Join the Polsky Center for a fireside chat between Michael Polsky, MBA ’87 and Andy Karsner, moderated by Dean Madhav Rajan, where they will discuss their careers and leadership journeys as well as the energy transition.

Michael Polsky is a visionary entrepreneur, business leader, and energy industry pioneer whose work has defined the global energy landscape. He is the founder and CEO of Invenergy, the world’s largest privately held developer, owner, and operator of energy solutions. Under his leadership, Invenergy has developed more than 200 projects, with a combined capacity of over 33 gigawatts across 34 U.S. states and four continents. Driven by Polsky’s pragmatic and results-focused vision, Invenergy has become synonymous with growth and innovation.

An engineer by training, Polsky’s career spans over 45 years and almost every form of energy. Beginning in coal, he worked in oil, nuclear, and natural gas power generation before founding and building two successful independent power companies developing cogeneration and gas plants. In 2001, Polsky founded his third company, Invenergy, playing a critical role in the global expansion of renewable energy at scale.
Focused on technology, economics, and opportunity, Polsky pursues innovations that make practical sense, and his companies have developed some of the largest solar, wind, natural gas, and storage projects in the world. Polsky-led Invenergy continues to explore cutting-edge advancements across emerging sources and technologies.

Known for its execution capabilities, Invenergy develops, builds, and operates some of the most complex energy projects. These include long-distance transmission projects, such as Grain Belt Express, which will be the largest single transmission investment in U.S. history; American manufacturing at scale, with one of the most advanced domestic solar factories; and the first liquefied natural gas (LNG)-to-power generator for El Salvador, Energía del Pacífico, which meets 30% of the country’s energy demand.

Polsky’s passion for entrepreneurship and energy innovation is also reflected in his philanthropy. With a groundbreaking gift in 2025, Polsky established the World Resources Institute Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition and the Polsky Energy Transition Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago, each developing practical solutions to address the world’s most urgent and critical energy challenges. He also endowed the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, where he serves on the Board of Trustees.

Polsky has received widespread recognition for his humanitarian and professional contributions, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Polsky holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Andy Karsner is a leading corporate innovation strategist and accomplished energy entrepreneur, policymaker, regulator and diplomat with more than three decades of global conventional and renewable energy experience, spanning every natural resource. He is Senior Strategist at X (formerly Google X), the innovation lab of Alphabet Inc., where he is part of the executive leadership team, shaping strategy for technology, policy, and commercialization at the nexus of natural resources and AI, machine learning, geospatial engineering, and high performance computing.

He began his career developing large scale energy infrastructure and has led or contributed to project development, management and finance enabling significant value creation on six continents. As a private equity investor, venture partner and advisor, his portfolios have included some of the most successful clean tech startups of the past decade, including Nest (AI), Tesla (mobility), Recurrent (solar), Codexis (biotech) and Carbon (3D printing).

From 2005 to 2008, he served as US Assistant Secretary of Energy, responsible for multi-billion dollar federal R&D programs and National Laboratories. In this role, he was on point to assemble significant bipartisan coalitions to implement or enact the Energy Policy Act (2005), the Energy Independence and Security Act (2007), and the America Competes Act (2008), all of which remain foundational to the framework of federal energy policy and regulation today.

Mr. Karsner exercised a discrete diplomatic and security role as a principal representative of the United States in the negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other bilateral energy and environmental technology accords.

From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Karsner served as Managing Partner of Emerson Collective, an investment platform funding non-profit, philanthropic and for-profit portfolios advancing education, health, immigration, the environment, and other initiatives. Along with Emerson’s Founder and Principal, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mr. Karsner co-founded Emerson Elemental (since spun out as Elemental Labs) with a deep focus on market-based solutions and technologies addressing conservation and climate change.

Mr. Karsner is Executive Chairman of Manifest Energy, an energy technology development and investment firm he founded in 2008. Earlier in his career, from 1999 to 2006, Mr. Karsner was Founder and Managing Director of Enercorp, a private company involved in international project development, management, and financing of clean and sustainable energy infrastructure. Enercorp was international agent and partner to Vestas and a pioneer in large scale wind power plant design and development. He has also worked with Tondu Energy Systems of Texas, Wartsila Power Development of Finland, and other multi-national energy firms and developers managing a wide array of conventional and renewable sources of energy.

Mr. Karsner has served on the Board of Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), a leading semiconductor equipment company, since 2008. He has also served as a director of numerous privately held companies and non-profit organizations, including Conservation International. He is a Precourt Energy Scholar at Stanford University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and serves on the Schultz-Stephenson Energy Task Force at the Hoover Institution, and has been an Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School addressing the geopolitics of energy technology. He serves on the Advisory Boards of MIT Medialab and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and member of the Trilateral Commission. He was formerly a member of the National Petroleum Council, and boards of the Gas Technology Institute and University of Chicago’s Argonne National Lab.

Mr. Karsner holds a BA with honors from Rice University and an MA from Hong Kong University.