Chicago Tribune
Feb. 22, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune News Service delivered by Newstex) -- WASHINGTON -- When Steven Chu talks about how Americans can break their addiction to oil and coal, he starts with his hi-fi amplifier. It's so old the on-off light burned out long ago, but inside lies a technology that -- in its day -- was as revolutionary as the changes needed to solve the nation's energy problems.
Radios, telephones and other electronics once depended on fragile vacuum tubes the size of small light bulbs. Then scientists pioneered a smaller, cheaper and more durable replacement called the transistor, opening the way to trans-Atlantic phone calls and a host of other marvels, including Chu's stereo.
Chu, the Nobel-Prize-winner turned Energy secretary, and other experts say similar scientific breakthroughs are what is needed to make such power sources as wind, solar and bio-fuels as cheap and easy to use as the costly, environmentally damaging oil and coal we depend on. Toward that end, President Obama's stimulus package contains $8 billion for energy research, including $400 million specifically targeted for game-changing technology.
The problem is that during the last three decades, the U.S. has spent many times that much on energy R&D -- with nothing like a transistor to show for it.
"It's very easy to say we should spend more" on research, said Jeffrey Wadsworth, president and CEO of the Battelle Memorial Institute, which manages several Energy Department laboratories. "What really needs to happen is more effective use of the money."
As Wadsworth is quick to acknowledge, that's easier said than done. A recent Energy Department task force report details the sort of breakthroughs that are crucial to fulfilling Obama's vision of a "clean energy economy," which could slash dependence on foreign oil, combat climate change and ignite the next great domestic job boom.
The wish list includes cells that convert sunlight to electricity with double or triple the efficiency of today's solar panels; batteries that store 10 times more energy than current models; a process for capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal; and advanced materials that allow coal and nuclear power plants to operate at hotter temperatures and higher efficiency.
Researchers are working on all of them. But what's required is more than incremental advances in technology. It's advances in understanding basic physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach," the report says.
As task force co-chair George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago put it: "Everything you can think of that is a renewable -- or somewhat more renewable -- energy option has roadblocks to it, and it needs a science solution."
There are also roadblocks within the federal government, the Energy Department report and two other new studies suggest. Experts from the Brookings Institution said this month the way federal energy research is managed is "holding back innovation and rapid deployment of clean energy technology."
And Harvard researchers said the government "has fallen short in what it can do to promote the development and deployment of advanced energy technology."
All three reports call for more research funding, and they suggest institutional changes to spend research dollars smarter.
The Energy Department task force urges a sharper focus on basic science research, including the creation of dream teams of exceptionally talented scientists, equipped with the best tools, and focused on the most pressing challenges so as "to increase the rate of discovery."
Harvard's Energy Technology Innovation Policy Group suggests a comprehensive federal energy-innovation strategy, the absence of which "has too often meant that different parts of the U.S. government have supported different energy technologies at different times, with inadequate coordination and follow-through."
The most detailed and aggressive recommendations come from Brookings, which calls the Energy Department's current research efforts "fragmented and insular."
Although much of the federal government's energy research is handled by the network of big national laboratories such as Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, Brookings proposes the creation of a national network of "energy discovery-innovation institutes" that would link federal researchers with universities and the private sector.
The academic and business leaders behind the plan say it would boost the chances for scientific breakthroughs but also help solve a second critical issue for renewable energy: how to get new technology from the lab to consumers.
The transistor could be a model. After Bell Laboratories scientists developed it using principles of quantum mechanics, it still took nearly a decade to ramp up mass production, even with the force of a major corporation behind it. Ground-breaking work in renewable energy today is coming to market through start-ups and small businesses that need help raising the hundreds of millions of dollars it will take to build factories for their products.
"Low-cost manufacturing and rapid deployment out into the marketplace is really where we need to make progress," said Robert McGrath, a co-author of the Brookings report and deputy lab director for science and technology at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
Energy entrepreneurs agree. The government needs to help build demonstration plants for promising technologies, said Howard Berke, co-founder of the advanced solar firm Konarka in Lowell, Mass.
"The real issue is, can you make a million" of your product, said Scott Faris, the CEO of Orlando-based Planar Energy Devices, which is developing super-storage batteries. "Can you make 20 million? And can you do it cost-effectively?"
Chu says he is keenly interested in the questions of how to encourage energy breakthroughs and how to spin new technology into consumer gold. In a recent interview, he pledged to assemble the sort of research "dream teams" that the Energy Department task force recommended. He said he would like department researchers "to create the technology and to do the science that industry would like to pick up."
And too much government subsidy for existing renewable energy technologies could impede future breakthroughs, he said, because they can become "incentive to make lots of money without too much improvement."
Energy research needs more stable funding, he said, but added, "Research doesn't cost that much. It's when you scale up, is where the real costs come."
In recent days, Chu and other administration officials have touted the energy spending in the stimulus plan. The $8 billion in direct research spending includes $1.5 billion for carbon-capture research for coal, $2.5 billion for energy efficiency and $2 billion for DOE's Office of Science -- featuring the $400 million tagged for breakthrough research.
It's a start, said Mark Muro, a Brookings fellow who co-authored the Institution's energy report. But, he said "It doesn't yet answer our challenge .. to do things very differently."
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