Energy Innovation Centers Seek Ways to Power the Future

About 6,000 windmills in California create energy, but a reliable way to store energy when the wind isn’t blowing remains a problem.

Washington — Leaders at the forefront of innovative U.S. research have a vision of the future. It’s a place where your car is fueled by sunshine. Buildings where you work and live are healthier and more efficient. The power grid that provides electricity is smarter. And you may just have a nice, clean nuclear power plant right down the street from your home, providing all the power your neighborhood needs.

Directors of the U.S. Department of Energy’s “innovation hubs” sketched this landscape of the future when they headlined a discussion forum in Washington in April.

First established in 2010, these hubs, headquartered in different locations around the nation, are drawing the maps that will allow our societies to navigate the hazards of the present and plot a course to a future that runs on clean, sustainable, efficient and available energy.

The hubs follow a model used successfully to surmount great challenges at other uncertain moments in U.S. history. Bring together top scientists from academia, industry and government, and give them what they need to brainstorm, collaborate and overcome the barriers that limit the adoption of clean energy technologies.

Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman said the hubs are devoted to the Obama administration's energy strategy of reducing dependence on foreign oil, addressing the climate crisis and supporting clean energy jobs of the future.

“The hubs have the agility and funding quickly to focus on what works, and very importantly, to abandon bad ideas that don’t work,” Poneman said, adding that the U.S. Congress approved a $260 billion investment in these research pursuits in 2012.

The Department of Energy has created five hubs, each with an intense focus on one sector of the energy enterprise: controlling photosynthesis, improving nuclear reactors, reinventing construction techniques, creating better batteries and energy storage, and insuring the flow of rare earths and other critical materials.

The Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, led by the California Institute of Technology, is focused on producing fuels directly from sunlight. Scientific director Nathan Lewis says evolution taught plants how to manufacture all their energy from the sun, so he thinks his lab will be able to figure it out.

“More energy from the sun hits the Earth in one hour than all the energy consumed on our planet in a year,” Lewis said. “It’d be great if we can take that inexhaustible, clean resource and make fuel for our cars, our airplanes, our ships.”

One of the current weaknesses of solar energy is that the source is intermittent. When it’s dark, cloudy or storming, the sun isn’t fulfilling your energy needs. A solar storage or battery system is needed if solar, and other renewable energy methods, are going to meet the constant needs of an industrial society. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research is focusing its work on that scientific and technological challenge, in association with the Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago metropolitan area.

George Crabtree, Argonne senior scientist, is directing the center's efforts to develop energy storage and battery technologies to improve the reliability of the electrical grid, to better integrate renewables in the grid, and to boost the performance capabilities of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Crabtree told the Washington audience his group has adopted the slogan “5-5-5” to describe the battery-storage system they’re aiming for: a system that will provide five times the energy density [the amount of energy stored in a given space] of current storage methods, at one-fifth the cost, to be achieved in five years. Success in getting there is going to require breakthroughs in both chemistry and materials science, which must be coupled with innovative engineering to create a useful storage technology.

“You could say that’s a risky and aggressive goal,” Crabtree said. “Yes, it is, but that’s what it takes if you want to have the big impact that we’re looking for.”

About half of U.S. energy consumption occurs in buildings — lighting them, heating them, running all the appliances we put in them. The Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy-Efficient Buildings is looking in that niche for breakthroughs. Manufacturers of various building components — windows, insulation, materials — have all been making progress in recent years to achieve greater energy efficiency. Executive Director Hank Foley said the Philadelphia center will work on the “tough engineering problem” of retaining and multiplying those efficiencies when they are all combined in a given structure.