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DOE Announces $777 Million in Low Carbon Energy Research Grants
nergy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Awards
April 27, 2009. The White House today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science will invest $777 million in Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) over the next five years. In a major effort to accelerate the scientific breakthroughs needed to build a new 21st-century energy economy, 46 new multi-million-dollar EFRCs will be established at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms across the nation (White House Fact Sheet).
Supported in part by funds made available under President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), the EFRCs will bring together groups of leading scientists to address fundamental issues in fields ranging from solar energy and electricity storage to materials sciences, biofuels, advanced nuclear systems, and carbon capture and sequestration (synopses of the 46 EFRC awards).
The 46 EFRCs, which are to be funded at $2–5 million per year each for a planned initial five-year period, were selected from a pool of some 260 applications received in response to a solicitation issued in 2008 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science.
Over 110 institutions from 36 states plus the District of Columbia will be participating in the EFRC research. In all, the EFRCs will involve nearly 700 senior investigators and employ, on a full- or part-time basis, over 1,100 postdoctoral associates, graduate students, undergraduate students, and technical staff (fact sheet). Roughly a third of these researchers will be supported by Recovery Act funding.
Researchers at the EFRCs will take advantage of new capabilities in nanotechnology, high-intensity light sources, neutron scattering sources, supercomputing, and other advanced instrumentation—much of it developed and supported by the DOE Office of Science—in an effort to lay the scientific groundwork for fundamental advances in solar energy, biofuels, transportation, energy efficiency, electricity storage and transmission, clean coal and carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear energy.
The 46 EFRC awards span the full range of energy research challenges described in the Basic Research Needs (BRN) series of workshop reports, while also addressing one or more of the science grand challenges described in the report, Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenge for Science and the Imagination (more information provided below). Many of the EFRCs address multiple energy challenges that are linked by common scientific themes—such as interfacial chemistry for solar energy conversion and electrical energy storage or rational design of materials for multiple potential energy applications. The distribution of the EFRC awards by broad topic areas (with the related BRN reports listed in parentheses) can be described as follows:
Renewable and Carbon-Neutral Energy (Solar Energy Utilization, Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, Biofuels, Geological Sequestration of CO2); 20 EFRCs
Energy Efficiency (Clean and Efficient Combustion, Solid State Lighting, Superconductivity); 6 EFRCs
Energy Storage (Hydrogen Research, Electrical Energy Storage); 6 EFRCs
Crosscutting Science (Catalysis, Materials under Extreme Environments, other); 14 EFRCs
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