The prospects for making serious progress in Washington on a national energy policy over the next few years look bleak.  A very slowly recovering job market, continuing budget crisis and divided Congress seem destined to ensure that energy policy over the next few years will consist of little more than a series of partisan sound bites and acrimonious debate over the mere existence of global warming.                                          

That deadlock will, of course, be a tragedy.  Worldwide petroleum reserves are more concentrated today than they were two years ago and concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have grown greater, not smaller, over the same period.  The threats to national energy security and the environment that motivated unprecedented interest in advanced energy technologies two years ago have not taken a holiday on account of the recession or mid-term elections.  The locomotive is still running away, and we are two years closer to the end of the track. 

With the prospect of leadership in Washington looking bleak, the unlikely saviors of national energy security may be state officials.  Ignored and derided for years by Washington policymakers as unsophisticated, local fiefdoms, the state public utility commissions that approve and oversee the vast majority of national electricity infrastructure investment suddenly find themselves at the precise nexus of national energy policy needs and the emerging energy technologies that can address them. 

It is essential that over the next few years the advanced battery industry and the developers of other advanced energy technologies engage with state public utility commissions as never before.  The PUC commissioners who are charged with responsibility for protecting the public interest in electricity investment may well become the most important thought leaders on issues of national energy security.  There have been glimmers of this happening in California for a while.  With Washington shut down, perhaps,  for the next two years, those glimmers may spread to the rest of the nation.  Those glimmers need to be encouraged.