“We’re here to discuss really substantive changes, and we would like you to be a participant in that,” said Desirée Plata, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Climate and Energy in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Energizing@MIT: the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Annual Research Conference that was held on Sept. 9-10.
Plata’s words resonated with the 150-plus participants from academia, industry, and government meeting in Cambridge for the conference, whose theme was “tackling emerging energy challenges.” Meeting such challenges and ultimately altering the trajectory of worldwide climate outcomes requires partnerships, speakers agreed.
“We now have to be humble and open,” said Giacomo Silvestri, chair of Eniverse Ventures at Eni, in a shared keynote address. “We cannot develop innovation just specializing in ourselves and our competencies … so we’d like to partner with startups, enterprise funds, universities like MIT and other private and non-private institutions.”
Added his Eni colleague, Annalisa Muccioli, head of research and technology, “The energy transition is a race we will win only by combining mature solutions able to deploy, along with emerging technologies that also require acceleration and risk management.”
Research targets
In a conference that showcased a collection of research priorities MITEI has identified as central to making sure a low-carbon energy future, participants shared each promising discoveries and methods for advancing proven technologies within the face of shifting political winds and policy uncertainties.
One panel focused on grid resiliency — a subject that has moved from the periphery to the middle of energy discourse as climate-driven disruptions, cyber threats, and the mixing of renewables challenge legacy systems. A dramatic working example: the April 2025 outage in Spain and Portugal that left tens of millions without power for eight to fifteen hours.
“I would like to emphasise that this failure was about greater than the facility system,” said MITEI research scientist Pablo Duenas-Martinez. While he pinpointed technical problems with reactive power and voltage control behind the system collapse, Duenas-Martinez also called out an absence of transmission capability with Central Europe and out-of-date operating procedures, and beneficial higher preparation and communication amongst transmission systems and utility operators.
“You possibly can’t plan for each single eventuality, which suggests we’d like to broaden the portfolio of maximum events we prepare for,” noted Jennifer Pearce, vice chairman at energy company Avangrid. “We’re making the system smarter, stronger, and more resilient to raised protect from a big selection of threats equivalent to storms, flooding, and extreme heat events.” Pearce noted that Avangrid’s commitment to deliver secure, reliable power to its customers necessitates “meticulous emergency planning procedures.”
The resiliency of the electrical grid under greatly increased demand is a crucial motivation behind MITEI’s September 2025 launch of the Data Center Power Forum, which was also announced through the annual research conference. The forum will include research projects, webinars, and other content focused on energy supply and storage, grid design and management, infrastructure, and public and economic policy related to data centers. The forum’s members include MITEI corporations that also take part in MIT’s Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Research (CEEPR).
Storage and transportation: Staggering challenges
Meeting climate goals to decarbonize the world by 2050 requires constructing around 300 terawatt-hours of storage, in response to Asegun Henry, a professor within the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s an unbelievably enormous problem people must wrap their minds around,” he said. Henry has been developing a high-temperature thermal energy storage system he has nicknamed “sun in a box.” His system uses liquid metal and graphite to carry electricity as heat after which convert it back to electricity, enabling storage anywhere from five to 500 hours.
“At the tip of the day, storage provides a service, and the sort of technology that you just need is a function of the service that you just value probably the most,” said Nestor Sepulveda, business lead for advanced energy investments and partnerships at Google. “I do not think there’s one winner-takes-all sort of market here.”
One other panel explored sustainable fuels that would help decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors like aviation, shipping, and long-haul trucking. Randall Field, MITEI’s director of research, noted that sustainably produced drop-in fuels — fuels which might be largely compatible with existing engines — “could eliminate potentially trillions of dollars of cost for fleet alternative and for infrastructure build-out, while also helping us to speed up the speed of decarbonization of the transportation sectors.”
Erik G. Birkerts is the chief growth officer of LanzaJet, which produces a drop-in, high-energy-density aviation fuel derived from agricultural residue and other waste carbon sources. “The important thing to driving broad sustainable aviation fuel adoption is solving each the supply-side challenge through more production and the demand-side hurdle by reducing costs,” he said.
“We predict a great policy framework [for sustainable fuels] can be something that’s technology-neutral, doesn’t exclude any pathways to supply, relies on life cycle accounting practices, and on market mechanisms,” said Veronica L. Robertson, energy products technology portfolio manager at ExxonMobil.
MITEI plans a significant expansion of its research on sustainable fuels, announcing a two-year study, “The long run of fuels: Pathways to sustainable transportation,” starting in early 2026. In keeping with Field, the study will analyze and assess biofuels and e-fuels.
Solutions from labs big and small
Global energy leaders offered glimpses of their research projects. A panel on carbon capture in power generation featured three takes on the subject: Devin Shaw, business director of decarbonization technologies at Shell, described post-combustion carbon capture in power plants using steam for warmth recovery; Jan Marsh, a worldwide program lead at Siemens Energy, discussed deploying novel materials to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air; and Jeffrey Goldmeer, senior director of technology strategy at GE Vernova, explained integrating carbon capture into gas-powered turbine systems.
During a panel on vehicle electrification, Brian Storey, vice chairman of energy and materials on the Toyota Research Institute, provided an summary of Toyota’s portfolio of projects for decarbonization, including solid-state batteries, flexible manufacturing lines, and grid-forming inverters to support EV charging infrastructure.
A session on MITEI seed fund projects revealed promising early-stage research inside MIT’s own labs. A brand new process for decarbonizing the production of ethylene was presented by Yogesh Surendranath, Donner Professor of Science within the MIT Department of Chemistry. Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor Aristide Gumyusenge also discussed the event of polymers essential for a brand new form of sodium-ion battery.
Shepherding daring, latest technologies like these from academic labs into the true world cannot succeed without ample support and deft management. A panel on paths to commercialization featured the work of Iwnetim Abate, Chipman Profession Development Professor and assistant professor within the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who has spun out an organization, Addis Energy, based on a novel geothermal process for harvesting clean hydrogen and ammonia from subsurface, iron-rich rocks. Amongst his funders: ARPA-E and MIT’s own The Engine Ventures.
The panel also highlighted the MIT Proto Ventures Program, an initiative to seize early-stage MIT ideas and unleash them as world-changing startups. “A mere 4.2 percent of all of the patents which might be actually prosecuted on the planet are ever commercialized, which looks like a shocking number,” said Andrew Inglis, an entrepreneur working with Proto Ventures to translate geothermal discoveries into businesses. “Can’t we do that higher? Let’s do that higher!”
Geopolitical hazards
Throughout the conference, participants often voiced concern in regards to the impacts of competition between the USA and China. Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and an authority on China’s energy landscape, delivered the sobering news in her keynote address: “U.S. competitiveness in low-carbon technologies has eroded in nearly every category,” she said. “The Chinese are winning the clean tech race.”
China enjoys a 51 percent share in global wind turbine manufacture and 75 percent in solar modules. It also controls low-carbon supply chains that much of the world is determined by. “China is getting so dominant that no person can carve out a comparative advantage in anything,” said Gallagher. “China is just so big, and the dimensions is so huge that the Chinese can truly conquer markets and make it very hard for potential competitors to seek out a way in.”
And for the USA, the issue is “the seesaw of energy policy,” she says. “It’s incredibly difficult for the private sector to plan and to operate, given the shortage of predictability and policy here.”
Nevertheless, Gallagher believes the USA still has a likelihood of at the least regaining competitiveness, by organising a stable, bipartisan energy policy, rebuilding domestic manufacturing and provide chains; providing consistent fiscal incentives; attracting and retaining global talent; and fostering international collaboration.
The conference shone a light-weight on one such collaboration: a China-U.S. three way partnership to fabricate lithium iron phosphate batteries for business vehicles in the USA. The enterprise brings together Eve Energy, a Chinese battery technology and manufacturing company; Daimler, a worldwide business vehicle manufacturer; PACCAR Inc., a U.S.-based truck manufacturer; and Accelera, the zero-emissions business of Cummins Inc. “Manufacturing batteries within the U.S. makes the availability chain more robust and reduces geopolitical risks,” said Mike Gerty, of PACCAR.
While she acknowledged the obstacles confronting her colleagues within the room, Plata nevertheless concluded her remarks as a panel moderator with some optimism: “I hope you all leave this conference and look back on it in the longer term, saying I used to be within the room after they actually solved a few of the challenges standing between now and the longer term that all of us want to manifest.”
