Energy undersecretary sees collaboration as way to kick start clean tech

Kristina Johnson earned all three of her electrical engineering degrees at Stanford (BS 1981, MS 1981, PhD 1984), and it would be an understatement to say that she’s put that education to good use. After serving as a professor at the University of Colorado, and as dean of the Pratt School of engineering at Duke University, she went on to Johns Hopkins University where she became the provost in 2007. Earlier this year she got the call from the Obama administration, and upon confirmation in May, she became Under Secretary of Energy in the Department of Energy, managing a vast portfolio of applied energy technologies and related issues. The job is nothing less than to grapple with how the United States can ensure an energy future that is reliable, independent, environmentally sustainable, and that contributes to economic growth.

Johnson found her return to Stanford in October for Reunion/Homecoming to be inspiring. She looks at the Center for Integrated Systems, which brings industrial and academic researchers together around pre-competitive but commercially relevant research, as a potential model that the Energy Department could adopt to spur the development of “clean tech” manufacturing of environmentally beneficial technologies. She began the interview below with that idea. I would really like to accelerate the clean tech manufacturing revolution in this country. To do that it seems to me we need to do what the Center for Integrated Systems did 30 years ago when I was a student here, which is bring in the major industry players into an environment where you develop processes with students, staff, and faculty; it’s a safe environment — a really nice ecosystem — it’s both competition and cooperation. What we need in clean tech manufacturing, is that same sort of collective wisdom. I think we need to form a number of CISes in the country around nuclear, renewable and carbon capture and storage technologies. I think that there is a great opportunity for the national labs, which I view as the jewels in our energy crown, to work more closely with universities and also industry, especially in the applied areas that I’m responsible for. We need to bring all the stakeholders together, and the reason for that is that we have people innovating but isolated from the people who are really going to make things at scale.

It would be serendipitous if you could design something that was manufacturable without having people who manufacture things for a living telling you, ‘well that’s a very nice coating that you have there, and it may get you an extra 2% transmission, but we can’t make that at volume and at low cost.’ What you need is an interplay between people who know the real-world problems and individuals who spend their lives creating and designing innovative solutions. It’s bringing those people together in safe places with good coffee and smart students that I think makes a real difference. I ran a research center in photonics when I was at the University of Colorado. It was a National Science Foundation engineering research center, and we had that mix. We brought together industry, university, government, and it was very successful in launching ventures and translating some of those results out into industry, so I think that that could also serve as a model for Clean Tech/Green Tech. Another great model is Bell Labs. Secretary Chu, my boss, has a vision for Energy Innovation Hubs, inspired by Bell Labs, which is focused at scale to drive energy technologies to their fundamental limits, thus reducing the cost and time to market.

Is that your top priority in the job?

My top priority is making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It’s really getting all the pieces to work together and be integrated. My portfolio involves fossil energy, nuclear energy, energy efficiency, renewable energy, electricity transmission and delivery, environmental cleanup and management, as well as legacy and civilian radioactive waste management. You can’t bring on renewables without having the proper amount of base load. In other words, you can’t bring on solar and wind without also having hydro, nuclear, clean coal, and gas. Given that coal and gas are such a significant part of the mix, in order to go to a low-carbon economy, we are going to have to have carbon capture and storage capability. You’ve got to get everybody working together, whether it’s going to be geothermal, biomass, hydro, or nuclear to replace some of the carbon intensive power, and then you also need carbon capture and storage for both gas fired and coal-fired power plants. The second part is developing an energy plan to achieve the President’s goals in a timely manner: Greenhouse gas emission reduction, reduction of our dependence on foreign oil, and creating jobs in this new clean energy economy. Those are DOE’s (and hence my) three priorities, and also making sure that the applied programs interact more with the universities and vice versa.

What is the connection between university research and the goals you mentioned, which include job creation?

Well, you look at one of our major battery companies in the U.S., called A123 Systems, that was started by a professor at MIT with an Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant from DoE and created numerous new jobs in greentech. It’s been an opportunity to translate basic advances into real products and processes, and companies that employ people. I’ve always been more on the use-inspired research part of the quadrant, in Pasteur’s Quadrant. Pasteur discovered and developed the field of microbiology, but he also did some pretty practical things such as developing Pasteurization, and vaccines as well. And you have Madame Marie Curie, who discovered the field of radioactivity, and was the first to apply radiation to cancer therapy. That’s where I think, through the Energy Innovation Hubs, we have the opportunity to fund university, industry, and government labs together. Industry provides the use to inspire the fundamental work of engineering and the basic sciences, and universities and government labs are sort of the glue between the two.

Do you think the outlook going forward for renewable energy funding is strong?

Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, much of the $32.7 billion is in greentech renewables such as wind, biomass, geothermal, and solar, as well as smart grid investment grants, batteries, and carbon capture and storage. There is also great interest in nuclear, which I am also quite supportive of. I think that there have been problems in the past that we know how to handle. Nuclear is very safe. I think the biggest challenge is that thirty years ago we built a lot of nuclear power plants, and 90% of the components came from the U.S. We had a really deep knowledge base. Thirty years later, 70% of the components are sourced overseas and our nuclear workforce is aging. The people who built and ran the power plants, are decades older now, so we’ve got to make sure we restart it while they can advise and teach the next generation. I see that as one of the big challenges and one of the great opportunities.

What’s guided you in your career, including this transition between academia and government?

It’s about people. I care deeply about my students, faculty and staff, and about universities and government, and that’s always been my first principle. I have wanted to start on a new path of public service and ever since I was a kid I wanted to make an impact in the energy and environment area. Getting the chance to serve the country in this capacity is like a dream come true. It is a little strange not to be in the classroom this fall. Not to be a part of the university level, which I loved. When I was at Hopkins in some ways it was very much like DOE. A couple of the initiatives I ran at Hopkins involved looking for strategic cross-cutting initiatives at the university level, and we launched a handful of them. We setup $15 million in funding over five years for university-wide collaboration competitions. The requirements involved having more than two schools working together on projects that may have a broader society impact. Those were the only ground rules. We received 97 proposals. Most of them were collaborations among three to five schools. We had Nobel Prize winners to junior faculty in meetings, on review panels, and in discussions and that were fabulous. It was an intellectually invigorating process that I am very proud of. It resulted in a strategic plan called Framework for the Future. [pdf] We also launched the Mosaic initiative, which is very similar to the initiative at Stanford to recruit faculty including underrepresented minorities and women. Mosaic has been very successful. Again, it is all about the people: in this case, recruiting the brightest and the best to tackle problems. It’s the same with DOE, where, under the leadership of Secretary Steven Chu (a former Stanford Professor), we have put a focus on hiring the best and the brightest, from Assistant Secretaries on down.

What from your Stanford experience has stayed with you throughout your career?

I was here for eight years, and the undergraduate and graduate work were different but equally exciting. Stanford was the place that I learned to work in a group. I had two great advisors. Professor Joseph Goodman was my first thesis advisor and Professor Bert Hesselink was my second one. When I was an undergraduate I worked in the lab, and what was really cool about that was that I was an undergraduate. I came in as a freshman and started working in the lab as a sophomore. I got a chance to watch and work on many different projects with graduate students. At one point Professor Goodman wrote an interdisciplinary grant with Professor Al Macovski, a radiologist over at the medical school, and an engineer at Lockheed in industry. You see that in my formative years there was this first proposal involving industry, university, and use-inspired research: medical imaging using optical methods to better visualize tumors. I thought that was just so cool. I used to talk with Professor Goodman about how to innovate by taking best practices from one field and applying it to other fields to solve problems. I remember that conversation very clearly. I was also at Stanford during Bayh-Dole [N.B. legislation giving universities control of intellectual property resulting from federal research funding]. I had a little invention, and I took it over to Neils Reimers [N.B. Stanford’s first head of technology licensing], whose office was in a trailer behind Branner Hall, with one assistant. This was in about 1977, before the law was enacted. Neils came back to me a couple of years later after Bayh-Dole and said, “Yeah, we’d be interested in your invention again.” We filed a patent, and that gave me the opportunity to learn how that whole process went, so I became quite interested in inventing. I have 129 international U.S. and international patents. I learned a lot about the inventing process here. It was interdisciplinary work. I also learned about how you can compete, and cooperate with people. I’m kind of competitive, I played sports here when I was an undergraduate: field hockey and lacrosse. But they were also team sports, so I learned a lot about teamwork, and that was really important. I owe a great deal to the university. It was a wonderful experience.