
The first Earth Day was in 1970 and according to a report in The New York Times on April 21 of that year, the organizer’s “main manifesto” was “to make life better, not just bigger and faster, to provide real rather than rhetorical solutions.” There was scant discussion—or evidence—of global warming at the time, but 40 years on, Secretary Chu says, “To meet the world’s climate goals, you’re going to have to capture carbon from virtually every stationary source.”

In 1997, Dr. Steven Chu won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Twelve years later, he was sworn into office as America’s 12th Secretary of Energy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Chu served as director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
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When asked what return on investment taxpayers can expect from the $36.7 billion the Department of Energy received as part of the 2009 Recovery Act, Chu explains it was, “a down payment on the creation of clean energy and a new infrastructure in the United States, which can run in a much more efficient manner and save money.” As for the person who is simply trying to find a job or save their home, the secretary says, “First and foremost, that money was targeted for getting people back to work. It was a program that would create [green] jobs.”
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“Fantastically new approaches to building mass storage batteries is something that I think could have great yield,” Chu says. “As we transition to more and more renewable energy that is variable, you could store this energy locally. And that makes it much more useful.”

Batteries play a crucial role in electric cars and plug-in hybrids. “There’s a lot of action there,” Chu says. When asked what sort of range he’d like to see for electric cars as the technology evolves, the secretary replies “300 to 350 miles would be great because you’re shrinking the battery, making it lighter, and allowing for more cargo and passenger space at the same time.” In 2009, Congress appropriated $7.5 billion to the Department of Energy for loans to companies using American factories to produce advanced cars and components. Recipients include Nissan, Ford, Fisker and Tesla.

“Another thing I’m very excited about is America's lead in high-performance computing—computers with such power that you can do realistic simulations,” Chu says. “So instead of taking five steps to building something you can take three. Now you can simulate and the designers know in great detail how much energy a building will consume. So if we can do this with new power plants and nuclear reactors, it goes back to saving money and energy.”

“The DOE has a very aggressive biofuels program. Corn ethanol is a very good start. But we think we can also incorporate other types of feedstock,” says Chu. “This is a great opportunity to create wealth in rural America. If we can do this it’s also a decrease of our dependence on imported oil. I see credible scientific progress happening now and for the next five to 10 years. We have already modified yeast and bacteria that have created direct substitutes for gasoline and diesel. The challenge, explains the secretary, “Is a matter of making the output high enough to be commercially viable…without subsidies.”

Not everyone is pleased with the idea, but “nuclear power has to be part of the development as we go to cleaner energy sources because it provides baseload power,” explains Chu. “We are working on energy storage and a transmission system that can handle the variable wind and solar that we expect to be ever-increasingly deployed. But we don’t suddenly go to 50 percent because you’ve got to develop all of these systems.”

As for the oft-discussed smart grid, the secretary sees “the proper government role more on the research and development side—to fund or co-fund pilot projects.” But “the overall investments that we need to modernize are going to be coming from the private sector because the private sector owns the transmission and distribution lines in the United States.”