Transforming the U.S. Energy System

Mike Davis is an Associate Laboratory Director at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Pacific Northwest is one of the 24 pre-eminent research laboratories and facilities sponsored by the Department of Energy. Pacific Northwest has an approximate $1.1 Billion dollar research budget spread among its 4000 staff located at 4 facilities in Washington State.

The vision of the Pacific Northwest Lab is to “reduce dependence on foreign oil, build a clean, efficient energy future and address global climate change - all in a context that strengthens the nation’s economy.” They believe their vision can be broken into three main categories:

1. Creating tomorrow’s electric infrastructure
2. Decarbonizing the energy economy
3. Enabling science-based policy

Mr. Davis also described how the domestic content of the United States energy portfolio is decreasing while the environmental impacts of energy systems are increasing. These two critical trends continue to accelerate in the wrong direction. The domestic trend must be resolved by the people and polices of the United States; no one will force us to decrease our reliance on imported petroleum, natural gas, or nuclear fuel. The current environmental issues such as increasing emissions and nuclear fuel disposal are seen domestically but require solutions on the global level. Solutions require:

• Federal investments
• Cost-sharing arrangements
• Vast and varied resources of the fed government, states, industry, universities, national labs, and other nations
• Strategic partnerships – domestic and global