I have been thinking a lot about innovation lately, mostly because I was at two clean energy industry conferences in the past two weeks, and in both cases walked away with a vivid and encouraging picture of the innovation economy now well rooted in the United States.

According to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the U.S. clean energy transition is essentially nonexistent and the goal of net-zero emissions is neither economically nor technically feasible. But the stories and facts and figures I heard at the New Buildings Institute’s Getting to Zero Forum in Los Angeles and the BloombergNEF Summit in New York tell a very different story. 

BNEF summits tend to be number- and chart-heavy affairs aimed at providing analysts and investors with critical financial and market insights, but some of those numbers are a good place to start. 

First, they tell us that the clean energy transition is alive, well and absolutely essential. By mid-century, BNEF expects renewables will provide two-thirds of the world’s electric power — including its rapidly accelerating demand growth — up from one-third at present. Global investment in the transition hit close to $2.1 trillion last year, a new record.

In the U.S., even with President Trump’s tariffs and the potential loss of clean energy tax credits and other federal funding, wind capacity will double in the next 10 years, solar will triple and battery storage will grow fivefold. 

And, at least for the next 10 years, BNEF says that renewables will displace natural gas as the generation of choice to meet rising electricity demand, although after 2035, cost-competitive natural gas will likely bounce back, particularly in the U.S. 

But numbers, however authoritative, don’t drive clean energy transitions; people, policies and innovation do, which is where the NBI conference comes in. The attendees in LA were green building professionals  — architects, engineers, utility and local officials  — and students. The viability of net-zero buildings is their starting point, and innovation a catalyst for a range of stories waiting to be told.

The Getty

Let’s start with the behind-the-scenes tour of the Getty Center on the first day of the conference, April 22, Earth Day. 

Camille Kirk, head of sustainability at the museum, said her job is to “seek opportunities to reduce sustainability-related risks and increase our resiliency and [use] our international leadership position to build capacity across the cultural sector in sustainability.”

What that means on the ground is that the Getty is always looking for ways to save water and electricity, Kirk said. The list she reeled off included switching out toilets that use 1.25 gallons per flush for models that use 1.1 gallons per flush, replacing water-hungry lawns with drought-resistant native plants and installing about 200 EV chargers across the museum’s facilities. 

(The toilet upgrade may not seem like a big deal, but multiply that 0.15 gallon difference by the Getty’s estimated 1.8 million annual visitors, and you save a whole lot of water.)

The Getty’s latest project is modernizing a 78,000 square-foot former grocery store and office building, now 27 years old, which it will use as a work and event space. 

While one might expect the Getty to go with a LEED certification  — the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard  —  the museum is “deliberately choosing not to certify under any particular green building system,” Kirk said.

The museum strongly supports such standards, she said, but LA has a lot of buildings, like the Getty’s planned rehab, designed in the 1980s and ‘90s, when energy-efficient, green architecture was not top of mind. 

“We also wanted to do this building as a case study for the kinds of owners that we think have these sorts of … buildings on their hands. They're facing the end of life with mechanical systems. They're facing end of life of interiors, and they're thinking about remodels. We want to show how to do this in a green way that is also cost effective and is not a scheduling nightmare.”

The result was a “salad bar approach,” drawing on a range of green building standards, Kirk said. “We set sustainability goals with a project performance plan. We used life-cycle cost analysis and energy modeling to help us interrogate our choices and ensure that we were choosing things with high impact,” she said. “[The process] made us ask more questions, both of ourselves and especially of our design team, and ultimately together we made this model better.”

Making the connection between innovation and impact is critical. People go to museums – and other public spaces like airports and sports arenas – in search of certain kinds of experiences, which are increasingly valued in our digitized society. Making sustainability an integral part of those experiences is at least part of the reason Kirk and others at Getting to Zero are working to make these large, often unique public spaces showcases and models for what is possible.

When it comes to museums, the American public is not partisan, said Sarah Sutton, co-founder of Environment & Culture Partners, a nonprofit that works with museums on sustainability and energy. “When they understand that [sustainability] saves money … that makes it easier for them to afford to participate”  — that is, buy tickets.

“Salaries are our highest expense in a museum,” Sutton told me during a brief interview at the NBI conference. “Energy is No. 2. So, if we can cut No. 2  without cutting No. 1, that means we can do our jobs better. We have more money to spend on the fun stuff, the reasons that people come  — buying more art for them to look at and having better exhibits.”

Market transformation

One of the key elements and impacts of innovation is market transformation, which basically means making new technologies widely available, affordable and easy to adopt.

At NBI, I heard about California’s Market Transformation Administrator – CalMTA – a state-funded initiative focused on residential electrification via room heat pumps and induction stoves, especially in the hard-to-crack rental, multifamily housing sector.

The story Trump, Wright and the Republicans are telling Americans is that such electrification will rob them of choice, raise their electric bills and generally be inconvenient.

But true innovation — driven by smart standards, policies and market transformation  —  does not limit choice. It provides more and better choices and often solves problems people care about.  

For example, CalMTA is promoting induction stoves and heat pumps that can be plugged into a standard 120v plug — no panel or system upgrades needed.

Plus, in both cases, companies’ marketing strategies do not focus on decarbonization but the experience their higher-priced products provide.

“We have to get people sold on the joy of the technology, and then we can have the questions of … how much does it actually cost?” said Weldon Kennedy, cofounder and chief marketing officer at Copper, which produces battery-equipped induction stoves.

The company showcases its admittedly pricey stoves (retail: $6,000) by enlisting celebrity chefs for cooking demonstrations. People have emotional attachments to their gas ranges, Kennedy said, so, “the hardest part of electrification is the human decisions. We’ve got all the technology now; we just need to influence about basically a billion decisions.” 

Copper recently worked on a project in Martinez, Calif., where it replaced 30 gas stoves with its induction stoves in a 32-unit building, all in one day, Kennedy said. “Two residents were like, ‘Nah, I don't want this new technology. Don't think so. [I’ll] keep my gas range,’” he said. “Forty-eight hours later, they changed their minds because they heard from their neighbors. … Water boils four times faster, and [they] can melt chocolate without a double boiler.”

Similarly, Vince Romain, founder and chief technology officer at Gradient, said one of the strongest selling points for his room-level, plug-in heat pumps for apartment dwellers is they replace older window-unit air conditioners. “They want their window back,” Romain said. 

The units fit over the window sill, creating a wide built-in ledge. “They put a plant in front of the window,” he said. “People aren’t looking at [the heat pump]; they’re looking out the window.”

New York stories

The New York City Housing Authority ran a pilot last year, putting window-unit heat pumps in 24 apartments in one of its public housing communities, using models from Gradient and Midea, a Fortune 500 appliance company. Initial results from the pilot found the electric heat pumps cut demand slightly in the summer and increased it slightly in the winter, but overall cut the energy used for space heating 87% and cut costs 50%. Reviews from residents were overwhelmingly positive. 

New York is now targeting 30,000 window heat pump installs over the next five years, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also has an induction stove program  — Copper won the contract  —  to install induction stoves in 10,000 public housing units.

At BNEF, I sat down with Brandon Owens, NYSERDA’s vice president of innovation, and asked him to connect the dots between innovation and affordability. “The focus has been on reducing technology cost,” Owens said. “When you do that, and you move those technologies to the market, what you're doing is creating a technology set that is able to produce and deliver electricity at a lower cost  — [and] lower rates for consumers  — and that's creating energy affordability.”

Jigar Shah said pretty much the same thing. The former director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office was at BNEF to launch his next venture, called Multiplier, which is aimed at getting startups to profitable commercial scale so they can “deploy, deploy, deploy” increasingly affordable clean technologies. 

“The biggest challenge with our sector is that you can't move fast and break things because breaking things has consequences,” Shah said. “Our sector, it's not like an app that doesn't work, that you downloaded and paid for … Like, in this case, these are electric vehicles, EV charging, solar plus battery storage. If it doesn't work, you don't save money … And so the question really becomes, how do we shorten the time that it takes to validate their technology and to get to much bigger work?” 

Trump’s pledges to cut consumer electric bills notwithstanding, Shah sees current uncertainty in the industry as an opportunity for energy efficiency and clean tech at the customer level —  what the industry calls “distributed resources.”

“If your rates go up now, you as an individual can make a decision on rooftop solar and battery storage,” he said. “You as an individual can make a decision on energy efficiency in your home, or your business. So I think you're going to start to see out of uncertainty comes a lot more interest in solutions that are distributed.” 

I have no technical background, so I always get a bit wide-eyed when people talk about opportunities for cool new technologies that empower customers and make our electric system cleaner, cheaper and more reliable. I mean, all the stuff I am writing about here is really exciting, and I have even more stories that I couldn’t wedge in to follow up on. 

What I kept thinking at NBI and BNEF was — this is what an innovation economy looks like. It meets people where they are, enjoying art at museums, cooking dinner at home or deploying new technology. It opens windows, solves problems and makes their lives better.

But continued cultivation and defense of our innovation economy is crucial for another, more pressing reason. The clean energy industry keeps thinking the Trump administration must eventually acknowledge that renewables and energy storage are cheaper, can get online faster and are ready to go right now to meet demand from artificial intelligence and data centers. 

It’s a rational, pragmatic scenario, and I’ve been listening to BNEF and others talk about it at conferences since, and even before, the election. 

The ginormous red flag here is that Trump and company do not operate rationally or pragmatically. Their agenda appears to be the fear-driven demonization of renewables and clean tech, and the promotion of fossil fuels at all costs. Rationality has nothing to do with it.

Innovation may be one of our most effective forms of subversion, upending political rhetoric with clean technologies that individuals and businesses can see, touch and integrate into their daily lives, changing the narrative