 Stephen and I got to work together at the first part of the administration and one of the things I just loved about Stephen was he was so committed to his staff and his people and that he would regularly call me about how we could increase their pay and so that's how it's one way you get the attention by being a good leader and says Stephen thank you so much for your leadership. You know in reading if you if you look through the many biographies of Dr. Chu you will find that he admits or he at least claims to be the underachiever in his family. Now I don't know about your family but in most families winning a Nobel Prize and being Secretary of Energy would probably put you at the top sibling spot but you can see the amazing family that he must come from. The second thing that strikes you about Dr. Chu is how generous he is in giving credit to the many teachers and mentors who developed and encouraged his love of math and physics. The people who gave him the freedom to experiment explore and it's something that I know he talks many times about even fail and there's great learning in failing. He's giving back to his students in the same way and as we strive to get more young women and men into the STEM fields people like Dr. Chu who teach and who mentor and who spark interest in science and math are invaluable in that effort. As the first scientist to serve as the Secretary of Energy Dr. Chu was responsible for implementing President Obama's ambitious energy agenda. He was given the task of increasing our investment in clean energy, reducing our dependence on foreign oil and addressing climate change and in a spare time create a few million jobs. When President Obama announced Dr. Chu's nomination as Secretary of Energy he said quote the future of our economy and our national security is inextricably linked to one challenge, energy, end quote. Dr. Chu took that challenge very seriously. While he was Secretary of Energy he was instrumental in pushing the development of alternative energy sources. Under his leadership the United States doubled, doubled the amount of power generated by renewables. More importantly he oversaw the opening of the ARPA-E translated the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy and Energy Innovation Hubs and ARPA-E has variously been compared to massive green venture capital firm and the laboratory where James Bond gets all of those amazing spy gadgets. So as the Q in this scenario Dr. Chu gave the scientists and researchers at those ARPA-E labs the freedom that they had at Bell Labs. He gave them and all the Department of Energy employees the freedom to pursue solutions to our energy problems that were both high risk and potentially very high reward as well. Inspired by people like Dr. Chu we are now working between the United States and Australia to bring out and increase that innovative spirit in all of us. I can think of few places on the world in the planet better than Australia to talk about solar energy. From government to academia to business Australians are working hard to take advantage of one of your greatest assets the antipodian light. We are taking full advantage of it at our small United States Embassy mission here in Australia. Here in Canberra we have put solar panels on all of our U.S. government owned diplomatic housing. Those panels now produce more than 180,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. They heat our water and they have reduced our costs amazingly. In fact we have received quite a few rewards at the Embassy Stephen. I know you'd appreciate this both for recycling for energy saving and our sustainability programs and we are proud to be one of the greenest embassies here in Australia. But Australian companies are also looking into better and more affordable solar roofs both for commercial and residential properties. Mining companies are building solar plants to replace diesel in their powering of their minds. In June President Obama and Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a cooperative effort between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of New South Wales and the Energy Change Institute here at ANU. Together we will research the further development of solarvoltaic technologies like tandem solar cells and thin film solar cells which I know you'll hear more about today. We are so fortunate to have had Dr. Chu at the helm of the Department of Energy during a crucial time for the United States. Because of his excellent leadership we are now closer to energy independence as a nation than we ever have been before. We now have more people employed by the solar industry than we do by the coal industry and we have encouraged the talents and imaginations of some of the best and brightest minds for the future. Not content to rest on his laurels or perhaps determined to finally become that family over achiever. Dr. Chu is continuing his impressive research now at Stanford. I'd like to tell you more about that but as I tried to read through it it was way undecipherable to me Stephen so I'm looking forward to hearing your talk today and you'll hear directly from him. I am so pleased that he was able to make his trip to Australia. He experienced a biking accident on his knee just shortly before he came and it was it is a true testament to both his valor and his persistence that he made the trip even though that serious accident. So Stephen we're so honored to have you here and it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Stephen Chu. Thank you John for that lovely introduction. I have to say working with John was a real joy. If you didn't get his real title let me translate he was head of HR for the US government and usually when you have to deal with HR people you cringe you know the hairs in the back of your neck stand up and you say oh and you have to weather it but but John was very good. He was more than very good. He understood that what we would do in the government what any organization do really it's all about the people and the quality of people and how to get the best people and if you get the best people to come how do you keep them there and that's what it's about. You absolutely have to do things by the rules fairly all those things but really getting people to come and serve at the government. Not everybody is willing to take a factor of five or ten cut and pay as I did and so that's why I was badgering him to say maybe we can only ask him to take a factor of three cut and pay. All right so let me just push on and before I talk about solar I have to put it in context and for all of you in the audience you whenever you do something in research you have to know what the competition is doing in research and if you're in industry you have to do that so the question is what is the competition doing and what part of the significant competition is fossil fuel oil natural gas and coal oil and natural gas particularly are deemed very valuable because oil for transportation especially and so let me quote two people I respect immensely and they said our ability to find and extract fossil fuels continues to improve and economically recover reservoirs around the world are likely to keep pace with rising demand for decades well I said that why let me just remind you of US oil production from 1945 to 2012 this chart goes up to 2010 and you see that peak oil production in the United States was about 1970 and despite the Alaskan oil fine that orange stuff it continued to decline but then on the extreme right hand side there's this little green triangle called type this is so-called tight oil that could be released if you fractured it with water and the following year tight oil increased to so that the US production is seven and a half million barrels a day by the end of this year it's going to be eight and a half million barrels a day the increase in tight oil was about four and a half million barrels a day which is more oil than any other country in the world except three Saudi Arabia Russia and the United States more than Venezuela and more than Iraq more than Iran or Canada more than every other country just the increase and it can go higher so so what else is there well there may be potential reserves of oil and gas that are perhaps 10 times larger than the rest of the world and so where you see brown you see potential tight oil and gas now tight gas in the United States is no longer being explored actively you've got high producing wells and gas is now 350 to four dollars a million BTU about one third one quarters the rest of the world and so in fact sadly gas is being flared in North Dakota at a great rate because they want to get after the expense of good stuff oil and so they're just burning it because they're interested in short term profits not wrong not total profits and so this is a real tragedy but the point here is that for example China may have one and a half times more oil a tight oil than in the United States and there are many other countries around the world who do this Russia of course is aghast at this new source of oil and they have people around in Europe trying to give into the Europeans that this is really dirty ugly stuff it's certainly the water tables and you shouldn't try to develop a gas and oil in Europe Russia has become a very environmentally conscious country in all countries except Russia so let me also say let me also say that I although it's not on the topic I do want to remind you something about the 800 pound pound drill in the room and that is really climate change but I'm going to introduce in a slightly different way and only talk about briefly this is a graph of tobacco use in the United States from 1900 to 2005 and the black curve is the average per capita use of cigarettes per male adult and by 1965 word Pete the average consumption of cigarettes was 220 packs a year including non-smokers we're a very smoking country from essentially zero to very large smoking and by 1950s and certainly by the 60s that blue curve the that same cohort adult males dying of lung cancer and it was beginning to rise considerably above the noise and the medical community saying oh wow what's happening there seems to be a correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer deaths the tobacco company said well correlation does not mean causation and since you can't predict who's going to get lung cancer you don't understand the microbiology of how you get cancer from cigarette smoking you can't prove it so what's to worry until you prove it kind of sounds familiar but nevertheless uh the epidemiology pushed on and by the late by the mid late 60s they were able to put warnings on packages of cigarettes the surgeon general said caution cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health the next surgeon general said caution cigarette smoking is hazardous to your health and it was probably fired by the next president but never mind that as we went to the 80s and 90s a huge campaign to convince young people not to start smoking ensued and you see that black curve just going down down down losing 60 percent of consumption per capita and and then you see uh deaths from cigarette smoking going down I want to point out that there's a 25 year lag a 25 year lag from the time the average person starts smoking when they get lung cancer so they do a lot of damage in this ensuing years that's not to say if you've been smoking for 25 years and you haven't had lung cancer you're safe no it's average you can get it in five years or you can never get it and so science today still can't predict that we do know today that if you smoke and this is very serious epidemiological studies to take all the other factors that might distort the correlation if you smoke a half a pack more a day you have a 25 times higher chance of getting lung cancer than if you didn't smoke 25 times not 25 percent and smoking is the greatest cause of premature deaths in the United States that are preventable we also know that coronary heart disease stroke two to four times higher all right so hold that thought for a moment here's some more data 1850 to 2010 and you see on that top curve these wiggly lines and this the average land and ocean surface temperature and to most people you would say that the those temperatures average over the earth are increasing uh except a few people in dc they look at that and they say no it's not increasing over the last 15 years it's been essentially stable uh that's true if you cherry pick the data that the last 15 years has been essentially stable uh we don't know why it's stable we don't know why in around 1945 to 1970 you have this long plateau uh we do know why over and that's very complicated having to do the ocean currents I don't want to go into this but certainly over a century we do know if energy in is the same and energy out is less there's only one way the temperature is going to go uh because you begin to average all over all these subtle ocean currents and things by the way the lower curve is the rise in sea level all right so um now we'd probably tell you something that only the climate experts will know about and that is um it turns out that if you're the biochemistry the chemistry of life is much more selective than inorganic chemistry and if you're a plant and you use you take in carbon dioxide to in photosynthesis to create the stuff that the plant needs your preference of taking in carbon 12 is much better than let's say carbon being dissolved in the ocean uh and so you're scarfing in carbon 12 and you're preferentially rejecting carbon 13 in isotope of carbon 12 all right now you're a plant you've got high levels of carbon 12 to carbon 13 yeah you get fossilized you go deep underground you take it up you're burning all right so there's less carbon 13 than carbon 12 when you're burning fossil fuel and so you look at this difference and this is called the zeus effect and here on the curve let's see if you have a pointer uh where's my pointer somewhere by the pointer my pointer is here okay so this this curve is carbon dioxide increasing from 1750 beginning of the industrial revolution of the present time and the uh bluish curve this thing over here is carbon 13 uh this is carbon 13 over carbon 14 uh and so what you're doing is you're taking massive amounts of carbon that are pre-selected to be more carbon 12 and carbon 13 and you're throwing it back in the atmosphere and so if you do that you dilute uh the carbon 13 which is happening quantitatively it makes sense it's quantitatively in agreement with how much fossil fuel we burn since the beginning of the industrial revolution there's another isotope carbon 14 which is also an indicator uh carbon 14 is a radioactive form of carbon it's made in the upper atmosphere with uh proton bombardment of nitrogen 14 carbon 14 decays in 5700 years it mixes into the atmosphere it goes it's incorporated all living things you me trees you name it and uh suppose you die and you've got a certain ratio of carbon 14 in your body and they put you in a coffin for 10 000 years make it a million years so that uh all the carbon 14 in your body is gone and they dig you up and you put they put you in a fossil fuel power plant right you're part of the new energy and uh and uh you don't have any want carbon 14 so if you burn a lot of fossil fuel you stick up uh stuff devoid of carbon 14 okay so it too gets diluted if it's requested for millions of years and here you see the carbon 14 going down as the CO2 goes up and you say well wait you're you only show the state it's 1950 and so what's going on here and what's going on is after the 1950s there was a big perturbation on carbon 14 it was called atmospheric hydrogen bomb testing and uh that was a big perturbation and you see this green curve as the United States and the Soviet Union began to test hydrogen bombs and they in in on land in the atmosphere this carbon 14 went spiking up like crazy this this oscillation it actually went out of the stratosphere the limit on the hydrogen bombs was actually defined by we can make them bigger but if we make them any bigger than 50 or 100 megatons most of the energy just goes up into space you've just blown too big a hole in the atmosphere so but they were testing bombs in the five to ten up to 50 megaton range and that's what was happening these oscillations are are actually the mixing time between the upper atmosphere and the biosphere so this tracer carbon 14 allows you to mix it and you see that since the testing was done in the northern hemisphere it took takes about a year and a half for the northern hemisphere to mix it takes a while for the carbon 14 in the atmosphere to be absorbed by the norm northern hemisphere ocean than the southern hemisphere ocean so you see this is going down this is going up and then you see this above here and so that you could say well most of us now working its way into the ocean no it's declining too fast and it is it too is consistent with the fact that you're burning lots of fossil fuel you're throwing up carbon 12 devoid of carbon 14 because it was underground for millions of years and therefore you're diluting the carbon 14 so both carbon 13 carbon 14 are telling you there's a direct quantitative connection between burning fossil fuel and and what we see it's not a natural oscillation between the atmosphere the land and the ocean because those natural oscillations don't do it this anisotopic mix okay so so so this is one of the reasons why scientists think that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that's shot up by about 45 percent and especially in the last 50 years is due to humans it can't be a nice natural cycling so it's got a human fingerprints all over it it may be your imagination you say if you see a lots of weird weather storms droughts things like that this is tracked by many people climate scientists is tracked by insurance companies and it's tracked by reinsurance companies a reinsurance company is a company that ensures insurance companies if there's a big drought uh as there was in australia for a couple of years or their massive hurricanes or typhoons earthquakes uh standard insurance company may not have enough cash on hand to pay out the premiums so they take out insurance and so the reinsurance companies are particularly anxious about these big events big weather events and so they track them they track tropical storms floods and a flood that causes a landslide extreme droughts and temperatures and forest fires and crop failures these are all things insured and they have uh what are the events that trigger insurance losses and from 1850 to 2013 uh it's increasing uh the only thing that was not increasing were the number of earthquakes they small number of statistics but the earthquakes over that same period were bobbing along and they were steady all these other things were increasing so again this doesn't prove that uh the warming temperatures are actually uh it's a correlation now the climate scientists say we can't predict hurricanes we can't predict thunderstorms or tornadoes we can't predict we will see more extreme weathers but it's a very imprecise prediction so it's again like the 1950s or 1960s 1970s and smoking it's beginning to rise above the noise all right um this is a cool thing that you should know about these are two satellites and they're very in a known polar orbit and they measured the distance between these two satellites to a few percent of the width of a human hair why they want to do this as the satellites go around the globe if there's an anomaly in the gravitational attraction here it makes the orbit of the satellites bob a little bit so you can imagine them going like that and you measure the distance between them and you can back out change in local gravity and so there have been there's a european uh pair of satellites there's an american pair of satellites there is on the books and in planning stage an upgrade to this based on actually cold atoms measuring gravity and this can be done perhaps a hundred times more sensitive than these guys and so uh we'll see what happens but let me just say what these satellites have been measured from april 2002 april 2012 this is greenland can you see my pointer you cannot see my pointer this is greenland over here and this massive blue is a big loss in ice and so if you look at certain glaciers over here you see these glaciers summer winter summer winter uh losing ice mass and uh it's not losing ice mass but it's actually accelerating uh remarkably you can do everything but they're in polar orbit they sample the entire world uh this is the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet again losing mass and again accelerating okay um they also can measure water tables water table changes in california water table changes in the midwest water table changes in india and australia and uh they're showing declining water tables now that's not all due to climate change in fact most of it is just due to water misuse but but uh they're doing that all right so let's go back to the analogy on smoking remember that 50 year lag we don't know what the damage is that we've already done for the greenhouse gases especially the carbon dioxide we stuck up in the air carbon dioxide is pretty stable and but it's not 25 years it's probably 50 to 150 years before it glides to the stop suppose we stop that is to say we stop emitting carbon today what's the final temperature it'll take 50 years 100 years to find out okay it's like all the mutations that you've been doing to yourself and smoking for the last 10 20 years and they're sitting there gathering gathering gathering actually lung cancer is a multiple mutation disease it's not a single point mutation and so it actually requires constant uh injury to yourselves all right so so we don't know what the real damage is and we don't know how long the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere the estimates vary from a few hundred years to a few thousand years all right so let's go back your adult you smoke your decision okay whether you want to do that and the difference is here we smoke and our grandchildren run the risk and their grandchildren run the risk because out to a thousand years and so so far society as a whole has been saying oh unless you're 100 sure or 90 sure that all this bad stuff may happen I don't want to give up smoking and it's not my problem anyway all right so so this I think is a problem uh but it's a problem that society at large has never had to face in the history of humankind never has scientists said what we are doing today will affect what will be happening 500 years a thousand years from today and it's invisible and and it's going to have to come out of the noise and it could take a half a century to come out of the noise so there are huge risks we don't know exactly what will happen but the risks are big all right another quote the stone age came to an end not for lack of stones and the oil age will come to an end but not for lack of oil that was said by shake Yamani a former Saudi oil minister ah you're chuckling you think that's why is the former oil minister no what he went is we transitioned to better solutions so you go from the stone age to some metal age and you need to transition to better solutions if you don't find better solutions and better solutions I mean economically better solutions the oil will go gas and coal in the ground will be used if it's the cheaper solution it will be used because if you're Venezuela if you're Russia heck if you're Australia there's a huge temptation to just pump that stuff out of ground because that's that's money all right so now solar power well let me just remind you that most energy sources are solar power of course it's solar the way you think of solar PV or solar thermal but wind is solar power hydro power solar power because it's the sun that makes the water evaporate ocean currents are solar power fossil energy is solar power that had been stored millions of years ago fusion is solar power and so is geothermal it's a different kind of solar power it's due to the ability of heavy elements when they radioactively decay to release energy but I let me remind you that when supernova explode they make a lot of heavy elements and radioactive heavy elements and so it's a different form of solar power but it's solar power the only exceptions are tidal power it's largely gravity gradients and moon and fusion power not in the sun that's clearly solar power but terrestrial fusion power if we ever get it why is that again to remind you this is an incredible understanding of the early epochs in the universe and this is time in seconds on a log scale that's one second a hundred seconds a thousand seconds 10 to four seconds and we are we're able to predict the abundance of the light elements due to what we know about physics and the early moments in the universe and what we see is the time evolution of hydrogen helium deuterium tritium beryllium lithium and so on the tritium all decays away deuterium is stable the universe is 25 percent helium a remarkable prediction but all these other predictions have landed right on the money okay but when we do fusion what we do is we take beryllium and lithium we breed it into tritium we combine with deuterium and we make fusion but where do we get that from we get the beryllium and the lithium from the creation of the universe so that's so that's not solar power so those are the reactions we use you know it's heavy water and heavier water this is hydrogen dioxide tritium dioxide and deuterium dioxide it does weigh more these are just scales all right so I went through this I think I don't know why I'm oh good I mean some my talk will be faster let me talk about first before I do that I just want to mention that about half of the carbon decrease will have to come from energy efficiency and should come from energy efficiency because energy efficiency is really the lowest cost option it not only saves on carbon but it saves money and it just means that you one has to do things in a smart way but I'm since this is a solar conference I'm going to talk about energy and particularly solar energy this is a chart of the dark blue or purple is the cost in the odd states of various forms of energy the cheapest today and this is the cost of new sources of energy if you want to put it in a new gas plant and and amortize over the lifetime and plant 50 years or so and the cost of natural gas and the operating cost of everything else natural gas is the cheapest in the odd states and we're assuming that natural gas stays at four dollars and a million BTU the Asian market is about 15 to 18 dollars a million BTU in Europe it's about 15 dollars the United States is anomaly low and because of that natural gas is the cheapest form of energy in the United States onshore wind is going to pass natural gas including transmission of onshore wind within five years with the subsidy we have it's cheaper than natural gas today by about 30% that subsidy is going to be ramped down turned off in the next couple of years but for good reason wind doesn't need it anymore in the next five certainly 10 years it won't need it large solar PV solar thermal you see them up higher out those lines there are wholesale electricity costs $50 a megawatt hour $70 a megawatt hour very very inexpensive and the point here is that renewable energy large-scale solar and onshore wind will get within a few percent of that within a decade very very good news so that's where I think without subsidy these things will be in less than 10 years nuclear is more expensive in the United States because unless we not have built plants on time on budget and coal is significantly more expensive in the United States and that's why we're no longer building coal plants natural gas is just too too low cost what are the orange things the orange things have to do with the actual cost of society of emitting carbon dioxide depending on how you cost it whether it's low medium high co2 costs and so just think of the natural gas being shifted to the right by those blocks or coal being shifted to the right and everything else so so the real cost of society in air pollution and it's only a rough estimate of what the cost of society will be in climate change you begin to shift everything to the right so if you consider the real cost they're already cheaper but even without that it's it's getting within striking distance solar huge success story over since the middle 70s over the last 40 years the price of solar modules has declined by about factor of 40 there was a this is called a learning curve every time you increase production shipments deployment by factor 10 the price goes down by a certain fraction another factor 10 it goes down by another fraction as the cost comes down the deployment increases and so it's true of virtually all technologies that they follow a straight line if with you plot it as the log of the shipments out and the log of the price and but this doesn't have follows completely straight line because there was a very attractive feed and tariff started in Germany that actually drove the cost of solar modules down because it drew a huge demand and so then you start to make more but it also got a lot of people interested particularly in China so they started investing in multi-billion dollar solar plants and there was an over capacity there was your shortage of silicon and over the shortage of silicon made the price go up and China got into the action and there was an over capacity and the bottom fell the market and so many large companies in Germany a few in the United States and a couple in China went bankrupt the largest solar company in China went bankrupt and so the bottom fell out of the market they were trying to sell at below cost in this period down here because they had sunk so they had to recover something and this the expression in those days was well you're losing every time you sell solar module but what you but you make that up in volume in any case the the market is stabilized over the last year it will probably remain say well maybe for a year or two but it will go down after that most manufacturers are making through the bulge and and they're still driving down costs and so that green dot is where we think solar modules will be sold for at a profit 50 cents a watt instead of 20 dollars a watt so that's a big big change in reduction in cost right now the solar manufacturers are making at cost the manufacturing costs is 50 cents a watt today and they're selling for 80 cents so it's marginal profit okay okay so we revitalize our solar program in in the Department of Energy we said how good can things get and so we started this in 2006 and eight we noticed that system prices and the goal was to get solar to be comparable to natural gas without subsidy we thought a dollar watt was realizable and so we broke the cost down starting 2010 prices which are over here this is the solar module these are the green is the solar module the orange is the balance of system and and there's a little sliver you can't release the power electronics is that little sliver and then we said okay how how much can you really reduce things and ideally you could reduce them so that the module cost would be 50 cents a watt this is a target of 2020 the balance of system 40 cents and everything everything else 10 cents 50 cents we're going to get there absolutely positively when we put this out the solar manufacturer said you guys must be smoking something over there in the Department of Energy and we said no and we discussed it with him and two years later Dick Swanson who's founded one a very successful silicon total company said in public talk he said it's unbelievable the Department of Energy actually sat with us told us how to think again about the business model and then we decided they were right and then everyone else decided they were right and then it became a brace to see to get those manufacturing costs down and then that's what's happening so that's a good thing i should say that module efficiency improvements is a big deal because if you go the polysilicon modules a few years ago was roughly 15 16 percent efficient they're now going to 18 19 uh efficient the silicon ones are now 20 21 22 percent efficient if you increase the efficiency going from 15 to 20 percent that's three over 15 that's a huge fractional change and so the land use the roof use and the installation costs all scale so everything else shrinks so if you're you're in the solar module or solar cell technology research business everything does scale with the cost of the efficiency especially a rooftop another thing i want to point out this is the solar spectrum at the top of the earth this is the solar spectrum at the latitudes typically where you find land that makes sense to where you have solar so this is not land in upper Siberia this is land in in United States and in southern europe and places like that and so looky here this this is only this is where the visible light is and all this stuff you can't see and so there lies an opportunity to actually make solar films that keep windows mostly transparent and you can still get a lot of energy if you can figure out how to do that a lot of things are happening the prices of silicon polysilicon cad tell you are jumping down like crazy there's a new set of materials only in the last 10 years press kvites that is is coming down like crazy it's now at 15 18 percent and there's a talk in this conference that described how you can use silicon which will remain inexpensive for a very long time with pros and bytes to get over 30 percent efficiency and that's a pretty realistic goal so that's all very exciting for those young people in the audience i'm going to remind you i'm using an analogy on how solar works think of rain being those photons hitting a solar panel and so your solar panels is big bucket and the rain goes in and and the photons come in they create electron holes and the electron holes are collected and a voltage is built up across this you've adjusted things so you can generate a voltage a voltage related to water is a pressure so you can get higher and higher voltage the more photons come in but in the end you want to tap that voltage and you want to turn it a little turbine and so you want to drive things and produce energy the bucket can be leaky so so that uh this these precious photons or electron hole pairs can leak out and surface recombination they can leak out as bulk recombination they can do all sorts of things but in the end you're collecting this you're producing a voltage and you're using this current to generate something now there's an optimum how do you want to run the solar panel if you have a large current use you say ah I can really spin the wheel but uh if you let if you want to spin this wheel very fast the voltage is very small and then there's no pressure okay so this is uh this limit's very inefficient uh the you know there's a there's no pressure to actually force the turbine uh if you throw it back you have a very high voltage but there's a little stream and you can't really force the turbine so there's this happy medium and the happy medium uh you can easily say where its power is voltage times current and you look at the voltage current curve of the photocell and you find out how to maximize that and and in designing the photocells that's what you're always thinking about what is the voltage going to be and what current can you sustain but now people make photocells know this and most of the people the engineers and scientists who are in the photovoltaic business are thinking about all these things clever ways new designs new materials things like that uh but let me tell you things that you might not be thinking about I certainly was not thinking about it until it became Secretary of Energy here you have solar cell and then it's hooked up in series to another one another one another one and so in series you get a big high voltage between this solar cell panel and this solar cell panel you take that DC voltage and you convert AC and that's good because these electronics are pretty expensive and they're actually less reliable than the panels and so that's what happens but imagine a leaf falls on theirs or a bunch of clouds fall in this section of the solar panels or maybe a defect in this panel the current has to go through all these so the current through each of the panels is constant if one of the panels is defective or has leaves on it or a cloud over it limits the current and so all of them suffer and so as a minimum you want to have a converter for each panel and then put them up and add them in parallel and so up until very recently that was not done when you start doing that you actually increase the efficiency of the solar panels by 20 30 50 percent in actual field use people will not put a solar set of solar panels on a roof that has a partial shape this is not even worth it all right so here's the thing what you'd like to do is divide these panels into sub panels so that really inexpensive integrated electronics built into the panel can actually do the inversion get it up to the voltage so you don't have to do the series again you don't have to use the whole panel the panels are this big and so if there's a defective part of the panel it just gracefully gets out of the picture okay that's something in parallel electronics but most electrical engineers don't know that this is a problem worth working on or that they can be very very rich if they solve the problem so listen because this problem is immediately solvable it is a electronics okay and electronics we know how to do you can start to unpackage what actually goes into the efficiency of a solar cell these are the valence electrons a photon comes in and it promotes an electron up to the conduction band you've got a hole down here and it can be either from the top or somewhere down here the hole quickly relaxes the top up here like a bubble come into the surface and the electron quickly relaxes bottom here so all those relaxation is just lost but it's worse than that because it also depends on the effective energy gap not this energy gap theoretical energy gap and this effective energy gap actually likes it to have more intensity on the solar panels okay and there are other things there's the fact so if you and this is a nice review article that unpackages all of these things there's entropy losses there's losses to all these things and Carnot cycles all this stuff and so one of the things that good scientists are looking at is look at everything on the menu can you can you improve on these things so it's just not a magic material this it's all sorts of things like trapping ways of eliminating all this so that's all good stuff now let's see radical new ideas solar cells at high temperature don't work as well because when you have high temperature you create a lot of phonons and the election holes scatter from the phonons and then they're lost and so you you're not you you know in a hot desert where it's 40 degrees centigrade and you've got the sunshine there's a tendency to get warm and so there's an issue of cooling the solar panels when they're hot and so a number of researchers have said well let's use this for advantage you can use in micron nanolithography you can make vacuums in here and so here the photon goes in and it creates an electron hole pair but you're also using the heat to make it more likely the heat means that there's a thermal tail of these electrons and you can make it more likely that you can actually get the electrons out so it's a it's a mixture of thermionic mission or heat assisted photo excitation it's a it's a new approach there are materials that do this whether it's ever going to be competitive with siltan I don't know but it's it's there so there are many many things like that that people are exploring this is a solar map of the United States anything in orange and red which covers two thirds of the United States has fantastic solar Alaska is blue and a little bit of orange is blue down here it's not so good it's comparable to Germany but actually now Germany actually is about four or five percent solar and and so even when the sun is not so good it can be pretty effective but in places now Australia is actually Central Australia is even better than this you know Australia is probably got the best solar reserves of anybody except possibly some sort of sectors of North Africa what about installation of solar it turns out that there are a number of companies and these are some of the company solar city sun runs and power and they go and they knock on someone's door it's happening all over California and they say we want to sell you electricity you loan us your roof so we can put solar on your roof but it's ours you don't have to pay for it if it breaks we fix it and we'll buy electricity from electrical companies so you're you're guaranteed electricity but you just signed a contract 20 years 15 years if you sell the house there's that's fine there are ways to you know figure figure that out and so that's all you just launch your roof and we'll sell you let's see if you live in Los Angeles and you are a medium user instead of paying 15 18 cents a kilowatt-hour average it's half the rate the contract would be nine cents a kilowatt hour so but you don't have no out-of-pocket expense you're just paying for electricity and so this new business model is made possible by two things the fact the solar's become very very expensive especially in sunny places like Palo Alto or or Los Angeles Arizona and the fact that there's what's called an investment tax credit that company gets three percent of the investment it takes to buy the modules the inverters and install it back the first year okay now the investment tax credit expires 2016 the end of 2016 I think you should let it ramp down to 10 percent instead of 30 percent in the United States everybody gets 10 percent but by 2020 I think for sure you don't need any special privileges because it will be so inexpensive and so that's another thing so the modules are coming down the inverters are coming down but very slowly because we just need a bunch of smart engineers more competition but then there are things called soft costs and they're not coming down very much at all and so let me before I tell you what soft costs is let me quote Min Lee who's the program manager of sunshod in DOE unlike physics where we can fundamentally figure out the upper limit for efficiency of solar cells there's no such limit to bureaucracy and having been ahead of the Department of Energy for four and a quarter years I can absolutely attest to that and it's and what that means it has nothing to do with the cost of the module the electronics and even the installation costs it has to do with inspection fees licensing fees and all these other things right now it costs about $2 a watt $2 a watt means there's a certain panel of a certain size of certain efficiency and a certain illumination so you're taking out whether it's in Germany or in Arizona or in Australia you just say this is the size of the solar panel and its efficiency costs $2 a watt to install in Germany it's an online application it's automated there's a minor inspection after it's all done but the county or the city doesn't inspect your roof before you install it and doesn't do things after you so they just inspect the electronics in neon states you have to have an online it's not an online application it's an in-person application you stand on very long lines you pay thousands of dollars and then you have to pay the county inspector to inspect your roof to see if your roof is okay and after they install it then the county inspector comes out and has to inspect that your roof won't leak and it too is okay and then someone else inspects the electrical hookup and so the county makes several thousand dollars on this and so when I was at the department of energy in the last two years we realized the soft costs are now two-thirds the installation the non-module costs are two-thirds the cost of solar roof top and the soft costs are coming to be one-third well that's crazy I said why don't you know this city or this town or municipality say make money the old-fashioned way you need income do it with speed traps and parking tickets leave solar alone this work in Massachusetts and suddenly the soft costs came down 50 cents a watt and they're 350 California we couldn't make them budge they're still four bucks okay and and they can go down another 50 cents just by saying hey don't view solar as a source of income this city but there's something else because there was installation costs so he said well of course German labor is more expensive than American labor not so what's going on so we videotaped them golly they spent one-third of the time on the roof it's American laborers so I said we can understand this technology and it imported okay and what you do is you get someone skilled at putting the frame and that's all they do boom they're on the next roof and someone slaps on the thing boom he's gone someone puts in the wire boom they're gone they make it into assembly line okay instead of one person doing it all let's see I gotta read the book how do I do this now how do you do that and so so they they can install it much more quickly because they're using sensible business practices in Australia this is 2009 again if you look at the key this is the cost of the panel this is the cost of profits inverters the racks essentially everything else in 2013 look at the cost of the panel compared to the cost of everything else it's ridiculous okay so the inventors of solar panels were doing a great job the inventors of installation were doing a lousy job and the electric engineers didn't know they should pay attention to inverters okay etc etc etc all right so in terms of policy you have to look at the whole package in order to lower the cost it's just not the solar panel all right so here's an energy quiz reliable electrical grade cannot tolerate more than five or ten percent intermittent renewable energy how many believes that once you go over ten percent solar or solar plus when the show is over in the sense it gets much more expensive if you're ten percent you need ten percent more backup power which should be included in the cost of the energy so the true of how many people think this is true how many people think it's false okay well you the Hawaiian electrical company disagrees with you violently in 2013 when the integrated solar in Hawaii was at three and four percent but racing up rapidly because it was getting cheap cheaper than one well Hawaii generates the electricity by burning diesel fuel or bunker oil it costs 39 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity in Hawaii I don't know if you know what your rates are but that let me tell you that's a high rate and and they said no the great can handle more than two is three percent three percent average power that means peak it could be eight percent it grows unstable we're responsible for maintaining great and some reporter from Forrest magazine was interviewing me about solar power and about stuff like that and I was no longer secondary energy so I was released from remaining silent and I said well that's just plain BS I said when it's 30 percent yes but not three percent and Hawaiian electric company got very angry me they may have taken a contract down on me I don't know but why was I so sure well because there is what are called existence proofs in Europe uh as Germany is about 30 percent renewable of which it's mostly wind with about four percent solar and the others bio Denmark's 33 Spain is 25 21% wind four percent solar Spain is not connected to the European grid in any substantial way it's got the parodies and it's got French electricity not wanting a renewable energy into France so so because of that there's only a very thin ties Spain is actually a standalone entity Ireland is mostly a standalone entity there are a few undersea cables but not many and so if you look down the list and those green arrows are that list and there you see on the left hand side the fraction of non of renewables 20 40 60 80 100 percent Norway is actually over 100 percent renewables it's all hydro they sell their electors excess electricity it's primarily Europe and um those those green arrows going down to 10 percent are those countries that essentially have no hydro pump storage or very little pump storage no hydro power so we're talking wind and solar which are intermittent and so we have existence proofs at 20 25 percent uh that you can manage a grid without blackouts brownouts without low shedding now these countries want to go to 50 percent and they have to 50 percent they have to start sharing energy and 50 percent you actually have to start thinking of pump hydro and batteries and all sorts of other things but at 20 25 percent it's manageable to already been done so that was the existence proof if the policymakers and the regulators only listen to the utility companies and don't know about what's happening in some other part of the world the utility comes to where the experts we know don't listen to these scientists or these environmentalists they are just blowing hot air then it is it is possible but let me say that careful planning is essential for this once you go over about 10 percent you have to actually plan you have to manage two way flows there has to be some way of doing some things and once you're 20 percent it gets even more important what is the careful planning okay suppose you're let's say 30 percent renewables first if you're a big country like Australia you're you're good you're not say China all perfect all of continental Europe and north Africa perfect but so but take a single place like Australia you have sun in lots of places this wire is so clouds over here don't affect something over here wind over here doesn't affect wind over there but you need transmission lines to bring that to the other places so transmission is actually becomes a big help for spreading out the variability load management is another big deal load management means you don't run defrost cycles in the middle of the day where electricity is most precious a defrost cycle is you blow hot air into your freezer and you defrost the full sheen sheen and then you recall your refrigerator you do this at night when energy is cheap if it's a really hot day and the price of electricity starts the real cost of electricity but you're you now begin to use all your spare capacity goes up you want to do load management you say turn let your thermostat scope a little stuff like that you have to have automatic two-way flows the outstates does not have automatic two-way flows in the western part of the United States when there was a blackout in San Diego people were calling from one electrical district to another and say hey Joe can I ask your electricity can you send me some okay or they would call up a hydroelectric dam is it can you let some more water through because you know we we don't have we've lost a generating capacity over here it was manual it was manual by phone in the 21st century okay and this should not be energy storage started with pump storage but batteries and batteries are going to get cheap and then finally the last thing is extra standby capacity when solar becomes 50 percent or six that solar renewable solar and wind become 50 60 70 percent that standby capacity is part of the cost of renewable energy let's make note about even at 30 percent it is all right so now why in the United States and in other countries are they fighting it and let me say that if I were a utility company and I get yelled at if there's a blackout I will want something where I can it's an old technology I can turn up the power when there's demand and I can turn down when there's not demand that's called fossil fuel and to a certain extent nuclear but if there's demand and the wind stops shining or the or the wind stops blowing the sun stops shining that's bad and so you actually have to think a little bit harder you have to actually think a lot harder if you're a utility company a guaranteed monopoly you have not gone into utility business because you're a brilliant engineer studied well at Stanford at the top of the class and say I want to work for a utility company you want to work for Apple and Google and Facebook no you don't want to work for PG&E and so there's an issue here about the selection of the people who operate utility companies but to be fair to them it's a selection effect guaranteed monopolies don't usually be the most innovative people that's kind of a Darwin's in fact but but and so it's up to think tanks it's up to others it's up to innovative utility companies to show that you can be more profitable if you think harder because in the end it's a profit that's the motivation and and then if you're a regulator you have to know about these existence proofs deployed existence proofs not some theoretical study done in the university a deployed existence proof is the only thing that actually can give us a utility that it might be operational and so that's also very important there's another quiz i'm a professor i give quizzes electric vehicles will never be cost competitive because of the high cost of batteries how we believe this is true how we believe that's false okay it is false but let me just tell you we have in the United States a Tesla but let me compare it to the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost this is this had the second longest production run of any car in the world almost two decades and when it was introduced it cost 1500 pounds 1500 pounds if you had a professional 10-year salary could buy you one of these babies and it was great it it actually got over 20 miles a gallon it was a seven liter engine that got a 48 horsepower but it was very smooth it was a Rolls and very quiet very smooth and it did this 15,000 mile run showed it could last it would break down and so by 1911 the technology was there except for one thing it was just too expensive and by the way the seven liter 48 horsepower engine was really really good thing in those days nowadays one liter gives you 140 horsepower okay and less emissions so we have made progress um uh and so what really changed uh transportation was a Model T it was the longest production run of any car in the world and Henry Ford said I want to make this affordable to the vast majority of Americans and it was this Model T that took uh United States from the horse and buggy whoop here into the automobile era so if you want to think electric vehicles you can't think Tesla which is without subsidy about 120,000 dollars for the long-range version you'll have to think 20 25,000 dollars for a 300 mile version and charge in 20 minutes you don't want to charge in four hours and so that's the challenge the cost of the battery 2008 thousand bucks a kilowatt hour Tesla 78 kilowatt hours 78,000 dollars for just a battery manufacturing okay to by 2012 it was cut in half now it's 40,000 dollars still a lot of money for a car yourself for 120,000 dollars well against and subsidy and so in 2011 we set as a goal can you make a manufacturing cost an automobile battery pack the whole unit for 160 dollars a kilowatt hour not 500 and with that price you can sell a car for 300 Tesla S range car for 25,000 dollars and uh utility scale can you get 100 dollars a kilowatt hour because 100 dollars a kilowatt hour it begins to be comparable to hydropower and and so that's for utility scale how are we doing we're doing pretty good this is Bloomberg new energy finance projection the the solid curve those x's are the actual costs as we enter into global pass you know uh the 2012 to the 13 beginning of 2014 and the costs are coming down uh the Tesla battery is actually three percent cheaper than the Nissan Leaf Factory uh and the Gigafactory will be down here uh turning operational in 2017 2018 at the latest so the costs are coming down and we're actually may be faster than the Department of Energy target very very exciting utility scale also coming down dramatically this company is starting to put them into uh testing uh their target manufacturing cost is this but that's for today's battery um higher demand that's going to have to last 30 years and uh without any maintenance to be utility scale but but these things are having their two or three companies that think they can manage uh i should say that there's new research going on this the other stuff was incremental research um when i got back to stanford i started collaborating with a professor in each way in mechanical engineering uh there he is he's one of the star professors rising professors at stanford and what we're working on is not a lithium standard lithium battery with a carbon anode uh or a silicon anode and the silicon anode he developed and this company is making these things but a solid metal lithium and sulfur battery where we think that the energy density could be four or five times greater uh the charging rate conservatively can be if it's some tricks uh eight maybe ten times faster and uh much safer and so uh you couldn't use lithium metal before uh if you charge charge it too fast you get dendrites and short out the battery and this is an example of a paper we just submitted last week now this is the third paper where the uh open circles are what happens to a lithium metal and the solid ones are what happens to this new method uh we just stopped testing after 120 130 cycles because that's a few months testing and uh so uh but there are several approaches uh we're looking at all of them in parallel to see what will happen stay tuned you'll will know in a year or two whether you can get something that could be that hundred dollar battery um and be one quarter the volume of the tesla battery and then one quarter the weight okay uh i'm going to skip about utilities and what always calls for all these other things i just say that we need new business models uh i will say that especially in europe that summer winter stores is a real issue it's also true in the northern part of the yon states may not be true in australia um but you can't rely on north africa as your solar source because if you get cut off from electricity due to some political instability in north africa the light source and so um uh so people would not be willing to do that but suppose as we see as i hope to convince you that uh renewable energy wind and solar become cheaper cheaper cheaper 20 years from day it will be cheaper than coal and natural gas uh as i said in yon states is right cheaper than coal uh and uh you so you have cheap electricity if you can take the carbon dioxide and you can split water cheaply to make hydrogen and combine those two things to make a liquid hydrocarbon fuel then the problem is solved because you can put a liquid hydrocarbon fuel on a tank or and ship it anywhere around the world we ship oil everywhere around the world and the ship that's 80 a hundred dollars a barrel the shipping costs are a few dollars a barrel and you put them in storage tanks 90 day 100 day reserves so you have some energy security okay that technology exists take a fleece and storage tank exists what doesn't exist is this ability to take cheap electricity at night time electricity and turn it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel if you do that then the renewable energy problem then you start then i see a hundred percent renewables and energy security and everything else so that's the last thing we need and let me just close by saying um the part of the things i like least about being a secretary of energy is oppressed they're venal they're trying to trap me like gotcha and eventually i told the president and after the election that i really enjoyed working with him i'd love to say two more years but my wife had other ideas and she was going back to california and she said steve no one's irreplaceable not even you and i'm going back to california okay i'm calm and uh so so on february one i announced that i was stepping down and and february seven uh the following news story period hungover energy secretary wakes up next to solar path now i'm going to read you part of the byline washington sources have reported that following a long night of carousing at a series of dc bordering holes energy secretary steven shu awoke thursday morning to find himself sleeping next to a giant solar panel he had met the previous evening according to sources went on to alleged i didn't even remember the manufacturer's name according to the sources choosing counter with the chrysaline silken solar receptor was his most revered galleons since 2009 when an extended fling with a 90 foot wind turbine nearly ended his marriage so i walk in and work morning to february seven public affairs the head public affairs comes to me and says we can't answer this and i said yes we normally don't answer slations news stories it's just not worth it because it then creates a thing to press love but so by noon we issued the following statement i just want everyone to know that my decision not to serve a second term as energy secretary has absolutely nothing to do with the allegations made this week's edition of the onion while i'm not going to confirm or deny the charges specifically i will say that clean renewable solar power is a growing source of us jobs as becoming more and more affordable so it's no surprise that lots of americans are falling in love with solar now there were limits to what they allow me to say books that's like could say regards of your sexual orientation but in any case the future solar looks bright there's a huge amount of technology that can be developed i urge everybody to pay attention to the whole problem not only this the guts of the pv but the whole system and not on the whole solar system but how it integrates with the current transmission distribution system and know that batteries within five to ten years at the outset will become very very inexpensive that can do peak shifting from noon time to four to ten o'clock at night and all these things are happening within a decade the most of the distribution systems are not planning for it and you have to plan for it because this is you need some serious technology in order to capture the local solution otherwise we don't do the local solution we do the more expensive solution and the local solution includes all that other residual grid coordination stuff so so anyway with that let me conclude and i'm not sure what else i'm supposed to do