Supply Chains, Trade, and Research with Antoine Vagneur-Jones, Yale Clean Energy Conference Speaker

Written by: Jenny Liu, YC '26

As Head of Trade and Supply Chains at BloombergNEF, Antoine’s research informs decisions around the intersection of geopolitics, resources, and the energy transition. He is a featured speaker in the Clean Energy Supply Chain and Trade keynote during this year’s Yale Clean Energy Conference.

 

What is your background, and how has your background shaped the work you do now as Head of Trade & Supply Chains at BNEF?

 

It’s been a bit of a journey. I think BloombergNEF (BNEF) sits between some of the experiences I’ve had before. I ended up majoring in my master's in international law. And then my first job was working in a think tank in Paris that was looking more at geopolitics. I was working on a contract for the Ministry of Defense. And I decided I want to do something different. So I moved to Japan and found a job doing business development at a renewable energy developer, mainly solar and gas projects. Those were two very different experiences.

What I like about BNEF, which I've been in for the past seven years, is that it's a mix of many different things together. On the one hand, there's a lot of intellectual freedom. You can look at lots of different things. And that means investigating many different interesting topics from things like onshoring or overcapacity to trade wars, industrial policy, and what to do about carbon embedded in trade flows. A think tank or NGO might link these interesting things together and look at them. BNEF builds on that by having a business case by writing it, presenting it, and publishing data in a way that interests clients. It feels like BNEF sits between a lot of those different spaces.

 

How do you make sense of what's happening in the world, and ensure your team does as well, and then communicate it?

 

It's been a learning process, especially because our team could be seen as quite broad. What we've basically tried to do is work out where we can add value. There are lots of other teams at BNEF that have regional or sectorial focuses. What we've worked out is that a really good way of dealing with complex subjects is to make them simple. Some of the heuristics that we've used is just packaging stuff into blocks.

There are three main blocks that we use for data analysis. [For example], we’re going to sort out manufacturing and manufacturing data. [Then] we’re going to compile aggregate trade data. And then, we're going to look at policy data, whether it's tariffs or manufacturing subsidies or local content requirements and rules. So we're basically going to divide things into blocks and deal with them the same way across lots of different sectors and regions. That means that we're able to take this and then can say “Hey, we've got all this manufacturing data, and we can see how those supply chains have evolved based on what subsidies were offered.” We can do some cool, more long term in-depth work, looking at the effectiveness of subsidy spending in different regions.

There's lots of different angles you can take once you have those building blocks but working out what those building blocks are and how to package them is the challenge. That's been the learning process for us.

 

I’m curious how understanding the energy sector through the lens of global supply chains informs your understanding of the sector as a whole.

 

BNEF didn't always have a trade and supply team. It was something that emerged over time, and that's because of the fact that there's been a lot more attention that's been devoted to something that was basically taken for granted. For a long time, everyone was just like, “Well, globalization is a thing. Free trade is a thing, and costs are going down. Manufacturing is getting built up. And everyone's happy.”

Since COVID, Ukraine, and geopolitics heating up with China, trade wars have now changed. There's been a bit of a change in terms of how we look at things. And people now have a very different view of, you know, whether or not to diversify. Or people have different ambitions when it comes to local manufacturing and growing it out.

I'm based in the U.S and the question of Chinese investment and involvement in the energy transition has become a hot topic. All of these different things are best understood from a supply chains perspective. These are all new topics that are very related to the supply chains world. The fact that we had all these forecasts about deployment was all driven by the fact that costs were coming down, and that was all driven by the fact that manufacturing was getting more efficient over time. We were seeing economies of scale and learning from a materials science perspective. Everything has always led back to supply chains. What's changed now is that many new topics have emerged that have led to people taking a different look at how things might evolve going forward.

 

In terms of these new topics that are emerging, what do you see the most challenging? And also what is the most promising?

 

Something new is happening in about 70 days’ time. The EU is starting to price carbon embedded in trade flows for certain products coming into the EU based on how emitting their production was. That's part of something called a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

Understanding the impact of that policy is really difficult for all kinds of different reasons. It requires understanding trade and carbon markets and industrial decarbonization, as well as the shorter term dynamics shaping commodities and trading. So that topic has been very intellectually stimulating and there's a lot of uncertainty about its ultimate impact.

But it also represents progress. The reason it exists is not just to put a tariff based on carbon. It’s basically having a tariff based on the carbon price that domestic producers have to pay. It's allowing carbon pricing to be brought to bear the impact of domestic producers without wiping out those producers' ability to compete against imports. It's leveling the playing field. It’s challenging, but it’s for a goal that is ultimately to decarbonize heavy industry.

That's the case with a lot of these topics. It really depends on where you're standing in terms of how they're perceived. On the one hand, there's this word “overcapacity” that I mentioned. We're in a historic moment where we've never really seen this level of excess manufacturing capacity for lots of different clean technology segments, whether that's solar, batteries, electric vehicles, or even electrolyzed wind turbines. There's more manufacturing capacity than is required to meet global demand.

On the one hand, that's seen as a potential concern because policymakers and manufacturers outside of China are saying that “Oh, well, we can't compete.” We're going to start to see all of these products crowd out local manufacturing, or we're going to see China “dominate” global supply chains for years to come.

On the other hand, when you're looking at it from a developer perspective or a finance perspective, solar costs have rapidly decreased and battery pack prices have gone down 20% year on year in 2024. That's massive real progress and that's made possible by this investment in supply chains.

We're used to talking about the fact that we're not on track for net-zero Paris targets. There's nowhere near as much investment as we should be having globally in all of these different sectors. Supply chains and manufacturing is the one bit of the equation where we are seeing more investment than we need. And that could be framed as something that's pretty good and positive. So, your question is a good question, but it also completely depends on where you're standing.

 

How do you see energy needs and energy capacity being reconciled with that supply, considering that like those needs and demands will increase over the next few decades?

 

Those capacities mean that things are cheaper. It means that it's easier to meet growing energy demand. The US, for the last 30ish years, didn't really see any load growth. That's now changing with all kinds of different expectations around AI data centers and their impact on overall power demand. How is that going to be met?

On the one hand, the fact that solar is quite cheap is good. You could have batteries and all of this in a world where there was a free flow of equipment and trade was liberalized. We would see renewable energy play a larger role in terms of meeting that demand.

As it stands, the US has very high tariffs on various types of clean energy equipment. That doesn't mean that it isn't going to get built. But when those tariffs are put in place, at a time when the key subsidies are being removed, that means we'll probably see less renewable buildup than we otherwise would have. So those are two different types of obstacles: the removal of subsidies and the imposition of tariffs.

At the same time, you have to map out what the alternatives are for meeting those energy needs. One of the things that's often talked about is the role of gas in the energy transition, which is something that the Trump administration is quite keen on. From a supply chain perspective, things change when you’re looking at it in a bit more detail.

Natural gas supply chains are quite clogged up so it's a very concentrated field. There are only a few big manufacturers, and what we're seeing now is that there are pretty big backlogs when it comes to natural gas turbines being delivered that can run from five, six, seven years, and costs have gone up as a result.

So actually that then changes your perspective on the relative competitiveness of clean energy because of the fact that it's a lot harder than we might have expected to procure the most competitive form in most cases of fossil fuel power. Everything is relative, and everything is dynamic. That's why having a good handle on the upstream side of the equation is important.

 

Where do you see the landscape of supply chains going as the energy sector changes, renewables mature, and companies are trying to figure out where to invest? How do you see it adapting?

 

What we've seen is what we're calling a “two track transition,” which is really how we're viewing the energy transition. You'll see charts for net zero investment or requirements, and you'll see all of these different things that we need to spend money on. Those things can be the grid, hydrogen, carbon capture, storage, direct air capture, as well as mature technologies like solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles.

What we've done over the last few years has tracked investment in not just what's required, but also looking at what's being invested in. There's a big difference between those mature technologies, like solar, wind, and batteries, which are becoming a lot cheaper and end up being built in large volumes. There are some head winds being faced in the US, for example, but if you're looking at things globally, we are seeing steady growth.

In other sectors, where the investment case is a little bit trickier, you really need strong policies and pretty big subsidies to try and get them deployed – stuff like trying to electrify heavy industry, trying to find niches where clean hydrogen might be useful, or dealing with really tricky sectors like shipping and aviation. There aren’t really any sort of readily available economical, or economically competitive, clean alternatives anywhere near the horizon. There are technological solutions, but they're expensive.

That's where we talk about a two track transition as a starting point to answer your question. I think it’s a useful way of visualizing the energy transition. It's an important one, because a lot of the news that's been surrounding things has been quite negative right now. Things look very different if you're looking at the solar sector, which is actually seeing a global boom in deployment, which is completely unprecedented and extremely impressive. This is compared to hydrogen where we saw a burst of interest, which then looked like a bit more of a bubble over time, where we see a lot of disappointment.

Broad brush strokes are useful when you're trying to create a narrative and trying to galvanize action. What's useful is trying to then divide things up and have a bit more nuance. I think dividing what's going on into those two buckets is quite helpful.

 

You touched on some of the challenges that global supply chains face in trade, but I'm curious if you have any more to add and also just what explicitly needs to happen to address these challenges.

 

In terms of changes facing global supply chains and trade, one of the big challenges is onshoring manufacturing. When it comes down to it, it's been a lot harder to bring many of those factories for making batteries or EVs or solar module cells online in places like North America and Europe.

There were a lot of announcements. There was more than $100 million dollars of announced fintech factories in the US after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But we suspect that a large share of those announced investments aren't going to happen.

Understanding the reasons why that's the case is pretty high up on our list of priorities. There are many different reasons, and there's many different issues, and there's many different solutions. Those can range from demand being lower than expected or having mandates for certain things to be deployed.

There are also difficulties in terms of permitting and building things and the challenges that are represented by shifting manufacturing to places where running costs are more expensive than the next most economically efficient provider. Chinese manufacturing costs are very low and it is very unlikely that the US is ever going to become competitive when it comes to clean technology manufacturing versus China over the next decade plus.

So then what does that mean? That means if you really want some manufacturing, you're going to have to put in place some market barriers. But then the idea is not to have those market barriers set at levels that are so high as to completely impede the energy transition. Those are all very political choices, and those are all value judgments. So actually navigating those value judgments is just as hard as trying to come up with a modeling exercise for the energy system. There are a bunch of different challenges that take all kinds of different forms. They have many different solutions, but they can be segmented