News & Views item - February 2010

 

 

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) a Top Priority of Steven Chu. (February 5, 2010)


  ARPA-E Fellows program; $100M in new funding for 2010

The budget request for ARPA-E is US$300 million in a Departmental of Energy's budget of US$28.4 billion the Department's secretary, Nobelist Steven Chu looks on it as his ace in the hole. It should be remembered that he championed it in an influential 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, on strengthening U.S. science.

 

Following his testimony yesterday before the US Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee of the U.S. Senate, Dr Chu told reporters he is convinced that an agency whose director has been on board for only a few months and whose staff could fit around a dining room table will accomplish great things.

 

In response to a question from ScienceInsider he said:

Now, the Office of Science [of the Department of Energy] is an extremely well run organization, but it's $5 billion.  And there is a level of conservatism there. Not only that, the Office of Science does mission-oriented research.

ARPA-E is a very different story. This is a quick hit of 2 or 3 years of money. After that, you need to find money either in the Office of Science or the applied areas, or in the private sector. So it's a very different philosophy than in the Office of Science, which has ongoing projects and has sustainability and other issues.

So, is $300 million the right amount? Absolutely. In fact, I wouldn't mind having a little more. If you look at the team, from the director on down, they are an extraordinary group of individuals. …

… When we did the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, the committee told me to sell the idea of ARPA-E to Congress. So I did, and during one of the hearings, they tried to get me to say that the idea was controversial, and that some people liked it and other people didn't. In fact, all the people said, "If it's well-managed, it's a good idea." DARPA was well-managed, and it's done great things. … And I can say with absolute confidence that we've got an extraordinary team of people [for ARPA-E]. So that this will be money well-spent.

 

Note: The director of ARPA-E is Arun Majumdar. Prior to accepting the appointment to head the Department of Energy's new agency in September last year, he ran the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as being its deputy director while fulfilling his commitments as professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.