Accelerating Energy Innovation: The Federal Role

Panelists explore opportunities for the United States to develop and deploy emerging energy technologies to better compete with China and other global rivals, as well as discuss pragmatic ways to expand federal investment in energy innovation and maximize its impact.

WORLAND: OK. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Justin Worland. I’m senior correspondent at Time, where I write about climate, energy-related topics. Welcome to this afternoon’s conversation on “Accelerating Energy Innovation,” and, more specifically, the federal role in accelerating energy innovation.

Obviously, this is a really fascinating moment to be an observer or a participant in the U.S. energy sector. The AI push and the electricity demand growth that that’s generated has created conditions ripe for innovation, lots of capital that’s looking to help meet the demand, a bipartisan consensus, of sorts, around the imperative. And these factors have made innovation a more powerful motivator than maybe climate change has in the past. And despite these tailwinds, there are really steep challenges. I’m a journalist and I try to frame things carefully, but, you know, I don’t think it goes too far to say that the U.S. is in many ways shooting itself in the foot, whether it’s permitting delays, interconnection bottlenecks, misaligned incentives. And so we’re watching all these—this really interesting moment of opportunity collide with these structural barriers. So we’re going to dig into all that with this really excellent panel, not just the problems but also some of the potential solutions.

So I’ll just introduce the panel quickly, starting—I guess I’ll start next to me with JC Sandberg, chief policy officer at ACP, America Clean Power; Heather Reams, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions; David Hart, senior fellow for climate and energy at here at CFR. And then we have joining us virtually Justin Briggs, who’s chief operating officer at Antora Energy.

So going to start, David, with you, maybe to lay the ground and help frame this conversation. In the fall you published the Global Energy Innovation Index here at CFR, looking at how thirty-nine countries can engage—are engaging in global processes to improve energy technologies. And I guess maybe if you could just, like, give us a sense of how the U.S. fits into that sort of global picture, and how the indicators that you track have changed over time with regard to the U.S.

HART: Yeah. Thanks, Justin. And appreciate everyone being here, and you for moderating the panel.

So this index takes a very broad view of innovation. Some of the coauthors are here in the audience. We include three subindexes. We cover knowledge, development, and use. We cover the development of markets. And also policy. And the U.S. overall placed thirteenth. As you mentioned, there were thirty-nine countries in the study. It does very best in the market area, where it placed third, but it does poorly in others, and particularly in knowledge production. And that’s something that worries me. So these are very conventional innovation indicators, like publications and patents. And the U.S. came in twenty-ninth out of the thirty-nine countries. So that’s worrisome.

Now, these numbers are scaled by the size of the country. So it’s not fair to compare Denmark to the United States directly. And if you look at the United States in absolute terms it does better. But even there, there are signs of concern. And as you mentioned, the trends are important. And the trends are declining, especially for the U.S. relative to China. So let me just pick one indicator. We looked at highly cited papers. So these are the top 10 percent of papers in terms of the citations that other scientists make to them. So it’s a measure of how high-quality the papers are. So the best quality papers. And over the last five years in this study China produced four times as many of those papers as the United States. So that’s an absolute terms.

And I should say as well, so all this is only through 2024 before the current administration came in. And I’m sure we’ll talk about their policies. So whatever issues you may think about with energy innovation, they do predate this administration.

WORLAND: So, Heather, I’ll come to you next. And maybe David just ended, concluding—or, ended referring to some of the policy challenges. And maybe you can just give us very high level—we’ll get into the specifics in a bit—but a very high-level read on the sort of current policy situation.

REAMS: Yeah. It’s great to be here with you all. I think we’ve had a pretty tumultuous 2025 with the new administration. The rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act and replacing it with the One Big Beautiful Bill, or whatever it’s being called right now, it created a lot of uncertainty for businesses that were planning on investing across the United States. In fact, I mean, if you remember reading when the IRA, passed Europe was thinking about how do we compete with the United States? And what do we need to do? And now you don’t hear that as much because of the changes.

But on top of that, it’s the uncertainty that the administration is bringing. So we don’t have congressional Republicans and the White House, also Republican, on the same page. They’re in different—seem to be in different camps, or varying camps. And, oh yeah, then you have the Democrats too, and where they are. So this is creating a lot of policy uncertainty. So something which you would think is like a slam dunk for Republicans, like permitting reform, is now becoming much more challenging as we’re getting into 2026 and looking at something, again, that’s very obvious, that should easily pass, but it’s not so easy to do. So I think that’s a good indicator.

WORLAND: Yeah. Well, so JC, let—maybe pick up on this point of uncertainty. Obviously, your members need policy consistency, a stable operating environment in order to succeed. How are you looking at the current moment?

SANDBERG: So, like the others have said, Thank you for having me. I don’t think I’ve ever done something at Council on Foreign Relations, so I appreciate the opportunity.

I think, to build on what Heather said, capital chases certainty. And I don’t think that this is a moment of retreat. I think what it is, is it’s a moment of recalibration. And so what happens in the marketplace is that capital has to assess, are we going to—as Heather said—are we going to have explosive growth and put our capital into the U.S., be it for projects or manufacturing? Or are we just going to maintain and kind of tread water? And I think, with one notable exception which we won’t talk about a lot today which is offshore wind which is this whole other bag of fun—(laughter)—I think for the most part—

WORLAND: We can talk about it. (Laughs.)

SANDBERG: For—well, you’re seeing what’s happening in the courts right now. So that is kind of—it’s on its own path.

I do think, though, that we are in this moment where a lot of capital was pouring into to actually meet the president’s vision. And I think we share the president’s vision of American energy dominance. I think we might just have a little bit different view of our role in that, or if we have a role in that. But I think that you were seeing a lot of manufacturing, a lot of project development, a lot of provision of electrons. And I think—or electricity—and I think that that’s needed now.

But I do think, as we look at—I’d be less than—I’d be a little disingenuous if I didn’t say that the industry is kind of in that moment of, and especially with our membership and the capital and the financial institutions behind them, are we in a maintenance moment or are we in—continue to be in a growth moment? And I think right now, I mean, I think we’re probably more in that maintenance. But I do think if they can find their path, I mean, permitting, reform, any of these other things, I do think that there is—the market fundamentals in the industry are still strong. And so I think, with that said, with a little more policy certainty I think you start to see the capital inflows again. It’s a long-winded answer.

WORLAND: No, it’s great. It’s great to—great to lay the ground. OK, so, Justin, I want to come to you with a bit of a different question. Maybe first introduce everyone here to Antora. And then, you know, give us a sense about how you’ve been navigating the energy innovation ecosystem.

BRIGGS: Yeah. Well, firstly, like the others have said, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Yeah. My name is Justin Briggs. I’m one of the cofounders of Antora Energy. Antora is the thermal battery manufacturer. So what is a thermal battery? For those of you who may not be familiar, it’s quite simple. It’s basically a shipping container-sized steel shell full of graphite blocks. Just big blocks of solid carbon. And those blocks store energy as heat. So when there’s excess electricity we use that electricity to resistively heat these blocks of carbon. So literally, just run it through a big toaster coil and heat up the carbon blocks to very high temperatures.

And carbon has some pretty phenomenal physical properties, so it stores a lot of energy. And then you can just store that with thermal insulation packed around the outsides in this steel box. And then that actually stores energy for days on end. And you can deliver that energy back to users either directly as heat, for example for industrial processes, or you can take the stored heat and convert it back into electricity and deliver that to an industrial user, to a datacenter, to a city, or any other large user of electricity. So that’s sort of what a thermal battery is.

As I mentioned, at Antora we’re manufacturing these things in the United States. We recently set up our first gigafactory, out in California. And we’re currently running at about twelve gigawatt hours per year and shipping these batteries out to customers. You mentioned our experience in the innovation ecosystem to date. I think we’ve felt very fortunate to have a really positive experience so far as a company. We were actually supported in the very early days of the company, back in 2017-2018, through the Department of Energy, both ARPA-E and what was then the Advanced Manufacturing Office, supported Antora. We also had support from the National Science Foundation and the California Energy Commission.

All of that support was, I would say, extremely catalytic to us. It was at a time when we were a very small company, just a small collection of people with some ideas. And there were high-risk bets taken on us, because we hadn’t proven out much. And those bets have come to fruition in a pretty big way. We’ve now raised hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital that was really catalyzed by that public support, and both by the dollars and the progress that we made, but also by the credibility of saying, hey, the U.S. Department of Energy has vetted this and it’s something that private capital can follow on. And that has been a huge part of our ability to grow the team to several hundred and to stand up what is now one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in the United States.

So there has been a lot of uncertainty this year, for sure. And we do like certainty. But I’ll also say we feel really grateful to have participated in the U.S. energy innovation ecosystem to date.

WORLAND: Great. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And now we’ll go and have maybe a little bit of a dynamic discussion, so anyone should, you know, feel free to chime in. But, David, I want to just go to a piece that you wrote right after last week’s appropriations package. You called it the reassertion of congressional authority on energy innovation, you know, basically as Congress seeks to fund some of these programs at levels that the White House didn’t want to fund them. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what’s playing out there? And then considered alongside, you know, One Big Beautiful Bill, like, do you see this as a signal that Congress is going to, I don’t know, keep things in line more broadly on energy innovation?

HART: Yeah. And I would love to hear my colleagues up here talk about this, because they’re the real experts. But I think it was an encouraging sign. I wouldn’t take it as a long-term signal yet, but it is the first indication that Congress is going to try to assert its constitutional authority over the power of the purse. The White House has challenged that. And we’ll see how far they want to go with their challenge. But in the case of DOE, so some of the programs that Justin was referring to, the president proposed to either eliminate them or slash them to the point where they would no longer be difference makers. And while there’s been a major realignment of spending across different technology categories, the overall figure was only cut a small amount.

And that’s encouraging to me. I think there is still a long way to go. It’s going to be up to Congress to exercise oversight to make sure that the funds that have been appropriated now for the current fiscal year, which is what we’re talking about. So this is the fiscal 2026 budget, which, for those who aren’t familiar with the federal calendar, began in October. So we’ve been working for several months on the previous fiscal year. And I believe passed the House this week and it’s going to pass the Senate, and should be signed into law soon. But even once the budget passes, I think there’s going to be still plenty for Congress to do to make sure that the dollars actually flow the way they’re supposed to.

WORLAND: Heather or JC, do you want to come in on this?

REAMS: Yeah. I’d just say that the Trump administration, in the first administration, did zero out a lot of these programs. So this is not new in terms of where President Trump and his administration has been. He zeroed out ARPA-E, the Loan Program Office, massive cuts EERE over the years. And somehow we’re able to fill them back, but in a bipartisan way. So we’ve seen this back and forth. A president can put out a budget. And you’re like, thanks for playing. Congress has the power of the purse. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. And that’s where politics becomes very, very local, right? They’re representing those businesses and state interests that are in their districts and states, which is what we expect them to do.

So you start seeing members of Congress operating kind of either together or unilaterally, but representing—you know, doing the legislative work, and not necessarily as part of a party, with the Republican Party with the president. And this is the dynamic I alluded to in my original statement, is, like, this—we don’t necessarily have Republicans all on the same page where they’re monolithic. I think it’s a good thing, because it puts opportunity for businesses to make their case to different members of Congress, whether it’s the House or Senate, to talk about the benefits of their company, or of business certainty, or whatever is needed to unleash capital. So I think that’s a piece of it.

But I do think there are—we all have—seem to have questions about the administration wanting affordability, wanting grid reliability, wanting to win the AI race, but still willing to pick some winners and losers. And I think that, to me, is a question that it’s like, OK, how do we overcome that, as a Congress, as a governing body? And where that the House and the Senate and the White House going to disagree? And I think they are definitely going to disagree. We’ll see that in 2026.

SANDBERG: I would just say this. I think Justin’s a great example of the why you need public sector investment in some of these things. And I think what we have to remember is that if we—if we’re taking a step back and we’re thinking globally, competitors are doing this but at a scale in which we can’t even imagine here in the U.S. And so before I, five years ago, came and helped start this trade association, I spent a decade at GE. And so I’ve seen this everywhere in the world. And especially in Asia and some of those Asian countries, both in South Asia and in China, where the early-stage investment is critical.

Now, we can quibble with what happens after that early stage investment, right, and how much government subsidization comes after that, and in industry, and in technology. And certainly there’s honest debate and disagreement to be had there. But I think what Justin is a good example of is why that’s important, why that early-stage capital investment is important. And also an acceptance that not all those companies are going to be Justin’s company, right, where they make it into other series of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. Some of those companies are going to fail. And the political fallout from that, I think, sometimes, is the thing that constrains more adoption of that, because there’s this fear that, you know, it’s a waste of taxpayer money, or whatever. But there’s more successes than there are failures. And I think there’s certainly a role for public-sector investment in this space.

WORLAND: Yeah. Well, OK. I want to come back to that point. But, Heather, I want to just follow up on the sort of landscape you laid on the Hill, and working with individual members rather than with the party. And just to sort of reflect on your work with One Big Beautiful Bill, and the way in which you were able to, you know, claw back some of the potential, you know, programs that they wanted to end, or funding levels that they wanted to cut. What worked? What are the lessons from that that maybe are useful for others to reckon with and think about going forward?

REAMS: Yeah. There’s a lot of interesting pieces here. And we’re using those lessons right now, because we need to. I think one is that not all—not everyone thinks the same about tax credits and what they do, right? So some Republicans like them, some Republicans didn’t like them. It doesn’t mean, though, that a Republican didn’t like a tax credit for a certain kind of energy and they didn’t like that energy. They didn’t like the tax credit for the energy. Sometimes it was both, but you have to be able to discern what was the issue? Was it more like I don’t believe the government should have this role, this is a mature technology, we shouldn’t be giving it? Or these should be tax credits reserved for nascent technologies? It ran the gamut. So I think that taking where Republicans are and saying they don’t support certain kinds of energy wholesale, big mistake. We need to go a la carte, very retail, to each member and figure out what was up and down. Where are they? That generally tracks with what’s in their district, generally.

I think second is that ripping the rug—pulling the rug out from underneath businesses and not giving any off-ramps was a big no-no. I think, I think even the most logical Republicans, even those who were—I would find—I would find sometimes illogical, went, we can’t do this to American businesses. We can’t just—and what does that say for investment? So some kind of business certainty mattered to nearly every member of Congress we talked to. And I think that’s an important lesson that we bring as we’re doing the work of 2026 and beyond. This is not a Congress or these are not policymakers who like uncertainty, but recognize that we do have uncertainty right now. And feel a need to fix it in some way, but are also not necessarily all on the same page. So I think that’s an opportunity, for sure.

And I’d say third is this need for—you know, the recognition there’s a need for energy. You started seeing it all of the above, all of the above. And you saw Democrats are now really starting to embrace all of the above, where Democrats before were some of the above, and you heard Republicans talking about all of the above. Now you’re starting to see a switch in some way. Again, another question, but another opportunity.

WORLAND: Justin, I might invite you to comment on anything that—you know, you were discussed a bit from JC, but also just to ask, I mean, you talked about the early stage investment. I think 2018 timeframe. Maybe talk a little bit about how the policy environment today is affecting your business. I don’t know if you benefit from the manufacturing tax credit. I mean, just anything today at this sort of current policy discussion.

BRIGGS: Yeah, absolutely. Well, maybe I’ll tie some of those things together. And I think, you know, there was discussion of these really early stage investments in innovation, which are absolutely critical. You know, I believe in supporting basic science. I believe in supporting speculative, early-stage companies that may have a big impact. But I think what we’re seeing now, as a more mature company that’s actually deploying a lot of our technology, is there is also a gap in some of the later-stage support. And in particular I think deployment and project finance is a big area where we’re seeing the need for—where there could be a lot more support on the federal level or the state level.

That could look Like a lot of different things. That could look like loan guarantees. It could look like recoverable grants. It could look like any number of other mechanisms. But there is definitely a shortage of capital willing to take, you know, the first, or the second, or the third swing at a big deployment of a new technology class. So far we’ve been pretty fortunate in finding some of those investors who would say, you know, we’re willing to, you know, put more money towards a multi-hundred million dollar project to build a big battery out in the middle of the country. But there are only so many of those. And that’s a place where I think the United States government could have a huge, huge impact.

To your question about, you know, sort of policy certainty and benefiting from the current policies, you know, I think, as with any business, it’s been said multiple times already, certainty is paramount for us. We’ve been fortunate so far to be in a place where what we’re doing is generally supported and appreciated by folks on both sides of the aisle. We’re producing American-made technology that was invented here. We’re manufacturing it here in the United States. And we’re deploying it to other manufacturers in the United States that make physical goods that benefit everyone. So that creates local jobs and it also stimulates the local economy in other ways. For example, there’s increased demand for local feedstocks that go into those factories.

And then, I think, really, really critically for us, and, again, in alignment with, I think, something that folks on both sides of the aisle believe, we’re really big on reshoring supply chains. And that’s something we’re really excited about, particularly for some of these new energy storage technologies, like thermal batteries. You know, we’re not using fancy chemistry. We’re not using rare minerals. We literally just take blocks of carbon and store heat in those blocks of carbon. And one of the great things about this particular supply chain is that the U.S. is actually positioned to dominate this supply chain.

We have historically. We have incredible carbon resources in this country. And we have incredible carbon expertise for how to extract and process those resources. So at Antora we’ve been partnering with folks in places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania to actually repower facilities that had once been producing graphite products for one use case, but had been shuttered or mothballed, and are now being dedicated to producing materials that go into our carbon-based thermal batteries. So I think support for any of that is hugely beneficial for actually getting some of these American-grown technologies deployed in a big way.

WORLAND: Great. OK, so I want to shift gears a little bit. Just, JC, you mentioned competition. And, I mean, that was obviously part of the sort of opening framing around the place of the U.S. Obviously, these discussions are often framed around the U.S. competition with China. You know, in the Biden years the administration was trying to play catch up, you know, trying to support clean tech to play catch up. In the Trump administration—the second Trump administration I think it feels as though, at least from the White House, their view of competition around energy technology is largely centered on hydrocarbons, and maybe some advanced tech, maybe. But, by extension, I think some have argued that the U.S. has largely ceded the clean tech game to China.

So I guess I’d be curious, maybe starting with David, do you agree? I mean, is this—is this something that the U.S., this moment—this moment that follows years of, sort of, pullback in advanced energy innovation from the U.S., is this something that the U.S. can come back from? And, you know, is there a case, maybe—or, I guess, and then how? And how would the U.S. come back from it?

HART: Yeah. So I would frame it a little bit differently. I think there are some areas that the administration supports strongly that would advance both, ironically, the climate agenda as well as the innovation and economic agenda. So fields like nuclear power and geothermal power and energy storage are there. But we do have to do something different, because China has made such a big footprint in a lot of these technologies. And it’s not stopping, right? It dominates the solar industry, dominates the battery industry. And those are important areas. But they’re moving on to the next one, and the next one as well. And I think the challenge that Justin put to us is where I would like to see more investment. And I want to refer to some work I did with a group called Clean Tomorrow. And one of my coauthors for that is here. Where we lay out a plan to expand the investment budget for the federal government.

And I think the biggest part should go into these downstream or later-stage programs. They tend to be more expensive anyway. If you’re building a factory, it’s more expensive than outfitting a lab. But that’s where China has got a big advantage. And they use a different institutional arrangement than us. There are plenty of arguments to be had about, you know, which is legitimate and which isn’t. But the fact is, if we’re going to catch up or we’re going to stay ahead in areas where we’re already ahead, we have to do things somewhat differently. And I think that means the kinds of ideas, thinking about how do we fund first-of-a-kind factories, first-of-a-kind projects. And there was quite a bit of that in the infrastructure bill. And the fate of that funding is really unclear right now.

WORLAND: Well, I mean, I guess there are sort of two questions that stem from that for me. I mean, one, it would be great to just talk a little bit about, particularly in the current landscape, what it would look like to focus more on project finance versus the kind financing—like, what would that look like? What are the sort of unlocks at DOE or elsewhere that would make sense in, you know, 2026? And then the other part would just be, what are the—what are the technologies where that’s feasible and where it’s worth spending the capital, whether that’s political or, you know, actual capital, to try to focus on those technologies? So there’s two questions there.

HART: Yeah. I mean, I think for the first one, the very broad ideas, there has to be a stronger partnership between the government and the private sector, both the investors and the companies. And that’s not something that the Department of Energy has historically done much of. It’s been basically a science agency. It supports this tremendous network of labs. So some new capabilities have to be created there. And the people that know how to do those things have to be drawn into the federal service. And I do worry about the massive cutbacks that were imposed in the last year on DOE. And a lot of the folks that had been drawn in with some of those capabilities have now been fired or let go. So there’s that kind of government capability question.

As for the specific technologies, I think we can argue about them. I don’t think there’s any doubt that energy storage—one of the reasons I wanted to have Justin here is, you know, that, I think, is, as he said, both sides of the aisle like it. It makes sense. It creates flexibility. It creates jobs. You know, it cuts the supply dependency, depending on the technology. So I’ll just offer that as one example. I don’t want to necessarily lay out what I think the whole portfolio should look like. Yeah, we can—we can get there one at a time. It’s a big landscape.

WORLAND: But it’s a good one because it’s hard to disagree with that, I guess. But, JC or Heather, do you have thoughts on any of these sort of things we’ve been discussing?

SANDBERG: I would just say, there’s certainly a place for innovation. But I think there is an industry right now that is ready to scale on the manufacturing side. And so I think—and there’s certainly a place for this. I just don’t want you all, or the domestic landscape, to lose sight of the fact that there is technology that—there are things that need to be done here that aren’t being done here right now, and were ready to be done here. And now with this uncertainty, of kind of everyone has hit the pause. I think lithium—there’s lithium batteries, which is kind of—kind of the flavor of the day right now in the storage space. Wind has always been, I think, more domestic than most. Solar is coming back. You’re seeing that come back. First, solar has been here domestically for a long time, but on the crystalline side people want to invest here as well. So I do think that we can’t lose sight of that while we’re talking about innovation.

But I also think that, again, it sounds like a broken record, that the certainty around that—right now, everyone’s kind of taking a step back. Like, what’s going to happen? Will these projects advance? I think they almost certainly will. Just the question is, then how long does it take that capital to decide it wants to find its way back into this market? And I think that, to Heather’s point, you know, Tip O’Neill said all politics are local. I think that’s certainly the case. That members—there is a certain amount of toxicity that was attached to the Inflation Reduction Act and the tax credits, given how it was. I think—how it came into being. I think there’s a long history, as you all know, of the clean energy industry being tied to the environmental movement, right? And we’ve kind of outgrown that now in a lot of ways, but—given the size and breadth of the industry—but in a lot of ways we haven’t, in fact, because we’re still tied to that in many political corners.

And so as we continue to make the business case for clean energy, you know, tax credits going away, and we won’t die, we’ll still be here. That there is that space that we need to occupy where we are back to local politics. And, as Justin said, manufacturing is good for the economy. I think the next thing that we’re going to see, and we’ve supported, and I know Heather’s talked about this before, is where else do we go further upstream, right? Are we going to be more into the extraction space? Everybody wants to talk about processing. If you’ve ever been to one of these sites where they process, you know why we don’t do it here. It’s very dirty business. But we can certainly have the natural resources that we need to extract so that we’re not so beholden in some of these things to people that might not like us in a year or two years, or even now.

REAMS: So many things to unpack. Great pieces here. I’d say one of the questions I have, and, you know, and some comments, is that—I mean, you’re right, like, we need energy right now. And what’s ready to be deployed right now, wind and solar plus batteries, is, like, right now. And if we need it, we should be using it, no questions asked, from where my organization and I sit. The pushback from the administration is questionable, considering the demand that’s there. But also, though, the uncertainty that the White House, I think, is pushing into is the continued investment, as we’ve been talking about, that uncertainty. Those dollars are just dissipating. They’re going someplace else. They’re going to another country. They’re going to a competitor who is getting a stronger foothold on the United States. And that pushes us further and further behind. Clawing back to where we need to—rightfully we want to be in the next several years, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a clear sense of what that’s going to be.

Unless, you know, at least from the—I’d say, White House, I can see it, but I don’t see it coming from Congress. I don’t see an alignment there. And, again, that’s where I think this uncertainty of, why should we invest. Also what’s been—and then you put on that permitting, I’ll come back to permitting. If you pull a permit that’s been given, what is that saying about the investments in this country and how safe they are? We’re trying—we’re talking about permitting because we can reduce costs by 20-25 percent with a robust permitting package. Now we’re seeing costs just increase over and over, with litigation and whatnot. So like there seems to be, without a strategic plan—and my advice to—you know, for 2026, to the both the administration and Congress, is to come up with a plan about how we’re going to win AI, how we’re going to bring prices down, and how we’re going to have reliability.

At the end of the day, that’s what people want. This administration has put out a great framework of how to win the AI race. But you’re, like, you and what investments are going to get us there? Nuclear is also very exciting. And the possibilities there. There are other technologies that are so exciting than what’s there, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear path to get there. We saw this a little bit also in the Biden administration. I don’t want to just jump on Trump. There’s a lot of, like, throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, I’ll say spaghetti, to see what sticks. There was a lot of money that was out there without really a clear game plan. And I think we’re still living in that, like, where’s the—where’s the clear markers from the government so that investors can invest, and we can unleash that capital, really, to do what we need to do as a country?

SANDBERG: The only thing I’d add to what Heather just said is that, for the first time that I can remember, like, electricity prices are going to be a kitchen table issue in this midterm election, right? So it’s kind of become like gas prices. And so I think you’ll see some political expediency around that issue as we get kind of a little bit further down the path in ’26. But I just would say—Hannah’s going to laugh at me when I say this—because you’re starting to see online, with influencers, and in Substacks, and all these places where kind of opinion foments on the internet, the utility price issue is—the and electricity bill issue—is real, right? It’s there. And so it’s something, I think, certainly that the Trump administration is begrudgingly paying attention to. And I think that will maybe help unlock some things as we get closer—or, further into the year.

REAMS: I’ll just add that affordability gets into—I mean, we saw it in the governor’s races in Virginia and in New Jersey. It was nascent, you know, it was early, but there was still something there. Certainly in Virginia, we’re going to make a big deal about it because of our—that’s where I live. I say “we,” me. Where I live, because that’s where a lot of the datacenters are, and the need for energy. But I—you know, certainly in the midterms. This is—we’ve got a long runway to November, and a lot of education, a lot of concern. And inflation is not coming down despite the fact that gas prices are below $3 in most places. I think it’s below $3 in thirty-seven states. That’s incredible. It’s an incredible number. But now we’re seeing, well, it’s not just gas prices. There’s going to be education about what these higher electricity bills mean, and what it—how it ties to inflation, and why your bread is seven bucks a loaf.

I looked on my bag of chips the other day. I was just looking. It was a good size bag, right? Just a—isn’t gourmet chips, but $7.29 for a bag of chips. I’m like, come on, man. I mean, I’m young enough to remember a small bag of chips being twenty-five cents, right? But I’m not trying to say they should be twenty-five, but, like, prices are really getting up there. And it’s putting a squeeze on families. And these are—a lot of these families are the same ones that voted for Republicans last cycle. And they’re going to want answers. Finally, this will put it on governors. I think governors are really sensitive to electric bills, utility prices, what the utilities are saying. And I think they have an outsized role here in speaking up about prices. And I think another kind of piece of the puzzle, and talking about Republicans in Congress and the White House, or Democrats, and then what those governors are going to say, to try to, you know, be the winners in the 2026 midterms.

WORLAND: I mean, along with, you know, in the beginning, I mentioned, obviously, the demand, which has, you know, created capital. And there’s, like, a lot of—a perfect storm brewing. And then you throw in affordability and it feels like this should be an opportunity where it makes sense to actually do these things. And then the question is can that energy be channeled into actually getting it right? And I think that’s, like, the big trillion-dollar question. We have just, like, seven minutes before I’m going to go to audience questions. And I want to ask—I want to ask two questions, if I—if I can.

One, I just go back to this all politics is local point, which came up, you know, a couple times. And then just ask about the sort of understanding of what happened with the IRA. Because the sort of conventional wisdom was that all politics would be local, and that would save the IRA. And then, of course, that didn’t happen. But maybe that narrative is more complicated. And so I wonder if maybe, Heather, you might just comment on that. And then the other question I’d love—you know, with just a very short amount of time to get the panel’s views on—is permitting reform. And, you know, I mean, we could have a whole panel on that, but just, you know, maybe some quick reflections and thoughts about where you see things now and where you might reasonably expect them to go.

REAMS: Yeah. I’ve got some thoughts on that, the IRA piece. It was a very good plan to make sure that major investments were in—what, 72-75 percent of Republican districts had some kind of funding from the IRA. And that’s a model that’s often used with defense contractors, particularly in the ’80s when you saw expansion of the military complex. And so everyone has a stake in the game, right? So you have to protect it in some way. That made sense. What makes—two problems with that. One, we really didn’t have a whole lot of time to really see the fruition of what the IRA would be. But, two, we didn’t pass permitting reform. And this is what Joe Manchin really wanted—Senator Manchin really wanted, is that permitting, that one-two. Do one and the other. So I think that would have accelerated some of the investments that we would have seen, and maybe it would have been harder to roll back so much because of the investments that were going on.

Another piece a lot of my—I’d say, Republicans that are more in a leadership role right now tell me, is that we didn’t ask for this. Thank you, but we didn’t ask for this. We weren’t bought into it to begin with. So that assumption you were putting on to us, that it’s in your district and here’s the jobs, really wasn’t there. So that tells me also, that’s a term issue, right? How long it was there. Like, I really didn’t know how great it was, so it really doesn’t matter to me. And I’m going to go vote back on principle than they are basically on that investment in the district. But you do see many Republicans, like you think about Buddy Carter and Georgia one, or batteries and the port are big business, and these are big business. He was certainly out there pushing pretty hard and trying to make the case for why Georgia—and the governor was as well. So you could see Republicans, where they were talking about their issues, have pledged to stay there, to hold the line in some way.

But after—IRA was—and the OBBB was so much more than just those IRA tax credits. I mean, you’re talking about border security, SNAP benefits, and a lot of competing priorities where the member had to make a decision and push as hard as they could, and then I think—and then take a step back, live to fight another day, and try to do no harm. So some of the work that was done in the Senate, like that excise tax that was put on for clean energy, was just punitive. So then we put our fight on getting rid of, like, the punitive pieces, rather than really trying to get more years or softer off-ramps. So it was a slog. I will tell you that. And working with Republicans it was really meeting them where they are, and really leaning on business certainty, this is how America operates, and the need for affordability, reliability, and AI race, at the end of the day.

WORLAND: JC, do you want to comment on permitting reform?

SANDBERG: (Laughs.) Like you said, Heather and I could probably riff on that for a couple hours. (Laughter.) You know, Manchin, we—as an industry, we get behind it for two reasons. One is, obviously, we want to put our projects in the ground faster. But the other piece of it that was probably more important was the transmission stuff—the transmission parts of that bill, for Manchin-Barrasso. And so they got very close. It died for a couple of reasons. Just ran out of steam. But I think for us, the most recent effort through House ENR—sorry—not in ENR. HNR, natural resources, was kind of this—it was the Chairman, Chairman Westerman, standing that up again, that process up.

Certainly for us in that bill, the business certainty provisions were really important. I would say we didn’t get the whole loaf, but we probably got three fourths of it on those provisions. But, again, for us, the marriage of the reforms to project timelines, those types of things, had to be married with a transmission. And that was our perfect storm. And I think if this is going to move forward again, we’re certainly working hard to make sure those two are married together. And I think they will be.

WORLAND: Great. So let’s turn to audience questions, you know, both here in person and online. And then just a reminder that this meeting is on the record. So anyone who—I’m told to ask that. For whoever it was that laughed, I have a note that says it’s on the record, not a personal comment. (Laughter.)

Q: If the political situation were more favorable, would you like to put—would you like to take us back to some period when the—when things were set up properly? Or would you like to see major changes from the way things were? In other words, are we nostalgic for the way things used to be or have we learned a lot and now we want to do things differently? And to what extent do your ideal ideas of what you’d really like to see happen coincide with likely future political climate possibilities?

HART: I’ll take a first crack at this, because I was thinking about this when these guys were coming in. And we should say, this is Chuck Weiss from Georgetown. People should introduce themselves, if they can.

So I think we should be careful not to understate the role of ideology and simple loyalty to the president in some of these recent politics. And that is a change from the past. It used to be was much more—energy politics along the lines of what Heather described was regional. It was, you know, different regions have different resources and different industries. And it was—that was an environment where deals could be made. And if you’re in a world where it’s about principle or ideology or loyalty, it’s much harder to make deals. Now, I don’t know how we go back there. I think we’re still running headlong into this new world. But I would love to get to a world where we could, you know, argue about the merits of technologies and in regions, and less about other principles. That’s my take on that.

REAMS: It’s such a good question. And being a student of political science, and being in Washington for over thirty years, there is a longing to, like, well, we didn’t always do it this way, and why are we doing it this way now? But the reality is, we are doing it this way now. We’re in a second Trump administration, an unprecedented time that brings a tremendous amount of challenges and a tremendous amount of opportunities. I’ve been running CRES for nine years, going into my tenth year. So I started when President Trump was elected, the day before he was elected for his first term. It’s been a ride, right, talking about clean energy and climate. So if I was longing for yesteryear, I would probably be out of business because Republicans weren’t even talking about climate or reducing emissions in the way that they are now, and recognizing the balance of energy, the environment, and the economy.

So I’d say we have to meet the moment. I think we should learn the lessons from the past, but recognize that technology is moving faster than we can possibly imagine. There are amazing companies and inventors and entrepreneurs, like Justin on this panel. And we need to figure out how we’re going to help them help our country move forward. And if that’s leaning on the past a little bit, I’d be OK with it. But recognizing we can’t go back.

WORLAND: Great. OK. Let’s see a question back there.

Q: Hello. Carolyn Campbell with Emerging Capital Partners.

My question is for Justin on the TV there. Could you say something about why you chose California? Is it still a state that’s conducive, given its budget issues and how it’s viewed by the administration? And your views on that state, politics is local. And would you do something differently, or will you be doing anything differently? Thanks.

BRIGGS: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. We originally chose to locate in California because there’s an extremely high density of extremely sharp engineers, and a high density of private capital that can support early-stage companies. So it’s sort of the classic Silicon Valley ecosystem that we grew up in. I met my cofounder at Stanford, and the other cofounder came from MIT, but we had all located in the Bay Area for that reason. It’s just an incredible hub of energy and new ideas. We are actually currently manufacturing in California as well. I mentioned, you know, a twelve gigawatt hour per year battery factory that we just stood up in a little under a year. That’s in California as well, which surprises a lot of people. It turns out that there’s a lot of great manufacturing workforce there. You know, the Tesla factory, for example, in Fremont is a place that trained a lot of amazing technicians to build things. And so we’re really benefiting from that.

That said, there are limitations as well. It’s easier to build things on a large scale and in other places. And so, you know, we really view our deployment strategy as national and global. So the whole intention for us was to build a technology that could be deployed as quickly as possible on the largest scale possible. So, just to give an example, and I actually wanted to tag back to a comment that David made about sort of how do we—how do we get that advantage back in certain areas? What are the areas where we could still really dominate going forward, the technologies where we may have some fundamental head starts? And that was part of the thinking behind a thermal battery that was based on carbon, is that this is a technology that, you know, when we started the company the word “thermal battery” didn’t exist. And now it’s something that’s moving incredibly quickly and the U.S. is positioned to dominate.

So, just to give an example, we went from FID, final investment decision, on a very large scale, multi-gigawatt hour storage deployment, to first energy delivered to the customer in about nine months. And that’s just an unprecedented amount of speed. And we did that in the Midwest U.S. That that project wasn’t built in California. It was built in the Midwest. But that’s the sort of thing that I think we’re going to need if we’re going to win the AI race, if we’re going to power American factories, and to support reindustrialization here in this country so we continue to make things. And so I think that’s the view that we have, is that you have to build a technology that is able to be deployed rapidly in any number of environments, whether it’s California, or Nebraska, or South Dakota, or Europe, or Australia.

WORLAND: Thank you. OK, maybe we’ll do—let’s do the—let’s do the online question, and then we’ll come back to the room.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Rachel Bronson.

Q: Hi. Thank you for this. Calling in from the Midwest, so appreciate the shoutout there.

I am mindful that the prime minister of Canada is headed to China right now to diversify Canadian exports outside—energy exports outside of the U.S., as it’s been a single kind of partner. And clean tech is clearly on the agenda as an area that Canada and China could participate in. And I’m wondering, tagging back to some of the things JC said and some of the things, Heather, that you said, what are the costs of not moving forward in the U.S. in a way that’s predictable and stable, in America’s ability to catch up? It’s not just what we can produce now, but the partnerships that may be formed. What partnerships are we losing? Are you concerned about that? And how does this play out?

WORLAND: David, do you want to start?

HART: I thought she was referring to you guys.

REAMS: You go ahead, and I can build on that. (Laughs.)

HART: Sure. Well, I mean, I think the alliances are scrambled now. I mean, that’s the simplest way to say it. I don’t think we know who our partners are. Now, I would like to see us revive our historic partnership with Europe, with Australia, with Canada. There is a kind of non-China economy and supply chains that we should be building up. And I think it’s a big missing part of our approach to this policy area right now. And I think Canada is a great example. Like, of all the countries we should be allied with, Canada is the most obvious one. And the fact that they’re thinking about closer ties with pretty much everybody else is a signal of the disarray that we’re in.

REAMS: I’d say also, it’s true. We all kind of woke up before we came back from the holiday break and, like, oh, wow, Venezuela. What do we—what are we doing now? When the Trump administration came in, we were talking about, you know, challenging Canada. I met with many of the premiers who were, like, did you see this coming? We really didn’t see this coming either. How do we be part of the solution? We want to have relationships that are—a relationship that’s strong with the U.S. So I think there are—have been questions about why. And I go back—(laughs)—I said this before, I’ll say it again. Where the White House is versus where congressional Republicans are different places on this So, you know, traditionally the administration speaks for the country. So you’re having, you know, the prime minister, go, yeah, I’m going to go talk to China. I mean, who can blame him for doing so, because there is a geopolitical reshuffling, scrambling, I guess, as you said, that we—that is occurring right now.

But I do—you know, this is how, Rachel, your questions is great. What kind of harm are we having here? It remains to be seen. I can tell you where congressional Republicans are—actually Democrats and Republicans, when it comes, say, to critical minerals, where Canada could be a solution for many of the minerals that we need, in a partnership. The DOMINANCE Act is getting ready to be introduced in the House. They created a fancy name for it, but it comes up to dominance, right? It’s one of those long names that they—someone was very proud of themselves for coming up. And they should. That’s a hard one. But really talks about critical minerals, and resourcing them, and onshoring.

Young Kim is the lead sponsor of it—of Republicans. And here’s her—here we have Republicans in the House and Senate—in the House, and Democrats, saying: We want to do this. We want to work on something that we’re going to work with our international partners. This is coming out of the Foreign Relations Committee. It’s not coming out of Natural Resources as well. So you can see that there’s just a difference in approach of where Congress sees itself vis-à-vis the administration. Again, this disconnect is also uncertainty, but it’s also an opportunity that I think should be utilized in 2026.

WORLAND: Do you want to, JC, comment on this? I think I would just also throw—because this was a question I was trying to get at earlier—but throw just one other element to it, which is, is there a point of no return, perhaps, for, you know, the technologies that your member companies focus on? I mean, is there a point where, well—yeah, a point of no return?

SANDBERG: I just think you get to a place where—I used to always say this when we were talking about tax credits. (Laughs.) You can’t have manufacturing without projects, and you can’t have projects without manufacturing, right? Because you need scale. As Justin knows better than anybody in this room, you need certainty in your available market to decide how you’re going to scale your technology and your manufacturing. I think what ends up happening if we don’t have that certainty is then it either doesn’t come here or it does—it doesn’t come here, or what’s here downsizes or goes away, and it just becomes kind of a race to the bottom with cost.

And, you know, tariffs are kind of meant to prevent that, but are super market-distorting. But, to Heather’s point, to have all these things that we want, you know, the upstream rare earth, the partnerships, and the other, we have to be a place that’s investable and we have to be a place where there is certainty in energy markets. And I think right now I would say calls—that’s called into question is too strong. But right now, I think there’s some uneasiness around that.

WORLAND: OK I’ll resist following up. (Laughter.) But is there other questions in the room? OK, right here, and go to you next.

Q: Thanks. Hi. Lachlan Carey from the New Energy Industrial Strategy Center.

I know this is a panel on energy innovation, but I wanted to perhaps zoom out a little bit because I think there’s a broader sort of assault happening on science and innovation generally right now, right? And the panel sort of hasn’t spoken to this. And it seems to me that perhaps this is analogous to the foreign policy for the middle class kind of effort that happened after the previous Trump administration, where perhaps there’s been a disconnect between a, you know, foreign policy and the everyday American, and now perhaps science and innovation and the everyday American. Which is all a long-winded way of sort of asking, how can energy innovation or innovation more broadly kind of connect to the everyday American in a way that builds political support for the type of budgets recommended by, you know, you, David, in your report, and the type of efforts that we’ve said are needed on this panel? Thank you.

REAMS: I was just talking with—over the holidays—with family about AI. I’ve got a brother who is a Silicon Valley guy. So AI is his jam. And it’s funny, you talk to a lot of people about what AI is. They think it’s to make, like, funny memes, or, like, to recraft something that you wrote. I mean, people aren’t really necessarily using AI every day right now to its capacity—its full potential and capacity. But we’re talking about winning the AI race, what does that mean? When you talk about innovation? Because that is what is going to happen. We’re talking about curing cancer. We’re talking about eradicating, you know, disease. We’re talking about better outcomes for education, and really pinpointing where children are having challenges learning, through running things through AI and being able to compile data in a way that we can’t do, and on and on and on, right?

So we don’t really know what AI will do. You say AI, it’s going to help us. It’s like saying, back in the ’90s, the internet is going to save us. Like, Jesus, the internet is going to—imagine hearing that now, the internet’s going to save you? AI is going to save you? So I think it really needs to be more talked about, massaged what is AI? And I actually give this to my datacenter friends who are advocating for datacenters, because there is a war on datacenters right now. And it’s a NIMBY-ism that is expensive. It’s bipartisan. And they really haven’t been able to push back. And I think one of those reasons is they haven’t been able to say what that datacenter is going to do, except maybe, like, it’s for kids to do their TikTok. And, I’m sorry, I don’t want a datacenter in my backyard with kids doing TikTok. Now, if you tell me you’re going to, like, figure out a cure for pancreatic cancer, game on, build it, right? And so I think that’s kind of that understanding of what innovation could be. That’s not necessarily energy innovation, but it’s part of it.

SANDBERG: Listen, on a personal level, we have a sophomore in high school. And she wants to be an engineer. And she is very empirical. Like, numbers work, and they work a certain way. And so it’s been—there have been some difficult kitchen table conversations, because she’s also very, like, astute into public—excuse me—current events, right? And so how do we talk about, like, empirical, and is this forever, and am I in the right career field if I want to be an engineer? Should I go do something else? Should I—so I do think this is all wrapped up in kind of this idea of a political moment. But I have to have faith that we’re going to get beyond this.

BRIGGS: Can I jump in on that as well?

WORLAND: Oh, yeah. Please.

BRIGGS: I think it’s a really good question. I appreciate it a lot. And I think we can do a lot better on this front of how we connect investment in science and innovation and technology to benefit everyday people’s lives. That that was part of the mission of Antora, is, how do we build a company that has the biggest possible positive impact on human lives? And we thought a lot about that in crafting what the technology was, what the business plan was, what the go-to-market strategy was. And, you know, in our view, like, you can’t build something that people don’t feel the benefit from. If you’re going to build a project in someone’s backyard, they have to see their energy prices go down. They have to see demand for the corn they’re growing go up. They have to see jobs crop up in their community. They have to understand what you’re doing and why it matters.

And so part of that, I think, is a technology design and investment question, like making sure that we’re driving forward the technologies that really will have an impact that lifts everybody up. And part of it is just a communication problem. How do we make sure we’re engaging with populations where we deploy, having those conversations early, and inviting folks over to see, you know, what you’re building, and explaining to them what’s going on, what’s under the hood, and why it’s helpful. So I think it’s a really thoughtful question, and something that we must do a lot better as people trying to innovate and people trying to deploy.

WORLAND: It’s a great, great question. I just—I’ll just add one thing, just using my moderator’s prerogative. Which, I mean, having spent time in the field talking to people, you know, in Georgia, say, where there—you know, there’s a lot of datacenters and a lot of a lot of anger, this conversation is accelerating really rapidly. And while it’s great to talk about the very real and important things, like, say, you know, cancer treatment that’s accelerated by AI, there are real externalities. And I don’t think that people are grappling with how to communicate around those externalities. And then you frame it with that macro picture around science, and I actually just feel a little alarmed about it, right? (Laughs.) Like, what happens when people start associating science with, you know, job losses, say, you know, in various industries? So great, great question. I think we had a question here.

Q: Chris Morales from Point72 Ventures.

I want to double-click on nuclear. Specifically, what do you think are the primary barriers to adoption more broadly within the United States? Is it state and local regulations? Is it a lack of fuel inventory and production? Is it other infrastructure? Is it sort of sclerotic federal bureaucracy like the NRC? Anything in particular pop into mind in your experience?

HART: Well, I mean, I think it all can be buried under the question of affordability. It’s a very complex, capital-intensive technology. A lot of pieces go in. I was reading last night about the U.S. ability to cast the vessels for large reactors. Basically, the U.S. doesn’t have that anymore. It’s in Japan. It’s in in China. So it’s a huge enterprise. And to bring the cost down, you have to make a massive investment. And I think the administration is going that direction. And we can argue about whether that’s the right direction. But I think ultimately there’s no single cause but it does add up to the question of whether it can compete in the market that utilities are in to sell power at a price that people are willing to pay, especially given all the other options out there. That’s my short take on it.

REAMS: I agree with the affordability. And our work has been largely on streamlining, permitting, NRC and others, to try to reduce those costs and create more certainty. So it piggybacks right there on affordability.

SANDBERG: I think it kind of falls victim in some areas and places too to the same thing as Heather said datacenters, right? NIMBY-ism is real. Heather’s heard me tell this story before. I have a very good friend whose parents live in Fort Collins, Colorado. And they were so excited to call their son and tell them that they had signed a petition to fight Top Golf coming to Fort Collins. So it’s—like, it’s at that level. You know, and any project developer in our fold, and I’m sure Justin, as he goes to site projects, you can, you know, tell about all the benefits and all the things that come with it. If a project is on your land, it’s the greatest thing that you ever saw, whether it’s a wind turbine, or solar array, or a battery, or a nuclear facility, or whatever. If it’s not, then you don’t love it. And so I think how we break through that, and as an industry I think more broadly, not just clean energy but the energy industry as we go and look at these things, I think it’s a conundrum for sure, and one that we haven’t really cracked the code on just yet.

WORLAND: Great. We have time for more questions. OK, back there.

Q: Thank you. Anya Schmemann, Council on Foreign Relations.

I wonder if you can comment on the role of government equity, the government investing in some of these industries. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Should the government be expecting a return on its investments? Or what happens if these investments fail? What should the role of government be in that case?

HART: You want to take that on?

REAMS: Yeah, I don’t have much on that.

HART: Well, I’ll offer a couple of thoughts on that. The first thing, we should remember that there are a lot of utilities that are publicly owned. I don’t know if they’re in your membership, but we have federally owned and municipal utilities. So that is an old story in America. But the new kinds of investments, like in mining companies and processing companies, I have mixed feelings. But my overall sense is the goal of government in driving innovation should be to take risk off the table. And that mostly means—and maybe Justin can speak to this—that mostly means grants and loan guarantees, stuff that doesn’t take equity away from the companies, because they need that for other kinds of things. So I have some serious concerns about it. Now, there’s a lot of different situations. And there may be situations where it’s appropriate. It might be good to have that in the toolkit. But I do worry about certainly the way it’s being done by this administration, kind of forcing their way into existing companies in exchange for government favors, which is the way I read some of this. But I think the idea is government’s goal in driving innovation is to reduce risk so that private investors can step up with equity.

WORLAND: Any other—anyone else want to comment on that? No? OK. Other questions? Nothing else?

HART: We’ve worn them down completely.

WORLAND: We’ve worn them down. This is—I feel like this—

HART: Or won them over, maybe is better.

WORLAND: (Laughs.) It’s an unusual CFR experience. I feel like typically everyone has lots of questions. Well, let me maybe just—let me ask—let me ask one more question, which is sort of afield, but I thought it was interesting, thinking about your Global Energy Innovation Index, David. And, you know, oftentimes these conversations are framed around competition between the U.S. and China. And I think particularly in this moment, the zeitgeist around Europe and European innovation and possibility is pretty, like, low. People aren’t exactly saying, let’s emulate Europe. And yet, your innovation index finds that the top—the top-performing countries are European. So I wonder if you might, like, just explain why that is. What is there to learn from them?

HART: Yeah. So one thing to reflect on is the different sizes of these countries. Like, if we put the Bay Area in, it would probably do really, really well. And that’s kind of what we’re doing when Denmark comes to the top and Finland comes. These are countries that have five to ten to twenty million people. It’s a much smaller enterprise. But what I think is exciting about Europe is the notion of putting together a welfare state that keeps people at a certain basic level of living, with innovation. And that’s—you know, that’s something they’re working at, but we see it succeeding, I would say in Scandinavia and Northern Europe more so than other parts of Europe.

At the same time, Europe often talks a good game and doesn’t deliver. Like they’ve been talking forever about really creating a venture capital industry, but it still seems to be very dependent on government. So I think there are things to admire there, and things to—you know, to be proud of in the U.S. But I do think one of the virtues of doing this kind of comparative thinking, and including looking at China, is there’s things that the United States needs to learn from the rest of the world. And that, you know, can be writ large with energy overall, energy innovations. We’re going to have to get better at learning from the rest of the world, whether it’s about technologies like electric vehicles or batteries, or institutions where the world has changed and, you know, we’re not the unquestioned technology leader in the world anymore. And that requires some adaptation. So that would be one potential lesson to draw from that work.

WORLAND: OK. We got a question here.

Q: Sorry to intervene again. Chuck Weiss, retired from Georgetown.

HART: Hold on one sec, we got to get the—

Q: We’ve talked about energy, and we hardly mentioned climate. We’ve hardly mentioned climate in all this time. Are there good prospects for innovation in renewable energy that do not depend on having serious carbon charges or other policies that favor nuclear energy—that favor renewable energy?

SANDBERG: In the current generation fleet, for wind and solar? Absolutely. I think these are technologies that are ready to go. I say it this way, and we really don’t—we do energy policy in the U.S. through the tax code, largely. That’s a broad—that’s a gross overgeneralization, but it’s not too far from true. I think these technologies—what the IRA did is just supersized deployment, right? And I think there’ll still be a role for these technologies. They deploy quickly. They’re at cost. I think batteries and technology like what Justin is doing is great. We’re awash gas. Gas is a great partner with renewables.

So I think that there is a long market ahead, even devoid of tax incentives. What I do think will fall or will suffer from lack of incentives in the near term are manufacturing incentives. So as those things kind of tail and taper off, I do think that we might see some bipartisan support down the road for extending those. Because I do think it will still take more time than what we currently have in those manufacturing incentives to really get that footprint and strong hold here in the U.S.

HART: Well, and the world is going solar. I mean, if you look at numbers out of the International Energy Agency, solar dominates global investment. Part of it is because China has brought prices down. And they’re selling below cost. But some of the numbers, looking at developing countries like Pakistan and, you know, the sort of larger developing countries. they’re adopting solar power at incredible rates. So the U.S. is a bit of an outlier right now, I would say, in that part of—part of the investment.

REAMS: And a different take would be that we are—our natural gas and exporting LNG is displacing coal around the world as well. That is the very reason of how the U.S. has reduced its emissions by 40 percent in a relatively short period of time. So you think about other nations importing LNG, which this administration is keen on, you can think about the footprint of their emissions going down in these developing worlds that are also very hungry for energy, are going to burn whatever they can get to make sure they have the energy. Why not do it with something that’s more clean?

Not to say they won’t go to solar or to wind or whatever the next—but the thing is energy is additive. It’s an iteration. But I think that’s been one of the challenges with the climate movement on the left, at least, has been that it’s been, like, keep it in the ground. This is the way it has to be. And it’s actually harmed the industry, the solar and wind industry, when trying—when it’s clearly bipartisan, and what it’s being built, and what it’s for. So I think there is a good climate message to be told right now, it’s just not the one that we’ve been telling very long.

BRIGGS: Maybe I’ll just—

WORLAND: OK. Oh. You want to take that real quick?

BRIGGS: Sorry, go ahead.

WORLAND: No, no, no. Go ahead. We have one more question, but go ahead, and then we’ll get the last question.

BRIGGS: Sure. I’ll just throw in there really quickly in response, because it’s a question that is near and dear to my heart, when we founded Antora we basically said, we’re not going to work on anything that doesn’t have a clear path to just winning on pure economics, no subsidies, no green premium of any kind. So that was literally the founding premise of the company. And I know there are others out there, you know, working on other technologies, other pathways, that have the same feeling. The only way this matters is if we can just compete on raw economics. So that is what the—that was the constraint around which we built the technology that we’re now deploying.

WORLAND: Great. OK.

Q: Hi. Jenny Schuch with The Asia Group.

Just getting back to the topic of, and the importance of, regulatory certainty. I’d be curious for your speculation or thoughts going forward on if the EPA potentially comes out with the final rule on the endangerment finding, potentially, very, very soon, how do you see that impacting your members and prospects for—I mean, how do we create demand signals for innovation if we lose something like that?

SANDBERG: I think those are two different things. Like, how would—our members are deploying because it’s cost effective technology. So it’s not—I think the climate stuff comes along as an added benefit, but I think we would still deploy the technology at scale. What I do—the endangerment finding I think becomes more difficult if a subsequent administration, be a Democrat or Republican, decides that they need to do something about climate. Do they have to start that engine again, right? And so I think there are two separate sides of the house. I think the industry still continues to deploy at scale and at pace in a cost-effective way. But I do think on the other side of the house, if some future administration wanted to do something in the climate space, that it takes a while to restart the engine again.

REAMS: And we were talking about—you said certainty. This administration, this next administration, or the next, this back and forth, we’ve set something up in motion that is really a pendulum of back and forth. I think that legislators, Congress really needs to think about legislating and really creating some predictability between administration to administration, or even Congress to Congress. We’re walking, I think, a very—narrow line that could be detrimental to the United States. It’s not just the endangerment finding, though that’s an excellent example of policy that’s been ingrained, and how we’re setting other policies, and then to roll that back. You know, whether you agree with the endangerment finding or not, this pendulum of back and forth is really detrimental.

WORLAND: OK. Well, maybe we’ll end on that note, of the need for some consistency. Thank you to this great panel. Justin virtually, and JC, Heather, and David. Was a great discussion.

REAMS: Thank you. (Applause.)

BRIGGS: Thanks so much.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.