Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E

“We live in a truly magical time,” said physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as he opened his testimony in March before the US House of Representatives Committee on Science. “With the flick of a finger, the power of 10 horses flows from a small wire in the wall of our homes to clean our carpets.” Chu was trying to convince skeptical committee members to support the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) as an innovative way to help solve the growing US energy crisis.

Chu, one of the authors of last December’s National Academy of Sciences’ report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (available from the National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html ) that recommended the creation of ARPA-E, continued to extol the virtues of energy for the committee, noting that abundant energy supplies have allowed us to “live well beyond the dreams of Roman emperors.”

But after waxing poetic, Chu got down to business, telling the committee members that worldwide consumption of energy has nearly doubled between 1970 and 2001 and is expected to triple the 2001 demand by 2025. “The extraction of oil, our most precious energy source, is predicted to peak sometime in 10 to 40 years, and most of it will be gone by the end of this century,” he said. “What took hundreds of millions of years for nature to make will have been consumed in 200 years.”

As a result, he said, the US must move aggressively to develop new technologies to supply the US with clean and sustainable energy, and the creation of ARPA-E within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would help do just that. ARPA-E, as proposed in the Gathering Storm report (see Physics Today, December 2005, page 25 ), would sponsor generic energy research “where risks and potential payoffs are high, and where success could provide dramatic benefits for the nation.” It would be modeled after the highly successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA identifies and funds innovative research for the military, but its independence from the traditional military command has allowed it to support risky, long-term research over its nearly 50 years.

Although science committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and most other members of the committee strongly endorsed the Gathering Storm report, several expressed significant skepticism about ARPA-E at the hearing. Boehlert noted that many energy technologies are “just sitting on the shelf,” and the creation of yet another government agency doesn’t guarantee they will get to the marketplace.

Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), chairman of the science committee’s energy subcommittee, was more dubious than Boehlert. “Why am I so skeptical? Let me count the ways,” she said. “First, it is not clear what problems we are trying to solve with the creation of an ARPA-E.” If it is the lack of private-sector investment in basic energy research, she asked, then how does creating a new agency to distribute scarce federal money help? If it is a failure by the federal government to fund transformation research, she continued, how do ARPA-E supporters explain the DOE’s hydrogen initiatives, or US participation in ITER, or the proposed global nuclear energy partnership?

If DOE isn’t transferring existing technology to the marketplace, she added, why not fix that problem instead of creating a new agency? “In short,” Biggert concluded, “is [ARPA-E] a solution in search of a problem?”

Boehlert reminded Chu and others who testified at the hearing that federal funding is extremely tight and, with new funding not likely, asked if they would support taking money from other Office of Science programs. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), the ranking minority member on the committee and sponsor of a bill to establish ARPA-E, said choosing between ARPA-E and the Office of Science programs was “the wrong question.” The choice, he said, should be either achieving energy independence or spending money on the Star Wars missile defense program and continuing to cut taxes.

Although most of the committee members are strong advocates of using science and technology to move beyond the current energy infrastructure, the ARPA-E proposal remains in limbo. Science committee staff said some version of a new energy research agency would likely be proposed in mid-June, probably with a lower price tag than the $1 billion for ARPA-E recommended in the Gathering Storm report.