ARPA-E to Fund New Clean Energy Projects

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) will spend up to $130 million to develop five new program areas for clean energy technologies in the agency’s fourth round of awards. “In addition to creating new jobs, breakthroughs in clean energy technologies can reduce our country’s dependence on foreign oil, decrease the cost of clean electricity, and build a sustainable infrastructure for future generations of Americans,” said Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a statement. The first program, Plants Engineered To Replace Oil (PETRO), aims to optimize the biochemical processes of plants in capturing sunlight and converting it to energy so that biofuels will be more cost-effective than petroleum products. The High Energy Advanced Thermal Storage (HEATS) program will develop improved thermal energy storage technologies. The Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies (REACT) program will search for alternatives that reduce or eliminate the need for rare-earth materials in electric-vehicle motors and wind generators. The Green Electricity Network Integration (GENI) program will promote software and high-voltage hardware to reliably control the electrical grid. The fifth program, Solar Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (Solar ADEPT), partners with DOE’s SunShot Initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of solar technologies. ARPA-E’s contribution to this program will be to invest in magnetics, semiconductor switches, and charge storage.