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The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia (2011)

Chapter: Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy

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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
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Panel II


Advancing Solar Technologies:
The Department of Energy

Moderator:
Alicia Jackson
U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources

Dr. Jackson emphasized the importance and the unique opportunity of bringing such a diverse group together. “There is a real sense of urgency in the Congress,” she said, adding that it is important that “we don’t let this opportunity pass us by—to lead not only in research and development, but also manufacturing.” She noted especially the interest of Senator Jeff Bingaman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Part of his urgency, she said, was driven by rapid developments in other countries, and the desire for the United States to take a leadership role in new clean technologies.

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY’S PERSPECTIVE

Kristina Johnson
Under Secretary
U.S. Department of Energy

Dr. Johnson began by stating the President’s current goals for energy:

• Reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.

• Conserving 3.6 million barrels of oil within 10 years.

• Building a world-class workforce for a sustainable green economy.

She noted that her own particular passion, derived from her background in academia, was to educate the workforce, and emphasized the potential for renewable technologies to create new jobs and an educated workforce. Among the many

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

predictions for job creation, she cited one from the Gigaton Throwdown, which projected that the global PV industry could create 1.5 million jobs by 2020,4 or approximately three to 10 jobs per megawatt of electricity.

Toward a Roadmap for PV

Dr. Johnson said that her office was now focused on how the United States could meet its energy goals. A guiding premise, she said, was that science and engineering informs policy, and policy will promote change and technology adoption. She said her office was trying to create a framework that can integrate energy policy, science, and technology goals in an energy technology roadmap. This roadmap will have quantitative goals, on-ramps, and off-ramps “as we find technologies that can get us to the President’s objectives.” She said that one feature of this work is to assemble the interesting roadmaps that already existed and “put them all into the same units. This will allow us to do a meta-analysis of the roadmaps.”

A second feature of this complex challenge is that “many of the roadmaps are not integrated.” Therefore, her office is trying to bring a systems perspective to the collection of energy roadmaps and to break down the silos in which they were created. “By ‘turning off’ all other sources of energy,” she said, “we can get to an estimate of where solar will be.”

It can also bring some new questions about quantifying energy efficiency. For example, she said, for an estimate of how much energy can be saved in buildings through efficiency measures, there may be overlap in the way that efficiency is calculated. “For example, if we bring in heat pump systems, do we call that an efficiency as well as geothermal energy source and add them together, or would that be double counting?” She said that her goal is to put all the roadmaps together on one map, have the assumptions peer reviewed, and use the results to help guide investments in R&D. “This is one of my very first initiatives as Under Secretary,” she said. A second priority is to coordinate R&D across the basic sciences and energy areas, and a third one is to organize initiatives that cut across the department and agency boundaries. “There is a big push in this administration to work across agencies,” she said.

New Funding for Renewable Energy

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has brought about $26 billion to the DoE, which is challenged to spend those funds both quickly and well. Much of the spending is being organized under four new headings:

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4Chad Augustine et al, Redefining What’s Possible for Clean Energy by 2020, Full Report, Gigaton Throwdown, June 2009.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
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• Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs)

• ARPA-e (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy)

• Energy hubs

• RE-Energyse

“What we’re trying to do,” Dr. Johnson said, “is to make sure that we have the workforce to do what we want to do. We want to invest in the kinds of technologies that will be required to meet the administration’s goals and create a green economy. The Center for Energy Workforce Development has said that 60 percent of the science and engineering workforce will retire in the next five years, and these are great-paying jobs. So this is a real national crisis.”

This challenge, she said, would be the focus of the RE-Energyse program. Run jointly with the National Science Foundation, it will invest $1.7 billion over 10 years to support science education from K-12 to faculty levels.

She said that she had lived through a time when workforce shortages were a barrier to new R&D. “My background is in photonics,” she said, “and I was heavily involved in the late 1980s and 1990s in trying to develop components for the telecommunications display industry. A lot of us started little companies in Boulder, Colorado, and we ended up stealing each other’s students as employees. This was not productive. We need to anticipate the workforce needs and invest in the right curricula, both at the community college and four-year levels.”

Seeing DoE Programs Through Pasteur’s Quadrant

Dr. Johnson turned to the concept of Pasteur’s quadrant, which she said had been useful for her in visualizing and discussing DoE programs.5 In the original Pasteur’s quadrant, she said, basic research is visualized as occurring on the y-axis, at the upper left, while applied research takes place on the x-axis, at the lower right. The upper right quadrant belongs to Pasteur, where the activity is described by Dr. Johnson as “use-inspired” investigation. This level of activity was said to be modeled by Pasteur himself in his successful discoveries of basic information while seeking to answer practical questions.

However, in visualizing the potential interactions of DoE research programs, Dr. Johnson quickly saw the need to divide the quadrants further to accommodate cross-cutting programs. For example, one might begin in the upper left quadrant with basic research on the photoelectric effect, which had its roots in the work of Einstein. One might want to develop that discovery toward an interesting use by

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5See Donald E. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997. Pasteur’s quadrant refers to that portion of learning which is use inspired but brings fundamental understandings. This is distinguished by the author from the traditional dichotomy of “basic” and “applied” research, a dichotomy popularized just after World War II by Vannevar Bush in his report to President Truman, Science: The Endless Frontier. Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
image

FIGURE 5 Pasteur’s Quadrant applied to DoE.
SOURCE: Kristina Johnson, Presentation at July 29, 2009, National Academies Symposium on “State and Regional Innovation Initiatives—Partnering for Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States.”

pursuing the physics further—an approach that actually led to the development of transistor technology, she said. This might be displayed in the diagram between basic and use-inspired research. If basic research, in the upper left, is represented by blue, and use-inspired research, in the upper right, is red, transistor technology might fit in a new square colored magenta. This is the kind of work visualized for the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRCs). These centers are funded for five years and renewable for five more. Their mission is to try to produce basic research that can be developed into prototypes or demonstrations. “These programs,” she said, “are looking for the next frontier of what could possibly be handed off to technology development and investment.”

She experienced the same need when studying the upper right quadrant, Pasteur’s quadrant, which was dedicated to use-inspired research. At some point during the exploration of transistor technology, the photovoltaic effect was observed, and uses for this new form of electricity led to exciting applied research.

“One might then say of the transistor technology,” she continued, “that it is only 7 percent or 8 percent efficient as implemented in a traditional PV panel with amorphous silicon. We want something up near 40 or 50 percent. So we might ask whether the solar technologies that can generate those kinds of efficiencies are deployable at scale. Now we go to the upper right quadrant, moving toward use but not quite there.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
image

FIGURE 6 DoE cross-cutting programs.
SOURCE: Kristina Johnson, Presentation at July 29, 2009, National Academies Symposium on “State and Regional Innovation Initiatives—Partnering for Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States.”

That’s what ARPA-e is looking for—the breakthrough that will bring orders of magnitude improvement and accelerate the commercialization of technologies.” ARPA-e then takes its place as the red upper portion of Pasteur’s quadrant.

As applications research continues, she said, the technology moves downward through Pasteur’s quadrant where the Energy Hubs are located in Dr. Johnson’s diagram. “You bring people together and ask, What does it take over a sustained period and at scale to actually deploy the technology and create the market?” This is where the technology R&D passes through the proof-of-concept stage and begins to look commercializable, ready for the lower right.

”So now we have been in the upper left, the upper right, and the lower right,” she said. “These are things that are high risk, but can have a big payoff in terms of the scale. We’ll migrate through overlapping platforms to bring people together that can really create new industries. This is my vision of how these programs fit together.”

A New Model for Research

Dr. Johnson then reviewed another cause of change in the way research is performed. In the traditional view, popularized by Vannevar Bush, research was

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

often portrayed as two-dimensional, with knowledge flowing unidirectionally from basic research toward application, development, and eventually commercialization. But this model, to the extent that it was ever realistic, was changed by the advent of transistors, computers, and the Internet—the features of the information age. In the old model, scientists would think about how things work, and engineers would make them work. The new availability of knowledge allowed the engineers to invent new things as well. They could design more intelligently, using mathematical models. Computers brought everyone the same platform and tools, allowing not only engineers but also social scientists to become more quantitative and take more analytical approaches to the deployment of technology. “This is a fundamental change,” she said, “that has not been clearly recognized.”

A second thing that happened, she said, was passage of the Bayh-Dole Acts. “When I was an undergrad at Stanford,” she said, “I had my first little invention. I took it to Niels Reimers,6 a pioneer of technology transfer, and he said, in a very nice way, Kid, get out of my office, we don’t do toys. Then the Bayh-Dole Act happened. I got a call back two or three years later saying, You know, we’re kind of interested in your idea.” The legislation had helped change the relationship between the invention and use of new knowledge. Universities had a new mandate to share and commercialize their technology. This was followed by the SBIR legislation, by which each federal agency set aside 2 percent of its R&D budget to support the commercialization of new technological ideas, preferentially by small businesses.7

Moving PV Toward Commercialization

Dr. Johnson suggested that both those major forces had already influenced the development of photovoltaic technologies and businesses. Freer access to information allows potential investors to learn about technology firms of interest, and the Bayh-Dole measures have accelerated the movement of new technologies toward the market place. Dr. Johnson’s interpretation of the Pasteur’s quadrant chart indicated her own interest in accelerating the movement of knowledge from the DoE into the commercial world. The Energy Hubs, for example, which are poised to move technology into pilot and demonstration phases, were the “secretary’s number one priority.” Of the eight or so topics planned for these hubs, a significant portion—electricity from sunlight, energy storage, grid modernization—are central to the advance of the PV industry.

The DoE has increased its support for solar research at every level, she said. Of the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers funded in 2009, 6 were solar technology centers. When ARPA-e solicited white papers on energy needs, solar

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6Niels Reimers founded Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing in 1970, which became a model for other universities.

7The 2 percent set-aside has been increased to 2.5 percent.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
image

FIGURE 7 Solar energy capacity has more than doubled between 2000 and 2007.
SOURCE: Kristina Johnson, Presentation at July 29, 2009, National Academies Symposium on “State and Regional Innovation Initiatives—Partnering for Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States.”

energy was one of largest recipients. The existing Solar Energy Technology Program had been bolstered by an additional $117 million from Recovery Act funding. Modernization of the national electricity grid is receiving billions of dollars in support.

Dr. Johnson ended by noting that the additional funding for renewable energy is also subject to the 2.8 percent SBIR and STTR set-aside, which totals about $55 million, which promotes commercialization and job creation. The majority of that amount is available for SBIR grants, she said, “and I want to encourage people in the PV area to apply for that funding.”

DOE SOLAR ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM: ACCELERATING THE U.S. SOLAR INDUSTRY

John Lushetsky
Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary
U.S. Department of Energy

Mr. Lushetsky began by thanking the Academies for helping the DoE “work through quickly” a host of complex strategy and policy questions regarding solar energy technologies. “We are innovating in terms of the clock speed we ask our partners to work at,” he said, “because we feel this is such an important topic.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

He said that the DoE’s Solar Energy Technology Program (SETP) was focused on reaching grid parity by 2015. “That is a slightly slippery concept,” he said, “because it depends on a number of conditions, including financing terms, market pull, and local solar conditions.” But he said that the DoE sees multiple technology pathways to meet this goal. The aim of the program is to allocate funds so as to maximize and accelerate market penetration.

Mr. Lushetsky said that the solar energy program was organized around four components: photovoltaic technologies, concentrating solar power, systems integration, and market transformation. Two pieces are concerned with deployment: market transformation and grid integration. He said that permitting processes and market acceptance were “at least as significant as some of the cost and technical issues.” Systems integration, he said, involves how these systems are deployed at large scale, how they behave, and how they interact with energy storage mechanisms.

Rising DoE Budgets for PV

The budget for the SETP was under $100 million for six years preceding FY2007, when it rose by more than $50 million under the Solar America Initiative. In FY2009, it rose by approximately $100 million more with the Recovery Act, and $51.5 million of that amount goes to photovoltaic technologies. The request for FY2010 is similar to the 2009 total, stretching across the same four components.

Of the four technical components, photovoltaic technologies is by far the largest, receiving 65.7 percent of the solar budget, while the relative portion for CSP is growing. The two largest recipients, industry and the national labs, split the amount almost equally between them, with about 5 percent going to universities. He expressed a desire to increase university involvement, increase workforce development, and raise the investment in long-term research, which received only about 10 percent of the funding. The largest portion—some 48 percent—went to programs designed to end in less than seven years.

Mr. Lushetsky displayed the various components of the program in the form of a pipeline that stretched from early-stage research done in partnership with the Office of Science to the applied activities of market transformation, codes and standards, outreach, and utilities. “The pipeline approach aims to balance near- and long-term research,” he said. “A big emphasis is on near-term commercialization.”

Of the $117 million in new funding from the Recovery Act, some $22 million will be devoted to the supply chain and crosscutting technologies at universities and companies. Some $6.5 million are allocated to 13 pre-incubator projects. Another $10 million will go to PV technology incubators and $37.5 million to high penetration solar development. The amounts for market transformation will be up to $10 million for Solar America Cities Special Projects and up to $27 million, over five years, for a network to train workers in solar installation.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
image

FIGURE 8 FY2009 projected solar budget.
SOURCE: John Lushetsky, Presentation at July 29, 2009, National Academies Symposium
on “State and Regional Innovation Initiatives—Partnering for Photovoltaics Manufacturing
in the United States.”

He emphasized that early-stage research would continue to be a focus of the program. “Even though it gets only 10 percent of the budget,” he said, “we continue to realize that making sure we have a robust R&D pipeline is very important. We also plan to partner with our Office of Basic Energy Science.” He said that the Next Gen program represents a wide diversity of early-stage technologies, and will be carried out by partnerships between BES and many universities. In most cases, the technologies in this program will be those that demonstrate advanced, post-2015 device and process concepts.

Partnerships to Accelerate Commercial Development

Mr. Lushetsky turned to the Technology Pathway Partnerships (TPP), which are designed to promote assessments of the life cycle costs of the total PV system, with the immediate goal of driving down costs in dollars per kilowatt-hour. The program previously focused on cell efficiencies, he said; this is an important part of cost reduction, but it does not consider the system as a whole. To address this need, the DoE released a solicitation that invited teams from across the PV spectrum, including “everyone from silicon manufacturers to roofers.” The idea was to stimulate knowledge sharing among people who seldom interact—something that does not need to be done in a mature industry, but is needed for the PV sector. “We’ll continue to look at it to see if it’s still needed,” he said. “The industry

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

has matured rapidly over the last three years, and many of you have told us that this was a key step in getting people to focus on system costs. We certainly count that as one of our contributions to helping the industry.”

More recently, the department has worked to strengthen PV technology incubators. This is a generic term, he said. “For us it means to help early-stage companies get beyond the proof-of-principle stage and ramp up to initial low levels of production. To do this, DoE works closely with NREL; together they try to leverage the output of NREL labs into production, with the goal of producing about 3 MW of electrical power. If all goes well, this stage is followed by commercialization, manufacturing, and steps to scale up the process.”

Broadening the Focus of Investment

Mr. Lushetsky said that the department is using a new approach to PV development. Rather than investing in successive promising cell technologies, it looks at all the cell technologies under development and tries to invest in supply chain and cross-cutting technologies that it can leverage across the whole sector. Examples of such technologies might be new methods of silicon supply, new types of substrates, or new types of encapsulation. By focusing on high-impact technologies, the department hopes to promote cost reductions across the industry. By supporting projects that tap significant expertise from related fields, it tries to develop and optimize technologies for PV. Finally, by emphasizing near-term technologies that can be inserted into current manufacturing processes, it hopes to accelerate progress toward grid parity.

Mr. Lushetsky turned briefly to the DoE’s major PV labs—NREL and Sandia National Laboratory—that account for almost 50 percent of its solar energy investment. Historically, NREL has provided the bulk of the department’s PV technology, working closely with experts at Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He estimated that the department supported more than 200 scientists and engineers with “deep solar knowledge.” He encouraged symposium participants to work with all of them.

Process Development Labs to Help Bridge the Gap

The department also supports a Process Development and Integration Laboratory (PDIL), he said, which supports R&D on a manufacturing scale. Its specialized equipment allows scientists at NREL to partner with industry in developing processes that are easily transferable to the manufacturing environment. If the task is to develop a silicon wafer, the PDIL offers good process control for testing different coatings or deposition layers with a large degree of flexibility and control. In-house metrology equipment can ensure that processes are working properly. This approach bridges the gap between pure R&D on small samples and the scale needed

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

by industry. He said that additional resources might be desirable, but welcomed inquiries and interest from industry about partnering with NREL at this facility.

Internationally, he said, the primary markets are found outside the United States, as are the manufacturing supply bases. But he said that the innovation base “is clearly in the United States,” especially with regard to diversity. In Europe, most investment has been made in polysilicon and crystalline silicon PV companies. In Asia, almost all investment has gone to crystalline silicon PV. In the United States, a robust venture capital and private equity base has funded many different technologies.

Mr. Lushetsky closed by highlighting the diversity of activities in the United States. “I think this is mirrored in the technology investments that DoE has been making as well,” he said, “through our TPP program as well our incubators and preincubators. So we clearly have an opportunity to capture the next generation of technologies, and that certainly drives a lot of our thinking. It’s not the only consideration, but I think it is an important one.”

BRINGING DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
INNOVATIONS TO MARKET

Carol Battershell
Senior Advisor for Commercialization and Deployment
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
U.S. Department of Energy

Ms. Battershell said that the Commercialization and Deployment group had been introduced in response to a perceived weakness in the commercialization activities of the national laboratories. Accordingly, the motto of the team is “Out of the labs and into the market.” That is, the team is charged with identifying and implementing the opportunities in technologies developed by the department’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) program.

The initial tool for doing this is a Technology Commercialization Fund to help national laboratories move their promising technologies across a gap between research activities and later stage funding. Funds are restricted to prototype development, demonstration, and deployment—not further scientific research. “We’ve had billions of dollars going into the national labs over the decades for research,” she said, “but much less going into commercialization. In conversations with the labs about what’s stopping commercialization, we hear a lot about the ‘valley of death’.”

Finding Industry Partners

In response, the EERE has allocated $14 million over the last two years to fund technologies in 10 DoE labs. The DoE requires evidence of market interest

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
image

FIGURE 9 Technology Commercialization Fund.
SOURCE: Carol Battershell, Presentation at July 29, 2009, National Academies Symposium on “State and Regional Innovation Initiatives—Partnering for Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States.”

in the technology, in the form of 50-50 cost sharing with an industry partner. In addition, this requirement leverages the government’s grants, which typically range from $100,000 to $250,000 per technology. The largest recipient of this funding so far has been the solar energy sector. Ampulse Corporation is one example, which was formed to commercialize technology developed at both NREL and Oak Ridge.

Bringing the Entrepreneur into the Laboratory

The other main part of the program, Ms. Battershell said, is to “get more eyes on the technologies”—to connect investors and entrepreneurs with research in the national labs on the brink of commercialization. This effort includes several programs. One is the Entrepreneur in Residence program that connects leading scientific and business talent. An entrepreneur is selected to spend a year in a national lab, mining any knowledge that is available. This does not bring exclusive rights to lab results, but better access. The entrepreneur also commits to looking preferentially at lab technologies to commercialize. “One thing DoE wisely recognized,” she said, “was that DoE does not have the ability to recruit or select the right entrepreneurs, so we partner with venture capital (VC) firms. The partnership is actually between the DoE and the VC firms, and the firms actually find the entrepreneurs.”

The EERE is still testing its entrepreneur-in-the-lab concept. One thing they have learned is that the model of one entrepreneur-one lab-one VC firm does not give the entrepreneur exposure to more than one VC firms when there is a

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

start-up idea to pitch. In the second round, said Ms. Battershell, DoE is trying to give the entrepreneur access to multiple VCs. “This is more like the real world, and doesn’t lock us into one VC,” she said.

“Speed Dating” for Entrepreneurs and Scientists

Another way the department is trying to “get more eyes on the technologies” is to create a “speed-dating” mechanism. Over a span of two days, they expose VCs to DoE technologies—as many as 80 technologies in a session. This is not so much an immersion in a particular laboratory as an exposure to how many technologies are potentially available and how many labs are “open for business.” A side benefit, she said, was the work EERE did with the scientists in preparing for these showcase events. They found that while the scientists were good at presentations to explain projects and budgets to project sponsors, they were often not experienced at selling their ideas to the private sector. As a result, the EERE began working with the lab scientists to help them present the benefits of their technologies and to research market possibilities so these ideas can easily be understood by investors.

A New Technology Information Portal

Ms. Battershell said that the program she found most exciting was the EERE Technology Portal. When she joined DoE about a year ago, she was surprised to find out there was “not a one-stop shop for the great technologies the taxpayers have been investing in.” For information about wind technologies, she said, one had to go to Sandia’s site, and then NREL’s site, and others, and even then was unlikely to find anything more than the patent applications. “So we’re looking at a way to gather all the information on one portal.” In addition, EERE has begun to write lively two-page marketing summaries of each technology. A demonstration site is now ready, and it is scheduled to “go live” early in 2010. She said that the site was designed to carry information on solar technologies, how to commercialize technologies in general, and the value of explaining the benefits of a particular technology over other technologies.

She noted that some additional Recovery Act funding would be arriving soon—from the IRS. The DoE and the IRS partnered to implement this program although the funding would not show up on the DoE site, even though it will support renewable energy technologies. It is the 48C Manufacturing Tax Credit, funded for $2.3 billion in the form of 30 percent tax credits to be taken over ten years. The 48C Program should be sufficient to support about $7.7 billion in manufacturing investments. This direction would be significant because government support for solar had focused on deployment rather than on promoting domestic manufacturing. The new funding was coming soon, she said, so that the department would have to prepare quickly for implementation.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

Ms. Battershell closed by commenting on the question of whether government is seen to pick winners. “How does the government provide assistance for commercialization and yet not pick winners?” she asked. “I think we’re walking that line well, but I would like to hear what people think.”

DISCUSSION

Reducing Costs

Dr. Guha said that the industry was not where it wanted to be in system costs, and asked the DoE’s view on that. “I’m a little concerned that while we are hearing about revolutionary devices and thinking out of the box, I want to assure you we have been reducing the costs. There has been a lot of smart work. And I’m worried that we’ve spent time developing a technology that will always remain the technology of the future.”

Mr. Lushetsky said that he would not place risky research in opposition to incremental cost reductions. “Our program, combined with the Office of Science program, needs to be funded significantly. I’ve been in DoE only a year, having spent all my career outside government, so I appreciate all the comments made here today about the need for incremental improvements, on the scale of investment required, and on the time horizon for these investments to bear fruit. Over time, significant gains can be made, and we can’t predict when they might flatten out. Throughout history, people who have predicted the end of technologies have always been wrong. As Dr. Johnson commented, there has been a lot of attention to early-stage work, and also a lot of work on bridging any perceived gap between basic and applied work.”

A questioner asked Mr. Lushetsky whether the DoE might better help reduce costs by a national procurement strategy than by some recent programs, such as grants in lieu of tax credits.8 “If we buy $26 billion worth of PV and put them on every government installation, how much can that drive down the cost of producing these technologies, as opposed to other programs?”

No Single Strategy

Mr. Lushetsky said there would be no single strategy. “If you look at grants in lieu of tax credits,” he said, “it’s uncapped. So from an appropriations standpoint, my guess is that it will distribute tens of billions of dollars, if not $100 billion, when all is said and done. Certainly, we need a government investment in solar and renewable energy technologies. For the manufacturing tax credit,

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8The Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy announced in July 2009 a program to provide direct payments in lieu of tax credits to businesses that invest in renewable energy. <http://www.treas.gov/recovery/1603.shtml>.

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

while it is capped, there is a similar argument. I think that both approaches are being pursued.”

Ms. Battershell added that there were targets within the government for a certain level of renewable energy production. “It’s not prescribed in terms of particular technologies, but I think the government investment in measures like grants in lieu of tax credits is huge.”

B. J. Stanbery of the HelioVolt Corporation said that his company had bridged the valley of death, and offered a lesson from an NSF experience. He said that the Process Development and Integration Laboratory (PDIL) was an opportunity is to solve the fundamental problem of bringing a technology to market scale. That must be done across the whole manufacturing equipment supply chain, he said, and can be seeded in the PDIL by borrowing from the NSF its practice of funding equipment-targeted experimental programs, with funding for both developmental equipment and process development. “This is not quite adequately balanced in your portfolio now,” he said.

Mr. Lushetsky agreed that it was not balanced, and that there was disagreement about whether the PDIL was the best place for it. But he agreed with the need for discussing how DoE should interact with the tool suppliers and others to enhance process development.

Communicating Among Agencies

Dr. Jackson of the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, referring to Secretary Johnson’s desire to lower barriers within the DoE, asked how this could be done between agencies, especially between NIST and DoD. Mr. Lushetsky said that his agency did communicate with colleagues at NIST, and said that those discussions should continue, especially on the topics of manufacturing and commercialization. “We have not gone as far as I think we could,” he said, ”and certainly the dialogue process is a key part of this overall discussion.” He said that DoD, in terms of government deployment, renewable energy, and energy efficiency, is “the DoE’s biggest ally,” with its mission-critical needs to reduce energy use, ensure fuel supplies, and reduce the logistics requirements for both. He added that within DoE, he is responsible for the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), which communicates with other government agencies about implementing efficiencies and renewable energy technologies. Finally, he urged the industry to recognize that DoD can be a very early adopter of new technologies. He cited DARPA’s high-efficiency solar cell program as an example. “DoD is a great launching point for new technologies,” he said, “for getting things out there, and moving them to the wider commercial market.”

Ms. Battershell cited two other examples of interagency cooperation, which she called “a bit of a forced marriage with some Recovery Act funding.” One was the grant in lieu of tax credits program, managed by the Treasury Department with DoE technical expertise. The second was the manufacturing tax credit

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×

mentioned earlier, with money from the IRS and the technical expertise of DoE. “While these partnerships should be seamless and invisible to the public,” she said, “getting those agencies to work together that quickly, meeting deadlines on both programs, was pretty remarkable.”

Dr. Wessner encouraged the DoE to make more use of the SBIR program. Although the DoE had led the government in working with small companies that responded to SBIR solicitations, he encouraged DoE to do additional solicitations for firms wishing to use technology that was already in DoE labs. “That can act as a catalyst for licensing and adopting the technologies,” he said. “So a program you already have at DoE can be an even greater asset.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 145
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 150
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 153
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 154
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 155
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 156
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 157
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 158
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
Page 159
Suggested Citation:"Panel II: Advancing Solar Technologies: The Department of Energy." National Research Council. 2011. The Future of Photovoltaics Manufacturing in the United States: Summary of Two Symposia. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12724.
×
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Technological innovation and growth are critical to U.S. competitiveness in a global economy. One means of facilitating growth and improving competitiveness is to foster more robust innovation ecosystems through the development of public-private partnerships, industry consortia, and other regional and national economic development initiatives. Public-private partnerships, in particular, catalyze the commercialization of state and national investments in research and development.

One of the major projects of the National Research Council's Board on Science Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) is to examine state and local investment programs designed to attract and grow knowledge-based industries. STEP analyzes state and regional innovation initiatives to gain a better understanding of the challenges associated with the transition of research into products, the practices associated with successful state and regional programs, and their interaction with federal programs and private initiatives. In April and July 2009, STEP convened two meeting to assess the future of the U.S. photovoltaic industry and the practical steps that the federal government and some state and regional governments are taking to develop the capacity to manufacture photovoltaics competitively.

The Future of Photovoltaic Manufacturing in the United States captures the presentations and discussions of these meetings. This report explores the prospects for cooperative R&D efforts, standards, and roadmapping efforts that could accelerate innovation and growth of a U.S. photovoltaics industry. It includes both efforts to strengthen existing industries as well as specific new technology focus areas such as nanotechnology, stem cells, and energy in order to gain an improved understanding of program goals, challenges, and accomplishments.

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