Chu’s speech also marked the release of a new report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).  This report joins a growing call for increased federal investment in RDD&D to around $16 billion per year.  The most compelling of the recommendations is one to create a Quadrennial Energy Review—modeled after the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review—that could provide increased long term planning and coordination for the federal government’s energy policy.

As reported by CNET, during his speech at the National Press Club, Chu “suggested that the U.S. is reaching a ‘Sputnik moment’ where political leaders and the general population will realize how the U.S. has fallen behind other countries in science and technology.” In response, the U.S. must “fund research in clean-energy technologies in order to stay apace and take advantage of the economic opportunity that cleaner energy technologies represent globally.”

Chu called for creating the right environment, not only for corporations, but for research and innovation in general, noting that ” federal support for scientific R&D is going to be critical for our economic competitiveness.” Excluding the recent ARRA stimulus package, termed a “one-time investment bulge [for] research to invent new technologies, and loan guarantees to scale up existing products,” the share of GDP dedicated to energy research and development has “trended down since 1979.”

And while the Obama White House’s energy agenda may be challenged in the aftermath of the November elections, Chu emphasized that “even politicians who are skeptical of climate change should recognize that investing in green-technology research and development is an economic decision.”

“It is a way to secure our future prosperity,” he declared, echoing Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao.

And while the U.S. is falling behind, all is not lost, according to Chu: “I am hoping that the United States can recognize the economic opportunity that virtually all the western European companies have recognized, that countries in Asia have recognized, and that developing countries have recognized. I am an optimist we will wake up and seize the opportunity.” After all, “the U.S. still has the greatest innovation engine in the world.”

If the U.S. can get into gear, in the way it won the space race — investing in science and education to train a legion of scientists and engineers, and funding the RD&D needed to accelerate projects — then our country can recapture a leading role in the transition to a clean energy future. And unlike a moon shot, there are far more co-benefits for Planet Earth.

Video of Chu’s speech available here.

Slideshow of “Is the Energy Race our new Sputnik moment” available here.

The first ARPA-E summit is currently underway, and as the author notes, despite frequent references to the Apollo Project, the “premise of the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA–E is somewhat simpler—emulate its older sibling, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)” in spurring the development of new technologies. “Since its founding in 1958 during the Cold War in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik,” DARPA has given birth to a wide range of inventions, including stealth fighters and the Internet. For its part, ARPA–E “plans to fund multidisciplinary technical ideas that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve national security and create jobs.”

Out of some 3,700 applications, “37 technologies qualified for government funds, with each getting an average $4 million.” On the bright side,  ”‘the number of good ideas has been amazing, and we don’t even have all the intellectual horsepower of the U.S. into clean energy,’ [ARPA-E director Arun] Majumdar says. But as he notes, ”‘we need multiple lunar landings, not just one.’”

Unfortunately, ”political realities might short-circuit those ‘lunar landings,’ many of which (according to the ARPA-E director) won’t become manifest for 10 years or more.” Majumdar says, ”We are not short on ideas. The question is, what happens next?”

In any case, things are moving ahead: “$100 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus) was made available on March 2, to be awarded via ARPA–E to the best proposals for new grid-scale storage devices, better power converters and more efficient air conditioners.

However, the article’s author worries that ”the bulk of [projects funded by ARPA-E] are old ideas dusted off after years of storage.” He asks if “ARPA–E been too conservative in these early stages, funding ideas that have been around for awhile? … Besides the stimulus monies, the Obama administration committed just $400 million to ARPA-e specifically—and asked for just $300 million in next year’s budget—for an agency intended to remake the multitrillion dollar U.S. energy landscape.”

In contrast, “China is spending $12 million an hour on clean energy, according to John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a politically liberal think tank. And the U.S. lacks what many here regard as the key to driving a transition to clean, abundant energy: a price on carbon. ‘Let’s not take this growth industry [in clean energy] and give it to every other country in the world but the U.S.,’” GE’s Jeffrey Immelt says.

But the article ends on an optimistic note: “ARPA–E’s conservative approach may prove to have been both politically and scientifically smart. In considering Galileo’s breakthrough, ‘he didn’t invent the telescope, he improved the telescope,’ said Chu in his address to the conference. ‘If you find a new rock or a new way of looking at the rock, chances are you can make a good discovery and you don’t even have to be that smart.’