The scramble for a piece of the energy and science spending windfall begins

With the 17 February signing by President Obama of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act , the attention turned to how the tens of billions appropriated for clean energy research, development, and demonstration, and billions more allocated for science, will be spent. The Department of Energy (DOE) is among the federal agencies that will be getting the most from the stimulus legislation, a total of $38 billion in new funding, including

—$4.5 billion in direct spending to modernize the electricity grid with smart-grid technologies.—$6.3 billion in state energy-efficient and clean-energy grants and $4.5 billion to make federal buildings more energy efficient.—$6 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy systems, biofuel projects, and electric-power transmission facilities.—$2 billion in loans to manufacture advanced batteries and components for applications such as plug-in electric cars. —$5 billion to weatherize homes of up to 1 million low-income people. —$3.4 billion for fossil energy research and development, including carbon capture and storage.

DOE also receives $1.6 billion to add to the basic research programs that are administered by the Office of Science. And the legislation provides $400 million to start up a new DOE office, dubbed the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Its mission will be to provide support to high-risk energy research projects that could pay off big for US energy security.

NSF also receives a windfall of $3 billion, with $2.5 billion of that to fund additional investigator-initiated research grants. Another $300 million is specified to pay for major research equipment, $400 million is for major research projects awaiting NSF funding, $200 million is for modernizing university research facilities, and $100 million is for education. The National Science Board, the governing body of NSF, will gather next week to begin figuring out how to divvy up all the money, with the only instruction from Congress being to spread the wealth around through all its directorates.

Perennially short-changed NASA will get $400 million for its science programs, $150 million more for aeronautics research, and $400 million for space exploration. NIST will get a $220 million supplement for its research, fellowships, and advanced research measurement equipment and supplies; $360 million to work through some of its renovation and maintenance backlog; and $180 million for a recently initiated program to fund construction of new university research facilities. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is to receive an extra $1 billion for its programs.

Two days after the bill signing, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a streamlining of DOE’s procedures for disbursing the nearly $40 billion in recovery funding that was appropriated to DOE programs in the stimulus act . Chu said the reduction in paperwork and other reforms should permit DOE to begin distributing loan guarantees in late April or early May, under the authority it has had since the 2005 Energy Policy. Loan guarantees authorized in the recovery act should become available in early summer, Chu said. In both instances, he cautioned, applicants may still have to secure their portion of financing or meet other conditions prior to closing.

Chu said that with the reforms, DOE should be able to disburse, by the end of 2010, 70% of the billions of dollars contained in the recovery legislation for agency programs. Chu also announced his hiring of McKinsey & Co. senior partner Matt Rogers to oversee implementation of the reforms and to advise him on the stimulus spending. Rogers has more than 20 years experience in working with the energy industry. The changes Rogers will oversee include rolling out appraisals of applications for loan guarantees, rather than waiting for the application deadline to evaluate them. Loan application forms will be simplified, and the department will speed up loan underwriting by using outside partners.

When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Tuesday, he said the bill should allow the country to double its use of renewable energy within three years.

Chu said he couldn’t specify how much of the renewable energy will come from which sources, but he said that wind is the most mature, followed by solar-thermal and photovoltaics . He noted that the Bonneville Power Administration, the federally owned utility in the Pacific Northwest, has already sited new electricity transmission lines to service wind farms.

Chu told a gathering of Washington energy reporters that he wasn’t fully prepared for the energy secretary’s traditional role as administration spokesman on the state of the world petroleum market . “I will be speaking and learning more about this in order to figure out what the US position should be and what the president’s position is,” Chu said.

Meanwhile last week, there were reports that the Environmental Protection Agency will soon announce its decision to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions by treating them as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act . EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency is considering reversing a Bush administration decision not to regulate CO₂ emissions from new coal-fired generating plants.

Scientific publishers were doubtless pleased to see the results of an NSF-sponsored study finding that open access (free) to the scientific literature may not guarantee its wide dissemination . According to an article in Science (not free), when a given article was made available online free after being in print for one year, use of the article increased by 8%. But for online articles for which a payment was required, use increased 12%. The researchers did note that researchers in the developing world were far more likely to cite open-access articles.

David Kramer