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Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

What clean energy needs to succeed

A spirited debate at Stanford about problems and solutions

Question: Take dozens of ambitious Bay Area cleantech visionaries and Stanford University student-entrepreneurs. Add U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Acting Under Secretary of Energy Arun Majumdar. What do you get?

Answer: A spirited, two-hour forum on what the clean energy industry says it needs to be successful.

With President Barack Obama looking for ways to “unleash a new wave of clean tech innovation through entrepreneurship…today is a terrific time to be a clean energy entrepreneur,” Chopra told approximately 100 people who attended the town hall-style event held recently at the Stanford Law School.

During the event, Chopra and Majumdar outlined the major challenge the country faces: how to quickly develop energy alternatives that will create domestic jobs while freeing the United States from spending $400 million a day importing oil from unstable regions of the world.

The country’s “national security, economic security, and environmental security” are at stake, said Majumdar, a mechanical engineer who is the first director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, also known as ARPA-E. “What we do in the next 10 to 20 years is absolutely critical.”

Innovations in energy technology, an effort championed by ARPA-E, will be key to ensuring security in all three areas for future generations, Majumdar added. Founded in 2009, ARPA-E supports high-risk, high-payoff technologies that promise to transform the energy landscape.

One of the potential products funded by the organization is a longer-range but lower-cost electric battery capable of powering a car over much longer distances more cheaply than is possible today. Several other battery prototypes now under development are also drawing ARPA-E’s financial help. “We don’t know which one’s going to win in the future, but you’ve got to take a shot,” Majumdar said. “You learn from failure. That’s how innovation happens.”

Part of the president’s goal, Chopra said, is also to examine policies that often turn into “regulatory bottlenecks” that impede growth of small energy-focused entrepreneurs. He urged the crowd to share their views about barriers that are getting in the way of their entrepreneurial ventures on government Web site www.reducingbarriers.ideascale.com.

The pair then turned the floor over to lines of people who stood patiently at microphones in the room, eager to give their perspectives on what needed to be done.

How to get enough funding to carry their ideas past the “Valley of Death” startups encounter as they move ideas from the drawing board to widespread adoption was foremost among several speakers’ concerns.

For example, one person lamented that a pullback in federal financing stalled Berkeley’s Property Assessed Clean Energy pilot program, which allowed homeowners in that California city to borrow money to pay for efficiency upgrades for their homes and repay the bill through their own property tax bills over 20 years. The alternative financing method was an important incentive because many energy efficiency upgrades are costly, yet the average homeowner sells their home after only about seven years.

Another speaker, from solar startup Alta Devices of Santa Clara, California, outlined endemic supply chain holdups because the raw materials and precision instruments essential to making their products come from Asia and Europe. “How can we as a country address the supply chain and access to all the critical materials and machines we need to make solar work in this country?” he asked.

A member of the student-led Stanford Energy Club wondered whether the Obama administration would ensure that highly trained foreign students can stay and work in the U.S. after earning Ph.D.’s in this country. In his State of the Union address in January, Obama urged America to “stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation.”

Chopra said the president will further address the issue “in the near future,” adding that “We obviously support provisions that are encouraging the best and brightest to stay.”

Another speaker, a representative from national non-profit consortium SolarTech, said he wished local governments would set uniform standards for companies to meet, since having thousands of different jurisdictions, each with its own requirements, “doesn’t get us where we want to be.”

Majumdar could relate. A recent survey found that a solar installation took only two days in San Jose, California but nine months in New York City. “We are now going to create a competition around the nation to see how you can reduce this permitting and installation time,” Majumdar said.

While only certain groups win funding from ARPA-E, Majumdar said the organization highlights many startups on its Web site and introduces those young companies to investors, federal and state agencies and other entrepreneurs.

“It’s not just that we want the ARPA-E technologies to win,” he said. “We want the nation to win. It’s the ecosystem that needs to win.”