Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment lately. But with political uncertainty clouding the longer term of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants on the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.
“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.
The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized annually by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm a couple of rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.
Deese defined what he called “the nice, the bad, and the ugly” of the present energy landscape. The great: Clean energy investment in the USA hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it harder for utilities and personal enterprise to construct out the clean energy infrastructure needed to satisfy growing energy demands.
“We’d like to construct massive amounts of energy capability in the USA,” Deese said. “And the three things which can be essentially the most allergic to constructing are high uncertainty, high rates of interest, and high tariff rates. In order that’s form of ugly. However the query … is how, and in what ways, that underlying industrial momentum can drive through this era of uncertainty.”
A shifting clean energy landscape
During a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may function a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, along with putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to constructing digital infrastructure responsibly, and a part of meaning catalyzing the event of fresh energy infrastructure that isn’t only meeting the AI need, but in addition benefiting the grid as an entire,” said Lucia Tian, head of fresh energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.
Across the 2 days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of fresh energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But in addition they acknowledged the impact of public policy, in addition to the necessity for presidency investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.
Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship on the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for instance. “In point of fact, what you’re doing is undercutting each academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.
During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not have the opportunity to fund the grid upgrades needed to satisfy growing power demand. “The quantity of investment we’re going to want over the subsequent couple of years goes to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government goes to need to play a task.”
David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy enterprise builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have modified the climate change conversation lately. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re form of dropping out or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a really big shift within the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the general public consciousness. There’s a realization that the consequences of climate change are already upon us.”
“All the pieces on the table”
The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a spread of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, in addition to a session on carbon capture.
Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is identical process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, may be powered down instantaneously, and firms like his are developing recent, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the intense heat produced by fusion reactors.
By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per yr. “For those who can get fusion working, it turns energy into a producing product, not a natural resource,” he said.
Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the most important cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the fee structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the corporate is concentrated on bringing down its power plant costs.
“We’ve to constantly be focused on cost, and achieving that’s paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.
One common theme across the conference: various approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it’s capable of reworking energy markets.
“I don’t need to get caught in a spot where we frequently descend on this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking concerning the best challenge civilization has ever faced. We’d like the whole lot on the table.”
The road ahead
Several speakers stressed the necessity for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and he or she said that academic institutions must focus more on the right way to scale and spur investments in green energy.
“The challenge is that academic institutions usually are not currently set as much as have the opportunity to learn the how, in driving each bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world goes to reach our road to net zero, the mindset of academia must shift. And fortunately, it’s beginning to.”
During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the identical,” he said. “The one thing [customers] care about on the subject of electrons is that they’re available after they need them, and that they’re very low-cost.”
Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take a minimum of five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. Nonetheless, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support on the federal level within the near future. “For those who’re in something that’s just a little too depending on subsidies … there’s reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.
World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off various firms founded at MIT. “All of them have one thing in common,” he said. “All of them went from anyone’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like several of these items ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.”
