CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- If a green energy revolution is brewing, it will be the students and twenty-somethings who fire the engines of innovation, rather than today's dominant companies. That was the consensus, anyway, of the roughly 550 researchers, students, entrepreneurs, CEOs and financiers gathered here last week.
Energy 2.0: The MIT Energy Conference, which took place Friday and Saturday, pushed what keynote speaker Daniel Yergin called "a great bubbling." Presentations ranged from algae-powered solar cells to corn-powered homes.
"High prices have revolutionized the energy scene and launched an era of innovation that could come to rival the internet boom," Yergin wrote in a December Newsweek article.
"Energy is unquestionably the challenge of this era," said Susan Hockfield, MIT's president Susan Hockfield. "And there is absolutely no question in my mind that the most productive source of new ideas and approaches is today's young people." She speculated that no matter how the energy problems of tomorrow are solved, some of the key people to unravel them were probably attending the conference.
"The name of this conference is Energy 2.0 -- what I would say is we never had Energy 1.0," said General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt. "GE is in (both) the health-care and the energy business. The last 25 years of health care has (gone through) maybe nine or 10 iterations of technology, but we still sell some of the same parts in the energy sector that we sold 25 years ago."
Kick-starting a sector of the economy that has remained mostly stagnant for more than a generation will be a challenge, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industry Association.
"Quick show of hands: How many people here in the audience have a solar system on their roof?" Resch asked. "OK, a dozen maybe. Now how many people want to have a solar system on their roof?"
Ninety percent of the audience raised their hands. "Pretty much everybody," he said. "What you can very quickly see is people want to have solar. There is an incredible untapped demand here."
The straw poll typifies the massive market forces now building, he said -- and it will only get stronger as oil and gas prices rise and alternative sources like solar drop in price.
Promoting Solar Nation, a new activist website, Resch said German subsidization of solar energy has made Germany the world's largest solar market, seven times bigger than the United States. "Yet the amount of sunlight that falls on Germany is equivalent to Anchorage, Alaska," he said. "It proves that if it works in Germany, it'll work great in the United States."
Electricity only constitutes a third of the U.S. energy budget. Plug-in hybrid cars took the spotlight in an afternoon session, offering what many panelists argued is perhaps the most realistic near-term path through the thicket of oil and climate crises to come.
And the biggest challenge of turning a 30- to 40-mpg hybrid car into a 100-plus-mpg plug-in hybrid is making a lighter, cheaper battery that can recharge quickly and pack more stored energy per pound.
Said Hockfield, "I never would have imagined two-and-a-half years ago that the thing I'd be talking about with greatest excitement is storage. Batteries are where it's at. Then ... four new battery technologies came out of MIT," she said.
"It is quite possible that 10 years from now, we'll look into this and say, 'Well, that wasn't such a big deal after all,'" said Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute of the battery tech challenges a plug-in hybrid creates. "But that doesn't mean it (will have been) easy."
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