More on ARPA-E's Funding of Clean Energy – from Guest Mike Brace

Here is guest blogger Mike Brace’s letter to his representative Geoff Davis (R-KY) on the Obama Administration’s choice of projects that received funding in this round under ARPA-E.  You’ll notice that he shares the many of the same sentiments that I wrote about yesterday.

Hon. Geoff Davis,

Geoff, I don’t know if you were aware of it but the DoE, ARPA-E has selected their grant recipients for this last round of funding and (to put it bluntly) you, I, the state of Kentucky and almost every American taxpayer got screwed.

If you recall, you wrote a well-versed letter on our behalf to ARPA-E expressing support for our hydrokinetic project, one of which is specifically designed to generate literally millions and millions of kilowatts based on the run-of-river current flow in the Ohio River. We all thought our technology to be a good fit for this ARPA-E grant of which I speak (DE-FOA-0000065) as it was specifically set up to do three things:

•           Reduce GHG and Carbon emissions

•           Enhance energy security

•           Restore science and technology leadership to the private sectors of America.

More specifically, none of this was to be done within the halls of our national federally funded laboratories, it was supposed to wean us off burning fossil fuels over due time, and (most importantly) it was to support technology that creates a lot of jobs and in a timely manner (24 to 36 months). This was spelled out in black and white so to that end we spent a great deal of personal time and money to apply for this grant.

With the exception of about $30M, none of this ARPA-E grant neither funded technology that is even remotely aligned with these goals, or (for the small share that they did fund) they gave the lion’s share to universities, gas/oil/car companies (or to national laboratories) all of which are already very well funded and shouldn’t have to ask for this kind of funding in the first place. It begs to be asked: what have they been doing for the last 20 years if not this?

I have attached the published list of recipients for the $151M that was given out for your review, and you can map out the distributions any number of ways, but I can break it out as follows:

Directly (or indirectly) a lot of the funded was divided up as follows:

•           $43M directly to universities (none in KY; and if you think that this amount will create in-so-much-as one additional job in this country think again)

•           $27.3M to Gas, Oil or Automotive companies (none in KY)

•           $15M to national DoE funded labs (none in KY)

Then, contrary to what they said they wanted to fund, most of the dollars were allocated to the following technologies:

•           $41.4M to Biomass fuels/technologies (which has no hope of displacing oil on a national level, still propagates internal combustion engines AND does not burn GHG or Carbon free)

•           $33.3M to Advance Battery Technology/Energy Storage (even if it offers any hope of being “transformational” none of them has a prayer of getting out of the lab in 36 months, not a one. And, aren’t we funding these already through other means?)

•           $15M to Building Efficiency/Technologies (I can’t help but ask “what’s transformational about that?” And who benefits? The power companies? The consumers? Public rates have never gone down despite the incredible amount of conserving already being done. Who are we helping?)

•           $11M to 5 different Carbon Capture projects (not a penny to KY or W VA, and [worst yet] this does nothing to reduce GHG or Carbon emissions, it only makes it worse. In the end it only stashes this problem away for our grandkids to figure out a way to deal with it.)

•           $10.2M to Gas/Oil/Automotive companies and their affiliates (didn’t the US Government already give them funds to help them become more ‘transformational’? How did these even get in there?)

Of the $151M handed out, only about $9.0M went to truly transformational technology, through private companies and towards technology that can possibly be mainstreamed in less than 36 months. Sadly, only $21M went to Wind, Solar and Geothermal energy technologies. Besides geothermal energy (which is spotty at best and not very scalable) none of these others can claim the peak performance power generation 24/7/365 that hydropower can. But here is the part I don’t understand: Not a dime went to hydropower or hydrokinetic technologies. Not one dime. (And I know that, besides ours, there were several others on the table worth considering.) We were very dissapointed in that fact.

Geoff, ARPA-E did announce that they will come out with another round of requests for funding proposals and [rest assured] that if we qualify for what they are asking for, we will pursue them as well, so please let this letter serve as a heads-up as a request for further support (if we need it). But, as someone desperately trying to believe in our government, and the choices that it makes for the welfare of its citizens, our group feigns to find anything good to say about this gross misuse of trust in those trying to make America a world leader in clean energy and advanced ‘transformative’ technology. We had so hoped it wasn’t going to turn out as it had. We are upset; you should be too.

A friend,

Mike Brace
Partner, EV World & Assoc, LLC
techeditor@evworld.com