Venture capitalists are not known to haunt Sproul Plaza, with its drummers and dreamers, but last spring Silicon Valley’s financiers showed up in force. On March 21 they filed across the flagstones and into the Student Union auditorium to hear such scintillating discussions as “Carbon Regulation and the Impact on Innovation,” and “Energy Storage: Hydrogen, Batteries, and Beyond.” The draw was not the topics, but rather the 400 people sitting in the folding chairs. They encompassed the entire energy universe of California—researchers in architecture, chemistry, biology, engineering, and economics from Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; influential state regulators; the governor’s main man on economic growth; and corporate types representing companies ranging from Dow Chemical to solar entrepreneur SunPower.

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The takeaway was obvious: With global warming breathing down our necks, energy is hot. And Berkeley, where brainpower is mingling with government power-brokers to implement the state’s greenhouse gas legislation, is even hotter. Having just announced a $500 million ten-year deal with oil giant BP to found a new Energy Biosciences Institute on campus, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), made a pitch for more: “We are seeking industry partnerships … We seek solutions. We don’t seek, dare I say, science papers anymore.”

Across campus, green ideals are teaming up with the other green—money. Typical of the new “double-greens” is the group that organized the March symposium, a multidisciplinary club of grad students called the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative, or BERC. In just two years, BERC’s 300-plus members have presented dozens of events and inspired the creation of a new Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation at Haas business school.

Unlike previous generations of environmentalists, who saw capitalism as “part of the problem,” the new greens see it as part of the solution, if not the solution. Take the event’s organizer and BERC co-chair Merrian Fuller, a first-year MBA candidate at Haas. She spent her early 20s working in an environmental nonprofit, but had a conversion. “After being frustrated by the politics of NGOs, lack of money, and slow speed, I see business as an efficient way to make changes,” she said. To her, climate change is urgent and requires new rules. “We have to experiment much more and be willing to fail,” she said. “We have to realize some policies and initiatives might not work out.”

Thriving in this atmosphere requires global awareness and specific knowledge, which is what BERC provides—a network of curious experts eager to break out of their “silos.” During a night out with a few BERC members at Jupiter, the local watering hole, the conversation skitters among disciplines—from battery chemistry to climate law, to nanotech, to hedge fund priorities. Henry Stern, a Boalt law student who’s spending the summer working on greenhouse gas regulations for a judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, said he views his friends as a strange new hybrid generation. Its members combine tech savvy with business skills in pursuit of a “triple bottom line” of social change, environmental benefits, and profit. But everyone acknowledges that this will not be easy. At the moment, high-carbon energy is simply too cheap.

If BERC members are optimistic, it’s because big money is finally starting to follow the carbon. “Clean tech is nonpartisan,” remarked one student. “Even the big energy guys think there’s money in it.” Clean tech seems to offer something for everyone—especially in a country that’s tired of thinking about big problems such as the war in Iraq. “The only people who don’t like clean tech are the people who don’t like money,” joked another student.

BERC is a telling part of a large universe of energy initiatives at Berkeley. They range from hundreds of millions in new funding for biofuel research at both the university and LBNL to less-publicized work on solar energy, nanotechnology, battery technology, and ener- gy efficiency, as well as multidisciplinary energy policy, law, and market analysis. There’s also the Cal Climate Action Partnership (CalCAP), a campuswide program for greenhouse gas reduction. Although the $500 million research grant from BP to found the Energy Biosciences Institute has drawn the most attention and controversy—Chancellor Robert Birgeneau called it “our generation’s moon shot”—the university’s involvement in alternative energy is deep and complex. Berkeley has always been a place that talked about changing the world. Now that it has an opportunity, it first has to face change here on campus.

Steven Chu (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab): "Moving fast is better than maintaining purity. Monasteries are good places, but they're not good for science." Illustrations by David Pohl

Seventy-six years ago, ernest Orlando Lawrence explored the mysteries and potential of the atomic nucleus with his cyclotron on the hill above Berkeley. This past June, an overflow lunchtime crowd squeezed into an auditorium on the same hill to hear Chris Somerville, the likely head of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), explain why the world’s next big mystery is the cell wall. In a hesitant and somewhat oldfashioned style, Somerville described his radical mission—to create “disruptive technologies” for remodeling plants, enzymes, and organisms to produce fuels from plants. He gave the crowd a PowerPoint tour of the unstudied structures of the cell and the technological challenge that lies ahead, reminding his audience of the urgency at hand. “We’re not running out of fossil fuels, we’re running out of climate,” he quipped. “Climate is the sole driver for biofuels, in my opinion.”

The story of how Berkeley became the hub of a would-be biofuel boom reveals not only the formidable power of the university’s labs, but also the extraordinary influence its professors have on state leaders regarding what many see as a climate change emergency. The desire for speedy technological fixes is driving unprecedented collaborations among the university, government, and industry.

Long before there was much interest in investing millions of dollars to produce fuel from green plants, Berkeley academics were intimately involved in creating California’s pioneering greenhouse gas regulations. In late 2006, Goldman Public Policy professor Michael Hanemann and Energy and Resources Group professor Alex Farrell released an influential multipart report that contradicted conventional wisdom, arguing that California’s economy could benefit from greenhouse gas regulation. “California has a different culture,” says Hanemann, pointing to the gonzo-creativity of Silicon Valley and the state’s innovative regulations on smog and energy efficiency, which stimulated better emissions control and appliance efficiency. “Nationally, the first instinct is to preserve the status quo. In California the feeling is that greenhouse gasses are a challenge and we’ll rise to the challenge by using innovation. As a bonus, we might also get industrial and economic growth.” Convinced that early regulation could avoid environmental disaster and benefit the state’s economy, the governor and the California Legislature passed AB 32, the greenhouse gas legislation (see p. 36). These regulations, which could eventually allow expensive new technologies to compete with cheap, entrenched fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal, made the very idea of a green tech “moon shot” feasible.

LBNL director Steven Chu looked at controlling greenhouse gas emissions as a grand physics problem, the way he might calculate the potential output of a Carnot heat engine. The challenge, he felt, was to figure out which low-carbon energy sources had the greatest theoretical output and the fewest barriers to production. If we wanted to meet all of the world’s increasing electricity needs with nuclear fission, he calculated, we’d need to erect a reactor every ten days and we’d have a terrible nuclear waste problem. He searched for technologies that were in their infancy, where improvements might make a big difference. That eliminated wind turbines, which— according to Chu’s calculation of the “Betts limit”—are already close to their theoretical efficiency of 59 percent. “When you start with a problem like energy, you have to look at what are the ultimate limitations. And then you work back from those.”

Chris Somerville (Energy Bioscience Institute): "We're not running out of fuel, we're running out of climate.

By process of elimination, Chu arrived at two promising avenues for research: energy efficiency—a field pioneered by Berkeley physicist Art Rosenfeld—and harnessing the power of the sun. Sunlight can be captured by both technology and plants, which led him to identify the fields of photovoltaics, nanotechnology, electrochemistry, artificial photosynthesis, catalysis (producing hydrogen from water using sunlight), batteries (to hold energy produced by solar cells), and biofuels. Chu imagined a spectrum of biofuels, ranging from ethanol—which requires modest leaps in innovation—to more technically challenging fuels, such as butane and octane, that could be used by both airplane and conventional auto engines. Chu dubbed these sun-related projects Helios.

In Chu’s view, the magnitude and speed of climate change calls for a close partnership between research institutions, government regulators, and industry. By setting standards and establishing incentives, smart regulators can push industry, setting in motion big technological changes. “Getting technology deployed is best done in a business space,” he says. “You can develop technology at research institutions, as has been done in the past, but there’s a time delay. I don’t think we have a time luxury,” he asserts. “We want to partner with industry early because industry’s strength is that they can make technology scalable.” Chu understands that not everyone shares this view. “A small segment doesn’t understand that moving fast is better than maintaining purity,” he says. “Monasteries are good places, but they’re not good for science.”

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