Energizing a Campus
December 2007 / January 2008
Volume 5 Number 6
Venture capitalists are not known to haunt Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, with its drummers and dreamers, but last spring Silicon Valley's financiers showed up in force. On March 21 they filed across the flagstones and into the Student Union auditorium to hear such scintillating discussions as "Carbon Regulation and the Impact on Innovation," and "Energy Storage: Hydrogen, Batteries, and Beyond." The draw was not the topics, but rather the 400 people sitting in the folding chairs. They encompassed the entire energy universe of California—€”researchers in architecture, chemistry, biology, engineering and economics from Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; influential state regulators; the governor's main man on economic growth; and corporate types representing companies ranging from Dow Chemical to solar entrepreneur SunPower.
The takeaway was obvious: With global warming breathing down our necks, energy is hot. And Berkeley, where brainpower is mingling with government power-brokers to implement the state's greenhouse gas legislation, is even hotter. Having just announced a $500 million ten-year deal with oil giant BP to found a new Energy Biosciences Institute on campus, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, made a pitch for more: "We are seeking industry partnerships.—€¦We seek solutions. We don't seek, dare I say, science papers anymore."
Across campus, green ideals are teaming up with the other green—€”money. Typical of the new "double-greens" is the group that organized the March symposium, a multidisciplinary club of grad students called the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative, or BERC. In just two years, BERC's 300-plus members have presented dozens of events and inspired the creation of a new Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation at Haas business school.
Unlike previous generations of environmentalists, who saw capitalism as "part of the problem," the new greens see it as part of the solution, if not the solution.
If BERC members are optimistic, it's because big money is finally starting to follow the carbon. "Clean tech is nonpartisan," remarked one student. "Even the big energy guys think there's money in it." Clean tech seems to offer something for everyone—€”especially in a country that's tired of thinking about big problems such as the war in Iraq. "The only people who don't like clean tech are the people who don't like money," joked another student.
BERC is a telling part of a large universe of energy initiatives at Berkeley. They range from hundreds of millions in new funding for biofuel research at both the university and LBNL to less-publicized work on solar energy, nanotechnology, battery technology, and energy efficiency, as well as multidisciplinary energy policy, law and market analysis. There's also the Cal Climate Action Partnership (CalCAP), a campuswide program for greenhouse gas reduction. Although the $500 million research grant from BP to found the Energy Biosciences Institute has drawn the most attention and controversy—€”Chancellor Robert Birgeneau called it "our generation's moon shot"—€”the university's involvement in alternative energy is deep and complex.
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Seventy-six years ago, Ernest Orlando Lawrence explored the mysteries and potential of the atomic nucleus with his cyclotron on the hill above Berkeley. This past June, an overflow lunchtime crowd squeezed into an auditorium on the same hill to hear Chris Somerville, the likely head of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), explain why the world's next big mystery is the cell wall. In a hesitant and somewhat old-fashioned style, Somerville described his radical mission—€”to create "disruptive technologies" for remodeling plants, enzymes and organisms to produce fuels from plants. He gave the crowd a PowerPoint tour of the unstudied structures of the cell and the technological challenge that lies ahead, reminding his audience of the urgency at hand. "We're not running out of fossil fuels, we're running out of climate," he quipped. "Climate is the sole driver for biofuels, in my opinion."
The story of how Berkeley became the hub of a would-be biofuel boom reveals not only the formidable power of the university's labs, but also the extraordinary influence its professors have on state leaders regarding what many see as a climate change emergency. The desire for speedy technological fixes is driving unprecedented collaborations among the university, government and industry.
Long before there was much interest in investing millions of dollars to produce fuel from green plants, Berkeley academics were intimately involved in creating California's pioneering greenhouse gas regulations. In late 2006, Goldman Public Policy Professor Michael Hanemann and Energy and Resources Group Professor Alex Farrell released an influential multipart report that contradicted conventional wisdom, arguing that California's economy could benefit from greenhouse gas regulation.
LBNL director Steven Chu looked at controlling greenhouse gas emissions as a grand physics problem, the way he might calculate the potential output of a Carnot heat engine. The challenge, he felt, was to figure out which low-carbon energy sources had the greatest theoretical output and the fewest barriers to production. If we wanted to meet all of the world's increasing electricity needs with nuclear fission, he calculated, we'd need to erect a reactor every ten days and we'd have a terrible nuclear waste problem. He searched for technologies that were in their infancy, where improvements might make a big difference. That eliminated wind turbines, which—€”according to Chu's calculation of the "Betts limit"—€”are already close to their theoretical efficiency of 59 percent. "When you start with a problem like energy, you have to look at what are the ultimate limitations. And then you work back from those."
By process of elimination, Chu arrived at two promising avenues for research: energy efficiency—€”a field pioneered by Berkeley physicist Art Rosenfeld—€”and harnessing the power of the sun. Sunlight can be captured by both technology and plants, which led him to identify the fields of photovoltaics, nanotechnology, electrochemistry, artificial photosynthesis, catalysis (producing hydrogen from water using sunlight), batteries (to hold energy produced by solar cells) and biofuels. Chu imagined a spectrum of biofuels, ranging from ethanol—€”which requires modest leaps in innovation—€”to more technically challenging fuels, such as butane and octane, that could be used by both airplane and conventional auto engines. Chu dubbed these sun-related projects Helios.
In Chu's view, the magnitude and speed of climate change calls for a close partnership between research institutions, government regulators and industry. By setting standards and establishing incentives, smart regulators can push industry, setting in motion big technological changes. "Getting technology deployed is best done in a business space," he says. "You can develop technology at research institutions, as has been done in the past, but there's a time delay. I don't think we have a time luxury," he asserts. "We want to partner with industry early because industry's strength is that they can make technology scalable." Chu understands that not everyone shares this view. "A small segment doesn't understand that moving fast is better than maintaining purity," he says. "Monasteries are good places, but they're not good for science."
When word went out in 2006 that energy giant BP was soliciting applications for a major project, the university and LBNL began writing a proposal (based on Helios initiatives) at what research vice chancellor Beth Burnside describes as "warp speed." Although the initiative was to be a ten-year project funded by BP at $50 million a year (roughly three times the $16 million the university received in corporate funding for research in 2006), Burnside later described the plan as "an ordinary though a little bit oversized industry-sponsored research project."
For some proponents, the whole purpose of the arrangement was speed. "It would have simplified things if the money to do this research came from the government," Somerville stated, "but if you really want to change the energy sector, you have to be partnered by big energy companies." He says the relationship would give academics at EBI "a reality check," shorten the path to commercialization and offer the university an opportunity to influence BP by changing its decision-making processes. "I think that's the biggest return BP will get on its investments—€”knowledge is empowering to make good decisions," he said. According to Somerville, BP would like to spin out private startup companies as an efficient way of commercializing the basic knowledge developed in the lab.
For Berkeley, which has seen public funding for research fall for decades, EBI would be an opportunity not only to get hold of private funding, but also to collateralize the university's knowledge on par with Stanford, which has contributed commercial ideas worth incalculable amounts to Silicon Valley's economy.
Californians have lived through booms in gold, aerospace, computer hardware, software, the internet and biotech industries, so they're willing to believe in the next one, even if it's a complicated bet on clean tech. Now, the federal government is also willing to back the bet. In June, the Department of Energy awarded a $125 million, five-year grant for research on making ethanol from cellulose. The lab receiving the grant, called JBEI (Joint BioEnergy Institute), is a collaboration among UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Stanford, LBNL, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National laboratories. It will be headquartered somewhere around Emeryville, Calif., and run by Jay Keasling, the Berkeley scientist who pioneered synthetic biology. JBEI is being described as a "startup" to EBI's think tank.
More money is probably on the way. Asked about funding for Helios, Chu declined to say what was in the pipeline but suggested that more announcements will be coming soon. Meanwhile, Professor Dan Kammen has proposed a California Climate Institute that would have a budget bigger than EBI's. He describes the Institute as a "do tank," where state regulators would work side-by-side with campus researchers to solve greenhouse gas issues quickly. There is talk of soliciting foundations for funds to set up another institute to study the social and environmental impacts of biofuels.
For all the hopes placed in the biofuels initiatives, most of us understand relatively little about the science behind biofuels—€”never mind the commercial relationships, or the impact of their innovations on farming communities far from the Bay Area. When Chris Somerville gave his presentation at LBNL, he described green plants as giant solar collectors, working double-time to turn sunlight into chemical energy to power transportation while storing carbon. Somerville surmised that the world could meet its need for transportation fuels with 1 percent of the world's land planted with miscanthus, a perennial that converts energy from the sun at 2 percent efficiency and doesn't appear to require much water, fertilizer, or cultivation.
Although 1 percent sounds like a modest amount of land, in global terms it's nearly three times the land area of Spain. In short order, land could replace oil as the world's most valuable commodity, quickly sending the greatest impacts of Berkeley's homegrown "disruptive technology" to the farthest, poorest corners of the earth. "I can't tell you with certainty that we can afford 1 percent," Somerville said. "It will be something we'll look at deeply and broadly here at the Institute—€”is there enough water and enough land, and what are the consequences to the societies that are sitting on that land?"
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The university's service to society, and its influence in state government, depend on its ability to stay above the fray. "A pipeline to talk with the government—€”that's a great thing—€”you have the great minds from Berkeley giving suggestions," says Borenstein. "What makes me nervous is when we become part of the political economy and hesitate to criticize policies. People may not say what they think in public because it would affect their relationship with the governor's office, the PUC, etc. It's really important that the UC faculty has independence—€”we do not want to go in the direction where UC becomes confidential advisors to state government. We need to spread the information more widely."
Borenstein's caution underscores the fact that changes wrought by climate change now extend beyond melting glaciers and anxious polar bears to Berkeley itself. As it prepares to take on the greatest challenge of our time, the university will require not only new technologies and industries, but also new institutions, new disciplines and new ways of communicating its expertise around the world. Although the science and policy of limiting greenhouse gasses have yet to be invented, the university already knows how to build upon its culture of debate and optimism. And as the university's ideas attract more political and financial backers, Berkeley will have to invest in its own integrity with as much deliberation as any venture capitalist.
Lisa Margonelli is an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline. This article was excerpted with permission from one published in the Steptember/October 2007 issue of California, the magazine of the UC Berkely Alumni Association.
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