MIT Climate and Energy Night spotlights progress in sustainability technology
Posters, keynote speakers, and lightning pitches rounded out a night of community building for the Boston climate community
On Friday, Nov. 7, the MIT Energy and Climate Club (MITEC) held its 20th annual MIT Energy and Climate Night at the Engine, MIT’s non-profit incubator for tech startups. The first of the club’s four annual flagship events, the Energy and Climate Night — formerly known as the MIT Energy Night — brought together students and representatives from various industries and academia for a night of keynote speeches, poster presentations, and lightning pitch rounds, all centered around the energy transition and climate crisis.
According to organizer Daniel Wang MEng ’24 PhD ’26, Energy and Climate Night is a celebration of the climate-focused research and innovation happening at MIT. He noted that a greater focus on climate technologies — bolstered by the event’s move to the Engine — and the inclusion of “lightning pitch sessions” from Boston-area sustainability startups were new additions this year, as the event previously only featured keynote speakers and posters. Wang said the organizers added the lightning pitch sessions to “give startups an opportunity to pitch their products and hopefully reach the right audience.”
Energy and Climate Night featured three keynote speeches. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Assistant Professor Priya Donti of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) spoke about the intersection of AI and climate change, which has recently become a topic of debate due to sustainability’s double-edged relationship with AI. On one hand, AI has exceedingly high energy demands; on the other, its proponents argue that the technology can invent solutions to various aspects of the climate crisis.
The second speaker was Iain Addleton, a strategic market analyst at LG Energy Solution Vertech. He discussed the energy grid’s relationship to the energy transition, focusing on the challenge of replacing a grid that took 125 years to build with one powered by renewable energy while increasing its capacity to fit growing needs within the next 10–15 years. Yet Addleton remains optimistic; he believes today’s 45% renewable share of the grid can realistically rise to “60 or 70% by the mid to late 2030s,” all while remaining affordable and reliable. According to him, a 100% renewable grid is not feasible, because “ the last 10% is, in a lot of ways, the hardest.”
Still, Addleton stressed that the aforementioned 10%, — often used as a “red herring to not do things now” — should not be a reason to stymie progress. “Maybe we’ll just always live at 80% renewables and not more than that … but [as a bottom line], we can have a much more renewable grid with existing technology,” he said.
Alex Creely PhD ’19 gave the third keynote speech. He is the chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a startup spun out of MIT that aims to commercialize fusion energy through power plants known as ARC (“affordable, robust, compact”). CFS is currently working with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) to build a nuclear fusion machine known as SPARC, or “smallest possible ARC.” According to Creely, what makes SPARC special is that it will be the first of its kind to return net positive thermal energy after its expected completion in 2027. In more scientific terms, it will have a fusion energy gain factor greater than 1; to compare, most current fusion technologies take in more energy than they put out.
Creely stated that CFS’s long term goal is to build ARC — which will output up to 11 times as much energy as it takes in — with the intent to begin contributing fusion energy to the grid by the early 2030s. While he is optimistic about commercial fusion, Creely acknowledged that thousands of these machines would have to be built worldwide in order to have an impact on the climate.
Aside from the keynote speakers, a part of the night was dedicated to posters from climate and energy research done at MIT, local startups, and other universities from all over the country. As a result of a partnership between MITEC and the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy (TEX-E), many presenters were from Texas universities. TEX-E sponsored students from universities such as UT Austin, Texas A&M, and Rice University to present their research at Climate and Energy Night.
One such student was Andrew Schwarz, an undergraduate senior from Texas A&M who presented his research on incorporating carbon nanomaterials into concrete to make it “greener.” Schwarz, who was also present at the event last year, thought the main benefits of Energy and Climate Night were “meeting people, hearing people critique [his] ideas,” and the chance to “interface with the more startup entrepreneurial ecosystem that Boston has to offer.”
This community-building aspect of Energy and Climate Night was also a draw for Monica Storss, social media coordinator of the nonprofit Long Now Boston. While she mainly attended the event to find speakers for an upcoming energy panel, she said the event was important because it made the human scale and impact of the climate crisis accessible and engaging, something she believes is “missing big time in science communications now,” especially for climate.
For Storss, the highlight of the event was its ability to bring the Boston climate community together. “When you’re working on [the climate crisis],” she said, “it feels like you’re doing it alone — and then when you’re in these spaces with each other, you realize that you’re not.”
A focus on innovative solutions to challenging problems and a record attendance bolstered the event’s hopeful atmosphere. When asked about his optimistic view on the energy grid’s transition to renewable sources, Addleton summed up the event’s raison d’être: “I have two children under the age of three. I have to remain optimistic.”