The U.S. Department of Energy plans to invest up to $366 million to establish and operate three Energy Innovation Hubs focused on accelerating R&D in three key energy areas. Each hub, to be funded at up to $122 million over five years, will bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers to shorten the path from scientific discovery to technological development and commercial deployment of highly promising energy-related technologies. “Given the urgency of our challenges in both energy and climate, we need to do everything we can to mobilize our nation’s scientific and technological talent to accelerate the pace of innovation,” says DOE Secretary Steven Chu.
The hubs are part of a broad-based clean energy research strategy that includes three complementary initiatives:
- The Energy Frontier Research Centers launched by the DOE’s Office of Science will support multi-year, multi-investigator scientific collaborations focused on overcoming hurdles in basic science that block transformational discoveries.
- The department’s recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (”ARPA-E”) will use an entrepreneurial funding model to explore potentially transformative technologies.
- The Energy Innovation Hubs will establish larger, highly integrated teams to conduct high-risk, high-reward research and seek to solve priority technology challenges from basic research to engineering development to commercialization readiness.
The three DOE Energy Innovation Hubs will focus on:
- production of fuels directly from sunlight;
- improvement of energy-efficient building systems design; and
- computer modeling and simulation for the development of advanced nuclear reactors.
The DOE will provide $22 million in the first year to establish each hub and up to $25 million per year for the following four years to support operations. Information on the DOE’s hub implementation plan can be found at http://hubs.energy.gov.
Source: Ethanol Producer Magazine