The message around clean energy has new some new buzz words; Affordable; Reliable; Secure.
By: Laura Kimes | April 14
The slide behind the stage on day one read: Why This Moment Matters. Affordable. Reliable. Secure. This was a far cry from my colleague Sandra’s “clean energy clarion call” experience at the same conference just three years ago.
I was at the ARPA-E 2026 Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego last week, representing E2 and our Emerging Leaders program. A few thousand scientists, founders, executives, Department of Energy (DOE) officials, and venture capitalists, all in one ballroom.
Established in 2009, many think of ARPA-E as a federal funding program. That is true but it is also the U.S. government’s mechanism for building an energy innovation ecosystem. One might think of the U.S. government as an impact investor. In the last two decades, ARPA-E has deployed more than $4 billion across over 1,700 projects in every state. So, the funding priorities of ARPA-E are closely watched with each new administration, and a topic E2 brought to federal lawmakers in March. Investing in innovation typically means more clean energy jobs, and a better environment.
The relatively new DOE Genesis Mission used a different lens to tout the benefits of innovation. Genesis is an initiative launched in late 2025. As the DOE describes it, “the Genesis Mission unites DOE National Labs, industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.” Genesis Mission’s 26 areas of scientific interest were on full display at the conference. Parallel to this, the U.S. government has set a goal to quadruple domestic nuclear power capacity, targeting an increase from approximately 100 GW across 94 operational reactors in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.
Language of dominance and national security reigned supreme, but my thoughts were on the words that used to permeate this conference. After starting my career roughly around the time that “global warming” was out and “climate change” was in, and after raising my first round as a founder circa the first Trump administration causing a shift in our offer from “climate infrastructure” to “resiliency,” I often find myself studying the evolving language of our energy landscape. I jotted down my observations at this conference like a biologist in a field study:
- Day One, 2pm: I heard the word “climate” for the first time (as in “climatetech”).
- Day One, mid-afternoon: A speaker said “photovoltaics” for the first time.
- Day Two, 10am: The word “solar” appeared for the first time (in the context of solar-powered data centers located in space).
- Day Three, 15 minutes before the end of the conference: The first time I heard the word “sustainability” from a stage in the entire conference.
For many, the framing has always matched the tone and tenor of this year’s conference; national security; global competitiveness; affordable, reliable electrons at the scale that AI demands. But to me, the shift was noticeable.
But the same business leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs making the economic case for the clean energy economy every day made their presence known. I walked into the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) pitch session on day two and saw a third of the stage was cleantech leaders. I could sit at any lunch table and find myself next to a business leader building an energy efficiency product, or a next-generation battery technology, or a novel cooling system. The clean energy business community is still vital to the conference.
The lunch and happy hour conversations kept circling back to non-market strategy – the bread and butter of E2’s state and federal advocacy work. How do you engage in advocacy when the vocabulary on the mainstage has shifted? Leveraging my role leading E2’s Emerging Leaders program, I made the case that advocacy is not just personally gratifying for founders and business leaders. It is as strategically crucial as one’s sales pipeline.
We talked about things like: What is actually resonating with lawmakers right now? How do you talk to a member of Congress about grid reliability and data center power demand and make the case that smart policies in those areas are good for the economy and good for the environment? E2 exists for exactly this moment; when the vocabulary has shifted and leaders need someone who can understand the room.
But for me, the best two hours of the conference happened at the happy hour after day one, hosted by the LA Cleantech Incubator (LACI) alongside Cleantech San Diego and Evergreen Climate Innovations. Regional cleantech investors and incubators from around the country, some I had only known through Zoom, some I knew from a decade ago, converged on a downtown brewery for an evening of conversations that are keeping me energized, days after the stimulation of the conference have subsided.
Three days at ARPA-E left me pondering the current landscape of language and framing. The deep tech, mining, nuclear, AI, and data center chatter appears disorienting if you walk in with a traditional clean energy frame. But the closer you looked, the more familiar it gets. The efficiency founders at lunch. The colleagues on the FOAK stage. The work toward building a clean economy and a more sustainable business landscape remains the same, even if the language has changed. Holding both of those things at once is the job right now, and E2 is uniquely poised to make that happen.