Dr. Arun Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Professor at Stanford University, where he serves on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and is a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy.
Prior to joining Stanford, Dr Majumdar was the Vice President for Energy at Google, where he created several energy technology initiatives and advised the company on its broader energy strategy. He continues to be a consultant to Google on energy.
In 2009, Dr. Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), where he served till June 2012. Dr. Majumdar has also served as the Acting Under Secretary of Energy, and a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy. .
1. Google has invested more than US$1 billion into renewable energy projects over the past five years. From your time at Google, could you share some insight on what the company hopes to achieve through these investments?
Google wants to reduce carbon emissions and encourage access to clean, affordable and reliable energy. Investing in renewables is a way to achieve that and the returns on the investments are quite good. Google would rather invest in something innovative like renewable energy or even a new business model that could catalyze something big and drive significant change – even if there is a higher element of risk involved.
2. The Green Grid Association has launched a movement to promote energy efficiency in Asia-Pacific’s data centers. What are some initiatives that companies in the region can adopt to promote energy efficiency in their data centers?
As a start, companies should be tracking their energy use. You cannot manage or assess what you do not measure. The industry uses the measurement PUE, or power usage effectiveness, to measure and help reduce the energy used for non-computing functions like cooling and power distribution. A PUE of 2.0 means that for every watt of IT power, an additional watt is consumed to cool and distribute power to the IT equipment. A PUE closer to 1.0 means nearly all of the energy is used for computing.
Cooling is one of the most significant consumers of power in data center and there are a number of ways in which cooling can be done more efficiently. These include: managing airflow in the data center to prevent “hot aisle” air behind the server racks from mixing with the “cold aisle” in front of the server racks; utilizing better design through thermal modeling to locate “hot spots” and better understand airflow in the data center; minimizing the use of chillers by taking advantage of "free cooling" to remove heat from your facility through ways such as low temperature ambient air, evaporating water, or a large thermal reservoir.
At its core, the imperative to adopt is really to reduce the cost of operationalization, and there are a lot of initiatives that can be adopted to ensure that power is used in the most effective and efficient manner.
3. As energy demand in Asia Pacific continues to increase, countries in the region are considering smart grid technology to increase the efficiency of their power distribution systems. What are the challenges you see that they will face in adopting smart grid technology?
The architecture of the grid today is a legacy of Tesla and Edison, and more than 100 years old. The paradigm so far has been centralized generation with one-way electrical power to billions of loads. With essentially no storage on the grid, generation and load has to be balanced in real time. If the loads change, generation always follows load. For the first time in 100 years, we are now finding that distributed generation will become affordable and cost-competitive with centralized generation. In contrast with centralized generation, the distributed ones such as wind and solar don’t generate electricity constantly over time, but they fluctuate. The Tesla-Edison grid was never designed for distributed resources such as these, and especially when they are fluctuating. The challenge now is to transition the grid to something smarter, ie one where we can accommodate both centralized and distributed resources (including load, generation and storage), where we can maximize the capacity utilization of these resources, make the system more reliable while reducing overall cost. That is what we call the smart grid. For example, we need communication between these resources and autonomous decision making so that it may not be simply generation following load as in the past, but rather load that could follow fluctuating generation.
A number of factors must be considered before smart grid technology can be successfully adopted. These include: How do you manage data and how do you create financial and other value from the data? What data should be used locally for rapid autonomous decision making, and what should be used in the cloud for long-term analytics and trends? Can we make the system bullet-proof in terms of resilience? How can we manage potential cybersecurity issues? Can we bring more transparency to the consumer and provide financial incentives for them to respond to the needs of the grid? And finally how do we transition the existing institutions and stakeholders to adopt such an approach?
4. In your current role at Stanford University, what are some research areas in energy that you are keen to explore and why?
I have just restarted my research group at Stanford, where I have been only for a few months. My research over the last 25 years (mostly at UC Berkeley & Lawrence Berkeley Labs) has focused on the science and engineering of nanostructures. There are new materials that can now be made that were never available 20 years ago. There are several thought-provoking science questions that have remained unanswered, which we hope to answer. There are also unique opportunities for applications of nanomaterials in energy conversion, storage, and efficient use that I will continue to pursue. I used to have an effort at the intersection of nanomaterials and biomedical applications, and I might look at that from a new angle.
Another area I’m starting to explore is nuclear. There is great potential for nuclear as a carbon-free energy source, but there are many concerns surrounding it and we have gone down a path that is very hard to change. I’m sure there is a better alternative ways of tapping into nuclear so that the risks are better mitigated.
And finally, I am interested in looking at the grid as a complex system that combines technology, infrastructure, institutions, finance, markets and policy. The grid is going through a major transition with the rapid introduction of natural gas and renewables as well as constraints on greenhouse gas emissions. I’m also interested in the resulting business models and policies.
5. Having overseen emerging green technology initiatives in your roles at Google and ARPA-E, could you share which of these you think holds the most promise for the Asia-Pacific region?
When I look at energy for any region, I tend to do so in the context of three securities – national security, economic security and environmental security. We have to look for options that balance our approach and address all three of them.
Because of limited energy resources in various countries, Asia-Pacific can really lead the way in energy efficiency measures and show the world how it can be done cost-effectively. There is significant potential here, and it needs the combination of technology, finance and markets, which can be aligned through enlightened policy. This spans both electricity and transportation.
It is important for Asia Pacific to reduce its reliance on coal and use natural gas instead for electricity generation. Natural gas is cleaner, more sustainable and efficient than coal, plus it is abundant in the region. China, for example, has the largest reserve of shale gas that has yet to be extracted.
But overdependence on a single resource is not a good idea. Hence, the use of appropriate forms of renewables to diversify the energy mix is very important. But that also requires the need to integrate renewables into a smart grid infrastructure, and ultimately maximize the utilization capacity of their selected energy type. Efforts to diversify through lowered costs and increased accessibility must be made, as these will be key to strengthening Asia Pacific’s three securities.