MIT’s annual Energy Conference, held last Friday and Saturday, featured an impressive array of young engineers, scientists, and renewable energy entrepreneurs. It also included a sizeable number of more established players in the energy field. And the question left hanging at the end of the conference was whether this group of inventors and dreamers could innovate fast enough, and create green energy cheaply enough, to prove wrong the forecasts of the establishment that the world is going to continue to burn fossil fuels for a long time to come. Daniel Nocera, professor of chemistry at MIT and a founder of Sun Catalytix — a company attempting to mimic photosynthesis to create and store energy — set the tone for the conference when he told students and researchers that if they really want to help pave the way to a renewable energy economy, then “do your job, which is discovery.”
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