| Energy Secretary Chu in sprint to put stimulus to work on renewable innovations | |||
| Nov 13, 2010 | Washington Post | ||
| Steven Mufson
It's a stunning fall morning in Washington, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, clad in bike shorts and a snug Stanford University biking shirt, climbs onto his Colnago bicycle and rolls down his leafy street and onto the Capital Crescent Trail. Then it's a 20-minute sprint - breaking the trail's speed limit - to downtown Washington. A Secret Service agent keeps close behind, with the help of a small electric motor. The trees are ablaze across the Potomac as he drops into Georgetown.
Chu winds his way through traffic along the Mall - where one angry motorist leans on the horn - before entering the Energy Department parking garage, right behind his general counsel's red Maserati with the license plate "ENERGY."
Chu's nearly two years as energy secretary have been a sprint of sorts. Until last year, the department spent most of its time and its $26 billion budget as caretaker of the nation's nuclear waste and weapons stockpile. But with rising concerns about climate change and the nation's economy hanging on a precipice, Chu was effectively made the green-energy czar. The stimulus bill gave the agency an extra $36 billion for grants and low-interest loans to jump-start new technologies and greater energy efficiency.
It isn't easy to foster innovation or choose economic winners; many policymakers say government shouldn't even try and that there are better ways to create jobs. But President Obama, egged on by Chu and others, thinks that money can lay the seeds for a more competitive, energy-efficient economy.
Chu - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former professor at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley - has been in a hurry to get the stimulus money out the door. The sense of urgency is something he has tried to infuse in others. One day in 2009, after biking to the office, he met with a handful of top officials awaiting their swearing-in ceremony.
"Be nice, but don't be patient," he told them, according to one of the officials. On the road Earlier this fall, Chu took one of his many one-day trips to visit Energy Department projects and companies or institutes hoping to land funding.
His first stop: Applied Photovoltaics, which is run from a garagelike space in a commercial building in Pennington, N.J. He sits at a small table with the company's directors. The doughnuts go untouched.
One of the founders, Jeff Szczepanski, dressed in a blue blazer and a wide tie with a giant yellow sun, is the salesman, or "eye candy," as he puts it. The other, Robert Lyndall, who sports a graying beard and ponytail, is the engineer. They are looking for money to manufacture thin-film solar cells that can be embedded into construction materials. It isn't a novel idea, but few companies are producing it.
Chu is curious. He asks about amorphous thin film, substrates, efficiency and degradation. Then he wants to know why architects aren't using the panels as roofing material. The answer is a combination of old habits, lack of experience, price - and availability. The Applied Photovoltaics team thinks the market is there.
Aides say Chu's ability to understand and absorb technical information sets him apart from the previous 11 energy secretaries - a financier, three business executives, an admiral, two governors, a U.S. senator and other politicians.
"When was the last time the boss knew more about what he was being briefed on than the people doing the briefing?" said David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs.
In Pennington, Chu is noncommittal about the money. The stimulus bill provides tax credits for companies such as this one, but it needs cash or a grant. Downstairs, a few local reporters are waiting. Chu, standing beside Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), puts on his political hat.
"Lots of great things start in garages," he says. "It is ideas like this that will disseminate things like solar." 'Intellectual integrity' At the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Chu is greeted as something akin to a rock star. Chu earned his Nobel Prize for work he did in New Jersey at Bell Labs, where he figured out how to effectively freeze atomic particles with lasers.
Holt introduces him, saying Chu "brings a level of intellectual integrity that quite frankly the department needed."
Chu's talk spans environmental history, deep-water drilling and energy efficiency. Explaining why electric car batteries are large and heavy, he uses a common measurement of energy and notes that a lithium ion battery stores 0.54 megajoules per kilogram. Body fat has 38 megajoules per kilogram, and kerosene has 43.
He shows temperature records from 1880 to 2009.
"We may not currently understand all the bumps and wiggles, but we understand the overall trend," he says. "What's going to happen is it's going to warm up."
Chu points to a study about Greenland's climate and glaciers.
"This is remarkable data," he says. "The world is changing."
Concern about global climate change helped bring Chu out of the physics lab and classroom and into public policy.
"Many of our best basic scientists realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation," he said in a 2007 interview when promoting a report on climate change.
At Princeton, he projects photos of scientists - such as Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer - who were among the fathers of the atom bomb during World War II. He says climate change poses a new threat to rally against.
"Scientists have come to the service of our country in times of national need," he says.
Chu's scientific bent was unexpectedly useful over the summer, when the Obama administration was desperate to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Chu was dispatched to BP's Houston offices to see what could be done.
He recommended that BP use gamma rays to see into the blowout preventer; its several inches of steel were obscuring other methods of figuring out whether the shear rams were clamping into the drill pipe.
He also tapped into his Stanford network to get names of engineers who could give advice, and he told Obama early on that the flow rate of oil pouring into the gulf might be greater than what BP was letting on. Weeks later, he marveled about how little innovation there was in the deep-water drilling business and how few gauges and backup mechanisms were installed on the blowout preventer.
But his crash course in the perils of offshore drilling has reinforced his concern about energy efficiency and alternatives to fossil fuels.
In his talk at the plasma lab, he says, "We kept going out into deeper and deeper water until we got in deep water." To fund or not to fund After Chu's talk, he's taken on a quick tour of the facility, which is seeking to harness nuclear fusion so it can be tapped. Temperatures in fusion experiments can rise to 30 million degrees, three times the surface temperature of the sun. The lab carries out these experiments in devices that confine plasma - a hot, electrically charged gas that is the fuel for fusion energy production - by using magnetic fields inside a vacuum chamber. It's a wildly expensive venture, and the prospects of success are remote.
First, they show Chu a machine with wires heading different directions, like a device having a bad hair day. Then they take him to see the stellarator, which looks like a contemporary sculpture.
"This is the type of machine that will make fusion a reality," one lab official tells Chu.
The project was terminated half built.
"Frank Gehry would be proud," Chu says.
Chu follows along as the director talks about tolerances, magnetic fields, mathematical formulas and alloys. If completed, lab director Stewart Prager says, the project would put the United States in the lead worldwide in fusion research and cost less than alternative approaches.
But the project ran way over budget, and Chu isn't sure the department can deliver the $90 million needed to resume the work.
Later he says, "There is no guarantee that fusion will be a commercial source of energy." Even if he believes in it, he adds, "the question is: Will we be able to build it three times better and less costly in 5, 10 or 15 years?"
His last stop of the day is the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where the Energy Department has decided to devote $122 million over five years to help create an energy "hub," one of three new federally funded research centers nationwide. The idea is dear to Chu, who seems to pine for his years at Bell Labs, where scientists have won a total of seven Nobel Prizes and one team invented the transistor.
But in Philadelphia, minds are focused on jobs. The mayor is there, and so is Gov. Ed Rendell (D), in the closing days of his term. Rendell is a pro, but this isn't Chu's element. He sounds awkward here, telling a story that falls flat about a tenure candidate who went to Penn State instead of Stanford. Still, he finishes with his central message: "This is the kind of center that can propel the country forward." New obstacles It remains unclear just what will propel the country's energy policy.
The midterm elections made it harder to push ahead. The department has used up most of the stimulus money. And with the big federal budget deficit, many critics say the department's grants and loans amount to subsidies for renewable energy that shouldn't be extended. Tough publicity lies ahead when some of the beneficiaries, such as new battery or solar-panel manufacturers, inevitably fail - if there were no risk of failure, private money would step up. The first grant recipient, a solar firm, has already delayed some plans.
"We're looking very hard at what would bring [solar-power costs] down by a factor of four," Chu says. "I'm confident that we can reduce it by a factor of two. The last factor of two will be much harder."
In the meantime, many people are judging the energy portions of the stimulus programs on the basis of jobs. Obama has turned to it time and again. A Council of Economic Advisers report in July said nearly 200,000 jobs had been created, impressive in the context of the renewable-energy industry but small when measured against the huge economy.
The bigger picture on climate change is cloudy, too.
The Obama administration's push for climate legislation has hit a brick wall in the Senate. Many lawmakers favored legislation that would have raised the price of oil and coal to discourage their use and make renewable energy more competitive; Chu belongs to that camp. Other lawmakers oppose higher fossil fuel prices, saying it will hurt manufacturers and consumers.
Chu - who lacked the political skills of earlier energy secretary Bill Richardson or the Washington policy stature of Carter-era secretary James R. Schlesinger - has played a minor role in the administration's climate-change efforts. His support for expanding nuclear power has put off many environmentalists who back his renewable agenda. And he has alienated the oil and coal industries as well - he once called coal his "worst nightmare."
"Are we willing to make investments today for our children?" Chu asks. "Or are we going to say we'd rather not increase the price of electricity half a cent a kilowatt hour, because we would rather take the money and spend it today?"
His biggest disappointment, he says, is that "two or three years ago I thought America and the world was really going to break forward and recognize that climate change is important, and now they are backtracking on that. The world economic recession has something to do with that, but the people who are against [climate action] have also tried to muddy the waters."
"Ironically," he adds, "in the last couple of years we know more and every year it gets more compelling."
The physicist sees a clear connection between addressing climate change and U.S. economic interests.
"People don't appreciate what's going on," he says, "that we are laying the groundwork for prosperity." | |||
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