Q: Much has been said in the press for the past 30 or so years about the potential of renewable, non-polluting energy resources. Yet, we still see little of this clean, "green" technology in daily life. Is this going to change?

A: The exciting thing now is that in fact these technologies — the clean energy technologies — are taking root in a way that we hoped they would 20 or 30 years ago.

The big difference between now and then is that the cost of the technologies has dropped so dramatically. Let me give two examples: Wind power cost 40 cents a kilowatt hour in 1980. It is 4-5 cents a kilowatt hour today, one-tenth the cost of what it was in 1980. The result: Wind is now the fastest-growing energy source in the world. Over the past year or two, we've seen an absolutely phenomenal growth in wind installations in Europe, in parts of Asia, and in North America.

We've had our biggest year ever in the United States in terms of wind installations. The largest wind installations in the world have just recently gone into operation in Iowa and Minnesota. India has put on line on the order of 1,000 megawatts of new wind-generated power in just the last couple of years. And in Europe, the growth has been phenomenal.

It's the same story with solar technology. Solar power, particularly solar-generated electricity, is one-fifth the cost today of what it was in 1980. We have some distance to go to make it competitive in all respects with other sources of electricity, but it is highly competitive today in a variety of situations, first and foremost, where it is used to provide power to people who are not connected to a standard electricity grid. There are on the order of about 2 billion [thousand million] people around the globe who are not connected to an electricity grid, and so for many of those people the most competitive technology is, in fact, solar technology, when you compare it with the high cost of extending power lines. We have seen very substantial growth over the last five years in the solar industry, driven by its competitiveness in rural areas across the globe. It's also increasingly competitive in on-grid situations, where a community is connected to power lines, particularly where the cost of electricity is high for various reasons, or where you can avoid having to upgrade distribution lines by putting in solar power instead.

I installed solar panels on my own home in Maryland. I'm connected to the local electric utility, but when my solar panels are making more power than I'm using, I run my electricity meter backwards, and lower my bill. When I use more than the solar panels make, I draw electricity from the utility and pay the going rate. With the solar panels, a high efficiency air conditioner, and compact flourescent lights, I'm paying just a dollar a day for electricity, on average.

In June, 1997, President Clinton launched the "Million Solar Roofs" initiative. The goal of this is to put a million solar systems on U.S. roofs by 2010. The reason that we're quite optimistic we're going to be able to meet that goal is, one, we've got the cost down so dramatically — and, equally important, it is continuing to drop — and, two, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, the technology is very reliable. It's proven. The systems come certified by independent testing laboratories. They will work for 25 or 30 years. They're low-maintenance — a roll of paper towels and a bottle of window cleaning solution is all it takes!

In addition, in our country, as in many countries around the world, there is now increasingly competition among electricity suppliers for customers. So customers now have a choice of who supplies them with electricity, as, increasingly, we do with respect to who supplies us with our telephone service.

This allows people to choose "greener" electricity providers, suppliers who will supply them with electricity made from renewable energy like solar and wind. It also gives them a choice of generating their own power in their own homes and buildings. This is the advent of the "green" power industry in the United States and around the world. In Pennsylvania there are now over 400,000 people who have chosen "green" power, because they have been given a choice of electric utilities, and they choose to buy electricity from cleaner sources. In California, we have a similar strong expression of interest from consumers to buy electricity from cleaner sources.

Q: Specifically, what are the sources of this clean power in Pennsylvania?

A: It's a mix of things. There is some hydroelectric power, there is some solar power, and there is power generated from landfill gases. In this last case, instead of permitting gas emissions to escape from landfills and increase atmospheric pollution, these gases can be used to generate electricity. There are hundreds of landfill gas facilities generating power around the United States as we speak. That's a very cost-effective technology. It happens that the gases that emanate from a landfill, looked at from a climate change perspective, are even more worrisome than the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels. These landfill emissions consist largely of methane, which ton for ton can do even more damage to the climate than carbon dioxide does. So not only are landfills relatively competitive sources of electricity, but siphoning off the methane prevents one of the worst global warming gases from getting into the atmosphere.

In addition, there are new sources of wind power being constructed in Pennsylvania, in order to add this clean source to the supply mix. Natural gas is a cleaner source of power generation than other fossil fuels, so increasingly we're trying to move in that direction as well. In fact, at the moment, the biggest new source of power in the United States is natural gas-fired generation. Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. We've worked in the Department of Energy with industry for years to develop highly efficient turbine generators that can extract a large percentage of the energy in a unit of natural gas and put out very little pollution.

Q: Do improved nuclear and cleaner coal- and oil-burning power plants qualify as clean energy, in your view?

A: When I talk about clean technology I'm talking about an array of technologies, including taking the more traditional technologies and improving them; so, for example, it's clear that countries in Asia and elsewhere are going to continue for the foreseeable future to burn coal. One of the things we are doing in the Department of Energy is to develop much cleaner, more efficient coal-burning technologies, so that when new plants get built that are based on coal, we put in the cleanest, most efficient plants available.

There will be for the foreseeable future quite a mix of technologies generating power in the world. We want to be sure that while we transition to renewable energy sources we are using the cleanest of the clean traditional technologies that we can, and that we continue to improve them.

Q: What kinds of clean technologies are coming along to help improve automobile-generated pollution?

A: There are many exciting things going on in the transportation sector. The first improvement consists of vehicles that put out substantially lower emissions. Some of this has already occurred. We've seen a dramatic reduction in per-vehicle emissions over the last two decades. Emissions today from individual vehicles are a small percentage of what they were 20 or 30 years ago. That's the first trend we see.

The second trend that we're seeing is the development of cleaner fuels that go into the vehicles: improved versions of traditional fuels like gasoline and diesel, and in the North American context anyway, less traditional fuels such as ethanol, methanol, and natural gas — as well as breakthroughs in the batteries that power electric cars.

The third area — which is perhaps the most exciting — is that we're seeing the beginning of whole new technologies for propelling vehicles. On the market as we speak in some countries are hybrid vehicles that link the best characteristics of electric motors with the best characteristics of internal combustion engines. Put them together, and we get vehicles on the road today that can get 60 or 70 miles per gallon of fuel.

I believe we're going to see increased sales of these kinds of advanced technology vehicles, and then further technological breakthroughs. The hybrid vehicles here today, in my view, will increase in numbers over the next several years, particularly in countries where fuel costs are high. Honda and Toyota have already put such vehicles into the market. U.S. manufacturers are working on similar technology. We were recently delivered an automobile under a research contract with Ford: a five- to six- passenger sedan with a hybrid electric-diesel propulsion system that gets better than 60 mpg and has low emissions.

Down the road, we're going to see further breakthroughs, and one of the most exciting is fuel-cell-powered vehicles. A fuel cell is a very simple way to make electricity in a very clean fashion in a vehicle. Essentially, you put hydrogen on one side of a membrane and oxygen on the other side of a membrane. When those two groups of molecules interact, they create electricity, with water and heat as byproduct. A fuel cell allows you to power an electric motor and obviates the need for the kinds of heavy batteries that electric vehicles now rely on. A fuel cell vehicle allows you to go to a fueling station and fill up with natural gas or gasoline or ethanol. Such fuels are used as the source of the hydrogen; the oxygen comes from the air, and the only emissions are heat, water, and very small amounts of carbon monoxide. These vehicles promise 80 miles per gallon and up, so they could be a very big breakthrough.

Q: When do you think a substantial portion of the world vehicle fleet might consist of such advanced vehicles?

A: I see the big growth taking place in the middle of the next decade and beyond. I think we're going to see a major ramp-up in sales from 2004-05 onwards. What we'll see between now and then are the beginnings — the market getting introduced to these vehicles, people getting experience with them, the development of the fueling and servicing infrastructure.

Q: One of the reasons being given for trying to produce clean power is that the carbon cycle produces global warming. But suppose global warming were not an issue — would there be any reason at all to go with new clean power technologies?

A: We should be developing and promoting these clean technologies for power generation, for buildings, for transportation, even without the very real concern about global warming. For a whole host of other reasons, clean power generation is absolutely critical. First, to confront dirty air in cities all over the world that are being choked by very commonplace forms of pollution. We are harming kids and the elderly all over the globe with huge and rapidly increasing amounts of pollution generated from vehicles and other sources of smog, chemicals, and particulate pollutants. The response to that, first and foremost, has to come from these advanced technologies.

The second reason that it is important to advance clean energy technologies is that we're dealing with finite resources on this planet. We have to maximize our efficient use of those resources, and these kinds of technologies allow us to do that, so we can make the most use of a gallon of gasoline or a ton of coal and transition to a time when we'll be relying to a much greater extent on renewable resources as the linchpin of a sustainable economy.

Third, there is a wonderful market out there for clean technologies and a very healthy race going on across the globe for that market share. We're looking at the need for new energy development over the next 20 years that will require investments of a trillion [million million] dollars or more, and there are wonderful economic opportunities for the nations and the people who can capture substantial pieces of that market. We are going to have to almost double the current installed base of electricity generation worldwide over the next couple of decades, and that poses a very fundamental challenge — that is, will we do it in a clean and efficient way, or will we do it using older and dirtier technology? The environmental future of the globe hinges, in part, on how we meet that challenge.

Q: How do you see the future of biomass energy generation — the use of forest and agricultural byproducts to create new sources of energy, as well as chemicals and materials?

A: The biomass resource is, literally, the residue of anything biological that grows on the land and also, to some extent, in water. That's the potential resource. There are new technologies that allow us to use biomass in a very clean and highly efficient manner to make electricity, to make liquid transportation fuels like ethanol, and, increasingly, to replace oil in the production of chemical-based products — a quick example would be ink made from soybeans rather than from petroleum feedstocks.

Obviously, we've been using biomass on the planet for a very long time — people heating their homes with wood, and by generating electricity from wood-fired power plants. What we're talking about in the newer use of biomass are technologies that can do this in a much cleaner and more efficient way. To make the leap with biomass that President Clinton has challenged us to make in the United States — which is to triple our use of bio-energy by 2010 — will require the newer technologies that address environmental concerns. It will require high-efficiency energy generation from biomass. For example, the pulp-and-paper industry today creates as a byproduct a waste called "black liquor" that they get rid of inefficiently. They would like to adopt a whole new technology called "gasification," which would allow them to become large net producers of clean electricity.

Similarly, today we make ethanol from corn [maize] for use in automobiles. What we're looking at are newer technologies that will allow us to make ethanol from all sorts of other organic materials, including not just the kernel of the corn but the whole rest of the corn stalk. We are, for example, supporting the construction of a brand-new commercial-scale ethanol facility in the state of Louisiana that will make ethanol out of waste that the sugar-cane industry is now paying to get rid of. It will go from being a net negative for this industry to a net positive — a new source of energy — while avoiding the pollution problems we would otherwise have.

In California, the rice industry is facing all sorts of problems because they can no longer, under environmental laws, burn the rice straw that comes from growing rice in the field. What we're looking at again is something that can take this rice straw and make it into ethanol through a very innovative process.

So this is a new approach to biomass that will take a whole range of new technologies and allow us to extract energy and products as a substitute in many cases for fossil fuels. With this and the other exciting technologies that are here today — or on their way — we have a bright energy future.