Happy October and welcome to our monthly newsletter! Estimated read time: 4m 30s

We’ve got a final call for DERVOS 2025 tickets, takeaways from our roundtables with Sightline Climate and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) at New York Climate Week, plus updates from our fast-growing team!

Enjoy the autumnal weather, Happy Halloween, and #BeConstructive. 

Susan Kish, CEO & Jonah Wagner, President

Last call! Two days until DERVOS in NYC

DERVOS 2025 kicks off this week with the Main Day on Governor’s Island this Friday, October 17th. There’s still time to get tickets! 

Poster by Nicole Kelner

In 2025, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) like batteries and rooftop solar are no longer a niche experiment, but an essential resource for unlocking affordable clean energy – fast.

DERVOS is where the distributed energy community gathers to share cutting-edge insights and engage in unfiltered debate about the role and future of DERs. 

Constructive is excited and proud to be partnering with the fantastic DER Task Force team to help make this the biggest and boldest DERVOS yet!

The DERVOS Main Day and New Energy festival both take place on Governor’s Island, NYC – a beautiful and historic location that is fast becoming a climate solutions hub.

On the agenda for Main Day (Oct 17 on Governor’s Island, NYC)

• Four ThunDERdomes — high-intensity debates on the forces shaping distributed energy including data center growth, “permissionless” plug-and-play technologies, and the race between “electrostates” and “petrostates” for energy dominance.

• Circuit Breaker — an intimate fireside conversation with Jigar Shah and Nick Chaset (Octopus Energy) 

• Demo Day & Showcases — featuring early-stage companies such as Pila Energy, Rune, ElectronX, Bayou Energy, and Paces, along with case studies on Virtual Power Plant performance and advanced grid orchestration.

• See the full program and speaker list here!

The Main Day isn’t all though. This year, DERVOS also features:

• Leadership Day / tomorrow, Oct 16 at NewLab, NYC - an invite-only convening of top thinkers and doers to explore the future of DERs through simulated, scenario-driven “War Games”

• New Energy Festival / Oct 18 on Governor’s Island, NYC - a groundbreaking music festival powered entirely by batteries charged with clean solar power and headlined by Eartheater. Tickets for the festival (separate from DERVOS Main Day) are on sale here!  

Tickets are nearly sold out. Secure yours now and join the community shaping the future of distributed energy.

Recap: Constructive at Climate Week NYC

Constructive co-hosted two roundtables at Climate Week NYC that explored how to turn climate ambition into scalable action – one focused on clean energy deployment in the UK, and the other introducing CATALYZE, our forthcoming industrial decarbonization summit with ASME.

UK Clean Energy Investment Pathways

The UK is positioned as a clean energy leader thanks to strong policy and extensive renewable power. Together with Sightline Climate we convened US and UK leaders from finance, industry, and government to discuss what it will take to unlock the next phase of cross-border clean energy investment.

Some of the topics we explored included:

• Building on policy foundations: Opportunities for the UK to leverage its climate policy and industrial strategy to maximize investment opportunities and incentives

• Defining “bankable”: where clearer standards for technology maturity levels can help developers and investors make better investment decisions

• Coordination, coordination, coordination: approaches to strengthen private-public relationships and build new financing models to support more projects

CATALYZING industrial decarbonization
with ASME

Industrial decarbonization is one of the most consequential fronts in the energy transition, representing 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also a huge economic opportunity worth $3-6 trillion annually by 2050.

That’s the driving purpose behind CATALYZE, our upcoming 2026 summit, co-produced with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and designed to connect the engineers who solve problems, the entrepreneurs who scale solutions, and the investors who fuel transformation.

At Climate Week, we co-hosted a salon with ASME to introduce CATALYZE and discuss some of the core themes that will shape the event agenda, such as:

• Finance <> Engineering: Supporting early engagement between investors and industry to help standardize finance frameworks and promote transparency

• Workforce renewal: Intensifying reskilling efforts and impact-focused communications around industrial careers to combat the looming shortage of engineers and technical professionals

• What gets measured gets managed: Building on ASME’s reputation as a standard-setter to serve as a platform for evolving standards, data, and impact frameworks across industrial decarbonization

Are you working on clean energy deployment, industrial decarbonization, or engineering solutions for sustainable manufacturing? If you have important insights, connections you could help us make, or partnership ideas for either of these program(mes), we would love to hear from you. Get in touch by replying to this email and join the CATALYZE community here!

The Constructive team has grown again – we are so thrilled to welcome two new, UK-based team members! Please meet Krysta and David:

We now have an established presence in the UK as well as the US and are well-positioned to build new relationships and share key lessons on clean energy deployment across borders.

We’ll be announcing more about our UK work soon, but if you know of an interesting initiative or someone we should meet, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Meeting the Power Crunch

Last month Constructive’s President Jonah Wagner and former DOE LPO Director Jigar Shah set out five pathways for governments around the world to meet the "power crunch" quickly and effectively with affordable, clean energy - and how Constructive can help. Read the op-ed here.

• The Electrotech Revolution – this excellent slide deck by Ember made a big splash in the energy community this month and is full of compelling evidence that clean “electrotech” is on an exponential growth curve. Ember also announced that renewable energy surpassed coal as the biggest source of electricity in the first half of 2025. The reality is more complex than the headline, but all in all, this is encouraging news about our global shift toward “borrowing, not burning”.

• Panels Don’t Solve Problems - a pithy article by Zia Khan at The Rockefeller Foundation that explains, in short, why we do what we do.
  “The next generation of collaboration will require true rigor. That means treating connection building as infrastructure, designing processes for problem-solving, and demanding metrics that point to results.” 

• Tina Turner may have wanted life beyond ThunDERdome – but we think she would have been a fan of distributed energy.

Finally, a shout out to the DOE Alumni Network who are uniting former staff to preserve institutional knowledge and facilitate nonpartisan policy engagement that furthers the Department of Energy’s mission. As a reminder, the DOE’s Liftoff Reports are all available on our website!

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