Dr. Dan Arvizu, Director of NREL, presented a challenge in his keynote address at the Power-Gen Renewable Energy Conference on March 2, 2005. At left is Robert Foster, President of Southern California Edison.

"We in the renewables industry need to think about what will be our flagship," said Dr. Dan Arvizu to an audience of energy industry professionals. Arvizu is the new Director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He presented this challenge in his keynote address to the second annual Power-Gen Renewable Energy Conference in Las Vegas.

When Dr. Arvizu talks, the energy industry listens. After 25 years at Sandia National Laboratories, and leaving his post as CTO of CH2M Hill to lead NREL, he speaks with extraordinary credibility.

The previous evening, when Arvizu was introduced at an opening reception, he said, "All the progress we're making in renewables is for naught, if we don't commercialize it." This rings true for the 1,500 delegates and vendors at this conference, almost all of whom are focused on renewable energy technologies that are available today.

In his keynote Arvizu said that the role of NREL is not to advocate technology, but to analyze and synthesize the opportunities and options that are available to the marketplace. NREL's constituents are all the market performers, he said -- end users, technology vendors and policymakers alike.

Arvizu touched on the need for renewables, not only for environmental reasons, but also because the world's growing need for energy will meet an eventual shortfall from fossil fuels. That gap, in 40 to 50 years, will be considerable.

"We're going to need on the order of 20 terawatts of incremental clean energy," he said. "If we put optimistic policy measures in place, we'll get to about a terawatt. I would submit that one terawatt out of 20 is just an asterisk. It's not really what I would call a significant contribution."

Quickly covering the various forms of renewable energy, Arvizu highlighted opportunities in wind, solar and bioenergy. He went on to mention the need for non-polluting transportation fuels, hydrogen, the capture of CO2 from fossil fuels, next-generation nuclear fusion and fission, and a resilient electricity infrastructure. The list still is growing.

"We're not out of good ideas," he said. "There are a lot of tremendous ideas that are now coming forward. We've got major opportunity spaces in materials, nano sciences, photobiology and electrochemistry."

All of these are necessary to pursue, he said, to fill the world's energy gap. He quoted a colleague as saying that "we don't need a silver bullet, we need silver buckshot."

Arvizu illustrated the relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and energy consumption. He pointed out that emerging economies will increase their standard of living and, as their GDP grows, so will their energy consumption, unless we somehow break the connection between the two.

The most affluent nations are the ones with the means and the will to effect change, he said. How we fill the energy gap relates to the amount of investment we are willing to make.

"Our colleagues in the fossil energy are focused on their FutureGen program, and the nuclear industry is focused on the next generation nuclear plant," he said, pointing out the perceived need for significant investments in these flagships of their respective industries. In closing, he asked the audience to think about what should be the flagship of the renewable industry.

"What investment do we need to make that's commensurate with the kind of investment that they're asking for to fill that gap? That is our challenge. That is my mission."