When word went out in 2006 that energy giant BP was soliciting applications for a major project, the university and LBNL began writing a proposal (based on Helios initiatives) at what research vice chancellor Beth Burnside describes as “warp speed.” Although the initiative was to be a ten-year project funded by BP at $50 million a year (roughly three times the $16 million the university received in corporate funding for research in 2006), Burnside later described the plan as “an ordinary though a little bit oversized industry-sponsored research project.” At the news that Berkeley had won the contest, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates quickly applauded it.

Reactions on campus came at warp speed, as well. Graffiti decrying “bperkeley” went up overnight. At a March faculty senate forum, Ignacio Chapela, an outspoken critic of an earlier deal between the Novartis corporation and the university, described the agreement with BP as “Faustian” and compared it to “prostitution.” Scientists involved in the project bristled. A group of faculty requested a blue-ribbon oversight panel for the deal, but that was tabled when a vote in the faculty senate endorsed the idea that corporate funding is an issue of academic freedom. Bad feelings, and many questions, remained.

“Some of the rhetoric was silly,” says Haas professor Severin Borenstein, “but people had legitimate concerns. The question was: Is this being done in a way to protect the free flow of information and independence of the university? The protestors served a good function of reminding people to watch the details. And if the protestors do derail the agreement, it will have been for a good reason—because more discussion was needed.”

For some proponents, the whole purpose of the arrangement was speed. “It would have simplified things if the money to do this research came from the government,” Somerville stated, “but if you really want to change the energy sector, you have to be partnered by big energy companies.” He says the relationship would give academics at EBI “a reality check,” shorten the path to commercialization, and offer the university an opportunity to influence BP by changing its decision-making processes. “I think that’s the biggest return BP will get on its investments—knowledge is empowering to make good decisions,” he said. According to Somerville, if the deal is signed, BP would like to spin out private start-up companies as an efficient way of commercializing the basic knowledge developed in the lab.

For Berkeley, which has seen public funding for research fall for decades, EBI would be an oppor tunity not only to get hold of private funding, but also to collateralize the university’s knowledge on par with Stanford, which has contributed commercial ideas worth incalculable amounts to Silicon Valley’s economy. “UC has recognized that they’re perceived as unfriendly to business,” declares Sean Randolph of the Bay Area Economic Forum, who terms Berkeley’s biofuel initiative “game changing” for the region’s economy. In alternative energy, Somerville said, “The university is ahead of the game and has the chance to be the center and hold it for a long time, maybe forever.”

Californians have lived through booms in gold, aerospace, computer hardware, software, the Internet, and biotech industries, so we’re willing to believe in the next one, even if it’s a complicated bet on clean tech. Now, the federal government is also willing to back the bet. In June, the Department of Energy awarded a $125 million, five-year grant for research on making ethanol from cellulose. The lab receiving the grant, called JBEI (Joint BioEnergy Institute), is a collaboration between Berkeley, UC Davis, Stanford, LBNL, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Lab. It will be headquartered somewhere around Emeryville and run by Jay Keasling, the Berkeley scientist who pioneered synthetic biology. JBEI is being described as a “start-up” to EBI’s think tank.

Dan Kammen (Energy Research Group): "Over the next ten years there will be an ongoing battle over open and transparent research."

More money is probably on the way. Asked about funding for Helios, Chu declined to say what was in the pipeline but suggested that more announcements will be coming soon. Meanwhile, Professor Dan Kammen has proposed a California Climate Institute that would have a budget bigger than EBI’s. He describes the Institute as a “do tank,” where state regulators would work side-by-side with campus researchers to solve greenhouse gas issues quickly. There is talk of soliciting foundations for funds to set up another institute to study the social and environmental impacts of biofuels. And the newly proposed Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation hopes to become a formal pipeline between university researchers and area businesses. It’s impossible to know the eventual sum of these formal and informal, state and private initiatives, but it’s already larger than anything in the university’s history.

On the day the Department of Energy announced its grant, the press was given a whirlwind tour of Keasling’s laboratory in Emeryville. The space was crowded with large gas chromatographs, incubators, and dozens of young scientists methodically moving test tubes and tallying charts while music from portable radios played. A news crew asked one of Keasling’s lab scientists to explain how a bioreactor works (it’s essentially a highly calibrated still—something like the ones used to create moonshine), and after three tries the scientist was still caught in a technical discussion about what this smallish device means for the future of the planet. “Imagine you’re explaining it to a child,” said an exasperated TV reporter.

For all the hopes placed in the biofuels initiatives, most of us understand relatively little about the science behind biofuels—never mind the commercial relationships, or the impact of their innovations on farming communities far from the Bay Area. When Chris Somerville gave his presentation at LBNL, he described green plants as giant solar collectors, working doubletime to turn sunlight into chemical energy to power transportation while storing carbon. Somerville surmised that the world could meet its need for transportation fuels with 1 percent of the world’s land planted with miscanthus, a perennial that converts energy from the sun at 2 percent efficiency and doesn’t appear to require much water, fertilizer, or cultivation.

Although 1 percent sounds like a modest amount of land, in global terms it’s nearly three times the land area of Spain. In short order, land could replace oil as the world’s most valuable commodity, quickly sending the greatest impacts of Berkeley’s homegrown “disruptive technology” to the farthest, poorest corners of the earth. “I can’t tell you with certainty that we can afford 1 percent,” Somerville said. “It will be something we’ll look at deeply and broadly here at the Institute—is there enough water and enough land, and what are the consequences to the societies that are sitting on that land?”

Can Berkeley troubleshoot the ecological and political consequences of a global transformation on this scale? “The biofuel initiative is important, good for the campus and good for society, but I’m concerned about how much they’ll pay attention to the potential impacts,” says Boalt professor and director of the Environmental Law Program Daniel Farber, reflecting the opinion of many I talked with on campus. “Every problem began life as a solution. Will we solve our problems and create new ones?”

The university’s difficulty in assessing these potential impacts is personified by the hyperhybrid work/life of Dan Kammen, who is on the EBI project’s executive committee. Trained in physics and now a professor of nuclear engineering, Kammen first became interested in alternative energy in the late 1980s. He later started an interdisciplinary study of energy technology, policy, and development, a history reflected in his office bookshelf, where an English-Xhosa dictionary sits near Plutonium, Power, and Politics and Biomass Energy Policy in Africa. A professor at the Energy Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the nuclear engineering department, as well as the founder of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Kammen, perhaps more than any other faculty member at Berkeley, has adopted multiple public roles: climate change analyst, policy wonk, technological innovator, and consultant to high-profile green tech investors such as British tycoon Richard Branson.

Kammen’s media savvy and upbeat enthusiasm for green tech give him the air of a friendly host on the Discovery Channel, but he is frank about the gamble the university has helped California take. “We need to make good on our commitment to AB 32, which we really don’t know how to do. We need to actually do what we said we could in our op-ed pieces.” He describes California as a guinea pig for new technologies, markets, and regulations, and a magnet for investment in new industries. And risks? “History is strongly on the side that it’s more important to make a decision than to make the globally optimum decision.”

Early in this new history, Kammen’s life is already “hectic beyond sensible.” During a half-hour interview in his office, he receives phone calls from reporters, a state official, and a documentary crew as he prepares to take the red-eye to Washington, D.C., to promote Berkeley’s energy initiatives. If this sounds impossibly taxing, it’s further complicated by Kammen’s dual roles as one of the most visible supporters of the initiative and as an influential critic of its implementation. “So far, unfortunately, our administration has sent the wrong message and has acted like this is a battle to be won against protestors,” he says, adding that what’s needed are mechanisms to monitor the university’s relationship with EBI, and a degree of transparency.

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