DOE National Labs Role in Energy Innovation - Adam Cohen

Okay, so this is on every year, all right? So what I want to do first of all, thanks for the warm welcome and I appreciate being back. I actually miss Chicago and I missed Argonne, and I keep going to all the little haunts that I say, 'Well, I remember Portillo's, I remember this, yeah, Oberweis ice cream.' So it's kind of fun to be back and visit. But what I want to do is I want to give you a quick and dirty overview of the challenge that we're facing. I want to put DOE's role in that context of the challenge, and then I want to talk about the National Labs and how the National Labs really need to serve as a system if we're going to rise and meet the challenge that we have ahead of us. So let me give you the bottom line up front because I know that everybody's busy and so in case you want to hear the overall messages and then leave and get some cookies and go back to work, that's fine. I will give you the big picture messages. We have a problem, all right? The climate is changing. We need to decarbonize our energy system. I hope this isn't a surprise to anybody here in this room. What might be a surprise is that the path forward on the power sector and the buildings is much clearer than the path forward on the industrial and the transportation sector. And so we're going to have some challenges there and I'll talk a little bit about that. We recognize that innovation is going to be vital if we're going to meet the clean energy and climate goals. Fortunately, the Department has and continues to support a large spectrum of research and development across a wide range. You know, as Peter talked about, fossil energy, renewable energies, nuclear energy, etc. Things like the Quadrennial Technology Review or QTR and the portfolio planning effort that we're going through now to formulate a budget framework are important elements to try to set the stage for how we're going to go forward with the solution. And we're also looking at regional solutions because we recognize that the problems and the resources are regional and the solutions might also need to be regional. So we're looking at that. Fortunately, we have the labs sort of our ace in the hole. The labs are technological powerhouses. I'm talking about the whole spectrum of the 17 labs. They work best as a system and I'll show you I think some of the efforts we've gotten to try to pursue that type of system. This is certainly how they're viewed by DOE and it's something that we want to make sure that the labs themselves understand. It's not to take away from the incredibly important, valuable, individualistic roles that the labs play in their areas, but they are part of this collaborative and they are viewed that way by Congress and by DOE. And fortunately, I think Secretary Moniz has put a priority on improving both the lab system as well as the collaborations with the Department of Energy and a strategic partnership with the Department of Energy. So that's the bottom line. Let me get into what the challenge is. We have an energy challenge and the energy challenge is very complex. The CO2 and the temperature and the climate are all changing at an incredibly rapid rate, but the real challenge is trying to make sure we understand how to go forward not just with a clean solution but also something that's going to give us economic security as a country, energy security as well as environmental security. The challenge is net zero emissions in the next 40 to 60 years and the challenge is to keep that curve below 450 ppm so we can keep the rise in temperature below 2 degrees C. So that's the challenge that we're facing writ large and it involves lots of aspects including many of which are being pursued by this laboratory. This challenge was recognized at the Paris Agreement and has been at every COP meeting since they started, but for the first time ever they came up with a methodology which we think had legs and was very supported by countries all over the world, 179 of them to be precise, all came up with nationally determined commitments where they sat back and said, 'Okay, as a country, given our needs and given our resources, here's what we're committed to do.' And that's great, it's a great start. If you add up all of these, then it's going to get us part way there, but it's not going to get us to net zero by 40 to 60 years. So we need to do more and we recognize that one of the paths forward is through something called Mission Innovation. Roughly speaking, it's the idea that we need to innovate if we're going to achieve the missions that we've laid out. That is, that circle of how you come up with a new energy supply system that meets environmental, economic, and energy security. Mission Innovation is 20 countries committed to doubling their R&D budget over the next five years, including the U.S., appropriations notwithstanding, we'll try to work through that. And in parallel, there was an effort by extremely rich folks, 28 of them, under the leadership of Bill Gates, who have come together with what we call patient capital to try to invest in early to mid-stage innovation and try to accelerate that down the path toward deployment. So also fantastic. We recognize we need the innovation to address greenhouse gases across all sectors and I've already mentioned this. The power sector is certainly true and we continue to make breakthroughs there, but don't ignore some of these other areas which are going to be a little stickier, like the industrial process heat area and the transportation. This shows the energy growth in the U.S. based on our model. So this is the Energy Information Agency. Peter and I talked about this before. I completely recognize that the models I'm going to show first of all are just models and second of all they're going to be tilted toward the conservative because DOE is a government agency and they want to make sure that they're reporting something that's a high confidence level. So understand that their projections are going to be conservative. If you have different projections, I completely understand. Models are only as good as the assumptions you make. But this shows that the energy is going up, the demand is going up, and the supply is we're projecting is going to go up to meet the demand. This shows the CAFE standards and the Clean Power Plan. So you'll start to see efficiency coming in, but generally the trend is up. And the same is true, that's the total power, this is the electricity. The electricity is just projected to continue to rise. Now fortunately, we've got models that show that we might be able to meet all of our needs with clean energy sources. So this shows a study from NREL 2010 and it's been updated a couple of times which shows again a conservative case that we could meet 80% of our electricity need with renewable sources, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. And then as you can see, this is somewhat of the old model because it shows that coal is still really high compared to natural gas. Natural gas is in blue, coal is in this other color here or darker blue, and we know that's not true anymore. We know that natural gas has now surpassed coal. So this also shows that nuclear is dropping and we hope that that's not true. We hope that nuclear will not only stay steady but even rise. And so by 2050, you would hope that nuclear would continue to close such a gap. So this is again just one model but it's the type of thing that we are trying to look through and say, well, if this is the power industry or the electricity generation industry and we've got potential technology paths to address this, then what are we missing? What are the gaps? What are the gaps to make this reality and what are the gaps in the other sectors that we need to pursue? We have a lot of confidence that we can solve this problem as a nation, as an R&D environment, because we see this type of thing, learning curves for select technologies. But this can apply to many technologies. I'm sure you could talk about this in the nuclear industry, we can talk about this in other areas, transportation, etc. But there's just a general trend: as you get more production, you're going to learn more, you're going to get better costs, and as soon as you start to get better cost, you get better penetration into the market. So this is the type of thing that we've seen over long periods of time and then even over the more recent past where we're starting to see deep reductions in costs for various technologies even over the last few years. And so this is driving some of the deployment of these renewable technologies and areas throughout the market and we expect this is going to continue. So this is what gives us the confidence that over time in the power sector we'll be able to get 80% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions. Again, this is the NREL case but I could show you similar models that talk about just the general advanced technology case where we look at the types of goals that have been set out for nuclear, fossil, renewable, and meeting those goals over this period and what it's going to do to the reductions. So not clear sailing by any means, but we're looking pretty good when it comes to the power case. We recognize that R&D is critical. R&D is what's going to lead to the innovations that we need. R&D is how we're going to address this type of problem set in this country. 35% of our greenhouse gases come from the power sector, the electricity generation. 35%, actually a little bit more now. For the first time ever, transportation has exceeded the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. So that's a huge problem. If we're only going to meet 50% or so of our reduction in greenhouse gases, that's not good enough. We need to do more. Same is true with industrial process heat, it's about 20% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and then buildings accounts for about 10%. So this is the problem that I think we're going to be facing. How do we take a look at really deep decarbonization of the transportation and the industrial areas? What would it take to do that? We know that R&D has a long gestation period. We know that eventually people see the return on investment. You know, this shows a National Academy of Engineering study where we've had investments in energy efficiency and they've returned 20 to 1. So we know that there's a return on investment. We know that when we come out with appliance standards, this is our projection, we're going to have huge, huge benefits, greenhouse gas reductions. And to put 39 quads in perspective, the total power used by the country is 100 quads and we're projecting to save 39 quads by our energy efficiency. So that's leading toward this confidence that we'll be able to meet this energy need. So given that, let me talk about the Department of Energy and their role. The Department of Energy is a science and technology agency and we believe, I hope everybody in this room believes, that the U.S. has to be a leader in this new economy. We have to rely on the technology and the science behind it in order to make sure that we can produce and we can sell and we can distribute and we can make the choices about what energy technologies are being pursued. The Department has a budget of about $30 billion and it's split three ways. I get to help run the fun part, the $10 billion in science and energy. Don't tell the weapons folks I said that because they actually have more, they have $11 billion in nuclear security and non-proliferation, $8 billion in clean up, and it's about another billion dollars if you add up things like the policy organization, some of the other overhead organizations, and some of the other smaller areas like the Energy Information Agency. So Secretary Moniz combined the energy and science under one Undersecretary so that you could get this cross-talk between the types of work being pursued in the Office of Science as well as the processes that the Office of Science uses. So in the latter, think like project management, the fact that the Office of Science does an extremely good job at designing, developing, building, bringing online these first-of-a-kind facilities at a very large scale. It's something that the rest of the Department really has not learned yet, but we're working on it. So breaking those types of barriers are extremely important too. But the main motivation was trying to accelerate the discovery stage, whatever it happened to be in science, all the way through to the applied science work and then eventually to the demonstration and deployment. The Department pursues broad programs in applied science and energy. We support policy setting, we support the modeling, we support reporting of various things, we support regulations setting. It's a fairly complex Department. I know in the labs we talk a lot about the R&D, but that's not the whole story of the Department. We explore breakthroughs with things like the ARPA-E agency which is exploring these next-generation technologies and we do tech-to-market or technology transitions including things like the Technology Commercialization Fund which is new and it's designed to accelerate over two valleys of death if you will, one between the basic science discovery to the development, demonstration, and one between the demonstration out to the deployment. So that's the pursuit of the Technology Transitions Office. In terms of DOE planning to try to make sense of all this whole picture, we obviously have a strategic plan and we did the Quadrennial Technology Review. I mentioned these because the labs were both extremely involved in developing both of these documents. The strategic plan, if you haven't read it, I would suggest you read it. It's about five pages and takes all of like 10 minutes to read. Talks a lot about the motherhood. I've already encompassed most of what the strategic plan says by just saying that the Department does three things: they do weapons, they do waste, and they do watts, right? So that's what the strategic plan says. The QTR though is an extremely valuable document. It's multiple hundred pages and it identifies the technology state as well as the gaps that we think need to be pursued. So anybody who was involved in the BES Basic Research Needs workshop series that was run over the last decade understands the concepts of identifying what are the basic research needs. Well, think of that broadly: what are the research needs writ large? What are the applied research needs? What are the demonstration needs? That's what the QTR does and it does it in all of these areas. So it tries to touch on all of the sectors: the power generation, the end use, the fuel generation, and the underlying science. So I would suggest you at least take a skim through it because that's forming the basis for where we think the framework is going to come for the budget for the next say five years if not longer. And we'll try to redo this every four years, that's the name quadrennial. And we also do something called a Quadrennial Energy Review. We're actually not the lead in this, the White House leads this effort, but the Department is extremely involved in this. This touches not just on the technology but also on the policy options, the markets, and the technology etc. as an overall. And we're right now writing the second installment of this QER. And then I already mentioned a little bit about budget formulation and portfolio planning. The idea is to take a look and say, okay, if Mission Innovation is going to double our R&D budget over the next five years, what do we do with that fund? Do we just peanut butter it over the types of things that we've been doing or is this a real opportunity to do some big things, some breakthroughs, some new things? And so we're trying to go through that effort and decide what do we want to do with this and how is that going to inform the budgets, again assuming that we're going to get the increase in funds, which is not a foregone conclusion, but we're trying. So this just shows the QTR chapters in box-ology form so you can see the grid, power, buildings, etc. and the various breakdowns in there. Other areas, I think everybody should see at least one of the areas that they work in or have worked in on this chart. This is our opportunity space and what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand how much does the Department spend in these various boxes, how much is going to be needed, what kind of impact are you going to see with the various investments. So for example, should we put another dollar in the development of hydrogen production and delivery? Is that going to give us an impact to the greenhouse gas emission or the energy security or the economic security? Same with biopower, same with distributed resource management, same with systems biology. Yeah, we're trying to look at this from a portfolio perspective and decide what is it we want to invest in so that we can see what investments are going to give the greatest impact. And we're going through that now and the lab directors have at least been informed and will be involved very much in this effort as we go on in the next couple of months in terms of this next year's budget. Let me go over some of the information if you haven't already seen about the fiscal year '17 request. So in terms of Mission Innovation, we have put in a sizable increase. The U.S. government baseline-wide, so the thing that's going to double is $6.4 billion and 75% of that or pretty close to $5 billion is within the Department of Energy. So it's not all the Department but a big chunk of it is in the Department. And clean energy, we consider anything that meets any of these criteria, you know, anything that would pass the 'ho-ho' test of it's clean, doesn't produce waste, doesn't waste water, doesn't produce emissions. So it's a wide spectrum that can be considered clean and can be pursued under this Mission Innovation. This table shows the budget requests in the various areas that are under the Science and Energy column plus the ARPA-E. This shows how much of that is Mission Innovation related and then the percent. So this is the enacted in '16, this shows the request, and then this is the increase. And you can see that there is a fairly large increase that's been proposed. So we at least propose something that's on the doubling track over the five years. In fact, that's in excess of what we would need to double, but increases in pretty much all the areas. The any reduction here is that's the percent in Mission Innovation because we actually are trying to do some things that are not considered Mission Innovation. And the same with FE, the FE Mission Innovation increased even if the total budget went down, again because it's a balance of what we're trying to do with the program as well as what we think could be accepted by both the White House and the Congress. How DOE does this, we have various modalities that we pursue, various scales and various technology readiness levels if you will. So this shows the TRLs 1 through 9. DOE basically stops at TRL 7, so that would be the start of a commissioning type or when you're starting to get out to the demonstration, deployment phase. We don't do as much in the TRL 1 which is really the discovery science. We do some and it just shows, you know, the types of things that we pursue, everything from the large-scale short-term to the large-scale long-term to, you know, really small-scale short-term. And we do try to look at this whole balance and how it works and see if we have any gaps. In terms of the R&D core programs, these are the types of things that are part of Mission Innovation that we're pursuing. We're pursuing upgrades to the Advanced Test Reactor and restarting the TRIGA research reactor hopefully to pursue safer nuclear fuels. We're looking at two additional pilot plants for carbon capture. We're looking at additional offshore wind collaborations. We're down-selecting a geothermal plant which is looking at enhanced geothermal. The synthetic biology foundry, trying to look at how we do biology to some of these additional fuels that we're going to need. Increased budgets for the Bioenergy Research Centers and then bidding out the Bioenergy Research Centers, trying to shift them from TRL 2 and 3 toward the middle of the development and deploy and demonstration areas. SuperTruck 2 looks at end use for how you look at heavy vehicles and improve the efficiency of them. SuperTruck 1 was extremely successful. SuperTruck 2 sets the additional goals going forward, looking at new engine designs and how engines are burned. This carbon capture in the FE studies and the oxy-combustion, expanding user facility use, and expanded exascale funding. So that's the core program and the Mission Innovation related activities. If I start to look at the individual modalities, all of these are going to see some level of increase in both the requests and hopefully in the appropriation. This shows the Energy Frontier Research Centers. Right now there are 32 of them. We're hoping over time that that'll double to something like 60. We know in the budget request we have an additional four, I think it is, and so we're continuing to pursue those. The reason that we're excited about these, not just because it spreads the whole country and it focuses on different areas across 33 states and the District, but because this is the accomplishments set that we've seen in the EFRCs. The publications are going up fine, I mean they do research, but look at the intellectual property and look at the licensing for these various EFRCs. Look at the companies that have benefited from them and look at the areas that are really being applied from the results of the EFRCs. So we've seen this run by the Office of Science having tremendous impact on some of these energy technology areas. And as you know, innovation hubs is another mode that we're looking at. We requested funding for the Energy-Water Nexus Desalination Hub and continued funding in some of these other hubs including the Argonne Hub for batteries and energy storage. These have also proved to be relatively successful with the exception of one that was canceled a couple of years ago. The rest of these have had good amounts of success and we're hoping to see additional work. I don't know if you're familiar with the National Network of Manufacturing Institutes or the NNMI, but we have this advanced manufacturing initiative across the government. This is DOE's focus area and the goal that we've set out to really try to look at things like the industrial process heat in the industrial sector areas to try to just rethink how manufacturing works so that we can improve the greenhouse gas emissions, reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, or reduce the fuel use, or change the way that things are done so that we can improve the technology. ARPA-E, ARPA-E looks at the breakthroughs and it's very complementary with DOE to do applied energy areas. They focus on early-stage technologies and they have a potential for really advancing from concept to prototype at a very quick state. And so it's been a fantastic success. Even the budget has grown. The National Academy is hoping to get this up to a billion dollars, but we're making decent progress. The request went in at $350 million which is a substantial increase from the '16 enactment. In terms of RPE, also a very successful program. 35 projects have formed new companies, eight projects have led to commercial sales, various additional follow-on funding, $1.25 billion in private sector funding. So we look at this as fantastic. This is the type of breakthrough that we were looking for when ARPA-E was started. And then I'm sure many of you have heard of or have worked on these various cross-cuts. The cross-cut is one of the outcomes from combining science and energy under one Undersecretary. So these are the cross-cuts that we're pursuing and are being potentially requested in the '17 budget and potentially funded. Excuse me, all of these are seeing increases. They were all in the enacted '16 funding and they're all seeing increases in '16 versus '17 because we like the idea of having the applied offices work together and having the applied offices work with the Office of Science to accelerate these developments going forward. Various areas, some small, some large: energy-water, the grid modernization, these are bigger ones. Something like supercritical CO2, anybody who works in the power generation has been talking about the Brayton cycle and the improvements and the efficiency that you can gain. This is trying to focus on that aspect for nuclear, for fossil, as well as for things like concentrated solar. We're also looking for new ideas. The labs have been very much involved in something called the Big Ideas Summit. This shows the results from the last summit where they presented nine ideas. And if you can just skim through the titles, I'm glad to talk about any of these during the reception or whenever. I don't want to go into details now, but the idea is that some of these could be real game changers and some of these could be really important to pursue even within a program, even if they're not cross-cutting big ideas, but even within a program. So something like pursuing hydrogen at scale to really deeply decarbonize the energy system, transportation, potentially process heat, energy storage, you know, other areas. Something like enhancing the global carbon sink so we can really understand from a first-principles perspective why the terrestrial carbon sink is increased and whether those mechanisms are going to continue. So we're trying to pursue these at various levels whether it's in the program or whether they're new cross-cut and funded activities. And then there are some other new initiatives such as the Regional Clean Energy Innovation Partnerships, expanding the National Lab small business, and looking at things like the innovation accelerators such as the Chain Reaction or the Second Tron Road at Berkeley. So why do we look at regional partnerships? Because the renewable resources are regional. You look at a map like this where you can see sun and wind and geothermal, various other sources are different across the country. And things like water use and energy generation are different across the country. And so we want to make sure that we're understanding what the basic issues are and how we can pursue them in the different regions across the country. So this just shows the current status of our request for funding. Just so everybody knows, the request went in at $10.7 billion. This is the Science and Energy plus ARPA-E. Right now we've got two marks, the House and the Senate, that are both $9.7. So I'm guessing everybody can do that average and figure out where we're going to end up at least in CR, but we'll see. So now let me get to the National Labs and how they fit into this spectrum. The National Labs are a technological powerhouse for the country and I think it's probably a well-kept secret of how much they've actually done. And we got to stop keeping this a secret. We got to tell everybody why these institutions are so critical both for the country and the challenge we have in energy as well as for the R&D spectrum in general. So this shows the spectrum of national labs that we have across the country. There are 17 of them. 16 of them are run by contractors, one of them is run by the government. So an EG&G is a government-owned, government-operated laboratory. The rest of them are all contractor-operated just like Argonne, Sandia, and NREL have multiple sites. Every other lab has a single site. They're spread across 14 different states if you consider the other sites for these labs. A broad spectrum of activities, a broad spectrum of sizes, a broad spectrum of focus areas. They have an impressive set of achievements developing things like nuclear power or superconducting material for cables or clean rooms that are used throughout the semiconductor industry as well as other areas. Looking at high-performance computing and the tremendous increase we've seen in computation and simulation power, large particle accelerators, synchrotrons, x-ray lasers. I mean the list can go on and on, but these are just some of the things that the labs have touched and really reached out to the broad spectrum of both research as well as applications and things like medicine and treatment. The labs work, as everybody probably knows, on very mission-driven areas. We do science of scale. We look at critical science and technology. It's a multidisciplinary team approach. It always has been. It's very collaborative certainly across the disciplines and the idea is that even across laboratories it's collaborative.

The labs have always been and will continue to be very responsive to national needs, not just from the big energy perspective but even things like the Iran nuclear agreement, where the labs served as subject matter experts for the various negotiations. The response to things like Aliso Canyon, Fukushima, or Deepwater Horizon, where the labs brought to bear their expertise to address some of these issues. And then obviously, a safe and secure operating environment is critical. This is not just a trivial statement about how we all want to be safe, and it's absolutely true and it should be a priority for everybody. But it's the idea that the work that we do is unique and it's first of a kind, and its unique set of hazards makes this statement unbelievably important because we have to demonstrate not just that the technologies work, but also they can be deployed and they can be used. And so that's something that we've always prided ourselves on and we need to continue to do that.

The labs have a very special place in the R&D spectrum or ecosystem, if you will. Again, if you look at the TRLs from basic to deployed, the labs fit in this area that the universities start to tail off and industry starts to pick up. They fill this gap between say the applied side or the use-inspired side of research all the way through development and then the demonstration area. They work with each other, with industry, with academia. They help determine how to realize the options that we can have for energy technologies and inform some of the policies that can get these deployed.

So let me talk about the labs as a system, because this actually was a question I had: do the labs really work as a system? Do we have any objective evidence? We have anecdotes. So I serve as the project management executive for the LCLS, a project that they're building out at SLAC. I can tell you anecdotally that involves lots of laboratories. Fermi is part of it, JLab is part of it, obviously Stanford is part of it. I mean, so you can see the collaboration. But the question is, is there anything that's more objective? So this just shows that there is a spectrum of these laboratories and they look across from science to technology, from large to small, from science-oriented to security-oriented, various technologies. And obviously you can't read this, but this shows the core capability assignments, 24 of them down the rows and then across the columns where all the science and energy laboratories, 13 of the laboratories, not the three weapons labs, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia, and not Savannah River. But I think you can read this one. So this just shows a snapshot of that previous chart, not all the core capabilities and not all the labs, but you can get a sense that yes, you can argue that there are multiple labs that do accelerator technology or that do nuclear or do particle physics, but the focuses are different. If you look at the broad spectrum and down into the details, the labs' overlap disappears. They actually are looking and filling some of this broad spectrum I talked about across this energy and science portfolio.

The labs get funded from all the programs in DOE. So this shows a Sankey diagram. These are the offices in DOE, including weapons and including environmental management. I apologize for the quality. And then this shows all 17 labs and they all get funding from various sources. So it's certainly collaborative as a team across DOE. The labs get about 12 billion dollars in total of DOE funding. I already said that DOE has 30 billion dollars of funding, so the labs are not all of DOE. They're about 40% of DOE. That's a huge chunk and it's extremely important, but it's not everything. And likewise, the labs don't just work for DOE. They have about three billion dollars in other stuff. So DOD, DHS, work other. I won't talk about here. So they do about three billion dollars worth of other funded areas. So DOE is not all of the labs. The labs are satisfying national needs in other areas as well.

In terms of whether the labs work together, this is a messy chart, but I wanted to take a look at is there any evidence that funds flow from one lab to the other. And in fact, there is. So we have something called inter-entity work orders. Anybody who works collaboratively in a program, the way it usually works is you have a DOE program office that funds two different labs and then they work together. But there's even evidence that the labs themselves, when they get funding, transfer it to other labs. And you can see the little hubs, those are all the DOE national labs, and these various spokes are all situations where labs send money to each other for various reasons. So it's very clear that they're working as a network.

If you look at something like the publication list, so this shows data from the SciVal database, all the publications that involve DOE authors shows up in the SciVal database. So these bars show the increase in publications, and then the light blue bars, numbers that you can't read, which are actually the most important, show an increase in percentage from about a little less than 80 to pretty close to the high 80s. I'm sorry, a little less than 72 to the high 80s. The light blue bars are any publication that have at least one author from a university. So we're seeing an increase in the collaboration between the labs and universities over time. We're seeing an increase in the number of publications, but we're also seeing an increase in the number that involve a university. And then the smaller bars, the orange has at most one other lab involved, and the red has at least two other labs involved in publication. So there's an increase from about 6% to over 11% where the labs are working with each other and publishing more with each other. So even from a publications perspective, there's more collaboration happening. So we're having the impact that we were hoping to have in terms of forcing collaboration. Different in different fields. I mean, so we looked at the different publication areas. This shows astronomy and astrophysics. You see a much higher percentage because those usually lend themselves to very large pieces of equipment that are only available in unique areas, and so the labs do collaborate more. It's different for things like biology and chemistry. I mean, so but we're just trying to understand where are these collaborations happening.

Lab vitality needs to be ensured. I think I've already made the case for how we need the labs to be part of this R&D ecosystem. I would submit the LDRD is an extremely valuable part of maintaining this lab vitality. It's a critical element for any healthy R&D organization to have this kind of discretionary funding to decide where to do the investments and invest in core capabilities. So the question is, if the limit is 6%, how come we're not getting higher levels of investment? I know the answer. I mean, it's because there's a limited amount of funds and no one wants to tap into the overhead. But this is a source of funding that's available at lab discretion to invest in the areas that you think are most important. This shows the spectrum of LDRD percentage versus the size of the lab for the science and energy laboratories. You can trick yourself into believing that there's a trend that the bigger the lab, the higher the percentage, but I would assure you that it's not a very big trend. You know, it's fairly wide spectrum, probably explanations for each of these, but it's going to be interesting to see how we can push to get higher and higher levels of LDRD investments over time.

Likewise, I looked at the LDRD percentage as a function of TRL. So if I were to grade a lab on a TRL basis, just taking a look at the types of work they do, the types of publications, this is a first cut. It's interesting, almost counterintuitive, that you see a higher percentage of LDRD as you get more oriented toward a technology. So of a lab like NETL or some of the weapons labs, which are generally more technology-oriented, they have a higher percentage. So I have to figure out why, because if I want to motivate these folks to have a higher percentage, I got to figure out what's motivating them to have a low percentage.

Diversity. Diversity is something that we need to make sure that the labs have this vitality, not just the numbers and people game, but also the idea of inclusion and diversity of thought. I show you this chart which at once shows a very complex set of data, percentage and numbers. For example, this is operations support. This is the number of people and that's the percentage. The number is about 9,500, the percentage is hovering around 50%. And some of these others show the data. The real point I want to make here is that over five years, we're seeing pretty flat lines when it comes to diversity for females. I've looked at the same thing for race diversity. The reason I want to point this out is I actually think we're on a good track to do more and more on diversity. We don't want to let this type of data be a diversion. We want this data to be motivating to continue to do more so that we can continue to enhance diversity. But we don't want people to ignore the fact that there could be long time constants for making some changes. So don't ignore this. Diversity is extremely important, but also don't let it drive too many decisions because it's a small subset of the data. But we do look at this type of thing to make sure that we're looking at what are the factors that lead to lab vitality, and diversity is absolutely a critical infrastructure.

You live with old infrastructure like DOE does. This shows some data for the 17 labs and the three plants. Huge amounts. 10,000 buildings, age 39 years is the average age for support structures, 35 years for facilities. These are old buildings. We're doing the best we can to try to maintain them, but very, very large costs. Six billion dollars in deferred maintenance, two billion dollars in annual operating costs. And so we're trying to do investments to change this, both from the overhead perspective at individual labs as well as from the direct perspective. And we actually have a pretty good record where we've increased the investment in R&D infrastructure to try to turn over and make sure that the new infrastructure is both more capable and more cost-efficient to run.

And then finally, I'll mention some of the general activities that we're doing to streamline lab management as well as improve the relationship with DOE so that we can get as much of the investment into the mission work as possible. So we had this thing called the Crennel, the Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratory System. Interesting, they found that there were over 50 reviews over the last 40 years about all the things that the labs could be doing more, better, DOE could be improving, all saying very much the same thing. And so one of the recommendations was we got to figure out a way to stop having these reviews and actually do some improvements. So the Secretary has made a priority of trying to improve the strategic relationship. They looked at six areas and I'll go through these real quickly. Recognizing value, making sure that people understand the value of the National Laboratories. Whatever we can do. So what is DOE doing? Involving the labs in developing the Quadrennial Energy Review and Quadrennial Technology Review, these baseline documents that are going to form our decision process. We need the labs' input for those. Same with the DOE strategic plan. Same with something that we're writing now called the Annual State of the Lab Report, which is a document that we can talk to Congress and say, let's put a spotlight on the labs. We want you to know what they do and why they're important.

Rebuilding trust. This largely relates to the relationship between labs and DOE. So having lab presence on things like the Policy Council or the way that directives are evaluated. Looking at new contract models, it's evolutionary and revolutionary contract models. Improving simple things like this last one, canceling an order that at one time limited the number of lab employees that are allowed to work in DC. The idea being that the lab should be able to make that decision. I mean, they know their budgets, they know the needs, they know the value of having people in various places. So trying to do both large-scale and small-scale improvements.

Maintaining alignment and quality across broadly DOE as well as across the laboratories and DOE by looking at things like breaking down stovepipes by having one Undersecretary so that we've got an organization that can look across from all the way to science to the applied areas. Looking at things like consistent laboratory planning, improving conference management procedures. Maximizing the impact of the labs. If the labs are this vital resource, we want to make sure that we're getting as much as possible out of them, meaning as much of the resource into the mission work as possible. So streamlining by looking at approving LDRD once, not for each project, not for each change, but once so that the labs can actually make decisions. They're looking at improving the acceleration of technology out to the commercialization level by having funds available to do that. Improving costs, meaning managing effectiveness and efficiency. So improving the costs or hopefully reducing indirect, reducing the number of data calls, trying to improve project management across the rest of DOE. Looking at infrastructure improvements, procurement improvements. And then finally, how do we document this so that we can make sure that the change is lasting to the next administration? Or at least if they don't last there, they're not worth pursuing. So things like documenting the changes in directives, having the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board have a role in documenting the various things that have been done, and having a transition plan so we can inform the next administration of these changes and why they were done, why we think they're critical.

Next steps for the science and energy lab complex. Already mentioned involvement in the portfolio planning, continuing these cross-cuts and involvement in what we call the tech teams, which are the organizations that cross the various organizational boundaries that support the cross-cuts within DOE. We have an exciting array of activities. I already mentioned some of the Mission Innovation. We have a wide array of projects that we're pursuing. So it's a really exciting time and we need to continue to push forward. And then finally, continuing these operational improvements both through the Lab Policy Council and the Operations Board as well as the National Lab Directors Council.

Thank you very much. I'm actually going to hand over to Harry to do the next bit with this. I have to go do something which is much less interesting, maybe. I expect that there are lots of things coming from the audience and I will let Harry...

So I'm not sure how to respond to that other than to say I think we owe it to ourselves to make the case that there is no question that climate change needs to be a motivating factor, if not the motivating factor. I have no disagreement that energy security and economic security could be the drivers that lead Congress to enact something that would be great, but we can't ignore anymore the fact that we've got this major problem that is really having impacts that are becoming non-predictable, nonlinear. I mean, the changes that are happening in terms of obviously the flooding and the other weather changes, but other things related to sources and resources that are being pursued. And we're not the only country in the world anymore. I mean, I know we'd like to think we are, but there are other countries here. I don't know if anybody knows this, but pretty much every other country has no question about the climate change. They question what needs to be done about it, but there is no question. It seems like this is the only country that's questioning some of this data. Maybe you could argue that some of this is circumstantial. I'll have a sidebar argument with you if you do, because I actually think the evidence is pretty compelling that there is no question that it's happening and it's coming from man-made sources. So I think we have to make the case, and if people aren't believing, we have to make the case stronger.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I actually think nuclear is a critical component. I think there are other models that, just like I showed the renewable case for 80%, nuclear could provide a substantial chunk, maybe up to 80%. There are some issues with nuclear that are outside of DOE's control, but DOE needs to shine the spotlight on them and needs to do a better job, such as cost of capital and cost of operating. You know, these are things that really are going to plague the industry in the nearer term. If I have to worry about whether or not a plant is even going to come online to make a decision to risk my whole bottom line, my whole basis for assets on this one plant that may never operate, that's untenable. I mean, so even with loan guarantees, you know, that's just not a solution that's going to work. So, you know, one question would be how do we make sure that we've got reliable support for building nuclear plants at something like four billion dollars or less a copy, and two billion would be better. And that's actually achievable based on what South Korea's been doing, or maybe not that low, but pretty close to that. But eight to twelve billion dollars, which is what we're starting to see now with the plants being built, I just can't do that. So we need to do that as well. I agree that there are some other aspects you have to consider for nuclear, such as the safety and the waste question. Those to me are things that are not going to drive the economic decisions. I think the economic decisions by the companies that are going to invest are based solely on the cost that they see. Maybe the small modular reactors is a way to go, and I actually think that's probably a decent solution for certain niche areas. But I like the idea of baseload power. I think building these large plants, if we can get the costs under control, is something that people will continue to realize, even but grudgingly, is part of the solution and it's going to increase. So that's my view. And the question is whether anything can be done about it. You know, we're doing a whole bunch to try to get the message out about where nuclear fits. Secretary is giving testimony, I think on Wednesday, that's focused on nuclear. The title, I think, of the hearing is 'A World Without Nuclear,' and his whole talk is about pro-nuclear and why this needs to be part of the mix. So I think we're doing what we need to do. There's a meeting tomorrow or Wednesday on consent-based siting, so looking at solutions for the waste or at least path forward for the nuclear waste question. We just continue to push that it's not off the table and we are investing in these areas that could be game changers, the SMRs being one of them.

Yeah, so that's a good comment. The cut was somewhat of a give and take. It was 8% loaded, now it's 6% unloaded. So it's the change from whether or not you have the overhead applied to the LDRD rate or not. And so right now we're trying to make it level. So understand that it was different between the science and energy labs and the NNSA labs, and we're trying to make it level across the whole area. I don't know where that was, but don't ignore the idea that we're still well below 6%. So whether it's 8% or 6%, we're still well below it. The science and energy labs are largely this clump here, you know, 4%. I think Argonne is at 4%, Oak Ridge's 4% is the data we had. Maybe you've increased to 5% now, but so 4% of the data we had. If we can get to 5%, that would be great. If we can get all the labs to 5%, that's a huge amount of funding. So whatever we can do, we should be pushing forward on that. You know, take things like energy efficiency and improvements that you have, reductions for various things, put half of it into mission, half of it into LDRD. Just keep increasing it so that we get up to some level, because then you've got funds that you can actually do some game-changing things. A lab like Sandia, and I granted they're much larger, they're like 2.4 billion dollars, their LDRD pot swamps the science and energy labs' budgets. They have lots of flexibility to pursue activities and it's great. Yet we don't want to tell them they can't spend that. We actually want them to spend it, but we want the other labs to continue to invest in other areas that are important to the labs' missions.

So part of the idea of this portfolio planning is to capture that idea. So how would you take a look at a five-year framework under which the budget requests can go? DOE has two types of budgets. We do annual appropriations and then we have no-year budgets because we actually have some functions that continue whether or not we have an appropriation. So it's not clear unless we have some significant change in the authorization language whether we can do multi-year budgeting like DoD and some of the others. But we're trying. I mean, you know, that's part of the push for having this Mission Innovation and here's how we're doing the planning and maybe that'll actually lead to a change in the authorization. So that is what we're trying to pursue for the near term. We're going to live with continuing resolutions and other changes.

Yeah, so also a great question. I mean, I actually do, no surprise, pay attention a lot to what's happening at Argonne. I mean, I have a long history here and I like the work that's being done. Very excited about the APS upgrade and the exascale activities. I want to hear more tomorrow about some of the transportation work done here, and so and also some of the other work that's being done. I think this is exactly what you need to be doing. I think the broadening of the lab's areas and really focusing on some of the energy storage and some of the other policy and planning areas that you've pushed into are great. And it's also encouraging to see some of the nuclear work that's continuing and maybe even some different areas that are being explored. So nothing but positive to say about the lab. I mean, you know, every once in a while you hear some negative things, but most of those go away pretty quickly.

Yeah, so this is actually a great point. So the tech to market, the technology transition, sits in the following space. It's an area that the department has in their mission and needs to happen, but it's never going to be a quote priority. And the reason is because we have a huge mission space and the R&D is always going to be the priority. And the tech to market has to be part of that R&D. And so it's not to say that it's not a priority, it's to say that nuclear weapons or the research and development or the underlying science, that's the mission of the department. The department isn't around to do technology transition. We do technology transition because we have these great developments that need to get out to the market. So within that context, yes, I think we're trying to tell that exact story and trying to look for mechanisms that at once recognize we need to have people come in, look at our technology, help us or enable people to get that technology out to the marketplace. So that's why things like the Cyclotron Road and the others that are being pursued here at Argonne, the Vault, etc., those are critical because it plays into that idea. You have a researcher who is doing the research and then has an option: do they want to take this technology out to the market? Do they want to work with someone to get it out to the market? Do they want to go back to the lab and let someone else take it? It enables all those options to happen. So it needs to continue and I think we're going to see more of that push as long as it's within this broader framework of saying, you know, here's the department's mission and we can't ignore that, and technology transition, just like some of these other aspects, have to be part of that overall mission. Is that okay?

So my view of the National Labs' role in national security, I would say that there are two areas of core capability that are absolutely spaces that the National Labs have to own still going forward. One of them is accelerator technology and the other is national security, particularly the weapons and the work related to weapons, even if it's non-proliferation work. But understanding the weapons, the yield, the impact, the design, the limits, the science, stockpile stewardship, all of that aspect is something that the labs have to own and they have to continue to steward that capability for whatever reason we end up needing it. You know, that's a policy and government decision, but the labs have to make sure that it's there if needed. And the same with accelerators. Not to ignore some of the other areas. I mean, you know, we own lots of little pockets, but pretty much everything else we do has overlap with others. The accelerator technology and the nuclear weapons pretty much have no overlap with others, you know, in this country. Not to say that other countries don't have a corner on their markets, but those are the two areas I think are critical. And so, you know, the national security work is part of that. I also think that the labs have to play a critical role in the non-proliferation area because they're the ones who really understand, I think, what some of these dual-use technologies can lead to and how to potentially prevent some of the areas from going that route. So that's why things like the support for the Iran nuclear agreement were so important. Without having the detailed understanding of the centrifuges and the outcome and the output and where things could lead, you couldn't put up the right barriers to prevent or at least to avoid getting the agreement through. So the fact that the National Labs have that in-depth understanding and knowledge helped us negotiate all of the areas that needed to be in that agreement. So for that reason also, I think it's critical.

Okay, so I think there's options. If there are any other questions, people want to come up to me on the side, that'd be great. If you want to say hi, that would be also great. But again, thank you for the attention, thank you for the time.