>>George Roe: You've heard the saying, I subscribe to it wholeheartedly, "It takes a village."
And we are really working together as a team on this
particular thing.
And to lead us off on this journey together, it is my pleasure to introduce
Mr. David Turk, the deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Just a little background on Mr. Turk: before he was in this
role at the department, he was the deputy executive director of the International Energy
Agency and he focused there on helping countries around the world tackle their clean
energy transitions.
His work included reports on digitalization of energy systems,
possible futures for clean hydrogen, even a project that tracks progress on a whole
wide range of clean energy technologies.
Would you please take us away, Deputy Secretary Turk?
>>David Turk: Well, thank you very much George for the introduction and all that you
do and other colleagues in the Arctic Energy Office.
It’s just a pleasure to be with you all and absolutely share the excitement George
has just expressed and I know our other folks talking today will as well.
And we’re really here because of both the critical challenges
but I think we also need to focus on the immense opportunities for clean energy in the
Arctic region.
Of course there are challenges and we should be up front with those.
Alaska is certainly on the frontlines of the climate crisis, warming faster than any other
U.S. state.
And that has implications: permafrost thaw, fisheries impacts, changes to forests
and weather patterns and wildfires as well.
At the same time there are real opportunities.
The Arctic has always been a living laboratory for
sustainable energy by necessity.
Resources are scarce.
We have to find ways to provide affordable, reliable, resilient energy in a harsh climate
and in extremely remote communities.
And I should say affordability and access are especially
critical.
Energy costs four times as much in Alaska as it does nationwide here in the U.S.
In rural Alaskan and Arctic communities, it’s eight
times the national cost.
And this hurts vulnerable populations the most.
So certainly at DOE we are incredibly proud, all of us, to
have had a long history of partnership and place-based support in the Arctic.
Our focus has always been on learning from local
expertise.
Too often here in D.C., we do more talking than listening but I think this is a
particular area where we need to do more listening and we’ve tried to do that from the
Department of Energy side of things.
And listening to that expertise including indigenous
and traditional knowledge and supporting what’s already going on in the region, exciting
efforts that are going on in the region.
So we launched our Arctic Energy Office about a year ago to deepen this partnership in
the Arctic and requested an increase in funding for the office for this fiscal year to make
sure we’ve got the resources appropriate with the challenges and opportunities.
We invest tens of millions of dollars in climate research
in Alaska every year.
Just to give a few examples, our Cold Climate Housing Research
Center in Fairbanks joined NREL last year to
develop new solutions for healthy, sustainable housing made for the North; collaborating
with the University of Alaska Fairbanks to scale the production of kelp for food, for
fuel and beyond as well.
Just this April we announced that DOE experts will help five
Alaskan communities from Sitka to Wainwright to reduce their dependence on fossil
fuels and move to cleaner, cheaper, more reliable energy sources.
In June, we gave $1 million to "Launch Alaska" through our Office of Technology
Transitions.
And you’ll hear from my colleague Christina here shortly, the EPIC Prize to
support local electric transportation entrepreneurs.
In July, we awarded over $5 million to six Alaska native communities for clean energy
projects to save money and increase reliability.
So we’re incredibly proud of DOE’s existing footprint in the Arctic.
But to really secure the region’s clean energy
future, we need a huge focus on commercialization of unique, innovative technologies that are
made for the far north.
There’s more, there’s much more that we can be doing to be a helpful
partner.
And that’s exactly what ArcticX is all about: investing in local expertise,
leveraging the full weight of our national laboratories and moving new technologies into
the field and to market for Arctic communities to benefit from.
And we’ve got to collaborate.
This is about partnerships.
If we’re going to be successful here we need to collaborate with the private
sector to fully catalyze this shift towards clean resilient Arctic energy.
It’s what we’re aiming to do across the entire country and
around the world for that matter, making sure solutions go from our labs to communities
at scale and that local experts benefit and have a back and forth and good healthy
exchange with our national lab and DOE network so that we can grow solutions from the
ground up.
So DOE is committed to doing our part, to doing as much as we possibly can
in partnership to invest in Arctic energy innovation.
And today’s program will certainly show that the entire Biden administration
is ready to do the same through a whole of government approach.
So thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for all the partnership and looking forward to really getting on to the
discussion here.
So back to you George.
I think you’re still on mute George.
>>George Roe: That would be correct.
Thank you.
>>David Turk: We’ve all been there George.
We’ve all been there.
>>George Roe: I know.
Great.
I have a couple quick questions for you initially.
So let’s start with this.
You enumerated some of the challenges, the opportunities that you’ve
seen in the Arctic region and some of the ways the Department of Energy is addressing
those gaps.
Are there any particular ones that would really stand out to you as like, these
are things that we could do more of, or that we could replicate more broadly, outside the
Arctic?
>>David Turk: Well, I think the thing we have to focus on – and again be honest and
have candid discussions among ourselves.
There are some real unique challenges to commercializing technologies in the Arctic
region and we need to have an honest, candid discussion of those and figure out how do
we address those gaps.
And I mentioned some of the programs that we’re doing on that.
But maybe three challenges in particular to focus on.
One is the seasonable variability for clean energy resources.
Whether you’re talking about the low light in the winter
making year-round solar challenging, the variable wind conditions, hydro resources freezing
in the winter, which doesn’t happen in some of
the states in the south of course.
And the winter load is when energy loads are highest and
when the heating needs are really there.
So there’s a mismatch of supply and demand.
Now that’s a challenge but there’s opportunities there.
There’s ways to leverage technologies just as we’re trying to do through the Arctic
energy office in ways that benefit local communities.
Another big challenge, a second big challenge is changing conditions.
Seventy percent of existing infrastructure in the Arctic is
sitting on thawing permafrost.
That is a big, big challenge.
And new technologies have to be adapted to climate change.
We’re having to do that across all 50 states in the U.S. but I
think especially so in the Arctic context and the context in Alaska.
And Arctic supply chains are also vulnerable to disruptions,
whether its extreme weather events, geopolitics, other kinds of issues like that.
And I think the part that I’m most excited about, and this is
a real opportunity space is, there’s a huge opportunity here for unique localized solutions.
One size does not fit all anywhere frankly in the U.S.
But one size does not fit all particularly in the Arctic context.
Every community has different needs.
Getting a new technology to scale at a community in Alaska has a whole different
connotation and set of challenges than in the Lower 48.
Many Arctic communities are not connected to centralized infrastructure like
they are in many parts of the Lower 48.
So technologies need to be able to run independently,
such as a micro grid.
Stand-alone energy systems, whether from dozens of kilowatts
to several megawatts, on that.
So it’s unique challenges in some ways, different
challenges.
But also the opportunity space and it is an opportunity for us certainly from
the Department of Energy to learn.
And I think there’s a lot of lessons learned of what
we’re doing in Alaska and in the Arctic that can
be useful elsewhere as well.
So we have to think of this as a two-way street.
>>George Roe: I really like that idea of a back and forth, learning from one another
across the latitudes, not just around the longitudes,
if we will.
So let’s take a little deeper into one particular aspect of that collaboration opportunity
space and focus in on technology transfer, commercialization of technology,
perhaps developed by the Department of Energy, perhaps elsewhere.
How can Arctic participate in that?
What does that look like?
>>David Turk: Yeah.
It’s a great question.
And I know Vanessa is going to be speaking here shortly and she’s been doing some terrific
work more broadly throughout our DOE enterprise as the head of our Office of Technology
Transitions and really focusing on commercialization opportunities.
And that is really, really a fundamental challenge and
sort of the key challenge, certainly a key challenge facing us today.
So again in the Arctic context, maybe a couple specific examples
in areas that there’s some real opportunity that
we should be certainly focused and being a good partner from the Department of Energy
side of things.
One is we should learn from and teach each other cold climate rural
community solutions.
So what works in an Alaska climate can work in Minnesota or
Maine for example and vice versa in ways that we should take full advantage of.
An example there in particular is cold climate heat pumps.
And earlier, just this month, we announced new industry partnerships to increase
the efficiency of these cold climate heat pumps in interesting ways that have benefits
for again real people and real communities in
Alaska but also in other parts of our country as well.
Energy efficiency, the first fuel as it’s called, is incredibly important
throughout not only the U.S. but throughout the world
and I think particularly appropriate in the Arctic and in Alaska.
Right?
If we can save as much energy in the first place, it reduces
those costs.
Everything goes further along those lines.
And then maybe one other example is really taking advantage of diverse renewable
energy resources.
We’ve got solar.
We’ve got wind.
It’s both of those technologies are doing great and going like gangbusters where
there’s significant resource pieces.
But there’s geothermal.
There’s tidal; certainly exploiting fully the hydro capabilities in
an environmentally sustainable way.
And even advanced nuclear.
There’s some really interesting advanced nuclear opportunities
including and especially for remote communities if we can get that technology
right as well.
And we’ve got to remember diesel and other heating oils cost a lot,
are vulnerable to supply disruption.
So there’s a huge opportunity for renewables, diverse renewables
to be cheaper, more flexible, more resilient.
But we’ve got to get this right.
These are real people, real communities, real lives that are at stake and we’ve got to
do this in a way that really works in the real world.
>>George Roe: Outstanding.
I have so many things to follow up on.
Maybe I can just focus in on one other aspect of what’s under
your purview.
Can you help us understand some of the ways that the national laboratories
at the Department of Energy are actually helping to create this clean and secure energy
future that we long for in the Arctic and beyond?
>>David Turk: So George as you know and hopefully we’ll get a chance to for others to
know and work with labs if you’ve not had a chance to work with labs, these are crown
jewels.
These are huge, phenomenal assets: 17 national labs that U.S. taxpayers have
invested in for decades, years and years.
And what we’re trying to do is have an Arctic lab partnership with these labs.
So we’re convening a group of 11 national labs, 11 of our
17 national labs, to work together to increase the impact of their efforts in the Arctic
in particular and really trying to leverage our
national labs even more than what we’ve been
able to do so far.
And then maybe one other particular example that I’d highlight – and I
was just out there at NREL and you mentioned NREL as well too George, looking at
what they’re working on.
It’s something called the ARIES effort.
So this stands for Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems.
And it’s a research platform, a real life research platform that
simulates how technologies will work on the grid scale and again in the real world.
So you do your modeling in computers, that has
a place.
But then you can use ARIES out there in the real world and test things before
you put it in real communities with real lives at stake.
So it helps us model how different clean energy and grid modernization
technologies, again in the Arctic context, can make Arctic energy systems more reliable,
affordable and resilient.
So that’s just one specific example in the NREL context but
there’s a lot more that our labs can do to be helpful in this context.
>>George Roe: That’s outstanding.
I’m a real believer in modeling and analysis.
There are so many parametric combinations you can
look at to check out resilience, robustness, etcetera.
So are there any particular topics beyond that that you would like to draw our
attention to before we turn our attention to Secretary Haaland?
>>David Turk: I think just the last thing I’d leave you with George, and I hit this
and I suspect all of our presenters will hit this,
is just the importance of partnership.
And partnership not in a kind of, if I can colloquially
use the word, "a BS kind of paper partnership way," right, where you sign an
MOU and everybody pats each other either physically on the back or now virtually on
the back and says, "Great, we’ve got an MOU,
we’ve got a partnership."
But real partnerships.
Real partnerships that benefit all of the partners involved, real information exchange,
rolling up the sleeves, getting to work, again pushing to commercial solutions in the
real world.
If we’ve just got partnerships where we talk among ourselves and nothing
in the real world is impacted, that’s just not
good enough.
So I know there’s a lot of partners on this call and hopefully would be
partners as well.
And certainly from the Department of Energy side we look forward to
building real partnerships ‘cause that’s the only way to be successful at scale in
pace of what we need to be doing.
>>George Roe: Well, I would like to really thank you for your time and just clearly how
much you’ve thought about this application space.
There are so many questions in the Q&A actually right now that are scrolling
past.
It’s kind of frustrating that we don’t have
more time but we’ll follow up on those as we can.
And to some of them maybe things to bring to your attention down the road.
We’ll work on that.
>>David Turk: Thanks everybody.