That’s the question posed by an article in Scientific American.
The first ARPA-E summit is currently underway, and as the author notes, despite frequent references to the Apollo Project, the “premise of the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA–E is somewhat simpler—emulate its older sibling, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)” in spurring the development of new technologies. “Since its founding in 1958 during the Cold War in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik,” DARPA has given birth to a wide range of inventions, including stealth fighters and the Internet. For its part, ARPA–E “plans to fund multidisciplinary technical ideas that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve national security and create jobs.”
Out of some 3,700 applications, “37 technologies qualified for government funds, with each getting an average $4 million.” On the bright side, ”‘the number of good ideas has been amazing, and we don’t even have all the intellectual horsepower of the U.S. into clean energy,’ [ARPA-E director Arun] Majumdar says. But as he notes, ”‘we need multiple lunar landings, not just one.’”
Unfortunately, ”political realities might short-circuit those ‘lunar landings,’ many of which (according to the ARPA-E director) won’t become manifest for 10 years or more.” Majumdar says, ”We are not short on ideas. The question is, what happens next?”
In any case, things are moving ahead: “$100 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus) was made available on March 2, to be awarded via ARPA–E to the best proposals for new grid-scale storage devices, better power converters and more efficient air conditioners.
However, the article’s author worries that ”the bulk of [projects funded by ARPA-E] are old ideas dusted off after years of storage.” He asks if “ARPA–E been too conservative in these early stages, funding ideas that have been around for awhile? … Besides the stimulus monies, the Obama administration committed just $400 million to ARPA-e specifically—and asked for just $300 million in next year’s budget—for an agency intended to remake the multitrillion dollar U.S. energy landscape.”
In contrast, “China is spending $12 million an hour on clean energy, according to John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a politically liberal think tank. And the U.S. lacks what many here regard as the key to driving a transition to clean, abundant energy: a price on carbon. ‘Let’s not take this growth industry [in clean energy] and give it to every other country in the world but the U.S.,’” GE’s Jeffrey Immelt says.
But the article ends on an optimistic note: “ARPA–E’s conservative approach may prove to have been both politically and scientifically smart. In considering Galileo’s breakthrough, ‘he didn’t invent the telescope, he improved the telescope,’ said Chu in his address to the conference. ‘If you find a new rock or a new way of looking at the rock, chances are you can make a good discovery and you don’t even have to be that smart.’
