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Laser light table. Credit: NREL, DOE.

Late last year we told you about the reality-TV-inspired event ARPA-E is conducting — “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” — to accelerate tech transfer out of national labs and into start-up companies to promote “innovative and promising solution[s] to the nation’s energy challenge.”

Readers — it is time to vote!

Fourteen of the 36 companies that signed option agreements are competing in the ANTEI challenge. The ARPA-E challenge website has nice summaries of each company that tells about the technology being presented, the national lab it came out of and a brief video profile. The website is also keeps a running tally of the votes.

Voting is easy: just click the “Like” button. The winner will be determined by combining the results of the voting with the evaluations of an expert panel from DOE.  The agency also says the top startup companies will be invited to be featured at the premier annual gathering of clean energy investors and innovators around the country, the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit at the end of February.

The polls are open until Monday, Feb. 6 at 8:59 am.

While the first ANTEI is coming to a conclusion, DOE Secretary Steven Chu announced today that the agency is adding a second “season” to the program, and is launching the 2012-13 version of ANTEI Feb. 1.

To learn more about working with DOE labs and their technologies, check out the Energy Innovation Portal on the EERE website.

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A general representation of how federal spending breaks down into categories. Credit: Congressional Budget Office.

We’ve been following the FY12 budget process and its favorable outcome for the science R&D community.

The Budget Control Act was signed into law last August and deficit reductions were required in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The graphic above from the Congressional Budget Office shows the distribution of spending categories in 2010. Presumably, 2011 and 2012 are similar.

A joint bipartisan committee, nicknamed the supercommittee, was formed last fall and tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. Its failure to do so by the Nov. 23, 2011 deadline automatically triggers $1.2 trillion in cuts starting in FY13 that will be split evenly between defense and non-defense programs, and will apply equally to mandatory and discretionary spending programs. The tortuous process that led to the agreement is summarized in this timeline put together by the New York Times.

So, why did science R&D funding fare relatively well in this year’s federal budget? In a recent Science article (Jan. 6, 2012), Jeffrey Mervis suggests three reasons.

First, he says, the country needs R&D to stay economically competitive. The steady mantra coming out of federal agencies has been innovation. Examples include NSF’s Innovation Corps, the Materials Genome Initiative and all of ARPA-E. In the article, Mervis quotes Barry Toiv of the Association of American Universities, who says, “The fact that we did all right suggests that legislators understand the importance of a strong research enterprise to the nation’s long-term economic health and that the government has a unique role to play.”

Second, the amounts are relatively small and the topic is politically safe. On this point Mervis talked to Joel Widder, who used to run NSF’s legislative affairs office and is now a lobbyist for the Oldaker Law Group in Washington, DC. Widder points out that increasing an agency’s R&D budget by a few percent does not have much impact on the massive federal deficit. The NSF is a good example. Its FY12 budget increased $165 million, while the most recent monthly budget report from the CBO estimated the federal deficit for Oct.-Dec. 2011 at $320 billion. And, there is little political risk. Mervis quotes Widder, “Nobody gets criticized for being a supporter of science.”

Third, federal funding for science is decentralized. R&D budgets are funded agency-by-agency. Each agency gains some natural protection from the congressional committees that oversee it and from other constituencies. Also, decentralization creates obstacles to funding cuts: A quiver of arrows is needed rather that one big spear to throw at something like a “Department of Science.”

Mervis warns, though, that the Budget Control Act requires about $1 trillion in spending cuts starting with FY13 and going through FY 2021. He says about $35 billion per year would disappear just from nondefense programs, including science spending, which could mean cuts to R&D budgets of around 7% per year.

There are uncontrolled variables like the possibility of Congress finding a way to meet the requirements of the Budget Control Act and the surprises that are part of an election year. But, Mervis is a science optimist and closes his article with “… recent history suggests that science will survive.”

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In December, President Obama signed the 2012 budget bill, breathing life into the federal fiscal year before the continuing resolution flowed into the new calendar year. Credit: adapted from the Congressional Budget Office.

Previously, we reported that indicators were looking positive for federal R&D funding based on the “minibus” approvals Congress made in November, which covered NSF, NIST, NASA and OSTP. The agencies — the so-called innovation agencies — all saw budget increases, even if only modest. (The OSTP budget was cut severely, however OSTP is a White House office and not charged with funding research.) Now that the full budget is approved, the science R&D community has cause to be pretty happy about the outcome. Overall, most funding agencies saw increases, or at least flat budgets.

The AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program has analyzed the final budget in detail, breaking it out into manageable pieces. According to an AAAS press release, total R&D spending for FY12 is down about 1.3% ($1.9 billion) from 2011, but most of the reduction was in defense. The AAAS analysis showed that defense R&D spending is down 3.2%, while non-defense R&D is up 0.5%.

In the release, Matt Hourihan, director of the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program, says, “It’s no doubt a tough fiscal environment, but the fact that we actually see some fairly sizeable increases in certain research areas suggests persistent support for science and innovation even now.”

In the DOD arena, the message was mixed. R&D budgets for operational systems development and classified programs were slashed 3.8% ($1.15 billion) and 7.6% ($1.33 billion), respectively, but basic science R&D (”6.1″) increased by 8.7% and applied research (”6.2″) increased 5.6%. This is welcome news for the DOD labs and their contractors, but where will that research go without operational systems research?

DOE R&D funding increased 8% overall, including an encouraging bump for ARPA-E to $275 million from $180 million in FY11. According to an article in Science (Dec. 23, 2011), legislators are impressed with ARPA-E’s approach to project reviews and have asked DOE to look into applying it more broadly.

The massive NIH $30.6 billion budget remained essentially flat with a 0.8% increase. That’s an increase of $241 million, almost the entire ARPA-E appropriation for 2012. For comparison, the FY12 budgets for NSF and the DOE Office of Science are about $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively.

The cross-agency support by Congress for R&D is a good sign, too, for the Materials Genome Initiative project. Last summer’s white paper (pdf) introducing the MGI included a request from the administration for $100 million. Because, the MGI is intentionally decentralized and managed for organic growth, there are no budget line items to point to. However, qualitatively, it looks like the agencies that have a natural role to play in the MGI — NSF, DOE and NIST — have received enough funding to advance MGI objectives.

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Abengoa, designer of novel concentrating solar power towers, is a participant in several new ARPA-E funded projects for storing thermal energy. Credit: Abengoa

Last week Eileen reported on ARPA-E’s new awards in rare-earth alternative technologies. This week I thought I would take a look at APRA-E’s $37.3 million initiative to find a disruptive thermal storage technology(ies), an effort cleverly called HEATS (high energy advanced thermal storage), all of which seem to have a novel material at their cores.

General speaking, the awards went to R&D groups working in three arenas: Large and medium-scale (utility-scale) storage systems, “thermal fuels,” and vehicular support systems.

In regard to large-scale awards, the quest is to find out if thermal storage could be used as a massive controllable and distributed load for grid stabilization. The technologies include supercritical fluids, molten salts, molten glass, metal hydrides and phase change materials.

The vehicular systems are mostly aimed at developing special “hot-cold batteries” for interior climate control to extend the mileage of an electric vehicle’s main battery pack. Some of the materials include PCMs, solid state thermal energy conversion materials and electrical metal-organic framework

Utility-scale HEATS

Navitasmax: Navitasmax, Cornell and Harvard Universities, Nano Terra and Barber-Nichols are getting $812,000 for a project, targeted at concentrating solar and nuclear applications, which involves evaluation of simple and complex supercritical fluids. They hope to show these fluids can be “tuned” to have very high heat capacity, which will provide the potential of developing low cost and efficient thermal storage.

Abengoa Solar: Abengoa Solar Inc. is getting $3.6 million to develop a new type of large-scale CSP conversion (salt?) tower and a novel thermal energy storage technology, which they predict can save 30 percent over parabolic mirror molten-salt system costs, along with higher performance. Abengoa has been developing projects based on new tower architecture, superheated steam and salt storage components

Halotechnics: This is a $3.3 million project by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne based on a low melting-point molten glass thermal storage system. Besides using abundant raw materials, the group predicts it can reduce costs by a factor of ten. It’s aimed at CSP and nuclear applications. The company, heretofore, has focused on molten salt technologies, but CEO Justin Raade says on its website, “We’ve been thrilled by the discoveries we’ve made with our molten salts and are very excited to explore the use of molten glass to reach even higher temperatures for more efficient energy storage.” It will optimize the material in order to develop a complete system to pump, heat, store and discharge the molten glass.

Pacific Northwest National Lab: PNNL’s Energy Materials Group and University of Utah will use $712,500 for a reversible high-temperature metal hydride thermal storage system exploiting recent breakthroughs. In particular, the team will try to demonstrate the desired cycle life in a reversible hydride and demonstrate an order-of-magnitude increase in storage density compared to existing systems. PNNL’s website says, “The team will first develop a metal hydride with a suitably long lifetime. If successful, they will then create a small prototype system.”

University of South Florida: USF and SunBorne Energy (a company that has tended to focus on India’s energy needs) have $2.5 million to develop a low-cost, industrially scalable system based on high-temperature phase change materials. They will use an electroless encapsulation technique (pdf) to enhance the heat transfer to overcome the low thermal conductivity of common PCMs. The proposed low-cost (75 percent reduction) system will operate at high temperatures with a small footprint. The idea is to prepare macrocapsules, from porous pellets of low-cost PCMs (salts, eutectics, metal alloys, polymers) and then encapsulate the pellets in high temperature material. Convective heat transfer would occur by submerging the PCM capsules in a liquid.

MIT: Like the project above, MIT and Boston College will use phase-change materials for high-temperature thermal energy storage. The team’s metallic composites-based PCMs will have high phase-change temperatures, high thermal conductivity values, long lifetime and low cost. The team intends to use its characterization and modeling skills to optimize the properties of these materials.

Thermal Fuels

University of Florida: With nearly $3 million, UF hopes to demonstrate a “thermal fuel,” a thermochemical fuel production system that uses a low-pressure, magnetically stabilized, nonvolatile iron oxide looping process. UF’s system uses a new dual-cavity, high-temperature chemical reactor that converts CSP to syngas with a process that uses water and recycled CO₂ as the sole feedstock.

University of Minnesota: UM, along with Caltech and Abengoa Solar Inc, says it can develop technology for a solar thermochemical reactor to make fuel production more efficient. With $3.6 million, the team is ambitiously aiming for solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies of more than 10 percent.

Vehicular Storage

University of Utah: The university, with HRL and General Motors Global R&D will use $2.7 million to demonstrate a high-density thermal battery based on metal hydrides. The thermal battery will be used for warm and cold climate control to provide heating and cooling to electric vehicles without draining the EV’s electric battery.

PNNL: PNNL’s Energy and Environment Directorate, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will be pioneering an electric-powered adsorption heat pump for EVs. Researchers will use $813,000 to develop new metal-organic frameworks with larger sorption capacities and can be regenerated electrically. The PNNL website says a heat pump based on electrical metal-organic framework material the size of a 2-liter bottle could theoretically handle the heating and cooling needs of an electric vehicle with far less impact on driving distance.

TREATS: Sheetak Inc, with partner Delphi Automotive, received one of the largest awards, nearly $4,7 million. TREATS, thermoelectric reactors for efficient automotive thermal storage, would provide EVs with a new HVAC system option that can store the energy required for heating and cooling. Sheetak has a solid state thermoelectric energy converters to recharge a dedicated hot-cold battery. The converter can also eliminate the need for an EV’s traditional compressor and heater.

University of Texas at Austin: UTA and Sinoev will use $2.5 million for R&D for a hot-cold battery. They will demonstrate a high-energy density, low-cost system based on new composite PCMs with an energy density they say is two- to three-times above the state-of-the-art PCMs for low-temperature applications.

United Technologies Research Center: UTRC and Ricardo Inc will use a $2.7 million award to demonstrate a “hybrid vapor compression adsorption” hot-cold battery system based on a metal salt that has a high mass and volumetric capacity tailored to the refrigerant.

MIT: With the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Ford and $2.7 million, MIT hopes to demonstrate what it calls a thermo-adsorptive battery climate control system. This hot-cold battery would eliminate the vapor compression cycle, and if it works with EVs, it may be applicable to residential and commercial buildings displacing electricity consumption during peak demand times.

MIT: Based on its HybriSol Hybrid nanomaterials, MIT will use $3 million to demonstrate the use of nanostructures for high-energy-density thermal energy storage device. The HybriSol device would be rechargeable and transportable.

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