One year after Vanderbilt launched the university-wide institute dedicated to solving the world's toughest energy challenges, the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate gathered researchers, industry leaders and policymakers for its first symposium. Keynote speakers from a Fortune 500 energy company, a national laboratory and a Tennessee-born solar giant offered a wide-ranging look at meeting rising energy demand while building a resilient grid.
The symposium, held Sept. 2-4 in conjunction with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's New Voices program, drew attendees around this year's theme, "Integrating Energy Sources Across Multiple Scales." Center Director Hussam Mahmoud and Deputy Director Hiba Baroud opened with remarks on VSEC's mission: developing the tools, technologies and policies needed for a livable, resilient and adaptive planet.
VSEC includes about 30 faculty from across the university, working across four interconnected areas-energy integration, climate mitigation and adaptation, resource sustainability, and systems risk, reliability and resilience. In its first year, VSEC-affiliated research produced 82 publications and 51 grants totaling $25.4 million, and the center has backed a dozen projects since 2025, including studies of AI-driven road temperature monitoring and religious institutions as sites of climate resilience.
Krish Roy, dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, told the audience that VSEC's work depends on collaboration far beyond engineering. "The answers and paths are not always absolutely clear," he said. "Navigating this field in a very changing world is a difficult task. It doesn't just require engineers; it requires people from very different backgrounds."
Roy pointed to artificial intelligence, data centers and electric vehicles as forces driving new demand for energy and resilient infrastructure, and he said VSEC's charge extends across the university, from arts and science to nursing to divinity. "There is no bigger example of radical collaboration than what VSEC is doing right now," Roy said.
TURNING SOLAR INTO AN ECONOMIC ENGINE
The symposium's opening keynote came from Matt Kisber, BA'82, co-founder and chairman of Silicon Ranch. Kisber traced how he and co-founders Reagan Farr and former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen launched the Nashville-based company and built it into one of the country's largest independent power producers. Its portfolio includes more than eight gigawatts of solar and battery storage projects that are operating, under construction or contracted across the U.S. and Canada.
Kisber said the company's approach-developing, funding, building, owning and operating every project rather than selling it-was set from the start. "We use square corners," Kisber said, recalling Bredesen's colloquial guidance. "It might be harder to do things the right way, but it's the best solution in the long run."
Silicon Ranch has worked to bring its supply chain onshore, Kisber said, citing a $1.2 billion First Solar plant in Alabama and a Nextpower facility in Memphis, and it has partnered with a solar recycling company to reclaim materials from panels at the end of their life. He also credited Vanderbilt with shaping the company's internship pipeline and its own sustainability projects, like the Silicon Ranch-Vanderbilt collaboration to develop solar farms near Brownsville and Shelbyville, Tennessee.
"Solar must do more than produce energy," Kisber said. "Solar must go beyond the megawatt to maximize the economic, environmental and social benefits of the clean energy transition in this country."
BALANCING GROWING DEMAND WITH EMISSIONS
Jennifer Port, chief of industrial decarbonization at ExxonMobil, presented findings from the company's 2025 Global Outlook showing that global energy demand has kept climbing over the past decade despite policy commitments and growth in renewables and electric vehicles.
"Energy is required for human development and is required for quality of life," Port said, noting that access to roughly 50 million Btus per person annually is enough to lift a population out of extreme poverty. A successful transition to lower-emission energy depends on three things, she argued: public policy support, market-driven solutions and technological advances. Because affordability will drive the pace of change, she pointed to product-level carbon-intensity standards as an effective policy tool in lowering emissions, along with continued investment in solutions such as carbon capture for hard-to-decarbonize sectors like steel, cement and heavy transport.
FUNDING THE FUTURE, BUILDING A SMARTER GRID
On the symposium's second day, Susan Margulies, Vanderbilt's vice provost for research and innovation, told the audience that federal research funding has entered what she called a "new normal," in which agencies award money without clear long-term budget visibility. That makes planning difficult, she said, and recipients now need to spend awards as soon as they arrive rather than saving them for later.
Margulies said the clearest path to funding today is demonstrating alignment with government priorities. She pointed to "Science: A New Golden Age," a July 2026 report to the president from Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which calls for directing federal research money toward national priorities rather than open-ended proposals. That shift has been good news for VSEC-aligned work, Margulies said: Awards tied to sustainability, energy and climate grew 229% from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2026, from $4.1 million to $13.5 million. She urged faculty to pursue cross-campus collaborations for larger federal proposals.
"This institute should be having technologies that can be developed, licensed and launched," Margulies said.
Susan Hubbard, deputy for science and technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, closed the keynote lineup with a talk on how AI is reshaping nuclear energy and grid management. Hubbard said AI is accelerating the design and licensing of new fission and fusion technologies and helping operators respond to extreme weather, pointing to a supercomputer simulation that took just 15 minutes to reconfigure the grid during a major weather event.
"AI is expected to be the greatest driver of U.S. innovation, economic growth and national security over the next decade," Hubbard said.
The symposium's program had breakout sessions on five panel tracks: cross-scale energy integration, materials and technologies for sustainability, distributed energy resources, grid resilience during extreme events, and climate mitigation and adaptation through the energy transition. VSEC leaders said the discussions will shape the center's priorities heading into year two.
