[naturenews] from [nature.com]
[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand
CONTINUED FROM newsnn2
Chu has already made headway. When he found out that billions of dollars in loans for energy projects that had been authorized in 2005 had not progressed, he insisted that they be pushed out in months, with the first one going to a solar-power company. It has helped to get involved personally, he says. Before closing on a $5.9-billion loan with Ford Motors, Chu says he was talking to the firm's chief executive every third day — an example that sent a clear message to his subordinates to act. "In certain areas, I'm not going away," he says. "The pressure is not going to let up."
To encourage more adventurous research, he has pushed to develop the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E, which draws its inspiration from DARPA, the celebrated research programme run by the Department of Defense that had an important role in creating the Internet. ARPA-E is designed to pursue high-risk, high-reward research on new forms of energy and conservation (see 'Blue sky, green tech'). The programme preceded Chu, but it's a pet of his, not least because he recommended it as a co-author on an influential study by the National Academies entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which in 2005 warned of declining American competitiveness.
The ARPA-E concept will work, says Chu, only if the smartest reviewers are enlisted to pick out the most innovative ideas — otherwise incremental research is rewarded. "I unfortunately can't review all of the proposals myself," he told a group of clean-energy businesspeople in October, only half-jokingly. So Chu wrote a letter to the presidents of top research universities asking them to nominate their best researchers as ARPA-E reviewers. Five hundred responded to the call for duty.
Chu himself spent about two hours with the final set of proposals. Fleming, Chu's former LBNL deputy, says this sort of task suits his old boss. "I've never known anyone able to go away and come back 10 minutes later knowing so much about a new topic." And on the day that he visited the LBNL, Chu announced the 37 winning proposals, which would use $151 million of an initial $400 million given to the programme.
Chu's most ambitious idea has been to create eight focused and independent energy labs, modelled after the Manhattan Project, to develop technologies such as next-generation batteries and advanced nuclear power (see 'Chu's innovation factories'). But this is where he has run into the most trouble, and it exposes the limitations of the do-it-all-yourself approach. As Congress debated whether to fund Chu's new labs in fiscal year 2010, staffers found that they couldn't get the details on what, exactly, the DOE wanted. Would they be virtual labs, or permanent facilities? How many years would they be funded for? What mix of basic and applied science would be supported? "The hubs were just dropped on Congress," says one congressional staffer who adds that Chu's office did not provide consistent or timely information.
The communication problems with the Hill were on display at a hearing of a congressional appropriations committee in May. Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat, California), a friend of Chu's, had a complaint. She had wanted to talk privately with him about some solar projects, but she had not been able to make an appointment to see Chu via his staff. "I'm a little bit surprised if you asked to see me and my staff said no," Chu replied.
"We just haven't gotten a response, that's sort of the way it's done," said Feinstein in an apparent attempt to educate the secretary on Washington customs. But Chu, who likes to deal with issues himself, did not seem to understand. "I'm still surprised," he said. "You actually have my private number."
In the end, when Congress doled out money to the DOE, Chu lost some battles. Money that he had proposed cutting from hydrogen research was reinstated. A $115-million education programme he had championed received nothing. Worst of all, for Chu, only three of his eight energy hubs were funded.
Chu's critics say that more attention to Congress could have alleviated the problems, but nearly a year into his tenure, he has not appointed an assistant secretary to head up his legislative-affairs office. Chu says the vacant position was not the problem. The issue was that he hadn't followed through himself. "The failure was on my part," he says, "because I wasn't communicating what the real vision was."
Energy ambassador
On a cold day in early December, Chu was preparing to travel to the United Nations' climate-change conference in Copenhagen. Before the trip, one of the last public events on his schedule was to appear with Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, to talk about speeding up the process for granting patents on green technologies.
In July, the two secretaries went to Beijing together to meet with Chinese energy ministers. Locke, a prominent politician of Chinese descent, was greeted warmly. But Chu, with his Nobel-prize pedigree, was a rock star in a culture that reveres education. "He was like a Michael Jordan," says an administration official. "Everybody knew this guy."
{Busy schedule: Chu likes to take care of many details on his own.}
C. OMMANNEY/GETTY}
Chu has taken a particular interest in China not because of his ancestry, he says, but because it emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation and it is also spending billions of dollars on clean-energy research. During the trip, Chu and Locke announced that the United States and China would jointly pursue research in areas such as energy efficiency and capturing carbon dioxide from coal-plant exhaust.
In his trip to Denmark, Chu reprised his role as energy ambassador. He announced plans to hold a conference next year with foreign energy ministers and pledged $85 million in US aid for renewable-energy projects in the developing world. For Chu, the summit served as a prelude to the fight next year, when he will use his main weapons — knowledge and powers of persuasion — to try to convince members of Congress to vote for a climate bill that would for the first time cap US emissions of greenhouse gases.
Chu says that when he ends his time as energy secretary, he will measure his success by two criteria: whether he aided adoption of a climate bill, and how much he changed the way that the DOE supports science. Those metrics would have seemed odd to a young scientist at Bell Labs in the 1980s who spent his days fretting over the precision of laser beams. Chu didn't plan on working his way to the upper echelons of the US government, where he is the first scientist since the cold war to play such an active part. "It just sort of happened," he says. "I followed the path first from going and doing the science, to getting very concerned about some issues that affect us all as a society, to finally saying, I can't sit idly by and occasionally give a talk on this. I really have to get proactive and put my money where my mouth is and do a career shift because it is that important."
But looking back, it's possible that the call to public service may have been whispering to Chu even during his graduate-school days at Berkeley, where the memories of the war effort remained fresh in the physics department. When Chu briefly took up sculpting at Berkeley, he chose to make a bust of Oppenheimer, the physicist-turned-manager who oversaw all details of the Manhattan Project.
Chu is now looking to another Berkeley star for inspiration. Lately, he has been reading the journals of Seaborg, who led the war-time team racing to extract plutonium for a bomb. Seaborg recounts how his group required fast-working Geiger counters that were not available at the time. So he pushed his crew to invent the needed detectors. For Chu, that sense of urgency in the face of a great threat stands out in Seaborg's work: "He kept saying: 'This isn't university research. We've got to move much faster'."
[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand
CONTINUED FROM newsnn2
Chu has already made headway. When he found out that billions of dollars in loans for energy projects that had been authorized in 2005 had not progressed, he insisted that they be pushed out in months, with the first one going to a solar-power company. It has helped to get involved personally, he says. Before closing on a $5.9-billion loan with Ford Motors, Chu says he was talking to the firm's chief executive every third day — an example that sent a clear message to his subordinates to act. "In certain areas, I'm not going away," he says. "The pressure is not going to let up."
To encourage more adventurous research, he has pushed to develop the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E, which draws its inspiration from DARPA, the celebrated research programme run by the Department of Defense that had an important role in creating the Internet. ARPA-E is designed to pursue high-risk, high-reward research on new forms of energy and conservation (see 'Blue sky, green tech'). The programme preceded Chu, but it's a pet of his, not least because he recommended it as a co-author on an influential study by the National Academies entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which in 2005 warned of declining American competitiveness.
The ARPA-E concept will work, says Chu, only if the smartest reviewers are enlisted to pick out the most innovative ideas — otherwise incremental research is rewarded. "I unfortunately can't review all of the proposals myself," he told a group of clean-energy businesspeople in October, only half-jokingly. So Chu wrote a letter to the presidents of top research universities asking them to nominate their best researchers as ARPA-E reviewers. Five hundred responded to the call for duty.
Chu himself spent about two hours with the final set of proposals. Fleming, Chu's former LBNL deputy, says this sort of task suits his old boss. "I've never known anyone able to go away and come back 10 minutes later knowing so much about a new topic." And on the day that he visited the LBNL, Chu announced the 37 winning proposals, which would use $151 million of an initial $400 million given to the programme.
Chu's most ambitious idea has been to create eight focused and independent energy labs, modelled after the Manhattan Project, to develop technologies such as next-generation batteries and advanced nuclear power (see 'Chu's innovation factories'). But this is where he has run into the most trouble, and it exposes the limitations of the do-it-all-yourself approach. As Congress debated whether to fund Chu's new labs in fiscal year 2010, staffers found that they couldn't get the details on what, exactly, the DOE wanted. Would they be virtual labs, or permanent facilities? How many years would they be funded for? What mix of basic and applied science would be supported? "The hubs were just dropped on Congress," says one congressional staffer who adds that Chu's office did not provide consistent or timely information.
The communication problems with the Hill were on display at a hearing of a congressional appropriations committee in May. Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat, California), a friend of Chu's, had a complaint. She had wanted to talk privately with him about some solar projects, but she had not been able to make an appointment to see Chu via his staff. "I'm a little bit surprised if you asked to see me and my staff said no," Chu replied.
"We just haven't gotten a response, that's sort of the way it's done," said Feinstein in an apparent attempt to educate the secretary on Washington customs. But Chu, who likes to deal with issues himself, did not seem to understand. "I'm still surprised," he said. "You actually have my private number."
In the end, when Congress doled out money to the DOE, Chu lost some battles. Money that he had proposed cutting from hydrogen research was reinstated. A $115-million education programme he had championed received nothing. Worst of all, for Chu, only three of his eight energy hubs were funded.
Chu's critics say that more attention to Congress could have alleviated the problems, but nearly a year into his tenure, he has not appointed an assistant secretary to head up his legislative-affairs office. Chu says the vacant position was not the problem. The issue was that he hadn't followed through himself. "The failure was on my part," he says, "because I wasn't communicating what the real vision was."
Energy ambassador
On a cold day in early December, Chu was preparing to travel to the United Nations' climate-change conference in Copenhagen. Before the trip, one of the last public events on his schedule was to appear with Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, to talk about speeding up the process for granting patents on green technologies.
In July, the two secretaries went to Beijing together to meet with Chinese energy ministers. Locke, a prominent politician of Chinese descent, was greeted warmly. But Chu, with his Nobel-prize pedigree, was a rock star in a culture that reveres education. "He was like a Michael Jordan," says an administration official. "Everybody knew this guy."
{Busy schedule: Chu likes to take care of many details on his own.}
C. OMMANNEY/GETTY}
Chu has taken a particular interest in China not because of his ancestry, he says, but because it emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation and it is also spending billions of dollars on clean-energy research. During the trip, Chu and Locke announced that the United States and China would jointly pursue research in areas such as energy efficiency and capturing carbon dioxide from coal-plant exhaust.
In his trip to Denmark, Chu reprised his role as energy ambassador. He announced plans to hold a conference next year with foreign energy ministers and pledged $85 million in US aid for renewable-energy projects in the developing world. For Chu, the summit served as a prelude to the fight next year, when he will use his main weapons — knowledge and powers of persuasion — to try to convince members of Congress to vote for a climate bill that would for the first time cap US emissions of greenhouse gases.
Chu says that when he ends his time as energy secretary, he will measure his success by two criteria: whether he aided adoption of a climate bill, and how much he changed the way that the DOE supports science. Those metrics would have seemed odd to a young scientist at Bell Labs in the 1980s who spent his days fretting over the precision of laser beams. Chu didn't plan on working his way to the upper echelons of the US government, where he is the first scientist since the cold war to play such an active part. "It just sort of happened," he says. "I followed the path first from going and doing the science, to getting very concerned about some issues that affect us all as a society, to finally saying, I can't sit idly by and occasionally give a talk on this. I really have to get proactive and put my money where my mouth is and do a career shift because it is that important."
But looking back, it's possible that the call to public service may have been whispering to Chu even during his graduate-school days at Berkeley, where the memories of the war effort remained fresh in the physics department. When Chu briefly took up sculpting at Berkeley, he chose to make a bust of Oppenheimer, the physicist-turned-manager who oversaw all details of the Manhattan Project.
Chu is now looking to another Berkeley star for inspiration. Lately, he has been reading the journals of Seaborg, who led the war-time team racing to extract plutonium for a bomb. Seaborg recounts how his group required fast-working Geiger counters that were not available at the time. So he pushed his crew to invent the needed detectors. For Chu, that sense of urgency in the face of a great threat stands out in Seaborg's work: "He kept saying: 'This isn't university research. We've got to move much faster'."
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