Steve Isakowitz, the Chief Finance Officer of the US Department of Energy, spoke at the MIT Energy Club on Monday evening, April 6, 2009. His subject was "Department of Energy 2.0" but he was primarily there to recruit students for jobs in the public sector. Earlier in the day he had met with MIT President Susan Hockfield as well. Steve Isakowitz is an MIT alumni, 83/84. He took time out from his vacation to speak and stayed long after the talk to meet individually with a long line of students.
There were about 100 people in one of the lecture halls in the Stata Center. Isakowitz polled the crowd and the largest proportion were Sloan School and other MIT students, some Harvard students, and an assortment of interested parties. He had a few slides that he played from his computer.
Isakowitz is an engineer who worked in consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton then for Lockheed-Martin. He joined the OMB under Clinton and for ten years participated in science and technology policy. He went to NASA as deputy CFO and to the CIA after 9/11 to coordinate intelligence and IT research with Silicon Valley and others. In the last year of the George W. Bush administration, he was appointed to be the CFO of DOE and was confirmed by the Senate. He is the only high ranking holdover from the previous administration's DOE to continue serving under President Obama.
This is not your father's DOE. For the first time in thirty years, the administration has energy and technology as a focus. This shows in the appointment of Secretary Stephen Chu, Nobel lauriate, a true energy expert, as a scientist, as a policy analyst, and as an administrator. DOE is ready and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has "kick-started the process." The department is not yet fully staffed and is running hard to keep up with the demands of the present economy.
One change is ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Administration-Energy), a new initiative modeled on the Defense Department's DARPA. ARPA-E started in the Obama DOE budget with $15m and ARRA funding added $.4b or $400m. It is one of four undersecretary level programs and, so far, Isakowitz is the acting head as well as being CFO. ARPA-E will be funding research and development of new technologies. The details have not yet been worked out. He himself does not want to replay the Carter years when out of 14 synfuel loans 10 went into default. Unlike DARPA, ARPA-E will not be a purchaser of the technology it develops, an audience member pointed out. That should make things interesting.
ARRA funds to DOE will be $32.7b and $149b in loans. They are administered by Matt Rogers, formerly of McKinsey, reporting directly to Secretary of DOE. There are $11.6b in energy efficiency, $3.2b for renewables, $4.5 for smart grid plus $60b for renewables loans (I asked about a revolving loan fund for weatherization and Isakowski said he knew of no specific funding for energy efficiency under ARRA loans.)
There will be a Clean Energy Corps "under the Serve America Act", based upon Americorps or VISTA.
After the talk, I told him about Paul Eldrenkamp, an energy contractor at the recent Building Energy solar trade show, who says we one chance every 30-40 years to get a building envelope right and that much of our nation's climate policy for the next 20-30 years is due to the sales skills of remodeling contractors. Because of that, I urged that the DOE have a good public education campaign letting people know exactly what needs to be done and how best to do it.
Of course, in reality, most DOE money still goes to nuclear security, weapons, waste, and power. With the Obama budget, non-proliferation is the fastest growing sector and civilian nuclear power and Yucca Mountain have funding decreases. (And no funds from ARRA?)