Luiz Barroso

Why organisations work with Luiz Barroso

• He has held three seats that almost no one else holds together: national energy planner (CEO of Brazil’s EPE), market designer and consultant across 30 countries, and partner in Latin America’s largest investment bank. That gives him a view of energy decisions from the policy desk, the operator’s desk and the capital allocator’s desk simultaneously.
• His work answers the question most energy speakers avoid: how does decarbonisation actually get financed and priced in markets that do not look like Western Europe? Investors and regulators in Latin America, Asia and Africa book him for that reason.
• He sits inside the IEA conversation on emerging-economy transition, having been a visiting researcher in Paris on exactly that question. That places him close to where international finance and national policy intersect.
• IEEE Fellow status, granted for contributions to electricity market design, signals a rare technical depth for an industry speaker. Most transition commentators cannot model what they recommend.

Biography highlights

• CEO of PSR Energy Consulting and Analytics, the BTG Pactual-owned firm
• Former CEO of Empresa de Pesquisa Energetica (EPE), Brazil’s national energy planning agency
• Visiting researcher, International Energy Agency, Paris
• Associate researcher, Institute for Research in Technology, Comillas University, Madrid
• IEEE Fellow; IEEE PES Outstanding Young Engineer Award recipient
• Author of one book, three book chapters and more than 70 peer-reviewed papers on electricity and gas market design

Biography

The energy transition has stopped being a question of ambition and become a question of capital. Boards have set decarbonisation targets; the harder problem is financing them through power markets that work differently in every country an investor touches. Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Indonesia do not have the same grid, the same regulation or the same risk pricing.

Luiz Barroso has spent his career inside that problem. As CEO of PSR Energy Consulting and Analytics, a BTG Pactual-owned firm, he advises private investors, public lenders, governments and regulators in around 30 countries on market design, financing and risk in electricity and gas. Before that, he ran Empresa de Pesquisa Energetica, the Brazilian government body responsible for national energy planning, a role equivalent to deputy minister.

His research credentials are unusual for someone operating in industry. He is an IEEE Fellow, recognised specifically for contributions to electricity market regulation and design, and an associate researcher at the Institute for Research in Technology at Comillas University in Madrid. In 2018 he spent a year at the International Energy Agency in Paris, working on the question of how energy transition unfolds in emerging economies.

That combination matters because most senior leaders hearing about energy transition are hearing from policy commentators, academic modellers or industry executives. Barroso has held all three roles. His work helps capital allocators, board directors and regulators see where the transition narrative meets the actual structure of power and gas markets, and where the money has to go for it to function.

Key speaking topics

• Energy transition in emerging economies
• Electricity and gas market design
• Investment and financing under decarbonisation
• Regulation and policy in liberalised power markets
• Risk management in energy infrastructure
• Power system economics

Ideal for

• Board directors and investment committees with energy exposure outside Western Europe and North America
• Infrastructure investors, development banks and sovereign wealth funds allocating to the transition
• Energy regulators, system operators and policy bodies in emerging markets
• Senior leaders in utilities, oil and gas, and large industrial energy buyers

Audience outcomes

• A clearer picture of how energy transition is actually financed and priced in emerging-economy power and gas markets
• A working understanding of why decarbonisation pathways diverge across jurisdictions, and what that means for cross-border capital
• Practical exposure to the trade-offs regulators face when designing markets that must attract investment and deliver reliability simultaneously
• A grounded view of which transition assumptions hold up when tested against grid reality and which do not