ARPA-E Conference Highlights: The Return of “Coolness” to Fossil Fuels

by | Mar 20, 2025

This week saw the 2025 ARPA-E Conference for the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) being held at the National Harbor Gaylord Conference Center. While ARPA-E officially stands for “Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy”, given the content at the conference, it could have been called (I will grant you, somewhat unfairly) “ARPA – Energy from Fossil fuels and Geothermal” (“ARPA-E/F/G”). Whereas previous ARPA-E conferences (excepting those during the Trump 1 administration) were primarily concerned with the “green energy transition”, electric vehicles, or energy reliability, the focus of this year’s conference was clearly on utilizing today’s energy technologies that provide baseline electricity (primarily fossil fuels and nuclear fission), while promoting new energy sources that also provide baseline energy. Now a disclaimer – the real theme of the conference was “we need energy, and we can’t afford to be picky about where we get it from” – a concept that it faithfully carried out.

Keynote Speaker – DoE Secretary Chris Wright

By far the most interesting speaker at the conference was Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright. A self-described “nerd”, Wright’s energy resume includes bachelor and masters engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and graduate studies in fusion and fission engineering at the University of California-Berkeley, as well as founder and CEO gigs at multiple shale gas fracking companies. Wright stated that his focus at DoE was to “unleash the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance”, which was enshrined in his first secretarial order.

Underscoring this goal, Wright said that we are living in an era where energy (particularly electricity) was in sharp demand, as it is specifically what has enabled the lifestyle that we enjoy in the US, a lifestyle that is shared by roughly 15% of the world’s population, or 1.2 billion people. As evidence of this, Wright stated that today only 2% of the US population is engaged in food production, where 80% of the population was engaged in food production two centuries ago (note that this is actually an understatement; today only 1.2% of the US population has agricultural jobs, while 200 years ago roughly 90% of the US population was engaged in agriculture). He also cited as another example that 60% of the world population still washes their clothing manually, which disproportionately falls on women and girls to the tune of up to 20 hours a week. The same burden extends to preparing and cooking food, and getting drinkable water – these tasks become the biggest time sink for the bulk of Earth’s population.

So how do we free the 85% of the globe’s population that doesn’t live in the first world from these burdens? In Secretary Wright’s vision, increasing the production of energy (especially electricity) is the answer. He cited several initiatives that are needed to make this happen:

  • Using all of the energy resources that we have to produce electricity. While electricity is the most flexible type of energy that we have, it is also the most expensive one.
  • Utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to improve our power generation. Secretary Wright stated that we are in an “AI arms race” where finishing anything other than first will have significant adverse impacts.
  • Pushing forward with fusion energy; Secretary Wright expects fusion energy to be commercialized within the next ten years, if not sooner.
  • Better energy storage for solar electricity production. Until solar becomes a dispatchable source of electricity (which today requires batteries), it is problematic because of its lack of dispatchability (i.e., turn on or off arbitrarily).
  • Enhance the growth of nuclear energy and natural gas, both of which we can have in abundance.

Given that the US is the #1 exporter of energy today, Secretary Wright believes that the US and its allies need to lead the charge of retaining and growing its global energy leadership.

Other Interesting Topics of Discussion at the ARPA-E Conference

While Secretary Wright stole the show (and was the only person at the conference to mention fusion energy), there were a number of other interesting topics discussed as well:

  1. What Large Corporations Can Bring to the Startup Game: This “fireside chat”, between the Dr. Corey Phillips, Program Director at ARPA-E and Jim Gamble, EVP of the Chevron Technology Venture (CTV) Group was a fairly long session that explored the importance of startups to both government and corporate R&D efforts. One of the comments Mr. Gamble made is that while CTV’s primary role is to invest in startups that can help develop things that Chevron needs internally in the future, there is also significant value to these startups as well. Mr. Gamble stated that one of the biggest challenges for startups is scaling their technology, something that companies like Chevron are really good at doing. He saw his role in this as bringing these startups the tools, processes, and perspective relative to scaling that startups often don’t have. Dr. Phillips likewise stated that strategic investors like Chevron, while not necessarily required for all startups, certainly add value and risk reduction by bringing the viewpoint of large customers to a startup’s product development efforts.
  2.  Deploying Nuclear Energy Quickly in a Changed Regulatory Environment: This panel, which included John Kotek (SVP, Policy Development for the Nuclear Energy Institute), Dr. Lou Sancho (CTO and EVP of R&D and Innovation at Westinghouse), and Grace Stanke (Nuclear Fuels Engineer, Constellation) looked at how the nuclear fission energy industry is changing to more quickly deploy reactors into areas and markets which need power. Historically, getting a nuclear power station from concept to commissioning took roughly a decade and significant risks to the utilities that were building it. The panel discussed what steps the industry and utilities could take advantage of the changes in the federal regulatory environment to speed this timeframe up, making nuclear energy more competitive with other power sources such as solar or natural gas when it comes to supplying our country’s rapidly growing demand for energy. This included steps like small modular reactors (SMRs), new approaches to waste management, and sponsorship from large users such as datacenters and industrial consumers. They also discussed how getting the nuclear energy supply chain involved in this planning can help speed the production and deployment of critical subsystems in an environment where US deployment of nuclear energy has lagged since the Fukushima disasters.
  3. The Role of Bio-Energy in the US Energy Picture: This panel looked at how the US, long an agricultural powerhouse, could utilize its leadership here to produce more biofuels for the US and for export. The panel, which included Dr. Alex Luce (General Partner, Creative Ventures), Dr. Christine Morgan (Chief Science Officer, Soil Health Institute), and Dr. Angela Kent (Professor, University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana), Dr. Om Parkash Dhankner (Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Dr. Nadio Shakoor (Asst. Member/Principal Investigator/Cofounder of Agrela Ecosystems), discussed how agriculture provides roughly 5% of our energy today, and how this can be further expanded through bioengineered “fuel” crops. They also discussed how this trend can help US farmers and agricultural startups increase the market for their agricultural products.
  4. The Intersection of Computing and Energy Storage: The growth of computing data centers, especially those providing AI services, is creating significant demand for electricity, which in many areas of the country (Virginia in particular) is putting strain on the electricity grid. This group, including Dr. Peter de Bock (Program Director, ARPA-E), Dr. Carlos Diaz-Marin (Fellow, ARPA-E), Dr. Emily Kinser (Program Director, ARPA-E),a and Dr. Benjamin Weiner (Fellow, ARPA-E), explored a number of new concepts for creating a more “symbiotic” relationship between computing and energy, including some of the initiatives/”wild ideas” going on in these areas. These included new approaches to building datacenter compute clusters, how to store power in/proximate to these data centers, and how to better manage compute workload and power demand.

Overall Impressions and Summary

In principle, I don’t disagree with Secretary Wright’s overall goal of increasing our energy production. It is really clear that our demand (especially for electricity) is rapidly growing, and with the “race to gain AI supremacy” (also something that I agree with Secretary Wright on), it is going to start growing exponentially. Solar, while the quickest new energy source to deploy, has significant dispatchability issues (BTW, I have solar at my home), but current battery technologies are problematic, and recent battery farm fires have started to kindle popular resistance against siting battery farms near populated areas. Finally, while we obviously support fusion, it realistically won’t be putting power on the grid in any quantities for at least 5 years, and during that time we are going to have a baseline “electricity generation gap” that can only realistically be filled with natural gas-fired power plants.

That said, I would have liked to see more emphasis at ARPA-E on fusion energy – it is really the race we cannot afford to lose, and all signs say that China is at least neck-and-neck with the US today. Fusion energy has a lot of upcoming challenges – supply chain and scaling being the two greatest, but certainly not the only ones that we face. Not planning for these will likely leave us with “one leg tied behind our back” in the race to fusion energy dominance – not a good place to be.