Pierre Conner, Executive Director, Tulane Energy Institute & Professor of Practice, Tulane University Freeman School of Business
Daniel F. Shantz, Entergy Chair in Clean Energy Engineering & Associate Dean for Research and PhD Programs, Tulane University School of Science and Engineering
Eric Smith, Associate Director, Tulane Energy Institute & Professor of Practice, Tulane University Freeman School of Business
Frédéric Gilles Sourgens, James McCulloch Chair in Energy Law & Faculty Director, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center
Randel R. Young, Executive Director & Distinguished Research Fellow, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center
On September 10-12, 2025, the energy world will rejoin us in New Orleans for the Future of Energy Forum on our Uptown campus. Last year’s Future of Energy Forum was a massive success. It brought political, technical, business, legal, and academic leaders together to discuss where our energy future might lead. Not coincidentally, it was itself the source of major news: news of Meta’s AI Center in Richland Parish – or more precisely, Entergy’s role in making this $10 billion project possible – broke at the Forum. Yet, more than any one speech, contribution, or news item, what made the Forum special was that it lived up to its name – it created a space for lively exchanges between experts and energy stakeholders of all stripes. The discourse that ensued has also been the thread running through cross-disciplinary energy activities at Tulane in the year since. So, when we look forward to this year’s Forum, we do not look forward to a distinct event. Rather, we look forward to continuing a programmatic discussion that will continue to inform our collective, cross-campus, interdisciplinary work for this academic year and beyond.
This year’s Forum will bring together an impressive list of energy leaders including CEOs of major corporations, diplomats and other senior governmental officials, general counsels, chief operating officers, chief innovation officers, chief sustainability officers, as well as academics and other thought leaders from accounting, architecture, business, engineering, economics, coastal and river science, environmental science, geology, law, and the Deans of Tulane’s Business School, Law School, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and School of Science and Engineering, and, led of course, by Tulane University President, Mike Fitts. The conversation therefore is likely to touch many aspects of the energy universe. If you can arrange to be in New Orleans and are interested in energy – please join us, free of charge, in this year’s Forum by registering here: https://energyforum.tulane.edu/
To help orient you, we wanted to pull together a few overarching themes you can expect from this year’s Forum. The Forum’s title this year is Powering the Future: Innovation, Competition, and Collaboration. We will discuss the importance of energy innovation, energy competition, and energy collaboration and then provide some thoughts on how they do relate to each other and, with luck, can push us towards an energy future that allows us to realize more and better energy outcomes for a growing set of business, public, and other stakeholders in the health, vibrancy and security of the energy system.
Innovation
For the longest time in human history, the concept of ‘economic growth’ was a little absurd because human beings, as a species, were in a circular “zero-sum” game in terms of productivity. To increase productivity required more muscle; more muscle required more food, more fertilizer, and more arable land, among other things. The limits of our agrarian world thus placed limits on growth – and made land the cornerstone of economic organization. When we discuss this long segment of our economic history, we sometimes refer to it –somewhat inaccurately – by reference to the Malthusian trap. For those unfamiliar with the trap – but familiar with Marvel movies – think of Thanos and his masterplan to bring the universe back into balance by ‘removing’ half of its population. The basic idea of this worldview is that there is an ideal balance between resources and population. If total population exceeds this balance, resource scarcity will restore it by reducing the excess population over time through famine, pestilence, or, in the Marvel movie, one big, purple, glove-wearing eco-terrorist.
Humanity escaped zero growth when we found ways to innovate around how we could create a new kind of muscle – or more precisely how we could replace muscle by powering things through different forms of energy. Energy became the very heart of humanity’s growth era. Energy innovation is still the cornerstone of our ability to create economic growth by expanding energy access to a larger population while also enhancing reliability, resilience, and sustainability of energy systems.
The first thing we think of when we hear the term ‘energy innovation’ is engineering. In an ideal world, we wait for engineers to produce a machine that can take trash and turn its mass back into energy. (Film buffs will recognize this utopia as the Mr. Fusion Home Reactor powering the DeLorean time machine in the end credits of the Back to the Future movies.) Engineering innovation has yet to achieve that feat. What it is doing is finding an increasing number of diverse ways to generate energy. Energy innovation today improves existing forms of energy generation – combined-cycle gas-fired power plants are superior to their older Rankine cycle generation cousins by producing energy more efficiently, flexibly and cheaply with lower CO2 emissions. Small modular reactors can also deliver less expensive, safe nuclear energy, and renewable technology has provided us with ways to transform primary, but intermittent, solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy into electricity. And of course, there is the continuing goal of building and commercializing fusion energy – something that engineers are closer to today than they ever were in the past.
Still, innovation is more than just engineering. We must find a means to fund and develop new energy technologies, along with the necessary infrastructure components to ensure their functionality. For example, we need new financing structures to provide funding, particularly for scaling prototype facilities. And we need to find a way to repay the finance sources through smart business and commercialization structures. That means we need business innovation to go alongside technical/ engineering innovation. The pioneers of American electricity – Edison and Insell – created the starting point for today’s grid because they thought systemically – they saw a potential offtake of energy and then built an engineering solution that could deliver the energy at prices that left room for both profit and growth. Not only that, but these energy innovators also managed to find financiers who understood the substantial market they could open for themselves by lending to such ventures.
Innovation, therefore, was not limited solely to engineering. It involved creating an energy system that enables us to pay for a better way of delivering cheaper, more reliable, and more sustainable energy, and this much bigger task is still as challenging, if not more so, than finding the perfect engineering solution. Think of it this way, we all know Edison. The reason we do – and we do not remember the names of countless engineers who worked on similar inventions at the same time – is that it took significant business innovation and engineering innovation working collaboratively to bring the world-changing effects of electric power to market.
Finding off-takers – buyers – is not just a business function. It is also a regulatory and policy function. For example, if we go to the effort of building an expensive new power plant somewhere that revolutionizes how people get their energy, we might want to make sure that nobody comes along two months later with a slightly improved version of our brilliant idea and steals our customers by under-cutting our price. That requires all manner of legal support, which begins with intellectual property protections for innovations. But just as importantly, it requires energy market design. In the earliest days of electrification, this regulatory design typically granted new entrants a so-called natural monopoly in exchange for rate regulation to precisely avoid the problem of a later competitor undercutting price and “free riding” off the work of the first mover.
Texas deregulation, for example, was another form of energy market design for different circumstances – here, it brought significant renewable power on the grid and displaced older thermal generation. Innovation, therefore, can also involve legal and regulatory developments to implement policy revisions capable of supporting a market in which new energy business solutions can thrive and adapt.
When we discuss innovation at the Future of Energy Forum, what we mean is that innovation must combine multiple aspects – it must focus on science, engineering, business, law, policy etc. If we think of innovation in only one dimension, we are getting it wrong. That is why we need inter-disciplinary engagement to promote innovation. It is this inter-disciplinary conversation that the Forum fosters.
Competition
Competition is the reason that innovation led to growth. Think of a world in which innovation is not supported by competition. In this non-competitive world, innovation would likely become centrally mandated. Technocrats would choose technologies to meet desired parameters. Then, there would be no more research – and, so, no more innovation.
In this alternative non-competitive model, we simply replicate zero-growth parameters. There are natural limits to this new footprint, and we must live within them. Trying to break this cycle can be extremely difficult. One must only think back to Stalinist five-year plans. These plans were enormously successful in facilitating industrialization of the Soviet Union. Still, they failed to transform these abundant strategic raw materials into an industrial or economic superpower. The opposite proved to be true, as the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated.
That said, China is still centrally-organized and remains fond of multiyear economic plans, but is a planned economy run largely by engineers. Today’s China carefully chooses technologies they will foster, typically in areas that have not seen much recent innovation. EVs and their supporting battery technologies are good examples of how the Government and NECs in China ‘pick and choose’ among technology solutions and often force technology choices on their production platforms nationally.
Competition in the energy world, therefore, is generally thought to be a good thing. When we are competitive, we continue to innovate. As Philippe Aghion does not tire of telling us, when we compete through innovation, we push the boundaries of the innovation frontier. To get to growth, we must compete at this innovation frontier. That is the only way to get even more out of the resources we have. The rewards can be sizeable. This presupposes, of course, that capital will be willing to support innovation in such a competitive setting. We are thus better off because of competition, not worse.
To apply this to the energy setting, energy innovation provides a host of ways to build our collective energy futures. We can choose fossil fuels, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, and one day even fusion; we can electrify parts of our transportation and industrial systems; we can choose not to electrify other parts. These are significant choices. Yet, the best way to make them is not for a policymaker to pick winners and losers from a three-page briefing paper. The best way to pick winners and losers is by having these different energy innovations compete. What is likely to occur is that the comparative advantage of each innovation will find its own best application. We will end up with a world in which we have ‘all of the above’ – but ‘all of the above’ in a way that makes economic and systemic sense. And what makes sense will be determined by market decisions in an efficiently designed energy market built around competitive incentives as well as informed consumers of those products.
Still, competition can also have its dark side. This dark side often arises when we think geopolitically. Global competition around energy today is fierce, both in terms of new markets and new technologies. Different states have significant control over different core elements of different value chains. China, for example, is a powerhouse when it comes to refining the materials needed for solar, wind and battery technologies, but it produces less than adequate supplies within its borders of oil, gas, lithium and synthetic graphite. The U.S. finds itself as the inverse of China. Decisions on energy solutions, therefore, have significant geopolitical ramifications. These geopolitical ramifications can even lead to war. In fact, a good argument exists that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated in part by Russia’s energy security considerations. Confrontations in the South China Sea between China and U.S. allies have a similar complexion.
When we think about competition in this global setting, we must also consider the dangerous side of competition. Considering this reality, we should always seek new ways to foster positive competition – globally– without also inviting the incentives for war. This can be a tall order. Yet, it is a tall order that engineers, developers, financial and commercial interests, financiers, foreign affairs specialists, lawyers, and other energy stakeholders and thought leaders can meet. We need to think across these disciplines to make it happen. That is the competition conversation the think the Forum will spark.
Collaboration
Independence is great, but nobody has everything they need. The existence of independence does not negate the reality of mutual interdependence, particularly in a complex modern world. This means that even as we compete, we need to collaborate. Think of it this way – Apple and Samsung are formidable competitors. Still, they must work together at times to create value chains that allow them to compete better against others by making competition more efficient. In the early days of electrification, we had a similar problem – different companies introduced their own, quite different, currents for their competing products. This often meant that one could not use products from two different manufacturers in the same household. We needed to, and thus did, standardize the current (alternating) and the frequency (60 Hz) for most consumer applications.
The same incentive for collaboration exists today. Think of solar. One thing we could do to improve solar power for more consumers is to make forms of solar technology inter-operable. Currently, this is not possible. Competing products cannot so easily be used together, and we have interoperability problems that hold back efficient and productive competition.
Collaboration at this level is plainly possible. For instance, it can happen due to self-regulation. Once a technology matures, it is often in everyone’s interest to reach some agreement around standard interfaces and specifications. These agreements are mutually beneficial, allowing each competitor to access the market primarily held by others. When there are multiple, equivalent, competitors in a marketplace, it is simply good business for each of them to gain access to the global marketplace. The only reason one might wish not to is if there is some doubt as to one’s own ability to compete on fair terms with a competitor. Yet, even in this context, it would be difficult to look to competition as a justification for the refusal to collaborate – the refusal to collaborate is precisely anticompetitive and never fosters more efficiency in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, “collaboration” has gotten a bad reputation. The result is that many types of potentially beneficial collaboration have been prohibited. One such example is found in the Jones Act relevant to U.S. offshore activities. However, when the beneficial arguments are strong enough, specific exemptions do come about. For example, a formal exemption exists for nuclear technical experts from competitive companies to share information, even to the point of auditing competitors’ nuclear plants. In this case, the overriding legal goal of the greater good resulted in that exemption.
In fact, market actors are often capable of self-regulation. For example, one of the key standards used in international oil and gas projects is that parties are generally expected to act consistently with international oilfield practices or as a prudent operator. This is a self-regulatory standard that parties in the industry impose upon themselves to avoid having to spell out complicated obligations as to how a project should operate in each instance. This is not altruistic on anybody’s part - it works precisely because everyone wins from engaging in this sort of mutually beneficial self-regulation. The day-to-day operation of oil and gas projects is therefore essentially governed by industry self-regulation rather than some external standard (accepting of course that any prudent operator would follow applicable environmental regulations etc.).
This is not to say that all market participants can or will be willing to choose to always collaborate. Sometimes, we need a regulator to step in and help. By way of just one example, part of the reason you can now charge your iPhone on the same charger as your Android phone is that the European Union stepped in to stop the use of proprietary charging ports for phones. This helps us all – forgetting a charger is no longer as big of a setback on a trip. It also opens new markets for new competitors in the charging segment. So sometimes, collaboration is something that requires at least benefits from policy changes in the form of regulatory intervention.
On the international stage, collaboration is the flipside of geopolitical competition. We all need to do it - yet doing so requires everyone to play by mutually agreed rules of the game. And we often have no regulator, geopolitically, who can step in and make states play fair. We can only self-regulate in geopolitics. That realization can be daunting. It is particularly daunting if one does not believe that self-regulation is ever prudent or advisable.
Part of what we need for successful collaboration is to find mechanisms that enable us to trust but verify that everyone plays by the same sets of rules. Finding these ways will require innovation – innovation by engineers, businesspeople, policymakers, lawyers, regulators, and others. The task is difficult, but it is not unmanageably so. It again requires a cross-disciplinary dialog among affected stakeholders trying to find a mutually acceptable solution. That is the dialog and kind of discussion platform that we hope to create at the Forum.
Energy Interactions between Innovation, Competition and Collaboration
We hope that this introduction to our themes for the Forum will make you eager to join us. What you can see is that these themes are not independent. On the contrary, they are interrelated and often interdependent. How we innovate, compete, and collaborate is something that requires us to think in all three dimensions simultaneously.
If we do not think things through, we can end up with perverse incentives that push inferior technology at the same time as making geopolitical confrontation more likely because we did not get our incentives for collaboration and innovation right. This can result in toxic competition on the world stage, and this toxic competition does not believe in growth. It believes in extracting as much value in a zero-sum game as is possible in each negotiation or other instance. Those who adhere to this toxic competition model or world view believe that those who do otherwise are just suckers to be rolled over. That is not an optimistic vision of our energy future.
Things do not have to go horribly wrong though. We can think things through. We can set incentives to collaborate and compete around a shared vision of innovation-led growth. But it takes skill to do that. It takes interdisciplinary conversations. It takes R-1 research institutions putting their weight behind helping to solve the world’s energy problems using interdisciplinary discussion platforms like the Forum. But at the end of the day, research universities do not solve these problems even as they help incubate the right ideas. It takes business and policymakers to do that. That is why we need to talk to one another so that we in academia can get our brief as to how to approach the big energy questions next. That is exactly what we will be doing at the Forum. We hope to see you there.
This paper represents the research and views of the author(s). It should not be construed as legal or investment advice. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Tulane Energy Institute, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center, or Tulane University. The piece may be subject to further revision.
