Hill Heat

S. 967, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Modernization Act of 2009, and S. 283, a bill to amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to modify the conditions for the release of products from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve Account.

Witnesses

• David F. Johnson, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Petroleum Reserves, Office of Fossil Energy, U.S. Department of Energy
• Dr. Frank Rusco, Director, Natural Resources and Environment, Government Accountability Office
• John Shages, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Petroleum Reserves, U.S. Department of Energy
• Kevin Book, Managing Director, ClearView Energy Partners, LLC
• Didier Houssin, Director of the Office of Oil Markets and Emergency Preparedness, International Energy Agency

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to a briefing to examine the economic, energy security, climate, and other environmental issues associated with biofuels-liquid fuels derived from plant, animal, or other organic matter (biomass). Expanded biofuels production in the United States and abroad presents several questions regarding the appropriate scale, direction, and regulation of biofuels development. This briefing will discuss the current state of biofuels technologies in order to better understand the full range of potential benefits, costs, and impacts associated with these fuels. Speakers for this event include:

• Lawrence Russo, Technology Manager, Biomass Program, U.S. Department of Energy
• Jennifer Holmgren, PhD, General Manager, Renewable Energy Division, Universal Oil Products
• Gerald Nelson, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute
• William Harrison, Technical Advisor for Fuels and Energy, United States Air Force
• Richard Altman, Executive Director, Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuel Initiative

Biofuels can be produced through a number of different processes using a variety of input materials or “feedstocks” and yielding different types of fuel products. This briefing will explore the intersection of technology, feedstock, and end-use issues and the implications of different pathways of biofuel production on fuel costs, agricultural resources, energy security, and greenhouse gas reduction. Key questions this briefing will address include:

• How are different types of biofuels produced?
• What are the different classes of feedstocks that can be processed into biofuels?
• What economic, technical, and environmental factors are driving or limiting biofuel development?
• What are the energy security and national security considerations associated with biofuels?
• What are the impacts of different biofuels on greenhouse gas emissions?
• How should federal policy weigh different costs, benefits, and impacts associated with biofuels production?

This briefing is free and open to the public. No RSVP required. For more information, contact Jan Mueller at (202) 662-1883 or [email protected].

This briefing is the third in a series on alternative transportation fuels. Previous briefings focused on liquid coal and tar sands and oil shale. The next briefing will focus on electricity, with details posted at www.eesi.org/briefings as they become available.

In an effort to explore the use of solar power to meet America’s future energy needs, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, led by Chairman Jim Costa (D-CA), will hold an oversight field hearing in Palm Desert, California on “Solar Energy Development on Federal Lands: The Road to Consensus.”

Federal lands have the potential to play a significant role in achieving our national renewable energy goals – experts believe some of the best solar and wind resources in the world are located on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service lands in the western United States. The deserts of southern California, in particular, hold exceptional promise for providing large amounts of solar power. The BLM has already received applications from developers interested in building nearly 50,000 Megawatts of solar in that region.

However, some contend that solar power plants could take up large amounts of land and potentially use considerable quantities of water, leading to questions about the most environmentally appropriate places to locate these facilities.

The Subcommittee will explore the complexities surrounding the siting and permitting of solar plants and transmission lines on federal lands, and examine the planning processes being undertaken by the State of California to achieve consensus among various stakeholders.

Witnesses

Panel 1

• Jim Ferguson, Councilman, City of Palm Desert, California
• Commissioner Julia Levin, California Energy Commission
• Commissioner Rachelle Chong, California Public Utilities Commission
• James Abbott, Acting State Director, California State Office, Bureau of Land Management
• Thomas M. Kretzschmar, Senior Projects Manager, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Panel 2

• Steven Malnight, Vice President of Renewable Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric Company
• Carl Zichella, Western Renewable Projects Director, Sierra Club
• Katherine Gensler, Manager of Regulatory & Legislative Affairs, Solar Energy Industries Association
• Michael Niggli, Chief Operating Officer, Sempra Energy Utilities

University of California, Riverside (UCR)
Palm Desert Graduate Center
75080 Frank Sinatra Drive
Palm Desert, CA 92211

Witnesses Panel I

• Earl Devaney, Chairman, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board
• Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General, U.S. Government Accountability Office

Panel II

• Danielle Brian, Executive Director, Project on Government Oversight
• Dr. Gary Bass, Founder and Executive Director, OMB Watch

The purpose of the Business Meeting is to consider the nominations of Kristina M. Johnson, to be the Under Secretary of Energy, Steven Elliot Koonin, to be the Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy, Ines R. Triay, to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Environmental Management), Hilary Chandler Tompkins, to be Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, and Scott Blake Harris, to be the General Counsel of the Department of Energy.

Witnesses

Panel 1

• Ray LaHood, Secretary, Department of Transportation

Panel 2

• Anne P. Canby, President, Surface Transportation Policy Partnership
• James Corless, Campaign Director, Transportation for America
• Steve Heminger, Executive Director, Metropolitan Transportation Commission
• Ned S. Holmes, Texas Transportation Commissioner and Chairman, Transportation Transformation Group

Archive webcast

Witnesses * Dr. Rick Melberth, Director, Federal Regulatory Policy, OMB Watch * Caroline Smith DeWaal, Director, Food Safety Program, Center for Science in the Public Interest * Rena Steinzor, Professor of Law, University of Maryland * Wesley Warren, Director of Programs, Natural Resources Defense Council * Dr. Cary Coglianese, Associate Dean, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania Law School

• HR 2020, the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2009
• HR 1736, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Act of 2009
• HR 1709, the STEM Education Coordination Act of 2009

On Tuesday, April 28 the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment will hold a hearing to receive testimony on the role of the Department of Energy’s research and development programs in developing technologies, codes, and standards to enable deployment of net-zero energy, high-performance buildings and support energy efficiency in domestic industries.

• Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy
• William J. Coad, President, Coad Engineering Enterprises and Chairman, High-Performance Building Council, National Institute of Building Sciences
• Paul Cicio, President, Industrial Energy Consumers of America
• Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Research Staff, Economic and Social Analysis Program, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
• Dr. J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President, Science and Technology, United Technologies Corporation

Buildings consume more energy than any other sector of the U.S. economy (40%), including transportation (28%) and industry (32%). From 1980 to 2006, total building energy consumption in the United States increased more than 46 percent, and is expected to continue to grow at a rate of more than 1 percent per year over the next two decades. In addition, almost three-quarters of our nation’s 81 million buildings were built before 1979. Because buildings are long-lived assets, significant improvement of their energy efficiency will require either retrofits or total replacement. Deployment of high performance buildings can reduce the environmental impact of buildings while making them cheaper to operate.

Industry accounts for approximately one-third of all energy consumed in the U.S. with much of that usage concentrated in heavy industries such as chemical, glass, cement, and metals production, mining, petroleum refining, food processing, and forest and paper products. These industries also have relatively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Despite their relatively high energy and emissions intensity, many industrial firms face competitive pressures that make it difficult to justify the technical and financial risks of R&D projects. Therefore, federal programs are essential to promote development and deployment of technologies and process improvements that increase energy efficiency, raise productivity, reduce and reuse wastes, and trim costs.

Building and Industrial Efficiency Technology Programs at DOE

The importance of energy efficiency and sustainability in the building and industrial sector has been recognized in various federal laws, executive orders, and other policy instruments in recent years. Among these are the energy policy acts (EPAct) of 1992 and 2005 (P.L. 102-486 and P.L. 109-58), the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA, P.L. 110-140), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Through these laws the Department of Energy (DOE) is authorized to carry out a range of activities to increase energy efficiency in a number of economic sectors.

Within the DOE Building Technologies Program both the High-Performance Buildings partnerships and Zero-Net Energy Commercial Building Initiative, work to improve the efficiency of buildings and the equipment, components, and systems used to control temperature, provide lighting, and plumbing.

A high-performance building as defined by EISA is a building that integrates and optimizes, on a life cycle basis, all major high performance attributes, including energy conservation, environment, safety, security, durability, accessibility, cost-benefit, productivity, sustainability, functionality and operational considerations. As part of this approach, DOE selected building industry groups to form a High-Performance Green Building Consortium that works to accelerate the commercialization of high-performance building technologies. DOE and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also created the High Performance Buildings Database, which seeks to improve building performance measuring methods by collecting data on various factors that affect a building’s performance, such as energy, materials, and land use. It is a unique central repository of detailed information and data on high-performance, green building projects across the United States and abroad.

The Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative aims to realize marketable net-zero energy commercial buildings by 2025. In general, a net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the course of a year. The program brings architects, engineers, builders, contractors, owners, and occupants together to optimize building performance, comfort, and savings through a whole-building approach to design and construction. The program is divided into three interrelated strategic areas designed to overcome technical and market barriers: research and development, equipment standards and analysis, and technology validation and market introduction. Key research areas include: commercial lighting solutions; indoor environmental quality; building controls and diagnostics; and space conditioning.

The Department also participates in a variety of activities to aid in standards and codes development for new building technologies, appliances, and compliance and design tools. For example the Building Technologies Program’s Building Energy Codes initiative works with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, state and local governments, national codes organizations, and industries to help develop improved national model energy codes. Unlike conventional building codes which dictate only minimum requirements for construction, “model” building codes are designed to push the technological envelope of what can be achieved in building design, construction and operation. Ultimately, there may need to be a comprehensive and unified framework of standards which accounts for the full range of metrics and benchmarks to maximize building performance. DOE also updates and improves appliances and equipment standards by testing products and technologies, and ultimately conducting rulemaking through a public process.

The DOE Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) seeks to reduce manufacturing energy intensity and carbon emissions through coordinated research and development with industry, deployment of innovative energy efficient technologies, by providing energy assessments of industrial facilities, and through dissemination of industry best practices. The ITP invests in high-risk, high-value cost-shared R&D projects to reduce industrial energy use and process waste streams, while stimulating productivity and growth. Projects may be specific to a certain industry (ex: aluminum smelting), or applicable across a range of industrial applications (ex: fuel and feedstock flexibility). In addition, the ITP serves as an informational resource by making available information on other financial assistance and research opportunities, background on both existing and emerging technologies, as well as results of case studies from past ITP projects. The ITP also sponsors 26 University-Based Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) that provide no-cost energy assessments primarily to small- and medium-sized manufacturers. By operating through university engineering programs the IACs serve as a training ground for the next-generation of energy and industrial engineers.

Pushing the Energy Efficiency Envelope

While these programs continue to demonstrate success in developing technologies and practices for high-performance buildings and sustainable industries, advancing the state of technology far beyond what is currently available will require the programs to incorporate entirely new technologies and approaches into their R&D agendas.

For instance, buildings of the future will be designed to operate as a singular system of interoperable components – a concept that is not possible today. A typical building is comprised of a complex array of components (wood, metals, glass, concrete, coatings, flooring, sheet rock, insulation, etc.) and subsystems (lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, appliances, landscape maintenance, IT equipment, electrical grid connection, etc.) all of which are developed individually by independent firms that do not often design and test their performance in conjunction with other components and systems. Even after building completion, systems are rarely optimized together to improve overall energy efficiency and environmental performance. The inefficiencies attributable to this fragmentation of the building components and systems, and the lack of monitoring and verification of a building performance, point to a critical need for a more integrated approach to building design, operation, and technology development. An approach that couples buildings sciences, architecture, and information technologies could lead to entirely new “self-tuning” buildings with subsystems that are able to continuously communicate with each other and respond to a range of factors. Wide-scale deployment of these types of net-zero energy high performance buildings will likely require federal programs to play a larger coordinating role in the development of the common technologies, codes, and standards.

Pushing the efficiency envelope will also require engaging the social sciences in providing a much greater understanding of how people and organizations make energy-related decisions. Individual and collective behavior plays a critical role in efficiency, not only through direct demand for energy, but also by creating or failing to create market demand for more energy efficient technologies. Consumers make these decisions every day when weighing options such as what vehicle or appliance to purchase, whether to drive or take public transportation, what light bulbs to install, or whether to shut down their computers at night. In aggregate these decisions have an impact on the supply and demand curves that drive both energy prices and, ultimately, energy technology development.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) produced a report on “Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities.” In the chapter on Environmentally Significant Individual Behavior, the NAS panel states: “A basic understanding of how information, incentives, and various kinds of constraints and opportunities, in combination with individuals’ values, beliefs, and social contexts, shape consumer choice in complex real-world contexts would provide an essential knowledge base for understanding, anticipating, and developing policies for affecting environmentally significant consumer behavior.” Integrating social science research into the larger energy R&D field will provide greater insight into the best ways to convey information to consumers and help them make decisions regarding energy efficiency and conservation. For instance, understanding consumer behavior will help in development of a whole building approach to design and operation of building systems, where components are integrated to reduce energy consumption through displaying information to occupants.