National Labs, Corporate Labs & Hydrogen-Powered Cars Feb

700 Federally Operated Laboratories 100,000 Scientists $24 billion (ca. 2000)

NIST (1905) USDA (1914) Los Alamos (1942) Lawrence Livermore (1951) Traditional Rationalization: Projects Too Large or Too Applied for Universities.

Stevenson-Wydler Innovation Act (1980) Created Offices of Research and Technology Applications Early 1980s: Informal collaboration, technical assistance & licensing. Championing technologies. National Cooperative Research Act (1984) Antitrust Exemption for Research Consortia Trade Secrets Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 CRADAs: Late 1980s: Resource Sharing + Exclusive Licenses + Close Relations With Individual Partners

American Technology Preeminence Act (1991) Support for “Precompetitive Technologies” SBIR and State Money National Technology Transfer Act (1995) CRADA Partners get Exclusive Licenses Inventors: 15% royalty capped at $150K 1990s: CRADAs Crowd Out Licenses. Startups “Entrepreneurial” Leaves of Absence. ARCH (University of Chicago) and Technology Ventures (Sandia)

More Patents, More Licensing Royalties More Spin-Offs and Start-Ups More Industry-Initiated Projects More Prototypes & Samples Fewer Company and Product Failures Shorter Time to Market Users Targeted More Narrowly More Small Firm Involvement Sally Rood, Government Laboratory Technology Transfer (2000)

More Late Stage Innovation Do CRADAs Crowd Out Basic Research? More Cooperation With Industry vs. Universities Less Publishing Sally Rood, Government Laboratory Technology Transfer (2000)

LBNL: $1m in royalties vs. $1bn annual budget. A Big Incentive for Individual Researchers.

Activities: $181 bn. 71% Development 20% Applied Research 9% Basic Research (But 32% of Total!)

1860s – 1910s:Hoechst & Bayer; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute 1870s – 1920:Edison’s Idea Factories 1900s:AT&T and DuPont Chemicals & Electricity :Long Distance 1920:$30m 1930:$100m 1940:$200m Beginnings

1920s:~ A dozen engineers 1940s: V-2 Program 90,000 parts 1,960 scientists, engineers, and technicians 3,852 support staff 1950s:IBM 1960s:Apollo 1970s: Semiconductors 1980s:Operating Systems Complex R&D

Attracting the Best Talent When is Knowledge is “Basic?” The Transistor Disk Drive Technology Carothers & Nylon Campus-Like R&D

1920s:Bell Labs Studies Quantum Mechanics & Information Theory 1930s:Keeping the Pipeline Full Carothers & Nylon 1940:$200m Bell Labs Discovers The Transistor 1950s:IBM Develops the Modern Computer. 1960s:Bell Labs Discovers The Big Bang 1970s:Xerox Parc 1980s:Biotech Campus-Like R&D

90% Industry, 10% Federal Who Pays?

Private Federal Pharmaceuticals 19%-- Semiconductors 15% -- Motor vehicles 14%-- Software 8%-- Basic science 6%13% Aerospace 4%40% Computers 3% 27% Who Pays?

Monopoly vs. Innovation Lucent and IBM R&D at Microsoft

“Since 2001, We have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable energy sources – and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.” “So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative – a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research – at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthorughs in two vital areas … We must … change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen”

A suite of technologies…

The Problem With Batteries William Nicholson & Anthony Carlisle (1800) Decomposition of Water William Robert Grove (1838) “Gas Battery” Oxygen + Hydrogen +Platinum Electrodes +Sulfuric Acid Corrosion + Cost

Extensions Phosphoric Acid & New Electrode Materials (1960s) Runs on Air Allis Chalmers & US Army (1960s) Pratt & Whitney & American Gas Association (1960s-1983) LLNL (1970s) Cogeneration KW stationery power (1997) 100KW bus (1998) Extended Warm-Up Period + Carbonates Problem

Friedrich Ostwald (1893) Theory of Fuel Cells Francis Thomas Bacon (late 1930s) Alkali Fuel Cells (Potasium hydroxide electrolytes) Allis-Chalmers & US Army (1950s) Apollo (1960s) & Space Shuttle (1980s) The Carbonates Problem

Emil Baur and H. Preis (1930s) Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells US Army (1960s) Stationary Plants (1990s) General Electric (1960s) Proton Exchange Membrane Technology Gemini (1960s) Royal Navy, Los Alamos (1980s) Buses (1995) and Helios Aircraft Proposal (2000) Platinum – Still ~ 100x more expensive per KWH generated.

Should We Do It?

Sperling & Ogden Reading: “Hydrogen … has no natural political or economic enemies, and has a strong industrial proponent in the automotive industry…In the end, though, the hydrogen situation is perilous… The key is enhanced science and techology in vestments, both public and private, and a policy environment that favors those investments.”

Sperling & Ogden Reading: Automakers Like It Currently investing ~ $150m/automaker/year 10x Improvement Needed Are They Willing to Invest in Tooling & Products? Without Automakers, It Won’t Happen

Romm Reading: “Hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles should be viewed as post-2030 technologies. In September 2003, a DOE panel on Basic Research Needs for the Hydrogen Economy concluded that gaps between current hydrogen technologies and what is required by the marketplace ‘cannot be bridged by incremental advances of the present state of the art’ but instead require ‘revolutionary conceptual breakthroughs.’”

Romm Reading: “DOE should focus its hydrogen R&D budget on exploratory breakthrough research.”

Addison White, Three Degrees Above Zero: “The project had been steadily expanding but in an orderly way, about as rapidly as was humanly possible as problems became defined and new ideas evolved. Incidentally, as a comparison, I think that our country has been conducting its affairs in an absurd way on cancer research, much of which is being done without a guiding idea. We are trying to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem without enough ideas, which is nonsense. It would have been the same sort of thing if we had tried to move more rapidly in the case of the transistor.”

Should Government Do It? If so, How Should Government Do It?

Do We Need to Make Energy Companies Happy? Would Energy Companies Block a Battery-Based Solution? [Sperling & Ogden]

Addison White, Three Degrees Above Zero: “White also has a distinct, if less happy, memory of an article, written at that time by a university physics professor and published by a national magazine, claiming that the Bell System was monopolizing the transistor, ‘sitting on it, so to speak so as to protect our investment in plant already in place. Meanwhile a hundred men here were busting a gut trying to make the thing work.'”