environments" that PwC's employees work in, spanning everything from offshore energy systems to large-scale infrastructure projects.