Hanwen Zhang, Contributing Photographer

Students, industry leaders and alumni explored how wallets and the planet might both be able to go more green last week at the third annual Clean Energy Conference, hosted at the School of Management by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. 

Kicking off last Thursday, the two-day event offered a survey of the latest renewable energy developments and gave attendees a sampling of recent technology and economics behind them. The conference included keynote speeches, panels and networking opportunities for its participants.

“I think this has been a really great convening of different organizations from all different sectors that are excited about propelling this [clean energy] space,” Brennan Wong SOM ’25 told the News.

The event was part of the Yale New Haven Climate and Energy Summit, which also included the Yale Climate, Environment, and Economic Growth Conference and the launch of ClimateHaven, an innovation hub focused on helping green start-ups.

CBEY’s Executive Director, Stuart DeCew, told the News that the conference, organized by the Yale Clean Energy Collaborative which focuses on making sure that activities around clean energy on campus have resources and a platform to share opportunities, drew over 700 attendees. 

“There were 25 different organizations and companies that were attending and over a dozen early-stage ventures in the innovation showcase who were talking about their work,” DeCrew said “It just goes to show, the community is rallying in a direction that really gives us an opportunity to meet the goal [of reducing carbon emissions] that scientists, policymakers and advocates set.”

This year’s conference theme was “Aligning Innovation, Equity, and Investment for the Clean Energy Future.”

DeCew explained that the two past conferences were held in the spring and fall of 2022.

“We’re seeing four times the number of organizations [this year],” DeCew said. “We also didn’t have an innovation showcase last year.”

At the showcase, students had opportunities to connect with firms and climate start-ups, including  Deloitte, energy company EDF Energy and environmental consulting company WSP.

Julie Zimmerman, vice provost for planetary solutions, kicked off the event by affirming Yale’s commitment to helping with the energy transition. 

Zimmerman said that the event represented the collaboration between the University and community partners to “catalyze, design, implement and iterate solutions” to the current environmental challenges.

Yale currently has a pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 and to achieve zero actual emissions in 2050. However, the University has faced criticism from students for continuing to invest in the fossil fuel industry. 

In 2022, the EJC submitted a complaint to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong claiming that Yale’s investments in fossil fuels violated state law. Hundreds of Yale and Harvard students and alumni stormed the field during the Yale-Harvard game in 2019 to protest the universities’ investments in fossil fuels. 

According to reporting by the News at the time, as of April 2021, the Yale Investments Office estimated that $800 million of the University’s endowment was invested in fossil fuels. 

Thursday’s slate of events included a discussion panel by renewable energy leaders and financiers. Avangrid CEO Jose Antonio Miranda, during the panel, weighed in on recent troubles facing offshore wind farm projects, citing supply chain disruptions for the difficulties of feasibly financing large-scale renewable energy infrastructure. Though Miranda said that Avangrid’s offshore project has been “insulated” from these forces, other renewable energy giants such as Orsted had to write off plans for key wind farms earlier this month.

Despite these setbacks, other presenters spoke about the new challenges and opportunities provided by the transition to renewable energy. 

According to Andy Bowman, CEO of energy storage start-up Jupiter Power, construction of wind and solar energy farms in distant rural areas has “inverted” the entire grid system. Where, traditionally, generated energy took place in power plants on the outskirts of urban areas, renewably captured electricity must travel further to reach city centers and can overwhelm transmission lines, Bowman said.

To solve this, Bowman said that Jupiter Power’s battery storage would ease the current strain by discharging electricity during moments of high grid stress. The company currently provides about 1,000 megawatts of electricity each day — roughly enough to power between 460,000 and 900,000 homes in a year.

In addition to its emphasis on making use of IRA funds, the conference also explored issues of equity. Speakers focused on financing strategies that would make renewables economically competitive with natural gas, while others shared ways in which underprivileged communities could earn financial support to secure green infrastructure.

During a “Tech Talks” presentation on Friday, Yan Zhao — principal engineer at GTI, a nonprofit research center — spoke about the organization’s efforts to test the effects of blended hydrogen on household appliances. Hydrogen blending, a process in which hydrogen gas reserves power homes through existing natural gas pipelines, Zhao said, would provide low-carbon energy alternatives without the need for new infrastructure. 

Under the Justice40 Initiative, the Department of Energy announced it is aiming to deliver at least 40 percent of the “overall benefits from certain federal investments” to disadvantaged communities. With this plan, Zhao said, GTI Energy’s hydrogen blending project would deliver energy to more disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“I just really appreciate that focus on the equity aspect of the energy transformation,” Jennifer Lovett, a conference attendee, told the News. “There’s a much larger portion of our community that is not able to take advantage of those same [clean energy] opportunities.”

Wong added that the recent transition toward more renewable energy offered a “new opportunity to think about inclusive growth more differently.” He said that the conference helped build on the interest in clean energy he had developed during his career in consulting.

Over the last year, the share of renewable technologies – geothermal, hydrogen and solar – in the world’s energy supply rose by 0.4 percent. Renewable energy is expected to account for 35 percent of global power by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency.

Saturday’s event also featured a reunion for members of the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate program, a 10-month online joint program between the School of Environment and School of Management, as members of the program were invited to campus for the conference.

“This is my first time to campus,” Lovett, a member of the FDCE program cohort from 2022, told the News. “It’s just amazing to see how many people are here, all focused on financing and deploying clean energy.”

DeCew told the News that the conference is especially important at this time because this year marks “a tremendous amount of investment” in renewable energy, especially since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

He said that the industry is growing fast, partly because clean energy is becoming cheaper to deploy than fossil fuels. DeCrew said that the United States is at the beginning of the largest industrial transformation since the New Deal, providing an opportunity to benefit communities that have long been underinvested in and marginalized in past years. 

“I think that there is a unique period of time here,” he said. “There is a time to act. And this decade is absolutely critical.”

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment was founded in 2006.