Under Secretary Kristina Johnson

A Full Plate at DOE

August / September 2010 Volume 8 Number 4

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The Department of Energy may well have the most ambitious undertakings of any government department—it’s leading (and underwriting) the efforts on renewable energy and innovation. Under Secretary Kristina Johnson is doing some of the heavy lifting.

Kristina M. Johnson, the Under Secretary for Energy in the Department of Energy, was previously the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of Johns Hopkins University. Before that, she served as the dean of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering from 1999-2007 where she helped to set up interdisciplinary efforts in photonics, bioengineering and biologically inspired materials, and energy and the environment. She was previously on the faculty of the University of Colorado where she led an NSF engineering research center and involved engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists and psychologists in working to make computers faster and better connected. Johnson is an electrical engineer with degrees, including a doctorate, from Stanford University, and more than 129 U.S. and foreign patents or patents pending. She spoke with Innovation editor Bob Cochnar in her Washington office.

A new organization called the American Energy Innovation Council recently released a report [see summary, page 15] titled “A Business Plan for America’s Energy Future,” which among other things calls for an annual federal investment of $16 billion for energy innovation. What do you think?
I think the focus and the tone is right on. We need to increase our investment in clean energy. Our budget right now in the applied energy areas is $4.2 billion matched with probably a few billion in basic energy sciences. I like the plan because there are a lot of things we need to do to be a leader in this new economy that we're not able to do now in the current environment. So we would look to accelerate our recovery capture sequestration program so that it's commercial ready by 2020. I'm very grateful for the R&D budget that we have in that we are maximizing what it can do to achieve the president's goals. If we had more funding, I believe there are things that we could do to accelerate our competitiveness in the clean energy economy.

Given the circumstances, do you have any ideas about how successful any kind of a additional budgeting might be?
We're in a very difficult budgetary climate. And so one of the things to do is to invest in areas that can create new economies and new directions so that can accelerate us coming out of this. I'm very strongly focused on how we grow the clean energy economy. That requires we have the kind of programs that are going to spur innovation. We must also develop the workforce by which we can create the jobs by having innovative individuals and entrepreneurial individuals go into the clean energy economy. So my focus has really been on what are the kinds of programs that will grow a clean energy economy and then how do we prepare a workforce to be ready to exploit them.

If you have an entrepreneur with an idea, he also needs to be funded somehow, which is a very difficult thing if you’re relying exclusively on the private sector.
Especially now, that's correct. So one of the areas that I've been working heavily is the Small Business Innovative Research program. We have been using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the SBIR dollars generated from that to look at a pilot program by which we've made improvements to the SBIR to make it more entrepreneurship friendly. And to better enhance them, let me give you some examples We’ve shortened the time between Phase 1 and Phase 2 funding from nine months to six months. We run two solicitations a year. So if you don't get funding on the first one you don't have to wait another year and then another nine months, it's almost two years before you get funded. And we’ve increased the dollar amount from $100,000 a year for Phase 1 to $ 150,000 and from $750,000 to $1 million for Phase 2.

I would like to know about the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program and how you are measuring success there.
Just to recap what the EECBG is, there are 2,300 cities and counties and tribal governments that have access to formula grants of about $2.4 billion. And there are competitive grants up to about $500 million. So with a project like the one in Colorado Springs, there was a $1.7 million program that was working on making their buildings more energy efficient. That has resulted in $140,000 in savings per year. So one of the metrics we look at is greenhouse gas emission reduction and we look at energy savings and look to monitor that and quantify it. We get monthly reports on progress. We're in the process of getting the money out. You know, it takes time to spend the $1.7 million, for example, and then to be able to measure the actual savings.

Are you satisfied so far with the progress of what's going on in general?
I think we strive to continue to do better. I think we got off to a slower start than anybody would like. And part of that is more funding than the states have really received before. And a lot of the states are in deficit so they don't have the funding to staff up.

I want to ask you about smart grid technology because whatever emphasis is placed on clean and alternative energy won’t seem to make much of a difference unless the grids are working right. They’re kind of old and tired.
The grid certainly is older and has not been modernized. We’re trying to do a couple of things with the $3.4 billion we’ve got. We're trying to deploy phasers, which can measure the stress the grid is under and give it the capability of having two-way communication. So right now you would push electrons out. But we don't know how they're being utilized. And furthermore, the folks that are paying for those electrons don't know how they are utilizing electrons. So we want to be able in the future to be able to do things like demand response, dynamic pricing. We want to be able to have someone, if they're in their home, to recognize if they were to turn on their dishwasher and their washing machine and their air conditioning and iron their clothes and do all that at four in the afternoon when most of the demand is on the grid, that they will see see a spike in price, which would be feedback to say maybe this isn't the time to do those discretionary-type of things. Studies in California and North Carolina have shown the decrease of 20 percent of electricity used by doing demand response.

Now, how far away are we at this?
We've been able to deploy something like 10 to 12 million smart meters, which help give people a sense of where they're using their electricity. We have deployed on the order of a thousand of super phasers and we are upgrading substations. We're preparing communities to do that. So that's one set of grants. Another set of grants, for example, provided Baltimore funds to buy a fleet of plug-in hybrid electric cars. They'll be able to plug them into charging stations at night, then use them during the day, and then will be able to, with sensors, understand and get information about how the grid responds to that. And so from that information I think we'll be able to design a smart grid. Those are the kinds of grants that we're looking at doing. So generally I would say the philosophy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been to generate great paying jobs, have collateral benefits of energy efficiency and get information about how we can do more to leverage to scale what works.

One of the problems we face when we broaden our sources of energy from what we've got now, solar to wind, is transmission. There are going to be places where there are no lines.
This is a really important question: how do we provide the ability not only to generate the electrons but then to move the electrons in an efficient manner in a way that that least disturbs the environment. Recently I was told that the utility in Hawaii put a cap on the amount of renewables that could be integrated into the grid at 10 percent. I think part of that is if you've got a lot of solar and a cloud comes over, your electricity can drop as much as 50 percent, and that's stress on a grid. In a small-scale area like in Hawaii you've got to find the net electricity from somewhere in order to balance the load or else it will drop electricity use. You might have a power outage. Having storage and transmission over a broad enough area that you can balance that load's dynamic is a challenge.

How do you store sunlight anyway?
Well, you generate electricity. It's a good question actually. So you generate another medium that you can store. You either heat something up and store it as heat or you generate electricity and store it in a battery. And that's the challenge. My career has been in optics and I love photons because they don't have mass or charge. It's hard to capture them so you've got to mediate them. Photons you can see. Electrons not so much. But you can sense that they're there. So you've got to figure out a way to store them and so you have to do a conversion. And that's really interesting because once you do a conversion no type of photon or electron conversion is 100 percent efficient. So you lose energy along the way and so that's one of the challenges is how do you create storage.

Who is working on that? Which lab is doing it?
Oh, lots of great labs. Through our ARPA-E [Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy] we have work going at MIT on liquid metal batteries. We have work going on at Arizona State, for example, in the lithium air batteries. We have work going on at NREL and PNNL and Lawrence Livermore. One of the state-of-the-art battery testing facilities is at the Idaho Natural Laboratory. Sandia has got some fabulous work going on in concentrated solar power. So the labs really are our crown jewels and they're helping carry out work on storage and the grid and then modeling the grid and knowing how large of an area you need in order to get the balancing of variable energy generated.

Now, all this technology that people are working on in the labs won’t do any good unless it gets commercialized. How are you going to do that?
That is the X-dollar question, right? We have to think holistically. First of all, it's often said that the government doesn't pick winners, which is correct. So what we need to do is to identify opportunities, fund the positioning of those opportunities so that they can be picked up by the market. And so the question is, where is that handoff? We need to look at things like policy that can encourage the picking up of the technologies. We need to work on some of the loan guarantees like we're doing with nuclear. We announced, as you know, two conditional loans for the first two new nuclear reactors in 30 years. The government is working on production tax credits. So our job should be to mitigate some of the risk that the market would have in picking up this new industry.

Do you think that the laboratories are going to buy into this?
Well, I think that the laboratories have a fabulous role to play. You know, a lab that is in my home state, NREL, has test facilities and demonstration facilities, as do all the labs. If you look at the technical papers that are published on solar, for example, many of the devices in the solar PV area are benchmarked at NREL. They're characterized at NREL and so that's a really important function of laboratories as well. I think that we provide testing and standards. We provide levers to encourage the adoption of new technology. We do investigations in R&D and we fund R&D in order to do the kind of work that industry just can't afford to do if they're going to be competitive globally. So we've got a huge role in that whole continuum. I want to highlight someone that we've just brought on, Karina Edmonds [DOE’s technology transfer coordinator, a new position].

Will she have enough clout to do her job?
Oh, yeah. What is clout? You get clout by listening to people, understanding what the problems are. You don't dictate, you facilitate. And at the same time your personal competence carries the day. And she's an incredibly competent individual.

She'll have a staff maybe?
Yes. Absolutely. And then you have the support of the whole DOE to do this. This is a priority of the secretary and I think that that's also really key. So she has got a great job.