The projects unveiled are part of the first solicitation from ARPA-E’s $400 million in total American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. The 37 selected projects, which are receiving an average of about $4 million each, span the energy sector, including potentially transformative innovations in energy storage, biofuels, carbon capture, renewable power, building efficiency, vehicles, and other energy technology areas.
DOE Secretary Chu said “After World War II, America was the unrivaled leader in basic and applied sciences. It was this leadership that led to enormous technological advances. ARPA-E is a crucial part of the new effort by the U.S. to spur the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies, creating thousands of new jobs and helping cut carbon pollution.”
Some of the innovative projects selected for awards include:
Liquid Metal Grid-Scale Batteries: Created by Professor Don Sadoway, an Ministry of Information Technology battery scientist, the all-liquid metal battery is based on low cost, domestically available liquid metals with potential to break through the cost barrier required for mass adoption of large scale energy storage as part of the nation’s energy grid. If successful, this battery technology could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America’s wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past. And if deployed at homes, it could allow individual consumers the ability to be part of a future “smart energy Internet,” where they would have much greater control over their energy usage and delivery.
Bacteria for Producing Direct Solar Hydrocarbon Biofuels: Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a bioreactor that has the potential to produce a flow of gasoline directly from sunlight and CO2 using a symbiotic system of two organisms. First, a photosynthetic organism directly captures solar radiation and uses it to convert carbon dioxide to sugars. In the same area, another organism converts the sugars to gasoline and diesel transportation fuels. This development has the potential to greatly increase domestic production of clean fuel for our vehicles and end our reliance on foreign oil.
CO2 Capture using Artificial Enzymes: The funding will support an effort by the United Technologies Research Center to develop new synthetic enzymes that could make it easier and more affordable to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories. If successful, the effort would mean a much lower energy requirement for industrial carbon capture and significantly lower capital costs to get carbon capture systems up and running. Success of this project could substantially lower the cost of carbon capture relative to current, state-of-the-art amine and ammonia based processes. This would represent a major breakthrough that could make it affordable to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from coal and natural gas power plants around the world.
Low Cost Crystals for LED Lighting: Developed by Momentive Performance Materials, this proposal for novel crystal growth technology could dramatically lower the cost of developing light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are 30 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs and four times more efficient than compact fluorescents. This higher quality, low-cost material would offer significant breakthroughs in lowering costs of finished LED lighting, accelerating mass market use, and dramatically decreasing U.S. lighting energy usage. Inspired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA-E was created to support high risk, high reward energy research that can provide transformative new solutions for climate change and energy security. This first ARPA-E solicitation was competitive with over 3,600 initial concept papers received. Of those, about 300 full applications were requested and ultimately 37 final awardees were selected.
