{"id":13,"date":"2009-10-30T14:48:23","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T18:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/?p=13"},"modified":"2009-12-29T23:17:56","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T03:17:56","slug":"151m-arpa-e-research-grants-target-key-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/151m-arpa-e-research-grants-target-key-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"$151m ARPA-E research grants target key challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The $151 million in ARPA-E grants announced on October 26th are targeted at some of the key energy and sustainability challenges facing the United States.  ARPA-E&#8217;s mission is to support transformational research &#8211; disruptive, game-changing research &#8211; which by definition is high-risk, but also high-reward if it succeeds.<\/p>\n<p>That said, the projects are not blue-sky, wild-eyed ideas.  Some are indeed about &#8220;next generation&#8221; technologies built on early research ideas, but others are tackling challenging problems in scaling and commercializing validated methods.<\/p>\n<p>A look at the areas of research &#8211; as categorized by ARPA-E &#8211; provides an indication of where one group of leading experts, the reviewers, see the big challenges.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, concerns about proprietary information haven&#8217;t allowed even an aggregate analysis of the <strong>3,500 concept papers<\/strong> and the <strong>over 300 invited proposals<\/strong> &#8211; those would yield <strong>valuable information for policy makers, researchers, providers of capital and industry decision makers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Still, there is value in these 37 data points.  The breakdown looks like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Energy Storage<\/strong> &#8211; 6 projects focusing on the energy density and capacity improvements needed for grid-scale storage and eletric vehicles<\/li>\n<li><strong>Biomass Energy<\/strong> &#8211; 5 projects focusing on the efficiency of the feedstocks used to create energy<\/li>\n<li><strong>Carbon Capture<\/strong> &#8211; 5 projects, focused on novel capture technologies<\/li>\n<li><strong>Renewable Power<\/strong> &#8211; 4 projects, targeting breakthroughs in core technology for solar PV (1), wind turbine efficiency (2) and enhanced geothermal energy (1)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Direct Solar Fuels<\/strong> &#8211; 5 projects on novel scientific approaches to generating energy directly from sunlight &#8211; nanotechnology (1), chemistry (1) and biology (3) based<\/li>\n<li><strong>Building Efficiency<\/strong> &#8211; 3 projects, one targeting operations I\/T and sensor-based), and two developing new materials (addressing energy loss and lighting technologies, respectively)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Waste Heat Capture<\/strong> &#8211; 2 projects on novel materials<\/li>\n<li><strong>Vehicle Technologies<\/strong> &#8211; 5 projects, one focused on recovering waste heat, one on new engine technology and three on materials and packaging<\/li>\n<li><strong>Water<\/strong> &#8211; 1 project on the efficiency of a core technology (reverse osmosis)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Conventional Energy<\/strong> &#8211; 1 project on improving refinery efficiency<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The $151 million in ARPA-E grants announced on October 26th are targeted at some of the key energy and sustainability challenges facing the United States. ARPA-E&#8217;s mission is to support transformational research &#8211; disruptive, game-changing research &#8211; which by definition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7,8],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","tag-arpa-e","tag-grants","","tg-column-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}