TEC 2018: Transforming Outlooks Into Realities

Friday, February 2 - Saturday, February 3, 2018

This year's event sought to spur thought, conversation, and creative action around the topic of Transforming Outlooks Into Realities. The event explored what policy, technology, and financial disruptions must occur to transform the global energy paradigm to meet national and international goals in 2030, 2050, and beyond.

Speakers, panelists, and guests were invited to think big, ask creative questions, and consider how the world will attain its highest ambitions. While we don’t have crystal balls (yet), we asked everyone to use their best analytical and data-driven perspectives to help us work through what’s been done, what needs to be done, and how to do more so that we can meet the world’s long-term energy and environmental challenges. Milestones are important, and as we near 2020, a year in which ambitious goals and targets from earlier pledges come to fruition, we ask ourselves to look far, but not too far, into the future, in order to see what is possible.

Thomas Linn Dinwoodie is an inventor, engineer, serial entrepreneur, futurist, and equity investor in the vanguard of clean technology.
 
​Driven by solutions to climate change, Dinwoodie founded his first wind power systems company, TDEnergy, Inc., in 1982. By 1994 he had founded PowerLight Corporation, a solar energy product and systems design company, serving as Chairman and CEO, where Dinwoodie designed and was awarded over thirty U.S. patents in solar photovoltaic products, primarily for integration of solar cells into products for building construction industries.
 
PowerLight merged with SunPower Corporation and from 2007 to 2012 Dinwoodie was acting CEO, then Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for SunPower Corporation Systems, a SunPower subsidiary serving residential, commercial, government, and utility customers, globally.
 
Dinwoodie is Lead Independent Trustee of the Rocky Mountain Institute (since 2008), a nonprofit think-and-do tank—co-founded by current chairman emeritus and chief scientist Amory Lovins—that focuses on the global transition to a clean energy economy. He continues volunteer service on such boards as the Sierra Club Climate Cabinet and Scientific Advisory Panel (since 2012), the MIT Mechanical Engineering Visiting Committee, and the MIT Energy Club Advisory Board, to name a few.
 
Dinwoodie is a seed investor, founder, or advisor, to a range of clean tech startups—spanning wind, solar and biomass gasification technologies, electric vehicle (EV) transportation, off-the-grid solar home systems (SHS), custom financial services, and clean utility operations—with a global reach.