Congress rejects most of Chu’s energy ‘Bell Lab-lets’

Just days before this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Willard Boyle and George Smith for work they performed at Bell Labs, lawmakers dealt a blow to Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s vision of creating “Bell Lab-lets” to tackle key research challenges blocking the way to a carbon-free energy future. Chu, himself a Nobel laureate for physics research he conducted at Bell Labs, will receive just $66 million of the $280 million he had sought this year to establish eight “energy innovation hubs,” centers that he hoped would duplicate many of the features that had made his former employer an engine of innovation and generated several Nobel Prizes in the decades before the 1984 breakup of AT&T.

The final version of the fiscal year 2010 appropriations bill for the Department of Energy (DOE) included just three of the hubs and provided each one with $22 million; Chu had requested $35 million per hub. The House–Senate compromise okayed hubs for modeling and simulating advanced nuclear reactors, developing methods to convert sunlight to liquid fuels, and designing energy-efficient buildings. Appropriators rejected other proposed centers for developing new materials for the extreme environments found in advanced reactors; improving methods for energy storage; designing materials, devices, and systems for a modernized electricity grid; refining carbon capture and storage; and producing solar electricity. An earlier House-passed version of the bill noted that the hubs could duplicate research already under way at the 46 energy frontier research centers—established by DOE earlier this year at universities, national labs, and other institutions—and that they overlap with the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which is to award $400 million in grants this year for high-risk research on alternative energy. The EFRCs and ARPA–E were funded mostly with onetime economic stimulus funding.

Chu had conceived of the hubs as being quite apart from both the much smaller EFRCs and ARPA–E. The hubs, he has explained, would attempt to overlay the Bell Labs template onto major energy and climate-change needs and would provide top-notch scientists with the flexibility and freedom to pursue their research paths in any direction—just the sort of treatment he had received at Bell Labs. “I call them Bell Lab-lets because some of the very best stuff that was developed in the telecommunications industry came out of Bell Laboratories,” Chu said in a 23 September speech.

The pre-breakup Bell Labs holds legendary status as the most prolific of a handful of US corporations that once routinely supported a significant amount of in-house, high-risk basic research—others are IBM, Xerox, and RCA. What stood out at Bell Labs, say Chu and other admirers of the institution, was its management’s encouragement for scientists to wander off to where their basic research took them, often for years at a time with no clear path toward a commercial product or process.

Eric Isaacs, a physicist who spent 15 years at Bell Labs and is now director of Argonne National Laboratory, says that Bell “had the full value chain—basic science, applied science, and engineering—and [was] able to deliver innovations throughout the nation.” Isaacs had pitched ANL to become the advanced energy storage hub. Appropriators in the House of Representatives pointed out that more than 10 of the EFRCs, including one at ANL, are already being funded to investigate, exclusively or in large part, batteries and energy storage. “A new set of centers with overlapping research goals risks adding confusion and redundancy to the existing fleet of research and development initiatives,” their report states.