Moving the nation to net-zero carbon emissions will require a massive transformation of the grid, and that won’t easily happen without a revolution in the relationship between regulators, energy providers and energy technology innovators, a panel of business, technology and government experts concluded this week.
One way to foster this revolution would be the congressional creation of a “Department of Energy Foundation,” argued some participants of the second EnVision Forum sponsored by FERC, this time with the assistance of Virginia Tech.
More than 40 nationally recognized energy and entrepreneurial experts looked at decarbonization of the U.S. economy and its interplay with, and impact on, the nation’s grid.
The idea of a DOE Foundation came up during the session “New Platforms for Partnership and Innovation.” The foundation would be modeled after the National Institutes of Health, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, but with longstanding simultaneous relationships with the pharmaceutical industry and regulator Food and Drug Administration.
“This foundation [would be] focused on creating those partnerships, a place where all those players to come together, share information and be supported by both philanthropic organizations [and] private sector companies,” said Jetta Wong, an energy consultant, president of JLW Advising and senior fellow in the Clean Energy Innovation Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Formerly with the DOE, Wong has worked with business incubators and universities for years.
“I’m focused on the creation of a Department of Energy Foundation, which would be an independent nonprofit with an objective to accelerate the commercialization of energy technologies through partnerships with the private sector and philanthropic organizations. This is important because there’s no one entity in the United States that has the responsibility to commercialize new technology. And … it really does take a whole ecosystem,” Wong explained at the start of a nearly two-hour discussion.
“The whole idea is to provide them the right resources and expertise [so that] their information and feedback loops can happen through this kind of public-private partnership. We’ve seen this by other agency-related foundations authorized by Congress,” she added.
Panel moderator Mark Johnson, former director of advanced manufacturing at DOE and now director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing at Clemson University, noted that electrification of every industrial process while decarbonizing the grid itself “would mean more than doubling the load on the grid.”
Pointing to the electrification of transportation as one example, Johnson added, “You want to make sure the power grid itself is not putting constraints on these ancillary areas of innovation. … Vehicle electrification is happening, so keeping contact between these two areas is really important.”
A standalone DOE Foundation was included in legislation last year but was not approved, said Abigail Regitsky, senior associate at Breakthrough Energy, a network of companies created by Bill Gates to focus on decarbonization and a net-zero economy by 2050. She said new legislation creating a foundation has recently been introduced.
“This foundation [would be] focused on creating those partnerships, a place where all those players to come together, share information, and to be supported by both philanthropic organizations but also private sector companies that can provide the technology. The whole idea is to provide them the right resources and expertise, and that their information and feedback loops can happen through this kind of public-private partnership,” she said.
Adam Rosenberg, staff director for the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Energy, said that while the concept did not get passed last year, it has been refined somewhat and could be approved this year.
“I don’t have a timeline to give you, but I think it’s another important tool … for allowing the DOE to be as nimble as possible and addressing various barriers to get from the lab to the marketplace,” he said.
Wong, who established DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions before going into private practice, said the department has done a good job of funding early-stage science but has not done well when it comes to taking that science and turning it into the first prototype, then scaling it up and then funding it … to take it to a commercial demonstration.”
Tim Heidel, a former DOE employee and now chief technology officer at VEIR, a developer of high-temperature superconductor transmission lines, said incorporating cutting-edge technologies in the grid is as much about people as it is about research and development.
“I think bringing technology all the way to market is going to be a long, long slog in this industry. You are going to require different skill sets along those different pieces of the [R&D] pipeline. We either have to ensure that we’re engaging different talent at those different stages of development or developing programs to really make sure that we’re pulling people through those different stages,” he said.
“Ultimately, what we’re trying to achieve here is routinely deploying proven and cost-effective technologies. Proven is what the early-stage programs work on. Can you prove it? Can you build one?
“And then you need to make sure it’s cost effective, which means you need to scale it up from there, and you need to get experience; and ultimately you need to make it routine; you need to make it something that is deployed every day, all day.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the researchers and a lot of the early-stage folks are going to disengage before you hit that routine button, because it’s just not their interest. But if we stop before something becomes routinely deployable, we just don’t solve the problem that we are trying to solve,” Heidel said.
Cheryl Martin, a former DOE employee experienced in dealing with competitive entrepreneurs and now principal at Harwich Partners, an energy consulting firm focusing on the acceleration and adoption of new technologies, said federally financed competitive projects require “precompetitive guardrails.”
“I think the technology pipeline is one of a lot of different solutions,” she said of the responses to a DOE competitive bidding process on a new technology. But DOE has to be permitted to provide enough “inside” information, especially if teamed with industry, to enable the bidders to develop proposals that address the issue or technology in question.
Johnson said competitors for grants would often state that they were planning to commercialize a research product and become a monopoly.
They had missed the point of DOE’s involvement, he said. “This is really hard, and it’s going to take a whole ecosystem to get there!”
Martin agreed. “Well, we don’t often have, you know, incentive structures for everybody to think about their piece of the whole, and how to bring together. So, I think this idea of system-level innovation thinking is still not well done. We’ve been successful in some places where you get consortia of people together who are focused on an outcome.
“That’s why I am super excited about what FERC has done here. They are bringing together people who may not interact every day together [in order] to try to bring together a different conversation. And I do think the more we can be thoughtful — what are the most important inflection points to get our electricity grid to where it needs to be and who needs to be in the conversations at those inflection points to share knowledge — that can help the whole thing come together as a system and would change the game.”
Tom Hassenboehler — formerly chief counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Environment subcommittees, and now a partner with the Coefficient Group, a D.C.-based consulting company — said many of his clients include big tech companies and industrial companies who “absolutely what to be part of the solution” but question why grid policies can vary from region to region.
“When it comes to innovation, you know, [commercial and industrial] consumers really are on the front line of this, and I hear about this quite often when it comes to standardization, electric interoperability to really drive the innovation that’s necessary to meet the climate goals,” he said.
“For example, our customers — in particular the Googles, the Walmarts of the world — as they seek to drive and scale their own renewable and climate ambition, they run into these issues across different regions of the country that are very problematic … whether it’s a lack of access to data both behind and in front of the meter; whether it’s a lack of ability for their multistate operations to operate seamlessly on an interconnection-wide basis and replicate the on-site generation tools that they have in one region versus the renewable purchasing options they have in another.”