Clean energy breakthroughs could save the world. How do we create more of them?

Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change. 

The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad. 

That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn’t be more different. 

In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren’t just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights. 

So what will come next? That’s the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow’s energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what’s to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future.

If you’re running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan? 

To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances. 

I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you define “breakthrough” or explain how it’s different from an incremental advance? 

A lot of really important innovation has been incremental. We’ve had amazing “breakthroughs” in a way with batteries, with wind energy, but it has happened over time. An example of a kind of a breakthrough was fracking, because that was a revolution, but for a long time, everybody ignored the importance of all the various technologies horizontal drilling, shale fracture fluid, subsurface mapping] developing in the background, or didn’t think it was going to happen. That one was a big step change when the price, performance, and shale gas field discoveries converged. 

Whereas with solar, it just kept getting cheaper consistently faster than we expected. One way you can define “breakthrough” is you can look at what everyone’s expecting and see when you do better than that. So breakthroughs are kind of surprises. 

So perhaps it’s better to think of a breakthrough not necessarily as an invention, but rather a point at which a technology becomes viable?

Right. 

Then can you put the recent clean tech advances we’ve seen into context? Have we seen anything like this before? 

I think that we’ve always had a lot of technological change. I don’t think it’s just around clean energy. If there is some kind of incentive, then energy developers will be very clever at finding solutions. As we realize that renewable energy has a lot of benefits to it, the more we focused on it, the more we were like, “Whoa, this is 10 times better than anybody thought it was going to be.” 

With clean energy, a big part of the rationale is its environmental and climate benefits, rather than simply profit. There’s sort of a moral motivation baked in. Does that motivation matter? 

For many technologies, there are always true believers. Most people who get really excited about an invention are not just trying to make a profit. I think they’re almost always really into the technology itself. 

So with renewable energy, people have been excited for a very, very long time. That excitement tided people over for many years when those sources weren’t all that profitable. Solar took a long time for it to become great. The reason people focused on it was because of their vision that this has such potential for energy and the environment. So I think that the moral dimension does play a role.

With a trade war kicking off, a lot of the raw materials and finished products in clean energy are likely to get more expensive. Is there a chance of backsliding in clean energy progress? 

I don’t think we’re going to lose the technology advances. [Development] can slow down. We saw that for offshore wind, with the COVID-induced inflation and higher interest rates slowing the industry down. We’re not losing any benefits of the technology though, and in fact it will probably induce new technological change. To me those kinds of things are temporary. Trade wars and stuff like that, they’re bad. They will slow things down, but they won’t stop innovation.

There’s also competition against clean energy. You talked about fracking and how that was an unexpected breakthrough. I remember in the 1990s people were talking about peak oil, and then that discussion went away because we just kept finding more oil and more exploitable resources. It seems like those same price and performance pressures on clean tech to improve also apply on the fossil side, and there’s still a ton of money and innovation there.

Are there any breakthroughs in fossil energy that could counteract progress in clean tech?

That is a good point. Yeah, that peak oil thing used to drive me crazy. When it was a big thing, what I kept trying to explain to people that the industry will just innovate. The higher the price of oil gets, the more we’re going to figure out how to get oil out of the ground. 

There could be more innovations in fossil fuels, but where we are in the US, climate change is a very real problem and it’s hitting people today. It’s not going away. I think that the majority of focus on innovation is going to be things that can help us deal with climate change while living high-quality lives. 

Being at a university, I see that the young bright students are not dying to get into fossil fuels. Most of them want to build a world that’s going to be liveable for them, for their children. That gets back to what you were saying: Does it matter what the underlying reason is for innovating? And I guess when I think of it that way, it does matter. Young people want to make a better world. And so they are excited to go into clean energy, not into dirty energy.

How do we start planning for another step change in clean energy? How do we prepare for stuff that we haven’t invented yet?

Investing in science and engineering is obviously a good idea if we want to have more kinds of scientific breakthroughs. But yeah, given that we don’t know what the technology of tomorrow is going to look like, we really want to focus on flexibility and adaptability in the near term. 

Something that I think is important but not always very sexy or appealing is to streamline the grid interconnection process. Every time a new energy project wants to connect to the power grid they have to get into this interconnection queue. The grid operators have to do a study and see how it’s going to affect the rest of the grid. That process is really slow and inefficient; it can take years and years for things to get on the grid. 

Speeding that up is something that’s going to be useful broadly. You don’t need to predict if it’s going to be enhanced geothermal or if it’s going to be new versions of solar that will win out to get that queue working better. 

Similarly, we need to build new transmission where and when it’s needed. It would be independent of where we end up on the energy supply side. Some of these battery technologies are facilitating distributed resources like rooftop solar and microgrids. Thinking about just how to integrate them on the main power grid would be useful. 

What do you see as the government’s role in facilitating this?

Certainly investing in science and engineering. A lot of it is also setting goals for specific technologies. It’s important because it coordinates the supply chain. That’s something that state or federal governments could do if they really have a vision. It doesn’t even cost very much money. A lot of it is reviewing and streamlining regulatory processes to make sure that regulation is doing what it should do. 

What about things like investing in companies or offering financing to startups? 

One thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of green bonds so that you can borrow money at a lower interest rate when what you’re doing is good for the environment. I don’t think that involves the government exactly picking companies; it just means you’re making this money available if you follow certain guidelines. 

Permitting risk is a kind of a bureaucratic risk, and the government could reduce that by understanding if there’s going to be a huge public pushback in building a certain area rather than every developer going out to do all their own individual work. 

One example is offshore wind in Europe. There, the state does a lot of work before the developers get there in understanding the specific sites. By the time they allocate the regions to build, they’ve done a lot of the work that takes a lot of the risk out of it, and then they put it up for bids to private companies. Mechanisms like that can be really useful.

For energy project developers, how do you decide whether to use what you can get off the shelf now versus waiting a few years, maybe another decade, for something better?

A friend of mine many years ago did some research on that, and basically she found that if things are improving at a pretty fast rate, it’s almost always worth it to go ahead and invest in what you have now because you’re going to get a lot of value out of it. Yes, it’s possible that 10 years from now, it’ll be something even better, but you’re already getting a lot of value from what you’re doing.

I don’t see many developers waiting around for a better technology. I think we have a lot of good options.