US Secretary of Energy Steve Chu (right) lived up to his reputation for candour when he appealed for help to a newly-revived advisory panel at its inaugural meeting at DOE headquarters in Washington DC today. “I don’t think we have a coherent national energy policy at the moment,” he told them bluntly.
Chu had triggered press speculation as to his motives in August when he resurrected the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board (SEAB), a scientific advisory panel that was abolished under George W. Bush. All became clear at the meeting today: he wants advice on how to ensure DOE’s various initiatives and departments can better work together, and with the private sector, to produce economic change. “The future of the United States in large part rests on how we modernize the energy economy,” he said.
Among the problems Chu says the agency is facing: how to ensure that innovative research funded through entities like the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is taken up by venture capitalists and companies to effect economic transformation in he US. He voiced concern that the research might instead produce manufacturing efforts overseas while the US economy failed to capitalize on DOE’s investment.
Chu’s interest in translating research into economic change helps explain the make-up of the panel—all its members are either from industry, or have a history of working in government. Several became animated in response to a presentation by Steve Koonin, Undersecretary for Science, who said “turf wars” and differing cultures prevented the Office of Science, the National Nuclear and Security Administration, and the Technology Development Offices of the DOE, from working together to translate DOE-funded research into industrial change.
This led William Perry of Stanford, a former Secretary of Defense and current chair of SEAB, to ask whether Chu ought to appoint a Chief Scientist to promote a coherent scientific strategy across all parts of the agency. MIT chemist John Deutch, a former Undersecretary for Energy, suggested that DOE maybe had too many Undersecretaries– one for science, one for NNSA, and one for Energy (a suggestion Koonin quickly rebutted by saying that all are “full-time jobs”).
Arun Majumdar, the Director of ARPA-E, was praised by the panel for his department’s choice of projects to fund so far, and for having hired several top-notch scientists and engineers as program managers. Both the panel and Chu said they wanted to extend the enthusiasm and efficiency at ARPA-E (which Majumdar says consists of only 25 people including program managers and people on the procurement side) to the rest of the DOE.
In basic research, Chu said he was looking for alternatives to the funding model in which individual Principal Investigators compete for 3-4 year grants, to solve major research problems in carbon sequestration, photovoltaics, and small modular nuclear reactors. “The Manhattan project didn’t fund people that way,” he said.
As examples of larger projects he cited the Innovation Hubs, centers that DOE is funding to focus on research problems such as artificial photosynthesis and energy-efficient buildings. The latter was a major discussion point for the panel; participants noted that 40% of the US energy budget is consumed by buildings.
Beyond research, DOE is pumping money directly into weatherization programs to make homes more energy-efficient. There seemed to be a little politics at work here: Cathy Zoi, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said that the deployment of energy efficient technology across the US was expected to change people’s opinion about energy so that in future a vote for clean energy legislation would not longer be perceived as “a bold vote”. DOE perceives higher efficiency standards for housing and appliances as a relatively easy way to produce economic change by getting people to save themselves money.
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The panel also discussed prospects for joint energy-efficient research initiatives with India and China, both of which are expected to massively expand their buildings stock over the next twenty years. Chu said that efforts to collaborate internationally on clean energy technology development were faring substantially better than Copenhagen talks on climate change, referencing a meeting of ministers for clean energy he hosted in July. “It was fundamentally a more satisfying emotional experience,” he said.