Summary
The Department of Energy (DOE) will soon wipe away a legacy of Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who served as secretary of energy from 2009 to 2013 under former President Barack Obama. According to the department’s budget request for next year, DOE intends to wind down most of its five Energy Innovation Hubs, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional centers that Chu devised to solve crucial energy-related problems and invigorate the sclerotic department. Chu compared the ad hoc, temporary hubs to the Manhattan Project, the World War II scramble to make an atomic bomb, and some DOE bureaucrats disliked the way the hubs crossed organizational boundaries. But observers say they succeeded in making DOE’s research more responsive and relevant. In fact, DOE appears to have embraced the once-controversial model and has started several new projects that hew to it, such as five quantum information science centers started last year to develop various quantum technologies, such as a quantum internet. Even as the hubs’ name dies, the concept has found new life.