“The Geopolitics of Energy”:  that was the title of a talk given at the Opportunity Crudes conference in Houston last week by Guy Caruso of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  It’s an endlessly fascinating and urgent topic, as very few sectors of the economy shape the world in which we live as much as energy — and particularly, oil — does.

Highlights of Caruso’s presentation – many of which are not novel or unique, but are worth restating:

Oil is currently inseparable with transportation:  Virtually 100% of mobility — whether by car, truck, rail, boat, or plane – is fueled by petroleum-based products.  Demand is flat or even shrinking in the United States and Europe, but this is more than offset by explosive demand growth in the developing world — especially China, but also India, and the Middle East.  “The center of gravity of the oil industry is moving East.”

Most of the lowest-cost endowment of oil resources on the planet are concentrated in the Middle East, subject to great political instability.  A scary thought:  Many leaders, especially in the lynchpin Saudi Arabia, are over 80 years old — what happens when they die?

Reliability of delivery is threatened by geographic chokepoints.  For instance, more than 15 million barrels per day — nearly 20% of world oil supply — passes through the Strait of Hormuz.  Although most of the oil passing through goes to Asia, the U.S. military remains the key protector of this vital trade route.

Meeting global demand growth in the face of declining conventional resources means two things:  a shift toward unconventional resources (which are more expensive to produce, and face significant environmental/technical challenges) and an almost insatiable need for ongoing additional capital investment.

Although technological leadership may remain with the “supermajors”, 15 of the 20 biggest oil companies in the world (i.e., the ones with the most reserves/resources) are now state-owned enterprises, such as Saudi Aramco and PDVSA.  While some of these companies like Lukoil (LSE:  LKOD), PetroChina (NYSE: PTR), and Petrobras (NYSE: PBR) do have minority stakes that float on stock exchanges, make no mistake:  They are not being managed for the purposes of shareholder value maximization.  These companies trade on stock exchanges solely to access global capital markets so as to finance immense expansion programs.  Otherwise, their motivations are far different than profit-maximization as expressed so effectively by the supermajors:  These organizations are arms of nationalistic pursuits.  In other words, the oil game of the future will be driven less by money and more by geopolitical moves on the global chessboard.

There are more upward pressures on oil prices than downward pressures.  Note that the oil industry is running at more than 95% of capacity — there’s almost no spare or excess capacity to cope with any perturbations.  Even so, most companies are using $60-80/bbl as the reference price in determining long-term capital investments:  Big bets require conservative assumptions. 

Shale gas is a game-changer — not just in the United States, but in many parts of the world.  More gas will be used for power generation, which will displace coal.  Indeed, without carbon capture and sequestration, coal will be under threat for both economic and environmental reasons in most places of the world.  (Exception:  China, which is growing so fast that it will build as much as possible in a true “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.)

Caruso closed by noting, humbly, that in his 40 years in forecasting the energy sector, there was a consistent tendency to underestimate the impact of technological advancement, which in turn renders long-term predictions subject to big errors.  Not only will the finer points of his analysis be inaccurate, but some of the overarching conclusions — which seem so obvious today — will no doubt be wildly off a few decades from now.  The key is figuring out which ones will be right and which ones will be wrong.  Black swans are hard to see when they haven’t yet flown to the horizon.

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

Last week, I attended a breakfast hosted by the Michigan Venture Capital Association, at which the president of the National Venture Capital Association, Mark Heesen, made some comments and fielded Q&A about the state of the U.S. venture capital sector.

Mark presented a mixed picture.  On the one hand, the VC industry is clearly contracting:  About half of the firms that existed at the peak in the early 2000s have withered away.  Moreover, distressingly, venture capital investment outflow has exceeded capital raised by venture capital firms each year for the past several.  As Mark noted, “This is clearly not sustainable.”

According to Mark, it appears that the venture capital industry is coalescing around two models:  (1) mega-firms with >$500 million funds, multiple offices/geographies, and spanning most vertical segments and stages, or (2) niche firms with <$100 million funds that specialize either in geography, stage, or vertical markets.  The firms that fall between these extremes are the ones that are vanishing, presumably unsuccessful. 

Turning to the cleantech sector specifically, Mark noted that – contrary to what is sometimes alleged by naysayers – cleantech VC activity is holding its own, accounting for roughly 15-20% of all U.S. VC investments.  However, what is changing is the nature of cleantech investments:  Whereas big/bold bets in game-changers to save the world were the rage a few years ago, it has become abundantly clear that such possibilities are extremely capital-intensive and subject to very long maturation cycles.  Accordingly, rather than investing in the next electric vehicle, battery, biofuel, or photovoltaic technology, cleantech VCs have ratcheted down their aspirations somewhat and are seeking more modest incremental  or enabling technology improvements.

Another trend in VC highlighted by Mark, one that is critically important for cleantech, is the re-emergence of corporate venture groups.  Corporate VC activity seems to come in and out of vogue every few years, and at least for the moment, it’s back on the rise again.  Notably, it is increasingly common for (1) corporates to invest in a technology without having the view of being the eventual acquirer, (2) corporate venture investors to take board seats, and (3) multiple corporate venture groups to be in the same deal. 

I just reviewed the portfolio of one of the most significant cleantech venture capital firms in the United States, from which I culled the following roster of corporate co-investors:  GE (NYSE: GE), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), General Motors (NYSE: GM), DuPont (NYSE: DD), ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP), Dow (NYSE: DOW), Waste Management (NYSE: WM), Valero (NYSE: VLO), Bunge (NYSE: BG).  And, it’s not just American giants:  also Mitsui, Unilever (NYSE: UN), Cenovus (NYSE: CVE).Consistent with the main message of a recent article in Technology Review called “Can Energy Startups Be Saved?”, it’s becoming apparent that partnering with corporations to gain access to their financial, technical, and marketplace heft is virtually essential for cleantech venture success.  Or, put another way, traditional venture capital may be necessary but alone may not be sufficient to build a great cleantech venture.

Interacting with companies that are literally many thousands of times larger than a start-up company can accurately be called “dancing with elephants”:  One must be creative to capture the attention of the big beasts, strong enough to harness their power, and yet deft enough to avoid getting squashed.  It’s pretty clear that this is an important skill to cultivate in the cleantech sector — VC and entrepreneur alike.

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that cleantech, in large part, is actually materials tech.  “Nanotechnology” has some vogue as a term, but fundamentally nanotech is materials technology, and materials technology is broader than nanotech (altering materials at a molecular or atomic scale).

Materials are at the core of most of the required innovations to help solve our most daunting environmental and energy challenges.

New materials to help extract contaminants from gaseous and liquid pollution streams.

New materials to improve the electrochemistries of batteries, solar modules, and fuel cells.

New materials to eliminate the need for rare earth metals in permanent magnet generators and motors.

New materials to lighten and strengthen vehicles and wind turbine blades.

New materials to increase the efficiency of thermal transfer in anything combustion-related.

And on and on and on. 

Alas, materials science and engineering is not a particularly widely pursued discipline — it’s quite nichey relative to chemical engineering or chemistry. 

It strikes me that we cleantech advocates need to get smarter in and pay more attention to the materials arena as fertile ground for the next big thing.  For young people with good STEM aptitude and strong interest in cleantech, materials science/engineering is a good field in which to start digging.

We in Northeast Ohio are fortunate to have two of the world’s best university programs in materials, at the University of Akron and at Case Western Reserve University.  Also, and not coincidentally, a large ecosystem of companies based on materials innovation is clustered in Northeast Ohio, with some of the most well-known being Goodyear (NYSE: GT), Sherwin-Williams (NYSE: SHW), Lubrizol, Ferro (NYSE: FOE), Materion (NYSE: MTRN), RPM (NYSE: RPM), GrafTech (NYSE: GTI), PolyOne (NYSE: POL), A. Schulman (NASDAQ: SHLM), etc.  Between academia and industry, our region is well-suited to inventing the materials technologies that can make a huge difference in the cleantech world.

 as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

With the Solyndra debacle and other bankruptcies (e.g., Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt), and a 65% decline in the MAC Global Solar Energy Index (SUNIDX), 2011 was a bad year for the solar industry.  Now into 2012, the hits just keep on coming.

Last week, the long-time solar energy poster-child First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) announced it was closing its German factory and laying off 2000 employees.  Earlier in April, Solar Trust and Q-Cells filed for bankruptcy, following on the heels of the bankruptcy filing of Energy Conversion Devices in February.  Turning from photovoltaics to solar thermal, BrightSource Energy withdrew at the last-minute its planned initial public offering on April 11, citing “adverse market conditions.” 

Adverse market conditions, indeed!  Quoting the immortal Vince Lombardi, “What the hell is going on out here?”

There are at least four fundamental forces at play that are battering the solar markets: 

First, over the past few years, China has made an astounding push into solar energy.  Whereas China was a non-factor in the solar industry not long ago, today China owns about 50% market share of supply.  Achieving this massive leap-frog was clearly an act of state-driven industrial policy, as it required enormous sums of capital — far beyond what would be justified solely to supply the Chinese domestic market for solar energy.  But, it’s more than merely state-sponsorship:  In March, the U.S. Department of Commerce found that Chinese solar manufacturers had been “dumping” their products into U.S. markets at prices below cost, exploiting unfair subsidies available to them from the Chinese government but not available to non-Chinese players.  Stay tuned to this brewing trade war.

Second, a ton of capital has been invested over the past several years in next-generation solar technology ventures.  While the technologies have differed widely, all have been premised on significantly reducing the costs of solar energy and enabling the market to expand by orders of magnitude.  Although some of these ventures have crashed-and-burned (e.g., Solyndra), others are still alive and may end up doing very well.  At the very least, these ventures have pushed the boundaries of innovation in the solar industry overall, which in turn has reduced the costs of solar energy in many ways and aspects — which in turn is in fact exponentially expanding the potential market for solar energy.

Third, European demand for new solar installations has fallen off a cliff.  Many of the leading European solar markets — Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Greece — all had very aggressive “feed-in tariff” policies, promising very high prices for any electricity generated by solar installations.  These prices had remained high, in fact escalated, while solar costs declined precipitously, enabling solar investors windfall profits:  a classic bubble, which has now largely burst, given the financial straits in which many of the above-noted European countries find themselves.  (Dedicated readers of this blog will recall my long-standing lack of enthusiasm about the feed-in tariff subsidy approach.  Its flaws are now being starkly revealed.)

Fourth, plummeting natural gas prices — due to the surge in supply, associated with the shale gas boom enabled by the broad deployment of advanced fracking approaches — are causing U.S. electricity prices to fall, and solar companies struggle to compete.  A quote from Andrew Beebe of Suntech (leading Chinese manufacturer, widely accused of dumping) in a recent New York Times article called “Clouds on Solar’s Horizon” speaks volumes:  “We’re really not competitive” at current natural gas prices.

The first two forces have dramatically increased supply and reduced costs of solar energy, whereas the second two forces have substantially depressed demand for solar energy.  When combined, the conclusion is simple:  The solar market is experiencing a massive glut.  Solar customers clearly benefit, but solar companies feel the pain acutely.

So, these are dark days for the solar industry.  According to this article in the Washington Post, even the Chinese companies that have come to dominate are hurting. 

But, as they say, it’s always “Darkest Before Dawn”…which in fact is the title of a new white paper by McKinsey & Company that presents the flip-side of this story.  The authors — Krister Aanesen, Stefan Heck and Dickon Pinner — argue that the impending shakeout and consolidation is quite typical of industry at solar’s stage of maturity, and that there will be a bright future for solar energy not that long from now.  That may be more true for customers and the planet, as low-cost and non-emitting solar energy becomes much more widespread, than for industry participants, who will face increasingly intense and relentless competitive pressures to constantly innovate and improve their technologies and business processes. 

From an investment perspective, perhaps the bottom is approaching or is being hit right now for the solar industry.  Earlier this year, Gordon Johnson, solar industry analyst from Axiom Capital Management, reversed his 14-month bearish position on the industry.  However, as of this writing, SUNIDX is still trending downwards — though the decline is shallowing.

For those in the solar sector, the road is bumpy and will be for at least awhile.  Seat belts fastened, please. 

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

At the foot of the Flatirons along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, Boulder is one beautiful town.  With the University of Coloradoand the region’s unparalleled outdoor activities, Boulder attracts many intellectual environmentalists.  Of course, like everyone else, this set of people needs to make a buck to pay the bills – there are probably more Ph.D.-holding waiters and waitresses in Boulder than anywhere else on the planet – so over the years Boulder has become a center of energy market and technology analysis.

The list of energy consulting and research firms in Boulder active during the past three decades is too long to include here, and most of them are now defunct and have slipped my memory anyway.  Recently, I came across the newest kid from Boulder-town, Pike Research.

Analyzing the clean technology markets, Pike has organized itself into five segments:  “Smart Energy”, “Smart Grid”, “Smart Transportation”, “Smart Industry”, and “Smart Buildings”.  I guess this terminology is to draw a contrast to all the things potentially considered “dumb” that have been and continue to be pursued to power our economy – including the entire realm of fossil fuels, which is not a topic that Pike covers. 

In each of these segments, Pike’s team either has compiled or is compiling information and perspectives on a number of subsegments, ranging from renewable energy to microgrids to electric vehicles to green buildings.  Individual reports can be purchased, or clients can purchase an advisory service that provides access to all of Pike’s research.

Of course, this research isn’t cheap for Pike to develop, and consequently isn’t cheap to acquire from Pike either.  But, if you’re looking to make a big strategic or investment decision in one of these technology fields, it’s good to have some set of data on which to make judgments.  Pike appears to have one of the more extensive catalogues of research, and so is well-positioned to be one of the first one-stop shops you should visit if you have this kind of need.

as posted on CleanTechBlog.com

In late January, a significant solar storm unleashed enormous amounts of energy into space.  Here on Earth, warnings were issued that the bursts of solar radiation could significantly affect a lot of the things that we 21^st century humans take for granted, such as telecommunications, air travel, and power grid stability.  Alas, in the event, it was mainly a false alarm:  Aside from increased aurora borealis displays, there were minimal disruptions to life as we now know it.  And, the world’s attention – diverted for a couple of moments – reverted to more mundane or trivial dramas.

That solar storm turned out to be a non-event, but that doesn’t mean that solar storms are nothing to worry about.  In 1989, a solar flare event plunged most of Quebec into a blackout. 

For quite awhile, the Earth has been very lucky:  The truly huge solar storms of recent decades flung their energy in a different direction across the universe, missing us.  We haven’t experienced a direct hit by a major solar storm since 1921, which in turn was smaller than the prior big event in 1859.  Of course, in those days, civilization wasn’t very dependent on electricity, telecommunications, and all the things enabled by electronics – so those storms didn’t cause widespread cataclysms.

In the February 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum, John Kappenman’s article, “A Perfect Storm of Planetary Proportions,” provides a harrowing description of the probable impact of an epic solar storm, 10 times as powerful as the 1989 storm, but of a magnitude that the Earth has experienced many times over the eons.  As Kappenman says, “the bad news is that it’s likely – certain, even – that such a storm will happen again.  And when it does, it will be one of the worst disasters in recorded history.”

The biggest challenge facing us is that the electromagnetic pulses of a major solar storm will induce enormous electromagnetic fields that will fry high-voltage transformers in utility substations over continental-sized areas.  When these transformers explode, few people will actually be injured much less killed, but the grid will go down – and stay down.  Spare transformers of this size aren’t just sitting on the shelf in inventory.  Replacing one or two wouldn’t be a big deal, but replacing hundreds or perhaps thousands of them?  It could take years to get the grid back to its prior condition, and could take months to restore power in some pretty large areas. 

Consider the social chaos caused about an entire state, or a multi-state region, caused by 10 weeks without power.

Kappenman notes that there are technologies that can mitigate if not entirely eliminate this risk by damping or filtering the effects of electromagnetic pulses on transformers.  Yes, this would be another one of those “smart grid” technologies.  But, deployment requires mass-retrofitting of equipment throughout the utility grid, which in turn would be a public infrastructure project of the highest-degree – and there is substantial public apathy towards any additional expenditure on just about anything worthwhile in energy, much less anything that might not be needed for a few years or decades. 

No:  As with so many other challenges, we prefer to just muddle along, keep our fingers crossed, and hope that we can come up with a good response when confronted with a crisis.  Alas, there are very few human-induced crises comparable to that day when the star in the sky that we utterly rely upon for everything decides to give the Earth a big slap upside the head.

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

On March 1, the Clean Energy Trust of Chicago convened the Clean Energy Challenge, a business plan competition for clean energy ventures from the Midwest.  The lunch speaker was Vic Abate, vice president of Renewables from General Electric (NYSE:  GE), who provided his perspectives on the growth of the wind energy business at GE.

Abate noted that everyone knew that GE bought the wind business from the detritus of Enron in 2002, 10 years ago, for a little over $250 million.  What most people didn’t know, Abate asserted, was that “GE bought the business again in 2003, and bought the business again in 2004, and bought the business again in 2005.” 

In other words, after actually buying the assets of Enron, GE found itself needing to invest a lot of money in technology development and manufacturing quality for their wind products in order to transform what they acquired into something profitable.  What were machines that experienced significant downtime became wind turbines with availability levels exceeding 98%, on par with conventional powerplant technologies.

Abate was appointed leader of the wind business in 2005 – and was the third leader that GE installed after purchasing Enron Wind.  In other words, it was a challenging turnaround situation.

Now, GE is pretty bullish about the wind business – although it appears that their optimism is more focused on Europe and China than on the United States.  Last year, GE booked more orders from wind turbines outside the United States than domestically, with $2 billion of sales in Brazil alone.  These countries, unlike the United States, decide on energy policies that support a sustained commitment to wind energy, and allow the private sector to correspondingly commit to making wind energy succeed in those countries.

In contrast, Abate was cautious in his views about the U.S. wind sector.  As the recent past chair of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), he ought to have a pretty informed idea of what’s going on.  He expressed concern about the upcoming lapse (again) of the production tax credit (PTC), which if allowed by federal inaction before the end of 2012, will turn the $10 billion U.S. wind market into something approaching zero for 2013.  Already, some of the major companies in the supply chain are beginning to throttle down in anticipation of this event.

Since I have long been associated with the efforts in Northeast Ohio to explore offshore wind deployment in Lake Erie – efforts now led by the Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo) – I asked Abate what his/GE’s perspectives on offshore wind.  He was not especially encouraging. 

Abate admitted that Europe is still pursuing offshore wind with some robustness, probably growing to a market of a gigawatt or two annually by mid-decade.  However, when Abate reviewed the historical data from the past 10 years, onshore wind consistently beat expectations in volumes and economics (which are, of course, related) whereas offshore wind consistently lagged expectations.  According to Abate, this illustrates the significant technical challenges associated with offshore wind.  In his view, driving offshore wind economics to competitive levels is not going to happen by incremental improvement, but will require radical breakthroughs, such as new materials technologies to enable upscaling to 15 megawatt turbines.  

All this tells Abate that offshore wind will be really hard to financially justify in the near-term, and thus will not be a significant focus for GE – especially in the United States, given the lack of any forces of urgency to drive the emergence of the sector.   This appears to put GE at odds with other multinational conglomerates – such as Siemens (NYSE: SIE), Alstom (Euronext: ALO), Areva (Euronext: CEI), Mitsubishi, Toshiba (LSE: TOS), and Samsung (LSE: SMSN)– who continue to make sizable bets in offshore wind advancement.  (Of note, none of these companies are based in the United States, and their corporate worldview may not be as heavily shaped by U.S. inaction on offshore wind.)In contrast, Abate was more confident that onshore wind economics would continue to improve, and remain competitive in the U.S. market even with relatively cheap natural gas, attaining 4 cent/kwh economics in some cases even without the PTC extended.  With this view, and given GE’s aggressively short-term share performance mindset, it’s easy to see why GE might focus exclusively on onshore wind and come up short in offshore wind relative to its global peers.

Returning to the PTC, and the associated business uncertainties, Abate has promoted the view within GE that “you’re either in or out in wind – buy or sell, but don’t hold”, and that GE has committed to ante up further because the electricity future in the United States for the next 10 years at least is “natural gas and wind.”  Forty percent of new U.S. generation installations last year were wind, as was the majority of global additions of capacity.  This global market is so sizable – despite U.S. waffling – that GE tells itself it has no choice but to be a major player in it. 

And, Abate makes it clear that only a very few companies like GE – with technological expertise, manufacturing excellence, financial wherewithal, and global reach – can be a long-term winner in wind.

Whether the United States itself can be a long-term winner in wind remains to be seen.

as posted CleanTechBlog.com

The consulting firm Deloitte recently released a report titled “Every Company Is An Energy Company (And If It Isn’t, It Will Be Soon)”.

The main message is that, with increasing energy prices, it will be imperative for every company to consider how to reduce energy consumption in its buildings and its shipping/fleet, as well as what kind of self-production of electricity and/or heat.

The secondary message is that a long-term shift to “values-based capitalism” is afoot.  Companies need to minimize their environmental footprint – in large part, through their energy strategy – because customers, shareholders, and employees alike are increasingly demanding that companies do so.

The authors, Nick Main (Deloitte’s global managing partner of climate change and sustainability) and Joseph Stanislaw(independent senior advisor to Deloitte), make the case that the clean energy game is just beginning:  Clean Energy 1.0 will evolve to Clean Energy 2.0 and 3.0 and so on over the generations to come.  And, it will take generations, because the energy asset base is long-lived and human behaviors of those making decisions are hard to change.

More bluntly, good ideas often become widely adopted only when those opposing the good ideas die off.

It is notable that Deloitte’s white paper appears to be aiming for, and solely references (with one exception:  National Grid (NYSE: NGG)), companies that are currently only consumers of energy — and major consumer brands to boot:  Unilever (NYSE: UN), IBM (NYSE: IBM), United Parcel System (NYSE: UPS), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP).  The text is essentially silent in its (potential) messages to companies that are energy suppliers themselves or that supply to the energy industry. 

Is it because Deloitte has already told this message in another format to companies that are already generating revenues (as opposed to incurring costs) from energy?  Or, is it because such companies just don’t like the message and don’t want to hear it again?

Will it take generational turnover in the energy sector itself before Deloitte’s story is more widely endorsed?

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

On March 1 in Chicago, I attended the Clean Energy Challenge, a business plan competition among energy tech ventures from the Midwest, convened by the Clean Energy Trust.

With $250,000 of prizes sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Challenge was the culmination of several weeks of screening and coaching of more than 100 ventures from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio, organized in two flights of competition:  start-up companies and student-run spin-outs from universities. 

The winners from each of these two categories were Hyrax Energy (start-up company) and NuMat Technologies (spin-out from Northwestern University).  From my perspective, these were good choices by the judges — most of whom were from venture capital firms. 

Frankly, Hyrax was far and away the most compelling of the start-ups, whereas NuMat had much stronger competition from its student-led spin-out peers.  I’m still trying to decide whether the student team pitches were generally better because they were involved in more coaching, were more receptive to coaching, or were less encumbered by the still-to-be-discovered challenges of actually running as businesses.

Onwards and upwards:  The student portion of the Clean Energy Challenge is in essence a regional qualifier for a national tournament, the DOE’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition, to be held this summer.

Also being held this summer, and not just limited to clean energy ventures, is the Cleantech Open, another business plan tournament that involves bigger prizes and leads even to a global competition in the fall.  (The Cleantech Open currently appears to be lacking a Midwest region — something I hope to be a part of remedying for future years.)  If you want to get into this contest, entry applications are due May 8.

While the cash prizes involved in these contests won’t make or break a new venture, the credibility associated with winning is very valuable.  Even those that don’t win benefit from the exposure to investors and, maybe more to the point, from the discipline of running the gauntlet.

Let the games begin! 

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

It’s virtually impossible (for me, at least) to understand or keep track of the organization of the U.S. Department of Energy.  And so, when I encountered the booth at the recent Energy Innovation Summit (as reported last week) for the generic-sounding DOE group called “Office of Science”, I had to stop and ask to find out more.

How can there be an office for something so broad as “science”? 

Well, it probably could be better termed as “Office of Research,” though I’m sure DOE leadership explicitly rejected that name as sounding way too academic and hence divorced from the commercial marketplace (i.e., private sector).

It’s true that the DOE Office of Science, the largest sponsor of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, is oriented to the needs of universities and research centers.  Notably, the Office of Science recently created 46 Energy Research Frontier Centers (ERFCs)spanning the United States to address some highly specialized technical fields of relevance to energy requiring world-class capabilities.

To illustrate, there’s the Center for Atomic-Level Catalyst Design (CALCD), led by Louisiana State University.  Not to mention the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center, led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Plus 44 other similar networks of scientific exploration.

While it’s true that this work is largely conducted by the ivory-tower, these ERFCs represent a very compelling resource for cleantech companies – large and small alike – facing particular technical challenges in developing new products and services for the energy sector.  When tackling especially thorny problems, it may be worth running the risk of getting blinded by science and peering into the bright shining light of a possibly relevant EFRC.