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The former Department of Energy chief commercialization officer talks about the public sector’s role in catalyzing new clean energy.
Vanessa Chan didn’t think she had the right temperament to work in government. After a 13-year stint as a partner at McKinsey, six years as a partner at the angel investment firm Robin Hood Ventures, and four years at the University of Pennsylvania, most recently as professor of practice in innovation and entrepreneurship, Chan considered herself to be an impatient, get-it-done type — anathema to the traditionally slow, procedurally complex work of governing.
But the Energy Act of 2020 had just formalized a new role within the Department of Energy ideally suited to her skills: Chief Commercialization Officer, which would also serve as the director of the Office of Technology Transitions. Who would fill these dual roles was to be the decision of then-incoming Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who found a kindred spirit in Chan. Under her leadership, Chan told me, “I found someone who’s less patient than me.”
In her four years at the DOE, the OTT’s annual budget — which she referred to as “literally a rounding error to most people” — grew from $12.6 million to $56.6 million. She leveraged it to its fullest extent, establishing a precedent for the potential of this small but mighty office. Chan spearheaded the “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff” reports that provide investors with a path to market for the most important decarbonization technologies, and announced over $41 million in funding for 50 clean energy projects across all of the nations 17 national labs through the Technology Commercialization Fund.
She also changed the way the DOE, national labs, venture capitalists, and startups alike talk about getting ready for primetime with the Adoption Readiness Level framework, which put a much-needed focus on factors such as economic viability, regulatory hurdles, and supply chain constraints in the same way that the established Technology Readiness Levels, pioneered by NASA, focus on the question of whether a technology actually works.
Now Chan is back at the University of Pennsylvania in a new, extremely apt role: the Inaugural Vice-Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She’s weaving lessons learned from her time in the public and private sectors into academia, where her goal is to help incorporate real-world skills into the education of engineers and PhD scholars to prime them for maximum impact upon graduation.
“It’s such a disservice if you invent something and it never sees the light of day,” she told me. “So we need to make sure that isn’t happening and we increase our odds of things making it to the market.”
Over two separate interviews, one before President Trump’s inauguration and one after, I asked Chan how her work with the DOE has helped climate technologies move from the lab to the market, the challenges that remain, and what to keep an eye on in the new administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get recruited for this job? Was government work even on your radar before?
No, this was never on my vision board. But the way in which this came about was in 2016, there was a workshop that was being led by DOE on a potential new foundation that was going to be focused on commercialization. And one of my former clients told the person running the workshop, if you’re talking about technology commercialization, you have to talk to Vanessa Chan. And when I was there, I just yapped off about all the issues that I see with commercialization and what the federal government should be doing about it. And I didn’t think anything of it.
And then fast forward to 2020, I get this cryptic email saying, “Hey, the Biden-Harris administration is interested in you.” I spent all the time during the interview [with the Biden-Harris team] going, “Here’s my thing about commercialization, but I don’t think you guys want me, because I’m someone who works really fast. I have no patience for bureaucracy. I like to disrupt. I don’t like the status quo.” And they’re like, that’s exactly what we want.
How did the DOE, and the OTT in particular, really undergo a shift in the Biden administration?
Historically, DOE has been very focused on research and development. And then when the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] and [Inflation Reduction Act] got passed, now there was half-a-trillion dollars going towards demonstration and deployment, and it became a lot more fun being the chief commercialization officer.
The mantra that we’ve had is that the clean energy transition — and quite frankly, commercialization — has to be private sector-led but government-enabled. Because in the end, it’s the private sector that’s actually commercializing. It’s not the government. DOD can buy stuff to bring things to market, but DOE, we’re an enabler. And unless the private sector has sustainable, viable economic models, nothing will ever be commercialized.
How does your work intersect with other DOE agencies that are focused on commercialization, like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office?
I worked very closely with all of them. In particular, one of the things that was really important to do was to get us on the same page of what it actually means to deploy technologies. So I quarterbacked an effort called the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff, which OCED, LPO, and any program office that was touching research, development, demonstration, and deployment was a part of.
If we use hydrogen hubs as an example, OCED was given $8 billion towards hydrogen. When we did the hydrogen liftoff report, what we found was a few things. One is that electrolyzer costs are super high, and so we have to be able to drive those downward to make the unit economics work. We have an issue where there is no midstream infrastructure. We also had a chicken-and-the egg, which is pretty classic: No one wants to buy hydrogen until the supply chain is stood up, [but] the supply chain doesn’t want to stand up until they know they actually have offtake agreements.
What we did with OCED was, we took $7 billion to invest in seven hydrogen hubs across the nation, and then we reserved $1 billion to create an offtake demand mechanism. And that’s the first time ever that the federal government has actually focused on a demand activation program.
Have these liftoff reports been well received on both sides of the aisle? Do you think they’ll continue to be referenced in the new administration?
We were very, very, very fact-driven. There’s no policy by design, because in the end it’s all about, what does it take for a technology to make sense, for it to be in the market? So it’s not Republican or Democratic, it’s just — what does the private sector have to do? I’m really hoping they’re not seen as partisan and really more a synthesis of what’s required for the private sector to actually scale technology.
What are some additional successes from your time at the DOE?
An example program is MAKE IT, which is Manufacturing of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies, which was a program that we created with OCED in order to figure out ways in which we could try to help bolster manufacturing across the nation. We also have this program called EPIC, the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters, and we have funded over 80 incubators and accelerators across the nation, which are supporting startups.
We’ve created a voucher program for startups and smaller organizations — sometimes there’s very tactical things that they need help on, and they need a small dollar amount, like a couple-hundred-thousand-dollars to tackle that. We’re like, Oh, you need to do techno-economic analysis? We’re going to pair you with this organization here that can do it, and you don’t have to negotiate anything with them. We’re just going to send them the money, you’re given a voucher, and you just call them.
When I talk with venture capitalists, something that often comes up is the difficulty of getting startups through the so-called Valley of Death, the funding gap between a company’s initial rounds and its commercial scale-up. How do you think about the public sector’s role in helping companies through this stage?
First of all, this private sector-led, government-enabled idea around commercialization is really important. And the work we’ve done with Liftoff and how we’ve gotten money out the door has really worked, because for every dollar going out the door from DOE, we’ve seen $6 matching from the private sector. That in itself is showing that there’s a way for the public sector to nudge the private sector to act.
What I’ll tell you, though, is that I think there needs to be a wholesale reframe around how the private sector thinks about investments and the returns that they want on them. Right now, we are in the Squid Games, where everyone is first in line to be sixth or seventh, no one is first in line to be first, second, or third, because they know the person who is first, second, or third is going to lose money. So what we need to do is figure out, how do we have the ecosystem crowdsource the first 10 of a kind, so that we get to the tipping point where the unit economics are working? How do we get the private sector to promise to buy technologies when they’re not quite there? How do we in the public sector help on the back end?
What are other primary barriers to commercialization that you see?
Another big barrier is that the time clock for moving up the learning curve and moving down the cost curve is quite long in some of these hard-tech technologies. And so the challenge is, how do we convince CEOs to make investments in something which is not going to benefit them, but benefit a CEO two or three down the line? Humans just don’t work that way, right? They’re all about earnings per share and quarterly earning reports and so forth.
Now the challenge is, if we don’t do it, then countries like China are going to do it. This is what happened in solar: We invented the technology, but China was willing to take a loss in order to get up the learning curve and drive down the cost curve, and we need to figure out how to do the same.
Have you been in touch with anyone from the Trump administration? Do you know who your successor will be?
No idea. My team didn’t even know who I was until day one. But what I’ll tell you is that OTT has really strong bipartisan support because we’re commercializing technologies, which is creating jobs, and I think everyone understands the importance of this. Also for the [Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation] I was very deliberate with the other ex officio board members to make sure we had a bipartisan board. We have 13 board members that we appointed here at DOE, and I have representation from every single administration since George H.W. Bush, including two Trump appointees.
I really do hope that whoever sits in my seat will reach out, and I left a letter offering that, too. Hopefully they do give me a call because I really want to wish them every success in the work that they’re doing.
What’s it like to be back at the University of Pennsylvania, watching this new administration from a civilian perspective?
This was the best job ever, so I’m just sad in general to not be at the Department of Energy because I really enjoyed the work that we were doing there. A lot of the money from the BIL and IRA were used to catalyze many, many red states. I am hopeful that people in power recognize this and are going to do right by those counties. Because I think, in the end, what we’re trying to do is really help with American jobs and competitiveness.
Any thoughts on the executive order that’s frozen disbursement of funds from BIL and IRA?
I don’t know, because I always think it’s not right to be on the outside in, trying to figure out what different executive orders are trying to say or not say. We all have to wait to see how these get executed upon.
What do you think people should be keeping an eye on to gauge the impacts that these sweeping executive orders are having?
In my mind it’s really, is the private sector spooked? Are they going to continue to invest the money that’s needed for these manufacturing plants to continue and so forth? Because in the end, it’s the private sector that actually is driving American competitiveness — the federal government is a catalyst. And so I think what I’d be looking to is the private sector. Are they stopping the momentum that we helped to kickstart?
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Europeans have enjoyed it for years. Now, through careful state interventions and creative salesmanship from startups, Americans are close to having their turn.
For U.S. consumers, going solar is usually a major undertaking, involving tens of thousands of dollars, months of logistics, a slew of financing options, and ever-changing incentives.
But in Germany, upwards of a million customers — homeowners and renters alike — are simply plugging in small, affordable solar arrays to standard power outlets. These small systems are, by law, 800 watts or less, a fraction of the size of a typical rooftop solar system in the U.S. Often called “balcony solar,” these panels can live essentially anywhere with sufficient sunlight: on balconies or patios, or mounted on exterior walls or flat rooftops.
But while governments across the EU have simplified regulations to make installation a quick, DIY process, and utility approval little more than a formality — unleashing a wave of consumer demand in the process — the U.S. has so far failed to follow suit. Here, utility regulations prohibit customers from feeding power back into the grid without a formal interconnection agreement, a process that involves lots of time and paperwork.
Utilities in the U.S. want to account for all electricity sources on the grid, since theoretically, even small plug-in systems could have a cumulative impact on local voltage and power quality, whereas in Germany, for example, this is less of a concern. There, plug-in solar-specific policy caps these systems’ generating capacity, and the grid and metering infrastructure has been more extensively modernized to handle distributed energy generation.
Now, however, there are a number of domestic plug-in solar startups finding creative ways to navigate the constraints of the U.S. market. One of them, the nonprofit Bright Saver, announced on Wednesday that it’s raised $500,000 in new funding from TrueVentures.org and a handful of individual backers. The company gets around power export regulations by selling panels with very low wattage. “So we’re talking 200- or 220-watt systems that never backfeed to the grid, because we think close to every typical household will consume that electricity immediately, simply with the refrigerator,” Cora Stryker, the company’s co-founder, told me.
The San Francisco-based startup has sold a couple dozen systems already and has a waitlist of about 1,500 people, Stryker said. So far, she told me, the majority of this “early adoption crowd” is mainly interested in reducing their own emissions. “We think that’ll change over time,” she said. “The mass adoption in Germany has been driven not by that climate-conscious crowd, but really people who want to save money. “
The main drawback to Bright Saver’s approach, however, is also what makes it possible in the first place: the panels’ incredibly small size, which can’t come close to covering a home’s full power needs. So while the upfront cost of a 200-watt panel is small — $399 at the moment — a customer’s energy savings will also be tiny — potentially on the order of just a few bucks per month. Depending on the location, the savings will eclipse the total cost in about five to 10 years, Stryker told me.
That might not be enticing enough to convince a critical mass of customers to jump onboard the small-scale solar train. But Stryker thinks that getting these products out into the world will help catalyze the type of curiosity and interest that can dovetail into policy change. “Selling product in the next year or two is a small revenue stream for us, but it’s also our theory of change,” she told me. “These need to get out there in order for people to know they even exist.”
Much of Bright Saver’s work involves advocating for easing plug-in solar regulations, which is already starting to happen, bit by bit. In March, the Utah state legislature unanimously passed a bill creating a new category for “small portable solar generation devices” under 1,200 watts, exempting them from interconnection requirements. Stryker told me that Utah’s governor was inspired to introduce the bill after reading a story in The New York Times about balcony solar’s success in Germany.
Now more states, including Vermont, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, are expressing interest in similar legislation. If just a few more get onboard, Stryker told me that would be a critical tipping point. “We’ve had conversations with manufacturers and investors who tell us straight up, they’re not coming to the U.S. market because they see only one state where they’re not going to run into these regulatory concerns,” she said. “They tell us privately, five to seven more states and they’re in. So that’s a key threshold for us.”
But one veteran of the plug-in solar market, Craftstrom, isn’t betting on this happening. The company has been selling 400- to 800-watt systems in Europe since 2017, and expanded into the U.S. a few years later, targeting markets where electricity prices are highest, like California and the Northeast. To deal with domestic regulations, the company patented a new type of meter to be placed inside electric panels that blocks excess power from flowing back into the grid. This prevention mechanism also allows the company to sell larger systems — up to 2,000 watts — in the U.S..
Craftstrom’s chief revenue officer, Ken Hutchings, thinks this type of system is critical for grid safety in the U.S., where distribution networks tend to be older and less standardized than in Europe, and not necessarily built for two-way power flow. This opens up utilities to a good deal of legal liability in the case of equipment failures.
While Hutchings wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see other states following Utah’s lead, he’s skeptical that the U.S. will become a haven for plug-in solar anytime soon — or even that it’s a good idea. “There’s no risk to one or two guys pushing power back into the grid,” he told me. “But when you have thousands and thousands of people doing it, tens of thousands, and the electric company is not sure who’s doing it, I think that’s where the issue lies.”
Thus far, Craftstrom has sold about 4,000 units in the U.S., with about 500 of those orders coming in the past month alone, Hutchings told me. He attributed the sudden uptick largely to a rush of customers trying to qualify for home energy efficiency tax credits — which he said Craftstrom’s systems are eligible for — before they expire at year’s end.
Craftstrom’s domestic prices are still more expensive than what its own customers in Europe can expect to pay for similar systems due to the extra hardware costs that come along with the specialized meters, as well as the fact that installing these products is not a DIY operation. That means Utah customers should now enjoy the same price relief, since the new state law lifts the grid restrictions that the rest of the U.S. faces. These days, Craftstrom’s more complex hardware plus the cost of labor “just about doubles the cost from what you’re able to get in Utah,” Stryker told me.
Bright Saver sold Craftstrom’s systems when it first started out earlier this year, but chose to discontinue this offering as it “didn’t serve our vision of making this accessible to everyone through cost and self-installation,” Stryker told me. Instead, the organization is focusing on policy changes that will make cheap self-install systems in the 800-watt range feasible in more states. And that means getting legislators onboard with some degree of deregulation, something Stryker acknowledges “has often been a dirty word” in the environmental movement.
“In this case, we need these regulations to get out of the way. They’re outdated. They’re artifacts,” she told me, referring to the requirement that small plug-in systems sign utility interconnection agreements. “I see it as a purple narrative, one that can appeal to values across the political spectrum — energy independence, energy affordability, renters’ rights.”
Of course, Stryker isn’t advocating for complete anarchy in the space. Grid stability is still a concern, and she said that Bright Saver is involved in discussions with regulators and standard-setting bodies to determine acceptable wattage thresholds. Countries that have embraced balcony solar in Europe have “impeccable” safety records, Stryker told me, enabling Germany to raise its wattage limit from 600 to 800 watts at the beginning of last year.
There are still some logistics to work out though. As the recent Utah law is written, plug-in solar arrays must comply with product standards from Underwriters Laboratories, a safety certification body. And while this organization has standards covering the individual components of plug-in solar systems, it has yet to create a systems-level standard. Depending on whom you ask, that might mean all domestic companies in the space are operating in a bit of a regulatory gray area at the moment.
Stryker told me she expects these system-wide standards to be released soon though, ideally in tandem with more bills like the one passed in Utah. “We think it’s a no-brainer.”
On Alaska’s permitting overhaul, HALEU winners, and Heatmap’s Climate 101
Current conditions: Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas brace for up to a foot of rain • Tropical Storm Juliette, still located well west of Mexico, is moving northward and bringing rain to parts of Southern California • Heat and dryness are raising the risk of wildfire in South Africa.
The Trump administration has started the process to roll back logging protections from more than 44 million acres of national forest land. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins proposed undoing a 25-year-old rule that banned building roads or harvesting timber on federally controlled forest land, much of which is located in Alaska. “Today marks a critical step forward in President Trump’s commitment to restoring local decision-making to federal land managers to empower them to do what’s necessary to protect America’s forests and communities from devastating destruction from fires,” Rollins said in a statement. “This administration is dedicated to removing burdensome, outdated, one-size-fits-all regulations that not only put people and livelihoods at risk but also stifle economic growth in rural America.”
Environmental groups slammed the proposal for jeopardizing wildlife habitats and putting waterways at risk. “Communities depend on clear water filtered by roadless areas, animals depend on the unfragmented habitat that can only exist where there are no roads, and anglers depend on clean water in the streams where trout and salmon swim,” Ellen Montgomery, the director of Environment America’s great outdoors campaign, said in a press release. “We cannot let these essential forests be carved up by roads, obliterated by chainsaws, and contaminated by mines.”
Heatmap’s new Climate 101 series aims, as Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman explained, to be “a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition.” That includes “everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.”
This might be especially helpful for those still trying to find their way into the climate conversation, but we hope there’s something here for everyone. For instance, did you know that contemporary readers might have understood Don Quixote’s “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMBYism? Well, now you do!
The federal Permitting Council signed a first-of-a-kind memorandum of understanding to work together with Alaska’s government to streamline permitting on critical infrastructure projects across the state. First established in 2015, the agency was designed to improve transparency and speed up the greenlighting of infrastructure approvals. But it had yet to forge such a close pact with an individual state. “Our team is ready to work with Governor Dunleavy to bring Alaska back into the energy spotlight, ending the neglect of the Biden Administration and bringing Alaska’s incredible natural resources to the rest of the world,” Emily Domenech, the Permitting Council’s executive director, said in a statement.
Domenech — a former staffer for House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson who went on to serve as a senior vice president at Boundary Stone, a firm founded by alumni of the Obama-era Department of Energy — acted as something of a Republican sage for the clean energy industry. In an interview with Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin after last November’s election, she urged the industry to forge closer relationships with members of the current congressional majority. “If you ask Republicans to be for or against the IRA as a whole, they’ll be against it,” Domenech said, “But Republicans think about energy as a regional issue. So instead of forcing this one size fits all approach, IRA advocates would be smart to give people room to support only the policies that make the most sense for their state or region.”
The Department of Energy selected another three companies to receive a special kind of nuclear fuel from its growing stockpile. HALEU — pronounced HAY-loo, an acronym for high assay low enriched uranium — is a reactor fuel enriched up to four times as much as traditional reactor fuel. The fuel is needed for all kinds of novel reactor designs, particularly those that use coolants other than water. Until recently, however, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over its global supply. The Biden administration set aside billions for HALEU production. In April, the Trump administration selected five companies to receive some of the government-procured supply, including Westinghouse, Bill Gates’ TerraPower, and the Google-backed Kairos Power. Now the agency has picked another three:
Two firefighters battling the Bear Gulch fire on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula were arrested by federal law enforcement Wednesday. The reason for the arrests is unclear, according to the Seattle Times. Over three hours, federal agents from Border Patrol carried out an “operation on the fire,” demanding identification from members of two private contractor crews who were among the 400 firefighters battling Washington state’s largest active blaze. The Incident Management Team from the National Interagency Fire Center suggested that the action did not interfere with the efforts to tamp down the flames.
The American West is primed for wildfires right now. Following a lull in June and July, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote that “the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for ‘Dirty August’ and ‘Snaptember,’ historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires,” was full of warning signs, including low precipitation and abnormally high temperatures.
Living, gnawing weedwackers.Vesper Energy
The 1.36 million solar panels at Vesper Energy’s Hornet Solar farm in Swisher County, Texas, one of the United States' largest single-phase solar projects, were overgrown with vegetation. So naturally, the company brought in sheep. More than 2,000 white, wooly ovines arrived this month and were allowed to roam the facility’s six square miles. “As Texas continues to lead the nation in solar energy growth, solar grazing highlights how innovation can support rural economies, preserve farmland, and strengthen the state’s reliable energy future,” Vesper said.
Here at Heatmap, we write a lot about decarbonization — that is, the process of transitioning the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward long-term sustainable technologies for generating energy. What we don’t usually write about is what those technologies actually do. Sure, solar panels convert energy from the sun into electricity — but how, exactly? Why do wind turbines have to be that tall? What’s the difference between carbon capture, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, and why does it matter?
So today, we’re bringing you Climate 101, a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition. In this series, we’ll cover everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.
There’s something here for everyone, whether you’re already an industry expert or merely climate curious. For instance, did you know that contemporary 17th century readers might have understood Don Quixote’s famous “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMYBism? I sure didn’t! But I do now that I’ve read Jeva Lange’s 101 guide to wind energy.
That said, I’d like to extend an especial welcome to those who’ve come here feeling lost in the climate conversation and looking for a way to make sense of it. All of us at Heatmap have been there at some point or another, and we know how confusing — even scary — it can be. The constant drumbeat of news about heatwaves and floods and net-zero this and parts per million that is a lot to take in. We hope this information will help you start to see the bigger picture — because the sooner you do, the sooner you can join the transition, yourself.
Without further ado, here’s your Climate 101 syllabus:
Once you feel ready to go deeper, here are some more Heatmap stories to check out: