[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ENERGY INNOVATION:
LETTING TECHNOLOGY LEAD
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 19, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-23
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BILL POSEY, Florida ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky AMI BERA, California
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
RANDY K. WEBER, Texas MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
BRIAN BABIN, Texas JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia JERRY MCNERNEY, California
BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana PAUL TONKO, New York
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida MARK TAKANO, California
JIM BANKS, Indiana COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
C O N T E N T S
July 19, 2017
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman, Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 4
Written Statement............................................ 6
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking
Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House
of Representatives............................................. 9
Written Statement............................................ 11
Witnesses:
Dr. Jacob DeWitte, President and CEO, Oklo
Oral Statement............................................... 13
Written Statement............................................ 16
Dr. Gaurav N. Sant, Associate Professor and Henry Samueli Fellow,
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Oral Statement............................................... 24
Written Statement............................................ 27
Dr. Venky Narayanamurti, Benjamin Peirce Research Professor of
Technology and Public Policy, John A. Paulson School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Oral Statement............................................... 31
Written Statement............................................ 33
Mr. Kiran Kumaraswamy, Market Development Director, AES Energy
Storage
Oral Statement............................................... 45
Written Statement............................................ 47
Discussion....................................................... 56
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Dr. Venky Narayanamurti, Benjamin Peirce Research Professor of
Technology and Public Policy, John A. Paulson School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University........... 86
ENERGY INNOVATION: LETTING TECHNOLOGY LEAD
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Tuesday, July 19, 2017
House of Representatives,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:09 a.m., in Room
2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Lamar Smith
[Chairman of the Committee] presiding.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Smith. The Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology will come to order.
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare
recesses of the Committee at any time.
And welcome to today's hearing titled ``Energy Innovation:
Letting Technology Lead.'' I'll recognize myself for an opening
statement and then the Ranking Member for her opening
statement.
Today we will hear from a panel of private sector
innovators who are inventing the way to bring next-generation
technology to the energy market. New technology provides
solutions to today's energy and environmental challenges.
Instead of government mandates, more regulations, and higher
energy taxes, the federal government should invest in the
research that allows innovative technology like advanced
nuclear power and energy storage to succeed. We should all
agree on these technology-driven energy solutions.
Unfortunately, nuclear power, which is the only reliable
emissions-free source of electricity, is still criticized by
environmental activists today. Those who are sincerely
interested in solving some of America's environmental
challenges should endorse and promote these critical new
technologies.
This hearing will consider the value of federally funded
basic and early-stage research as well as the research
infrastructure at universities and national labs. These
investments provide valuable expertise that would otherwise be
unavailable to industry.
The Science Committee has jurisdiction over the $9 billion
R&D portfolio at the Department of Energy, which funds basic
science and energy research. Fundamental research conducted by
the DOE Office of Science has led to groundbreaking discoveries
about our universe, innovative new technologies, and private
sector achievements across the energy and manufacturing
industries.
Much of the technology we will hear about today is rooted
in the basic science discoveries made at DOE national labs.
Industry can build on these early-stage research discoveries,
and use research infrastructure to create market-ready, next-
generation energy technologies. For example, Dr. Jacob DeWitte,
who started his career as an intern at Sandia National Lab, is
the Co-Founder of Oklo, a privately funded startup company
working to commercialize a small advanced nuclear reactor
design. Dr. DeWitte's compact fast reactor design is ideal to
replace the diesel generators used in rural areas, industrial
operations, or even on military bases.
This reactor was developed using early-stage nuclear energy
research conducted by DOE national labs. It will have zero
emissions and could lower costs for consumers by up to 90
percent. If environmentalists are serious about reducing
emissions, they should champion advanced nuclear reactors as an
essential part of a clean energy future.
At UCLA, Dr. Gaurav Sant and his team have used basic
research in chemistry, materials science, engineering, and
high-performance computing to design a technology that converts
carbon dioxide into a cement-like material. This technology
could take captured carbon dioxide from power plants and turn
it into a usable, cost-effective material. This innovative
technology has the potential to revolutionize the market for
CO2, turning a waste product into profit.
Even large companies can benefit from basic research. AES
Energy Storage is revolutionizing renewable energy through the
deployment of batteries for the electric grid. AES's most
recent project in California is capable of storing up to 120
megawatt hours of energy produced by wind and solar power. This
is the energy equivalent of serving 20,000 customers for four
hours. Basic and early-stage research in electrochemistry can
improve the efficiency and resiliency of the thousands of
batteries used in these facilities.
This Committee authorized exactly this kind of basic and
fundamental research in the DOE Research and Innovation Act,
which passed the House earlier this year. Enabling these
private sector innovators to develop the most competitive ideas
is essential to groundbreaking energy technology. If we want to
protect the environment, lower costs for consumers, and
increase our energy potential, innovative technology is the
solution.
And note that during the White House Made in America week,
we have three American companies testifying on innovative
technology.
By allowing the market, not the government, to determine
the best approach, we can develop technology that will increase
energy efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and save the
American people money.
America's energy history is full of innovative technologies
that have unlocked new possibilities. It is technology, not
regulation, that improves efficiency, lowers costs, and reduces
the environmental impact of all kinds of energy.
For too long the government has picked winners and losers
through regulation, federal loans and loan guarantees, or
market-distorting subsidies. It is time to let the scientists,
researchers, engineers, and inventors ensure that the United
States remains the world technology leader and is better able
to address environmental concerns.
As we shape the future of the Department, our priority must
be basic energy research and development that only the federal
government has the resources to pursue. This will allow private
sector innovators, like the witnesses who join us today, to
take groundbreaking energy technology to the marketplace,
creating jobs and growing our economy.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:]
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Chairman Smith. That concludes my opening statement, and
the gentlewoman from Texas, the Ranking Member, is recognized
for hers.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you for holding this hearing. I'd like to thank all of our
witnesses for being here today.
In years past, this Committee would hold an annual hearing
on the Administration's budget proposal for the Department of
Energy, and I would typically begin my remarks with a few brief
reminders of how government-supported energy research can pay
off, ranging from the birth of the nuclear power industry to
the shale gas revolution. I'd then move on to provide my views
on what usually was a thoughtful, well-crafted budget proposal,
even if I might have had some disagreements with it.
Unfortunately, this is not a typical year. First, while the
Administration's budget blueprint was released back in March
and its detailed budget request was released in May, our
Committee has still not yet scheduled a hearing with Secretary
Perry testifying to explain and defend his proposal.
While the panel before us today has a broad and impressive
range of expertise that will at least enable us to begin this
discussion, none of these witnesses can speak for the
Department. In order for this Committee to fulfill its
oversight responsibilities, I urge the Chairman to schedule a
hearing with the Secretary as soon as possible.
As for the fiscal year DOE budget request, I want to be
clear: I am deeply disturbed by the Trump Administration's
proposed budget for the Department of Energy. It would
completely eliminate ARPA-E, an agency that has already
demonstrated incredible success in advancing high-risk, high-
reward energy technology solutions that neither the public nor
the private sector had been willing or able to support in the
past. This accomplishment was highlighted in a congressionally
mandated National Academies review of the agency released just
last month. Bipartisan industry leaders like Norm Augustine and
Bill Gates have repeatedly called for tripling this agency's
budget given the unique role that it is now playing in our
energy innovation pipeline.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't refer my colleagues to
Secretary Perry's March 8th tweet, issued just eight days
before the budget blueprint was released, which states, and I
quote, ``Innovators like the ones supported by our ARPA-E
program are key to advancing America's energy economy.'' I
really couldn't have said it any better.
In addition, the President's budget proposal would
eliminate DOE's loan guarantee and Advanced Vehicle Technology
Manufacturing programs. Mr. Chairman, we just held a hearing on
these programs a few months ago, and we learned that their
record of accomplishment more than justifies our continued
support. The DOE Loan Programs Office has been instrumental in
launching the utility-scale PV industry, Tesla Motors, the
construction of our first new nuclear reactors in 30 years, and
it is now supporting the commercialization of new carbon
capture and reuse technologies. Overall, the Loan Office's
losses are only about two percent of its entire portfolio, a
rate that is lower than many venture capitalists achieve. And
even after accounting for those losses, the interest payments
from these loans and loan guarantees have returned over $1
billion to the Treasury. If we're aiming to create jobs and
reduce the deficit, these are exactly the programs we should be
supporting.
Finally, the budget proposal would slash the Department's
other critical energy technology offices for energy efficiency,
renewables, the grid, fossil energy, and nuclear energy by $2.3
billion overall, or about 57 percent. And it would cut the DOE
Office of Science, the largest supporter of physical sciences
research in the country, by over $900 million, or 17 percent.
Our national infrastructure for scientific and energy
research would be irreparably harmed if these cuts were
actually implemented.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that every program the
Department currently implements is perfect, that reforms should
never be considered, or that reasonable people can't simply
disagree on the best way to allocate its resources even after a
careful, rigorous review.
One of my largest concerns now, especially given the
incredibly severe damage that this proposal would impose on our
entire research enterprise, is that such a thoughtful review
never actually took place before this budget proposal was
released. In fact, last month Administration officials
confirmed that there was no engagement with the private sector
at all to determine what industry would be able or willing to
fund in the absence of federal investment. This is simply
unacceptable.
In closing, I hope that we can all take a step back and
more carefully consider the direction we want to move the
Department in over the next several years.
I look forward to the hearing and listening to our
witnesses on all of these critical issues. I yield back
whatever balance of time I have.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
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Chairman Smith. Well, actually there's not much balance
left but I appreciate the gentlewoman yielding back, and thank
you for your statement.
Before I introduce our witnesses today, I'd like to
introduce the newest member of the Science Committee, Ralph
Norman of South Carolina. Having served as a former state rep
in South Carolina, he brings a wealth of experience to the
Committee, and he's going to be serving on the Environment and
Oversight Subcommittees, and Ralph, we welcome you to the
Committee.
And I'll go to our witnesses. Our first witness today is
Dr. Jacob DeWitte, Co-Founder and CEO of Oklo. Previously, Dr.
DeWitte worked at Sandia National Lab, Urenco U.S., and the
Naval Reactor Research Laboratories. He studied nuclear
engineering at the University of Florida and received his Ph.D.
in nuclear engineering from MIT.
Our next witness is Dr. Gaurav N. Sant, Associate Professor
and Henry Samueli Fellow in the Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Dr. Sant received his bachelor's degree, master's
degree and Ph.D. from Purdue University.
Our third witness today is Dr. Venky, and he prefers to be
called by his first name, Dr. Venky, which makes it easier on
all of us. Dr. Venky is the Benjamin Peirce Research Professor
of Technology and Public Policy at Harvard's John A. Paulson
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Dr. Venky
previously served as Dean of the John Paulson School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Dean of Physical Sciences
at Harvard. He received his bachelor's and master's degree in
physics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University.
Our final witness today is Dr. Kiran Kumaraswamy, Market
Development Director at AES Energy Storage. He previously
served as the Senior Manager at ICF International in Fairfax,
Virginia. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Madras.
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Madras.
Chairman Smith. Madras, and his master's degree in
engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
And we welcome you all to the Committee hearing today and
look forward to your testimony, and Dr. DeWitte, we'll begin
with you.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JACOB DEWITTE,
PRESIDENT AND CEO, OKLO
Dr. DeWitte. Thank you, and Chairman Smith and Ranking
Member Johnson, and distinguished Members of this Committee, I
want to thank you for holding this hearing and for giving me
the opportunity to testify today. I am honored to be here, and
I'm eager to share my experience commercializing advanced
reactor technologies that build upon a rich legacy of research
and development with the national laboratory system and the
Department of Energy.
As Chairman Smith mentioned in his intro, I was fortunate
to grow up around Sandia National Laboratory, which played a
huge role in influencing my decision to go into the fields of
technology, science, engineering and math as well as pursue
ultimately an entrepreneurial career, and I'm also excited to
be working with them now further to commercialize this
technology.
So I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Oklo, a Silicon Valley-
based company developing and building a very small advanced
reactor that produces 1 to 2 megawatts of electric power. We
sometimes refer to this as a micro-reactor that is designed to
bring distributed, clean, affordable, and reliable nuclear
power in small packages to a wide variety of markets, both
domestically and internationally.
We started Oklo because we believe advanced reactors will
play a significant role in the energy mix of the future, and we
want to make that future a reality as quickly as possible.
Over half of the active advanced reactor commercialization
efforts ongoing in the United States today are pursuing fast
reactor technologies. One of the key technologies to the
success of fast reactor R&D in the United States has been the
development of metal fuels. Metal fuels are alloys of uranium
or other actinides that combine incredible durability,
flexibility and resilience to achieve phenomenal fuel
utilization, manufacturability, and safety performance. Metal
fuel was used in several key early experimental reactors
operated in the 1950s and 1960s and showed great promise but it
was sidelined until several key engineering discoveries were
made through R&D campaigns sponsored by the Atomic Energy
Commission and then the DOE, which ultimately enabled the fuels
to realize their potential. These advances were highlighted by
successful demonstrations at the EBR-II reactor, which operated
in Idaho.
Over half of the fast reactor developers in the United
States are building upon this rich R&D legacy in metal fuel,
and it is a striking example of a successful government
investment in R&D that matured a promising technology to the
point of readiness and commercialization.
There are also opportunities to expand upon the successes
in metal fuel. Lessons learned in the development of metal
fuels have identified avenues to expand its capabilities, which
illustrates the continuum of innovation that can occur when one
discovery leads to many more than can further advance the state
of the art.
At Oklo, we are working to commercialize a reactor that
builds on the successful legacy of metal fuel. We pursue a
business model of following market needs and demands, in other
words, we strive to make reactors people want. It can be
tempting to push an exciting new technology to market, but then
miss what the market needs for the sake of the technology, so
talking to users to understand what the market requires and
wants takes discipline. In our experience, we found the
capabilities offered by metal fuel match customer needs and
have continued to find market fit and traction thanks in part
to R&D success of metal fuel.
We've partnered with several national labs to date
including Argonne, Idaho and Sandia National Laboratories to
support our commercialization work. A significant amount of
this work has focused on commercializing our specific
application and design of metal fuel. For example, we are
working with Argonne and Idaho supported by the Gateway for
Accelerated Innovation and Nuclear, also known as GAIN, to
assemble fuel performance data that we used in formal pre-
application meetings with the NRC to support our licensing
case, as well as to fabricate three prototypic fuel elements
demonstrating key characteristics, which we were excited to
announce all three hit production specs.
We are currently expanding our work with the national labs
because many of the capabilities we need are uniquely found in
the national lab complex, providing us with an international
advantage. This is why it is so important to maintain and
preserve our capabilities and expertise in the national lab
system and also why we need to develop new capabilities like a
fast test reactor.
In fact, I would like to highlight the efforts to build a
fast reactor that this Committee and Congressman Weaver has so
earnestly led and supported in a bipartisan way. This is
incredibly important to develop this capability in the United
States because the construction and operation of a domestic
fast test reactor will pay substantial dividends to American
energy competitiveness as well as leadership. This facility
will be a national asset and will not only accelerate ongoing
advanced reactor commercialization efforts but will also be a
catalyst for new innovations and new technologies.
Furthermore, to support ongoing innovation, DOE needs to
provide a fuel source for demonstration, prototype, and first-
of-a-kind advanced reactors by providing low enriched uranium
fuels that are enriched above the five percent enrichment that
current LWR fuels use.
In general, the regulatory challenges that we face in
advanced reactor space have been overstated, and I'd like to
take a few minutes, or few moments, I should say, to comment on
that. While there are challenges, I must emphasize that the
widely-held view that advanced reactors cannot be licensed
today is mistaken. We are formally engaged in pre-application
activities with the NRC and have found clear licensing pathways
for our technology but work remains.
Innovation in nuclear is proceeding at a pace reminiscent
of the early days of nuclear power, and the United States is
still the global leader, but we need to be mindful of
international competition. China and Russia are investing
heavily to develop advanced nuclear technologies, and we cannot
afford to fall behind. Our national capacity to innovate,
combined with our national capabilities to research and
develop, give us tremendous advantages.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. DeWitte follows:]
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Chairman Smith. Thank you, Dr. DeWitte.
And Dr. Sant.
TESTIMONY OF DR. GAURAV N. SANT,
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND HENRY SAMUELI FELLOW,
DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING,
HENRY SAMUELI SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
AND APPLIED SCIENCE,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES (UCLA)
Mr. Sant. Thank you, Chairman Smith, Ranking Member
Johnson, and Members of the Committee for inviting me to appear
before you as you review private sector leadership in next-
generation energy technology to increase efficiency,
environmental benefits and consumer savings, and review
associated research and regulatory hurdles.
As requested by the Committee, I am focusing my testimony
on research that we've been engaged in that seeks to convert
carbon dioxide (CO2) into a novel building material,
CO2NCRETE, with CO2 at the front. The
views expressed herein are my own, and do not necessarily
represent those of UCLA. In brief, I'm an Associate Professor
and Henry Samueli Fellow in the Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science at the University of
California, Los Angeles. I'm a civil engineer, and a materials
scientist with broad ranging expertise in materials synthesis,
characterization and simulation.
My testimony today can be summarized as follows starting
with the motivation. Electricity generation from coal-fired
power plants alone represents about 25 percent of CO2
emissions from the United States. It's about 1.2 billion tons
of CO2 emitted in 2016. Carbon capture and storage
(CCS) has been proposed as a solution to mitigate CO2
emissions caused by industrial activities. However, CCS is not
always viable due to issues with high cost, uncertainty in the
permanence of the sequestration solution, and/or the lack of
suitable geological features in the local vicinity where CCS
can be achieved. Therefore, it is necessary to identify and
create new pathways for the beneficial utilization of CO2
while simultaneously yielding a permanent CCS solution.
A novel approach to mitigate CO2 emissions is by
upcycling or beneficially utilizing industrial wastes that may
be in the form of solids, liquids, or vapors to create new
materials, for example, CO2NCRETE. As an example, in
the case of flue gas-borne CO2, this is accomplished
by converting gas borne CO2 by mineralization into
stable carbonate compounds which may offer cementitious
character into building materials. Not only do such innovative
technologies yield environmental benefits, but they also have
the potential to reduce the environmental impact of the
construction sector as follows. The production of ordinary
Portland cement--the primary binding agent used in traditional
concrete--results in nearly nine percent of global CO2
emissions. For example, nearly .9 tons of carbon dioxide are
emitted per ton of OPC produced. Therefore, the development of
new cementation agents that take up CO2 will help
reduce the CO2 emissions associated with OPC and
concrete) production.
With respect to material recycling, the simultaneous reuse
of CO2 and industrial byproducts--solid wastes--
resulting from coal combustion creates a new paradigm in waste-
to-resource recycling of materials. This creates a circular
economy paradigm between the energy and construction sectors
and thus greatly enhances the sustainability metrics of both
industries. The upcycling process that we've proposed and
demonstrated is accomplished by contacting calcium hydroxide
with flue gas-borne CO2. Such calcium hydroxide or
portlandite can be secured by calcining limestone and hydrating
the lime that results or by leaching calcium species from
alkaline industrial wastes such as slags and coal combustion
residuals. Following combination with fine and coarse mineral
aggregates, chemical additives, water, and suitable binding
agents if needed--similar to traditional concrete--this mixture
containing calcium hydroxide forms a slurry that can be shaped
into common construction elements, such as beams, columns, and
slabs. Importantly, the upcycled concrete production process is
designed to bolt-on to large point-source CO2
emitters including petrochemical facilities, coal- and natural
gas-fired power plants, and cement plants. In each case,
emitted flue gas is used to both provide both waste heat to
hasten chemical reactions, and to provide CO2 to
ensure mineralization without imposing any additional need for
emissions control. The process cycle is being designed for
scalable operations to accelerate the R&D pathway towards
pilot-scale trials, technology commercialization and
deployment.
CO2NCRETE offers a transformative route for the
beneficial utilization of flue gas-borne CO2 in the
cementation cycle. This creates pathways to produce
construction materials with up to 50 percent or lower carbon
dioxide intensity than ordinary Portland cement.
Furthermore, by creating a robust CO2 and solid
waste offtake partnership between the energy and the
construction sectors, the outcomes of this work create new
sectoral synergies which would be difficult to realize
otherwise. Significantly, this CO2 upcycling
approach can reduce the environmental impact of electricity
generation from fossil fuels, while simultaneously advancing
the materials, methods and processes utilized by the
construction sector.
Financial support secured from federal agencies including
the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and
the National Science Foundation has been instrumental in
enabling our work. The support of federal agencies such as
those noted above, and others, is critical for enabling basic
and applied R&D, technology creation and development. Broadly,
with significant competitive international investments in R&D
around the world, federal support of basic and applied R&D, in
core and emerging domains such as CO2 utilization
and reuse is more important now than ever. This is because
federal R&D support is vital to enable the creation of
knowledge and technology within universities and national
laboratories, the reservoirs of knowledge that have ensured
U.S. intellectual leadership globally.
Furthermore, federal support of R&D is especially important
in the case of technologies which benefit conventional
industries which are unlikely to being offshored, for example,
electricity generation and the construction sector, which
feature reduced appetite for technical and commercial risk due
to uncertainty in revenue, profit pressures, regulatory and
compliance burdens, or high costs associated with the
development of greenfield facilities with long operating
horizons. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the government to
underwrite a larger proportion of the costs associated with R&D
that has the potential to benefit such industries, and in turn,
the general public, until sufficient technology maturity is
achieved.
However, once such maturity is achieved, and industry is
assured of the commercial value and potential of new
technology, it is expected that industry will take over and
accelerate the residual R&D pathway including commercial trials
that results in market penetration, and diffusion of new
technology.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify on this
important topic.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Sant follows:]
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Chairman Smith. Thank you, Dr. Sant.
And Dr. Venky.
TESTIMONY OFDR. VENKY NARAYANAMURTI,
BENJAMIN PEIRCE RESEARCH PROFESSOR
OF TECHNOLOGY AND PUBLIC POLICY,
JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
AND APPLIED SCIENCES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Mr. Narayanamurti. Thank you, Chairman Smith, Honorable
Minority Leader Johnson, and Members of the House Space,
Science and Technology Committee. Thank you for this
opportunity to speak about the role of----
Chairman Smith. Is your mic on? There we go.
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Can you hear me now?
Chairman Smith. Yes. Thank you.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Thank you for the opportunity to speak
about the role of public policy in energy innovation.
My perspective comes from a lifetime of working in science
and technology, first at AT&T Bell Laboratories, then in
national labs, Sandia National Lab, and in academia as well as
my recent research at the Harvard Kennedy School and my role on
several committees of the National Academies and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I have three main points to make to you today. First, we
must break down the false dichotomy between so-called basic and
applied research. In my lexicon, there's only word, research,
and research must be scientific research, physics research,
technology research, engineering research.
Second, in energy alone, history has shown that sometimes
engineering inventions precede detailed scientific
understanding and sometimes new scientific discoveries lead to
new engineering inventions. This creation of the steam engine
200 years ago by James Watt led to the industrial revolution
long before the science of thermodynamics, the invention of the
light bulb, Edison and transformers led to the field of
electrical power engineering. On the other side, the scientific
work of Einstein, which showed the connection between mass and
energy, and the work of Enrico Fermi on nuclear fission led
eventually to nuclear power.
My second point is that government has an important role in
fostering energy innovation done in the proper way, which
couples the desire to understand and the desire to create new
things. That's what America is about, in my view. If you do not
combine so-called basic and applied research, it's a missed
opportunity. We learn by doing. Everything I do in class, we
learn by doing. The private sector in energy in particular does
not invest appropriately long-term R&D. In fact, that's through
widely of the American economy because of the global
competition and because the fruits of this research cannot be
easily captured because of the risks and the breadth of those
values. This leads to valleys of death which government funding
is needed to overcome. The early stage I, which is where I'm
expert of transformative, it really is important because in
fact that--the risks are huge but the gains also can be very
large, high risk, high reward, as Honorable Johnson mentioned.
Technology transfer, secondly, is a body contact support.
It requires interactions, collaboration between actors from
places like the national labs, universities, and the private
sector.
I now want to turn to a few points on the role of the U.S.
Department of Energy, which has its mission general science as
well as energy and national security. In the energy space,
Department of Energy investments in the past have led to major
technological advances such as the shale gas revolution, which
we are using the fruits of today. It was done in the 1980s when
people at the DOE and the Gas Research Institute helped an
entrepreneur by the name of Mitchell, Mitchell Energy. The big
companies didn't want to do it, and it was not of course cost-
effective then but today it has become a huge effect here, and
similarly, nuclear power, which has also been mentioned, and
solar photovoltaics. This has often been done by the so-called
applied offices in the DOE. The full potential of the
Department of Energy's work in this space can only be realized
by further breaking down the boundaries between basic and
applied research. Recent attempts to break down this boundary
and the creation of interdisciplinary research efforts through
energy Frontier Research Centers, Energy Innovation Hubs, and
ARPA-E were, in my view, the steps in the right direction
including the creation of a unified Under Secretary for Science
and Energy. We do want to break down these barriers, and if I
may be, as a respectful reminder, point to this Committee which
also has responsibility for the National Science Foundation.
Eric Block, who came from IBM and understood the industrial lab
culture in the 1980s, changed many of the NSF features in a
very positive direction. He created physics frontier centers,
he created science and technology centers, and he created
engineering research centers, which have a 40-year history of
great success and have been evaluated in books. The recent
constructs at DOE in fact emulate them. Energy Innovation Hubs
are like science and technology centers and like engineering
research centers, and they deserve to be funded just as the
physics frontier center. So this not against the basic
research; it is how you keep the boundary.
So I would like to say the great diversity and complexity
in energy science and technology calls for a portfolio approach
both in terms of content and management. I did not mention
ARPA-E. ARPA-E is a slightly different construct, which where
actually the program managers modeled like DARPA to actually go
for the high-risk reward, and we have done studies on it which
I can speak about later in questioning, which actually shows
enormous effort which ARPA-E has also done.
So in closing, I believe we are in a critical juncture and
our choices today will have far-reaching consequences. I cannot
overemphasize the importance of government support of energy
innovation across the basic-applied divide and enhancing
cooperation and collaboration between academic, national
laboratories, and industry.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Narayanamurti follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Dr. Venky. You certainly know
how to message research.
We'll now go to Mr. Kumaraswamy. We look forward to your
comments.
TESTIMONY OF MR. KIRAN KUMARASWAMY,
MARKET DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR,
AES ENERGY STORAGE
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Thank you, Chairman Smith and
distinguished Members of the Committee. I'm honored to testify
in front of you today on the topic of energy innovation and
private sector leadership and commercializing new technologies.
Innovation can and will transform the energy sector and in
turn, people's lives. Bringing change to the industry is part
of our DNA at AES and, in many ways, is what we do best. AES
was started 35 years ago by two former government employees,
Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke, who saw an opportunity in the
emerging independent generation market and we continue to grow
by innovating new solutions to serve emerging power sector
needs.
I think innovation is very different from invention.
Invention is a new idea. Innovation is actually doing something
with the idea or applying an existing idea in a new way to
drive a greater impact. That means that to AES, innovation can
happen not just through technology, but by thinking about
business models differently or modifying market structures.
It's an approach we call applied innovation.
There is no better example of our applied innovation
approach than in our energy storage business. We've come far
from where we started ten years ago in the energy storage
business. Back then, battery based energy storage on the grid
was experimental, and did not exist as a business opportunity.
Today, it is a proven solution and is operating successfully
across the country and in several global markets. We stand at
the beginning of the next big scaling up, taking this vital
technology to more customers, more countries, and more grids
around the world.
In the context of today's discussion and applied
innovation, it's pretty important to understand how we got
here. In 2007, AES Energy Storage was founded as a subsidiary
of AES to carry forward our initial survey of advances in
battery technology and power electronics. At the time, no one
had designed a large-scale energy storage system using lithium-
ion batteries. The conventional wisdom of the time was that
batteries could not meet the challenges of utility-scale
performance. As lithium-ion technology emerged, our team
believed we had found useful business cases for battery-based
energy storage systems
We moved forward with designing and building the first
megawatt-scale lithium-ion battery energy storage project.
Several years later, with 20 projects now and 398 megawatts
deployed and awarded across seven different countries globally,
we've helped ensure more customers in more locations can
benefit from energy storage.
In 2014, in California, we demonstrated that batteries
could compete successfully against peaking power plants,
securing the world's first power purchase agreements for energy
storage to serve a utility customer for 20 years, and still the
largest contracted energy storage project in the world.
Just last week, Siemens and AES announced we will join
forces to create Fluence, a new global energy storage
technology and services company that unites the scale,
experience, and reach of its two parent companies.
With the market at an inflection point, what did we, as a
private company, learn about commercializing next-generation
technologies in the power market? I'd like to make four points
to the Committee.
First, the existing power market is not designed to reward
innovators, and many of the needs reside within the network
without any capability for compensation. Many of the rules in
the current power markets were put in place for traditional
generation and do no fully account for technical and
performance characteristics of advanced technologies like
energy storage. It is important to remedy these regulatory
concerns as soon as possible. The federal government has an
important role to play here to ensure markets are fully
competitive and have the policy in place to catch up with the
technology. Otherwise, market rules set up several years ago
become an unintended roadblock for commercializing energy
storage.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission currently has a
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking related to removing barriers for
storage participation in wholesale power markets. These types
of efforts that include reforming market regulations to enable
storage to compete in markets should be accelerated.
Second, on the topic of battery chemistry research, we
believe that lithium ion is mature right now and private
capital from large battery manufacturing companies is moving it
forward at incredible speed and investment. The government
should continue funding R&D on other early-stage battery
chemistries that have the potential to achieve greater
capabilities in the near future.
Third, the national labs through the Department of Energy
are doing a great job in advancing the modeling and
visualization of benefits that energy storage brings to the
grid. These are complex analytic simulations that require the
use of state-of-the-art power market models and a high degree
of computational rigor. The government should encourage and
increase investments in the DOE and national labs to continue
this important work.
Finally, the last point that I would like to make is that
the federal government should continue to provide technical
assistance to storage project deployments, particularly for
states and utilities that are considering their first projects
but may be constrained by lack of technical experience. Through
our experience in the energy storage business, we have found
that deploying projects in the field is the best way to enhance
learning among all stakeholders.
Mr. Chairman, thank you again for the opportunity to
testify today. I would like to invite you and the other Members
of the Committee to visit any of our storage facilities in the
United States. I am happy to take questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kumaraswamy follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Kumaraswamy.
Let me address my first question to Dr. DeWitte and Mr.
Kumaraswamy, and it is this: What regulatory hurdles did you
face and what do you suggest Congress do to address those
regulatory hurdles? And Dr. DeWitte, we'll start with you.
Dr. DeWitte. Thank you for the question. We're actively in
that process right now, and we have a long road ahead of us,
frankly. The nuclear regulatory process is--it's an ongoing and
sort of everlasting process once you are commercializing a
technology and putting it to field and into market. There's
been a lot of concerns historically about the readiness for the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission to handle advanced reactors. We
found that that's generally been overstated and that they've
been well prepared. In particular, recent activities around
working with DOE to prepare for what are called advanced
reactor design criteria as well as other efforts the NRC has
undertaken to prepare themselves technically to review advanced
reactor applications are paying dividends as we speak.
Our formal interactions with the regulator have gone quite
well so far. However, there's still room to improve, and I
think a couple of those areas focus on rightsizing regulations
for reactor size and potential risk and also rightsizing
security and staffing requirements. That still needs to be
done. So there's still opportunities for improvement but
generally we've been pleased.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Good. Thank you, Dr. DeWitte.
Mr. Kumaraswamy?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Thank you, Chairman. Like I mentioned in
my opening remarks, I think one of the key things in the power
sector is that you have market rules that are put in place for
technologies that were prevalent at that time in the
marketplace, and these are commonly tailored towards
traditional generation facilities, and one of the concerns that
we have is that when you have advanced technologies like energy
storage that are trying to get into these regional power
markets, those rules don't apply directly to them so they have
to be changed in order for you to allow for the capabilities
and performance characteristics of these devices.
So just to give you an example, Indianapolis Power and
Light, which is an AES Company, which is in the State of
Indiana, we have had difficulty integrating a new 20-megawatt
battery energy storage project in that regional market mainly
because of the fact that the power market rules in the Midwest,
independent system operator are not set up to handle the
characteristics of energy storage, and so Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission is doing a great job. They have that
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to remedy a lot of these issues,
and I think encouraging those efforts to completion as quickly
as possible once FERC actually gets the quorum would be a
pretty important step for us to make sure that the technology
can be brought into the market and the market can realize all
of those benefits that the technology provides.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Good. Thanks.
Dr. Sant and Dr. DeWitte and Mr. Kumaraswamy, do your
technologies reduce carbon emissions? And if so, can you
quantify it? But first of all, do they reduce carbon emissions,
and is that significant? Dr. DeWitte--Dr. Sant, let's start
with you.
Mr. Sant. Thank you, Chairman Smith. Yes, they do. I should
point out the way our work is really set up, what we're trying
to do is reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that are
associated with cement production. So we're trying to create
replacements for Portland cement, which like I pointed out,
provides about, give or take, nine percent of global CO2
emissions. Being able to reduce the CO2 footprint
associated with cement production by avoidance and by taking up
CO2 by utilization, both yield reductions in carbon
dioxide. However, we should be careful to point out that this
is a small number, so we're talking about a few percentage
points. It's a big number if you look at it in terms of the
potential reduction that you can achieve, but in the grand
scheme of things, it's still only a few percent.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Sant.
And Mr. Kumaraswamy?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Sure. Energy storage definitely has the
capability to reduce the amount of emissions that we have. It's
also notable that the U.S. electric grid currently has less
than one percent of energy storage in the system. That's equal
to about 20 minutes of the total demand that we have for energy
in the country. This is in comparison to about 4 days' worth of
storage that we typically find in other networks like gas
networks and significantly more storage than we have in things
like data networks. So just a point that the amount of energy
storage that we have in the system is significantly lower in
the energy system.
By increasing the amount of energy storage that we have in
the grid, we can make sure that we integrate all of the
renewable energy sources that we have on the system, and most
importantly, help operate the existing conventional generation
resources much more efficiently. Instead of cycling them back
and forth, you actually get the capability to operate these
existing generation facilities at more stable output blocks,
which means that they actually produce less emissions, and you
reduce the amount of renewable curtailment also and so there's
significant environmental benefits with energy storage.
Chairman Smith. Thanks, and Dr. DeWitte, briefly, nuclear
is obviously going to have a huge impact on carbon emissions.
Can you explain why and how?
Dr. DeWitte. Yes. It has a huge impact on reducing CO2
and other emissions because it doesn't produce any during
generation and it has a massive scalable potential. One single
fission event produces 50 million times as much energy as when
you combust a single molecule of natural gas, so you can avoid
a lot of emissions. Look at France and Sweden. They have some
of the best track records for decarbonization solely due to
nuclear, frankly.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate your answers
today.
And Ms. Johnson is recognized for her questions.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Venky, we have heard from scientists and policymakers
alike that there's often a false boundary drawn between basic
and applied science. To some, supporting basic research is an
important role that government--of government while applied
research should be left to the private sector. Yet this idea
that there is a line that neatly divides the two separate
levels of research is not realistic and certainly goes against
general understanding of scientific discovery and innovation.
As you mentioned in your testimony, you have written
extensively about this issue. Would you agree with this
characterization or do you really feel there is a distinctive
line?
Mr. Narayanamurti. So thank you very much, Honorable
Minority Leader. I want to really emphasize that historically,
this divide started during World War II, but really, many
scholars, not just me, including economists, social scientists
have done studies and have shown that this is a false dichotomy
and in fact you have to actually fund all aspects of research
to be effective.
My own work, which really was modeled after Bell Labs--in
fact, I looked at the original speeches of Bell Labs. They were
such iconic institutions which did such great science and such
great technology. They made an explicit point of not breaking
research up into parts. In fact, the leader of Bell Labs had
arguments with Vannevar Bush on that subject because he said we
do not separate them because in fact discoveries and inventions
feed on each other and there's both back and forth.
So my argument is, research does need some insulation but
not from engineering and technology. It is about the long term.
It is about the somewhat unpredictable, unscheduled. Nobody
predicted the shale gas revolution would happen by that
research, as an example. Same with nuclear fission, same with
solar cells. So the point is, the longer-term work, the federal
government has an extreme role and it must involve science,
technology and engineering intimately linked and not separated,
and that's--the Department of Energy, the way this has been
separated, has been a severe hindrance in my view in terms of
stovepiping. As I mentioned, even NSF realized in the 1980s
through a corporate lab director named Eric Block to create
these interdisciplinary centers including engineering research
centers so the question to ask is, how are the Energy
Innovation Hubs like the Science and Technology Centers and
Engineering Research Centers, which is missing in the Office of
Science.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you. Any other witnesses like to comment
on that?
Dr. DeWitte. I would, please. Thank you.
I think it's one of the interesting things about the
commercialization that we're working on towards--with metal
fuels specifically and advanced reactors is it opens up the
pathway to continuous innovation for improvements that we've
discovered along the development pathway already. It's
important to never lose sight of that and not to think that
something is just ready because it's still at some of those
stages that you discover new things to do. Those are still too
early for commercial readiness, and it's important to have an
awareness on that, and also to maintain that perspective that
once you get something ready to go for commercialization, that
doesn't mean innovation is done. There's still opportunities
and pathways to bridge on that.
Mr. Narayanamurti. May I add?
Ms. Johnson. Sure.
Mr. Narayanamurti. So you can argue how far in the
innovation chain one should fund, and we can discuss that. This
is back to the late stage, and that's a legitimate argument. I
would say it depends on the situation.
Ms. Johnson. Dr. Venky, the President's budget request
declared some research as early stage and therefore worthy of
federal support and other activities as later-stage research
that should be immediately eliminated given that the private
sector is supposedly better equipped to carry this research
out. However, the Administration officials recently confirmed
to Committee staff that they did not engage with the private
sector at all while compiling the budget request to determine
what industry would be able to or willing to pick this up. In
your experience, are the cuts proposed for the fiscal year 2018
budget research areas that the private sector is willing to
simply start funding after the federal government cuts them
off?
Mr. Narayanamurti. This is an extremely important question.
I actually--I personally feel, I think there is not good data
on that anyway, but the private sector today in the United
States is just not doing the longer-term work because of the
risk involved, and that's one of the reasons in fact because of
global competition, other countries are beginning to do more of
that because of state support. So the point is, our companies
are not doing it, not in every industry. IT is still--I think
Google and Microsoft are doing some, which his very good, but
the energy case, it's definitely not true.
There is evidence, on the other hand, if government makes
the investments, eventually it reaches the private sector as it
did for the shale gas and several other cases, but what is
really quite important, I think, is there does need to be like
our Engineering Centers, our Energy Innovation Hubs, ARPA-E,
must involve consultations with the private sector. We do want
to have them involved in that discussion so that we can
actually think about that. When we made our energy plans in the
book which I co-authored with two of my colleagues, we actually
interviewed a lot of private sector people where they thought
the investment should be made. So I think because they want the
long-term investments, so I think we want to involve them in
the discussion as well. It has to be a cooperative thing. As I
said, technology transfer is a body contact support.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you. My time has expired.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Ms. Johnson.
The gentleman from California, Mr. Rohrabacher, is
recognized.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you, Mr. Chairman, for taking the leadership and calling
this hearing today. We need to have discussions like this on
basics, and your leadership is certainly making sure that we
get that type of discussion.
Let me note that to our witness who was mentioning about
the--Mr. Sant, who was mentioning about the turning of CO2
into useful material, and we compare that to what I consider to
be sort of an irrational approach to try dealing with CO2
and just trying to eliminate CO2. You're suggesting
that we actually can use CO2 in a way that will be
beneficial to humankind and making a profit out of extracting
it. And let me note that you're talking about cement. There is
a company in my area, Newlight, that has developed a
methodology of--and they have a process now working that takes
CO2 out of the air and turns it into plastic, high-
quality plastic, and I think that we are going to find with
research that instead of going about the regulatory and trying
to stamp out the use of CO2, we're going to find
it's much more effective for mankind to find useful purposes
for CO2 that we can actually extract it from the air
and we don't have to worry about the debate as to whether
CO2 is a pollutant or not if you actually have
people using it for positive ends. So number one, I thank you
for your testimony today. I didn't know about your uses that
you're suggesting that are available, and I think it deserves a
lot of attention. So thank you.
What also deserves attention as far as I'm concerned is the
future of nuclear energy in this country, and throughout the
world. Nuclear energy had such great--we had such great hopes
for it but it should be evident to anyone now that the former
light water reactors, the initial move on stage in the nuclear
area, is extraordinarily dangerous. We have closed down San
Onofre in my area, and rightfully so, because there are dangers
involved with light water reactors.
Mr. DeWitte, does your, what you're trying to develop now
in the nuclear energy field, does that have the same dangers?
Dr. DeWitte. No, very different safety profile. It operates
truly on natural forces. It's very passive. It has a pressure--
basically no pressure operations and so it makes it a very safe
profile in terms of what it can do and behave.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Can it melt down and release
radioactivity?
Dr. DeWitte. Effectively, no.
Mr. Rohrabacher. So we have the capability now, Mr.
Chairman, to actually do this. We've had this capability for a
while, and we have instead been for whatever forces at play in
our society, we have been channeling resources into developing
nuclear power plants that have extreme danger associated with
them, and now we should understand, and the testimony today
highlights this, that we should focus on our alternatives,
making sure the alternative that we have, which is a nuclear
energy source for electricity, that is far less dangerous, if
not dangerous at all. We should make sure that that comes to
play. That's right through this Committee. This Committee will
do the things that are necessary to make sure that the next
generation of nuclear power, which is safer, that we get into
that new generation as soon as possible. And when we're talking
about that, as soon as possible.
Dr. DeWitte, do you see the fact that the small-scale
programs and perhaps like your own which provide--were provided
technical support and lab capabilities, do you think, is that a
better way for us to approach this than through large grants
through the license to try to move things through the
regulatory process?
Dr. DeWitte. I think in general it has substantial benefits
for where the industry is now, and I think it is a better way
because I think what we've seen is, we've had very high impacts
and high-leverage outcomes from a very small amount of money to
date, much more efficiently than you would get with a large
cost-share program at this stage. That doesn't mean that you
can have those down the road for demonstration-type purposes
but I think it's a better use at this stage.
Mr. Rohrabacher. And one last thing, Mr. Chairman. I think
that the--it doesn't really make sense for us to be funding big
companies to help them move through the licensing process,
which is basically a federal process, so we're giving grants to
people to help them deal with the federal agencies and instead
we should try to reform the federal agencies so that they don't
have these impediments to this type of progress.
Thank you very much again for your leadership, Mr.
Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Rohrabacher, and the
gentlewoman from Oregon, Ms. Bonamici, is recognized.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you to the panel for your excellent testimony.
Dr. DeWitte, I want to thank you particularly for
mentioning in your testimony NuScale Power, which is of course
headquartered in northwest Oregon in the district I'm honored
to represent, and also thank you for mentioning the role of the
national labs and the Department of Energy in your work over
the years. I really appreciate that.
Mr. Kumaraswamy, thank you for talking about energy
storage, and your work on energy storage and the potential for
modernizing the grid is something that I've had many
conversations about back home in Oregon. In your testimony, you
say that the national labs through the Department of Energy are
doing a great job in advancing the modeling and visualization
of benefits that energy storage brings to the grid, and you go
on to say that the government should encourage and increase
investments in the Department of Energy and national labs to
continue this work. Yet we are now looking at the Trump
Administration's proposal, which has significant cuts to the
Department of Energy. They seem to be ignoring recommendations
from industry experts like you. For example, the fiscal year
2018 budget proposes to eliminate the Advanced Modeling Grid
Research subprogram that's within the Department of--excuse
me--within the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy
Reliability. I know that Administration officials recently
confirmed that they did not engage with the private sector at
all when determining which Department of Energy R&D programs
they would be cutting or eliminating.
So could you comment on what the consequences would be of
cutting research and development programs like that one that
provide us with the capabilities that you mentioned are so
important in upgrading the grid?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Sure. I think one of the hallmarks of
commercializing new technologies like energy storage and
bringing them to market is making sure that the needs of the
system and the benefits of the technology can be understood and
appreciated by all of the stakeholders, and so just maybe I can
offer an example of one of the early instances when we actually
deployed energy storage in the marketplace. This happened to be
in the mid-Atlantic region of the country in a market called
the PJM regional transmission market, and this was largely made
possible because of the fact that the market made the need
completely known to everybody that was involved in that place,
and so you know, it was need that was oriented around frequency
management and the role that energy storage could play towards
addressing the frequency management issue and provide all of
the service and for all of the stakeholders to evaluate those
benefits. The tools were available for that. And so I think
that's the key part towards commercializing new technologies,
and other parts of our electric sector where we don't have
organized electric markets like in the PJM market or portions
of the Northeast, I think the need still remains pretty
obscure.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, and I do want to get to another
question. Thank you very much.
Dr. Venky, the Trump Administration released its budget
proposal for fiscal year 2018, and the research and development
funding levels, as I mentioned for the Department of Energy,
are woefully inadequate, and the President said he wants to
usher in an era of American energy dominance yet he's
simultaneously proposing to cut and, frankly, devastate our
energy research enterprise, so that's not the path to a
stronger America. It's a path to energy reliance on
international, sometimes unstable competitors.
So does the fiscal year budget proposal set us on a path
toward energy dominance, and will the private sector be willing
and able to fund the research that will no longer be funded if
these budget cuts go into effect?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Thank you very much for that question
because I think you're right on. In fact, many of the things
mentioned including nuclear power at Idaho Nuclear Laboratory
or National Nuclear Energy Laboratory, which does a lot of test
facilities for many of our things, they come from the so-called
applied offices, and these are extremely important test
facilities which are vital for the national interest.
Second, in fact, this early-stage technology research is
not being done by the private industry. As I said, we do want
to involve them. There needs to be cooperative research and
development agreements but, in fact, we will become second
class from what I see in my role both as Foreign Secretary of
the National Academies and continuing looking at what is
happening in China and other places. That technology is moving
forward, and we need to be at the leading edge.
Ms. Bonamici. I agree that----
Mr. Narayanamurti. I cannot----
Ms. Bonamici. Dr. Venky, the energy efficiency and
renewable energy would receive a 70 percent cut, and some of
the activities will get an 80 percent cut. Oregonians are
leading the way with some of these technologies. What would be
the consequences of drastically reducing that research and
development for U.S. competitiveness in a global economy?
Mr. Narayanamurti. We will not be protecting our future. As
an American, I came here during the height of the space race
and the role of technology, how important it was. I'm
passionate about technology. It is politically agnostic. It
really will shape our future. Even electric cars, that horse
has run out of the barn. It's only two percent today but longer
term people learn to make it cheaper, it'll be much more
efficient because the engine is much easier to maintain from
simple engineering, the same reason shale revolution happened
because natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than coal. So it
behooves us--people talked about nuclear. Nuclear is extremely
important, and I think for this Committee, it's important to
know that no matter what happens, the electricity grid is going
to need base power, at least 20 percent base power, so we will
have to have it come either some kind of natural gas or nuclear
or some other--maybe even coal, clean coal where you capture
it. So we want to protect that. It has to be diversified and
heterogeneous and we should be advancing the nuclear technology
so it becomes safer, more cost-effective, et cetera, and doing
that kind of research, I personally think it's still valuable.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Dr. Venky.
I see my time is expired. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Bonamici.
And the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Weber, is recognized.
Mr. Weber. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My goodness. So many questions here.
Dr. Venky, I'm going to come right back to you. You said 20
percent base power backup, whether it's clean coal, whether
it's nuclear, whether it's natural gas. How did you get to 20
percent?
Mr. Narayanamurti. I think people have done great work and
figured out statistically what will happen so you know that you
need some base power. People have--people who know how to
manage grids will tell you that you've got to maintain
stability have a certain backup of steady power.
Mr. Weber. That seems low to me because that's one-fifth of
the power required.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Somebody may say it might be a little
higher. Certainly it's going to be required.
Mr. Weber. Would you agree that it's better to have more
power than less power?
Mr. Narayanamurti. It's always good to have. I believe in
safety.
Mr. Weber. Okay. And you believe in clean coal technology?
Mr. Narayanamurti. If clean coal can be done. So one of the
options--technology must provide options, and so when you have
one of the areas that long-term federal funding might be
valuable is in fact for carbon capture and storage if you can
actually make use of the carbon, which is even better. So I
actually want to keep those options open including for large
investments for certain cases because options is what the
technology is about.
Mr. Weber. Okay. Well, certainly they are, and I would say
the higher percentage is the best option there.
Mr. Narayanamurti. And then there are many global countries
which are dependent on those. They might have to have some
global implications, which might help the overall----
Mr. Weber. Was it Theodore Roosevelt who said ``Speak
softly and use nuclear as backup''? I'm just----
Mr. Narayanamurti. Sorry. I get excited.
Mr. Weber. Just asking.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Yes.
Mr. Weber. Dr. DeWitte, this question is for you. You were
a strong supporter of our nuclear energy legislation, which
passed the House three times last Congress--you alluded to
that--and again earlier this year as part of the DOE Research
Innovation Act. What could the policy--obviously you're
tracking that bill and paying attention. What could the policy
in that bill including the construction of that versatile
neutron source provide to you and other advanced reactor
companies? Would you elaborate on that for us?
Dr. DeWitte. Absolutely. Thank you for the question. That
legislation's incredibly important because it enables--one, it
opens up the opportunities and streamlines the processes to
work with the national labs and take advantage of their
infrastructure and capabilities, and it also, of course, paves
the way to provide new capabilities with a versatile neutron
source or a fast test reactor, which will accelerate both the
development of new fuels and materials so that we can get to
market more quickly with these technologies and discover
entirely new things that we don't even know about today because
we don't have those capabilities that a facility like that
would provide.
Mr. Weber. All while working with the regulatory agency
that would be involved in the process----
Dr. DeWitte. Absolutely.
Mr. Weber. --which would help expedite that process.
Dr. DeWitte. And that's critical too because they need to
learn from it, and we can all learn together, frankly.
Mr. Weber. You bet ya. Now, you also mentioned that France
and Sweden have done a really good job of reducing their
carbon. Do you know percentages and time frames?
Dr. DeWitte. Generally speaking, France decarbonized pretty
substantially in about 15 to 20 years. They effectively went to
80 percent nuclear-based power sources, which reduce their
carbon emissions by a commensurate amount. Sweden was a similar
time frame and a lesser but a similar impact. It wasn't quite
the 80 percent that----
Mr. Weber. Is France still at 80 percent today?
Dr. DeWitte. They're a little less just because they
haven't been building as many nuclear plants, and
unfortunately, they're moving to shut some down, which is a
terrible mistake.
Mr. Weber. Okay. And do you know the grid size per chance
of each of those countries?
Dr. DeWitte. I do not but I know that they are smaller of
course than the United States as it is, but off the top of my
head, I think the French grid is somewhere slightly smaller
than Texas.
Mr. Weber. Okay. You were vocal about how--is it Oklo? Is
that how you say that?
Dr. DeWitte. Yes, sir.
Mr. Weber. Oklo is funded through private investment but
this is not the norm for innovative nuclear companies. Why did
you choose that model?
Dr. DeWitte. Because that gave us a pathway to get to
market quickly. It also gave us a control over our own destiny
so we weren't at the whims of either a project manager at some
agency or at the political whims depending on what was going on
of the government. It gave us insulation from that. It also
gave us the ability to focus on what the market wants and not
have to cater to what perhaps a grant maker wants.
Mr. Weber. Refresh my memory. How long has the company been
in existence?
Dr. DeWitte. We started--we launched in 2013, and so it's
only been about a little over four years.
Mr. Weber. And where are you located?
Dr. DeWitte. We're in Sunnyvale, California.
Mr. Weber. Sunnyvale, California. Okay.
Mr. Chairman, I'm going to yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Weber.
And the gentleman from California, Mr. McNerney, is
recognized for his questions.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chairman. It's a good
hearing, and I'm enjoying listening to your testimony. I think
it's pretty bipartisan, and I look forward to continuing this
discussion.
Dr. Venky, would you describe the valley of death for
technology and how the government can play a role in that?
Mr. Narayanamurti. So as, you know----
Mr. McNerney. Your microphone.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Sorry. And I'll try to speak more
softly. I tend to get excited.
Mr. McNerney. I can understand that.
Mr. Narayanamurti. I would like to say that it's good to
have passion, though, to care about it, and I care deeply about
us being number one, and my Bell Labs past taught me that. We
always have the leading edge.
Mr. McNerney. Valley of death question.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Yes. So very early stages, if we take
the transistor, the original transistor was a total clooch.
Nobody ever thought you could actually make circuits out of it.
So the first phase is to sort of make it something which you
can actually make at least a few of. That's the first valley of
death, to actually where is this just a good research curiosity
and not really any technology. As you learn how to do this,
there are of course various stages where you would decide to
turn it off. The big valley of death comes a little bit before
manufacture because then you have to literally make millions of
them and actually invest a lot of money in that. So that--so
it's a question of the investment where you go up in scale, so
those two valleys of death are particular important, and the
first one, there's no clear question that we have a role.
That's exactly what ARPA-E or Energy Innovation Hubs, et
cetera, do or Engineering Research Centers.
The second one is for the very large issues, and there, you
could argue where is the appropriate government's role. At the
Harvard Kennedy School, when I first became Director of Science
Technology Public Policy program in 2011, we convened a very
large group including one of people from industry and a lot of
people from government and academia to debate the government's
role. It's actually there in that report, and there's not
uniform agreement, but everybody agreed for some particular
ones, it might be the nuclear case, it might be the carbon
capture or storage, but there's a huge public-goods aspect
where in fact you must have the options should in case
something happen, and coal is an important commodity worldwide,
that maybe there is a role. And then should there be some joint
thing. Everybody agreed including the industrialists of some
important points that things should be steady. We cannot let it
be just simply political, i.e. it is a failure.
Second, the companies must have a significant skin in the
game. They must have something like 50 percent skin in the
game, large skin in the game, and you could find that was the
view of this workshop which I held, and of course, some people
you may say for some things we don't have a role, the private
companies should take it and just spend the money.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you.
Mr. DeWitte, in your opinion, does the fiscal year 2018
budget proposal set us on the path toward energy dominance?
Dr. DeWitte. I don't think it does. I think there's more we
can do, absolutely. But I do think there are some good signs in
there, particularly the appropriations for fast test reactor.
I'm supportive of that. But I think we need to not lose sight
of the fact that if we really care about dominating in the
global space, the rest of the world is investing heavily and
massively. We cannot lose sight of that. And we have to pay
attention to that. But we also have to be focused and mindful
about what the markets are wanting and needing and not just in
the United States, and that's something that I think sometimes
there can be a focus too myopically on. We need to look
worldwide and how we can compete globally.
Mr. McNerney. Could you discuss how federal investments in
nuclear R&D have paved the way toward your company to succeed?
Dr. DeWitte. Oh, absolutely. That's a cornerstone upon
which we're building and all advanced reactor developers are
building. That's an absolute, fundamental necessity that we are
thankful was invested in.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you.
Dr. Venky, again, the department of Energy has four Energy
Innovation Hubs and they're establishing a fifth one on the
cross-cutting issue of the energy-water nexus, which was
supported by the last Congress. Do you support the use of--
continued use of this model, especially with regard to the
energy-water nexus?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Yes. Unlike ARPA-E, which I've looked at
in detail in my research, I know the Energy Innovation Hubs, I
know the one at Argonne, which is run by George Crabtree in
storage, I actually think it's a very important model. These--
the full impact will only be known about 10, 15 years down the
road but we know from history from what NSF has done and what
Department of Defense has done that these will be very
valuable. So I--it will have to be a balanced portfolio and
there do need to be certain critical areas where you actually
combine strengths. Industry should be involved as well as the
national laboratories and academia, and I actually think it's a
very good model, one of the different ways of doing it.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, my time went too fast. I'd like another five
minutes.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. McNerney.
The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Hultgren, is recognized.
Mr. Hultgren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all so
much for being here. This is an important hearing, and grateful
for your work, and it is so important for us, especially as the
Committee continues to look at ways in which the DOE can better
assist the private sector as they do what they do best:
innovate and bring new products to the market. Seeing firsthand
how the national labs work at Fermilab in my district and
Argonne just outside of my district, I've been able to see why
the labs and our user facilities are often referred to as the
crown jewel in our research ecosystem. I was glad to see stable
funding for these facilities in the energy and water
appropriations bill the Committee just reported, and I'll
continue to keep fighting to see this in the final bill as
well.
I wanted to address my first question to all of you if any
of you have comments on it, and wondered if you could just let
us know in what ways did you specifically use federal funded
research infrastructure like user facilities at the DOE
national labs to develop your technology, and what other
facilities should DOE be looking at and how could we change the
operating practices of the labs to make them even more
accessible to small business and startup developing innovative
technologies.
Mr. Narayanamurti. When I was at Bell Labs, we did much of
our research work in supporting, for example, light source
facilities at Brookhaven National Lab, at Argonne National
Laboratory as an example because they are extremely important,
and then when I was Vice President, I actually--of Sandia, we
actually created photolithography where one can use some of
these light sources at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, et cetera, to
advance lithography techniques, but those are very--these large
facilities including run by the Renewable Energy Laboratory,
these are all extremely important including high-performance
computing at Fermilab, at Argonne National Laboratory, and we
still use them even in academia including the computing
facilities. So test facilities are a crucial role and extremely
important.
Mr. Hultgren. Thank you. Anybody else?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. I could offer a comment. I think one of
the key areas that's being pretty helpful from the nation lab
side has been looking at the benefits that storage brings to
the grid. I think there's significant research that's being
done by NREL, by PNNL and Oak Ridge Labs and many of the
national labs towards establishing all of the values that
energy storage bring to the grid, right, and so I think that's
a cornerstone for us to make sure that all of the stakeholders
that are involved in some these key decision-making processes
are able to appreciate those benefits. Like I mentioned in my
testimony, I think it's one where the private sector can
significantly benefit from that type of research and
computational models that are deployed at the national labs.
Mr. Hultgren. Dr. DeWitte?
Dr. DeWitte. I'd be happy to. We've benefited tremendously
from the decades of research and development that Argonne led
in advanced reactor development, and we're actively working
with them now and the capabilities they and Idaho as well as
Sandia and others have, and the GAIN program has tremendously
help--been tremendously helpful in streamlining access and
partnering.
Mr. Hultgren. I'd like to follow up on that if that's all
right, Dr. DeWitte. As you said, Oklo participated in the
Gateway for Acceleration and Innovation in Nuclear, or GAIN
program, which provides the nuclear community with access to
the technical expertise at the national labs in order to
commercialize these new technologies. I wonder, do you think
these small-scale programs that provide access to technical
support and lab capabilities are a better investment than
providing large grants to move through the licensing process?
Dr. DeWitte. In general at this stage in the advanced
reactor industry, I do think they are more effective. I think
as the industry grows and matures, it might be valuable to
revisit that, but the impact that you can get and the return
effectively on investment that you can achieve with these small
grants that are targeted across a broad spectrum of areas. They
yield really high-impact results for very little money. What
we've done with a few hundred thousand dollars is frankly been
phenomenal in our mind as well as the mind of our investors,
very high impact.
Mr. Hultgren. That's great. Dr. DeWitte, sticking with you,
does working with DOE improve or slow down the process
necessary for startups like yours to create and implement
innovative technologies? What policy changes can be made at DOE
to make their engagement with the advanced reactor community
more productive?
Dr. DeWitte. Yeah, I think the answer is, there's benefits
and drawbacks at this point, and we're learning. Both parties
are learning how to do this better and more efficiently.
Contracting structures are being modernized and updated and
general interaction mechanisms, and GAIN is very helpful in
streamlining that process and identifying issues and helping
address them, but the biggest single issue is DOE lacks the
sense of urgency that the private sector demands.
Unfortunately, in nuclear, we've gotten complacent in the
industry like the pace of nuclear compared to the pace of our
Silicon Valley peers is order of magnitude different. So we're
trying to accelerate that, and DOE needs to, I think,
recalibrate that and continue to strive to be more urgent in
what they do.
Mr. Hultgren. Is there anything we can do to help with
that?
Dr. DeWitte. I think one of the issues is, it's been
helpful, I think, that you guys have done and will continue to
do is through frankly Congressman Weaver's bill to open up
access to the national laboratories and be able to partner with
them in different ways both as user facilities as well as
possible demonstration facilities. That and the impetus that
that provides I think is a huge opportunity to help address
that issue and otherwise continually revisiting that challenge
and seeing what can they do to be faster and more efficient
interacting with the private sector. It's just a constant
learning process.
Mr. Hultgren. Great. My time's expired. I'd love to follow
up with you, but I need to yield back my time.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Hultgren.
The gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Perlmutter, is recognized.
Mr. Perlmutter. Thanks, and Mr. Hultgren on that side and
Dr. Foster on this side like to talk about their labs in
Illinois. They're like Illinois Chamber of Commerce, okay? So I
want to talk about my lab and I want to start with you, Mr.
Kumaraswamy, the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, and
if you could talk about the way that that lab assists you and
others in making sure this technology that is being developed
really is valuable to the citizens of this country, so if you
could start there, sir?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Absolutely. I think they're doing some
fantastic work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We
are grateful for that. One of the key areas of focus for us at
AES is the application of using energy storage for peaking
applications, so when we think about the country actually
needing significant amounts of generation capacity that would
run for a fraction of the time, right? That's what we're
talking about when we talk about building new peaking gas
plants.
I think that energy storage is an extremely cost-effective
alternative for building those peaking gas plants, and that's
an area that we have continued to benefit from the NREL type of
studies, right, because one of the areas of research that goes
on at NREL is to make sure that you actually look at the
benefits of using storage for the peaking application and
produce those type of high-quality reports based on solid
analytics and that helps us pursue these conversations
regionally and nationally across many different stakeholders.
Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you.
And you know, Dr. Venky, you were talking about clean coal
and nuclear and, you know, natural gas, you know, a couple of
the others, and I think we need to have a whole diverse
approach to our energy production, and so I have a slide up
there which shows NREL working on photovoltaics, you know,
starting back when the lab started at 76 bucks down to about 30
cents, and there are some tax credits involved, and you know,
part of what we're trying to do as a country is to provide a
cheaper and better and less polluting as possible. So talk a
little bit about that continuum of research.
Mr. Narayanamurti. Thank you very much for that question.
Actually, NREL is a laboratory where another postdoc of mine
spent significant time looking at their portfolio and analyzing
and talking to people.
First I want to mention that we are not given a
consistent--somebody asked how can this help. That technology
transfer is an important mission and that we are proud of it.
So NREL actually developed the first technology which led to
First Solar, and First Solar is among the few highly U.S. solar
companies which are not in China or Germany. This is extremely
important and we should be proud of it, and we should actually
celebrate it because it came. The cost of solar of course has
been coming down very significantly and producing a lot of
jobs. You talk about the jobs, and these jobs will be there no
matter what. The energy system is going to be heterogeneous. It
is going to require things like solar as well as storage as
well as natural gas, and all of it on day one it'll evolve
depending on circumstances, on geography, natural resources, et
cetera. It's a worldwide issue so us working in this--but
however, the way that DOE also needs to make this as an
important strategy and can make it simpler but there are
certain things the NREL lab directors and the laboratory people
should have greater discussion of working across that boundary
under some proper guidelines that are open and fair in those
matters so sometimes it can be more interfering the way the
Department of Energy might run it. Developing a coherent policy
there would be valuable. It would help NREL.
Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you.
And Dr. Sant, so high school, college, law school, I worked
for a precast concrete company, and I was in the laboratory and
we'd do the cylinders and then crush them and see how strong
they were based on different things that we added. So talk to
me a little bit about how strong this CO2NCRETE
using a byproduct that could be a pollutant or could be a real
substantial ingredient, tell me how strong this
CO2NCRETE really is.
Mr. Sant. Good question. So in fact, about 65, 70 percent
of all concrete in the world that's cast, so to speak, has a
strength on the order of, let's say, about 30 megapascals.
That's the kind you'd use to build a house. The stuff that
we're producing is well within that territory so there's
clearly a large accessible market you can reach out to.
I will be careful to point out that we're not trying to
look for opportunity to build hundred-story buildings. We're
looking for opportunities to build everyday construction, which
is really where the large volume of construction is, building
as an example. It's also important to point out exactly in that
spectrum that there's a unique opportunity here because as I'm
sure you're well aware, the construction industry is not really
very tolerant of cost escalation. We like the lowest bid, and I
think what one of the opportunities that comes about with what
we're doing is, we seem to have a real line of sight for being
able to produce something that's cost-competitive as is, which
is an important part because that's how you start to get
penetration and diffusion.
Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you, and I yield back to the Chair.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Perlmutter.
Mr. Loudermilk. [Presiding] Give me a moment to get
prepared after the move here, and now I'll recognize myself for
five minutes for questions. That was convenient, wasn't it?
Dr. DeWitte, I'd like to kind of follow up on something
that you mentioned when you were having the discussion with Mr.
Webster--or Weber. I'm sorry. You talked about stability, and
it was the stability and where the government may be, what the
reaction of the government is, and the lack of stability going
forward when it comes to research and development, and I think
that really hits upon a problem that we're facing today because
politics is 90 percent emotion, and if we're good, ten percent
logic sometimes, and I see you laughing because we're seeing
that play out right now on the other side of Capitol.
But historically, we've had agencies and other elements of
government that had been that buffer between the whims of
politicians and the science of research and development. They
were that element that was there that focused on handling the
politics on our side but buffering that from the research and
development element of our society. The problem I see now from
my perspective is that the political drive has filtered into
those agencies. There seems to be a political element now
within those agencies which we didn't have as much in the past,
and some of that comes from talking with some of our research
institutions in Georgia.
I recently visited one of our research institutes--well, I
visited in the last couple years several of them, and I asked
the question, where do we need to go, what do we need to be
doing, and there's two things especially when it comes to
grants, that we're continually hearing the same concerns from
our research institutions is twofold. One is the cost to manage
the grant is going up, is extremely high, some up to 20 percent
and even more spent on--of the grant money spent just on
administration of the grant and reporting, and there's--I'm
seeing that that is pretty consistent. And the other is that
there's too much emphasis on short-time successes. In other
words, there's no room for failure anymore but failure is part
of the scientific process. I mean, if it wasn't--if Thomas
Edison was receiving a modern-day grant, he wouldn't have
invented the light bulb because, as he said, he didn't--his
failures were 10,000 ways to prove something didn't work.
So Dr. DeWitte, and I'll expand this out to others on the
panel, do you see that? I know you're dealing with private
sector and it makes me think that maybe that's some of the
reason why you're not going to the government for funding if
you would opine on that?
Dr. DeWitte. Of course. Thank you for the question, and I
think that's a very real situation. We recently made some
decisions at Oklo with our investors and our executive team not
to pursue certain federal opportunities for funding because the
costs of managing that were too high. They just simply weren't
worth it. And the other part of it is, often those can be
targeted in a scope that's, like you said, so risk-averse that
it's focusing merely on near-term objectives that really aren't
moving the ball forward or they're not even looking at
opportunities for finding impact in a market specifically, and
as a result, you can kind of just miss the entire objective
altogether, and I think that's a very real challenge today.
Mr. Loudermilk. Dr. Sant, I noticed you were nodding at
part of that. Would you like to----
Mr. Sant. I think that is right. You know, very often I
think a lot of goals end up being very narrowly focused, which
means that you have to conform to a pretty narrow spectrum of
ideas that even potentially look at, and also given the fact
that there's limitations in how much risk you can take, that
turns out to be problematic, but I think the part which also
turns out to the harder is grant timelines turn out to be
rather short. I know that most of them are three years, if
you're really lucky, 5, and very often sustained work just
needs much longer durations than that without an annual review
deciding your fate, so to speak.
Mr. Loudermilk. Yes, Doctor?
Mr. Narayanamurti. A couple of comments on the same point.
The Energy Innovation Hubs, et cetera, Energy Frontier Research
Centers, are partially aimed at that longer-term issue, that
is, five-year funded or four-year funded, same with the NSF, to
encourage that, and some of that needs to happen.
I think appropriate for this Committee is a lot of it's
energy. The Department of Energy has been studied a lot
including the national labs, which are our crown jewels, and
the Senate Committee has made recommendations including how the
costs in the DOE might be minimized, et cetera, which would be
quite important in tackling the kind of problem you're asking
about, in fact, the reporting requirements, et cetera, which
would ease some of the burden and get more effect for the
actual work being done.
Mr. Loudermilk. Well, thank you, and this is something that
has been a passion of mine is reforming our grant system to
reduce that cost so more of the money will actually go into the
research and development and also allow for longer term
because, you know, failure is part of scientific research. So
thank you all for being here.
At this time the Chair will recognize the gentlewoman from
Hawaii, Ms. Hanabusa.
Ms. Hanabusa. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Venky, I am a great friend of DARPA. I've sat on the
Armed Service Committees for years, and DARPA, in my opinion,
has been one of the best hidden secrets that the Department of
Defense has, especially in terms of its ability to innovate and
its structure. Some have described it as 100 geniuses running
all over the place with a travel agent kind of moderating, so
it doesn't have the usual bureaucratic structure that we think
about.
You have testified that you've spent a lot of time looking
at the structure of ARPA-E, and as you know, in the Trump
budget, his proposed budget, there's only about $20 million and
it's really to transition the demise of ARPA-E. Can you first
tell me from your perspective and what you know about how ARPA-
e operates its importance and its significance as well as the
kinds of research that you can point to that have been actually
very critical for the Energy Department?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Thank you very much for asking that
question. I feel quite passionately about ARPA-E because it's a
very important innovation in the Department of Energy. You
know, we all value peer review. Peer review is important, but
it has its limitation because it leads more to the average, and
so ultimately you need program managers who are technically
savvy, know the people and the work which is being done, and
will consult obviously--you cannot just do it arbitrarily but
try to actually pinpoint high risk and high reward where there
are actually people who are evaluating the very high-risk part
and then they would look at that, take an average, look at that
distribution and by judgment make some high risk, and that's
what ARPA does too. So it's an important innovation in the
management system where you combine some good aspects of peer
along with judgment, and especially with regard to high risk.
The other thing which when we looked at many of the awards,
we looked at--my postdoc looked at some 4,000 awards which were
given by APRA-E. You should remember it's still early. It's
only five years old. But what we found was that there was many
scientific papers which were published in leading journals like
Science and Nature and their impact was similar to that
published in the Office of Science and yet there were a large
number of patents. There were very few patents from the Office
of Science. So that tells me ARPA-E is not being negligent in
its science but is also developing new technology, i.e. the
other is a missed opportunity. So I'm very positive of that
aspect.
And then in its early stage, there are some examples. The
National Academies recently issued a report that actually I
didn't know that. A colleague of mine at Harvard, Joanna
Eisenberg, whom I hired a long time ago, she has developed some
very narrow biomaterials which actually now are going to the
Nature paper. Another colleague at Advanced Storage, battery
flow, which is also scientific as well as leading to a company.
So there are different forms here, and the early prognosis is
good, and my guess is, it is a very important innovation along
with Energy Innovation Hubs and Energy Frontier Research
Centers to want to have portfolio.
Ms. Hanabusa. So what do you think is going to take its
place, if anything can take its place?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Oh, I hope it does not--I hope in the
end--I believe including ARPA-E and much of this work was often
a bipartisan. I really believe this should be bipartisan. It is
for the country. And that doesn't mean the program manager is
always going to choose exactly the right one. That is not--even
private people don't do it. And these are risky but there
should be some successes, and it should be bipartisan. I hope
it really is funded.
Ms. Hanabusa. Mr. DeWitte, when Dr. Venky was speaking, I
saw you nodding. Do you have an opinion of ARPA-E?
Dr. DeWitte. It's an interesting question. I do. I mean,
we've supported different, I guess, workshops, if you will, and
have been rather impressed by some of the activity that's gone
on. However, one of the things that I think--it's an early-
stage organization, and it's still growing in a lot of cases
and still has a lot of upside. That said, it has struggled, I
think, and we've seen certain struggles of it being a little
too academic in certain areas. That's not always a bad thing,
though. I just think it's a matter of making sure you have an
organization that continues to learn because some of these
things should be able to afford to fail and learn and grow from
that. That's something that we really like to see happen.
Ms. Hanabusa. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Ms. Hanabusa.
And the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Higgins, is
recognized for his questions.
Mr. Higgins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, thank you for appearing before this full
Committee. Your combined IQ is frighteningly high and a welcome
transition from some of the things we witness in Congress.
Representing a state that is recognized as perhaps the
Nation's leader in the oil and gas industry, I witnessed
regulatory overreach over the last decade to push the American
oil and gas industry to the shores of other countries, and
considering the totality of circumstance of the world's
ecology, my personal opinion is that it's a psychologically
unsound logic.
So Mr. DeWitte, my question is for you, sir, regarding
nuclear technology. Nuclear energy is one of the most heavily
regulate industries in the United States, and we must balance
the benefits of nuclear energy with potential safety risks and
ecological concerns. These regulations can impede the potential
for the export of U.S. nuclear technology but we must recognize
that a high regulatory burden on exports in the United States
could work against nuclear safety worldwide and security goals
if it allows less regulated technologies form countries like
Russia and China to reach new nuclear markers. What types of
regulations do you believe, sir, are unnecessarily holding back
the export of U.S. nuclear technology?
Dr. DeWitte. Thank you very much for the question. I'm very
passionate about this issue because it's a huge hindrance to
global leadership in nuclear and it's something that we really
actively as a country need to reevaluate because, like you
said, our barriers we're self-imposing are preventing us from
being a massive world player that we should be here but also
ceding the opportunities to frankly less mature and less safe
and less beneficial competitors, and the reality is, we need to
reevaluate that at the DOE level as well as the Department of
Commerce, the NRC and the Department of State.
In the last ten years or so, there's been significant
changes to the rules about export controls in nuclear that have
been very detrimental. They've gone in the wrong direction. The
expectations that were set in terms of exporting reactors to,
for example, the UAE when we were negotiating those deals 8 or
so years ago were misguided and have set the wrong expectations
and the wrong standards that aren't aligned with what frankly
the U.S.'s goal and the global goals for nuclear deployment
should be. We need to reevaluate those and we have to do it now
because it's affecting us today.
Mr. Higgins. Thank you for that answer. I concur. Would you
have specific recommendations perhaps you could provide this
full Committee in writing over the course of the next month or
so whereby we may consider your recommendations, sir----
Dr. DeWitte. I would be----
Mr. Higgins. --as we attempt in a bipartisan manner to
consider of course ecological concerns of our planet while at
the same time recognizing the superiority of clean United
States technology regarding energy development?
Dr. DeWitte. I would be happy to. American nuclear
technology is the best so I'd be happy to do that.
Mr. Higgins. One more brief question, if I may. The
Department of Energy has recently made improvements to its Tech
to Market and Technology Transitions programs. However, many
companies still struggle with tech transfer contracting
procedures that can take up to a year to complete. From your
perspective, how could the federal government streamline
public-private partnerships and ease access to taxpayer-
supported research?
Dr. DeWitte. I'll take a first go at that. I think one of
the issues that we've seen is the fact that the contracting
structures and the liability bases that the labs are
effectively using to make their determinations are out of touch
with what the objectives of the national labs really should be
to the point that it's--they're afraid to do anything. We need
to reevaluate that. It gets to a more fundamental question I
think is, what are the contracting structures for the operators
of the national labs? Bell Labs operated Sandia Labs in a
beautiful way and in a way that centered around advancing the
national interest and achieving and growing national
excellence. I think we've lost that today. I think it's time to
reevaluate some of that so we can get back to what the core
mission and the core capabilities of the labs are. I think
that's one of the starting points, and there'd be some others,
but for the sake of time, I'd be happy to defer those to
writing.
Mr. Higgins. Thank you. I would appreciate that. I believe
your colleague has a comment.
Mr. Narayanamurti. I want to just second this aspect here.
It is very important that the DOE is now actually having a
technology transfer lab and a lot of it can be done at the
laboratory level, people that understand the technology
closely. That was our finding with NREL so I think reform and
really recognizing strategically would add greatly and improve
our technology transfer.
Mr. Higgins. Thank you, sir. Gentlemen, thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Higgins.
And the gentleman from New York, Mr. Tonko, is recognized.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of
our witnesses for participating in a very interesting hearing.
The only way we are going to meet our energy challenges is
through investments in research and development. We cannot lose
sight of the vital role that government plays in innovation.
The federal government must be an active partner with our
universities and certainly with our private sector.
Having an R&D portfolio that covers the spectrum from basic
sciences to technology development, testing and deployment
greatly augments the work being done by the private sector and
in the university community, and sustained support of these
efforts is essential to lowering costs and improving
performance of our energy technologies.
Dr. Sant, can you tell us a little bit about the role
federal agencies have played in supporting your efforts?
Mr. Sant. Of course. Happy to answer. So federal agencies,
like I said, the Department of Transportation, the National
Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have all funded
our work. It's all been funded at early stage. We're in a
university. However, the important thing to point out is that
we've been able to access support from each of these agencies
that is really, really very strategic. It's come together to be
able to address questions that are very narrow but we're very
interested in. For example, we're interested in trying to
understand how to really take building materials, which
literally eat carbon dioxide. There's two parts to this. So of
course while we look at the basic to the applied continuum,
while we're working at the basic part, we need support going
all the way into the applied end of the spectrum, and the
reason that I say this is, while we do things in a laboratory
and it's easy often to realize successes, the challenge that
you often run into is that as you start to scale up, there are
things that don't work, which require you to go back to the
lab, and so you need this pathway where you can stage research
and funding dollars to be able to go across the entire pathway,
and that's how you succeed in taking ideas and converting them
into innovation and then translating them into technology.
I think this is especially important to point out with
conventional industries, for example, like the energy sector,
the construction sector, which have very limited risk
appetites, so to speak, and that's why it's very necessary for
the government to underwrite a larger portion of the R&D
pathway than would be typical, for example, let's say, in the
semiconductor space, and hence I think it's extremely strategic
that agencies keep this in mind as funding decisions are made
because it has implications on timeline and how you focus
investment to go from ideas to wins that you can translate
globally.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. And you talked about that carbon
footprint in your comments slightly. The DOE's Office of Fossil
Energy----
Mr. Sant. Yes.
Mr. Tonko. --has been working to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions through their fossil energy research, and you've been
involved in that somewhat?
Mr. Sant. Yes, so we are actually funded at this point
through the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Mr. Tonko. Wonderful, and certainly I agree that across the
field we need to develop technologies to reduce our carbon
footprint, which is what I'm very proud of in terms of
supporting a bill to make advanced gas turbines more efficient.
The gas turbine R&D bill that I'm carrying with a fellow
Republican with authorize DOE's Office of Fossil Energy to
carry out a multiyear, multiphase R&D program to improve the
efficiency of gas turbines used in our power generation systems
and to identify the technologies that ultimately will lead to
gas turbine combined cycle efficiency of 67 percent, what might
seem just like a trivial improvement but tremendously important
in terms of electrons saved.
If Members of Congress are going to claim to support an
all-of-the-above energy philosophy, then we need to support and
fund an all-of-the-above research strategy to complement it.
That means supporting robust funding for EERE and certainly for
ARPA-E.
Dr. Venky, we know that ARPA-E plays a critical role in
expanding our portfolio of innovation programs and lowering the
risk on projects that would not be supported by the private
sector. Can you give some examples of how the products,
processes, fuels or technologies that have been developed as a
result of ARPA-E's investments are changing our energy system
and addressing the challenges we face?
Mr. Narayanamurti. As I mentioned to another question from
the Congresswoman from Hawaii, the National Academies recently
issued a study. Of course, ARPA-E is still in the early stages,
only four years old or something like that, but there are
several examples we see highlighted. One was actually from
Harvard with the slip-on technology, and I know of work that is
done at Santa Barbara, Gallium Electronics, which has blossomed
significantly, and as I mentioned in my previous response, they
also have been doing some very good science. It's really a
missed opportunity if you don't do them together. It's really--
there's so many good examples. They're the right track, and I
will hasten to bet that ten years from now with the fullness of
time, we're going to have lots of examples because there's both
good science being done and patents being created.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. Thank you very much.
I'm out of time, so Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Tonko.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Babin, is recognized.
Mr. Babin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I
appreciate all you witnesses being here today.
Dr. Sant, I would like to ask you a couple of questions if
you don't mind. Can you explain the upcycling process in
layman's terms?
Mr. Sant. Sure.
Mr. Babin. And how the process differs from traditional
approaches to carbon utilization if you don't mind?
Mr. Sant. Sure. So in a brief sentence, we can define
upcycling as beneficially utilizing a waste so it's this idea
of converting trash into treasure. We combust fossil fuels, we
emit carbon dioxide from the stack. The work that we're focused
on is really trying to take that carbon dioxide and reutilize
it. Now, the way we reutilize it is, we use this compound
called calcium hydroxide, which you produce, for example, by
either burning limestone and emitting CO2 and so
hence it lets you keep the same mineralized CO2
within a loop so that's how you reuse it. The other way you can
actually produce calcium hydroxide is by using alkaline waste
that you get from industries like slags and fly ash as an
example and extracting calcium and magnesium ions out of those.
So what you're really looking at doing is creating, let's say,
a chemical sponge to soak carbon dioxide, and over the course
of that reaction, you undergo a transformation to produce
limestone.
Now, an important thing to point out about this upcycling
process is the reason it turns out to be very attractive is it
gives you a strategy for both avoiding and reducing the amount
of carbon dioxide you would produce otherwise by producing
traditional ordinary Portland cement. That's an important thing
because what you can do with this approach is, you can create
an offtake partnership so essentially a power producer can work
alongside a cement producer since both of them emit CO2
but one produces a material that can potentially soak up
CO2. You let these industries actually start to work
together.
I think the sector-level synergies are extremely important
to catalyze because as you go forward and we look at this idea
of trying to create new synergies and new efficiencies in the
energy space, we need to get industries that were otherwise
not, let's say, correlated with each other, interacting with
each other.
Mr. Babin. All right. What is--if this was a widely
deployed process throughout the land, what would be the impact?
Would it be dramatic? Would it be a partial impact? Please let
me know what you think there.
Mr. Sant. Sure. That's a very good question actually. So if
we assume global scaling of some of these processes which
utilize carbon dioxide, landscape analysis that we have done
and others have done shows that you can basically use up to
about ten percent of global CO2 emissions, right, so
it's on the order of let's say three or four billion tons. Now,
ten percent seems like a small number. It's actually a really
important number because what you're really showing is a value
system and a pathway to creating value that you cannot utilize
otherwise.
So when you look at concrete, which is one way that you can
utilize CO2, or plastic, which is another way to do
it, by creating value, you show that there's opportunity where
there was none, and I think that's something which is
important, for example, for industry to be able to see because
we are very often used to seeing carbon dioxide as a negative.
What we're trying to do is really create this positive
perception which is associated with revenue generation because
that helps you really create longer-term pathways which are
associated with more risk which do of course render a more
permanent solution but you want to get points up on the board
before you go for the big ones every time.
Mr. Babin. Okay. And then just to maybe enhance what you
just said, in what way can your upcycling technology
potentially surpass more traditional CO2 utilization
such as through the use of captured carbon for enhanced oil
recovery, for example?
Mr. Sant. So one of the really important things about the
work that we're doing is that we can utilize flue gas without
any pre-processing or without any post-processing, so an
important aspect as to what really drives up the cost that's
associated with carbon capture as an example utilization is
lots of these processes require enriched or purified
CO2. The way our process is designed is we can
basically take flue gas that comes out of a stack in a power
plant or in a cement plant or a petrochemical facility and use
it directly as a reagent in our chemical process. I think this
is an extremely important point because the cost of capture is
really a limiting step at this point, and if you can start to
utilize flue gas without a capture cost, now you really start
to see some economic viability that can start to model these
processes.
Mr. Babin. Okay. Thank you very much, and I yield back, Mr.
Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Babin.
And the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Beyer, is recognized.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much.
Dr. DeWitte, I was fascinated by all your conversation,
your work on the small nuclear reactors. I was sitting next to
Congresswoman Jackie Rosen from Nevada, and she was sort of--I
don't want to mischaracterize but instantaneously anxious about
the fuel. So I pointed out the first page of your testimony
about how you're reusing fuels from some of the other places
including the plutonium. At the end of the day, is storage
still a problem or an issue that has to be solved with respect
to the small nuclear reactors?
Dr. DeWitte. In terms of waste storage?
Mr. Beyer. Yes.
Dr. DeWitte. It's a different problem but it's a very much
smaller problem in the sense that the output effectively is
going to be something that's radioactive for nominally 300
years at most, at most, and a very small volume of what you
would produce otherwise. So really, what we're doing today is
we're taking fuel. We're only extracting about one percent of
the total energy content in that fuel and then we're putting
it--trying to dispose of it. What we're trying--that's what
we're doing today. What we're trying to do and what other fast
reactors can do is take that and extract basically the rest of
that 99 percent energy content out. Now, there's still some
radioactive material at the end of the day but you can safely
store that. It only needs to last for a couple hundred years
before it decays away to nothing. At that point you can have it
vitrified. You can make glasses out of that you could drink out
of, in fact, so it would be perfectly safe. It's a very
manageable problem at that point.
Mr. Beyer. The sense I'm getting from your testimony is
that the development of your fast reactor technology to scale
could solve a lot of the disposal problems of the bigger
reactors that we have already.
Dr. DeWitte. Absolutely. It changes it from a problem to
really an opportunity because now you have a bunch of fuel that
we could power the United States on for hundreds of years, like
all of the United States power needs, so it's a phenomenal
opportunity.
Mr. Beyer. You talked a little bit I know before about the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they've been adapting to
small rather than big. How about the insurance companies, you
know, the liability and--are they still treating you like Three
Mile Island or----
Dr. DeWitte. That's an excellent question, and I think it's
a question that needs to become more prevalent and mature going
forward. There's a lot of differences between small reactors
and advanced reactors in terms of what the potential risks are,
the potential consequences, and therefore what the liability
should be and what the insurance capabilities need to be, and
generally it's a much smaller footprint, it's a much smaller
need, so the current framework in some ways and in some cases
is kind of--it's inefficient. It's not set to actual technology
capabilities today, and that needs to modernize, and I think
that conversation in general needs to pick up. Frankly, now is
the time to do that.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much.
Mr. Kumaraswamy, I've had many conversations with folks in
your business about the exciting role that batteries can play,
especially when you think about power plants as a step by step.
Do you see this as also promoting clean energy, reducing
emissions, having a role in a 21st century electric grid?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Absolutely. I think the way we see is that
it gives us the capability to recouple the demand and the
supply piece, which gives us transformational capabilities,
right, and so again, like I said, it has significant potential
for you to think about increasing the efficiency that we
operate the existing system with, both in the general and the
transformation and distribution side. It's a question that we
get asked all the time about whether storage or generation or
transmission or distribution, and it's all of the above really,
right, because it is able to play into all of those areas that
we have traditionally assumed to be pretty bifurcated. And like
I said previously, when we are faced with a future where the
baseload generation plants are facing retirement decisions and
we're continuing to add more renewable sources into the grid,
there's a need that you have to add more peaking capacity into
the grid, and the most cost-effective way of providing the
peaking capacity is through deployment of large-scale energy
storage.
Mr. Beyer. Are you working with Elon Musk and all these
electric cars and steering wheels--cars without steering
wheels, things like that?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. I buy some of the products.
Mr. Beyer. Dr. Venky, you know, one of the criticisms
that's often come from my friends on the other side about
Department of Energy was picking winners and losers and
interfering with the free market by crowding out private
investment, but you worked at Bell Labs, you worked at Sandia
National Laboratory, how do you perceive this or what's been
your experience about the federal government having a role in
these things?
Mr. Narayanamurti. Well, I--first of all, there are many
forms in which you can actually interact with industry. With
the early stages, take ARPA-E. They are having wide
solicitations. They ask for a lot of different proposals. They
get reviews of them, and obviously some people get selected,
some don't. This is true for even academia. So it's a very
quite robust process but your risk case is not going to be
perfect. In a sense, you must pick winners and losers, so to
speak, and hopefully the ARPA-E program managers are wise
enough that--and long term of course--so I just don't see that
argument at all as long as the process is fair and this is how
it is done. It's always a judgment question. This is true. I
complain when my grant is not approved. Was it unfair to me?
You know, as long as the process was robust.
So the other feature which I think is important is there
are many different kinds. There can be joint agreements with
industry where they're actually putting skin in the game and
say we want your help. There's cooperative research and
development agreements. So we should allow for different forms
and different industries but the early-stage part, I don't see
that as an issue. Even in the very long range, as long as we
have an open process and we have this thing properly
documented, that would be great.
And the Loan Guarantee program has been under debate.
That's the one where you can actually have a serious argument.
It of course has to be done with much greater care because the
amount of investment is huge.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Doctor, very much.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Beyer.
And the gentleman from Kansas, Mr. Marshall, is recognized
for his questions.
Mr. Marshall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My first question's
for Dr. Sant. Dr. Sant, Chairman Smith and I had the
opportunity to recently see what we believe is the country's
largest 3D printer at Wichita State University, and one of the
technologies they showed us was additive manufacturing to the
3D printing, and they described it as a potential game changer
for manufacturing. Can you talk a little bit about how you
think they could use this additive technology to manufacturing?
Would it help you scale up your technology?
Mr. Sant. Yes. So actually we are working on additive
manufacturing, specifically related to construction systems. In
fact, there's great opportunities. An important part of what
we're working on, and I think we've stumbled into this but it's
turned out to be a major opportunity. The material that we're
working with is much easier and must better suited for additive
manufacturing than traditional concrete, and this turns out to
be quite an advantage for a variety of reasons. So traditional
concrete that amongst the poorest what you call strength-to-
weight ratios of synthetic materials, using additive
manufacturing components lets you use materials a lot more
effectively so if you imagine that you can produce structural
elements--beams, columns and slabs--and take them out to a
construction site and start to assemble them kind of like a
large Lego set that has major impacts on the construction
sector because it really starts to improve construction
productivity. If you can imagine--very often we heard of
construction projects being delayed. If you can imagine you're
taking prebuilt sections out on site and starting to assemble
those, that's a much more efficient process to be able to
construct with much more efficient systems so additive
manufacturing clearly in our minds is the path forward as far
as construction goes.
Mr. Marshall. Well, thanks, and what I'm going to always
remember is they showed us the structure of wings for
airplanes. They of course manufacture lots of airplane stuff in
Wichita, and they basically told the computer to make it
stronger and it ended up looking like a bird's wing and just
the micro structure of it.
I'll go to Mr. Kumaraswamy next. Battery storage is a huge
issue obviously. A third of the energy in Kansas is now
generated via wind energy, and the storage of that wind energy
is always the challenge, and we hope to--we are already an
energy exporter from Kansas, so just talk a little bit about
your technology. As I understand and read your process, it's
a--your batteries are side to side to side. What's the future
look like for battery storage or what's your vision and where
do you think we're going with this?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Sure. That's a great question. We--the
product that we have, which is called Advancion, is an energy
storage platform. We are not a battery manufacturer company so
we actually buy batteries from many different certified
suppliers. It's a platform that we have that we have developed
that actually has some unique advantages in terms of serving
the grid. It's pretty modular in terms of the architecture that
we have come up with, and again, we are in a leadership
position in deploying energy storage solutions both nationally
in the United States and globally.
For the specific issue that you mentioned, there are
significant applications of energy storage, so if you have
intermittent variable generation, one of the issues that you
have is making sure that the time in which the generation
actually is produced aligns with the peak times in which the
demand occurs on the grid condition, right? And so oftentimes
what we see with both wind and solar generation is that there's
a misalignment of when the generation production happens and
when the demand for electricity happens in the late evening
hours when people actually come back home, and that's one of
the applications of energy storage is the ability to actually
move all of the generation that's happening in the early
afternoon periods towards the early evening periods when the
demand hits its peak, and we are currently deploying some of
these longer-duration storage projects also.
We have a project that's currently under construction in
California. It's 100-megawatt, 400-megawatt-hour energy storage
project so it's 100 megawatt, 4 hours of duration project. So
think about moving your generation from the 4 p.m. hour to the
8 p.m. hour. That can be completely done, and we think that
it's the most cost-effective way in which we can accomplish
that objective.
Mr. Marshall. Are these still just commercial batteries
side to side to side to side or what's that look like?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. It's lithium-ion batteries. The Advancion
platform that I mentioned is largely agnostic to technology. We
basically look at whatever technology makes the most amount of
sense for our customers, which are utilities in most cases, but
to date what we have found is that lithium ion has the best
amount of efficiency and cost-effectiveness right now, and as
far as we can see, that still applies at least in the next 2-
to three-year time frame with the synergies that lithium-ion
technology has with the transportation sector on the electric
vehicle side. It still continues to be the technology that we
are anticipating will provide the characteristics that can be
helpful for the grid.
Mr. Marshall. Thank you. I wanted to talk nuclear
engineering but I'm out of time. Thank you, and I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Marshall.
And the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Crist, thank you for
your patience.
Mr. Crist. Not at all. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you to all the panelists for being here today to
share your unique perspectives on energy technology research
and development.
I'm from Florida, the Sunshine State, where our energy is
our economy and our environment. Protecting our natural
resources is of the utmost importance to myself and the
constituents I represent. That's why I'm extremely interested
in increasing the use of clean energy to meet our environmental
needs, particularly in the area of solar.
Mr. Kumaraswamy, from my understanding, better energy
storage technology could help the United States to greatly
expand our portfolio of zero-emission energy sources. Can you
discuss how energy storage can be combined with renewables like
solar and wind to help reach our clean energy and environmental
goals?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Absolutely. Just also as a note that the
United States actually has a leadership position in terms of
deployment of grid-scale energy storage. I think as of
Bloomberg data that's a couple of months old right now, we have
more than 30 to 40 percent of the global energy storage
installations across the whole world. So it's something that we
should be proud of.
And energy storage, again, you know, it's one of those
things where there's significant potential for using that along
with renewable energy technologies like solar and wind. AES
actually is currently also developing a project in Kauai at the
end of Hawaii which is a combined solar plus storage project,
right, and so it's a combination of solar technology and
battery-based energy storage technology to make sure that you
almost create a firm block of power that can be developed to
the grid. Like I was mentioning previously, one of the things
that you had to worry about if you have intermittent variable
generation is the misalignment of when the generation occurs in
the system and when the demand actually peaks, and storage is
the glue that can help you bridge that gap that you have in the
system.
And the other issue is also that in several cases what we
see is that when you keep adding more variable generation to
the system, there's a tendency for us to think about adding
more peaking gas plants to balance all of the generation. In
our view, it's not the most prudent choice to add capacity into
the grid that runs for like a fraction of the year, right? If
you think about peaking gas plants that we have across the
country, the average capacity factor of that is something like
5 to six percent of the year. In an economy where we're moving
towards shared services in pretty much every commodity that we
think about. If we think about Air BnB on the hotel side or
Uber for the transportation side, we are thinking about shared
services, right? So in that economy, we think that if you make
multibillion-dollar investments into peaking gas plants but run
for a fraction of the year, that's just not in the best
interest of ratepayers, and I think storage would be a lost
more cost-effective in performing that function.
Mr. Crist. Is the same type of energy storage equally
suited to grids powered by different energy sources, wind
versus solar versus natural gas versus coal-fired power plants
or would it make more sense to use several different types of
energy storage?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. The storage itself is agnostic again to
the type of generation that you have. It just gives you the
capability to store energy and release it at a later point in
time, right? And so it's agnostic to whether it's coal or
natural gas or any other source that you actually use to charge
but again, in many markets that we have gone into, we have seen
significant benefits including environmental benefits that
additional storage brings to the grid.
Part of the reason is also that it lets you optimize the
existing portfolio of generation plants to operate more
efficiently, right, because as the demand keeps changing, power
plants keep moving up and down, basically they're consuming
more fuel or less fuel to balance the needs of the grid, right?
If you add storage into the system, the storage actually is
able to take up the job of moving up and down to balance the
demand conditions, letting the existing power plants operate
much more efficiently which means that they're running at
better heat ray blocks, at better efficiency blocks, which
means that their emissions go down, so that's a significant
benefit that we have seen in some of these markets.
Mr. Crist. Well, thank you. It's clear to me that we need
greater energy storage in America. What can the federal
government, Congress in particular, do to help encourage
additional research and development in this field, in your
view?
Mr. Kumaraswamy. Like I mentioned in my testimony, I think
on the lithium-ion side of the house, I think the technology is
stable. There's a lot of private capital that's chasing more
innovation like improving cell density and production and costs
and all of that, so I think private capital will continue to
push that forward.
There is a significant role for us to make investments in
early-stage R&D on other promising battery chemistries that
have greater potential in the near future like extending the
duration in which you can actually storage energy, right? So I
think that's an area that the government should continue to
focus on.
And I think the second and most important area is also that
we want greater recognition of the benefits that storage brings
to the grid, particularly for applications like peaking
capacity. When we go and talk to regulators across the country,
it's one of those common questions that we bring up all the
time, which is how does it compare with a peaking gas plant,
and it's an apples-to-oranges type of comparison because a
peaking gas plant has to be turned on to provide a service and
then it shuts off, and when it shuts off, it can't provide a
service. In contrast, energy storage is a 24 by 7 resource.
It's connected to the grid all the time. So when you need that
peaking capacity, it's able to discharge and provide you that
capacity, and for the remainder of the day or the remainder of
the time, it's actually able to provide for other ancillary
services that are needed for the grid.
And so the other area of focus should be continued
investments in the national labs to make sure that there's
awareness of all of the benefits that storage brings to the
grid.
Mr. Crist. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
yield back.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Crist.
And again, thank you all, our experts, for being here
today. The testimony to me was very informative and very
valuable to us.
The record will stay open for a couple of weeks in case
Members have additional written questions they want to submit,
and that concludes our business, and we stand adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:12 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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