A Photosynthesis Friendship and the US Grid Evolution—Plus, Clean Energy Research and Science Fiction Collide!

In this week’s episode, our hosts Kerrin and Taylor discuss:  

• A 30-year friendship that brings together NREL and minority-serving institutions through DOE’s Visiting Faculty Program to focus on unraveling the mysteries of photosynthesis. NREL researcher Juanping Yu and Alabama State University professor Harvey Hou research collaboration has resulted in research papers, an Energy Earthshots award, and new friendships.  
• Upgrading the nation’s power grid is a huge undertaking, but one that must be done to ensure an affordable, sustainable, and reliable energy future. The recently released National Transmission Planning Study identifies solutions that can help planners and developers revamp the grid to support the next generation of transmission needs and provide broadscale benefits to electric customers.  

Plus, special correspondent Jason Youngstrom shares an update on an event that brings science fiction writers and NREL researchers together to hypothesize about the future of our energy needs.  

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at podcast@nrel.gov. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.

Transcript

[intro music, fades] 

Kerrin: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We’re highlighting the latest in clean energy research and innovations happening at the lab. It’s October 16. I’m Kerrin Jeromin.    

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle.  

Kerrin: Taylor, today, I want to talk to you about the power of friendship. 

Taylor: Aw, Kerrin, I love our friendship, but not sure if our audience is really interested in that being our area of focus on the pod.

Kerrin: Luckily, I’m not actually talking about our friendship – as much as I love that. I’m talking about friends Harvey Hou and Jianping Yu a chemistry professor and molecular biology researcher who met nearly 30 years ago as postdoctoral researchers. 

Taylor: Hou went on to teach at Alabama State University, and Yu came here, to NREL. And for almost three decades, Hou and Yu dreamed of working together to research the mysteries of photosynthesis—you know, the process where plants turn energy from the sun into food.

Kerrin: Of course. Both of them focus on the study of photosynthesis—but different parts of the process. At Alabama State, Hou teaches the “light” stage—how the electron transfer reactions convert and store the sun’s energy as chemical bonds. 

Taylor: Meanwhile, at NREL, Yu studies the metabolism stage—or how carbon dioxide is reduced to form organic carbon compounds like sugars or starches. 

Kerrin: The good friends have remained in touch over the years, connecting at research conferences and always sharing knowledge with each other and their peers. Yet, the one thing that eluded them was the ability to work together on a research project.

Taylor: I feel a happy twist coming. 

Kerrin: Yes, yes of course, enter the U.S. Department of Energy’s Visiting Faculty Program. The program is designed for full-time faculty members from institutions historically underrepresented in STEM research—STEM of course stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The program provides opportunities to enhance research competitiveness and innovative STEM learning for students through a funded collaborative experience with a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory—of which, NREL is one.

Taylor: Alabama State is one of the nation’s oldest institutions of higher education founded for Black Americans. It was founded in 1867 in Marion, Alabama, as the Lincoln Normal School. The school was stood up using $500 raised by nine formerly enslaved men now known as the Marion Nine. Today, the university is in Montgomery, and it offers more than 60 undergraduate and graduate degree programs for students of all races.

Kerrin: Because Hou is a full-time faculty member at the university, he was eligible to apply for the Visiting Faculty Program. And, in 2023, he was accepted! 

Taylor: Which meant he was headed to NREL—and to finally, after all these years, collaborate in the lab with his good friend Jianping Yu! I love a story with a happy ending. 

Kerrin: Don’t we all. But the story doesn’t end there. Some pretty cool things emerged from their 10-week collaboration. 

Taylor: It’s like a feel-good sequel. The team published a paper together that explores how cyanobacteria regulate energy. 

Kerrin: And not only that, they were part of a larger team that won a U.S. Department of Energy Science Foundations for Energy Earthshots Award, giving them three years of additional funding. 

Taylor: But. There’s. More! Part of the vision with the Visiting Faculty Program is for all that collaboration and innovation that’s happening at the national laboratories is also shared with the students. So Hou brought the first Alabama State student ever to intern at a national lab to NREL. Together they studied the energy-generating mysteries of cyanobacteria—isolating microbes that convert nitrogen into ammonia during photosynthesis! 

Kerrin: And these are all great things for you to now go back into your old biology books, or Google and refresh yourself on. I did. Listeners, if you’re an educator looking for opportunities like this one, head to nrel.gov/about/teachers to learn more! 

Taylor: What a great story about some pretty cool research and a very cool friendship!

Kerrin: Agreed. And for the record Taylor, I do think our friendship is pretty cool.

Taylor: Agreed.  

[music]

Taylor: OK, so this next story covers the final report of a big study that was released earlier this month: The National Transmission Planning Study. 

Kerrin: Right, so to set the scene here: The U.S. power grid has been called one of the greatest—and largest—engineering marvels of the 20th century. It’s made up of more than half a million miles of transmission lines and delivers power to 160 million customers every day. 

Taylor: Over the past decade though, the rate of adding new transmission lines to the US grid has dramatically slowed. Meanwhile, electricity demand is steadily increasing. And most of the nation’s low-cost renewable energy resources aren’t located close to places with the most energy demand. So long-distance transmission lines are essential.

Kerrin: All of these things point to the fact that transmission is a key part of the clean energy transition—but planners and developers need a better understanding of how the nation’s current transmission system must evolve to break free of this, well, gridlock. 

Taylor: So, here’s where the National Transmission Planning Study comes in. This study identified transmission solutions that can help planners and developers revamp the U.S. power grid to support the next generation of transmission needs and provide broadscale benefits to electric customers. 

Kerrin: It found that the contiguous U.S. transmission system will need to at least double in size by 2050 to maintain reliability at the lowest cost to customers.

Taylor: Wow. Study author David Palchak said one of the motivations behind the study was to develop a framework to analyze transmission across many different complicated dimensions, from economics, emissions, reliability … and at a national scale. 

David Palchak : What we're trying to do is expose some common solutions that we see across a lot of different futures. And, you know, what we're good at at NREL is looking at high renewable energy futures and understanding where these resources might go around the country and trying to create those futures and understand the role that transmission will play. So we're not trying to replace what happens at the regions and we're certainly not doing any actual building of transmission or coming up with real, you know, plans of service that would likely go into practice. We're just trying to really kind of bring a lot of ideas and solutions that could be picked up by different planners and utilities around the country. 

Kerrin: If you’d like to learn more, you can check out the study, at nrel.gov, and use the search terms National Transmission Planning Study.

[music] 

Kerrin: Alright for this part of the podcast, we’re going to hand the mic over to our special correspondent Jason Youngstrom, who also guest hosts for us once in a while! Jason’s got the latest on a pretty cool and pretty futuristic converging of the minds that happened recently at the laboratory. 

Taylor: Great to have you as always Jason, please take it away!

Jason: Thank you both! I’m going to kick this off with a question for our listeners: What do you think the world will look like in 2100?

It may sound like a far-off date deep in the misty future, but it’s just 75 short years from now. And the world of 2100 was the topic on everyone’s mind at a recent NREL workshop titled Visioning Energy: Science Fiction Author-Energy Researcher Collaboration. The event was held this past summer at NREL, and it gave our researchers a chance to talk through the long-term opportunities and ramifications of the tech that NREL is working on right now. It also gave them an opportunity to meet with a group of people that have experience thinking deeply about the future: And yes, I’m talking about science fiction writers.

While it may seem strange to invite speculative fiction writers to talk to scientists about the world we are building, science fiction has long dealt with the impact of scientific advancement on society.  Pairing the scientific experience of NREL researchers with the speculative chops of these authors resulted in a lively afternoon of discussion about the science NREL is working on—and how these discoveries will change society.  For the NREL researchers it was an opportunity to think about the impacts of the scientific advances on their lab-benches right now.  And for the authors, they got to see first-hand what technical marvels are currently being developed.

So when thinking about 75 years into the future, it’s helpful to think about what technology looked like 75 years ago. Way back in the 20th century! 

[echoing]

In 1949 the transistor was just moving from the lab to production and transistor radios wouldn’t hit the market for another five years. 

[radio static]

Computers were the size of houses with a fraction of the power of your smart phone, and the internet wasn’t even a dream. 

[dial up modem sounds]

Thinking of those advances, it’s perfectly reasonable that the cutting-edge science coming out of NREL today will be fully commercialized by 2100. Some of it may even be obsolete!  Just like the transistor radio. 

[radio static]

The optimism was baked into these conversations, there was a foundational assumption that by 2100 the Earth will be a carbon neutral or carbon negative economy, and that the planet will not be getting warmer. The NREL scientists were also confident that at this point energy will be so plentiful and cheap that many of the processes that are today considered too energy intensive would be reasonable for mass deployment. There was even talk of solar collectors in space beaming energy to earth 24x7.  

[deep humming sound]

With these energy advances, power becomes essentially free, some of the technologies that benefit from ubiquitous energy are desalination plants and clean hydrogen – hydrogen produced by water electrolysis powered by renewable energy. So plentiful energy makes possible potable water for all and carbon neutral liquid fuels for transportation and industry. 

The groups also spent time talking about the increased role of computer power in daily life: basically, with cheap energy the computer- intensive processes of AI become commonplace. All of this energy, water, and processing power has the potential to make a lot of our work less labor intensive. This could mean the people of 2100 have a lot more free time to focus on the things they really enjoy. Maybe we can look forward to the two day work week envisioned by the 1962 TV series the Jetson’s!

[futuristic music] 

For the gathered scientists and writers this means that the work of the next 75 years is going to be on the policy side. If NREL meets all of the scientific goals of clean energy, we as a society are going to have to revisit the way work relates to the necessities of life, to make sure that all of us are able to make the most of the energy rich world of 2100.  This is some pretty serious Star Trek stuff, personally I’m hoping for a replicator and naturally, those stylish boots from the original TV show!

[sci-fi music]

Of course, all of this speculation depends on some pretty amazing scientific advances from NREL and others in the next 75 years. And we, here at NREL, are working every day to make this dream of a clean energy future a reality. 

 [music]  

Kerrin: Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to live a Jetsons lifestyle, how about you Taylor?  

Taylor: Beam me up scotty! But it is cool to bring science fiction writers into the conversation as we’re building a clean energy future. A lot of innovation starts as a wild idea in someone’s mind. 

Kerrin: So, so true. And I love that creative space. To all our listeners, live long and prosper, may the force be with you,

Taylor: And also with you. 

Kerrin: And thank you for tuning in to another episode of Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast. We’ll be back in two weeks with more news from the lab. 

Taylor: Thanks everyone!

[music]  

Kerrin: This episode was based on stories written by Justin Rickard and Emily Mercer. Special thanks to correspondent Jason Youngstrom. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca, and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift B-C. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land. 

[music]