Resilience in a Changing World, What the Chicago Energy Conference Has to Teach Us
On April 11, the University of Chicago Energy and Climate Club and Northwestern Energy and Sustainability Club co-hosted their second Chicago Energy Conference. Centered around the theme of resilience, the conference brought together more than 30 speakers from across industry, academia, entrepreneurship and policy. Panels covered a wide range of topics, from Artificial Intelligence to workforce development, and the theme of making the energy transition hold under the pressure of a changing world was especially relevant.
Resilience is a very hot topic in the energy and climate space, the International Energy Agency had already mentioned in its 2025 Energy Outlook the increasing structural challenges facing the rapid expansion of clean energy. As deployment accelerates and as we start looking ahead, our focus is shifting from the need to generate clean power, to the necessity of ensuring flexible energy systems that can absorb new forms of demand, withstand disruptions, and adapt over time.
What the conference especially made clear throughout the various speakers and panels was the complexity that lies in resilience itself. Resilience can be a paradox, as sometimes the very tools designed to improve energy systems can also introduce new vulnerabilities.
Artificial intelligence
Take Artificial Intelligence for example, a recurrent theme throughout the conference. People have talked about how AI can help optimize energy systems, yet AI is also one of, if not the, greatest pain points of the energy transition. Global electricity consumption by data centers stands at around 415 TW/hours/year, roughly 1.5% of global electricity use in 2024. However, electricity demand from AI data centers is expected to more than double by 2030. And paradoxically, this is the same computational infrastructure that’s being deployed to make grids smarter.
Cybersecurity
The cybersecurity dimension compounds this challenge. The expansion of smart grid technologies and distributed energy resources (DERs) not only brings new energy capabilities online, but it also multiplies points of entry for attacks. The highly concentrated electricity demand of data centers, their dependence on programmable power electronics, and their integration with cloud-based control architectures collectively increase the vulnerability of power systems to cyberattacks. And this is a very present issue. The Wall Street Journal exposed that known cyberattacks have already disrupted German wind power in 2025, targeting original equipment manufacturers and major oil companies.
History of the Chicago Grid
Chicago offered its own version of these tensions, and the panel on the history of Chicago’s grid gave the conference a distinctly local flavor. Illinois’ power supply comes primarily from nuclear generation. The state produces more electricity from nuclear energy than any other state, with its six nuclear power plants accounting for 53% of the state’s electricity net generation in 2024. That foundation of clean, firm power is a source of grid stability for Illinois, but its base is narrow and fragile, especially considering data center growth projections for the state. Concerns were strong enough that in January 2026, Governor Pritzker signed the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, which lifts a decades-long moratorium on new large-scale nuclear reactors while also investing in battery storage and virtual power plants. The nuclear panel highlighted yet another layer of complexity. Nuclear power is simultaneously one of the most reliable tools for decarbonization and one of the most contested, especially because of cost, waste and construction concerns.
Policy and Workforce
Another crucial point of discussion was the policy and human aspect of the energy transition and where this also requires resilience. The workforce and policy panels aimed to address that a grid built on clean energy is only as resilient as the communities that it is built with and for. This requires strategic policies that prepare workers for new jobs (e.g., building powerplants, managing data centers, maintaining distributed energy resources, etc.), and enable inclusive decision-making with meaningful participation of workers and representatives.
Politicians must also seek to secure social license for change, as was outlined in a 2025 Nature comment. However, this relies on the assumption that the geography of these new jobs (already 34.8 million according to the IEA) matches the geography of the lost employment opportunities and that training pathways are accessible. In that sense, the transition holds a key risk of reinforcing inequities in access to affordable and clean energy, creating new health risks, and limiting workforce development opportunities in communities dependent on fossil fuels.
Conclusion
What the Chicago Energy Conference ultimately made visible was that resilience cannot be engineered from a single vantage point. Resilience is a product of how all of the complex layers interact and who gets to shape that interaction. The paradoxes that surfaced throughout the day: AI as both optimizer and burden, nuclear as both backbone and bottleneck, decarbonization as both opportunity and displacement, are not problems to be solved so much as tensions to be actively managed. This management will require exactly the kind of cross-sector, multi-disciplinary conversation and collaboration that the speakers and two undergraduate clubs attempted, in their own way, to model.