Technology in the Greenhouse:  Navigating the Clean Energy Transition

Abstract: Energy is the lifeblood of modern societies.  Energy services are woven throughout the fabric of modern life, rural or urban, in the developed world.    A successful global future energy system will provide energy security, economic security, and health and environmental security:  energy that is clean, available, affordable and reliable.  Addressing the challenge of climate change offers an opportunity to make progress on all those broad goals with energy technologies that are clean, deployable at large scale, and fully cost competitive. 

Technology improvements have started a transition away from an energy system that is dominated by fossil fuels.  There is no shortage of energy available to support human endeavors.  Instead, the challenge is to provide clean conversions of that energy to the services required:  electricity, transportation, lighting, heating, and cooling, and manufacturing.  Deep reductions in the cost of technologies like solar photovoltaics and wind power generation, increasing energy efficiency, and efforts to modernize the transmission and distribution of electric power, including deployment of energy storage, are reshaping the energy landscape for the United States and the world.  Recent progress has been impressive, but there is much more to be done.  This presentation examines options for meeting those challenges, outlines the need for additional energy innovation, and explores research and development pathways that offer important opportunities for continued progress toward those goals.  The range of opportunities available to create a clean energy transformation has never been bigger, if we apply in a sustained way what we know how to do now and fill the innovation pipeline for the future.

Bio: Lynn Orr is the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor Emeritus, Department of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University.  He served as Under Secretary for Science and Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2014 to 2017.  Previously at Stanford, he served as Dean of the School of Earth Sciences from 1994 to 2002, as Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project from 2002 to 2008, and as Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy from 2009 to 2014. 

He joined Stanford in 1985. His research activities focus on how complex fluid mixtures flow in the porous rocks in the Earth's crust, the design of gas injection processes for enhanced oil recovery, CO2 storage in subsurface rock formations, and pathways for the clean energy transition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit adverse effects of climate change.

He was employed previously by the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC (1970-72), Shell Development Company in Houston (1976-78), and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro (1978-85).  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering. 

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.  He serves on the Board of Directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and chairs the Board of Directors of the ClimateWorks Foundation.  He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Packard Foundation from 1999 to 2008, and he helped establish the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowships for Science and Engineering in 1988.