Energy Secretary Steven Chu: Hire Brash Young Turks to Create the New Bell Labs

Luke Timmerman8/11/09Comments (2)Follow @ldtimmerman

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their projects on carbon capture and sequestration, smart grid technologies, and nuclear nonproliferation work.

Some of this certainly fit into Chu’s vision for the future of energy in the U.S., but it was really much broader. He started by batting aside any notions people might have that oil is all the country needs. “You can bank on it, the price of oil 20 years from today will make $75 barrel oil look like a bargain,” Chu said. Increasing demand from growing countries like China and India will continue, and it will force exploration to move into more expensive territory for extraction, like oil from tar sands, and deep offshore locations.

While the U.S. keeps heading down that path, it has fallen behind competitors in Europe and Asia in at least five important technologies. He cited automobile fuel efficiency, battery technology, electricity transmission and distribution, power electronics, and nuclear power. On some of these technologies, “the U.S. is nowhere to be seen,” he said.

Chu spent a fair amount of his talk on climate change, and leaning heavily on the evidence gathered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its Nobel-winning efforts from 2007. He regionalized the issue by pointing to spots on the U.S. map that are likely to become “dust bowls,” including a few spots in the Pacific Northwest, if nothing serious is done to curb carbon emissions.

A big part of the solution, Chu said, is in conservation. He rolled out a funny slide to explain how refrigerators have become significantly more energy-efficient since the 1970s. (Much of those gains have been offset, however, by refrigerators’ bigger size, related to Americans’ growing appetites.) Even so, if all of today’s refrigerators were still operating at 1975 efficiency levels, we would be using more energy that way than is currently produced by all wind and solar sources in the U.S. today. “That’s how important efficiency is,” Chu said.

One simple conservation measure is making buildings with white roofs that can reflect light upward, which has been shown to decrease air-conditioning demand by 20 percent, Chu said. Buildings can also be loaded with computer sensors, like those that monitor oxygen and engine temperature in a car, to make them much more efficient consumers of energy. “We have something to learn about buildings,” Chu said.

Energy transmission is another big area in need of innovation, Chu said. He recently got back from a trip to China, which was building a massive transmission line from western parts of the country, where much of the wind and solar power is generated, to more populated regions in the eastern part of the country. This power could be transmitted hundreds of miles with only 5 percent energy loss, Chu said he was told. In the U.S., he said it’s not unusual to have 10 percent energy loss over 190 miles.

When he asked his Chinese host how expensive that is, and how ratepayers react to footing that extra bill, he got an amusing reply that says a lot … Next Page »

Luke Timmerman is the National Biotech Editor of Xconomy, and the Editor of Xconomy Seattle. E-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ldtimmerman.