President-Elect Joe Biden has announced that Jennifer Granholm, former two-term governor of Michigan, will be his nominee for secretary of energy. The secretary of energy leads the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a department that has historically been deeply interwoven with federal HPC efforts thanks to its oversight of the country’s national laboratories and its strong ties to various technology industries.
Granholm was Michigan’s attorney general from 1999 to 2003, and its governor from 2003 to 2011 (Michigan’s term limit laws prevented her from seeking a third term as governor). During her second gubernatorial term, Granholm served as a member of President Obama’s economic advisory team and helped to revitalize Michigan’s economy – in part, through an emphasis on clean energy jobs. Since leaving public office, she has worked as a professor of law and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I’m honored that President-elect @joeBiden has placed his faith in me as his Energy Secretary nominee,” Granholm tweeted in the wake of the announcement. “We have an opportunity to build back better while creating millions of jobs – we can do it!”
Granholm has a history of advocating for domestic manufacturing as a necessary complement to domestic R&D efforts, for instance with companies manufacturing components for electric vehicles. As secretary of energy, she would be able to approach those priorities on a much larger scale through the DOE’s far-reaching research and investment portfolio.
For Biden, Granholm is part of a climate change and clean energy play that stretches across a wide range of cabinet positions; her nomination was announced alongside nominees for the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality and the newly formed White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy.
“This brilliant, tested, trailblazing team will be ready on day one to confront the existential threat of climate change with a unified national response rooted in science and equity,” Biden said. “They share my belief that we have no time to waste to confront the climate crisis, protect our air and drinking water, and deliver justice to communities that have long shouldered the burdens of environmental harms.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Granholm will succeed Rick Perry and Dan Brouillette, who served from March 2017 through December 2019 and December 2019 to present as part of the Trump administration. While neither Perry nor Brouillette showed the same enthusiasm for clean energy, the last few years have seen the Department of Energy expand its computing operations through substantial funding for exascale and pre-exascale supercomputing, broadened support for quantum technologies via the U.S. National Quantum Initiative Act, and the creation of new offices (such as the Office of Artificial Intelligence and Technology and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response) and programs (such as the High-Performance Computing for Materials Program).