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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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On the Chevy Bolt’s return, China’s rare earth crackdown, and Nestle’s spoiled climate push
Current conditions: A possible nor’easter is barreling toward New York City with this weekend with heavy rain, flooding, and winds of up to 50 miles per hour • While Hurricane Priscilla has weakened to a tropical storm, it’s still battering Baja California with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • A heatwave in Iran is raising temperatures so much that even elevations of more than 6,500 feet are nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Bureau of Land Management has canceled Nevada’s largest solar megaproject, Esmeralda 7, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman scooped late Thursday. The sprawling network of panels and batteries in the state’s western desert was set to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power — equal to nearly all the power supplied to the southern part of the state by the state’s main public utility. At maximum output, the project could have churned out more power than the country’s largest nuclear plant, the nearly 5 gigawatts from Plant Vogtle’s four reactors in Georgia, and just under the nearly 7.1-gigawatt Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington, the nation’s most powerful electrical station. It would have been one of the largest solar projects in the world.
Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen, and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at what Jael called “a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna.” The solar farm notched a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management advanced its draft environmental impact statement. When the environmental review came out, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. “But that never happened,” Jael wrote. Instead, as part of a deal with conservative harderliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill, Trump issued an executive order that, among other actions aimed at curtailing renewables development, directed the Department of the Interior to review its policies toward wind and solar. A series of departmental orders followed that effectively froze all permitting decisions for solar. Fast forward to today, when Esmeralda 7’s status on the BLM website was changed to “cancelled,” normally an indication that the developers pulled the plug.
The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, a 2.6-gigawatt giant that’s nearly triple the size of the nation’s current largest operating seaborne wind farm, is just six months from coming online, its leadership said. In an August earnings call, Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue said the project would start producing electricity in “early 2026.” But on Thursday, the company told Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler that “first power will occur in Q1 of next year,” and “we are still on schedule to complete by late 2026.” As of the end of last month, Dominion had installed all 176 turbine foundations.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has waged what Jael called a “total war on wind power,” halting work on projects that were nearly 80% complete and ordering a half dozen federal agencies to join the effort. But the industry has fought back. Two weeks ago, as I reported in this newsletter, a federal judge lifted the administration’s stop-work order. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last month brushed off the targeting of offshore wind as a “one-off complication,” the assault has alarmed even the administration's favored sectors of the energy industry. Earlier this week, Shell’s top executive raised the alarm over what she said could set a precedent that blows back to big oil in the future.
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A fresh jolt for the Bolt. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Elon Musk’s promise to deliver a Tesla for under $30,000 may — as I wrote here yesterday — remains unfulfilled, but one of his biggest rivals is bringing back its popular affordable electric vehicle. General Motors announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out a new line of Chevrolet Bolts in 2027, starting at $29,990 and later introducing a $28,995 model. “The Chevrolet Bolt was the industry’s first affordable mass-market, long-range EV and it commanded one of GM’s most loyal customer bases thanks to its price, versatility and practicality,” Scott Bell, Chevrolet’s global vice president, said in a statement. “After production ended, we heard our customer’s feedback and their love for this product. So the Bolt is coming back — by popular demand and better than ever — for a limited time.” When Chevy discontinued the Bolt in 2023, the car was popular but had some problems, Andrew Moseman wrote Thursday in Heatmap. And while the 2027 Bolt “is virtually indistinguishable from the old car,” he wrote, “what’s inside is a welcome leap forward.” Notably, the new Bolt’s lithium-ion-phosphate battery delivers a max range of 255 miles and can handle a 100% charge without risking long-term damage to the battery’s lifespan.
Though the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles expired last month, it’s morning in America for battery-powered car drivers. The U.S. is adding charging stations at a record clip, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
China’s Commerce Ministry announced a new edict Thursday requiring foreign suppliers to obtain approval from Beijing to export some products with certain rare earths if the metals account for 0.1% of the goods’ total value. Export applications for products with military uses “generally won’t be approved,” The Wall Street Journal reported, and licenses related to semiconductors or artificial intelligence will be granted on a case-by-case basis. “This is a very big deal,” Dean W. Bell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, wrote in a post on X. “China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to manufacture advanced chips. If enforced aggressively, this policy could mean ‘lights out’ for the US AI boom, and likely lead to a recession/economic crisis in the US in the short term.” The new restrictions even apply to some lithium batteries and equipment used to make them.
Less than two years ago, Nestle formed an industry alliance with food giants Danone and Kraft Heinz to cut methane emissions from the dairy industry’s hundreds of thousands of suppliers. But last month, Nestle’s logo vanished from the initiative's website. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the Swiss behemoth had abandoned the effort. “We have decided to discontinue our membership of the Dairy Methane Action Alliance,” a company spokesperson told the newswire.
The exit comes as sustainability executives, academics, and carbon-accounting experts spar over how to measure companies’ emissions in what Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo called an “obscure philosophical battle that could reshape the clean energy economy.” With the Trump administration phasing out wind and solar tax credits next year, Emily wrote, “voluntary action by companies will take on even greater importance in shaping the clean energy transition. While in theory, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol solely develops accounting rules and does not force companies to take any particular action, it’s undeniable that its decisions will set the stage for the next chapter of decarbonization.”
Increasingly extreme weather is driving up insurance costs all over the world, making homes almost impossible to underwrite in fire- or flood-prone places such as California or Florida where climate change is raising recovery costs. But Japan’s largest non-life insurer is taking a different approach than just canceling policies. As the Financial Times reported Thursday, Tokio Marine purchased Integrated Design & Engineering this year for roughly $642 million in a bid to offer the design consultancy’s services to “Japanese companies at risk of landslides, flooding, and natural disasters related to climate change” to upgrade facilities before destruction occurs.
It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order as part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill, which also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to subsequent actions by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to freeze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7 but was unable to reach them in time for publication. If I hear from them confirming the project is canceled – or that BLM is wrong in some way – I will let you know.
It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.