ScienceInsider

by Richard Kerr and Jeff Mervis

It was certainly striking in the telling. But the truth is another story.

Speaking to business leaders at a White House event last week on clean energy and the economy, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was asked what he’s doing to improve energy efficiency at Department of Energy laboratories. Chu launched into a story of gross energy negligence at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which he headed before coming to Washington, D.C.

Less than 2 years ago, Princeton agriculture expert Tim Searchinger published a paper in Science that sought to quantify how growing biofuels on cropland in the United States could lead to deforestation abroad. He estimated in some cases that indirect emissions could lead to a doubling of emissions associated with corn ethanol. Previously, researchers thought using the fuel could cut emissions by 30% since it would replace gasoline. Rarely do scientists have as immediate an impact on government policy. Since Searchinger’s paper was published, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, spurred by Congress, has been mulling whether to take so-called indirect land use into account when calculating the carbon footprint of biofuels for new regulations it is crafting, expected by December. Critics say Searchinger’s calculations were faulty and that uncertainties made it impossible to gauge their effects.

Right now, indirect land use related to biofuels isn’t included in proposed climate change legislation in the U.S. Senate, as well as proposed agreements that will be on the table in Copenhagen. In a recent policy piece published in Science, Searchinger and colleagues wrote that such a policy "erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral,” calling it a major "accounting error."

To discuss these issues, Insider conducted an e-mail conversation with Searchinger and John Sheehan, an expert on biofuels at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

by Eli Kintisch

Dan Reicher, former assistant U.S. secretary of energy and now director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, testified yesterday as part of the Senate climate hearings and mentioned an innovative tool Google recently announced: Google PowerMeter. It's an effort by Google to allow individuals to see constant energy-efficiency stats. "The power of that kind of information in helping you make efficiency choices is incredible," Reicher told ScienceInsider.

PowerMeter hopes to capitalize on the so-called Prius effect. The top-selling hybrid car, researchers have learned, saves energy not only because it switches efficiently between gasoline and electric power but also because of its conspicuous control screen, allowing drivers to see their real-time gasoline efficiency. According to a review by the U.K.'s DEFRA environmental agency of smart metering in people's homes, the Prius effect deployed at home could save up to 15% on energy bills.

Presenting data from a smart meter, Google PowerMeter sits on your Google homepage or handheld device and provides monthly, weekly, and hourly updates as to energy efficiency. "Give people feedback and it becomes a game," says Google's Ed Lu, an applied physicist who runs the program.

(Photo Credit: Google)

By Eli Kintisch

On Monday, the Department of Energy announced $151 million in grants for ARPA-E, its pie-in-the-sky, high-risk energy research program. Thirty-seven grantees got funded, and Energy Secretary Steve Chu said that the program would serve as a "bold, transformational" step and would "spur the next Industrial Revolution" of energy research. Three things about ARPA-E we've learned, and three questions that remain:

Energy Secretary Steve Chu is serious about shaping ARPA-E in the Bell Labs model. It's pretty rare that federal research managers will say publicly that they expect some of the work they are funding to fail. Usually, they support basic research that has value because it adds to the scientific literature, or they support commercial work that generally leads to products. ARPA-E is different: It supports potentially commercial work that may well crash and burn. As Chu sees it, the way to go is the Bell Labs model: Support a number of risky research projects run by highly talented scientists, and if one or two pan out, the whole effort is worth it.

There's a lot of pent-up interest in energy research, and it's coming from everywhere. 

by Erik Stokstad

President Barack Obama didn't launch any new initiatives in his visit today to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he highlighted clean energy technology and the need for climate change legislation. But he did wonder if he'd be able to leave the campus. "I understand a bunch of engineering students put my motorcade on top of building 10," he quipped. MIT has an archived webcast of his speech.

The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill, H.R. 3585, that would require the Department of Energy to create a road map for solar energy technology development and to get more industry input. The bill requires industry grants to be merit-reviewed and increases the authorization for funding from $250 million to $550 million by 2015 (current appropriation is about $200 million). DOE would also have to establish an R&D program for recycling of solar panels. No companion bill has been introduced in the Senate.

Researchers in Germany released a study (PDF, auf Deutsch) yesterday showing how by 2050 Germany could reduce its emissions by 95% from its 1990 levels while maintaining its living standards. Renewable energy for electricity, traffic, and heating would do 60% of the job, the rest would come from industry, farming, and waste management.

After dodging a shutdown of its animal research, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is proposing to hire a vice chancellor for research to manage grants and compliance with federal rules.

by Jeffrey Mervis and Adrian Cho

Watch out, Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the U.S. is not quitting the race to find the famed Higgs boson just yet.

If all goes as planned, physicists at the last dedicated U.S. particle physics laboratory will get to run their particle smasher an extra year. The Department of Energy has requested money in its next budget to run the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, in 2011. That proposal would give Fermilab researchers a shot at bagging a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson before scientists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, can spot it with the more-powerful LHC, which is supposed to finally start smashing particle in December.

"I'm behind it, and the Secretary [Steven Chu] is behind it, too," William Brinkman, head of DOE's Office of Science, told ScienceInsider this morning during a meeting of the office's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C. "There's a lot of competition" for the approximately $20 million that would be needed, says Brinkman, "but we think there's an opportunity for us to make progress, and we want to do it." The proposal is part of the department's budget request now being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget prior to the submission of the president's 2011 budget request to Congress in February.

Physicists believe the Higgs boson is key to explaining how all particles gain mass—as Higgs bosons lurking “virtually” in the vacuum drag on all particles.

by Eli Kintisch

Results are out today from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy's yearly report card of states' energy-efficiency policies. No surprise: California leads the way, same as last year. Overall, states are adopting better standards; the average score rose from 15 last year to 17 out of 50. But the main problem with the rankings is that they include few data on actual energy saved.

Until now. This year the council included a new effort to look at state-by-state energy efficiency by analyzing household energy use per person. The biggest surprise: Texas was second only to Washington state in efficiency improvement between 1997 and 2006, the most recent data. The results say a lot about making policies actually pay off—and how far the U.S. has to go to improve its energy efficiency.

by Jeffrey Mervis

The nominees to head the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy breezed through their joint Senate confirmation hearing this morning. But the 1-hour hearing gave Marcia McNutt at USGS and Arun Majumdar at ARPA-E a chance to raise the lid on some issues they are likely to tackle once each is approved—and no opposition to either nominee is expected—and sworn into office.

by Eli Kintisch

The U.S. Congress is giving Energy Secretary Steven Chu enough money to launch three of his beloved Bell Labs—fewer than half of his request.

In his proposed budget for 2010, Chu wanted $480 million to start eight Energy Innovation Hubs, or "Bell Lablets," as he called them, to stimulate research in areas ranging from solar energy to new materials for the electric grid. Each would receive $35 million to get started, and $25 million more in each of the following 4 years.

Last week Congress poured semi-cold water on the idea. Conferees to the Energy and Water spending bill approved funding for three of the centers, two in energy efficiency and renewable energy and one in nuclear energy.

Its skepticism was no surprise, having been included this summer in reports accompanying the spending bills in the House of Representatives and Senate (House, Senate versions). In August, Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis described how Chu admitted to a mediocre job of selling the idea and overcoming congressional concerns that the concept was poorly thought out and not well-coordinated with other energy research at the Department of Energy. House appropriators were particularly unkind to the idea, noting:

A new set of centers with overlapping research goals risks adding confusion and redundancy to the existing fleet of research and development initiatives.

by Eli Kintisch

Last week, the White House nominated Arun Majumdar to lead ARPA-E, the risk-taking blue-sky energy research shop at the Department of Energy. Majumdar is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At the new agency, Majumdar will face a myriad of challenges: shaping the organization's priorities in a time when thousands of scientists are delving into energy research areas and clamoring for money, defining its balance between applied and basic research, and deciding just how "blue-sky" he wants DOE to be going with the new concept.

"He's a good manager—running two labs and always having time for the students," says former student Marta Cerruti, a chemist. Cerruti says Majumdar's wide knowledge "in many fields" will help him with ARPA-E's wide goals. He's shown the ability to balance short- and long-term goals in lab research, for example during a project to design a multiuse portable sensor. "He was always pushing us to look for long-term goals—namely, that it could work in moist environments, but at the same time, keeping the short-term objective," Cerruti says. That goal was to make a sensor that could work in dry ones, a much easier task.

Assuming the Senate confirms him, Majumdar will come to Washington with the best connections he could ask for: Current Energy Secretary Steve Chu was his former boss at LBNL.