Congress Reauthorizes America COMPETES Act to Support Advanced Energy Technologies, Workforce Development

In a flurry of final-days legislative action on Capitol Hill, the lame-duck Senate passed a reauthorization of the 2007 America COMPETES Act. The verbosely titled act – the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science Act –created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), among other programs.

The America COMPETES Act also includes important provisions for supporting teacher training in technology areas, as well as school, college and graduate programs for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) – some of which are under the aegis of the Department of Energy. The reauthorization bill had passed the House of Representatives in May; it now goes to the President for signature.

Funding for ARPA-E is now extended for an additional three years. Support for many other innovation and technology transfer programs are also created, extended and expanded.

ARPA-E: Supporting High-Tech and Speculative Energy R&D

ARPA-E is modeled on the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was created in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.  DARPA has supported advanced research for defense purposes, including the precursor to today’s Internet.

Since funding was first authorized in the 2009 Recovery Act, ARPA-E has focused on supporting “high-risk, high-reward” energy technology research, including research into energy efficiency-related technologies that might not attract more conventional private-sector or research body funding due to their speculative nature. ARPA-E can support energy technology research at any stage, from early theoretical research through to commercialization. Past sponsored research has included advanced building cooling systems, highly efficient lighting, energy storage technologies, high-efficiency motors, and more. Summaries of grant awardees’ projects are available on the ARPA-E programs page.

Energy Efficiency Provisions

Other provisions relevant to energy efficiency include:

• An initiative in support of sustainable manufacturing and high-performance green buildings conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST);
• Inclusion of smart grid technologies in provisions for energy education, research and development;
• Support for research on cloud computing, which has the potential to reduce energy consumption from IT equipment and data centers by combining tasks in single servers, thereby reducing idle servers that consume energy but produce little productivity; and
• Support of green jobs training for small and medium-sized manufacturers through a competitively awarded grant program, with specific note of building energy efficiency.