Michael Kanellos: March 23, 2009, 8:21 AM

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Obama to Check Out Serious Materials, Solyndra, Solar Lighting

It’s green building day for the President.

As part of an effort to underscore the $39 billion in the stimulus bill for energy and $20 billion in tax incentives for clean energy, President Obama will check out some green building materials. First, he will meet with Paul Holland of Foundation Capital to discuss the green drywall and energy efficient windows from Serious Materials. Serious, Holland will also no doubt point out, is buying up closed factories in Illinois and Pennsylvania to make its products.

He’s also going to look at CIGS solar panels form Solyndra and a solar lighting system from Orion Energy.

Green building is going to be big for the administration. Energy Secretary Steve Chu has long been an advocate of curbing greenhouse gases by making buildings run more efficiently. The lab he ran, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, is the nation’s premier lab for green building. Obama has also been a huge advocate of efficiency. Building operations consume 39 percent of the energy in the country and another 12 percent gets sucked up by building materials.

And in a shameless plug, don’t forget to attend our Green Building Summit in June. Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, will be speaking.

Michael Kanellos: March 23, 2009, 7:15 AM

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Steve Koonin, Steve Chu’s Pal in Science Funding, Joins Team Obama

Steve Koonin, an academic star at Caltech for years who became chief scientist at BP, will join the administration as undersecretary of science.

Koonin, one of the best speakers on the green circuit, worked with Steve Chu to get the $500 million dollar biosciences research institute inked between the University of California, the University of Illinois and BP. Interestingly, Koonin once told me that he left Caltech to go to BP because he thought he could help push the energy agenda forward by working at BP instead of in academia or a federal agency. Similarly, Chu left Stanford in 2004 to head up Lawrence Berkeley Lab for the same reason.

Looks like it worked out well. The BP-Cal project is a model for other universities and the federal government is now stacked with scientific minds.

The president will also nominate David Sandalow, a holdover from the Clinton era, to be the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for Policy and International Affairs.

One thing not to expect from Koonin is cheerleading. The energy problem, and the sporadic food crises that inflict the world, derive from a rising standard of living in emerging nations that can’t be stopped. It’s a somewhat dour, but realistic view of the future.

“Energy is only the most immediate manifestation of a larger problem,” he said in 2008. “This will be the defining challenge of the next couple of decades.”

He also supports putting carbon underground as a way to sequester it. So if you’ve got a company looking for loans to turn CO2 into baking soda or fuel, he’s not your sympathetic ear.

“There is a good reason CO2 is the end product of combustion. It is a low energy molecule,” he said. “Getting rid of CO2 by burying it underground may be the best option.”