Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. At the 2025 MIT Energy Conference, the participants said that political uncertainty began to compete with fossil fuels by defeating the future of subsidy for green energy.
“These techniques need to be reduced, training wheels, and more of a level playground,” Brian Days, an MIT institute Innovation Fellow, during the main panel, a conference.
The theme of the two -day conference, which is conducted by MIT students each year, “success for Personnel: Driving Climate Innovation in the Market.” The speakers expressed optimism about progress in large -scale green technology, rapidly changing regulatory and balanced by topical notes of the alarm about the political environment.
The Days defined what he called to “The Good, The Bad, and Ugly” of the current energy landscape. The Good: Clean Energy Investment in the United States hit a high level of $ 272 billion in 2024. The Badd: Future Investments announcements have been closed. And ugly: Macro’s status is making more difficult to build a clean energy infrastructure required to meet the growing energy demands for the utilities and private enterprises.
“We need to build a huge amount of energy capacity in the United States,” Deca said. “And three things that are the most allergies to construction are high uncertainty, high interest rates and high tariff rates. So it is ugly. But the question … how, and in what ways, that the underlying commercial speed can drive through this period of uncertainty.”
A shifting clean energy landscape
During a panel on Artificial Intelligence and increase in power demand, speakers stated that technology can serve as a catalyst for green energy successes, in addition to stressing the existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to the creation of digital infrastructure responsibly, and a part of it is to catalyze the development of clean energy infrastructure which is not only meeting the need for AI, but also benefiting the grid,” Lausia Tian, the head of clean energy and dearbonization technologies in Google, said.
During the two days, the speakers emphasized that the cost-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies would eventually determine their fate. But he also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as government investment to deal with large -scale issues such as grid modernization.
Vanessa Chan, a former US Department of Energy (DOE )’s official and Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, innovation and the current vice dean of entrepreneurship, for example, warned of “knock-on” effects for the National Institute of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs. “In fact, what you are doing is reducing every educational institution that does research across the country,” he said.
During a panel titled “No Clean Energy Transmission Without Transmission”, former director of DOE’s Grid Payment Office said that Retperers alone would not be able to fund the grid upgrades required to meet the demand for increasing power alone. “The investment we need in the next few years is going to be important,” she said. “This is where the federal government is going to play a role.”
David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy enterprise builder at MIT, said that extreme weather events have changed the conversation of climate change in recent years. He said, “There was a story 10 years ago in which it was said … If we start talking about flexibility and adaptation for climate change, we are like throwing or losing in the towel,” he said. “I have seen investor story, startup story, and more generally, a very big innings in public consciousness. It realizes that the effects of climate change are already on us.”
“Everything on the table”
The conference had panels and main addresses on a series of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.
Alex Crielie, a chief engineer at the Commonwealth Fusion System, explained that fusion (combination of small atoms in large atoms, which is the same process that fuels the wires) is safe and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion features, he said, can be immediately operated below, and companies like them are developing new, low-sexual magnet techniques to include extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.
In the early 2030s, Kreley said, his company expects to operate 400-megavat power plants that use only 50 kg of fuel per year. “If you can work fusion, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.
Quin Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface features at geothermal energy supplier Fero Energy, said his company is making geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation and scale economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the biggest cost in the production of geothermal power. Fero “flipped the cost structure” completely “fully flipped” with progress in drilling, and now the company focuses on reducing the cost of its power plant.
“We must continuously focus on the cost, and it must be achieved that the geostation is paramount to the success of the industry,” he said.
A general theme at the conference: Many approaches are progressing rapidly, but experts are not sure when – or, in some cases, if – each specific technique will reach a tipping point where it is capable of replacing the energy markets.
“I want to catch at a place where we often get into a position of this climate solution, where it is either either either either either either either,” said Peter Ellis, the global director of the Nature Climate Solutions at Nature Conservancy at Nature Conservancy. “We are talking about the biggest challenge that civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”
Ahead road
Many speakers emphasized the need for academics, industry and government to cooperate in search of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of stability for Microsoft, compared the challenge of the Apollo Spaceflight Program, and said that educational institutions need to pay more attention to how and how to increase investment in green energy.
“The challenge is that the educational institutions are not currently able to know how to run both the bottom-ups and top-down changes over time,” Lurs said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road for net zero, then there is a need to transfer the mentality of academics. And fortunately, it is starting.”
During a panel, “From Lab to Grid: Scaling First-of-e-Energy Technologies,” Hannan Happy, CEO of Renuable Energy Company Exocat, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all similar,” he said. “only thing [customers] Regarding electrons, it cares that they are available when available, and they are very cheap. ,
Melissa Zhang, Principal of Azimuth Capital Management, said the energy infrastructure development cycles usually take at least five to 10 years – longer than an American political cycle. However, he warned that Green Energy Technologies are unlikely to get significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you are in something that is very dependent on subsidy … then the reason for being worried about this administration is,” he said.
Jean Gabelis, CEO of the Lab-to-Grid panel, lists several companies installed in MIT. “They all have the same thing,” they said. “They all walked to someone’s view, in a laboratory, proof-off-concept, scale. It is not that none of this stuff ends. This is a continuous process.”
