• Research Review Home
• Current Issue
• Archives

Director's Perspective: Transforming Our Energy Enterprise

From the 2007 Research Review.

By now, we are all familiar with the statistics: Global demand for energy is projected to increase 50% or more by the year 2030, and energy demand in developing countries is likely to double in that time.

The rapid growth of energy demand, the uncertainty of future supplies, the increasing reliance on oil from unstable regions, and the resulting dramatic rise in fossil fuel prices—all of these are creating formidable challenges to our economy and our energy security. At the same time, the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is a looming threat to our environment.

Without fundamental changes in how we generate—and how we use—energy, these challenges threaten our livelihoods, our lifestyles, and our planet.

I strongly believe that these changes cannot be incremental. The world must transform its current energy system on a global scale, and in order to help achieve this transformation, our nation must focus on moving next-generation energy technologies into the marketplace far more quickly than we are doing now.

At NREL, we refer to this fast-moving approach as commercialization at speed. We have been preparing for it for decades, so that today, we have many technologies that are mature enough to make a compelling business case. The challenge is to move these technologies into the marketplace more quickly by breaking down the remaining barriers.

At the same time, we must create an infrastructure in which our current technologies have far-reaching and significant impacts. We call this deployment at scale, and it means that we must identify and remove the structural barriers that are preventing advanced energy technologies from being adopted quickly and easily.

We can achieve these two imperatives by aggressively pursuing innovation while accelerating our commercialization and deployment efforts. All three pursuits are needed to achieve the necessary transformation of the world's energy system.

At NREL, we are studying the energy marketplace and developing innovative technologies that are targeted to meet the needs of the marketplace. We are managing our intellectual property to help it reach its full commercial potential and are working closely with entrepreneurs who will help commercialize our technologies. We aim to provide consumers not just with clean energy options, but also the tools that will help them integrate advanced energy technologies into their everyday lives.

NREL's research provides a pathway for new solutions in the form of a steady flow of technological advances. New concepts and systems are emerging that will allow renewable energy industries to become more cost competitive, expand their markets, and keep moving forward.

Our work covers the spectrum—from promising, but as-yet unproven, technologies that could still require years of research, to the relatively near-term cost-cutting improvements needed to accelerate the market acceptance of well-demonstrated new technologies.

And as the most opportune concepts move to commercialization, we continue to find still more ways to improve advanced energy systems and to integrate them into our existing infrastructure. In this way, research continues to feed the technology pipeline, providing industry and society with the best options for solving our energy problems.

This work is enormously challenging, yet it's essential to our energy future. We continually ask ourselves, "How can we ensure that our initial steps toward a sustainable energy economy will take us where we need to go?" The answer, I feel, will be found through balanced efforts that simultaneously address aggressive innovation, commercialization at speed, and deployment at scale. As director of the national laboratory at our nation's epicenter of clean energy research and development, I am confident we can—and will—get there.