[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
OVERSIGHT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JUNE 25, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-30
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
_________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
36-794 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois Ranking Member
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon MO BROOKS, Alabama
AMI BERA, California, BILL POSEY, Florida
Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania BRIAN BABIN, Texas
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
BRAD SHERMAN, California TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee PETE OLSON, Texas
JERRY McNERNEY, California ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
PAUL TONKO, New York JIM BAIRD, Indiana
BILL FOSTER, Illinois JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington
DON BEYER, Virginia JENNIFFER GONZALEZ-COLON, Puerto
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida Rico
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois VACANCY
KATIE HILL, California
BEN McADAMS, Utah
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
C O N T E N T S
June 25, 2019
Page
Hearing Charter.................................................. 2
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 10
Written statement............................................ 11
Statement by Representative Randy Weber, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 11
Written statement............................................ 13
Written statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 14
Witnesses:
The Honorable Rick Perry, Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy
Oral Statement............................................... 15
Written Statement............................................ 17
Discussion....................................................... 36
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
The Honorable Rick Perry, Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy... 84
Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record
Report submitted by the Honorable Rick Perry, Secretary, U.S.
Department of Energy........................................... 120
OVERSIGHT OF THE DEPARTMENT
OF ENERGY'S RESEARCH
AND DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISE
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2019
House of Representatives,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:03 a.m., in
room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eddie
Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the Committee] presiding.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. The hearing will come to order. And
without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recess at
any time.
Let me say good morning and welcome to today's hearing,
the ``Oversight of the Department of Energy's Research and
Development Enterprise.''
Welcome, Mr. Secretary. We are delighted that you are here
today.
As you know, this Committee has jurisdiction over the
Department of Energy's (DOE's) vitally important science and
energy research and development (R&D) activities, the
laboratories and facilities. So I hope we see you much more
frequently from now on, and I look forward to working with you
throughout this Congress.
With the budget season mostly behind us, I'd like to bring
just a few items to your attention. I'll start with the good
news, which is that, despite the Administration's best efforts
to make draconian cuts across the board to DOE research and
development programs, most actually fared well in the House of
Representatives. I am particularly pleased to see the increases
to the budget for ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency--
Energy) and the Loan Programs Office, both of which have
yielded truly transformative results for energy technologies of
all types.
I'm also quite happy that the House supported a
substantial increase in the ITER (International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor) international fusion project, which I
strongly advocated for as well. I went to visit that project a
couple of years ago, and practically everybody over there was a
Texan. It's crucial that we honor our commitment to this
project and ensure that we are providing the support for that
the Department of Energy itself identified would be necessary
to maintain its construction schedule and minimize its total
cost to U.S. taxpayers. The completion and operation of this
project will have substantial contributions to what we know as
fusion energy today. If successful, this project could be a
huge gamechanger in the energy future of not only our nation,
but for humanity as a whole.
Now for the bad news. Yet again, it is extremely
disheartening that quite frankly disturbing to see the dramatic
cuts laid out in the Administration's budget proposal. I know
that you must think I sound like a broken record, Mr.
Secretary, because we had this same conversation last year, but
unfortunately, it is necessary until the Administration stops
producing these short-sighted proposals and deploys a thorough,
thoughtful process for developing its budget request. I'm
thankful for your enthusiastic report of all these programs,
Mr. Secretary, but enthusiasm alone is really not enough for
the American people. We need to see constructive, forward-
looking budget proposals being submitted to Congress.
Moving beyond the budget, we are here today to allow our
Members to ask questions pertaining to all research and
development programs within the entire Department, as the title
of this hearing suggests. Constituents from Member districts on
both sides of the aisle benefit greatly from these programs,
and we believe it is our duty to ensure the responsible use of
their tax dollars. Many of these programs haven't been
authorized in many years, or ever, in some cases. We hope to
create more thoughtful, bipartisan legislation this Congress to
support the important science and energy research stewarded by
the Department, and we want to work with you in that effort.
With that, I'd like to thank you again for being here, Mr.
Secretary, and I look forward to a productive discussion this
morning.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]
Good morning, everyone, and thank you Mr. Secretary, for
appearing before us today. It is good to see you again. As you
know, this Committee has jurisdiction over all of the
Department of Energy's vitally important science and energy
research and development activities, laboratories, and
facilities, so I hope we see you much more frequently from now
on, and I look forward to working with you throughout this
Congress.
With the budget season mostly behind us, I'd like to bring
just a few items to your attention. I'll start with the good
news, which is that despite the Administration's best efforts
to make draconian cuts across the board to DOE research and
development programs, most actually fared well in the House of
Representatives. I am particularly pleased to see the increases
to the budgets for ARPA-E and the Loan Programs Office, both of
which have yielded truly transformative results for energy
technologies of all types.
I am also quite happy that the House supported a
substantial increase to the ITER international fusion project,
which I strongly advocated for as well. It is crucial that we
honor our commitment to this project, and ensure that we are
providing the support that the Department of Energy itself
identified would be necessary to maintain its construction
schedule and minimize its total cost to U.S. taxpayers. The
completion and operation of ITER will make substantial
contributions to what we know of fusion energy today. If
successful, this project could be a huge game changer in the
energy future of not only our nation, but for humanity as a
whole.
Now, for the bad news. Yet again, it is extremely
disheartening and quite frankly disturbing to see the dramatic
cuts laid out in the Administration's budget proposal. I know
you must think I sound like a broken record, Mr. Secretary,
because we had this same conversation last year, but
unfortunately it is necessary until the Administration stops
producing these short-sighted proposals and deploys a thorough,
thoughtful process for developing its budget request. I am
thankful for your enthusiastic support of all these programs,
Mr. Secretary. But enthusiasm alone is not enough for the
American people. We need to see constructive, forward looking
budget proposals being submitted to Congress.
Moving beyond the budget, we are here today to allow our
Members to ask questions pertaining to all research and
development programs within the entire Department, as the title
of this hearing suggests. Constituents from Member districts on
both sides of the aisle benefit greatly from these programs,
and we believe it is our duty to ensure the responsible use of
their tax dollars. Many of these programs haven't been
authorized in many years, or ever, in some cases. We hope to
create some thoughtful, bipartisan legislation this Congress to
support the important science and energy research stewarded by
the Department, and we want to work with you in that effort.
With that, I would like to thank you again for being here, Mr.
Secretary, and I look forward to a productive discussion this
morning.
Chairwoman Johnson. Our Ranking Member is not present, but
we have a well-known Texan who is sitting in for him today, and
so now I'd recognize Mr. Weber.
Mr. Weber. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for hosting this
hearing, and welcome to our fellow Texas Statesman, Governor,
Secretary Rick Perry. We appreciate him being here.
As we've heard from the Chairwoman, the Department of
Energy and Secretary Perry have proposed a budget that requests
cuts to programs that have traditionally received bipartisan
support from this committee. I'd like to remind my colleagues
on both sides of the aisle of two important facts. No. 1, the
budget proposal is just that, a proposal. We, the Members of
Congress, are the ones tasked with actually setting the funding
levels after hearing from important witnesses like Secretary
Perry today.
Second, I want to stress that we will have tough decisions
to make on the DOE budget. We do not have unlimited funds, and
we cannot fund every project, no matter how worthy. Critical
programs must be prioritized, and we have to make smart,
targeted investments that give the American taxpayer the best
bang for their buck year after year.
And at the Department of Energy, there is an incredible
range of programs for us to review. This committee's
jurisdiction includes all of DOE's civilian research, including
over $10 billion in research, development, demonstration, and
commercial application programs, as well as the Department's 17
national labs. This amount incredibly totals 1/3 of the
Department of Energy's budget, 1/3 of the budget.
Mr. Secretary, I don't have to tell you that you lead an
incredible Department--quite well, I might add--with a long
history of major research achievements. Over the past 70 years,
research conducted at DOE's national labs has led to monumental
achievements in medicine, manufacturing, computing, as well as
the development of innovative energy technology. Each national
lab has made invaluable contributions to the United States'
scientific progress, and they have repeatedly demonstrated that
basic science research is the most effective way to encourage
innovation.
Additionally, DOE's 26 user facilities provide our
Nation's researchers with the most cutting-edge tools of modern
science, like advanced light sources, particle accelerators,
and the two fastest supercomputers in the world. Each year,
approximately 22,000 researchers from academia and the private
sector use DOE facilities to perform new scientific research
and to develop new technologies.
Here at home, DOE heads most federally sponsored research
in the physical sciences. Internationally, the United States,
through the Department's work, is the world leader in basic
science research and technological development. But other
countries like China are making significant investments in
basic research, threatening America's global standing as the
leader in scientific knowledge. Without the Department's
continued investment in basic and early stage research, the
U.S. is in danger of losing its global technology edge.
By investing wisely in this research, the Department can
achieve its goal of scientific discovery and technological
breakthroughs for future generations. DOE must also invest in
the research infrastructure that brings the best scientists in
the world to the United States.
I look forward to hearing from Secretary Perry about DOE's
implementation of several key pieces of bipartisan Science
Committee legislation that was signed into law last Congress,
including the DOE Research and Innovation Act; the National
Quantum Initiative Act; and my bill, the Nuclear Energy
Innovation Capabilities Act.
The Department of Energy must prioritize the kind of
ground-breaking basic research authorized in these bills over
grants for technology that is ready for commercial deployment.
When the government tries to push developed technology into the
market, it wastes limited resources in competition with private
investors. But when basic research is the priority and target
of Federal support, everyone has the opportunity to access the
fundamental knowledge that can lead to the development of
future technologies.
I want to say thanks again to Secretary Perry for taking
the time to be here today, and I yield the balance of my time,
Madam Chair.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Weber follows:]
Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for hosting this hearing and
a big Texas welcome to our fellow statesman, Secretary Rick
Perry.
As we've heard from the Chairwoman, the Department of
Energy and Secretary Perry have proposed a budget that requests
cuts to programs that have traditionally received bipartisan
support from this committee.
I'd like to remind my colleagues on both sides of the aisle
of two important facts. Number one, the budget proposal is just
that; a proposal. We, the Members of Congress, are the ones
tasked with actually setting the funding levels after hearing
from important witnesses, like Secretary Perry today.
Second, I want to stress that we will have tough decisions
to make on the DOE budget. We don't have unlimited funds, and
we can't fund every project, no matter how worthy. Critical
programs must be prioritized, and we have to make smart,
targeted investments that give the American taxpayer the best
bang for their buck year after year.
And at the Department of Energy, there is an incredible
range of programs for us to review. This Committee's
jurisdiction includes all of DOE's civilian research, including
over $10 billion in research, development, demonstration, and
commercial application programs, as well as the Department's 17
national labs. This amount totals one-third of the DOE's
budget.
Mr. Secretary, I don't have to tell you that you lead an
incredible Department, with a long history of major research
achievements.
Over the past 70 years, research conducted at DOE's
national labs has led to monumental achievements in medicine,
manufacturing, computing, as well as the development of
innovative energy technology. Each national lab has made
invaluable contributions to U.S. scientific progress. And they
have repeatedly demonstrated that basic science research is the
most effective way to encourage innovation.
Additionally, DOE's 26 user facilities provide our nation's
researchers with the most cutting-edge tools of modern science,
like advanced light sources, particle accelerators, and the two
fastest supercomputers in the world. Each year, approximately
22,000 researchers from academia and the private sector use DOE
facilities to perform new scientific research and develop new
technologies.
Here at home, DOE heads most federally-sponsored research
in the physical sciences. Internationally, the United States,
through the Department's work, is the world leader in basic
science research and technological development.
But other countries, like China, are making significant
investments in basic research, threatening America's global
standing as the leader in scientific knowledge. Without the
Department's continued investment in basic and early-stage
research, the U.S. will lose its global technology edge.
By investing wisely in this research, the Department can
achieve its goal of scientific discovery and technological
breakthroughs for future generations. DOE must also invest in
the research infrastructure that brings the best scientists in
the world to the U.S.
I look forward to hearing from Secretary Perry about DOE's
implementation of several key pieces of bipartisan Science
Committee legislation that was signed into law last Congress--
including the DOE Research and Innovation Act, the National
Quantum Initiative Act, and my bill, the Nuclear Energy
Innovation Capabilities Act.
DOE must prioritize the kind of ground-breaking basic
research authorized in these bills over grants for technology
that is ready for commercial deployment. When the government
tries to push developed technology into the market, it wastes
limited resources in competition with private investors.
But when basic research is the priority and target of
federal support, everyone has the opportunity to access the
fundamental knowledge that can lead to the development of
future technologies.
Thank you again Secretary Perry for taking the time to be
here today and I yield the balance of my time, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Thank you very much. If
there are Members who wish to submit additional opening
statements, your statements will be added to the record at this
point.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]
Today we welcome Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to discuss
the Department's fiscal year 2020 budget request and the
Department's priorities.
Before he joined the Administration in 2017, Secretary
Perry served as the 47th Governor of Texas and under his
direction, the State of Texas became a national leader in
energy innovation and economic growth. The Secretary has
brought this same approach and valuable experience to the
Department of Energy--and today we can see the results.
DOE is the nation's largest federal sponsor of basic
research in the physical sciences and is a world leader in
technology development and innovation. The Department funds
robust research programs across the scientific disciplines--
from materials science and mathematical modeling to fusion
energy science and the characterization of neutrinos.
Through decades of strategic investments in R&D, DOE is
also responsible for groundbreaking discoveries in computing,
manufacturing, and medicine.
The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has
jurisdiction over all of the Department's civilian research,
development, demonstration, and commercial application
programs, as well as the 17 DOE National Laboratories. This is
equal to over $10 billion in spending at DOE--approximately one
third of its overall budget. Our discussion with the Secretary
will focus on programs within this broad jurisdiction.
The President's request emphasizes increased reliance on
the private sector to drive commercialization of energy
technologies. This ensures the Department will focus limited
research funds on the early-stage and basic research that the
private sector cannot perform. While I support efforts to
refocus on fundamental research, the FY 2020 budget request
also cuts funding in the majority of these DOE programs from
enacted levels.
This Committee has consistently supported robust funding
for basic research performed by the Department, in particular
the Office of Science. The President's request includes an
overall $1.04 billion decrease in funding for the Office of
Science--including a $307 million cut to Basic Energy Sciences,
a $211 million cut to High Energy Physics, and a $161 million
cut to Fusion Energy Sciences--all programs that have
historically received strong bipartisan support from this
Committee.
For example, Committee Members on both sides of the aisle
have steadily supported full funding for U.S. contributions to
the ITER project, a key fusion energy experiment funded through
the Office of Science. With steep cuts to the Fusion program,
the President's budget proposes just $108 million in U.S.
contributions for this project, which is only one third of what
is required in FY 2020 to maintain our participation in this
world-leading international research collaboration. Fusion
could be the next great energy frontier--with the potential to
produce near-limitless, zero emission power for centuries.
We can't afford to cut investments in this critical
science.
However, by comparison, the FY 2020 budget request includes
stable funding for Advanced Scientific Computing Research
(ASCR), one of the Office of Science's top priority programs.
ASCR supports the Exascale Computing Project and its mission
goal of completing of the world's first exascale computing
system.
Exascale systems can perform one billion, billion
calculations per second and developing one is critical to
enabling scientific discovery, strengthening national security,
and promoting U.S. industrial competitiveness. Thanks to DOE's
targeted investments in ASCR, the United States now hosts the
top two fastest supercomputers in the world--Summit at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory--and the Department is on track to reach
exascale by 2021. As other countries like China race to develop
exascale systems of their own, DOE's continued strong support
of advanced computing is essential to maintain U.S. leadership
in this field.
In order to support innovation in next-generation science,
DOE must also invest in research infrastructure and in cross-
cutting research initiatives with other Federal agencies. This
includes initiatives in critical research areas like quantum
information science, big data and artificial intelligence, and
nuclear science, as well as key investments in our nation's
light sources and neutron sources.
I want to thank Secretary Perry for his testimony today,
and for outlining his plans to execute DOE's mission objectives
in the upcoming fiscal year and beyond for this Committee.
Maintaining U.S. leadership in science will require a shared
commitment to prioritize DOE research and support the next
generation of energy technology.
Chairwoman Johnson. At this time, I'd like to introduce
our witness. The Honorable Rick Perry currently serves as the
United States 14th Secretary of Energy. He oversees the
Department of Energy, which is tasked with advancing national,
economic, and energy security of the United States, promoting
scientific and technological innovation in support of that
mission, and ensuring the environmental cleanup in the national
nuclear weapons complex.
Prior to his current Cabinet post, Mr. Perry was elected
Lieutenant Governor of Texas in 1998 and later served as
Governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015. He was the longest-serving
Governor in Texas history.
Not to tell my age, but I've known this gentleman since he
was a young man serving in Texas. I'm going to ask our
Secretary to make his opening statements, and then we'll
proceed with questions. Mr. Perry.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE RICK PERRY,
SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Secretary Perry. Madam Chairwoman, thank you for your kind
remarks. Our years in grade school together were great. And
we're just out of college, for the record. So thank you.
And, Ranking Member Weber, it's my great pleasure to be in
front of you in your current role, and thank you for your
friendship and your wise counsel through the years, as I can
say to a number of the Members that are up there.
Governor Crist, it's always a pleasure to be in front of a
colleague, and as we were making remarks behind the door there
that life after Governor is good, and so thank you for your
friendship and assistance through the years.
It's a pleasure to be in front of each of you Members
today and to share with you my observations about the
President's 2020 budget and his budget request, as Ranking
Member Weber so succinctly described it, appropriately, for the
Department of Energy.
If I may, to further highlight some of the great work that
we're doing, there's just a very short video here that I'd like
to ask you to enjoy with me.
[Video shown.]
Secretary Perry. And it actually has volume, too. It's
kind of a new thing we're working on over at the agency to get
some volume with our video.
Basically, what I'm saying here is that we do some pretty
good--for those of you that aren't awake----
[Video shown.]
Secretary Perry. Thank you for the privilege to be able to
show that to you. As you can see, it is a really exciting time
to be at the helm of DOE.
And I appeared before this Committee last year, and I
committed to fulfill a number of goals, including protecting
our critical energy infrastructure from cyber threats;
investing in early stage, cutting-edge research and
development; and advancing our leadership in exascale in
quantum computing. And I'm proud to report to you that DOE has
made progress in every one of those areas.
This past fall, I fulfilled a commitment to visit all 17
of our national labs, and I got to witness firsthand, as you
saw in that video, the brilliant work that those incredible
facilities are engaged in. You'll have the opportunity to see
examples at National Lab Day July the 24th. It's going to be
right up here in your backyard on the Hill, and I hope you will
consider coming by.
Our national labs are homes to, as Randy shared with you,
the two fastest supercomputers in the world, 5 of the 10
fastest supercomputers in the world, and we've got next-
generation if you will exascale computers that are coming
online in the very near future to accelerate America's capacity
and capabilities in the artificial intelligence (AI) world.
This is really important. It's important in a host of different
reasons, which we'll expound on here during the course of this
committee meeting.
But I am completely and absolutely convinced the impact
that this is going to have on the world that we live in, not
just in the area of energy as we commonly think about it, but a
broad array of science-oriented, science-centric areas.
Unfortunately, the success of our national labs has also
made them a target, a target for people and nations seeking to
steal America's ingenuity. And in response, we're requiring DOE
employees to fully disclose their involvement in foreign
government talent recruitment programs that are sponsored by
countries of risk. And you know all who all those are, Iran and
China and Russia, North Korea.
And we've banned our researchers from joining Chinese
talent recruitment programs. I happen to think these are
commonsense approaches. These are things that we should be
doing. And they will better protect our national security and
advance research and technology.
So in the coming weeks and months I look forward to
working with all of you at the Department as we work on these
programs that we talked about, our shared programs, Dr. Babin,
and we--I thank you, Madam Chair, for your kindness, your
hospitality, and for your longtime friendship. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Perry follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
At this point, we'll begin our first round of questions,
and the Chair recognizes herself for the first round.
Mr. Secretary, do you stand by the proposal of the
elimination of ARPA-E? I've heard you make some very positive
statements, but we are concerned about the future of ARPA-E.
It's been such a positive program, and our Appropriations
Committee just recommended a fair amount of funding.
Secretary Perry. That's right.
Chairwoman Johnson. Give us a little bit of how you stand
on ARPA-E.
Secretary Perry. Madam Chair, I'm going to give you a
backwards look, and then I'm going to give you a forward look
if I may. My backwards look is to my previous position of being
the Governor of the State of Texas and the work that we did
there while Randy was a member of the Texas legislature. We
worked together on some really exciting, successful public-
private partnerships, Texas Enterprise Fund, Texas Technology
Fund, and those basically were mini-ARPA-E's if you will. If--a
little different in some senses, but when you think about the
cutting-edge technology that comes out of our national labs,
for instance, the dollars that we expend in that arena, our
desire to bring technology and then commercialize it, that's
what ARPA-E from my perspective historically has been about.
And I respect OMB's work in what they do, but I'll be real
honest with you. I respect this Congress more. And I understand
how the process works, and I think Ranking Member Weber was
spot on when he reminded us that this is a starting point, and
we recognize that.
So going forward, just like I said in other Committee
hearings previously, I respect this process, and I understand
how this process works fairly well. And we're going to expend
the dollars--and hopefully very wisely and thoughtfully and
efficiently--that Congress appropriates.
So as you all have historically said, we like ARPA-E, we
want it to be run efficiently and effectively, be wise about
it, but we hear the message here. Previous Congress sent a
clear message about what they think ARPA-E needs to be. I hope
you see a reflection of your desire for this program to go
forward and to expend these dollars thoughtfully with the
result of programs that are making for a better future for this
country.
Chairwoman Johnson. Well, thank you. Have you had a dialog
with some stakeholders as to whether or not they would continue
to invest in these programs without support, or has there been
the opportunity for that dialog?
Secretary Perry. Yes. Yes, Madam Chair, there has been
that dialog with stakeholders. And, as a matter of fact, the
timeliness of your question is succinct here today. DOE is
going to be announcing our 2019 Technology Commercialization
Fund Project selections. And there are 77 different projects,
and they're going to be matched with funds from the private
sector.
As a matter fact, I think there's about seven of you on
this Committee. Congressman Baird, your district is one of
those that's going to be receiving some of that, and I think,
Congressman Lamb and Perlmutter, Wexton, Tonko, McAdams, and
Governor Crist, your district as well are all going to have
funding for projects.
And so to lengthen the answer just a little bit more,
Madam Chair, those conversations are almost continual because
of the work that's gone on at our national labs. The focus of
the Department when it comes to--I'm a big believer both in a
personal and professional way that public-private partnerships
are very, very good for commercializing technology that is
developed in our national labs.
Chairwoman Johnson. Well, thank you very much. My time is
expired. I'll now recognize Mr. Weber.
Mr. Weber. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And I'm glad to hear, Mr. Secretary, that you all are
going to have National Lab Day on July 24th in honor of Charlie
Crist's birthday, so happy birthday in advance, Governor.
Secretary Perry. That's exactly why I picked that day,
Governor.
Mr. Weber. So I just didn't realize he had that kind of
pull, you know?
Secretary Perry, as you know, the President signed my bill
the nuclear iteration--Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities
Act into law last fall. And while I've been pleased to see the
Department take some important steps in implementing this
legislation such as announcing the mission need for the
versatile fast test reactor, which is authorized in the bill,
we really heard kind of little from the Department about the
rest of the bill.
So talking about the budget specifically, I was kind of
disappointed to see the fiscal year 2020 budget request did not
include funding for the National Reactor Innovation Center,
which was included in the budget request. And just by way of
notes, this innovation center is critical to the development of
advanced reactors and will allow those private companies you
were talking about to prove their reactor designs without
having to endure the lengthy NRC (Nuclear Regulatory
Commission) licensing process. And it's also my understanding
that the Department of Defense, DOD, is interested in this
funding and a reactor prototype at one of the national labs
through this program. So I guess my question to you is how do
we not get that in the budget? What's your thoughts on that
process?
Secretary Perry. One of the things I'm going to do if I
may, Madam Chair, is I'm going to ask for Under Secretary
Dabbar to share just a little bit of his observation here
because I think this is really important. He's head of our
science shop. All the--all of the--our national labs are
underneath him and what have you.
But, Randy, before--or, excuse me, Congressman Weber,
before we do that, I just want to say that we think some of the
most exciting research that's being done at the Department is
dealing with small modular reactors (SMRs), the advanced
reactors that are out there. We've got two private-sector
companies that we're working incredibly close with. We've got a
piece of line land on Idaho National Lab property where we're
going to be, you know, building this out and seeing some real
progress made on this. And we think that not only from a
commercialization aspect of being able to deliver emissions-
free power, it's also going to be a very, very important tool
to nonproliferation with these small modular reactors.
So, if I may, could I get Paul Dabbar to share----
Mr. Weber. Sure. If you'd be very quick because I do have
a question for----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. All right.
Mr. Dabbar. So the versatile test reactor, which is part
of the legislation we'd like to thank this Committee for
passing, we're moving down the process to identify where to
actually place it, at which of the national labs. As you can
probably guess, we have more than one interest from a national
lab Director about where to place it. But we're in the middle
of that process. And obviously, we're looking forward to
placing it in one of the labs. It has a long history which we
have several of, of nuclear power. Yes, good. Thank you.
Mr. Weber. OK. Well, I'll take that to mean that you
really don't know what the cost is going to be, so how much to
put in the budget, but we do need to focus on that. Let me go
to question two.
Fiscal year 2020 budget request includes $161 million cut
to the Fusion Energy Sciences program, and, as a result,
proposes $108 million in the U.S. contributions to the ITER
project, which is the world-leading international research
collaboration in fusion energy that has in the past received
strong and continued bipartisan support from this very
committee.
This funding level is just over 1/3 of what is required in
fiscal year 2020 to maintain the U.S. commitment to participate
in ITER. So my question is is the Department recommending that
we withdraw from ITER because--it's hard to square this fusion
budget which would make the U.S. responsible for delaying the
project and increasing the overall cost with maintaining our
international commitment. Are we thinking of withdrawing from
the ITER project? I mean, how can we expect other countries to
make investments in the U.S.-hosted international projects
like, for example, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility if we
don't keep this--our commitments overseas?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir, Congressman, you know the
history of this, and it really got sideways back when I showed
up here in the spring of 2017. ITER was in pretty dire straits
frankly. It had poor management. There was not the type of
results that I think any of us were comfortable with.
Subsequently, they have a new Executive Director in there
that's doing some really good work. We have regained our
confidence. I went and was on the ground there to see, to talk,
to interact with the folks there in the south of France where
this facility is. We have become convinced that they are making
the right kind of progress. We're doing more in-kind
contribution on the solenoid that's coming out of General
Atomics in California rather than direct appropriations. But
with that said, the $107 million request for 2020 is sufficient
to maintain the progress on some of the highest-priority U.S.
hardware contributions that we're making.
So to answer your question specifically, we are
recommending that we continue to be engaged with this,
cautiously optimistic that when we roll back in here for the
next budget cycle that we'll be able to even have better
evidence of progress that they're making.
Mr. Weber. Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Secretary. It's no
surprise to me that you focused on it and were already on top
of it, so I appreciate it, but I just--again, I think it's
important, and so I think we want to continue that commitment
as much as we possibly can.
I'm over my time, Madam Chair. Thank you. I yield back.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Lofgren.
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for
being here.
Following up on Congressman Weber's focus on fusion
energy, I wanted to mention the National Ignition Facility at
the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is the world's
largest laser run by the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA). It's the premier facility within the
United States for high energy density and inertial confinement
fusion research.
I was concerned that the budget from the Administration
was low. However, the House Administration Committee has
provided level funding. I just would throw this caution out.
When we lowball in the budget, it does have an impact on morale
among the scientists even though--this is not the first time
this has happened. It happened under the prior Administration
as well where the request is low. Congress, you know, gets
level funding, but it has an impact that's not positive on the
morale of the workforce, so just for the future.
I'd just like to ask about the Energy Research and
Innovation Act, which the President signed last fall. There's a
provision in there which directs you to establish and support
an R&D program in inertial fusion for energy applications.
There was a clear recommendation in the National Academies'
report which highlighted several promising research areas to
explore with the enormous clean energy potential of inertial
fusion energy concepts. These are areas that the weapons
Stockpile Stewardship Program would never pursue because it's
really not their bailiwick, but the research needs are quite
different.
What is the status of the Department's implementation of
this now statutory direction to establish and support an
inertial fusion energy research and development program?
Secretary Perry. Madam Chair, if I could, I'd like to
have, again, Paul Dabbar kind of share with you a little more
detail on that specific----
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you. Thank you.
Secretary Perry. Paul?
Mr. Dabbar. So, Congresswoman, we are very much focused on
seeing commercial fusion move forward. We've been very
enthusiastic about the private sector also working with us,
increasingly so, including Congressman Bera's--where he went to
university at Irvine, which is Tri Alpha Energy. In inertial
confinement there's a company that came out of technology from
Livermore and from Los Alamos called General Fusion, which is
actually approaching this from an inertial-confinement point of
view. We've accelerated our work with the private sector,
including with inertial confinement, that inertial confinement
company, and we look forward to advancing that technology, as
well as others.
Ms. Lofgren. So the Department's R&D program is basically
just private sector?
Mr. Dabbar. No. No, Congresswoman. Most of it is the
science area, but what we've seen is that there has been a
growth in the private sector also, so----
Ms. Lofgren. Which is good.
Mr. Dabbar. Yes. And so--and they've brought--there's over
$1 billion worth of private-sector money which has been raised,
and one of them is in inertial confinement. And we are engaged
with them in a number of programs to engage with them, amongst
others.
Ms. Lofgren. I wonder if I could ask this. Could you
follow up this hearing with a more detailed, in writing, report
on kind of the status of implementing this statute and where we
are, next steps, and the like? This is enormously important to
the Committee on both sides of the aisle and really to our
country and the world. I would very much appreciate that if you
could do that.
Secretary Perry. Ms. Lofgren, I--let me just add to that
that I certainly--I don't think I am out of line here inviting
you to go take a look at one or both of the private-sector
efforts that are going on. TAE, which is down in the--is that
the Inland Empire?
Mr. Bera. It's----
Secretary Perry. Is that right, Dr. Bera? Is that----
Mr. Bera. It's in Orange County.
Secretary Perry. In Orange County. Yes, it's in Irvine.
And----
Ms. Lofgren. It's not inertial, though.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Lofgren. I mean, it's interesting, but----
Secretary Perry. It--yes. So there's just some fascinating
work. I visited there down at General Atomics and what they're
doing in that side of it.
And then at Idaho National Lab, some of the work that's
going on there, and I think you're next door to Lawrence
Livermore----
Ms. Lofgren. Correct.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. And with the--with that
light source there. It's--there are some--it's down the road,
we understand that, but investments that we're making today we
may look back on 20 years ago--20 years from now and say well
done.
Ms. Lofgren. I'll just note, thank you for your enthusiasm
for the national labs. It's really important.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Lofgren. And I think if we put the kind of focus on
this area of research that we should, we'll get there a lot
sooner. We've never adequately funded the science on it. And I
thank you, Mr. Secretary. And my time is expired.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Posey.
Mr. Posey. Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding this
hearing, and thank you for appearing, Mr. Secretary. Over here.
About half the people in this room are old enough to
remember the fuel crisis, the energy crisis in 1973 where
everybody in the world that--everybody in this country that
wanted to get gas had to go get in line on an odd number of tag
days in Florida and wait for hours to get a half a tank of gas,
just brought everything to a screeching stop. And in response
to which Congress passed and President Carter signed the act in
1977 which created the Department of Energy to make sure we
would never, ever again be victims of such an energy crisis.
And I commend you for reaching the current point that
we're at now, an unprecedented level of energy independence, so
thank you for a job well done, you and the Administration.
I was very happy to see your references to space in your
video presentation. Ultimately, the exploration of space is
about the survival of the human species and exploring the
unknown to expand our knowledge.
Last year, the House Science, Space, and Technology
Committee worked together to pass H.R. 589, a bipartisan
Department of Energy reauthorization bill, which is now law.
And, as you know, part of the legislation directs the
Department to carry out a program on low-dose radiation
research within the Office of Science, which is going to be
necessary to better understand for the future of human
spaceflight.
And so I just wondered if you could give us a little bit
of an update on the status of the plan to implement the program
and, if not, you can mail it to me.
Secretary Perry. Thank you, Congressman Posey. That focus
on the partnering between DOE and other agencies of government,
in this case NASA, is--it's one of the more fascinating things
that we do, particularly developing the ways to propel us to
deep space. There's going to be work that's done, and small
modular reactors may be part of the tie-in here to the
propulsion on some of these.
But the other side of it is there's a program that's--I
think it's called KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling
Technology), and I actually--I got to see the work that they
are doing on it at the Nevada test site a few months back. And
KRUSTY is an acronym for Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling
Technology. And Los Alamos is the--is actually where the work's
being done. They were just--there were showing it to us out at
the test site in Nevada. And it's--the--they're partnering--
it's just like you see public-private partnerships and you see
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), DOE, DOD
particularly through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency) working together on some of these projects. The
national labs partner up often, so Los Alamos and the Y-12
National Security Complex, and then the national security--I
always call it the Nevada test site. That's not the proper
name, but the Nevada national security site are where they're
building and testing these full-scale flight prototypes for
nuclear reactor.
And by the--we're going to get back into space. We're
going to go very far into space, and it's going to be driven by
funding that you all are making available through these
national labs, so thank you.
Mr. Posey. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Bera.
Mr. Bera. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Secretary Perry, thank you for being here. I just wanted
to follow up on a conversation we had a year ago regarding the
budget hearing and the 123 nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia.
You know, at that time there were negotiations taking place,
and I think in your comments there was some hesitation of
moving forward without that 123 Agreement. And, you know, just
for the record, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 requires a
peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement, which is the 123
Agreement for export of nuclear commodities.
I know this past March, earlier this year, you approved
the Part 810 authorizations for transfer of certain nuclear
energy technologies to Saudi Arabia. And while that Part 810
authorization doesn't require the 123 Agreement to be in place,
part of the approval process requires us to consider whether
the transfer of these technologies are in the best interest of
the United States, which is what the 123 Agreement typically
symbolizes.
And let me put it in context. My other committee is the
House Foreign Affairs Committee and obviously we are very
concerned about the tensions in the region. You know, we've
obviously pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. In recent days,
the Iranian regime has talked about increasing their nuclear
production and potentially restarting their nuclear program.
Last year, the Saudi Crown Prince on ``60 Minutes''
suggested that if Iran were to pursue nuclear weapons, they
would certainly be within their right to pursue nuclear weapons
as well. And I think all of the Members of this Committee,
certainly when we're thinking about the United States'
interest, would be very concerned about seeing a nuclear arms
race take off in the Middle East in one of the most unstable
parts of the world.
So both in my role as Chairman of the Subcommittee on
Oversight for Foreign Affairs, as well as my role as Vice Chair
on this Committee, could you give us an update on where we are
with Saudi nuclear sales?
Secretary Perry. Dr. Bera, thank you. I think you very
succinctly, for all of us, described why it's so important for
the United States to continue to be engaged in that process. If
you really care about nonproliferation, if you care about peace
in the Middle East if you will, and there's--in the broadest
context, the United States being involved, being engaged,
continuing to have a discussion and a negotiation going on not
just with Saudi Arabia but with all the folks that we can bring
to the table on this, wherever they may be.
I think it's important from a--just in edification
process, the--there's been some misinformation out there from
my perspective on the Part 810 and what--just what does that
mean. And this isn't some blessing that we're, you know,
basically saying, you know, here's the keys to the kingdom so
to speak and, you know, take this information, do as you will
with it and what have you. And 810--signing off on a Part 810
simply says it's OK to go have a conversation. It's OK to--you
know, to start this conversation with a U.S. technology company
dealing with civil nuclear and your--and you don't necessarily
have to have a 123 agreement in place to do that. Thailand is a
great example of a country that we have signed Part 810s with.
And then there was some other misinformation out there
about this information somehow or another is secret, and it's
not. We have--now, some of it is proprietary. And previous
Administrations have made that proprietary information, you
know, off the books so to speak, appropriately. But we tried to
be--you know, we've got a reading room where the folks can come
and take a look at it, and we're working with Members of
Congress that are really interested in this and want to see
what's going on as well.
Mr. Bera. Great. Thank you.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Bera. And I would just emphasize, you know, again,
given the tensions in the region, this is a complicated issue,
I would still push for that 123 Agreement----
Secretary Perry. Absolutely.
Mr. Bera [continuing]. And I understand there's the
competing interests of the Russians and the Chinese and the
Saudis could pivot and go in that direction, but if they're
really serious about this and they want to be a serious player
in the world, we've got the best technology, the safest
technology----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Bera [continuing]. And the best companies. They
shouldn't go in that direction, so----
Secretary Perry. And I made the statement to the
leadership of the kingdom that if you want to send a message to
the world that you're really serious and want to be adult
members of the world community, you need to sign a very strong
123 agreement with the United States.
Mr. Bera. Great, thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Biggs.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking
Member Lucas. I appreciate conducting the hearing today even
though it's Randy Weber sitting in, so that's good.
Mr. Weber. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Biggs. No, I will not yield to you, sir.
I thank you, Secretary Perry, for joining us today. And I
congratulate you, Secretary Perry, on the excellent job that
you are doing at the Department of Energy. And I think it's
amazing to see what a deregulatory agenda, coupled with pro-
growth policies, can do to benefit our economy and national
security at the same time.
I'm also encouraged by the Administration's commitment to
a long-term strategy for viable and competitive nuclear energy
and to developing the necessary infrastructure to meet our
Nation's energy needs. Nuclear energy is particularly important
to my home State of Arizona where nearly 30 percent of the
State's electricity comes from nuclear energy. The Arizona
Public Service, the largest electricity company in the State,
serves 2.7 million people and operates the Palo Verde
generating station, which produces more than 70 percent of the
State's clean energy. The Palo Verde nuclear power plant is
America's largest source of clean air energy, providing over
2,500 jobs and generates an economic impact of more than $2
billion, all while emitting no greenhouse gases.
Secretary Perry, you visited Arizona in February where you
stated that President Trump is focused on having a diverse
energy portfolio that includes nuclear energy, and we're glad
that you came out. I'm personally glad that you came to Arizona
to see what we're doing there.
You also stated that America needs to continue to be
engaged in the development of the next generation of nuclear
power. And so, Mr. Secretary, I'm wondering if you would please
elaborate on the Department's efforts related to the
development of the next generation of nuclear power.
Secretary Perry. Mr. Biggs, thank you. The advanced
reactor technology program is what you're making reference to,
and we're doing the R&D on that as we speak to address the
long-term technical barriers that we have. And SMRs is part of
this, and I think from my perspective increased funding for
microreactors--and microreactors, this is particularly of
interest to the DOD as they--as we live in this world--and I
know we're going to talk about resiliency at some point in time
today of the grid and what's going on, but, Mr. Waltz, from a
military standpoint, having these microreactors, even smaller
than our SMRs, to develop the power in some of our military
operations is going to be tantamount to our ability to perform
the national security mission that we have.
We're continuing--and I want to talk with some specificity
here. We, the DOE, is continuing to support the development of
NuScale Power. That's their efforts to complete the licensing
process and begin to commercialize the design and build
associated with the supply chain that they're going to need,
the commercial deployment of those reactors. And that's
happening at the Idaho National Lab outside Idaho Falls, and
2026 is the projected timeframe on that.
So we know--look, the key for us is we're going to have to
have lower capital costs to build these nuclear plants. I mean,
that's the--we all recognize that, what--the challenges that
the civil nuclear program has got, reducing the schedule times,
the costs that go into building those. We need to be focused on
the supply chain, keeping it in the United States and the
components that are fabricated by U.S. companies for this and,
again, getting back to--when we're able to do that, Madam
Chair, we're going to be able to send the message that, No. 1,
our energy supply is going to be harder to disrupt, so whether
it's a cyber attack, whether it's a natural disaster, all of
that is going to be directly affected by these advanced
reactors and the development of those----
Mr. Biggs. So, Mr. Secretary, with regard to that, you
know, we've talked about private enterprise and their role in
this. How do you incentivize private--the private sector to
participate in this and accelerate the science with this?
Secretary Perry. Yes, well, I think the fastest way you
incentivize the private sector is for government to get out of
the way from a regulatory standpoint, from, you know, a cost
standpoint, so both--and I don't want to--I don't want anybody
to walk away thinking that I have left somehow my understanding
of how States function. States have to be very engaged in this
process as well and State governments not be an impediment to
the development of these technologies as well, for that matter,
States not be impediments to the development of an all-of-the-
above energy portfolio for this country.
So I would suggest to you one of the best ways that we can
send a message that we want you to invest in this is to make
sure that--either by permitting or regulatory fiat we create
more of a hurdle for these companies to be able to bring their
product to the market.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Madam
Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Bonamici.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you to the Chairwoman, Ranking Member.
And thank you, Secretary Perry, for being here today.
Last year, I asked you about exascale and quantum
computing, and today, I'd like to start my questions on the
existential threat of climate change and the Department's
efforts to accelerate our transition to clean energy. Secretary
Perry, the Fourth National Climate Assessment makes clear that
greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the most
substantial factor in global warming over the past six decades.
The Department of Energy is one of the 13 Federal agencies in
the U.S. Global Change Research Program that contributed to the
assessment.
So, Secretary Perry, did the Department of Energy sign off
on the findings of the Fourth National Climate Assessment? I'm
going to make it easy. This is a yes or no question because I
want to----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Bonamici [continuing]. Get to several questions. Did
it? OK. And do you agree that the National Climate Assessment
is the result of collaborative peer-reviewed effort across
Federal agencies compiled by the nation's top scientists?
Again, that's yes or no. Do you agree that it's----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Bonamici. OK. And according to the assessment, fossil
fuel combustion accounts for 77 percent of our nation's total
greenhouse gas emissions. Do you agree with this finding in the
assessment?
Secretary Perry. I--Senator, that one I've gone to the
point of--I know you're reading--I mean, you're reading a
technical report, and if that's what the technical report says,
I'm--here's what I will share with you, that the climate's
changing, man's having an impact, and, as I've stated before,
you know, I welcome a thoughtful conversation with anyone on
how we can cleanup the environment, you know, no matter which
side of the aisle you may be on here.
What we're focused on at the Department is coming up with
new innovation, new technology that will help us address this
issue of the climate----
Ms. Bonamici. I appreciate that. Mr. Secretary, I have
some more questions, and I'm going to ask you about that. So
the assessment also identified that without a rapid
decarbonization of the world's energy systems over the next few
decades, it is unlikely that we'll be able to reach the 2
degrees Celsius warming target that was set in the Paris
Climate Accord. Do you agree with that finding in the
assessment as well?
Secretary Perry. Here's what I'd like to do. I know you
got a lot of questions you want to ask me that are yes or no.
But I'd really like to get Paul Dabbar to share with you what
Fatih Birol, who's the head of the International Energy Agency
said within the last 30 days about the decarbonization of the
planet.
Ms. Bonamici. Well, I'd like you to submit that for the
record because----
Secretary Perry. OK. Great.
Ms. Bonamici [continuing]. This is your time here today.
So also, Mr. Secretary, last year, the Natural Resources
Defense Council sent a letter to this Committee outlining the
failure of the Department as Office of Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy, or EERE, to spend the funds that were
appropriated by Congress in fiscal year 2018.
So the President's fiscal year 2020 budget request
outlines the Administration's plans to reprogram $353 million
in prior-year balances from EERE to help pay for fiscal year
2020 programs. The Impoundment Control Act requires the
Administration to obligate funds when Congress appropriates
money to the executive branch.
And last year, this Committee learned through a GAO
(Government Accountability Office) request from Chairwoman
Johnson that the Administration violated the Impoundment
Control Act in 2017 by withholding 1/3 of the budget for ARPA-
E. So you can understand why we're concerned about the same
issue occurring at EERE. So the Impoundment Control Act does
allow agencies to withhold obligation of funds when a deferral
or rescission is requested by the President and approved by
Congress.
So, Secretary Perry, are you aware of any deferrals or
rescissions that Congress has approved for fiscal year 2018 or
2019 funding for DOE programs?
Secretary Perry. I am not.
Ms. Bonamici. And how did the total number of funding
opportunity announcements (FOAs) for EERE in '19 compare to the
number of announcements issued in fiscal year 2018 to date?
Secretary Perry. Do want to take----
Ms. Bonamici. And, Mr. Secretary, you're the witness here
today; I'd like you to answer the question.
Secretary Perry. Yes, well, I'm going to refer to my
expert then if you don't mind, ma'am.
Mr. Dabbar. Where--we issued all the FOAs for EERE, and
they're in there in the middle of submittals and reviews right
now for 2019.
Ms. Bonamici. Mr. Secretary, will you recommit here today
to distributing DOE's appropriated funds for 2019 and 2020 in
accordance with congressional intent?
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Bonamici. I appreciate that. Thank you very much,
Madam Chairwoman, and I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Cloud.
Mr. Cloud. Thank you, Secretary, for being here. It's good
to see you.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Cloud. It's great to have a Texan heading up the
Department of Energy.
Secretary Perry. Thank you.
Mr. Cloud. I want to thank you, first of all, for your
thoughtful written report. I found it personally refreshing
actually that we had a comprehensive report that sought to
recognize the security challenges facing us but--and recognize
the breakthroughs that we need to make for advancement but also
kept in mind that we are supposed to be, as the Chair said,
responsible use of the taxpayer's dollar. And while we do want
to make sure DOE employees' morale is high, I think we should
also make sure that the taxpayers' morale is high, and with $22
trillion hanging around their neck, I think most of us realize
that their morale is not as high as it should be.
I represent of course the 27th District of Texas, so,
first of all, I want to thank you for the work in helping with
the port of Corpus Christi. Seeing the first crude shipment
come out of the United States in a while out of that port was
really great for the United States as we're making this
transition to an energy-dominant nation, which you've been so
key in.
I'm also home to the South Texas Project Electric
Generating Station, and I know we're committed to America's
leadership in nuclear energy to help deliver clean, reliable
power to the people of Texas and across the country.
Much of America's existing fleet of reactors is aging with
many of the nuclear plants nearing the end of their 40-year
license. The Department of Energy is researching ways to
promote the longevity and safety of nuclear plants through its
Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program. The program
works with universities and companies like STP, South Texas
Project, on research. Could you provide an update on the work
being conducted through the LWRS program?
Secretary Perry. Do you want--do you know which one that
is? No?
Mr. Cloud, if I could, let's take that one for the
record----
Mr. Cloud. OK. Yes.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. And get you the proper
information and give it to you and the rest of the Committee
Members in writing.
Mr. Cloud. I appreciate that.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Cloud. Your written report touched on rare-earth
minerals and, you know, there's a lot of talk about alternative
forms of energy, having an all-of-the-above approach. Could you
discuss what DOE might be doing in terms of rare-earth
minerals? I mean, we know China controls 70 percent of them, so
as we look to alternative forms of energy, as we're becoming a
dominant--energy-dominant nation that's finally independent in
energy, we don't want to trade that for dependence on rare-
earth minerals.
Also, of course, rare-earth minerals have, as your report
mentions, extreme national security, military applications, and
those sorts of things.
Secretary Perry. And I think that's very succinct that
we--I want to stop and draw a line right there and say that
that's looking backwards, and some of the innovation and
technology that's going on at the Department at this particular
point in time may shed some light on that--dealing with rare-
earth minerals that are controlled by maybe some countries that
don't necessarily have our best interest in mind may not be as
big a challenge as what we thought it was 12 months ago. And
part of that reason is because of the research that's going on
at our national labs.
And I'm going to again ask Paul to kind of share with you
just--because he's fresh out of seeing some of this, and it has
to do with battery storage. And the progress, Mrs. Fletcher,
that's being made on battery storage is really fascinating. And
I've always said that battery storage is the Holy Grail. If
we're able to get to that point where we can use our
renewables, solar and wind in particular, to power these
batteries that have longtime storage--and what we're finding
now is that the elements that are being used to create some of
these batteries are not rare-earth minerals and--they're
elements that we have right here in the United States, so we're
going to be in control of our future substantially more on the
battery storage.
Paul, if you just kind of give them a little glimpse of
what's going on here, and I think that's pretty exciting stuff.
Mr. Dabbar. So a couple of examples, obviously the
complexes to a large degree are a very large R&D business, and
so in this particular area, for example, in batteries that are
not lithium-ion, beyond lithium-ion batteries that not only
have tremendous improvements in performance at 3 to 5 times but
are made out of elements, as the Secretary said, that we don't
have to source it from places that we have had more of a
challenge.
The second thing, as an example, that we did with the
support of this Committee is the recycling battery announcement
that we made it Argonne National Lab where we announced the
first research for recycling batteries, so the materials that
you are talking about that have to be potentially sourced from
other places in the world, we're looking at with all these
batteries being used in the economy now, how we could reuse
those rather than needing to source that from other locations.
Mr. Cloud. You mentioned on the electric grid, and I think
in 2017 you produced--or the DOE I should say produced a report
on listing recommendations that we should do to prepare for an
EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack. Do you know of any progress
that's been made?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir, a substantial amount of it. In
April of this year we--DOE issued a $35 million Cybersecurity
for Energy Delivery Systems research sale--excuse me, research
call to the federally funded research and development centers.
And they're working exactly on what you're talking about there,
the resiliency, the reliability of the Nation's energy
infrastructure, and they're looking at a host of different ways
to--you know, we actually stood up an office that we refer to
as CESER (Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency
Response) cybersecurity and the emergency response that's
headed up, and so, again, thank you for the funding of that. I
think it's very timely.
And the previous that I talked about, this $35 million is
going to be used for testing that can be used to verify and
validate operational technology equipment and software. And
there was also a funding opportunity announcement that was
released in the month prior, in March, of--to establish a Cyber
Manufacturing Institute, and that one's co-managed by our CESER
office and EERE to mitigate cybersecurity threats.
And so there is a--there's a lot of movement in that
space. The DOE, our national labs, and our private sector
partners are all engaged I think in a very constructive way to
send the message to our citizens, to those that operate our
electric and power systems that we're doing everything possible
to protect them against both cyber threats, physical threats,
and national--or natural disasters as well.
And in Florida, you know, your--I think your Governor is
about to do a--an announcement on infrastructure resiliency and
what have you. You know, our two States, you know, we--from
time to time we get more natural disasters than we'd really
like to have. But how we build that infrastructure and how we
develop that resiliency of the grid is very, very important not
just because of the cyber side of this that, you know, 10 years
ago that wasn't a problem. It is today.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. McNerney.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair and thank the
Secretary for coming today. And I do want to say I worked at
Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. I worked at the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and I have--
Livermore Lab is right outside of my district. I'm well aware
of the quality and quantity of labs, and I encourage you to
support those labs as much as you possibly can.
Secretary Perry, do you believe that research on climate
science is needed, or do you think that the climate science is
settled?
Secretary Perry. I--well, I think we're continuing to add
to the body of science that's out there, Mr. McNerney.
Mr. McNerney. Do you think we need to continue to work on
that? What makes the DOE labs uniquely qualified among the
national science agencies to conduct research on climate?
Secretary Perry. Well, partly because we've historically
been engaged in it, so when you go back and look at the history
of climate science, DOE and their scientists have been involved
with it. There is a FOA out right now, Congressman, that is
going to--it's a selection that DOE issued yesterday on climate
modeling. And I think this is just another example of how DOE's
role in the predictive modeling of what's going on in the
environment, these severe storms that we're seeing now----
Mr. McNerney. Secretary, I know you're not intentionally
filibustering, but I----
Secretary Perry. Yes. No, I'm just excited about the----
Mr. McNerney. I am, too, but----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. What's going on at DOE.
Mr. McNerney [continuing]. And so I strongly urge you to
continue to double down on climate research----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. McNerney [continuing]. Including climate intervention
research because we're going to have to have those tools
available.
Secretary Perry, one way to make energy from renewable
sources that are remote available to load centers across the
country is to better connect them with the--what we call
Interconnection Seams. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory
has completed a study on this. However, the Committee staff has
informed me that the release of the report that contains
findings from this study has been delayed without explanation,
and the authors have been told not to discuss it publicly. Are
you aware that the limits have been placed on the authors in
discussing results of this study publicly and whether these
limits remain in place today?
Secretary Perry. I'm not.
Mr. McNerney. OK. So will you make a commitment to make
this report publicly available?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. We'll circle back and find out
where that originated from and make it right.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you, Secretary. I appreciate that.
In April of 2018 the DOE canceled a $46 million funding
opportunity announcement on solar R&D just days before the
winners were to be announced. Can you or anyone on your staff
explain why that was pulled at the last minute?
Secretary Perry. We'll go research it, sir, and get back
to you.
Mr. McNerney. I appreciate that. And I appreciate also
your comments on artificial intelligence. Mr. Olson and I are
Co-Chairs of the Artificial Intelligence Caucus, and we're
going to continue to pursue that subject with vigor. And I know
the national labs have a lot to offer on that, so again I urge
you to keep those labs well-funded and keep the morale high at
those labs----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. McNerney [continuing]. By not threatening their
funding year after year.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. McNerney. And with that, I'm going to yield back.
Secretary Perry. Thank you.
Mr. McNerney. I'm going to yield back the three minutes
that the prior speaker took.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Olson.
Mr. Olson. I thank the Chair. And howdy, Secretary Perry.
Secretary Perry. Don't go over your time, Pete.
Mr. Olson. Never my intention. I want to start off, sir,
with something that's very important to Fort Bend County, a
town called Needville, Texas. I want to give you a personal
invitation from a young Texas lady we both know and admire. Her
name is Katie Vacek.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Olson. You remember you met her at President's--
Trump's first speech before Congress.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Olson. She fell out of a live oak tree, broke her
spine, has not walked for 3 years. As you can see, now, she's a
fellow Aggie----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Olson [continuing]. Proud Aggie, and she wants to
thank you personally for meeting with her and inspiring her to
get moving forward and going to College Station. So on her
behalf, maybe find some time to come down to Needville, Texas.
The Jay Cafe had the best chicken-fried steak and pecan pie in
all of Texas, and maybe pop over to the Petra Nova power plant
right across the way from Needville. So if you have some time,
come down. We'd love to have you come down.
Secretary Perry. You don't even have to use the extra bait
of chicken-fried steak to get me there.
Mr. Olson. Thank you. Now, I have a question that's very
important to my hometown of Sugarland, Texas. It involves the
NNSA. As you know, the NNSA picks up some nuclear waste that's
been used by industry and then disposes of it. They send it out
to a site called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the WIPP.
Radioactive americium-241 is needed for safe drilling. This is
one of the nuclear waste. It is a known carcinogen. Usually
what happens, NNSA picks it up, they send it off for safe
storage somewhere in America, but there's a very small amount
of that mineral that is picked up by NNSA but can't be kept
here because it came from foreign sources originally. It's an
identical fuel, identical. We can't dispose of it because it
came from another country. And so we have these sites all
across our country now, right now sprinkled with this
radioactive waste. One site, Secretary Perry is half a mile
from my son's high school Fort Bend Christian.
In 2015, they had a small release of americium and cesium-
137. Workers took that home on their clothes. I know you'd like
to change the law to make sure we dispose of this carcinogen
without regard to where it came from. So are you aware of this,
and how can we help you to make this commonsense dispose,
dispose, dispose and not delay?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. Congressman Olson, we are
familiar with this, and what I--I apologize for turning my back
to you and asking a question but--because I wanted to make sure
that I was correct in the assumption that I was making that
this is going to require a statutory change in which you just
mentioned, and we will assist you in any way we can from the
standpoint of using science at the labs or what have you to
back up because, I agree with you that these types of materials
do need to be put in appropriate disposal places.
And so the idea that just because it was produced in a
foreign country versus the exact same element that is produced
at a national lab's reactor for these isotopes--and there's a
host of these isotopes that we use in medical and obviously for
the oil and gas industry. But we agree that the statute needs
to be changed because it clearly--I think it's the old land-use
act----
Mr. Olson. Yes.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. That prohibits any foreign-
produced elements of--being placed in--like the WIPP.
Mr. Olson. Yes.
Secretary Perry. So we would support your effort there.
Anything we can do from a scientific standpoint to back that
up, consider it available.
Mr. Olson. It sounds like I have to call the ball, three
down and cleared to land.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Olson. This is our job, not your job.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Olson. We're on that, sir. Thank you so much.
A final question very briefly is about AI. As Mr. McNerney
mentioned, we are co-chairs of the House AI Caucus. And your
video was awesome. It shows the potential future about AI. Can
you discuss briefly AI's potential for protecting our grid,
protecting our pipelines, protecting our national labs? I mean,
this is the future.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Olson. And how are you guys doing that at DOE to make
sure we utilize----
Secretary Perry. Yes. I can't do it briefly because it's
just such a broad--and--but I think at some time in the
future--let me just leave it at this: I don't think there is a
field that government is participating in that has any more
potential to have a bigger impact on our citizens than
artificial intelligence. The supercomputers that the Department
operates, two of the fastest, five of the 10 fastest that we
operate. And we are--our next-level computers are going to be
operating--the exascale computer that's coming online at
Argonne over in Mr. Foster's district in 2021 will do a billion
billion transactions per second.
Mr. Olson. Wow.
Secretary Perry. That's the speed of which we are--that's
anywhere between--I think it's up to 50 times faster than the
computers we have today. I mean, it's fascinating work. So the
AI, machine learning that's coming with that, we're going to
find answers to challenges that we had no idea we were going to
be able to address in the very near future.
Mr. Olson. Thank you. Final request, beat Alabama. I yield
back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Horn.
Ms. Horn. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here.
And I want to start off by framing this, that issues of
workforce development, STEM, (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics) building our workforce of tomorrow, as well as
the cutting-edge technology development are all very important
both to me and to my district, and clearly energy is a big
issue in Oklahoma, as it is across the country.
So I want to start with ARPA-E and the funding because I
think we have to have a conversation about the role of
technology development. In its 10-year history, ARPA-E has
funded high-risk, high-reward energy innovation projects that
create cleaner energy and economic growth. And the important
thing about that, of the 145 projects that have been supported
by ARPA-E, they have attracted $2.9 billion in follow-on
funding, follow-on private-sector funding, and 76 of these
projects have gone on to form new companies.
I say that to ask, in the proposed budget, it basically
zeros out ARPA-E, and in the balance of public-private
partnerships, we're looking at the cutting-edge development of
government investment leading to follow-on actual companies and
economic growth and development.
So my question is what are you doing as the Secretary of
Energy to communicate the clear successes that this program has
had to the President and his budget team?
Secretary Perry. Mostly sitting in front of Committees
like this defending what ARPA-E has historically done, so--and
I will continue to do that. I recognize that from time to time
we're not always on the same page of the hymnbook, and this is
one of those.
Ms. Horn. I hope you've raised that, because it's such an
important way to encourage that economic growth and development
by investing in cutting-edge.
Now, turning for a moment to cybersecurity and
manufacturing, which are also topics that are critical and I
think that we need to talk about. The Manufacturing USA
program, of course you probably know it's a network of advanced
manufacturing technology areas that have the goal of
establishing American leadership in manufacturing.
And with respect to cybersecurity, which is absolutely
critical in high-tech manufacturing, the Manufacturing times
Digital or MxD, which is a program that's funded by the
Department of Defense, is focused on improving cybersecurity
and digital manufacturing, and that is their focus. And on
March 26 of this year, your Department announced a $70 million
award for cybersecurity for a new Manufacturing USA Institute.
So, Secretary, my question is why the duplication of
efforts in those projects, which are basically the same? And
have you encouraged your staff and the DOE to work with the DOD
because this is very important, but in terms of streamlining
our programs and not duplicating effort, why the duplication
here?
Secretary Perry. Yes. Congresswoman Horn, may I ask Paul
Dabbar to weigh in here just a second? I think he may be able
to enlighten us all a little better than me telling you from a
high level.
Mr. Dabbar. So we work with Under Secretary Griffin, who
is in charge of research at DOD quite a bit, as well as our
other peers at NASA and NSF (National Science Foundation) and
the others. We each focus on different areas. To be direct, DOD
focuses on lethality applications. The Department of Energy is
more about energy and about science, and so there's different
applications for different aspects. DOD, for example, does not
focus on cybersecurity for the grid. They focus on
cybersecurity for what they do.
So there's a lot of similarities, there's a lot of overlap
in their lab research and our lab research, but there's some
very practical points of research that are different that's
hard to fully get into here today.
Ms. Horn. So just a quick follow-up on that, did you
coordinate with the DOD to build the scope of this program to
not overlap or their overlapping of the manufacturing? Because
it's a whole new institute. That's my question. It's a whole
new institute. Are there not other ways that this could be
coordinated?
Mr. Dabbar. For this particular institute I'm not certain
if there was a discussion specifically with Under Secretary
Griffin's scope, but we do it all the time with him across, you
know, quantum, around AI, around hypersonics. So this
particular one, I can't answer, and we can follow up with you
on that.
Ms. Horn. I would appreciate that, and I yield back the
balance. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Gonzalez.
Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair and Secretary Perry,
for being here today.
One of the challenges that I think we always face in this
committee is connecting our basic research, which I think is
absolutely critical to the future of our Nation to everyday
constituent issues and things that folks on the ground are
feeling on a day-to-day basis. And kind of with that in mind,
especially when we're talking about things like quantum
computing and AI and big data--and these are, you know,
important buzzwords but, again, how do we connect it to the
day-to-day?
And one of the big issues across our country and in my
district is the issue of veteran suicides. The number that's
been most widely circulated is 20 veteran suicides a day. I
know that the DOE and the VA (Veterans Affairs) have engaged in
a partnership to solve just that with the use of some of our
technology. I know my colleague Mr. Norman has introduced
legislation to reauthorize that partnership. And I guess I'd
like to just turn it over to you just to hear from your
perspective how is the partnership working? What are you
working on specifically with respect to the VA, and how can we
do even better?
Secretary Perry. Thank you. And, Mr. Gonzalez, thank you
for your serious passion about this issue. Probably every one
of us in here--because this isn't just about veterans.
Mr. Gonzalez. Right.
Secretary Perry. This is about our kids, it's about our
colleagues, it's about the citizens of this country. And, Mr.
Tonko, you and I talked about this. Congressman McNerney and I
have talked about it, the importance of what we potentially
have in front of us now because of the breakthroughs that we're
seeing in the partnerships that are being created between
historically disparate agencies of government. Nobody ever
thought DOE was supposed to be involved in the--in traumatic
brain injury or, you know, posttraumatic stress or CTE (chronic
traumatic encephalopathy).
And what we are showing people is that we have a real role
to play in this. As a matter of fact, we may have one of the
most important roles to play because of that computing capacity
that we have and the ability for us to partner with the VA in
the sense of working with the VA. The data that they have--and
they know they can trust us. No offense to maybe some of the
private-sector folks who have big computers and what have you,
but I'm pretty sure that the VA and those veterans know that
they can trust the Department of Energy not to allow this
information to be used for some other purpose.
So we are going to continue to look for ways to--you all
have funded a line item at the DOE now if I'm correct in that
to--this program is funding a--and it's a partnership of--and,
if I may, the University of California San Francisco, Dr.
Geoffrey Manley out there, finding some just really big
breakthroughs dealing with brain science. So this is important
work.
Mr. Gonzalez. Fantastic. And, as you may also be aware, I
recently joined my colleagues on this Committee to introduce
the bipartisan Securing American Science and Technology Act,
which is designed to improve our ability to protect federally
funded research from foreign espionage, cyber attacks, and
theft. I think it's a huge issue. We're going to invest in our
technology. We want to make darn sure that nobody's here
stealing it.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Gonzalez. And so I applaud your efforts on the talent
program and, again, I was hoping you could maybe provide an
update on what the policy is and how you see it evolving going
forward.
Secretary Perry. Can I ask----
Mr. Gonzalez. Absolutely.
Mr. Dabbar. So the first thing that we just implemented,
as the Secretary mentioned in his opening, was to ban people
working at the national lab complex to work for foreign talent
programs from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. And so we'll
be giving people who are currently employed in the lab complex
working for the Chinese State as a--you know, being co-hired,
that that's no longer going to be allowed, and they have to
make a decision of either working for them or working for us.
By the way, this is very consistent with the cutting-edge
universities where a lot of universities around this country
are beginning to realize that this is a conflict of interest
for them, so we're very consistent with what the university
systems are looking at.
The second thing that we're looking at is whether we
should be developing a list of technologies that we're
developing in the national labs and whether that list should be
included--that before we do any work with anyone from those
foreign countries, that we have an extra review----
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Mr. Dabbar [continuing]. So this would not be a ban but
this would be an extra review for key technologies such as
quantum, such as new generation of batteries, and so on.
Mr. Gonzalez. Fantastic. And I guess what--my final
comment, I would encourage to--when I think of the innovation
space, there's a funding component, there's a talent component
and some other components, but not only should we be about
making sure that folks aren't playing for both sides but how do
we attract even more great talent here to the U.S.?
And with that, I yield back.
Mr. Tonko [presiding]. The gentleman yields back. The
Chair now recognizes himself for five minutes.
And thank you again, Mr. Secretary, for joining us this
morning. Obviously, the agency has many daunting challenges
before it and very timely, so great to have you here.
Every year, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)
publishes data on economywide greenhouse gas emissions. In
2017, the transportation sector was the highest-emitting
sector, but not too far behind it at 22 percent of U.S.
emissions was industry. Emissions from the sector are expected
to grow in the near term, and many industrial processes are
considered to be difficult to decarbonize without readily
available or cost-effective alternatives.
Despite over 1/2 of our economy's climate emissions coming
from transportation and manufacturing, the majority of our
Federal R&D spending at DOE focuses on reducing emissions from
the electricity sector. While these are critical and indeed
worthy investments, I also believe DOE must support innovation
in cleaner energy, not just cleaner electricity. Will you agree
that DOE can help to develop cost-competitive technologies that
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions out there while ensuring
that domestic energy-intensive manufacturers continue to be
leaders in innovation and remain globally competitive?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. And I think our labs are
engaged in some of those efforts as well. You know, the
nonpoint source pollution issue, while I was the Governor of
Texas, I had the opportunity to work with and put into place
some programs that did exactly that, big fleet engines, for
instance, the TERP (Texas Emissions Reduction Plan) program.
Congresswoman Weber, if you'll remember, that was a reduction
in emissions from old, inefficient fleet-type engines, and we
gave a tax credit--and again, this wasn't on the innovation and
the technology side, which is what DOD--E does, but it would--
it's a--maybe it's an idea that those of you in Congress could
take a look at from the standpoint and give some incentives to
States to implement programs like this.
But we will continue to look for ways to--and I'm really
proud of what the United States has done from the standpoint of
reducing emissions. I mean, we're leading the world in the
total reduction of emissions. And a lot of that's----
Mr. Tonko. Well, but then we were swinging back up, so----
Secretary Perry. But I think that's--you know, most of my
folks at the Department tell me that is a temporary bump back
up. And again, as we transition, I think it's important for us
to go--where I can go sell American LNG (liquefied natural gas)
into the European theater, remove old, inefficient coal-burning
plants for cleaner-burning American LNG, I think that's just
good all the way around. If I can get the Indians and the
Chinese to recognize that, then we'll be making some progress
in the world.
Mr. Tonko. Well, we do that at the common table----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Tonko [continuing]. We need to stay with.
There are many technology options we can explore to
decarbonize manufacturing. This includes cogeneration, combined
heat and power and waste heat to power, which can greatly
improve energy efficiency at our industrial facilities. Mr.
Secretary, is supporting greater adoption of cogeneration a
priority for the Department?
Secretary Perry. I don't know whether I'd put it as a
priority. It's one of the areas that we care about, just like
over in Congressman Weber's district there's a--I think it's in
your district where the Petra Nova facility is. It's in Mr.
Olson's.
But the point is innovation and technology is the key to--
you know, again, I don't want to backtrack here, but 15 years
ago they told us we'd found all the energy resources that we
had in this country, and they were wrong because innovators in
technology--and I will suggest that the innovation and
technology is going to be found through the artificial
intelligence and the machine learning that we have the power to
control at the Department of Energy because of the funding by
this Committee.
Mr. Tonko. While cogeneration is critical, it will not
solve challenges with process emissions, so other advancements
such as carbon capture may be necessary. And I understand that
the Office of Fossil Energy has done substantive work in
developing this technology. And while CCS (carbon capture and
storage) is not yet cost-effective in power generation, I
believe it will ultimately be necessary for certain industrial
applications. And what will you do to encourage collaborations
amongst relevant offices at DOE to leverage existing resources
and programs to ensure the CCS for industrial purposes are
being given proper consideration and funding?
Secretary Perry. I have made that one a priority, sir, and
up to and including in the Clean Energy Ministerial we got CCUS
(carbon capture, utilization and sequestration) put in as a
priority at a global level at the Clean Energy Ministerial that
was initially held in China and this last year in Vancouver. So
we're making not just progress here in the United States, we're
seeing some global saluting of that flag if you will by our
partners around the globe.
Mr. Tonko. But, again, I would suggest it needs to be
applied to industrial emissions.
With that, I have exhausted my time and will now recognize
Representative Baird for five minutes.
Mr. Baird. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr.
Secretary, for being here.
We do appreciate the research funding that you mentioned
in your initial comments. But your Department has an Office of
Science, which funds the Bioenergy Research Centers (BRC), and
they conduct coordinated and geographically diverse research in
support of developing a viable and sustainable domestic biofuel
and bioproducts industry from dedicated bioenergy crops. So
each BRC is led by a DOE national laboratory or leading a U.S.
research university and is staffed by multidisciplinary
stakeholders in science, engineering, and industry.
So as a scientist and a farmer, I support the biofuels and
the bioproducts industry, and I'm particularly interested in
the research and development that can diversify these
industries, and that helps them to produce more product while
lowering their cost of reducing their environmental impact.
So my question is what do you see in fiscal year 2020 and
beyond to support Bioenergy Research Centers and to expand
their important research?
Secretary Perry. Mr. Baird, we are very supportive of
these Bioenergy Research Centers, and each of them are led by a
DOE lab or a top university and sometimes--and even in
partnership, and they're basically designed to lay out the
scientific groundwork for new bio-based economy.
And the--well, I give you an example. Maybe some in your
districts the following centers were selected based on an open
competition. The Great Lakes Bio Research Center, that's up in
Madison, and they're partnering with Michigan State. There's
another at the Oak Ridge National Lab. There's another at
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBL). There's a center for
bioenergy and byproducts--bioproducts innovation, and that's at
the University of Illinois at Urbana at Champaign.
So I think there's been--over 2,500 peer-reviewed
publications came out of that. There's been 1,000-plus
invention disclosures that came out of it, so from the
standpoint of what your return on the investment I think it's
pretty--it's been pretty good, sir.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. I have one other question, and that
deals with looking in another area. Now, my colleague Mr.
Gonzalez made reference to the Veterans Administration, but--
and I recently cosponsored some legislation along with my
colleague Representative Wexton to prioritize opioid research
at the National Science Foundation. And I know you've indicated
the use of the DOE's supercomputing capacity to tackle the big
data challenges often in the healthcare space. So would you
mind elaborating again on what kind of role you think the DOE
might play in helping the Federal healthcare agencies,
including the Veterans Administration----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Baird [continuing]. Better understand--to better
understand the opioid crisis?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. The good news is we're making
some good progress. Mr. Waltz, back probably in mid-2000s, '06,
'07 when the war on terror was really at one of its apexes,
being the Governor of Texas, I had the opportunity to go to
Brooks Army Medical Center on a fairly regular--more regular
than I'd like to be in going to young men and women who were
burned.
And then at that particular point in time we saw our
Federal Government being rather liberal in the dispensing of
opioids and, you know, half-a-dozen years later we figure out
that we've basically created a whole generation of young people
who are dependent upon these things. And we started pulling
back from them. And this was probably 3 or 4 years ago. BAMC
(Brooke Army Medical Center) had decreased by 90 percent the
amount of opioids that they were giving to the young people
that were coming in and dealing--they were coming up with some
different ways to deal with it.
With that said, we've still got a real opioid crisis in
this country. We think it may be genetically driven to some
degree, so again, the supercomputers and our ability to do
genetic testing of some of these populations out there and,
again, doing it in a way that the people know that this
information is going to be safe and secure, the Department of
Energy is going to play a very vital role in being a partner
working with NIH (National Institutes of Health), working with
the VA, working with some of our private sector partners and
our university systems to--I think we will find a solution to
the opioid epidemic that we have in this country. And we'll--
this will happen--my projection is this will happen sooner
rather than later.
Mr. Baird. Thank you, and I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Foster.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you,
Secretary Perry.
You know, I just want to tell you how much I enjoyed
having the privilege of escorting you around the two crown
jewels of the national laboratory system, Argonne National
Laboratory and actually I think there was a slide that was
going to be put up here in a moment, if we could put it on the
screen, please.
[Slide.]
Mr. Foster. Yes, so this is one of the many hats I wear is
as the Co-Chair of the National Labs Caucus where we are also
planning to be visiting all 17 of the national laboratories.
And I'll be leading as large a congressional delegation as I
can corral. The first of these, shortly after National Lab Day,
we're going to be heading to the New Mexico national labs, Los
Alamos, Sandia, also White Sands where they do missile,
antimissile, directed energy work, and the Alamogordo Trinity
test site where the first nuclear weapon was detonated about 75
years ago now.
The next one is going to be in the bay area where
Representatives Jerry McNerney and Zoe Lofgren on this
Committee will be the hosts of a visit to the bay area labs,
Livermore, Sandia, LBL, and SLAC.
Following that, we are visiting the crown jewels. I'll be
hosting a visit to the Illinois labs at Argonne National Lab
that I represent and, which, by the way one of the things that
they have done at their synchrotron light source is to use them
to directly image the molecules that are involved in opioid
receptors in the brain, these G-coupled protein receptors. This
is Nobel Prize-winning research that allows us to directly
image the molecules involved in opiate addiction and one of the
very wonderful things that are often not talked about, and of
course Fermi National Lab where I worked for 23 years before
getting into this insane business.
Also, later on, Congressman Ed Perlmutter will
enthusiastically host a visit to the Denver area and western
labs and at times to be scheduled where also the two Republican
Co-Chairs of the National Lab Caucus will be hosting visits to
Oak Ridge and Savannah by Chuck Fleischmann. Lee Zeldin will be
hosting a visit to the Brookhaven National Lab. And we've
actually already had our first visit, where Chairman Lamb has
invited us to go see NETL (National Energy Technology
Laboratory).
And so, I understand why you enjoyed so much visiting
these 17 labs, and it's really essential that the entire
Congress recognizes the importance of these. And so--any of
you--any opportunity for Paul Dabbar, you or any of your staff
to join these, you're obviously more than welcome.
Now, in my remaining time I would like to discuss the
issue of low-enriched versus high-enriched uranium. You know,
this is something that comes up in many guises. You mentioned
the KRUSTY work. You also recently signed a letter where the
Navy was trying to discourage Congress from pursuing something
that it's pursued for quite a while now, which is to encourage
the Navy to look at the possibility of using low-enriched
uranium in its propulsion reactors.
Now, I'd just like to emphasize the reason that 30 Nobel
Prize winners have signed a letter advocating the minimization
of low-enriched uranium. There's a reason that we don't test
nuclear weapons. If we did test nuclear weapons, our nuclear
arsenal would be safer, cheaper, more secure, more reliable.
But we do not test nuclear weapons because if the rest of the
world followed us in that example, it would be a national
security disaster.
The situation is identical for low-enriched and high-
enriched uranium. If we start using high-enriched uranium,
weapons-grade uranium in applications where it is not strictly
needed and the rest of the world follows us, things like
propulsion reactors for icebreakers or, you name it, the things
that they have the right to do under the nonproliferation
treaty, it will be a disaster for nonproliferation and national
security because any country that has a reactor's worth of
high-enriched uranium has everything they need in terms of
fissile material to make multiple nuclear weapons.
And so we've worked as a country for 40 years minimizing
worldwide use of this, and we will continue to engage with you
to make sure that every time that we have the option of using
low-enriched or high-enriched uranium that we choose the safe
one and not use weapons-grade.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Foster. So we've already communicated on this----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Foster [continuing]. And we'll be continuing.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Foster. And I have a grand total 23 seconds left, so I
guess I just wanted to see how you view after having now
completed your visit of the 17 labs. You know, what are the
things you'd really like to get done organizationally that will
really improve their effectiveness?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. Let me just add, as I don't
know if I would make any changes organizationally to the
structure that we have. I think these labs--I got some pretty
good advice from former Secretary--former Governor of New
Mexico Bill Richardson. He said, ``Perry, don't mess with the
national labs.'' And that's frankly some pretty good advice.
For the record, I would like to invite all of you to come
out to your neck of the woods in October of this year for an
XLab event that we're having, which is where we bring in the
private sector that are partnering with the national labs in a
host of different areas. I mean, it's some fascinating stuff.
And again, we don't have time for me to put on my cheerleader
hat and talk about these national labs, but whether you've got
one in your district or not, if you have the opportunity to go
to a national lab, please do it. It's some of the most
brilliant, capable men and women who are making, I think, more
difference in America than any single group of people in this
country.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. And you've been a wonderful
Ambassador to science to an Administration that makes that not
always an easy job, so thank you so much----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Foster [continuing]. And yield back.
Secretary Perry. And, Mr. Foster, let me just say, in the
timeliness of this XLab event in Argonne in October is on
artificial intelligence.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Balderson.
Mr. Balderson. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr.
Secretary, for being here this morning.
Mr. Secretary, approximately 25 percent of my district in
Ohio is rural.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. There you are.
Mr. Balderson. For my constituents to access a quality
education, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--
STEM--is critical. Many of the job openings that cannot be
filled in rural Ohio are STEM-focused. As Secretary of Energy,
what are you doing this year and what will be done in fiscal
year 2020 to ensure that the Department's STEM outreach and
engagement activities reach the rural communities like mine?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. One of the areas that we're
focused is on the DOE's Office of Economic Impact and
Diversity, and that program is created to expand the
participation of individuals who historically may not have had
the same opportunities.
I can speak a little bit of--historically to this. I grew
up in a place--my high school--well, my school, grades 1
through 12, had 115 kids. I probably wouldn't be sitting here
in front of you if I'd gone to a bigger school because I
could've learned how to use a slide rule and probably done a
little better in organic chemistry and I would've ended up
being a veterinarian. Organic chemistry changed my life and
made a pilot out of me. So anyway, enough of my personal
travails.
The point is that a lot of these rural communities don't--
haven't historically had access to some of the science,
technology, engineering, and math programs that children really
need to be successful, and this program is exactly focused on
that.
And Secretary--or I should say Under Secretary of Science
Paul Dabbar and our Chief Commercialization Officer are
currently working with our national labs, again, and the
University of Chicago to do a roundtable this summer to explore
some pathways of continuing to harness these kids with this
technology, and we're--you know, I'm pretty excited. We've got
a--we've got a program called Making Nuclear Cool Again at the
Department where we're reaching out and helping to--you know,
again, when I was going to college, being a nuclear engineer
was a pretty cool thing, and it's lost a lot of its shine if
you will.
So, again, whether it's small modular reactors, whether
it's the microreactors we're talking about, bringing the
nuclear energy interest back into that area and preparing young
people to be the scientists and technicians that we're going to
need are going to require these STEM programs. And rural
America absolutely does not need to be overlooked any longer.
Mr. Balderson. All right. Thank you very much for that
answer. My final question is I'm honored to be the lead
Republican cosponsor of Congresswoman Stevens' bill, the
American Manufacturing Leader Leadership Act. The bill passed
out of this Committee last month and underscores my support for
making strategic investments in advanced manufacturing R&D.
Mr. Secretary, if this bipartisan legislation was enacted
and the Department had the ability to open an additional Center
of Manufacturing Innovation, what manufacturing challenges
would you look to research?
Secretary Perry. Well, there's a host of areas that
advanced manufacturing is making some housing--and you think
about Secretary Carson actually had on the Mall I think within
the last 30 days some manufactured housing. And, you know, when
we talked about--Mr. Baird, where I'm from, manufactured
housing generally was on wheels, and that's not the case
anymore. Because of our additive manufacturing processes that
we have today, we're able to build some housing that is highly
efficient, that is cheaper substantially than--so advanced
manufacturing in places that you don't historically think
about, automotives, the--we're literally building a nuclear
reactor and the parts for the nuclear reactor out of additive
manufacturing. I mean, it's just--it's stunning the progress is
being made in that arena, so Advanced Manufacturing Office is,
you know, obviously got our attention, and it is another of
those priorities that we have.
Mr. Balderson. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam
Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Beyer.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, very much. Mr.
Secretary, thank you for being here.
You know, DOE has robust programs have helped demonstrate
carbon capture technology, on an ethanol plant, on a hydrogen
production facility, on a coal-fired power plant, but we're
enjoying this explosion of natural gas, the shale gas
revolution. What is DOE doing for carbon capture on natural gas
plants and on other things like cement manufacturing?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. As I said--and I'm not going to
rehash this again, but we--we've really focused--I think one of
the first projects I went to as Secretary was the Petra Nova
plant outside of Houston. I think it's in Fort Bend County. And
the--where 90-plus percent of the emissions are captured.
They're then sent over to be used in an enhanced oil recovery
process in an oilfield I think 80 miles away in--outside of
Victoria, Texas. So----
Mr. Beyer. And what kind of plant is Petra Nova?
Secretary Perry. Petra Nova is a coal-powered plant.
Mr. Beyer. OK. So those are--you know, those--we're not
building any new ones; we're closing the old ones down. What
are we doing with the natural gas plants?
Secretary Perry. Paul, you want to take a----
Mr. Beyer. Mr.----
Mr. Dabbar. So this is actually one of the most exciting
things that we're doing----
Mr. Beyer. Paul, if I could focus on the Secretary----
Mr. Dabbar. Yes.
Mr. Beyer. Great, thanks. But if you don't know, Mr.
Secretary, I'll move on. The National Academies----
Secretary Perry. Well, here's what I'm interested in. I'm
interested in trying to pass on information the best I can to
you, and if I don't have----
Mr. Beyer. OK. OK. I understand.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Those timely, I'd like to
use Paul because he gets out into that area more than I do.
Mr. Beyer. But we have greater access to Paul.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Beyer. We can----
Secretary Perry. Yes. Great.
Mr. Beyer [continuing]. Do that for the record.
Secretary Perry. Perfect.
Mr. Beyer. We only get you once a year or something.
Secretary Perry. I hope you've got good access to me. All
you got to do is call.
Mr. Beyer. Well, I do.
Secretary Perry. OK. Great.
Mr. Beyer. The National Academies have pointed out that we
need negative emissions technologies, pulling carbon out of the
air, out of the ocean. How has the National Academies'
assessment been received by the Department of Energy and what
are you doing about the negative emissions technology?
Secretary Perry. Yes, let me just give you a little
statement that I think--I found really interesting. Fatih Birol
is the head of the International Energy Agency in Paris. I
don't think there's anybody that I've been dealing with that's
got a better handle on--that's as nonpolitical. He just looks
at the facts and what have you. And he said if we eliminate 100
percent of the passenger cars that are running on gasoline
today, transition every one of them to electric, we would still
need 81 percent of the oil and gas production that is occurring
in the world to be able to continue on developing,
manufacturing, running our fleet engines and what have you.
So we know we've got--we've got some real challenges here
from the standpoint of how are we going to deal with--you know,
there are folks that are talking about completely switching
over their fleets to renewables, and that--you know, I'm not
going to argue----
Mr. Beyer. Mr. Secretary, can I interrupt? I asked
specifically about pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and out
of the oceans.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Beyer. Is DOE working on this? This is one of the
National Academies' recommendations.
Secretary Perry. Yes, I think there are some Oregon State
projects that are going on on the ocean side of it, correct, is
my understanding.
Mr. Beyer. OK. Well, maybe we'll follow up with Paul
later.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Beyer. One more question. You mentioned a number of
times about artificial intelligence and your excitement about
machine learning. What questions is the Department of Energy
attempting to answer with machine learning?
Secretary Perry. You don't have enough time to get the
answer to that from me or anybody else sitting here because
it's across the board. It's things as interesting as
concussions. And we've historically been taught that there are
three levels of concussion, mild--or, excuse me, there's mild,
moderate, and severe. And because of the work that's been done
at the University of California San Francisco, the program that
we're involved with, their Department of Neuroscience, Dr.
Geoffrey Manley will tell you there's 28, and that's because of
artificial intelligence and machine learning and these
supercomputers that we're running at the Department. So, I
mean, that's just in a very slender area of brain science. When
you----
Mr. Beyer. So you're using artificial intelligence to
solve problems across the board not specifically Department of
Energy questions?
Secretary Perry. Right, and I hope----
Mr. Beyer. Department of Energy as a resource rather than
energy questions that are arising.
Secretary Perry. Right, but they're energy questions that
are arising that we're being able to find solutions to because
of this massive amount of data that we're able to crunch if you
will and give us answers to questions that, before, we just
didn't have the time and the computing capacity to get to.
Mr. Beyer. OK. My time is up, but I'd appreciate, perhaps
through the Under Secretary, answers to the questions about
carbon capture----
Secretary Perry. Right.
Mr. Beyer [continuing]. And the shale gas. So thank you
very much. I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Waltz.
Mr. Waltz. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you, Mr.
Secretary, for your leadership.
Look, I think that what's going on in the energy
revolution in the United States of America is one of the great
news stories and maybe the news story of the 21st century from
the exports reaching 10 million barrels a day to export of LNG
and shifting that entire industry, and then, as a combat
veteran, which my colleagues have heard me say on this
committee, I can't tell you how many veterans, how many wounded
warriors we have in Walter Reed, how many we've lost hauling
diesel fuel across exposed supply lines getting IED'ed when
many of those outposts and in fact many portions of our
military can and should be existing on renewables.
So one of the things that I'm most excited about is solar
and where Florida is going with solar. One of my first visits
was to a solar site with--that's built by Florida Power and
Light, and its drive to have 30 million panels by 2030 with 10
gigawatts of electricity. I am proud to say Florida has
eclipsed California now in Q-1 of 2019 with the most solar
power installations for No. 1 in the country for new panels and
in the next five years is--should be No. 1 across the board. So
I think the Sunshine State is living up to its name.
My question, Mr. Secretary, is how do you see the
Department really sustaining the private-sector growth? And, as
a conservative, I love it that it's the private-sector leading
the charge on this, but obviously it's a state issue, and
Governor DeSantis has been a real leader. How do you see the
Department continuing to really embolden and empower the
private sector and--particularly in solar but renewables writ
large?
Secretary Perry. Well, I look at our role as--from the
standpoint of continuing to fund the opportunities to have
public-private partnerships, the commercialization of
innovation and technology that's coming out of our national
labs, for instance. I think a Governor and a legislature in a
particular state would be wise to look at ways for that--and
give incentives to companies to risk their capital, working
with their universities, for instance, which is where, by and
large, your State's innovation and technology will come from,
looking for ways to partner up with the DOE where you have the
trifecta if you will of the State, the Federal, and the local
working together on some of these projects.
So--and a great example of this, Florida Power just
announced a 491 megawatt utility battery. I mean, that's
massive. I mean, we're talking--and so with what you're doing--
--
Mr. Waltz. It's exciting.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. On solar--and by the way,
just for the record, solar just bypassed hydro--or was it--
isn't that right? Solar just bypassed hydro as a total
deliverer of power in this country. I mean, it's just some--you
know, the wind, the solar side of things are really making some
good progress. And battery storage is I think the--as we talked
about----
Mr. Waltz. Yes.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Earlier, the Holy Grail of
this----
Mr. Waltz. Mr. Secretary, just in the interest of time,
I'm glad that you mentioned resiliency. Again, my predecessor
in this seat, now Governor DeSantis, has announced a Chief
Science Officer and is going to announce a Chief Resiliency
Officer. If there's anything I hear about from constituents,
it's traffic and flooding. I've joined the National Flood
Coalition. Where do you see--I know you mentioned a bit
earlier. Where do you see the Department's help in resiliency
issues?
And then just in the interest of time if I could ask you
to submit for the record--I know you mentioned the 17 labs.
We've talked a lot about it. DOD also has 63 labs, and I'd be
interested for the record how you coordinate. I mean, that's a
lot of activity, and we need to spend those dollars efficiently
and just how you coordinate, and then also expanding the scope
of ARPA-E and--I think if we get into some other areas like
nuclear waste disposal and other things that it may be more
palatable across the board----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Waltz [continuing]. In terms of funding that
organization.
Secretary Perry. Yes. And so let me back up here and just
hit a few of the highlights of what you talked about. I think
coordinating between agencies is really important, and one of
the ways to do that is actually to show up and to know what
other agencies are doing rather than just kind of staying
siloed in your own--I'm going to DARPA tomorrow to talk to them
about some of the things that they're doing, some of the ways
that we can partner with them and, quite frankly, to make sure
that, you know, they're not duplicating some things.
I think Paul did a pretty good job earlier talking about--
you know, we kind of got different--we've got different
missions----
Mr. Waltz. Right.
Secretary Perry.[continuing]. DOD and DOE, but to make
sure that we're not--and the resiliency side of what, you know,
we talked about, CESER is really important in that. We are the
agency that has the responsibility for the reliability in the
electrical sector. That's--to make sure that the lights come on
and it's protected, that is the DOE's responsibility. Other
agencies have some areas of--that kind of come in on the
fringes, but DOE, that's their baby, making sure that we have
that reliability, that resiliency in the electrical grid. So
we're doing everything that we can, using those computers to
model.
And let me finish up by saying that the modeling side of
what DOE is doing on the environment is going to pay, I think,
some great dividends to your State, those States with those
low-lying areas that are seeing flooding occurring, seeing the
effect of this changing climate that we live in, and so, you
know, I think these are some important goals and roles of which
DOE is a----
Mr. Waltz. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I'm on Armed Services
as well, so I certainly appreciate that coordination. And,
Madam Chair, I yield my time.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Crist.
Mr. Crist. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you,
Secretary, Governor Perry, for being with us today. It's always
good to see you.
It's no secret I'm really excited about solar energy, as
is my colleague, Representative Waltz, to help our nation and
frankly the world transition to a clean energy economy.
Unfortunately, the Administration proposed cuts to the Solar
Office of more than 70 percent and justified those cuts by
saying that the office is conducting activities that can and
should be carried out by the private sector.
Last year, however, the Administration established tariffs
on solar cells, which supply the majority of U.S. solar
companies. These tariffs have arguably raised prices, slowed
the industry to a degree, and made it harder for solar
companies to invest in their own research and development
activities. And, notably, two companies the tariffs were
intended to help--Suniva and SolarWorld--are now out of
business as of just this month.
Did the Administration consult with solar developers to
your knowledge about their ability to invest in research,
development, and demonstration under the financial constraints
of the tariffs?
Secretary Perry. Congressman Crist, I have no information
that--either acknowledging that or--I have no knowledge about
any correspondence between those companies and the
Administration.
Mr. Crist. OK. Thank you. Did you ever consult with others
in the Administration such as maybe the trade representative
about how tariffs could negatively impact the ability of solar
companies to invest in research and development?
Secretary Perry. Not necessarily just solar companies but
there have been a number of companies that I've had
conversations with that I did share with Ambassador Lighthizer
the challenges that the tariffs, as proposed, were going to
have on these U.S.-based companies and, frankly, have had some,
you know, success in being able to--you know, one of the things
I do--one of my jobs as Governor, as you know, is get people
together and to open up some doors. I think it's wise for us to
be able to say, hey, look, here's a constituent that I've got
that's having some challenges with what you're proposing and
would you talk to him? And I've had some success in being able
to put them together.
I don't know--because those--you know, we don't have a
deal yet with the Chinese with specificity----
Mr. Crist. Right.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. But I think it's important
for us to--you know, they need to hear from people who are on
the ground who see the challenges that decisions that we make
in government have on them.
Mr. Crist. Wonderful. Do you think tariffs are a more
effective way to protect these companies than sustained Federal
investment in research and development?
Secretary Perry. You're starting to get a little bit out
of my area of expertise, Governor.
Mr. Crist. All right. Very well. Well, I will yield the
balance of my time, and thank you for being here again.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir, thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Marshall.
Mr. Marshall. Yes, thank you so much, Chairwoman. And, Mr.
Secretary, again, welcome.
And I just want to start by saying what a great country we
live in. I'm so proud that our carbon emissions today, a nice,
steady downward trend since 2003, and I think that's mainly due
to conservation and innovation.
And if I could take our time to lock in on agriculture and
rural America for a second, as I look at the big picture,
transportation creates about 29 percent of this country's
carbon emissions, industry about 1/4, and agriculture about 9
percent. So we feed this entire country and only produce about
nine percent of carbon emissions, and we're still able to
transport another 1/4 of our products out of the country with
that in mind.
In my adult lifetime we're doubling the agriculture
production, we're using less water, but still over the last
decade agriculture has had a smaller carbon footprint. So I'm
really proud of that.
What is the DOE doing to help promote conservation,
promote innovation? So even though we're improving, agriculture
wants to keep improving. How can we keep working together? What
can we do to put wind beneath your sail?
Secretary Perry. Yes, Mr. Marshall, I think there's a
couple of areas that I would mention just that I've seen,
again, in my travels through the national labs. And keep in
mind one of my prior jobs in the State of Texas would be the
Agriculture Commissioner for 8 years, so--and I grew up on a
farm and my mom still lives on that farm. So there's this real
personal connection back to rural lifestyle, rural values, and
certainly the great contribution that agriculture and those
rural communities make to America.
With that said, in--the additive manufacturing side is one
of the areas where I think we have some great potential to
continue to be developing more efficient equipment both from a
weight and a strength standpoint that these national labs, the
work that's being done at Oak Ridge National lab, their
additive manufacturing facility there is pretty fascinating. I
made mention of Secretary Carson having some manufactured
housing, additive manufacturing housing shown on the Mall here
within the last 30 days. He also had a vehicle. It was a Cobra,
a Shelby Cobra that was built by the national labs.
And so the agricultural community can be served, I think,
well in the additive manufacturing side with some of the work
that we're doing.
Also at the Sandia National Lab at--and this is Sandia
National Lab over in California at Lawrence Livermore, the work
that they're doing on efficiency, on diesel engine combustions
and the emission side of it, again, there is--you don't think
about the Department of Energy and agriculture--that's not the
first thing that comes to mind.
Idaho National Lab--and I'll finish with this--the work
that they're doing on biofuels and some of the real progress
that they're making there. So there's three examples of a place
where the Department of Energy is I think making some positive
impact on the agriculture/rural communities.
Mr. Marshall. Great. Let's talk about rural America for a
second and the challenges, the improvements of battery storage.
Like Texas, Kansas has a large wind energy production. About 35
percent of our electricity is generated from wind, was recently
in Johnson City, Kansas, our largest solar farm. We are
breaking ground on it recently. And what I learned is that,
despite originally intending to buy those solar panels from
China, that already, as President Trump predicted, they've
removed that supply chain of solar panels to other countries,
and therefore able to pull this project off, so it's exciting.
But one of the challenges is when we have battery storage
for one or two people in a mile stretch of dead-end road is a
little bit different than battery storage for big cities. Can
you speak a little bit what the DOE is doing for battery
storage and how that technology is being--improving. What do
you see the future looks like?
Secretary Perry. Yes. I mentioned a little earlier what
was happening in Florida with what Governor DeSantis was laying
out, along with Florida Power, on their storage. A lot of that
technology came from work that's been done at a national lab,
PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and some of the
work that they're doing on battery storage, so we're--you know,
there's new grid storage launchpad that's occurring at DOE.
That's going to accelerate material development, testing,
having some independent evaluation of battery materials,
battery systems.
I think I asked Paul to talk a little bit about some of
the elements in these batteries that are not rare-earth
minerals that are going to be very effective for us and that we
don't have quite--well, we don't have the concern about where
those materials are going to be coming from. They're developed
in the United States. So validating this material capability,
accelerating new technologies, and obviously collaborating--the
collaboration both with the DOE and the labs out there in the
private sector.
And the States have a role to play in this as well.
Mr. Marshall. Of course.
Secretary Perry. I mean, one of the things I always remind
people is that when they think about Texas, they always think
about, you know, yes, you are a big oil-and gas-producing
state, which we are, but we also became the number-one wind-
energy-producing State while I was the Governor of the State
because we wanted to have a diverse portfolio. And so the wind
energy side of what occurred in Texas--I remind my friends in
Europe on a regular basis, Mrs. Fletcher, when I go over there,
that Texas produces more of its energy percentagewise than what
the European Union does. That's a good thing.
Mr. Marshall. Thank you, and I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Wexton.
Ms. Wexton. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you,
Secretary Perry, for joining us here today.
Mr. Secretary, earlier this month, your Department moved a
political appointee into the position of Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Energy Efficiency within DOE. Do you know who--
the name of this individual? I can just tell you, Mr.
Secretary. It's Alex Fitzsimmons.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Wexton. Does that sound familiar?
Secretary Perry. Yes, I--yes.
Ms. Wexton. OK. Can you tell me anything about his
qualifications for this job?
Secretary Perry. I--as a regular practice, I don't talk
about personnel issues in the public.
Ms. Wexton. Very good. Well, I'll just share with you some
of what I've learned in the public domain about Mr.
Fitzsimmons. He graduated from George Washington University in
2012 with a degree in political science, and he spent the next
4 years in a variety of junior roles at fossil fuel energy
advocacy groups, including the American Energy Alliance.
Now, I was surprised to learn, but you may not be, that in
2015, while Mr. Fitzsimmons was there, the American Energy
Alliance called for Congress to eliminate the Office of Energy
Efficiency, the very office he now leads. Were you aware of
that?
Secretary Perry. No, ma'am, but here is what I am aware
of.
Ms. Wexton. No, that was my question. Now, you know about
the Office of Energy Efficiency----
Secretary Perry. This is going to be good. You should let
me go, but I'm not going to do it now.
Ms. Wexton. Fair enough. Now, you do know about the Office
of Energy Efficiency. It has hundreds of full-time staff. It
supports thousands of national lab employees. It's the lead
Federal agency for energy efficiency policy programs and
research, which include advanced manufacturing, building
Federal energy management, and low-income weatherization,
right? I mean, that's what it does.
Now, by way of contrast with regard to qualifications, the
previous Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency
Kathleen Hogan served in that role for a decade. Prior to that,
she served at EPA as a Division Director. She received a
Presidential Rank Award, was inducted into the Energy
Efficiency Hall of Fame for the U.S. Energy Association, and
was a contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She has a Ph.D. from
the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at
Johns Hopkins University.
And her predecessor served at DOE as a technology leader
for nearly 20 years before rising to the rank of Deputy
Assistant Secretary.
Now, as I understand it, Mr. Fitzsimmons is the first-ever
political appointee to serve in that role, and he is by far the
youngest. Can you tell me why you chose to fill the position
with a political appointee instead of a career technologist?
Secretary Perry. I'm going to pass on talking about
personnel issues.
Ms. Wexton. OK. Well, I understand that Mr. Fitzsimmons is
serving in an acting role. Can you tell us when you expect to
fill that position on a permanent basis?
Secretary Perry. I can't.
Ms. Wexton. Well, when you do, I hope that you find
somebody with the experience and gravitas to lead hundreds of
the nation's best scientists and engineers.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about some of the budget
proposals from the Administration. This year, the
Administration's budget request proposes massive cuts to
renewable energy across the board with cuts higher than 70
percent for both wind and solar offices. If these cuts were to
take place, can you tell me approximately how many lab
employees would lose their job?
Secretary Perry. I would have to go back and--I think
trying to play the hypothesis game of if you do this, then
what's this budget look like is----
Ms. Wexton. But would you see that cutting the budget----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Kind of a waste of my time
and your time frankly.
Ms. Wexton. Would you agree that cutting the budget by 70
percent will cause some of the lab employees to lose their
jobs?
Secretary Perry. What I'll tell you is that I think, you
know, cutting the--you could make the statement that cutting
the budget by 100 percent would cause some people to lose their
job, but that's not the reality that's going to happen in this
Committee, and how you look back historically at what this
Committee has done.
And here's what's more important is that I understand how
to manage an agency. I had the opportunity to manage a fairly
big entity for 14 years as the Governor of the State of Texas.
And I also respect the appropriations process. And the
appropriators are going to decide the dollars----
Ms. Wexton. Madam Chair, reclaiming my time----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. That are spent.
Ms. Wexton [continuing]. If I may. Reclaiming my time. I
understand Mr. Secretary, what you're saying about the budget
and appropriations process, but what I would ask that you keep
in mind is that even when these proposed cuts are rejected by
Congress, which they surely will be, that you understand that
these proposed cuts have severe impacts on lab employees and
the morale within those labs that you have spoken so highly of.
Thank you, and I yield back my time.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mrs. Fletcher.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding
this hearing. Thank you, Secretary Perry, for testifying before
our Committee today.
As a native Houstonian and a Texan and now the
Representative for Texas' 7th Congressional District in Houston
where I represent the energy corridor, I appreciate the all-of-
the-above energy approach that you talked about this morning
and that you embraced as the Governor of our State. And these
innovative policies have led Texas to being really the leader
in renewable energy.
People are indeed surprised when I tell them that Texas
produces the most wind energy of any State in the union, more
than three times the next-leading State. And I give credit to
your policies for that every time I talk about it because I
really think that it is important what we're doing in terms of
diversifying our portfolio in talking about research.
And so for that there are a couple of budget priorities
that I do want to talk about and get your perspective on this
morning. The Department of Energy has worked on carbon dioxide
removal technologies, and the intergovernmental panel that
we've talked about this morning as well recommend carbon
capture as being a critical piece in our path forward in
combating climate change. So where DOE has worked on
technologies like direct air capture and development through
fossil energy, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energy, ARPA-E, and the Office of Science, we've seen some of
the major successes from that in the Petra Nova plant that you
referenced earlier in your testimony.
In addition, in response to Congressman Beyer's question,
there's the NET Power plant just outside of Houston, which is
working on natural gas technologies, as well as coal. So
there's a lot of that happening.
But from the budget priorities, it's not clear whether the
Department of Energy will continue to support this promising
technology. Can you talk a little bit about what the Department
of Energy plans to do going forward when it comes to carbon
capture technology?
Secretary Perry. I can give it to you--the short version
is we're going to continue to support it. It's going to
continue to be a priority. There's a National Carbon Capture
Center in Alabama, and that's going to be validating new
technologies that are out there and some transformational
technologies, taking it from the bench to lab scale.
Our--a key priority to all of this is going to be
continuing to reduce the cost of the technology so that you can
get this broad deployment of these technologies.
One of the things we try to do and the reason,
Congresswoman Fletcher, we put in--and I asked and was
successful in getting into the Clean Energy Ministerial carbon
capture utilization sequestration technologies in a global way
because, you know, one of our roles I think is American
technology is how the world in a lot of cases gets transformed.
And if we can take this type of technology, if we can continue
to improve it where it's at commercial scale and get our
friends in India and in China to take this technology and to
implement it, then we really start having commercial-scale
impact on the environment.
So one of the reasons this is--you know, we continue to
really push this is because of its applications globally, and
so I'm--I can assure you that it's going to continue to stay a
priority at the agency.
Mrs. Fletcher. Well, in a follow-up to that question
because it was concerning to me that the fiscal year 2020
budget proposal, which I understand is just a proposal, but it
had a 65 percent reduction in CCUS. And my understanding was
that some of the rationale at least presented was that this
would be a place where industry could better commercialize the
technology. My understanding at this point is that while
certainly we use it for enhanced oil recovery, generally, CCUS
is not commercially viable. And so I guess the question I have
for you in front of this Committee is what do you suggest that
we do here to chart the path forward for CCUS and give you the
tools that you need to continue that research at DOE?
Secretary Perry. Yes, I tend to agree with your
observation that it's going to still continue to require our--
DOE's engagement from the standpoint of expending some funds on
innovation and technology, and this National Carbon Capture
Center in Alabama is a great example of that.
There's still work to be done, so--and if I could correct
the record just on one thing that I said earlier, and I made
mention that solar was producing more energy than hydro, it's
actually wind energy. I should have known better in--being from
Texas----
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. But I just--for the record.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you, Secretary Perry. And with that I
see I've exceeded my time, so I will yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Casten [presiding]. The Chair now recognizes Mr.
Sherman for five minutes.
Mr. Sherman. Mr. Secretary, half a million people live
within just 10 miles of the Santa Susana Field Nuclear
Laboratory. Your Department signed the consent order for
corrective action in 2007 and the administrative orders on
consent (AOC) in 2010 with the California Department of Toxic
Substance Control. The latter required full cleanup of the site
by 2017, so in 2010 your Department agreed to full cleanup by
2017. But to date no meaningful cleanup has occurred at all, so
you're supposed to be completed by 2017; you haven't started by
2019. Will you come to the San Fernando Valley and explain to
people when this site will be fully cleaned up?
Secretary Perry. Mr. Sherman, I would be more than happy
to accompany you and try to explain--well, I'll do my best to
explain that what happened the 7 years before I got here and
why there wasn't any progress made on that, but I don't know if
I'll be successful in convincing anybody but----
Mr. Sherman. I look forward to joining you in the San
Fernando Valley, and I thank you your----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Sherman [continuing]. In making that comment for the
record.
Countries that are friends live by the nonproliferation
treaty if they signed it. Iran and North Korea have gone toward
a nuclear program without the additional protocol with the IAEA
(International Atomic Energy Agency). And we have Saudi Arabia,
which claims to be our friend, but at least when it comes to
nuclear matters, seems to be acting like a rogue state. The
South Korean firm, Korea Electric Power Corporation, is talking
to the--to Saudi Arabia about a large nuclear power
construction project. That project, South Korean nuclear
project, is based on American technology. Can you state for the
record the Administration's position on whether this South
Korean firm would need to see a 123 Agreement between the
United States and Saudi Arabia to sell large nuclear reactors
to Saudi Arabia?
Secretary Perry. Mr. Sherman, what I think we--would be
helpful here is if people understand that Part 810 and----
Mr. Sherman. I'm going to get to a Part 810 question----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Sherman [continuing]. But the first question is is
South Korea free to build large nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia
using American technology----
Secretary Perry. Here would be my answer is it would be no
because they would require a Part 810 before they could go into
a--because that is U.S. technology.
Mr. Sherman. I think they'd also need a 123 agreement, but
I agree with you, it is U.S. technology.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Sherman. Can you commit to me that the Administration
won't enter into a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi
Arabia unless Saudi Arabia signs the additional protocol? This
has been our bargaining position on these since the----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir, that's--that has been our
position in all of our conversations that we have had with the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Sherman. Good answer. The Atomic Energy Act section
303 requires that you keep Congress fully and currently
informed on subject matters relating to atomic energy. You have
issued at least seven Part 810 authorizations to allow U.S.
companies to discuss and submit documents to Saudi Arabia
seeking their business. It took my office about six months to
get a copy of these Part 810s. Can you promise to provide the
810 authorizations in the future if they relate to Saudi Arabia
to both this Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee
promptly?
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. And let me just--the caveat on
that, Mr. Sherman, would be unless the company deems them to be
of proprietary information. At that particular point in time--I
don't know all the specific details, but every bit of
information that is publicly disclosable you can bet will----
Mr. Sherman. Well, I would hope that you keep in mind
Members of Congress are trusted----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Sherman [continuing]. With the most secret information
of our intelligence and defense agencies. If I'm not going to
reveal what I know from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),
I think Westinghouse can trust me.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Sherman. With that, I thank you for your answers, good
answers. Thank you.
Secretary Perry. Thank you.
Mr. Casten. The Chair recognizes Mr. Perlmutter for five
minutes.
Mr. Perlmutter. Gentlemen, thank you for your testimony.
Thanks for your stamina. We're getting to the end of the line
here.
So, first thing, Mr. Secretary, 2033, OK? I hold this
bumper sticker up at a lot of hearings. The Under Secretary is
familiar with this. This is when the orbits of Mars and Earth
are the closest for decades, and we've been talking about
getting our astronauts to Mars by 2033. And with your interest
and your work with NASA on potentially nuclear propulsion as
part of the ability to get our astronauts there is I just want
to enroll you in getting our astronauts to Mars by 2033 and I
want you to work with Mr. Bridenstine on that. You don't have
to answer it. I just want to enroll all of you in this measure.
Secretary Perry. Yes, I want to answer it, though.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right.
Secretary Perry. Buzz Aldrin will wear me out if we don't
get ourselves to Mars as soon as we can.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right. Thank you. I'm glad to hear
that. No. 2, Dr. Foster, who was up here talking about Argonne
and Fermi in Illinois and all that stuff, he is one of the most
biased Co-Chairs in favor of his state than any of us could
ever have. And I appreciate the visits that you all have made
out to the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is in my
district and obviously very proud of that.
And I think some of the words you've used I think we've
got to really take heart. And I'm going to lay into you guys a
little bit because you used words like brilliant, capable,
outstanding staff, your scientists, your technicians, your
engineers, second to none in the world, OK? And you as the
chief executive, you as the lieutenant, the CFO (chief
financial officer) here, you've got a staff that's fantastic.
And if you were back as Governor of Texas and you say to that
staff, you know what, I'm going to cut your budget by 85
percent, that's what you guys mean to me, I mean, when you say
that, it hurts.
And so Ms. Lofgren and you had an interesting
conversation. You said I'm going to look to Congress to help me
on this. But I'm going to say to you, Mr. Secretary, we look to
you. We depend on you to defend your Department.
So I'm going to just ask you, what are the dynamics that
lead to something like an 85 percent cut to the Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy portfolio?
Secretary Perry. Yes. I'll give it back to you like I
did--or I think I did----
Mr. Perlmutter. Remember, last year, you and the Under
Secretary and I talked about these budget cuts, which last year
were pretty draconian. I said, look, I--you know,
Administration to Administration you can, you know, kind of
push a priority but you don't gut the rest of it. And you said,
no, we don't want to do that, but again, it happened.
Secretary Perry. But I don't think--that's not what--
that's not the budget, and we have a budget that's already been
approved, and that's not what the budget is. I know what the
OMB said, but, I mean, again, I go back----
Mr. Perlmutter. So I guess my dynamics are between you and
OMB (Office of Management and Budget), how does it really work?
Because they come in with these budgets. They say this is what
it's going to be and you have to say OK but we're going to work
with Congress?
Secretary Perry. Pretty much.
Mr. Perlmutter. OK.
Secretary Perry. I mean, I ain't going to lie to you.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right.
Secretary Perry. Listen, I----
Mr. Perlmutter. No, I--no, that's why I'm asking you.
Secretary Perry. I don't write that budget. And when I was
the Governor of the State of Texas, I had a budget, and it
would go over to the legislature, and I knew what it would turn
out to be. And that was a doorstop.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right. Well, so----
Secretary Perry. And that's how OMB's budget----
Mr. Perlmutter. Let me ask you this. So let's----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. I think this Congress looked
at it.
Mr. Perlmutter. No, I appreciate this conversation. So as
the head of the Department, when OMB comes back with these
numbers that really aren't realistic that are going to change
dramatically in Congress, what do you say to the staff? It
doesn't matter? We're going to go to Congress and we'll see
what they do?
Secretary Perry. Pretty much.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right. All right. OK. So that's enough
of that.
Secretary Perry. Listen, it's their----
Mr. Perlmutter. I'm just--look----
Secretary Perry. It's their--this is their prerogative. I
understand how the process works. I don't get spun up--and----
Mr. Perlmutter. But I don't want your staff to get spun
up. That's the point. And that's where----
Secretary Perry. I don't think they do.
Mr. Perlmutter. All right. If----
Secretary Perry. I don't think the national lab folks--
they know where I stand on this. They have heard me not only in
word but in deed----
Mr. Perlmutter. And we've seen that.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Supporting them.
Mr. Perlmutter. We've seen that, and I appreciate that
because you have defended and stood up for the National
Renewable Energy Lab and these other labs, and I----
Secretary Perry. And will continue to.
Mr. Perlmutter [continuing]. Appreciate that. All right.
Last thing, that laboratory, NREL, has something similar
to--somebody else mentioned what we call the Collaboratory,
which is the lab, Colorado University, Colorado State, the
School of Mines----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Perlmutter. [continuing]. Conoco used to be part of
that group; I think they still may be--you know, as a way to
provide the best minds toward, you know, advancing science and
advancing the commercial use of some of these new technologies.
So I just wanted to put that out there, that we've been doing
that for a while.
Secretary Perry. And that's interesting. It's some of
these types of innovative solutions, options is how I look at
managing DOE, you know, the--listen, OMB has their job. They do
their job. I get that. But it's coming up with some of these
solutions using the private sector, using some university
resources and what have you to find the--you know, find a way
to manage these, to get us to the point where we can have
solutions that are----
Mr. Perlmutter. All right. Thank you, gentlemen, and I
yield back my time.
Mr. Casten. Thank you. The Chair will now recognize
himself for five minutes.
Thank you so much for coming, Secretary Perry. I really
appreciate it.
Earlier this week, we had received reports that the
Department of Agriculture was actively working to bury peer-
reviewed scientific reports on the impacts of climate change in
the agricultural sector, and there's a significant problem.
This Administration has some discomfort around objective truth,
but as it comes to climate change, this is a real concern
because if we are essentially going to reject the scientific
method in our process, we're going to put not just the American
people but our entire species at risk.
So my question to you, Mr. Secretary, which is a real
simple one--I don't think you'll need your notes for this--are
you personally aware of any steps that your Department is
taking to suppress reports that discuss climate change or its
effect?
Secretary Perry. No. As a matter of fact, we just
announced today a----
Mr. Casten. I've got a number of questions, so that's----
Secretary Perry. OK.
Mr. Casten. I'm delighted to hear that. That's terrific.
Can I have your commitment that if you become aware of any of
those efforts, you will exert your leadership role to make sure
it doesn't happen?
Secretary Perry. Sure.
Mr. Casten. Terrific. I am delighted to hear that. I'm
delighted to hear in your opening testimony that you accept
that manmade climate change is real and something we have to
deal with. I like to point out to people that in the hundred
thousand years or so that our species has existed, 50 percent
of all the CO2 we have ever emitted was since 1980.
That was the year that Nolan Ryan signed with the Houston
Astros. That's within our collective memory, and the scale of
that change is meaningful.
As we warm the climate, the average temperature goes up by
a few degrees, but the number of extreme events increases
dramatically. You mentioned that in a number of your testimony
as well. I know you're personally aware of this in Houston. I
think these are easy. Presumably you would agree that there's
been a significant increase in the number of extreme weather
events?
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Casten. And would you agree that those are caused by
global warming?
Secretary Perry. I'm not sure I can----
Mr. Casten. Would you agree that weather is a bell curve,
and as you move the average on the bell curve, you increase the
tails by a much greater percent than the middle?
Secretary Perry. I'm not going to--you know, I have--those
are your words, not mine. And I--listen, I think----
Mr. Casten. Well----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Sitting here trying to----
Mr. Casten. Well, I'm asking you to opine on basic
statistics. If you're not comfortable----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Casten [continuing]. With basic statistics, I'll move
on, but----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Casten [continuing]. I will----
Secretary Perry. Here's what I'm not comfortable with----
Mr. Casten. I will stipulate that----
Secretary Perry. I'm comfortable with the Department of
Energy is doing some really fascinating work on predictive
modeling, and I hope you would be supportive of that----
Mr. Casten. Well----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Rather than sitting here
trying to go back and forth about do you believe this, do you
believe that is look at what we're doing.
Mr. Casten. Well, Secretary, I'm----
Secretary Perry. And what we're doing is making some real
progress on giving predictive real science-based evidence to
this Committee and to the citizens of this country----
Mr. Casten. Secretary Perry, if I may----
Secretary Perry [continuing]. And that's what's important.
Mr. Casten [continuing]. I agree. I think the Department
of Energy is awesome. And I'm going to echo Mr. Perlmutter. You
run a $12 billion agency that does fantastic work. The
weatherization budget is zeroed out. What I need as a citizen
and I think what we need as a Congress is for you to exercise
leadership to defend those budgets and priorities even when the
Administration doesn't because it is clear that OMB and the
President are not supporting that.
I want to shift to something that I think we may have a
whole a lot of agreement on. I am delighted to hear you
describe energy storage as the Holy Grail of energy. We've got
this fantastic improvement in your state and elsewhere of
resources that need storage to balance that load. It's why one
of the first major bills I introduced when I got here was the
bipartisan Promoting Grid Storage Act, which would create
crosscutting R&D programs at DOE and technical assistance and
demonstration programs to help the public and private sector
de-risk and deploy those new storage technologies.
Your budget, to its credit, increases the energy storage
R&D supported by the Office of Electricity by 5 percent. That's
about $2.5 million. It reduces spending in the Renewable Energy
Vehicle Technologies program by 79 percent or $270 million. So
that is a net drop of--it's rounded off--$270 million in
funding for energy storage that I think from your testimony and
sort of where I come from we agree.
Can you help me understand and this Committee understand
why, if energy storage is indeed the Holy Grail of technology,
we have a budget that drastically defunds our commitment to
deploy the energy storage that we need to keep our grid
resilient and the mix of changing resources we have?
Secretary Perry. In a broad sense what I would tell you is
that the crosscutting technologies--I mean, just because we
don't fund at the same level as we have historically or that
you've seen in previous line items doesn't mean that there's
not ongoing technology moving something forward. For instance,
I would suggest to you that in some of the electric vehicle
side of things we're--we've spent the dollars to get us to the
point where we need to be with those, and we don't need to be,
you know, spending more dollars going forward in that that
we've already, you know, moved to a place where we're
comfortable----
Mr. Casten. But I'm talking about in aggregate total
spending. Your budget would suggest that you think that the
technologies are all mature and we don't need R&D anymore----
Secretary Perry. Not----
Mr. Casten [continuing]. Given a 79 percent cut.
Secretary Perry. Not necessarily. What I'm saying is that
I think that we have the ability to manage those dollars in a
way where the priorities are. Are the priorities on the
electric vehicle the place they were 4 years ago? No, because
we've matured.
Mr. Casten. OK. Well, given the comments just made to Mr.
Perlmutter that it sounded like you were--you felt like the OMB
budget was just something but we're going to fix that. We agree
that energy storage is the Holy Grail. I think we agree that
the budget doesn't meet that goal. What would you like to see
Congress do----
Secretary Perry. I----
Mr. Casten [continuing]. To develop a budget that's
actually going to deploy energy storage at the scale we need?
Secretary Perry. I think the budget that we've got is
appropriate to get us to the place that we need to be----
Mr. Casten. Across the board?
Secretary Perry. Yes, across the board, the budget that's
already been approved.
Mr. Casten. The OMB budget----
Secretary Perry. No, the budget that----
Mr. Casten [continuing]. The proposed budget?
Secretary Perry. The '19.
Mr. Casten. OK. OK. I yield back my time.
Ms. Hill is recognized for five minutes.
Ms. Hill. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Perry, my colleague Mr. Sherman a few minutes
ago engaged with you about the Santa Susana Field Lab. We are
neighbors, and so I want to second what he stated given that
many of my constituents are impacted by this site as well,
which is just outside of my district. And although operations
at the site ceased in 2006, it remains extremely toxic with
both chemical and radioactive contamination. I'm deeply
disappointed, along with my constituents, with that lack of
action and transparency the DOE has shown with respect to clean
up activities at the site over the last decade.
As Mr. Sherman discussed, the DOE and NASA signed an
administrative order of consent ordering that DOE and NASA take
responsibility for their pollutants and contaminants at the
Santa Susana Field Lab and do a full cleanup, which was
supposed to be completed in 2017 and clearly has not been, and
in fact nearly nothing of progress has happened.
So can you speak more specifically about your plans of
action for the complete cleanup of this site and how long it
will take?
Secretary Perry. I can--let me give you the--for the
record here the Department, as you said, signed an
administrative order of consent with California to clean up--
the background cleanup at the site. And the preferred
alternative in the FEIS (Federal environmental impact
statement) is not in the AOC cleanup for the following reasons.
There are various factors that are included in making a
recommendation for preferred alternative. These include
considering the final land use of the site as open space and
the ecological and cultural impacts of any cleanup option.
Additionally, studies performed after signing the AOC
identified less contamination than previously projected. When
considering the factors with potential effects at the--at
that--at the site, the preferred alternative would be the best
option for the site to be clean in a way that ensures it will
be protective of human health and the environment while
avoiding unnecessary damage to the cultural and ecological
resources present at the site. The final decision will be fully
protective of human health and the environment.
Ms. Hill. I understand that. So what's the progress in
terms of the preferred alternative? Is there a negotiation that
needs to happen? What are we looking at in terms of something
being able to--I mean, no cleanup really has started, right? So
even a preferred alternative I would like to see some action
toward, and I'm wondering if you can speak to that.
Secretary Perry. May I get Under Secretary Dabbar to----
Ms. Hill. Yes, thank you.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. Share with you----
Mr. Dabbar. The environmental impact statement was
completed by us, and sorry we can't comment what happened in a
previous leadership team, but we completed that. We submitted
that to the State, and we're working with the State on the
actual specifics of what would make sense, given that
environmental impact statement. We look forward to working with
the State of California on that.
Ms. Hill. Thank you. So I know that you mentioned to Mr.
Sherman or my colleague that you might visit our region and----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Hill [continuing]. Speak about this with our
constituents, and I look forward to discussing those plans
further.
Secretary Perry. Happy to.
Ms. Hill. I know that the other piece that has been
somewhat confusing to our region is the level of resources that
have been allocated to clean up. And I do recognize that this
happened before your Administration, but can you explain how
the Department decides to distribute the funds between nuclear
cleanup sites?
Secretary Perry. Well, I think we go through a process
of--I mean, when you look at the history of this country, when
you look at Hanford, for instance, when you look at the
Manhattan Project and all of the cleanup--that we have a
massive amount of work to be done in the future. So, you know,
we prioritize it as best we can, and I think do a relatively
passable job of--my bet is you think they probably need to
spend a little bit more money, and the San Fernando Valley
would be my----
Ms. Hill. I'm guessing everybody wants more money to be
spent----
Secretary Perry. And I'm pretty sure----
Ms. Hill [continuing]. On their cleanup.
Secretary Perry [continuing]. That the Senators from
Washington State have a--the same observation, that there's not
enough money spent in the Hanford site to suit them.
Ms. Hill. I do think that it would be worth us taking a
better look at just how these decisions are made, maybe some--
--
Secretary Perry. I don't disagree with you.
Ms. Hill [continuing]. Metrics and how we can just better
understand that and explain it back to our constituents as
well. But I do commend the Department for restarting the low-
dose radiation program, and if we want fewer resources to be
spent on cleanup, we should change our radiation limits in
regulation.
Really quick, I know I don't have a lot of time left, but
I want to turn to freedom gas and renewables. And, Secretary
Perry, last month you released an announcement that the
Department of Energy would be expanding Freeport LNG facility
in Texas to spread freedom gas to other countries. And while I
applaud the desire to increase the economic competitiveness of
the United States throughout--through the export of energy
technologies to other countries, I'm concerned that the
majority of the time is spent advocating for coal and natural
gas as opposed to renewable sources.
So I'm wondering if you can just talk about how--how those
other sources of energy, whether it's solar, wind, hydropower
and geothermal----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Hill [continuing]. Are going to be included in these
plans in terms of export.
Secretary Perry. Again, I remind people of my history with
wind. There was not an elected official in the country, not a
Governor, not a President, no one who has a record that is any
more productive when it comes to a renewable, in this case
wind, than I had as the Governor of the State of Texas. So--and
we continue to promote them and talk about them. We do an all-
of-the-above impact.
But let me get with specificity to LNG and why you may--or
it may appear to a lot of folks that you spend an inordinate
amount of time promoting liquefied natural gas. And I don't shy
away from that. I do. I think it's a--I think it is a clean-
burning fuel that every molecule of LNG that we can get into
the market displacing older, inefficient coal-burning plants in
Europe, for instance, is a win for the climate.
And I'm going to continue doing that because I think the
idea that, you know, the--not only is it in our best interest
from a geopolitical standpoint, it's also in the climate's best
interest, and I think it's in the world's best interest.
So we promote an all-of-the-above approach. I--we, by and
large, don't try to pick winners from losers. We try to explain
to people why the technology may be better for them to go one
way or the other. But, by and large, we stick with the all-of-
the-above approach. And if it can come from the United States
and be United States-friendly technology-wise or resource-wise,
then I think that's good for us.
Ms. Hill. Well, I know I'm out of time and I want to thank
you----
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Ms. Hill [continuing]. And I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher [presiding]. Thank you. I'll now recognize
Mr. Lipinski for five minutes.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for
being here, for your testimony. You talked about high-
performance computing, the importance of it. You were at
Argonne National Lab a couple months ago for an announcement on
the Aurora computer, so thank you for coming out there. Just
last week in the House Energy and Water appropriations bill I
introduced an amendment, we passed the amendment to provide
additional funding for the Argonne leadership computing
facility support personnel and help us to hopefully speed
through the process of this exascale computer.
So can you elaborate on the potential of exascale
computing and the ramifications if we fall behind as we are
racing China on this?
Secretary Perry. Yes. Mr. Lipinski, I think the most--the
simplest way that I tell people about what's going on with
exascale and then quantum computing is this: Who gets to
quantum first wins. And I know that's--that may be so
simplistic and--but it's really true. And the work that we're
doing getting us to exascale, obviously that Aurora computer at
Argonne is one of the first steps. I think the next one is out
at Lawrence Berkeley in getting us to exascale. And that's
doing, as I said earlier, a billion billion transactions per
second.
Then, the next step is quantum, and at that particular
point in time--and for the United States to get to that first,
it's going to impact everything across the board because the
artificial intelligence, the machine learning that goes along
with them and being able to manage that much data is kind of
the name of the game. So----
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. Well, I appreciate your support
and we need to continue to support it and provide the funding
that's necessary to move this forward.
I want to move on to artificial intelligence efforts. The
DOE has many efforts going on, as well as other Federal
agencies. I know that the Administration is taking steps to
improve coordination of AI, but I think the coordination
efforts could be improved, so, earlier this year, I introduced
the Growing Artificial Intelligence Through Research Act, which
in part ensures that they're an essential coordinating entity.
So I just wanted to ask, can you describe how AI efforts
are coordinated across DOE, as well as coordinated with other
Federal agencies, and how might your AI efforts benefit from
additional coordination?
Secretary Perry. Yes. Mr. Lipinski, your question is
pretty timely. I mentioned this a little earlier. But tomorrow,
I'm doing a little tour of DARPA of which we're talking about
the coordination between DOE and in this case DOD and the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency over there. And so
they're very focused on AI.
Now, in a lot of cases, as Under Secretary Dabbar said,
they have a different mission than DOE does, but we complement
each other. And what we want to do is make sure that we're not
duplicating, that we are in fact complementing, that there's
some synergy that comes out of the dollars that we're spending
dealing with artificial intelligence and how we combine those.
Nuclear security is part of this. The electric grid
security is part of this. All of these areas are going to--
cybersecurity, you know, modeling for the--Mrs. Fletcher, the
thing that I mentioned with Mr. Carson earlier about the
predictive modeling that DOE has gone into so we can better
predict what's going to happen with these severe storms, these
computers, this artificial intelligence that's going to be
managed with these computers, with this predictive modeling,
this--these are examples of where we can stand up in front of
our constituents and say, listen, here's where your tax dollars
are being spent, and here's some good return on that investment
that you're having. Self-driving cars, I mean, this list goes
on and on.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I just want to get in one more
question.
Secretary Perry. Yes.
Mr. Dabbar. Mr. Lipinski, I think actually Argonne is
really at the cutting edge of your exact topic. Let me just
quickly comment to it. Historically, AI has been looked--has--
primarily people have been focused on it as image capture and
data--pattern recognition. That's what most people talk about
when they talk about AI. Argonne is much farther down the road
on this, and this deals with your exact point, which deals with
coordination. Using AI to learn first principles at physics, at
chemistry, at biology, and of materials. For AI to actually do
research based on first principle science is actually where AI
is going. And so I think your bill is very important.
And about coordination, what they're doing at Argonne I
think is very much at the cutting edge because this isn't just
about the advanced computing. And Rick Stevens at Argonne, they
just showed up here and just laid out--the head of materials
and chemistry from Argonne, the head of the light source for
imaging, and the head of computing. And they're developing a
holistic cycle of research based on first principles of using
AI to drive first principles of physics and of materials and
then using the imaging machine at Argonne as all one organized
entity for--to do research. This is actually where research is
going.
Mr. Lipinski. And I just for the record, I'm going to ask
you, because my time is up, if you can get more information
about the funding opportunity announcement for fiscal year 2020
about the two or more multidisciplinary quantum research
centers. I wanted to find out more about that. It's something
I'm very interested in. It's something also that Argonne is
very interested in. So----
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir. We'll get it, and we'll get it
on the record.
And let me just finish by saying October, this coming
October, there will be an XLab event at Argonne, and it is
focused on artificial intelligence. I hope you'll be there.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you.
Secretary Perry. Yes, sir.
Mr. Lipinski. I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thanks. Before we bring the hearing to a
close, I want to thank Secretary Perry for coming to testify
before the Committee today.
The record will remain open for two weeks for additional
statements from Members and for any additional questions the
Committee may ask of the witness.
The witness is excused, and the hearing is now adjourned.
Secretary Perry. Thank you, Madam Chair.
[Whereupon, at 12:56 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by the Honorable Rick Perry
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Appendix II
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Additional Material for the Record
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Report submitted by the Honorable Rick Perry
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