Amid all the negative publicity that Solyndra’s failure has brought to the Administration’s cleantech efforts, one cleantech program has received broad bipartisan support: DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-e). In 2012, ARPA-e will receive $275 million, a 53% increase from the prior year with both the House and the Senate supporting significant funding for the agency’s third year of operations.

ARPA-e is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which for over 50 years has funded early-stage research projects that show the potential to develop technologies that could yield disruptive advances for the military. DARPA’s projects have resulted in major leaps including, but definitely not limited to, the Internet, stealth technology and the Global Positioning System. Both agencies operate by soliciting proposals from companies, universities, and labs within broad thematic areas and select the most promising proposals for grant awards.

Readers of my blog know that I am not a big fan of some of the Administration’s cleantech efforts. ARPA-e is at least one exception. Authorized in the last year of the Bush Administration and initially funded through the Obama Administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the ARPA-e program may be one government program that can help seed the disruptive advances needed in our energy economy.

Why, given the negative publicity around government funding for cleantech projects, has ARPA-e been able to win bipartisan support?

Focus on early stage R&D
Government-funded R&D has long been an area of bipartisan support. Most members of Congress believe (as do I) that the government has a role in funding early-stage research and innovation in areas of public interest where the private sector is unable to economically justify conducting such R&D given the high degree of risk. Unlike the DOE loan program that funded Solyndra’s factories, the purpose of the ARPA-e grants are to fund high-risk, high-reward R&D projects that industry alone cannot support, but whose success could dramatically benefit the nation.

Grants (of reasonable size) not investments (of enormous size)
The bulk of the Administration’s cleantech investments were funded through the ARRA including the initial funding for ARPA-e. Since ARRA’s purpose was to stimulate the economy, government agencies, including DOE needed to get funds out the door as quickly as possible (unfortunately this failed). That led to many extremely large awards of both grants and loan guarantees. Just a few high profile examples — $527 million to Solyndra (bankrupt), $465 million to Tesla, $249 million to A123, $76 million to Range Fuels (bankrupt), $43 million to Beacon Power (bankrupt) and $25 million to Amyris. Some of these awards were grants; others were loans where the government hoped to get a return on its investment.

Unlike many other programs handing money out for cleantech related efforts, ARPA-e’s awards have all been grants made with the clear understanding that they are for high-risk R&D that often will not work out. In no case is there an expectation of a financial return to the government. Anytime a government program expects to make a return on investment it is, in my opinion, likely to fail both because the government is inherently flawed at making good business decisions and because politics usually won’t allow for even a single failed investment.

ARPA-e grants to date have averaged $2.9 million and have gone to 180 different projects. As a result, ARPA-e largely avoids the minefield of government trying to play businessman as well as the negative PR fall-out from large project failures. In addition, while politics can play a role in any grant process, the smaller the awards the less potential for political influence to outweigh project merit.

Energy Independence & Global Warming
ARPA-e’s guiding legislative mandate is to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of technologies that reduce energy imports, reduce energy-related emissions including greenhouse gases, and improve energy efficiency in all economic sectors. By combining the goal of energy independence with reduced greenhouse gas emissions the program is able to appeal to a much broader array of elected officials. If the program only focused on reducing greenhouse gases, I strongly suspect there would be much less support from Republicans. By avoiding the polarizing nature of focusing only on global warming or only on energy independence, ARPA-e is able to appeal to a broad audience.

One of the best ways to help solve our energy challenges is through disruptive energy technologies. If ARPA-e can deliver for energy technology even close to how well DARPA has delivered for defense technologies it will ultimately have a large impact on the economy, energy security and the environment. To achieve this, ARPA-e must remain nimble and avoid being sucked into the massive DOE bureaucracy. If it is able to do so, I suspect it will continue to have bipartisan support and will be a long-term shining star in the Administration’s cleantech efforts.

(Note: ARPA-e will hold their annual Innovation Summit February 27-29)

David Gold heads up cleantech investments for Access Venture Partners. He is also the author of the GreenGoldBlog.

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Building on the success of an energetic premier conference held last year in Austin, this year’s Cleanovation again promised an interesting dynamic, where Israeli cleantech startups travel to Texas to pitch for investment from a community of experienced energy-sector investors.

More structured, and less free-wheeling than last year’s event, this year’s offering spotlighted water technologies, a timely issue as Houston itself was encircled by wildfires while dealing with protracted near-drought conditions. Israeli technology to deal with water scarcity issues has a well-earned reputation in the marketplace, and that expertise certainly seemed welcome by the Texas audience.

On the flip side, as the energy market matures in Israel, particularly as Israel looks to exploit its natural gas and oil resources, there is a lot for the country to learn from Texas energy expertise – across a variety of fronts, including legal, regulatory, and M&A.

Showcasing a U.S.-based clean initiative was an excellent presentation by a Waste Management executive, discussing how that company continues to look for ways to generate renewable energy from its operations.

On a Green IP note, it was also heartening to hear that attendees were considering and utilizing the green patent incentive programs exhaustively covered by this blog for their technology. All in all, a stimulating event, and illustrative of the global Cleantech economy in action.

Held on Rice’s idyllic campus, this event featured a large contingent of Cleantech companies, presenting on their technology to an audience of venture capitalists, solo investors, and professional services folks.

In an interesting twist on the typical conference format, the afternoon session saw company presentations of intermittent lengths, with some companies giving rapid-fire 90 second or less type elevator pitches, while others presented in 4-minute increments. The back-and-forth between presentations of various lengths help hold audience interest, while allowing a large spectrum of companies to present.

As a Cleantech-focused IP lawyer, it was heartening to see the scope of innovation being presented, and more importantly, that the stakeholders in fostering that innovation spanned academia, government, and the private sector. While investment dollars may be under pressure, the opportunities for start-ups to at least get an audience for their innovations persist.

In the current environment, a focus on building an actionable IP portfolio is critical, and companies in the Cleantech sector simply must consider taking advantage of the various incentive programs, previously chronicled in this blog, in order to effectively accumulate those IP assets with limited spend and business disruption.

Other interesting takeaways from this event include confirmation that the U.S. government continues to take a leading role in driving the direction of innovation in the cleantech space. In the morning keynote, led by Dr. Eric Toone of Duke University and the ARPA-E initiative of the Dept. of Energy, it was apparent that companies hoping to secure government-investment would do well to align themselves with the focus areas that the Dept. of Energy has delineated.

An open question, not addressed during the interesting presentation that spotlighted some of the companies and technologies that have received ARPA-E investment, remains concerning the IP implications of these kinds of grants. As winners and losers emerge from those subset of Cleantech companies that have taken government funds, the consequences of utilizing that investment source on future licensing and enforcement activities will be interesting to watch.

Finally, while the Rice Alliance does an admirable job of promoting technology start-ups across sectors as diverse as nano-technology and life sciences, it was interesting to hear that Cleantech companies, particularly those targeting the energy sector, have received the lion’s share of financial support. While perhaps not surprising considering the locale, that factoid, delivered as it was with relish by the conference director, reinforces the tremendous challenge and opportunity in energy for both established and start-up companies.

And there is no doubt that IP will play a major role in driving future solutions, particularly in light of the confluence of the declining domestic manufacturing capability, globalization, and the still-unresolved political and economic ramifications of the climate-change debate.

Conferences like the Rice Alliance and Cleanovation underscore the centrality of those issues, while providing fertile ground for spotlighting potentially disruptive technologies that one day may move the needle in remaking our economy and lifestyles.

Gaston Kroub is a partner in the New York office of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell LLP. Gaston serves as the co-chair of the Greentech Committee of the NYSBA’s IP Section and has been accredited as a LEED Green Associate. Gaston is a registered patent attorney whose practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and counseling.

Article appearing courtesy Green Patent Blog.

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What if the ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide that are heating up the atmosphere could be used to produce an abundant supply of liquid fuels? The U.S. government and private labs are pursuing that Holy Grail of renewable energy — but for now the cost of large-scale production is prohibitive.

A novel experiment is taking place in the Princeton University lab of chemist Andrew Bocarsly. Like a battery, the experimental device has two poles of charged materials resting in a bath of chemical-laced water. A small tube bubbles carbon dioxide into the device, called a cell. The CO2 interacts with the charged metal coating one of the poles and, with the help of a special catalyst, begins to form bigger molecules that combine carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.

These bigger molecules have a more common name: hydrocarbons, the molecules that make up the fuels that power the modern world — coal, natural gas and oil. And what Bocarsly and his colleagues have done is essentially reverse combustion: they have taken the byproduct of burning fossil fuels — CO2, the greenhouse gas most responsible for climate change — and transformed it back into a fuel suitable for burning.

“The dominant thinking 10 years ago was that we should bury the CO2,” Bocarsly says. “If you could efficiently convert CO2 into something that was useful you wouldn’t have to spend all that money and energy to put it into the ground. You could sort of recycle it.”

The experiment in Bocarsly’s lab is part of an intensifying research effort to transform the copious energy from sunlight into liquid fuels by improving upon the work of plants, which, using only energy from the sun, take CO2, fuse it with hydrogen split from water, and make molecules to fuel growth. These ambitious energy projects would recycle CO2 emissions by allowing CO2 molecules to switch back and forth between byproducts of burning and building blocks of new fuel. It’s a potentially revolutionary technology, and the problem is not so much in pulling off the transformation — at least four different approaches to carry out “reverse combustion” either exist commercially or have been demonstrated in laboratories — but the high cost of doing so.

“Since the sun provides enough energy for our needs, our goal is to make a fuel using CO2 and sunlight — and maybe water — as feedstocks to produce the chemical fuel that can store the sun’s energy in a form that we can use where and when we need,” writes chemist Michael Berman of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is funding much of the research. “We hope that this is something that can be done in an economically viable way.”

Attaining that goal remains a distant prospect. But the potential payoff of these long-shot experiments is potentially so great that the U.S. government, various labs, and some start-up companies are pumping sizeable amounts of money into the research. The technologies include producing methanol in a lab, harnessing microbes found in extreme environments to produce fuels, replicating the process of photosynthesis itself, and using sunlight to forge a synthetic fuel made of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Creating liquid light
In 2003, chemist Emily Barton took up a discarded experimental device that had been languishing in her mentor’s Princeton lab for more than a decade. She was searching for a novel solution to the growing problem of CO2 piling up in the atmosphere and changing the climate. The device — an electrochemical cell that transforms electricity into chemical reactions, or vice versa — employed an electrode made from the silvery white metal known as palladium and a catalyst called pyridinium, a byproduct of oil refining. When Barton’s predecessor and inventor of the device — Lin Chao — applied an electric current, the cell knitted CO2 into methanol, the simplest hydrocarbon.

When Chao had written about the device in 1994, it was largely ignored. But Barton reasoned that turning CO2 back into a useful product like methanol could provide a solution to the CO2 problem. Even better, she could tweak the device by adding a compound used for thin-film photovoltaic devices — gallium phosphide — and turn the cell into a solar-powered fuel maker.

Although this photovoltaic route is currently prohibitively expensive, venture capitalists have funded a start-up company — dubbed Liquid Light and based in New Jersey — to try to turn this electrochemical cell into the fuel refinery of the future. The company has replaced the expensive palladium electrode in the original with something cheaper and may not use pyridinium as the catalyst. “The only inputs we need are waste CO2, water and electricity,” says Liquid Light chairman and physicist Nety Krishna, noting the technology’s potential to simultaneously help solve two huge challenges — global warming and satisfying the world’s growing energy needs.

Tapping into ‘extremophiles’
From the various branches of the military to the Department of Energy, the U.S. government has a keen interest in alternatives to oil. In fact, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-e) has created a program exclusively devoted to producing fuels from CO2.

“For every dollar the price of a barrel of oil goes up, the Navy spends $31 million more for fuel” per year, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told an ARPA–e conference in March when announcing the military’s new collaborative effort with the fledgling energy agency. “Changing the way we produce and use energy is fundamentally about improving the national security of this country.”

Scientists are attempting to create electrofuels by using extremophiles — microbes that thrive in extreme environments.

The ARPA–e program for turning energy inputs into liquid fuel goes by the name of “electrofuels.” The scientists funded by the program attempt to create these electrofuels by harnessing the wonders of extremophiles — microbes that thrive in extreme environments, such as hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean — to convert CO2 into fuels, using either electricity, hydrogen, or even ammonia.

That’s because extremophiles, unlike the vast majority of known life on the planet, make their living without photosynthesis. In fact, in the depths of the ocean, certain microbes rely on the energy in chemicals spewing from volcanic vents, while their extremophile peers more than mile underneath the planet’s surface rely on the slow decay of radioactive elements in the planet’s crust to thrive.

“We have bugs that go all the way,” making fuels from various energy inputs plus CO2, says chemist Eric Toone, deputy director for technology for ARPA–e and the electrofuels program manager. “I know it’s going to quote-unquote work. The interesting question now is: Is it going to matter?” The electrofuels program will only succeed in reducing the world’s oil addiction if it can produce fuels at a cost of roughly $60 per barrel — a price it is nowhere near achieving given the cost of electricity, hydrogen, and ammonia. “You’ve got to make this fuel at such a massive scale and such a low price,” Toone notes.

Another challenge is that the bugs themselves are not necessarily happy with the program. E. coli, Ralstonia eutropha, and the great microbial groupings of Pyrococcus and Rhodobacter, all want to use the extra energy to grow, not to make fuels. To force them to do so requires complex genetic and metabolic manipulation to ensure that as much energy as possible goes into fuel production.

Replicating photosynthesis
Researchers working outside the biological realm do not face the same constraints as a fuel-making microbiologist, or even a leaf. So the U.S. Department of Energy has hedged its ARPA–e bet by also investing in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) at the California Institute of Technology. The goal there is to build a system that works as well as photosynthesis in plants to produce fuel, whether hydrocarbons or just hydrogen.

“Chemical fuels would be the game-changer if you could directly make them efficiently and cost-effectively from sunlight,” says chemist Nathan Lewis, JCAP director.

Artificial systems can move energy as electrical current rather than the relatively chunky molecules that plants must rely upon in photosynthesis. In fact, an artificial system that uses photovoltaic panels to produce electricity, which is then used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, can turn roughly 10 to 20 percent of incoming sunlight into the hydrogen gas that can fuel a hydrogen fuel cell. The most efficient photosynthetic plants — algae — only manage to turn roughly 3 to 6 percent of incoming sunlight into plant food.

So Lewis and his colleagues will have to build artificial light absorbers, molecule-makers, and even membranes to separate the various products of artificial photosynthesis, just as plants do. All of these components exist but do not necessarily work well together as a system. Within the next five years, JCAP hopes to prove that such a system can be created, and produce some fuel to prove it.

MIT’s Nocera predicts that enough energy to run a house could come from one drinking water bottle and sunlight.

Such a system has long been known by another name: the hydrogen economy. That hydrogen can be recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell to produce the electricity to drive an electric car or power a home. The problem with the hydrogen economy has always been the second word — the best hydrogen fuel cells rely on expensive platinum, and splitting water relies on expensive machinery. The most expensive cars on the planet are probably the hydrogen fuel cell test vehicles built by the likes of GM and Honda.

But a company called Sun Catalytix is attempting to make at least splitting water cheap, and thereby provide an inexpensive source of the hydrogen for fuel cells or to make hydrocarbons with CO2. Dropping the metal cobalt and the molecule phosphate into water as a catalyst and then running electricity through it — preferably supplied by the sun via a photovoltaic cell — can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Chemist Dan Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team created the new catalyst — an invention somewhat erroneously hailed as an “artificial leaf” — predicts enough energy to run a house could be derived from one drinking water bottle in less than four hours of sunlight.

If hydrogen becomes cheap, then suddenly programs like electrofuels begin to make a lot more fiscal sense. “If you’ve got something you can drop in water and it evolves hydrogen, that’s pretty damn cool,” says Toone, which is why ARPA–e is also funding Sun Catalytix’s work. “We’ve seen the data and it actually works.”

Building a hydrocarbon

In the New Mexican desert, a six-meter wide dish of mirrors concentrates the sun’s rays on a half-meter-long cylindrical machine shaped like a beer keg. The mirrors focus sunlight through a window in the machine’s side, bathing a dozen, concentric rings in the sun’s heat. Temperatures quickly reach 1,500 degrees Celsius, which drives oxygen out of teeth made of iron oxide (rust) before the teeth rotate back into the dark side of the reactor. There the teeth suck oxygen back out of introduced steam or CO2, leaving behind hydrogen or carbon monoxide. When enough H2 and CO are produced, the mixture forms a very basic fuel known as synthesis gas, which is the building block used by the chemical industry to make hydrocarbons, chemicals, and even plastics.

Think of this keg-like machine as high-temperature, high-speed reverse rusting — and the expensive parts are not the inputs of CO2 or water, but rather the expense of the mirrors to harness the sun’s heat. “The real feedstocks are not CO2 and water, it’s sunlight,” says chemist James E. Miller of Sandia National Laboratory, co-inventor of the device. “Even though sunlight is free, what costs you most is collecting it and converting it into a useable form.”

Other groups are working on different designs or different materials, but the Sandia team in New Mexico estimates that it could make diesel or jet fuel for roughly $10 per gallon. There is another problem, however, one common to all such efforts to reverse combustion: To replace the more than 20 million barrels of oil consumed each day in the U.S. would require 62.4 trillion moles of pure CO2 per year. “If we go to a scale that is meaningful, where does the carbon come from?” Toone asks. “Learning how to recycle carbon is going to be important.”

Coal plants offer one source, producing roughly 500 pounds of CO2 per second when burning enough coal to generate one gigawatt of electricity, but that still isn’t enough to make a dent in transportation fuel use. Sucking CO2 out of the air remains prohibitively expensive, according to a recent report from the American Physical Society. But pulling CO2 out of seawater, where it is more highly concentrated, might offer one solution, as well as helping remedy the other peril from rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere: ocean acidification.

Regardless, the first stirrings of a shift away from fossil fuels have started to show. The Princeton lab that gave birth to Liquid Light is now making butanol, the smallest molecule considered a hydrocarbon fuel, via the same process the lab used to make methanol. “We are making that unambiguously,” Bocarsly says. But “we’re in the early stages of understanding this.”

Article by David Biello, appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Starting today and until December 15, start-up companies can apply for one of the Department of Energy's thousands of unlicensed patents for greatly reduced cost and paperwork.

The Department of Energy's 17 national laboratories currently hold more than 15,000 patents and applying for them usually costs between $10,000 to $50,000 and months of paperwork. But now, as part of the "America's Next Top Energy Innovator" challenge, start-up companies can submit a business plan and use this template agreement to obtain up to three patents from a single lab for $1,000.

The challenge is part of the Obama Administration's Startup America Initiative to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. "Our goal is simple,” said Secretary Chu, "unleash America's innovation machine and win the global race for the clean energy jobs of the future."

And while all innovative companies are an inspiration and critical to America's future growth, only a handful can be America's Next Top Energy Innovators.

In a year, we'll showcase the start-up companies — who make the most progress toward executing their business plan and commercializing their new technology — at the premier annual gathering of clean energy investors and innovators around the country, the 2012 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit.

If you're an interested, you can peruse the available technologies on the Department's Energy Innovation Portal and read answers to the most frequently asked questions here.

Good luck!

Article by Ginny Simmons, new media specialist with the Department of Energy's Office of Public Affairs

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Secretary Chu announced a new program today, called “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator,” to reduce the cost and paperwork for start-up companies to purchase the Department’s many thousand unlicensed patents and start bringing more of these new energy technologies to the U.S. marketplace. “Our goal is simple,” said Secretary Chu, “unleash America’s innovation machine and win the global race for the clean energy jobs of the future.”

Starting on Monday, May 2, entrepreneurs will be able to apply for any of these patents by submitting a business plan for how they propose to use them. Best of all, within the scope of this challenge, a portfolio of up to three patents will cost an upfront fee of just $1,000 — a total savings of $10,000 – $50,000.

The top entrepreneurs, who complete the process and demonstrate significant progress toward executing their business plan and commercializing the technology, will appear in a showcase at the 3rd Annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit showcase in 2012 — the premier annual gathering of clean energy investors and innovators around the country.

Some examples of the technology available for licensing includes:

* A system for converting solar energy to chemical energy and, subsequently, to thermal energy.
* The Grid Friendly Appliance controller that senses grid conditions by monitoring system frequency and provides automatic demand response in times of disruption.
* High-performance semiconductor materials that have a broad range of potential applications, including high efficiency solar cells, solid-state lighting, and high-speed transistors.

If you’re an interested entrepreneur, you can browse the available technologies and learn more about the streamlined licensing process on the Department’s Energy Innovation Portal.

Good luck and we hope to see your applications in May.

Article by Ginny Simmons, New Media Specialist and contractor for the Office of Public Affairs.

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The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit took place last week just outside Washington, D.C., and the show floor was filled with projects that promise to advance the United States as a force in clean energy. Most of the exhibiting companies were very young and in possession of early-stage technologies that are difficult to explain. But a few offered a clear glimpse of the future.

A little background: ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy) is a new federal agency created by the Obama administration and originally funded with money from the 2009 stimulus package. It is the Energy Department’s answer to DARPA, the military’s extraordinarily successful research program that formed the basis for the stealth fighter, GPS and the Internet. ARPA-E is funding environmentally-friendly solutions like smart buildings, carbon capture from coal plants, electrofuels and improved solar and wind power.

1. Printable LED Lights: Nth Degree Technologies
At the summit, Nth Degree Technologies made the debut of what it calls Printed Illuminated Paper. The company embeds paper with thousands of tiny LEDs, each the size of a white blood cell, to make sheets of light that can be cut to any shape or size.

The company had two kinds of demos on hand: One was two light bulbs, or rather pieces of illuminated paper cut into the shape of light bulbs. (See the video.) However, Mark Lowenthal, the company’s vice president, told me that these were just attention-grabbers and that the final product will be based on a different technology and will bear more resemblance to the piece of paper in the photograph to the right. This light was far brighter and used 8 watts of electricity. The next generation of illuminated paper, Lowenthal said, will consume a quarter the wattage and be 50 to 100 times brighter.

2. Trapping the Ocean’s Power: Atmocean, Inc.
The idea behind the Atmocean WEST (Wave Energy Seawater Transmission) is to deploy an array of oceanborne devices that capture wave energy and store it for later use, all while creating better fishing grounds. How is such a trifecta possible?

WEST creates its power from a sort of tug-of-war. A series of buoys (the yellow items in the graphic) float on the surface. Underwater, each buoy has a tail equipped with a series of toggles that creates a huge amount of drag. Between the buoy and the tail is a pump that is activated with each passing swell. That pump sends seawater through a hose to a central floating platform, where it operates an air compressor. That compressor, in turn, routes through a hose to the ocean floor, where the air is stored in bladders.

Those bladders are the invention of an ARPA-E awardee, Bright Energy Storage Technologies. (Atmocean isn’t an awardee, by the way, but was one of several companies whose presence on the show floor was a tacit endorsement by ARPA-E.) Bright Source has realized that air, trapped in the pressurized environment of deep water, is an efficient way to store energy. A pneumatic tube connects the bladder to shore, where the air expands in volume and can be released to spin a turbine whenever the energy is needed.

Now about that fishing thing: Atmocean’s CEO, Philip Kithil, told me that his initial tests have shown that the toggle-and-buoy system creates an upwelling of cold water, which if it were borne out would make the area around the buoys into a nutrient-rich ground for fish.

3. Refrigeration Anywhere: Xergy Inc.
Xergy uses the principles of a fuel cell to create cooling in a much smaller space than a traditional air conditioner, while consuming a fraction of the power and without using refrigeration fluids that are harmful to the atmosphere. “We are using hydrogen as a working fluid and pumping it across a membrane using electricity,” says Bahmad Bahar, the company’s president and an Iranian engineer who grew up in the family’s refrigeration business.

The company was a finalist in ARPA-E’s BEETIT (Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices) category and is a finalist in GE’s Ecoimagination contest.

With no moving parts and a simple design, Bahar thinks Xergy’s air conditioners could be scaled to cool an environment of almost any size, from a computer’s CPU to a full-size building. And since it takes up less space, a unit could be inserted where air conditioners have never gone before, like the wall of a building or the door panel of a car.

4. Storing Sun and Wind Energy: General Compression
One of the biggest problems with renewable energies like wind and solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. General Compression is one of several companies funded by ARPA-E that is figuring out how to take these intermittent sources and make them into something that can provide “baseload power” that is available 24/7.

When the wind blows or the sun shines, a renewable-energy plant often produces more electricity than the grid can presently use. General Compression takes that extra power and uses it to make compressed air, which is stored in a salt cavern underground. Then, when night falls or the wind dies, the air can be released to spin turbines and create electricity.

There’s just one problem. When that stored air is released, or un-compressed, it becomes so cold that it’s difficult to handle. Other companies contend with this problem by burning some fossil fuels to heat the air. General Compression’s answer is to trim the cold temperatures (and also the heat from the initial compression) by venting it to a pool of water on the surface.

Article by David Ferris, appearing courtesy the Matter Network.

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One of the central questions yet to be answered in energy technology is how to store energy from alternative sources like solar or wind that don’t always produce power when we need it.  For the Navy and Marine Corps, this is particularly important, as we move toward our established goal of at least 50% non-fossil fuel use by 2020.

Because just like in the commercial world, the steady march of technology has created a voracious appetite for ever-increasing amounts of energy.  A Marine platoon in Vietnam took two or three radios on patrol, now a single squad in Afghanistan takes over ten.

Last week at the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) Innovation Summit, I announced two new joint energy initiatives between DoD and ARPA-E to begin research and development of technology to answer this energy storage question, technology that once developed, will move us a step closer to a new energy future and a new clean energy economy for the United States.

The first initiative is a program to develop and build small, scalable hybrid energy storage modules that will provide long energy endurance and high energy density. The program goal is to extend current power durations and densities by up to 30%, while concurrently providing rapid charge and discharge of large amounts of energy.

The applications of this technology are incredible. Right now much of the power that we generate is wasted; if it isn’t used at the moment it is created it just isn’t used. But with a hybrid energy storage module, we’ll be able to store energy, and do so by building tactical energy networks composed of two, twenty, or even two hundred modules.

* In Afghanistan, where our Marines are beginning to use expeditionary solar power panels to power their patrol bases and electronic equipment, this means increased storage capacity, which ultimately means fewer Marines guarding convoys, and less money and effort spent moving fuel to the battlefield.
* For our ships, the modules will provide efficient and stable power for our weapons systems. So if ships are damaged, the crew has both power and time to keep fighting.

Beginning in FY 2012, DoD and ARPA-E have requested $25 million each, the approximate price of two H-1 helicopters, to support development of hybrid energy; $50 million that could multiply the operational impact of those two helicopters by a hundred or a thousand times. That is a smart investment, and it’s one worth making.

The second project I announced will fund a Grid Storage Study to evaluate how to improve energy reliability and energy security on more than 500 DoD installations worldwide through large-scale energy storage. This project will leverage the experience of ARPA-E’s GRIDS program, which is funding technology that could potentially balance short-term variability in renewable energy generation.

The Grid Storage Study is an opening step towards answering the technical challenge I described above, creating stable delivery of renewable energy from variable and inconsistent power sources like solar or wind.

Both of these joint projects have promise, both have potential, and both create tremendous opportunities for civilian energy needs. Through ARPA-E’s innovation, DoD can and will serve as a transition agent, moving the technology from R&D to practical application.

We have some amount of experience doing just that. We’ve done it before with technologies like the internet or GPS; innovation is who we are and what we’ve always done.

The joint initiatives I announced last week will make us better. They will complement the host of initiatives we’re undertaking to change the way we use, produce, and acquire energy and will help achieve the President’s vision of a new energy future for the United States. The future is getting just a little bit closer.

Article by Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy.

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President Obama has recently been talking about his plan to “Win the Future.” Whether it’s taking steps to reform our education system, rebuilding our infrastructure, or encouraging breakthroughs in technology, the phrase is about marshaling the country’s best and brightest to solve today’s problems. As the President put it, “To win the future, we have to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world, tapping the creativity and imagination of our people.”

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit that kicks off today just outside of Washington, D.C. highlights the amazing ingenuity of our citizens and businesses. This annual summit showcases the most advanced and revolutionary breakthroughs in energy technology today. These aren’t base hits. They’re the potential home runs – the breakthroughs in clean energy innovation that could make it affordable to put solar panels on every house in America, put millions of electric vehicles on the road or even harness wind energy that’s miles and miles above the ground a lot sooner than you might think is possible. We’re talking about truly changing the world – and making the U.S. the global leader in clean energy technologies.

Over the next three days, key players from academia, business and government are converging to discuss exactly how we can bring about the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies. With keynote remarks from Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Bank of America Chairman Charles Holliday, and Senators Lisa Murkowski, Lamar Alexander, and Mark Udall – the program itself promises to be a real treat. (full program)

Stay tuned to the Energy Blog over the next few days to see exclusive video interviews, inside looks from the Technology Showcase and in-depth profiles of featured projects.

Also be sure to follow along on Twitter, as we will be live-tweeting the events tomorrow with hash tag #ARPAE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Sometimes when one gets so focused on the daily tasks at hand, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture around us. But when you take a step back, it is an impressive canvass. Thanks to the hard work of everyone at the Department of Energy over the past year, we’ve made remarkable progress in laying the foundation for a new energy future, advancing groundbreaking science, and reducing the nuclear dangers facing the world. In the process, we’ve begun to change the way the Department does business so we accomplish our work more efficiently and more effectively.

The steps we’ve taken have put America on the course that leads to a clean energy future and millions of new jobs. Through the Recovery Act, we awarded more than $32 billion to promote clean energy and put our citizens to work. In just two years, we’ve laid the groundwork for a strong advanced vehicle manufacturing industry and put America on track to double our renewable energy generation. We’ve toughened and enforced appliance standards that will save consumers more than $250 billion, and we’ve helped more than 300,000 families weatherize their homes so they can save money on their monthly energy bills. More than 2.5 million smart meters – which provide consumers with realtime data about their energy use — have been deployed as we embark on what will become the most significant investment in electrical grid since it was pioneered by Thomas Edison. From extending commitments to the country’s largest solar thermal plant to the world’s largest wind farm to America’s first new nuclear power plant in 30 years, our momentum is real and tangible.

We are also expanding the frontiers of science to spur innovation and position the United States to lead in the global race for clean energy. With funding for the first time from the Recovery Act, we quickly set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), to support transformative research. We launched three Energy Innovation Hubs and dozens of Energy Frontier Research Centers to accelerate energy innovation. And we began to take a strategic approach to how we fund research and development. From a car battery with a 500 mile range to producing gasoline from sunlight, we have unleashed bold new research efforts that – if successful – could fundamentally change the way we use and produce energy. This includes the world’s largest and most comprehensive effort to develop, test and deploy carbon capture and sequestration technologies that are crucial to avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

Finally, our work has strengthened nuclear safety and security at home and abroad. We permanently cleaned up 235 square miles of contaminated land – an area 10 times the size of Manhattan Island – and collected enough debris and contaminated soil to fill more than 350 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And we have taken steps to improve project management so we can continue the momentum. Since President Obama outlined an ambitious nuclear nonproliferation and security agenda in Prague, we have secured enough loose nuclear material to make more than 800 warheads and ensure improved security at hundreds of sites around the world. We also played a central role in organizing April’s historic Nuclear Security Summit, which brought together 47 world leaders to agree on effective national and international measures to secure nuclear material and prevent nuclear smuggling. And we made the world a safer place by helping negotiate the New START Treaty – the most significant arms control agreement in nearly two decades – and by supporting the effort to get it ratified by providing the Senate with assurances about the modernization of our nuclear security enterprise.

Article by Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy

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With the recent “shellacking” (as President Obama referred to the election results) of the Democratically controlled Congress, much of the buzz in the cleantech space has been doom and gloom. Is cleantech doomed to a new dark age? I do not believe so.

Energy policy is one area where there is an overlap of goals between the parties. Members of both parties largely agree that energy is critical to our economic and national security. And most Republicans do not dismiss out of hand the risks of global warming.

I suspect that energy policy will be a topic where this Congress will get something done especially with the President’s increased desire to work across party lines. It won’t be exactly what the president wants and it won’t be exactly what the Republicans want. It will be an old-fashion compromise that may actually result in some policies and that will have greater long-term impact on cleantech than most of the short-term handout programs that were put in place under the largely ineffective cleantech stimulus bill.

So, where can the Democrats and Republicans potentially agree when it comes to cleantech?

1) Energy efficiency. Republicans and Democrats have demonstrated their ability to find common ground here. George Bush signed the law from a Democratic Congress that will end the life of the incandescent bulb and that increases the fuel efficiency standards for vehicles by 40% by 2020. Democrats like tax credits for installing energy efficiency improvements, and Republicans like reducing taxes. Reads like a match made in heaven.

2) Renewable energy standards. Many states have put in place such standards with support of both parties. Some Republicans in Congress have previously voiced their support. If the definition of “renewable” were expanded to include nuclear as an acceptable alternative, I suspect there would be broad support in Congress. A renewable energy standard is exactly the kind of long-term macro-economic policy needed to drive change and create more sustainable demand for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Utilities putting big dollars into development of renewable energy power sources and energy efficiency will drive much more industry growth and relieve issues around debt financing to a much greater degree than the government’s ineffectual efforts to play banker. And if the definition of “renewable” were expanded to include nuclear, then I suspect the base of support would broaden even more. Given that most renewable energy sources can’t serve as base load, it would be the right environmental and national security move to include nuclear in the energy mix.

3) R&D. Republicans have long been supporters of government R&D. Although there will be an issue around funding offsets for the R&D, I believe there will be broad consensus on the need to invest in our energy future. What will happen, I suspect, is that the focus of this R&D will shift more to early stage disruptive technologies rather than the late-stage grants and government loans which are already proving to be failures. Even the Administration has internally begun to question the effectiveness of these programs. If the scope of cleantech R&D is expanded to include clean coal technologies and next-generation nuclear, I believe the support base will broaden even more. The most effective way to ramp up disruptive R&D funding is likely through the new ARPA-E and possibly to the few federal labs that do not have their roots in our nuclear weapons programs (e.g. the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). By funding ARPA-E, most of the research would take place in our universities and private companies where the potential for real product development and technology transfer is much greater than in our defense oriented federal labs. The biggest challenge will be finding the funds given the need to reduce the deficit. One possible solution would be to take the funds already appropriated to later stage projects/loans that have yet to be awarded and redirect them to disruptive R&D. Another would be a…

4) Gas Tax. Cap and trade is likely dead. And given that such a program would have been a largely ineffectual mess (see my previous post, Cap and Trade: Right Debate, Wrong Solution) that is not necessarily bad. As I pointed out, the area where there is the greatest overlap between environmental, national security and economic objectives is with gas/diesel, which most cap and trade proposals largely wouldn’t have touched. The co-chairs of President Obama’s bi-partisan tax commission recently included a gas tax as a piece of its budget solution and two key Senators (one Republican, one Democrat) recently recently wrote the commission encouraging them to consider even bigger increases. A heftier tax phased in over time may be possible by using the concept of a “tax and dividend”, whereby a tax is levied to increase its price and much or all of the revenue is distributed back to consumers. If the money raised from this tax is largely given right back to the consumers in the form a rebate, then it’s not a tax increase but rather a tax incentive to reduce consumption of gasoline/diesel. Increasing the cost of gasoline/diesel to drive market demand for alternative fuels and energy efficient vehicles can help Republicans and Democrats achieve their desire of enhancing our national and economic security while reducing carbon emissions.

5) Government Procurement. The government is a large consumer of many items. One of the best ways to accelerate market adoption is by creating a market for the product/service. For example, the Federal government’s decision to require all new buildings to be LEED certified is accelerating a shift in the building industry to green buildings. The government purchases a large amount of energy for buildings, vehicles, airplanes and ships. Policies that drive increased purchases of domestic energy sources based on non-fossil fuels can provide a significant lift to multiple cleantech industries. The Department of Defense understands the critical nature of this issue, especially around liquid fuels. The Pentagon’s concern provides the nexus of an opportunity for collaboration between Democrats and Republicans on government procurement policies.

Even if you believe we will see a stalemate in Washington on cleantech, the global macro-economic trends will not change. Consumption of fossil fuels is accelerating as the world, especially heavily populated China and India, dramatically increase the number of automobiles, power plants and factories. It is a certainty that the price of these commodities will, on average, increase over time. The next spike in oil prices, I suspect, won’t be too many years away and, worst case, whatever lull in cleantech enthusiasm that may occur will be quickly washed away.

The essence of any government policy with the goal of accelerating cleantech is simply an effort to narrow the time between today and the inevitable day when fossil fuels become expensive enough that various renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions become compelling without any government involvement. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I do not believe that we will achieve our cleantech goals through massive grant or loan programs to the private sector. Policies that target the underlying macroeconomic environment will ultimately have a much greater impact than handout programs. Many of the policies that lie in the zone of potential cooperation between Democrats and Republicans such as gas tax, national renewable energy standards, and federal procurement policies can help drive steady long-term demand for renewable energy and energy efficiency. I am optimistic that these are areas where real progress can be made.

David Gold heads up cleantech investments for Access Venture Partners. He is also the author of the GreenGoldBlog.

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