Presidential Report Provides Roadmap for Transforming U.S. Energy System
DOE Supercomputers Pursue Clean Energy Breakthroughs
EPA Finalizes 2011 Renewable Fuel Standards
DOE: $21 Million in Commercial Building Energy Assistance
Electric Car Drives Length of Americas
Emerging Economies Show Renewable Energy Leadership
Presidential Report Provides Roadmap for Transforming U.S. Energy System
The US should prepare a federal energy policy and update it regularly, according to a report released on November 29 by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Accelerating the Pace of Change in Energy Technologies Through an Integrated Federal Energy Policy provides a roadmap for the federal role in transforming the U.S. energy system within one to two decades.
The report recommends significantly increasing federal investments in energy-related research and development from the current $5 billion per year to about $16 billion per year.
It calls for regular strategic Quadrennial Reviews of energy policy similar to the quadrennial reviews of the U.S. Department of Defense. The first one is targeted for early 2015. Reviewers would include presidentially appointed experts from academia, NGOs and industry.
It also recommends the president engage the private sector, consumer representatives, and Congress in exploring options for new revenue streams that could support development of more efficient energy technologies.
Accelerating the Pace of Change responds in part to a fall 2009 request by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to review the nation's current approach to energy-related innovation and to recommend ways to accelerate the transformation of the U.S energy system.
PCAST concludes the transformation is being slowed both by the large number of federal policies that affect development, implementation, and use of energy technologies and by the lack of coordination among the many departments and agencies with responsibilities under those policies.
To facilitate planning, the Executive Office of the President would lead the Quadrennial Energy Reviews, and DOE would provide a secretariat. A main focus would be on promoting widespread use of new technologies that have proven worthy of scale-up, PCAST said. See the White House press release and the PCAST Web site which includes an executive summary and the full report.
DOE Supercomputers Pursue Breakthroughs in Clean Energy
DOE announced on November 30 the largest ever awards of its supercomputing time to 57 innovative research projects that are using computer simulations to perform experiments in areas including biofuels and climate change.
Using two world-leading supercomputers with a computational capacity roughly equal to 135,000 laptops with quad-core processors, the research could speed development of more efficient solar cells or foster improvements in biofuel production. The projects span both academic and commercial research, including partnerships with companies such as General Electric and Boeing to use sophisticated computer modeling in pursuit of innovations such as better wind turbines.
DOE is awarding time on two of the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputers: the Cray XT5 ("Jaguar") at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the IBM Blue Gene/P ("Intrepid") at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. The awards include nearly 1.7 billion processor hours, the largest total ever.
Granted under DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, many projects aim to advance renewable energy solutions and to understand the environmental impacts of energy use. The program, open to all scientists, is supported by DOE's Office of Science and is managed by the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Lab.
The INCITE program researches the roles of ocean, atmosphere, land, and ice in climate change; advancement of materials for lithium air batteries, solar cells, and superconductors; improving combustion in fuel-efficient, near-zero-emissions systems; and development of fusion energy systems.
