The Energy Exchange - Which Innovations Will Shape the Future of Energy?

[The world needs more energy with less emissions]

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: Innovation is the only way to resolve this equation.

Prakash Sharma: AI can run the grid smarter. AI can also be a tool to reduce emissions to innovate.

Nigel Brandon: It takes time to innovate, and it can take decades. And we haven't got decades in front of us.

[The Energy Exchange]

[Wich innovations will shape the future of energy?]

Marie-Noëlle Semeria, Senior Vice President R&D, OneTech: In the energy transition, everything is moving, but not at the same speed, so the greatest challenge for us is to provide the energy people need at the right time, with the right innovative technology at the right price.

[Around 730 million people still live without electricity]

Nigel Brandon, Professor of Sustainable Development in Energy: There is still a big inequality in access to energy. I'm thinking of Africa or parts of India where we should allow people to have more energy consumption per person than they do at the moment. So how do we do that in a way that doesn't damage the environment and that requires innovation.

[Meeting global energy demand resquires tchnology at scale]

Prakash Sharma, Vice President, Head of Scenarios and Thechnologies: It is about getting the technology or getting that innovation to the market and scale it up. And the moment you do that, you automatically bring the cost curve down and and it becomes more affordable.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: We have to think about how we can integrate it in the existing assets or in new ones and anticipating the long duration of these technologies, most often in a very demanding environment.

[China shows what scale can achieve]

[Accounting for ever 80% of global solar manufacturing capacity]

Prakash Sharma: When it comes to solar, China has an edge because they have invested in developing clean tech supply chains for the past 15/20 years. But when it comes to new technologies like nuclear, geothermal, artificial intelligence, the field is wide open for both Europe and the US.

[R&D is helping drive the next wave of new technologies]

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: In 2025, Total Energies invested $1 billion in R&D, innovation and digital. We have more than 3,500 engineers, researchers and technicians in 15 different research centers.

[Innovation needs the right conditions to scale]

Prakash Sharma: It takes time from moving a technology from lab to commercialization stage. Industry calls it a valley of death. There has to be some sort of incentives because there are risks associated with it.

Nigel Brandon: It's a constant challenge of raising capital and raising money at the same time as developing the technology and maturing it. AI is a tool that helps us design systems. It speeds up the development cycle. It helps us balance these really complex systems.

[IA is accelerating energy innovation]

Prakash Sharma: Your ability to predict failures, your ability to predict a an efficient energy system improves significantly with AI. Another point is the role of physical AI in the actual real world. So you have robots and autonomous machines maintaining say, a large wind turbine or maintaining your solar farm.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: AI will not replace securement expertise, but it will amplify it, which is a great opportunity. Pangea 5 is the TotalEnergies is a new high power computer. We invest more than €100 million and it multiplies by 6 our power capability. We need new supercomputing in order to run much more data, much more cases.

[High performance computing is accelerating progress]

[Energy consumption reduced by ~40%]

[The next phase needs better technology and breakthroughs]

Nigel Brandon: Lithium ion battery is great, but it's not so good at storing weeks or days of energy. So that brings forward the opportunities for new ideas in the energy storage space.

Prakash Sharma: Solar and wind are the cheapest supply option in the world today, but they only produce when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. So the equation has changed from cheap power to whether you can get foam clean around the clock. Reliable electricity and that's where the new technologies come into play around long duration energy storage, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, because these are the dispatchable technologies you need to bring about the flexibility and resilience in the system.

Nigel Brandon: We are likely to need technologies that pull CO₂ back out of the air. One is to use something called direct air capture. This is literally, if you like, a big fan in simplistic terms, that passes the air through something that absorbs the carbon dioxide and pours it out of the air.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: All of these technologies need some breakthrough, either in materials or in chemistry.

[No one can deliver the energy transition alone]

Nigel Brandon: It may start in a university laboratory or a National Laboratory, but then it needs to be picked up by an industrial partner who is prepared to put in the capital and the capability to scale it.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: TotalEnergies is working with more than 1,000 external partners a year, startups, universities, national labs, industrial partners that play a role to open our minds. We start a few decades ago with an invention jointly with CNRS and University of Rents developing new technology to quantify, maintain emissions and it's led to deployment plan across operated assets. We were able to decrease by more than 65% submitting emission in all sides. So it's why partnering with all those is so essential.

[TotalEnergies is a global integrated energy company that produces and markets energies (oil and biofuels, natural gas, biogas and low-carbon hydrogen, renewables and electricity) and is staying the course of its transition strategy. Learn more : totalenergies.com/energy-transition]

[No single technology will define the future of energy]

Prakash Sharma: The next chapter is going to be more about the system. It is not about generating clean power. It is about storing it, moving it, transmitting it to the grid so that the smart grid balances all by itself.

Nigel Brandon: The energy system of tomorrow has to be resilient, it has to be as clean as we can make it, and it has to not add undue economic burden on society.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: I don't think a single technology will define the next decade. It's a mix of different technologies that can change the landscape and can contribute to the new energy system.

[TotalEnergies logo]

[©TotalEnergies - November 2026]