Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change.

The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad.

That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn’t be more different.

In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren’t just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights.

So what will come next? That’s the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow’s energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what’s to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future.

If you’re running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan?

To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances.

I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor.........

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