At the second annual Vineyard Forum, experts, leaders and community members came together to discuss one of the most pressing issues of today: power.
During multiple panels throughout Thursday, participants talked about the future of energy, the future of media and the future of politics. Panelists shared the innovative ways they are currently addressing skyrocketing energy demands, the changing landscape of journalism and media, and the state of the United States’ current democracy.
The Vineyard Forum is sponsored by the Vineyard Gazette and MassLive. It took place at the Harbor View Hotel, and began with a panel on energy, moderated by Scott Kirsner, a columnist at MassLive.
“We have an insatiable demand for energy in the world, and in this country, and also in this state,” said Carmichael Roberts, CIO of Breakthrough Energy, a large-scale investment fund that invests in diverse energy solutions.
Massachusetts and New England pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country, partly because the area relies on imported oil and gas subject to intense price fluctuations. Alicia Barton, the CEO of Vineyard Offshore, is trying to decrease the region’s reliance on outside energy with large-scale wind projects, one of which was completed off the south shore of the Vineyard this spring and is currently powering hundreds of thousands of New England homes.
Energy demands will only climb as AI — a massive consumer of electricity — becomes more and more prevalent, panelists agreed. An increase in extreme temperatures, which tax the grid through heating and cooling, is another driving force of rising electricity demands.
But beyond the challenge of producing energy, there is also the question of storing it. Thats been the priority, and battle, of Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold. As wind and solar production increases, there must be places to store the excess energy so it can be consistently provided to consumers and avoid heavy price fluctuations.
“I do believe that in our future we can have 100 per cent renewable energy,” Mr. Finegold said. “But we have to have a place to store it.”
Mr. Roberts pointed out that nuclear fusion — which requires few inputs — is a massive future source of energy. But just like battery storage, which often receives pushback because of its perceived fire hazard, the word “nuclear” is an instant harbinger of fear.
The topic on many minds was AI, a volatile industry which will disrupt the energy sector as it is expanded and regulated, said Mr. Roberts.
The economics of AI don’t work, Mr. Finegold said, because consumers do not typically pay for AI chatbots and services.
“At some point, we’re going to have to pay,” he said. “I think that’s when consumers will start to pull back….I think it might force people to actually think twice about when they use this stuff.”
In the second panel, moderated by Adi Ignatius, Harvard Business Review editor-at-large, participants shared innovative models for journalism and media in an era where information, according to panelist Chuck Todd, is like a water pipe.
“Our information ecosystem is both the sewer system and the drinking water coming out of the same pipe,” said Mr. Todd, who hosts a weekly interview at Noosphere, an app that gives readers access to affiliated reporters’ content. “You’ve got to filter out all the you know what. I think we want somebody else to do the filtering, and I think that that’s what we’re probably missing here, are those curators to filter it out.”
Nancy Gibbs, former editor of TIME and director of the Shorenstein Center of Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, agreed.
“Information is the battle surface of the 21st century,” she said. “The press obviously has a critical role to play in that. But so do lots of other individuals and institutions.”
Panelist Bimal Kapadia talked about his company Meadowlark Media, a platform that hosts sports shows, each run by a certain media personality. It’s an entertaining way to bring people real, hard-hitting information — like the melted cheddar on top of the broccoli, he said.
“Because of the various ways to dissemination information — your voice, your text, your videos — the creators have to show up at all the spaces and places that the audience is,” said Mr. Kapadia. “It’s just the nature of it now.”
That’s where legacy news organizations often fall short, said Ms. Gibbs. In order to keep people’s attention, newspapers must incorporate other ways to get people to subscribe, like the New York Times’ games, lifestyle, sports and wirecutter sections that help fund its journalism.
Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz, co-founder and CEO of Hunterbrook media, funds his company’s investigative newsroom in a different way. In addition to a newsroom, his company has an investing branch and a law firm, which use the journalists’ reporting to make investment decisions and litigate specific issues. That pays the way for the expensive, long-form journalism few news organizations can afford.
“We don’t need to focus on the clickbait or the easy stuff,” Mr. Horwitz said. “We can go deep, and we can focus on getting the data and the findings that maybe wouldn’t attract a lot of eyeballs or subscribers, but arms people who can take action with that information.”
Once again, the conversation turned to AI.
Mr. Todd said he is concerned that AI will turn writing into “white noise,” producing written outputs that all sound the same.
“It means that people that have distinctive voices, distinctive writing styles, they’re going to flourish,” he said. “It’s just going to create a different type of demand in us as consumers.”
As AI becomes more prevalent — and also runs out of information to scrape from the internet — local, on-the-ground, real time reporting may gain back some of its value, said Mr. Horwitz.
“Soon they’ll be up against the frontier of what information is available, and that’s when I think the local information and the local news will become especially important,” he said.
In the last discussion of the day, Mr. Todd sat down with Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin. They began by discussing the United States Constitution.
“Nothing is more common than to hear somebody get up on the floor and say we have three co-equal branches [of government] and then move on to their point,” said Mr. Raskin. “First of all, co-equal is not even a word.”
The pre-eminent branch of government, he continued, is Congress. The power to make laws, impose taxes, spend money and declare war all lies with the legislative body.
President Trump has taken many of those powers, and some of those powers, “we’ve given away, we’ve surrendered it,” said Mr. Raskin.
“The struggle to restore the preeminence of Congress as the driver of the republic. In the creation of a more perfect union, that struggle is the same struggle as to reinvigorate and revive our democracy and everybody’s right to vote and participate,” he continued.
He quoted John Dewey: “The only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy.”
Mr. Todd and Mr. Raskin both mentioned ways to do that: giving Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. statehood and representation, establishing health care for all citizens, implementing rank choice voting in primaries and electing the President via a popular vote rather than electoral one.
“The electoral college is an accident waiting to happen every four years,” Mr. Raskin said.
The government must also “rebuild” anti-corruption infrastructure of the Department of Justice and Homeland Security — both of which have been “dismantled,” Mr. Raskin said.
“The main thing we need right now is a legislative crusade against corruption, because the government is awash in corruption at every level, and at this point they’re not on our side,” he said.
Mr. Raskin left the audience with words of hope.
“The whole trajectory of our development has been towards greater, deeper, more meaningful democracy,” he said. “It is definitely democracy’s moment for renewal, expansion, renovation, reconstruction, reconstitution. Democracy is not a status quo system of rules and institutions. Democracy is a project. It always has been a project, and if you see it as a stationary thing, you’re losing.”
This article appears in July 17, 2026.