ENVIRONMENT | Protecting our natural resources
29 February 2008
National Lab Shows Research Can Yield Renewable Innovations
Over 30 years, scientists have improved solar, biomass, wind technologies
Washington -- Renewable technologies like solar, wind and biomass might seem like the newest developments in the global hunt for clean energy, but people have been harnessing these forces to grind grain, sail boats and convert one form of energy to another for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
A relatively sophisticated device -- the modern solar or photovoltaic cell, which converts sunlight directly into electricity -- was unveiled at Bell Laboratories 54 years ago, in 1954. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter stood on South Table Mountain in Colorado and detailed his plans to create a national Solar Energy Research Institute.
“No matter how good a job of conservation we do, the world's supply of oil and gas will dwindle, become more expensive and finally run out,” Carter told the gathered officials, in terms with which no one in the 21st century would argue.
“Foreign oil already costs us four times as much as it did five years ago,” he said. “ ... We must begin the long, slow job of winning back our economic independence. Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out, it will not pollute the air, it will not poison our waters, it’s free from stench and smog. The sun's power needs only to be collected, stored and used.”
The institute began operations in Golden, Colorado. In 1991, it was designated a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and was renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
NATIONAL TREASURE
Today, NREL is the pre-eminent laboratory in the world for research and development in all aspects of clean energy and energy efficiency, and the principal research lab for the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Its fiscal year 2007 budget was $378.4 million.
“Even very early on,” Tom Foust, technology manager of the NREL Biomass Program, told America.gov, “the laboratory’s primary mission, which it maintains to this day, was developing solar energy. A secondary mission was developing biofuels.”
Along with solar and biomass/biofuels, NREL scientists work on advanced vehicles and fuels, basic sciences, energy-efficient buildings, computational science, electric infrastructure systems, energy analysis, geothermal, hydrogen and fuel cells, renewable resource maps and data, and wind energy.
In 2006, NREL Director Dan Arvizu gave President Bush a tour of the laboratory.
“I was in the lab almost 30 years ago,” Arvizu told America.gov, “and I worked on some of the technologies that are now commercial products. I told the president -- ‘The things you’re seeing now, that we have in the laboratory today -- it’s our job to make sure that it’s not going to take us 30 years to get them into the marketplace. There is beginning to be an accelerated pathway for getting technology into the marketplace.’”
At the lab, 1,200 scientists, engineers and analysts work with U.S. colleagues from government agencies, private companies and universities, and with international scientists from government organizations and research laboratories all over the world.
“Much of the world is ahead of the U.S. in terms of its policy formation for aggressively pursuing clean energy technology,” Arvizu said. “We have much to learn from Europe, Scandinavia, Brazil” and other nations.
Since 2006, Arvizu said, he has traveled -- sometimes more than once -- to China, Brazil, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Germany, “and, in all cases, we are forming relationships with them for various things that they do well.”
INTO THE MARKETPLACE
The goal is to develop and advance renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies through basic and applied research and engineering, testing, scaling processes up to industrial volumes, and technology demonstration. A critical part of the laboratory's mission is to help move NREL-developed technologies into the marketplace.
An example of such technology transfer is in the National Center for Photovoltaics Process Development and Integration Laboratory, where NREL and industry scientists work together, according to the Web site, to “close the gaps between laboratory and industrial processes” more quickly.
“The photovoltaics operations here at NREL,” Larry Kazmerski, director of National Center for Photovoltaics, told America.gov, “were designed from the very beginning to establish facilities that would help industry” measure and characterize materials and demonstrate new technologies -- “things industry couldn’t afford to do.”
NREL, along with leading academic institutions and corporations throughout the United States, have shown that focused research can yield valuable new technologies in the near term with many collective benefits for society added over the longer term.
“The challenge that remains before us,” Arvizu told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2006, “is to continue to bring down the cost of renewable electricity and fuels in order to accelerate their adoption.”
During another high-level tour of the laboratory, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told Arvizu in 2007 that he thought the United States was misunderstood abroad. Reinfeldt had just come from visits with President Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom Reinfeldt discussed “green” policymaking and building economies while protecting the environment.
“The Europeans in particular believe the United States is not doing anything in renewable energy or efficiency, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Arvizu said. “A grassroots effort that’s astounding is happening in almost every community across the country.”
NREL also works at the regional level with states, cities, mayors and local economic and development zones.
“Much of that technology will be available to the rest of the world,” Arvizu said, “as we build the tools to allow local communities to get engaged.”
More information about NREL is available on the laboratory’s Web site.
