Clean Energy Innovation and Investment in a Fragmented Global Landscape 

Written by: Martin Waana-Ang

Reflections on the Yale Clean Energy Conference, November 2025 

The 2025 Yale Clean Energy Conference took place at a singular moment in the history of the energy transition. Global energy investment is projected to exceed several trillion dollars this year, with a rapidly growing share flowing into clean energy technologies and infrastructure. In power systems alone, renewables now account for the overwhelming share of global capacity expansion. In the United States, solar, batteries, and wind are expected to comprise the vast majority of new capacity additions over the coming years. 

In what follows, I examine three themes: (1) how clean energy innovation is being reshaped by supply chains and systems-level constraints; (2) where capital is flowing, and why investment patterns remain uneven; and (3) what this implies for policy, law, and institutional design in the decade ahead. 

1.  Innovation Has Become a Supply Chain and Workforce Question 

Early clean energy debates seldom foregrounded supply chains: now they are centre stage. That shift reflects an uncomfortable fact: the bottlenecks to decarbonisation today lie less in basic science and more in the ability to build, at scale, the hardware of the transition—wind turbines, batteries, solar modules, EVs, grid infrastructure—and to do so reliably and affordably. 

China’s role looms particularly large. Chinese firms now manufacture a dominant share of the world’s solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines. And they capture a substantial proportion of new capital investment in clean-tech manufacturing plants for batteries, solar modules, and wind equipment. This concentration has two faces. On the one hand, it has enabled rapid deployment: the expansion of Chinese exports has made the energy transition affordable in countries where decarbonization was previously aspirational. Emerging economies are now able to procure EVs, solar, and batteries at price points that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. On the other hand, the United States and Europe are uneasy about dependence on a single jurisdiction for critical energy technologies, and industrial policy measures—from large-scale subsidies to local-content rules and tariffs—are, in effect, attempts to re-shape this geography of production. 

Innovation, in this context, is no longer just about better solar cells but about the design of redundancy, diversity, and security into global value chains. That is a very different kind of innovation challenge, and it brings trade policy, competition law, and investment screening regimes into the heart of the clean energy conversation. 

Additionally, renewable energy sources are expected to constitute the overwhelming majority of new U.S. generating capacity, but this build-out sits atop a construction sector already facing a significant labour shortage. Turning record levels of clean energy investment into steel in the ground requires electricians, welders, transmission engineers, and construction managers in volumes that existing training systems are not yet producing. 

For lawyers and policymakers, this raises questions well beyond energy regulation narrowly conceived. How should migration law, vocational education policy, and labor standards be adapted to support a rapid scale-up of the clean energy workforce? Can permitting and land-use law be reformed in ways that accelerate project delivery without sacrificing environmental and social safeguards? What institutional mechanisms are needed to coordinate energy regulators, workforce agencies, and regional planners? Innovation at this stage of the transition is as much about institutional and administrative capacity as about novel technologies. 

2.  The Investment Boom: Abundance and Unevenness 

The second major theme across the conference concerns the pattern of investment. Aggregate numbers suggest a boom: global clean energy investment has risen sharply since 2020, and spending on renewables, grids, storage and other clean technologies now rivals or exceeds total investment in fossil fuels. Yet this boom is not evenly distributed. 

In the United States, two years of policy stimulus have unleashed unprecedented commitments. The clean energy sector has announced hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments, including scores of new or expanded manufacturing facilities and hundreds of gigawatts of pipeline projects. Europe, similarly, has mobilized substantial public and private capital around its own industrial policy instruments, although the architecture is more fragmented. 

Emerging and developing economies face a very different picture. Countries with rapidly growing power demand, limited fiscal space, and higher perceived political risk often confront a cost of capital several percentage points higher than that faced by borrowers in advanced economies. The result is that, even when technology is cheap, financing costs can render projects uneconomic. Chinese equipment has helped drive down capital expenditure for many projects, but broader geopolitical tensions and concerns about over-dependence on Chinese technology have led to tariffs, local-content conditions, and screening of foreign investment that can, paradoxically, raise costs or slow deployment. 

The Yale conference’s focus on emerging markets, therefore, is not peripheral; it is central to the question of whether the global investment boom can translate into universal clean energy access rather than a bifurcated transition in which rich countries over-invest and poor countries lag. 

A recurrent concern raised at the conference was policy uncertainty. Firms making multi-billion-dollar bets in clean energy manufacturing and infrastructure require strong, predictable demand signals over a decade or more. Fluctuating tariffs, changing tax credits, shifting eligibility criteria, and politicised permitting battles all erode that predictability. The precise design of policy may matter less than its durability: governments need to pick a course and maintain it long enough for learning curves and industrial ecosystems to develop. The legal and institutional question, then, is how to design climate and energy policies that are both sufficiently ambitious and sufficiently sheltered from abrupt reversal—without unduly tying the hands of future democratic legislatures. 

III. Three Frontiers of Clean Energy Innovation 

With this backdrop of supply-chain concentration, labour shortages, and uneven capital flows, what does clean energy innovation actually mean today? The conference discussions suggest three interlocking frontiers: technological systems, financial architecture, and institutional design. 

On the technological front, rapid growth in solar and wind is driving demand for storage, flexible generation, and smarter grids. Renewable power now accounts for the vast majority of global capacity expansion, which in turn requires innovation in grid planning, congestion management, and interconnection rules. Digitalization and artificial intelligence formed another forward-looking strand: participants discussed both the challenge of decarbonising energy-hungry data centres and the opportunities for AI to optimize grids, forecasting, and industrial processes. 

Increasingly, the real innovation lies in the integration of these technologies into coherent systems rather than in incremental improvements to any single device. That integration is deeply governed by regulation and market design: capacity markets, ancillary service rules, grid codes, interconnection queues, and data governance frameworks. 

On the investment side, innovation is underway not just in new funds or tax structures but in attempts to align capital flows with the risk profile of clean infrastructure. Blended finance and de-risking instruments are being deployed by multilateral institutions to draw private capital into emerging-market projects, though questions of additionality and accountability remain. Traditional power-purchase agreements and project-finance contracts—built around firm capacity and predictable fuel costs—are being stretched to accommodate variable renewables, storage, demand response, and hybrid assets. Change-in-law clauses, stabilization provisions, and termination regimes are being stress-tested by volatile policy environments and rapid technology cost declines. 

Finally, perhaps the most under-appreciated frontier is institutional. Policy continuity and administrative capacity are themselves infrastructure for the energy transition. Regulators historically tasked with least-cost energy provision under fossil-dominated systems must now balance affordability with decarbonization, resilience, and equity. Planning and permitting reform are central: many jurisdictions are grappling with how to accelerate permitting for clean infrastructure while respecting environmental review and community participation. And as new investment flows into clean energy, attention must also be paid to communities and workers tied to fossil infrastructure, through transition funds, retraining schemes, community benefit agreements, and robust decommissioning obligations. 

IV. Towards a More Coherent Global Investment Agenda 

The Yale Clean Energy Conference, by design, sits at the junction of academia, policy, and practice. That positionality matters. The themes that surfaced this year point to several directions in which scholarship and policy engagement could be particularly valuable. 

First, there is a need to move from purely national industrial policy to more cooperative approaches to risk-sharing. The current wave of industrial policy is overwhelmingly national, as states compete for clean-tech factories and supply chain segments. From a climate perspective, however, the relevant metric is global deployment, not national manufacturing share. Legal and policy design must preserve legitimate resilience concerns while avoiding a race to the bottom in subsidies and trade restrictions that could fragment markets and slow deployment. 

Second, there is an urgent need to recalibrate the global financial architecture. If the bulk of clean energy investment continues to concentrate in a handful of advanced economies and China, the world will miss both development and climate goals. Multilateral development banks and climate funds are experimenting with new risk-sharing instruments, but questions of governance remain: who sets priorities, who bears residual risk, and whose voices shape project selection and social safeguards? Legal scholarship can contribute to redesigning these institutions for a just transition rather than simply more efficient capital mobilisation. 

Third, innovation and investment must be assessed through a justice lens. The siting of transmission lines, renewable plants, data centres, and new industrial facilities raises perennial questions about distributional equity and procedural fairness. Legal frameworks for environmental impact assessment, free prior and informed consent, community benefit-sharing, and land tenure security are central tools of energy policy and not peripheral concerns. 

 

 

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