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’s mission is to support transformational research – disruptive, game-changing research – which by definition is high-risk, but also high-reward if it succeeds.
That said, the projects are not blue-sky, wild-eyed ideas. Some are indeed about “next generation” technologies built on early research ideas, but others are tackling challenging problems in scaling and commercializing validated methods.
A look at the areas of research – as categorized by ARPA-E – provides an indication of where one group of leading experts, the reviewers, see the big challenges.
Unfortunately, concerns about proprietary information haven’t allowed even an aggregate analysis of the 3,500 concept papers and the over 300 invited proposals – those would yield valuable information for policy makers, researchers, providers of capital and industry decision makers.
Still, there is value in these 37 data points. The breakdown looks like this:
- Energy Storage – 6 projects focusing on the energy density and capacity improvements needed for grid-scale storage and eletric vehicles
- Biomass Energy – 5 projects focusing on the efficiency of the feedstocks used to create energy
- Carbon Capture – 5 projects, focused on novel capture technologies
- Renewable Power – 4 projects, targeting breakthroughs in core technology for solar PV (1), wind turbine efficiency (2) and enhanced geothermal energy (1)
- Direct Solar Fuels – 5 projects on novel scientific approaches to generating energy directly from sunlight – nanotechnology (1), chemistry (1) and biology (3) based
- Building Efficiency – 3 projects, one targeting operations I/T and sensor-based), and two developing new materials (addressing energy loss and lighting technologies, respectively)
- Waste Heat Capture – 2 projects on novel materials
- Vehicle Technologies – 5 projects, one focused on recovering waste heat, one on new engine technology and three on materials and packaging
- Water – 1 project on the efficiency of a core technology (reverse osmosis)
- Conventional Energy – 1 project on improving refinery efficiency