Walking around the exhibit hall at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit feels a bit like touring the state science fair. Hundreds of booths, organized by topic area, display carefully crafted posterboards; experiment demonstrations; and product samples ranging from bits of iron made with lasers to models of buildings made with carbon-sucking cement.
Unlike most science fairs, of course, the booths are manned by PhDs and founders whose products seek to solve the world’s toughest energy problems, many of whom already lead well-funded companies looking to put steel in the ground. This year’s summit, just outside Washington, D.C., drew the largest number of attendees in the event’s 16-year history, at more than 2,800.
However, according to several agency employees Latitude Media spoke with on site, up until just a few weeks before, it was unclear whether the event would even take place.
Layoffs across the Department of Energy, policy changes driven by the second Trump administration, and the potential of a government shutdown — which would have prevented federal employees from staffing the event — all loomed over its planning. As one ARPA-E official told Latitude Media, the delays made the turnout even more encouraging, given that the office was “very late to get final approval to do this thing and promote it.”
The growing attendance is in line with the agency’s expanded activity in recent years. But an additional lure — especially given the uncertainty over the fate of federal agencies and programs like those run by ARPA-E under the Trump administration — was Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s name on the agenda.
Attendees including investors, entrepreneurs, and federal employees all told Latitude Media that they weren’t sure whether his presence was a good or bad sign. After all, Project 2025, the conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating ARPA-E altogether; the Trump administration has already implemented several of the document’s other proposals with regards to DOE. And while Trump has yet to release his latest budget request, those in his first term sought to zero out ARPA-E’s funding. And earlier in March, at the CERAWeek industry conference, Wright criticized the Biden administration’s energy policy as being “focused myopically on climate change with people as simply collateral damage.”
But he struck a markedly different tone at the summit. He applauded the work of ARPA-E and the national labs, emphasized the potential of nuclear fission, fusion, and energy storage, and even called out certain companies in the audience by name. And while he praised the president as having an “instinct for energy,” he also appeared to stand up for ARPA E’s independence in a speech that surprised many attendees.
“Science and advancement is not about uniformity,” he concluded. “It’s not about top-down control. It’s about ambitious, passionate, innovative people, engaging, challenging each other, bouncing ideas back and forth and not giving up.”
Inside Trump 2.0’s ARPA-E
ARPA-E not only funds high-risk, high impact technologies; it also focuses heavily on getting those technologies to market, explained Brent Ridley, a tech-to-market advisor for the agency’s data center energy use programs.
Projects the agency backs aren’t just demonstrating their fit for a target market, Ridley said, but their ability to meet a “moving target market.”
“The technology you’re developing with ARPA-E has to have in mind not just what’s coming out in June, but where people have hinted they might be going in three to five years,” he explained, pointing in particular to the data center space, where chips are evolving rapidly. “If you can’t imagine your technology leading at that moment, you probably need to be more ambitious.”
The milestones set for ARPA-E programs are “borderline impossible,” said Ridley, who himself has been the recipient of an agency grant. Companies moving through its programs get a level of scrutiny that doesn’t exist in traditional incubators. Plus, hard tech companies often struggle to find traditional venture capital funding, and ARPA-E serves as a connector.
“Ifyou’re a hard tech company like we are here, most of those thousand investors at [high-profile incubator Y Combinator] are not really interested in your thing,” he said. “They’re like ‘are you doing software that involves AI?’” But at ARPA-E events, founders have the opportunity to talk to investors that are explicitly open to hard tech.
ARPA-E dates back to 2007, when then-President George W. Bush officially created the agency as part of the America COMPETES Act. At the start, it didn’t have a budget; but in 2009, President Barack Obama allocated $400 million, and nominated the agency’s first director. The agency hosted its first energy innovation summit in 2010.
In his first term, President Trump didn’t immediately nominate a director to lead the agency, which was instead headed up by acting directors until Lane Genatowski (recently tapped to lead the Loan Programs Office) was appointed and confirmed by the Senate in 2019. This time around, the agency will be led by quantum networking executive Conner Prochaska, who previously served as ARPA-E’s chief of staff, and later as DOE’s chief commercialization officer.
Science and advancement is not about uniformity. It’s not about top-down control. It’s about ambitious, passionate, innovative people, engaging, challenging each other, bouncing ideas back and forth and not giving up.
The agency’s purview is wide, but there are already some indications of what sectors will get most attention. Nuclear, for instance, got the most mentions in the keynote speeches, though storage also got an effusive call-out from Wright.
“Solar is growing very fast, getting more efficient and taking panels, cheaper materials and developing energy,” he told the crowd. “The biggest problem there is the sun doesn’t always shine, and we don’t know when clouds are going to come and when it’s not going to shine, but if we can get energy storage better, that’s a game changer.”
But there will also likely be a “strong focus on oil and gas,” said Christian Vandervort, another ARPA-E tech-to-market advisor for many of the agency’s advanced fuel projects. Vandervort, a former General Electric executive, pointed to a program focused on addressing leaks in natural gas infrastructure, known as REPAIR.
That program is nearing completion, and the project reams have been very successful, he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s an example of something that we might initiate in the near future — what’s REPAIR version two?”
Other focus areas could include critical minerals (“We need to know how to get them out cost effectively and cleanly,” said Vandervort.) and next generation geothermal, especially when it comes to expanding the locations where the technology is used.
Nuclear in the spotlight
Wright’s optimistic tone on the first day of the conference was at odds with the wider administration’s apparent attempts to undo immense chunks of the energy department’s work. But while the encouragement isn’t likely to prompt any startups to change their pitch — Ridley said many projects currently have an explicit “no green premium” call-out in their slide deck — it also didn’t go unnoticed, particularly by the sectors Wright called out by name.
One of the companies Wright highlighted on stage is Deep Isolation, a Berkeley-based startup developing nuclear waste disposal solutions using deep borehole technology and directional drilling methods adapted from the oil and gas industry.
Jesse Sloan, Deep Isolation’s executive vice president of engineering, said that while he initially wasn’t sure what to expect from Wright’s ARPA-E appearance, he was ultimately “very encouraged” by the Secretary’s comments — and by his surprise visit to Deep Isolation’s booth in the exhibit hall.
“That opportunity has never come before us before,” Sloan added. “There has been bipartisan support for the past several years, but I’ve never seen a push like that before.”
ARPA-E programs have been a key part of Deep Isolation’s ability to develop its technology and scale. Most recently, the company was selected for the $9 million CREATE program. As one of 18 selected projects, Deep Isolation worked with agency funding to conduct lab and field testing of its universal canister system for nuclear waste storage.
Sloan is hopeful that ARPA-E will continue to be a resource for the company moving forward, such as through the SCALEUP program, which offers larger capital investments to help get disruptive technologies to scale.
“The next step for us is really proving the entire system through an end-to-end demonstration,” Sloan explained. Scaling up is a pricey and risky stage for any hard tech company. But — if the policy and funding environment allows — the company would ideally like to do that demonstration at home in the U.S.
But even in light of Wright’s visit, the company isn’t banking too much on federal support; indeed, Sloan said there are a number of executive orders that have already impacted funding opportunities.
“With the new administration, things are very much still in the air and being settled out,” he added. “We’re definitely working with other countries as well.”
