DOE names winners of long-shot energy research grants

A broad portfolio of 37 risky concepts for the production of clean energy were selected on 26 October for funding by the Department of Energy’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA–E). The following day, President Obama announced that DOE will hand out a total of $3.4 billion to 100 utilities and other energy companies to spur modernization of the US electricity grid.

In a speech at Google Inc’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said the $151 million in ARPA–E awards comprises “a portfolio of bold new research projects, any one of which could do for energy what Google did for the internet.” ARPA–E was authorized in 2007 legislation but was not funded until this year. Its role is to support long-shot carbon-free energy concepts that could produce breakthrough technologies if successful. All the awards went to projects headed by academic researchers or companies both large and small; national laboratories were relegated to partnering with several of the awardees. The selected projects span renewable energy, energy storage, industrial and building efficiency, petroleum-free vehicles, and carbon capture. A number of awards will support work on advanced battery concepts, such as a $6.9 million effort by MIT researchers to make a low-cost, all-liquid, metal cell with the potential to store enough electricity to smooth out the inherent peaks and valleys in wind and solar energy generation.

Several ARPA–E grants will fund novel approaches to capturing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil power generation. One of those is a $2.2 million project at United Technologies Inc to mimic an enzymatic process by which the body captures Co₂ from cells, transports it through the bloodstream, and exhales it through the lungs. Other projects will attempt to transform sunlight directly into motor fuel; those include a $2.2 million University of Minnesota effort to use two organisms in symbiosis to produce gasoline from sunlight and CO₂. An MIT spinoff, 1366 Technologies Inc, received $4 million for a photovoltaic technology that could produce high-efficiency, single-crystal silicon wafers directly from molten silicon. The process offers the potential for cutting the cost of photovoltaic installations by half, the company says.

A team of companies led by Momentive Performance Materials in Albany, New York, will get $4.5 million to develop a low-cost manufacturing process for LEDs for solid-state lighting applications. “The transition to LED-based SSL would have enormous impact on everyday life, from substantial energy savings to revolutionary design and applications in general illumination,” said Eric Thaler, Momentive’s chief technology officer.

Chu remarked on the “stunning level of interest” shown for the program and said ARPA–E had received 3700 concepts in response to an initial solicitation of interest last April. The agency then invited 300 of those hopefuls to submit formal proposals, which were then prioritized by 500 expert reviewers. ARPA–E will award its remaining $249 million from fiscal year 2010 funds through a second solicitation in the coming months.

Big money for smart grid

Obama announced the smart-grid awards in a 27 October speech at a large solar-generating station in Florida. He said that once completed, the nation’s more efficient electricity generation, transmission, and distribution system will save consumers $20 billion over 10 years on their utility bills. The 100 grants, ranging from less than $1 million to $200 million, also should make the grid better able to accommodate new supplies of renewable energy.

Awards will finance installation of 18 million smart meters, for 13% of US homes. The two-way devices, already installed in some markets, give customers the ability to monitor their electricity use in real time and can eliminate the need for manual meter reading by utility companies. More important, as utilities shift to electricity pricing that changes with peak and off-peak demand, consumers will be able to choose when to buy power and can program new smart appliances to run when rates are low. The grants will also pay for the replacement of 200 000 transformers and the automation of 700 substations—5% of the US total. Hundreds of sensors called phasor measurement units are to be installed to improve monitoring of grid conditions and help prevent minor disturbances from cascading into power outages or blackouts.

The winning utilities, selected from 400 applicants, will put up another $4.7 billion of their own capital for the grid upgrades. The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that the full implementation of smart-grid technologies could cut US electricity use by more than 4% from today’s levels by 2030.

The grid awards were by far the largest single disbursement from the $39 billion DOE received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. They eclipse the $2.4 billion in DOE grants announced in August for accelerating the development and manufacturing of electric vehicle components. In September Chu announced that $144 million in ARRA monies would be distributed to pay for smart-grid workforce training programs and for state public utility commissions to hire new staff and retrain employees to review electricity project proposals.