Innovating with Amazon: Six Months of Building and What's Next

The kickoff introduces the Year 6 cohort and features startup pitches from companies developing carbontech solutions that use carbon as a feedstock. The Carbon to Value Initiative connects startups with its invitation-only Carbontech Leadership Council, whose corporate, nonprofit, and government members provide market insights and explore collaboration on technology development, pilots, validation, testing, and demonstration. The initiative is a partnership among Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon, Greentown Labs, and Fraunhofer USA.

The program covers corporate sustainability strategy across finance and the business case, communications, organizational change, data and disclosure, AI tools, decarbonization, supply chains, nature, and circular systems. Its Energy and Water programs add sessions on corporate energy procurement, grid flexibility, and water stewardship. Listed sessions address battery storage and flexible power; clean-energy procurement amid uncertainty; hourly energy matching; building decarbonization; corporate AI’s carbon costs; critical-material sourcing and material recovery for supply-chain resilience; circularity’s business case; Scope 3 supplier engagement; water risk and corporate balance sheets; AI and water stewardship; and collective action on the Colorado River. Other sessions cover regenerative agriculture, nature finance, sustainability disclosure, and communicating sustainability to policymakers and markets. The event also lists a keynote, tutorials, breakouts, workshops, and an Advanced Perspectives Program.

An invitational pitch event for Cohort 2027 finalists, following application review and virtual presentations by selected semifinalists. The underlying program supports technical founders developing early-stage technology innovations. Its priority areas include domestic critical-mineral extraction, midstream processing and recycling; manufacturing scale-up for energy applications; industrial competitiveness; energy generation and power management; batteries; grid storage and security; and nuclear, fusion, transportation, computing, and biomanufacturing technologies.

The symposium focuses on accelerating deployment of transformative clean-energy technologies and policies for the public good, forging cross-sector alliances, and renewing leadership commitment to clean-energy innovation. The agenda includes a fireside chat; sessions on battery innovation and battery research; an emerging leaders panel; “Learning from Hundreds of Millions of Experiments in a Single Afternoon”; “Life Science Lessons”; and “High-Throughput Materials Science for Solar.” An innovation ecosystems panel and closing address round out the program.

The forum brings together cleantech innovators, investors, corporates, and other ecosystem participants to address grid stability, water scarcity, waste-to-value, critical minerals, and geopolitical pressures on supply chains and energy security. The program includes a closed-door, peer-level executive roundtable and an opening plenary covering cleantech trends, capital flows, innovation, and the 2027 Global Cleantech 100. Agenda topics include nuclear fuel supply and nuclear supply chains; mineral processing, refining, recovery, and the post-mining supply chain; physical AI applications in grid construction, critical minerals, and dual-use; data-center power demand, grid capacity, water use, cooling, and wastewater resource recovery. Other sessions address heat resilience, energy efficiency for AI compute, geopolitical risk across energy and cleantech supply chains, and investor perspectives on cleantech funding. Innovation Showcases feature cleantech companies presenting technologies and business models.

The program combines a shared market program with concurrent Capital, Markets & Deal Strategy and Energy Innovation & Investment tracks. Sessions address capital availability, tax equity and credit transfers, private credit, project bankability, investment risk, insurance, and the effects of policy and market changes on project finance. Topics include macroeconomic and geopolitical forces affecting U.S. energy investment; capital deployment across renewables, gas-fired generation, storage, transmission, and digital infrastructure; financing firm power amid rising electricity demand; and project-finance trends and capital sources. The innovation track covers emerging energy asset classes, post-tax-credit renewable and storage economics, AI and data-center power demand, permitting and commercialization barriers, small modular reactor economics, construction risk, geothermal, long-duration storage, and distributed energy. Closing discussions consider which energy technologies and business models may scale by 2030, what makes infrastructure bankable, and investment lifecycle strategies including M&A, value creation, and exits.

Rocks provide geomaterials used in cement and critical minerals used in smartphones and energy technologies. The seminar examines resource efficiency: how to obtain more useful value from each tonne of rock, rather than simply extracting more, given the costs and environmental consequences of extraction, processing, transportation, and resource development. Topics include redesigning cement feedstocks to enable lower-temperature processing and decarbonization while conserving mass and increasing material yield and retention; using water–rock interactions under thermal and chemical gradients to mobilize valuable elements and create additional value streams; and applying smart sensing to target extraction by identifying valuable properties within heterogeneous rock resources. The discussion also addresses material retention and quarry utilization efficiency.

An intensive workshop on projected electricity demand and expanding the supply of natural resources used to generate power. Topics include natural gas, geothermal development and repurposing oil and gas assets; hydrogen, uranium, lithium and critical minerals; and water, environmental, storage, site-selection and regulatory considerations. Program discussions cover grid shortfalls and raw materials for electricity generation, solutions for increasing electricity supply, geothermal, and technology including ORC, sensors and small nuclear reactors. Other sessions address AI prompts for grid and behind-the-meter planning; lithium direct lithium extraction (DLE) and hydrogen technologies; regulatory and legislative factors affecting geothermal, critical minerals, low-carbon energy, grids and data centers; and mining and oil-and-gas intersections, including near-surface imaging and copper for electricity transmission. The program also includes an AI prompt clinic focused on water, the environment, science and regulations.

Resources for the Future and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation bring together researchers and stakeholders to examine energy economics, policy, and technology, with an emphasis on connecting research and decision-making. In-person attendance is by invitation only. The program includes an opening discussion on how researchers can collaborate with decision-makers amid changes in the US energy research and policy landscapes. Topical breakout sessions use lightning talks, practitioner reflections, and moderated discussion to cover energy supply chains, energy workforce transitions, industrial decarbonization, and energy system resilience. Other sessions address consumer perspectives on electricity rate design, energy efficiency, vehicle purchases, and energy policy choices; clean-energy research and deployment involving nuclear energy, geothermal technologies, carbon capture, and carbon dioxide removal; and the United States’ position in global clean-energy innovation. Facilitated networking focuses on data access, combining quantitative and qualitative research, reaching new audiences, and building communities of practice. The program also includes participant-nominated breakfast salons and a funders’ panel on emerging energy-system research needs and opportunities for impact.