Editor's Note: This entry has been cross-posted from DOE's Energy Blog.
We have the video of the online town hall event with Secretary Chu up and ready for your viewing. Check it out below.
During the event, Secretary Chu highlighted several parts of the President Obama’s clean energy and innovation agenda:
- Ending taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels so we can increase our investments in clean energy by a third;
- Creating three new Energy Innovation Hubs;
- Putting one million advanced technology vehicles on the road by 2015;
- A "Sun Shot" initiative to make solar energy cost-competitive with fossil-based fuels before the end of this decade; and
- An ambitious new goal of having 80 percent of America’s electricity come from clean sources by 2035.
He also provided some inspiring examples of how investments in clean energy work. Among them: The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab is a leader in advanced battery research and development. Envia, a California-based start-up that received funding from ARPA-E, licensed and further advanced Argonnne's research. And now General Motors has signed agreement to use Envia's advanced battery technology as it develops its future electric cars.
The Secretary took about 40 minutes of questions from both the in-house audience and the online audiences. Among them: Will the chronically underemployed be among those benefiting from clean energy jobs? How can you make coal a cleaner source of energy? How can we get more biologists going into the bioenergy field instead of just the biomedical field? What can be done on a federal level to make our energy more efficient?
And then the question that ended up being the most memorable was "What is the best way to weatherize your home?," since the Secretary answered it and then went on to describe his trials and tribulations in finding a solution to the drafty mail slot in his own home's front door.
You can catch the entire event and all of the Secretary's answers in the full video above.
And since this event marked the first of a new yearlong "Energy Matters" live chat series, check back to the Energy Blog as we schedule more in the coming months.
