From pv magazine USA
A few months ago, we listed potential U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) secretary appointees under President-elect Joe Biden, gleaned from Twitter’s collective wisdom. We’ve updated the tally and the leader’s list, and the same names keep popping up.
The clear crowd favorite is still Washington Governor Jay Inslee. Here’s Inslee’s clean energy manifesto, developed over his career and honed on his curtailed presidential campaign. However, Inslee might end up as the clean power czar or the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Biden is considering creating a White House office led by a global warming “czar.” Candidates for the head role reportedly include Inslee and former Secretary of State John Kerry
There have been additional votes for Ernest Moniz and Elon Musk, as well as Martin Heinrich, David Hochschild, Saul Griffith, Sandra Steingraber, Jennifer Granholm, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Jan Mazurek, Susan Tierney, Anne Pramaggiore, Sean Casten, Amy Klobuchar and Jason Bordoff.
Perhaps more insightful than Twitter’s choice of DoE secretary is its take on the job and the cabinet itself. A large number of tweets have asked for the creation of a cabinet-level climate czar and the elevation of the EPA to cabinet department. Other tweets have called for breaking up the DoE into a sub-cabinet-level nuclear weapons and stockpile agency and a cabinet-level agency dedicated to the low-carbon energy transition.
Research or deployment?
Politico is handicapping the Biden cabinet competition and has come up with these contenders for the DoE.
- Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who was President Barack Obama’s energy secretary and has been an informal adviser to the Biden campaign on energy matters.
- Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall served as deputy secretary of energy during Obama’s second term, and as White House coordinator for defense policy, countering weapons of mass destruction, and arms control.
- Arun Majumdar is the founding chief of ARPA-E. He later served as acting under secretary of the DoE under Moniz and is now on the Stanford University faculty.
Generate Capital President Jigar Shah spoke about Moniz in 2013, but his words were prescient, then and now. And they apply to any candidate steeped in the academy or the lab.
“With the likely nomination of Ernest Moniz as the secretary of energy, President Obama has chosen invention over deployment – and R&D over job creation and carbon reduction,” Shah said. “Innovation that is not deployed leaves the president’s promise of oil independence and renewable electricity unfulfilled. We need a ‘deployment' energy secretary. One who understands how entrepreneurs move from research to revenue. One who understands the difference between venture capital and project finance – the difference between research and deployment.”
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Musk is far more valuable to have as the head of Tesla vs Energy Secretary. Nothing moves the market forward faster than fierce competition. No company provides that better than a Musk-led Tesla.