Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Grid-enhancement technologies will also be important for maintaining a reliable electric system as more people switch to electric vehicles and electric heating according to Karen Wayland who is the CEO of the GridWise alliance. She also said that “It’s a historic investment in grid upgrades to enhance resilience, reliability and security, and it’s going to help transform the grid into one that can accommodate these low-carbon goals.”
State regulators and energy offices will also be compelled to consider setting up new programs to advance demand response and electrical vehicle deployment. This could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors.
Jennifer Granholm is the Secretary of Energy. Yesterday, she was in Delaware to announce that the DoE has upgraded a million U.S. homes with energy efficiency improvements via the Home Performance with Energy Star program. She said that since 2001, that program “has helped American homeowners and renters save $7.7 billion on their energy bills and cut carbon emissions equivalent to a year’s worth of 11 coal-fired power plants.”
One of the major elements of the infrastructure bill is a focus on emerging technologies. Tens of billions of dollars in new funds will be added to the DoE’s coffers. Much of this money is destined to help young companies scales up everything from long-duration storage and hydrogen to carbon capture, direct air capture, and small modular nuclear. New offices will open inside the DoE to carry other that missions. These new offices include an Office of Clean Energy Demonstration which will receive about twenty-one billion dollars to oversee expensive new pilot projects. DoE has a record of stewarding along new technology. Tesla Inc is the electric vehicle colossus valued at over one thousand dollars per share. It can trace its origins to a four hundred and sixty-five million government loan in 2010. Tesla used this money to open its first assembly plant in Fremont, California. Now the infrastructure bill is effectively tasking the department with repeating that success story many times over. It is responding in part to requests from innovation advocated and DoE officials, who have argued that the feds need to do far more to bring emerging technologies to the wider market.
Those arguments have been supported by some evidence which shows that DoE’s lab-stage work on clean energy often does not translate into real-world breakthroughs. A study published last year showed that startups backed by the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy were twice as likely as their competitors to receive a patent but no better are reaching commercialization.
The Tesla success story has its inverse. The Solyndra solar manufacturing company got a five hundred and thirty five million dollar loan guarantee from the same DoE branch known as the Loan Program Office (LPO). Conservatives attached the Obama administration for squandering funds on what they considered to be vanity clean energy projects. Today that LPO is profitable thanks to the broader success of its portfolio. The Solyndra fiasco slowed the LPO’s work to a near standstill. This was especially true under the Trump administration. It made awards to only one venture which was the Plant Vogtle nuclear project in Georgia.
Innovation advocates have found a willing ear in the Biden administration and also several Senate Republicans. However, it remains to be seen how their ideas will play out through the lens of the country’s contentious politics.
Much of the technology that will get the attention of the DoE such as hydrogen and carbon capture is unpopular with environmental justice advocates. They have cried foul at the plans of the administration to deploy the tech in front-line communities. That may trigger debates in the Democratic Party over the department’s big-ticket energy demonstrations.
Christopher Davis is the senior advisor to the DoE Secretary. During a media call about the bill yesterday, he said, “Summing up the idea of the demonstrations, to reach our net-zero goal we have to replicate these huge [projects] dozens and hundreds of times across the country. Someone has to build the first ones, to show that it can be done.”