Steven Chu
Steven Chu: Nobel Laureate as Energy Secretary
February / March 2009
Volume 7 Number 1
The new, blunt, thoughtful energy secretary, who's also a physicist,
already knows his way around DOE
Steven Chu has received almost universal applause as President Barack Obama's pick to be the new Secretary of Energy and responsible for 120,000 employees including 30,000 scientists and engineers at 17 national laboratories. Many consider the selection of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist to be a critical choice to lead the nation's energy policy into the future.
Part of his task will be to keep clean technology on the front burner of political discourse, even as the economic bailout and falling oil prices make it seem like less of a priority. In naming Chu, the president said that Chu "blazed new trails as a scientist, teacher and administrator and has recently led the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in pursuit of new alternative and renewable energies. Steven is uniquely suited to be our Secretary of Energy as we make this pursuit a guiding purpose of the Department of Energy, as well as a national mission."
The 60-year-old Chu takes over from Samuel Bodman, who ran the DOE in the Bush Administration and whose agenda was focused on the war on terror and economic growth. Top Democrats in the Senate such as Jeff Bingaman, (D-N.M.) head of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) praised the choice. So did Bodman.
In his confirmation hearing before the energy committee, Chu stressed the need to consider every option when senators pressed him for his views regarding coal, nuclear, solar and bioenergy, and associated issues such as carbon sequestration, spent nuclear fuel disposal and reprocessing. He expressed optimism that "real progress can be made" regarding biofuels. Chu noted that coal, nuclear and gas form the base load for electricity generation, and "we have to evolve, recognizing that it cannot happen overnight, the nurturing of renewable energy resources."
On nuclear power, Chu said, "nuclear power will be part of our energy going forward, because it is carbon-free and because it is base load. Now, having said that, we don't have all the answers today as to how to develop that in a way that would make us all happy, particularly about waste." Regarding nuclear fuel recycling, Chu testified that it "is an option we will be looking at very closely," explaining that current processes "are not ideal." He characterized recycling as "a research problem at the moment" that would lend itself to international cooperation. On coal, he testified, "India and China, Russia and the United States, I believe, will not turn their back on coal. So it is imperative that we figure out a way to use coal as cleanly as possible." He later said, "it's a question of science and technology, and really putting the pedal to the floor on trying to develop, as quickly as possible, the capture and sequestration technologies."
He stressed the importance of energy efficiency, saying it "remains the lowest hanging fruit for the next decade or two." In responding to a question on reducing carbon emissions, he favors a cap and trade system, noting "the simpler it is, the happier I will be."
It is Chu's technical acumen that has won him such respect and his position as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1997, he shared the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on laser cooling, or using light to cool atoms to a very low temperature, just above absolute zero. Chu has been a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been studying biological systems at the single-molecule level. At the same time, he managed a lab with 4,000 employees and a $650 million budget.
Chu grew up in St. Louis, Mo., and received his bachelors degree in math and physics in 1970 from the University of Rochester and a doctorate in physics from UC Berkeley in 1976. He did post-doctoral research for two years before moving on to Bell Labs, where he and colleagues worked on the laser-cooling technology. He became a physics professor at Stanford in 1987 and was appointed director of the Berkeley lab in 2004, whereupon he also became a UC Berkeley professor.
He is married to Jean Chu, an Oxford-trained physicist, and has two grown sons, Geoffrey and Michael, by a previous marriage. Among his many posts: he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' committee on Alternative Models of Federal Funding of Science, and is on the steering committee of the Energy Security, Innovation and Sustainability Initiative of the nongovernmental Council on Competitiveness. He also serves on the board of trustees of the University of Rochester, the board of directors of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the board of directors of NVIDIA Corporation, the governing board of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the scientific board of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
The energy secretary position is important because it involves oversight of 17 national laboratories and the agency funds more engineering and physical research than any other federal agency.
Chu is frank. A few years ago, an interviewer asked him what kind of car he drove. Chu said he drove a Lexus and there was no excuse for that. Chu comes to the job as energy becomes a security issue for the U.S. He has a passion for the subject and was a member of the committee that wrote the National Academies of Science report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. In September 2008 he spoke about the nation's energy needs and forcefully asserted that the most recent observations about climate change show that it represents a very real risk.
Under a business-as-usual scenario, he said, the level of greenhouse gases could more than triple by the end of the century, creating a 50 percent risk of a 5-degree Celsius temperature change in the following decades. He said that could take humans into unknown territory since 5 degrees represents the total change in the Earth's temperature since the last ice age. A large percent of the planet's species would not be able to survive such a change.
For years, Chu has stated that carbon dioxide emitted by cars, power plants and factories have caused global warming. He has said that free markets are not enough to drive big changes in the way people use energy.
"Our country needs to act quickly with fiscal and regulatory policies to ensure widespread deployment of effective technologies that maximize energy efficiency and minimize carbon emission," Chu said. He said that it was important that the federal government invest in the ideas that the cleantech industry—€”funded to the tune of $7 billion in 2008—€”has not been willing or able to invest in. Some advocates such as venture investor Peter Nieh of Lightspeed Venture Partners have been urging the new administration to create a venture-like fund using federal money to invest in heavy research that industry can't do on its own. Please see the article that begins on page 25.
Above all, Chu has said that science will guide policy in the future. Among his projects is the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, Calif., a 150-researcher venture that is funded by the Energy Department with $135 million. Chu oversaw the JBEI as head of the Berkeley lab. JBEI's mission has been to use biological synthesis to convert plant cellulose into fuel and is one of a number of LBNL alternative fuel projects. The idea is to take microbes that can eat away at cellulose walls—€”more efficiently than other processing methods—€”and convert food into sugars that can be consumed as fuel.
Before Chu became director, the lab had little such work. During Chu's tenure, its budget has grown when most other labs have had their budgets cut. Lawrence Berkeley is unique for its long history of research into energy conservation.
The lab was behind the campaign to get consumer electronics makers to get rid of energy vampires, or devices (such as video cassette recorder clocks) that use energy even when they're not being used. Chu took that heritage and focused his efforts on energy.
In an interview with The New York Times, the lab's deputy director, Paul Alivisatos, said that Chu deserved credit for shaking up the lab and putting the focus on energy. Chu also helped set up another biofuels research center funded by $500 million from BP. That effort raised some protests about corporate funding at universities, but Chu shook it off and got the research center operational.
This emphasis on particular kinds of energy research has its critics. The use of food to create fuels means that the biofuels will compete with growing food for people. That's not a welcome thought in an age of growing worldwide hunger. And the fall in gas prices means that biofuels will have to be made more efficiently than corn-based ethanol, which takes a lot of energy to produce, if they are to have any effect on climate change and still be affordable.
But Chu isn't focusing only on biofuels. He's also a fan of nuclear energy.
Chu is likely to face some tough choices, since the economic bailout will likely consume a lot of federal money in the near term and there won't be money to fund every single energy project. Chu is open to science providing answers on a variety of fronts. Some ideas for saving energy may have been considered kooky in the past. But even the weirdest ideas are likely to get a hearing from Chu.
Dean Takahashi is lead writer for digital media at VentureBeat.com and reports from Silicon Valley for Innovation.
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