CERAWeek 2026 Attendee
Sumedh Wargantiwar is a second-year MBA student at Chicago Booth and co-chair of the Climate, Energy, and Sustainability Group. Prior to Booth, he worked in M&A consulting at Deloitte and in corporate strategy at BMO Financial Group. At BMO, he helped commercialize climate finance solutions, contributing to the strategy and deployment of over $100 billion in sustainable finance. At Deloitte, he advised clients across utilities, oil and gas, and private equity on mergers and acquisitions, due diligence, and post-merger integration.
During his MBA, Sumedh has deepened his focus on the energy transition through internships at Aypa Power, a Blackstone-backed battery storage developer where he helped with M&A of over 200 MW of battery energy storage projects; Earth Foundry, a climate-focused venture firm where he evaluated early-stage climate tech opportunities; and Climate Vault, a carbon market platform advancing decarbonization through cap-and-trade innovation. Sumedh is passionate about clean energy deployment, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and scaling capital toward the energy transition.
“Attending CERAWeek as part of the UChicago delegation was one of the best weeks of my MBA. Presenting on Innovator’s Row and debating real tradeoffs with practitioners who live them daily was the highlight. Conversations kept returning to the same problem: getting projects permitted and connected to the grid. I expected geopolitics and grand strategy. Instead, hundreds of GWh’s of battery capacity sits idle across the US because interconnection queues and permitting timelines destroy project economics before a single megawatt-hour flows. My Innovator’s Row poster made the same argument, and hearing experts independently confirm it, offer solutions unprompted was clarifying.
I left more optimistic than I arrived. The nuclear sessions moved commercial fission and fusion from theoretical to plausible. The Canada House installation made the stakes concrete: uranium, hydropower, LNG, and a refurbished nuclear fleet. Canada has what the world wants. Deeply grateful to UChicago for this week.”