ARPA-E
Encyclopedia
ARPA-E, or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is a United States government agency to promote and fund research and development of advanced energy technologies. It is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA).
within the United States Department of Energy
(DOE) in 2007, though without a budget. The initial budget of about $400 million was a part of the economic stimulus bill
of February 2009.
Like DARPA does for military technology, ARPA-E is intended to fund high-risk, high-reward research that might not otherwise be pursued because there is a relatively high risk of failure. Like DARPA, it is intended to fund projects involving government labs, private industry, and universities. ARPA-E has four objectives: (1) To bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission to energy research that will attract the U.S.'s best and brightest minds; (2) To focus on creative, transformation energy research that the industry cannot, or will not. support due to its high risk, but that has high reward potential; (3) To utilize an ARPA-like organization that is flat, nimble, and sparse, capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; and (4) To create a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.
announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) on April 27, 2009 as part of an announcement about federal investment in research and development and science education. The first Funding Opportunity Announcement
for the new agency offered $150 million, with individual awards of $500,000 to $20 million. Applicants submited only eight-page "concept papers" that outlined the technical concept; some were invited to submit full applications.
Arun Majumdar
, former deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
, was appointed the first director of ARPA-E in September 2009, over six months after the organization was first funded.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
announced the inaugural "ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit" on March 1-3, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
.
s went to researchers and inventors in 17 states.
It supported renewable energy
technologies for solar cell
s, wind turbine
s, geothermal drilling, biofuel
s, and biomass energy crops. The grants also supported energy efficiency
technologies, including power electronics
and engine-generator
s for advanced vehicles, devices for waste heat recovery, smart glass and control systems for smart buildings, light-emitting diode
s (LEDs), reverse-osmosis membranes for water desalination, catalysts to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, improved fuel cell membranes, and more energy-dense magnetic materials for electronic components. Six grants went to energy storage
technologies, including an ultracapacitor, improved lithium-ion batteries, metal-air batteries that use ionic liquid
s, liquid sodium batteries, and liquid metal batteries.
Some specific examples of ARPA-E grants include a large-scale liquid metal battery, under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
. Based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals, the battery could lead to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. At the University of Minnesota, researchers have developed a bioreactor
that has the potential to produce gasoline directly from sunlight and carbon dioxide, using a symbiotic system of two organisms. Momentive Performance Materials
was funded to investigate crystal growth
technology to lower the cost of light emitting diodes.
, to increase the efficiency and power density
of electric machines; an airborne wind turbine
, consisting of a high-performance wing
that carries a turbine and is tethered to the ground; a dynamic liquid prism
that can be adjusted using an applied electric field
, allowing concentrated photovoltaic systems to track the sun without the use of mechanical systems; and a thermal energy storage
system for concentrating solar power systems that uses supercritical fluid
s to potentially store twice the energy of an equivalent-size molten-salt
system. A $4 million grant to 1366 Technologies
helped develop solar cell
s that can be cast into molds directly from molten silicon, cutting costs significantly as compared to traditional methods in which wafers are sawed off a large ingot.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military...
(DARPA).
History
ARPA-E was created by the America COMPETES ActAmerica COMPETES Act
The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007 or America COMPETES Act was signed by President Bush and became law on 9 August 2007. This was an Act, "To invest in innovation through research and development, and to improve...
within the United States Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...
(DOE) in 2007, though without a budget. The initial budget of about $400 million was a part of the economic stimulus bill
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, abbreviated ARRA and commonly referred to as the Stimulus or The Recovery Act, is an economic stimulus package enacted by the 111th United States Congress in February 2009 and signed into law on February 17, 2009, by President Barack Obama.To...
of February 2009.
Like DARPA does for military technology, ARPA-E is intended to fund high-risk, high-reward research that might not otherwise be pursued because there is a relatively high risk of failure. Like DARPA, it is intended to fund projects involving government labs, private industry, and universities. ARPA-E has four objectives: (1) To bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission to energy research that will attract the U.S.'s best and brightest minds; (2) To focus on creative, transformation energy research that the industry cannot, or will not. support due to its high risk, but that has high reward potential; (3) To utilize an ARPA-like organization that is flat, nimble, and sparse, capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; and (4) To create a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.
ARPA-E and EERE
ARPA-E was created to fund energy technology projects that translate scientific discoveries and cutting-edge inventions into technological innovations, and accelerate technological advances in high-risk areas that industry is not likely to pursue independently. It does not fund minimal improvements to existing technologies; such technology is supported through existing DOE programs, such as those of the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).Launch
President Barack ObamaBarack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) on April 27, 2009 as part of an announcement about federal investment in research and development and science education. The first Funding Opportunity Announcement
Funding Opportunity Announcement
A funding opportunity announcement is a notice in Grants.gov of a federal grant funding opportunity.Funding opportunity announcements can be found at Grants.gov/FIND and this website lets organizations apply for grants for over 1,000 grant programs from 26 federal agencies.Each FOA includes...
for the new agency offered $150 million, with individual awards of $500,000 to $20 million. Applicants submited only eight-page "concept papers" that outlined the technical concept; some were invited to submit full applications.
Arun Majumdar
Arun Majumdar
Arun Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay graduate who is presently President Barack Obama's nominee for the Under Secretary of Energy...
, former deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus...
, was appointed the first director of ARPA-E in September 2009, over six months after the organization was first funded.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
Steven Chu
Steven Chu is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and...
announced the inaugural "ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit" on March 1-3, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
.
Funding and awards
DOE awarded $151 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds on October 26, 2009 for 37 energy research projects under the ARPA-E. More than 3,600 concept papers were submitted to the first competitive review and this first round of grantGrant (money)
Grants are funds disbursed by one party , often a Government Department, Corporation, Foundation or Trust, to a recipient, often a nonprofit entity, educational institution, business or an individual. In order to receive a grant, some form of "Grant Writing" often referred to as either a proposal...
s went to researchers and inventors in 17 states.
It supported renewable energy
Renewable energy
Renewable energy is energy which comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat, which are renewable . About 16% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables, with 10% coming from traditional biomass, which is mainly used for heating, and 3.4% from...
technologies for solar cell
Solar cell
A solar cell is a solid state electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect....
s, wind turbine
Wind turbine
A wind turbine is a device that converts kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used to produce electricity, the device may be called a wind generator or wind charger. If the mechanical energy is used to drive machinery, such as for grinding grain or...
s, geothermal drilling, biofuel
Biofuel
Biofuel is a type of fuel whose energy is derived from biological carbon fixation. Biofuels include fuels derived from biomass conversion, as well as solid biomass, liquid fuels and various biogases...
s, and biomass energy crops. The grants also supported energy efficiency
Efficient energy use
Efficient energy use, sometimes simply called energy efficiency, is the goal of efforts to reduce the amount of energy required to provide products and services. For example, insulating a home allows a building to use less heating and cooling energy to achieve and maintain a comfortable temperature...
technologies, including power electronics
Power electronics
Power electronics is the application of solid-state electronics for the control and conversion of electric power.-Introduction:Power electronic converters can be found wherever there is a need to modify a form of electrical energy...
and engine-generator
Engine-generator
An engine-generator is the combination of an electrical generator and an engine mounted together to form a single piece of equipment. This combination is also called an engine-generator set or a gen-set...
s for advanced vehicles, devices for waste heat recovery, smart glass and control systems for smart buildings, light-emitting diode
Light-emitting diode
A light-emitting diode is a semiconductor light source. LEDs are used as indicator lamps in many devices and are increasingly used for other lighting...
s (LEDs), reverse-osmosis membranes for water desalination, catalysts to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, improved fuel cell membranes, and more energy-dense magnetic materials for electronic components. Six grants went to energy storage
Energy storage
Energy storage is accomplished by devices or physical media that store some form of energy to perform some useful operation at a later time. A device that stores energy is sometimes called an accumulator....
technologies, including an ultracapacitor, improved lithium-ion batteries, metal-air batteries that use ionic liquid
Ionic liquid
An ionic liquid is a salt in the liquid state. In some contexts, the term has been restricted to salts whose melting point is below some arbitrary temperature, such as . While ordinary liquids such as water and gasoline are predominantly made of electrically neutral molecules, ILs are largely made...
s, liquid sodium batteries, and liquid metal batteries.
Some specific examples of ARPA-E grants include a large-scale liquid metal battery, under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. Based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals, the battery could lead to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. At the University of Minnesota, researchers have developed a bioreactor
Bioreactor
A bioreactor may refer to any manufactured or engineered device or system that supports a biologically active environment. In one case, a bioreactor is a vessel in which a chemical process is carried out which involves organisms or biochemically active substances derived from such organisms. This...
that has the potential to produce gasoline directly from sunlight and carbon dioxide, using a symbiotic system of two organisms. Momentive Performance Materials
Momentive Performance Materials
Momentive Performance Materials Inc manufactures silicone, silicone based derivatives, quartz, ceramics and other specialty materials for diverse industrial applications. In 2009, the company had sales close to $2 billion, of which more than 90% were in silicones and derivatives segment. As of...
was funded to investigate crystal growth
Crystal growth
A crystal is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. Crystal growth is a major stage of a crystallization process, and consists in the addition of new atoms, ions, or polymer strings into...
technology to lower the cost of light emitting diodes.
Second round
A second set of ARPA-E funding opportunities was announced on September 10, 2009. DOE selected six energy research and development projects to receive a total of $9.6 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The selections, made by DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), include a dehumidifier based on a nano-structured solid polymer that is permeable to moisture but impermeable to air; next-generation permanent magnets with a lower content of critical rare earthsRare earth element
As defined by IUPAC, rare earth elements or rare earth metals are a set of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, specifically the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium...
, to increase the efficiency and power density
Power density
Power density is the amount of power per unit volume....
of electric machines; an airborne wind turbine
Wind turbine
A wind turbine is a device that converts kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used to produce electricity, the device may be called a wind generator or wind charger. If the mechanical energy is used to drive machinery, such as for grinding grain or...
, consisting of a high-performance wing
Wing
A wing is an appendage with a surface that produces lift for flight or propulsion through the atmosphere, or through another gaseous or liquid fluid...
that carries a turbine and is tethered to the ground; a dynamic liquid prism
Prism (optics)
In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. The exact angles between the surfaces depend on the application. The traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use...
that can be adjusted using an applied electric field
Electric field
In physics, an electric field surrounds electrically charged particles and time-varying magnetic fields. The electric field depicts the force exerted on other electrically charged objects by the electrically charged particle the field is surrounding...
, allowing concentrated photovoltaic systems to track the sun without the use of mechanical systems; and a thermal energy storage
Thermal energy storage
Thermal energy storage comprises a number of technologies that store thermal energy in energy storage reservoirs for later use. They can be employed to balance energy demand between day time and night time. The thermal reservoir may be maintained at a temperature above or below that of the...
system for concentrating solar power systems that uses supercritical fluid
Supercritical fluid
A supercritical fluid is any substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point, where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist. It can effuse through solids like a gas, and dissolve materials like a liquid...
s to potentially store twice the energy of an equivalent-size molten-salt
Molten salt
Molten salt refers to a salt that is in the liquid phase that is normally a solid at standard temperature and pressure . A salt which is normally liquid at STP is usually called a room temperature ionic liquid, although technically molten salts are a class of ionic liquids.-Uses:Molten salts have...
system. A $4 million grant to 1366 Technologies
1366 Technologies
1366 Technologies is a company based in Lexington, Massachusetts that has developed a technique to produce silicon wafers by casting them in their ultimate shape directly in a mold, rather than the prevailing standard method in which wafers are cut from a large ingot. The company's management...
helped develop solar cell
Solar cell
A solar cell is a solid state electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect....
s that can be cast into molds directly from molten silicon, cutting costs significantly as compared to traditional methods in which wafers are sawed off a large ingot.