Rather than updating yesterday’s post on DOE Secretary Steven Chu’s announcement of $151 million in research grants for fat-chance-but-here’s-hoping efforts to radically improve energy supply and efficiency, here’s a fresh list of additional reports. Wanna know the truth? Tracker’s doing this mainly because the pie chart here (hi res), which I found at Wired Science News along with a fat caption, is so elegant and interesting that it merits front right placement.

As for the REAL money, we’ll track tomorrow the reports on President Obama’s announcement today of $3.4 billion for improving the nation’s electrical transmission system. We need some help here in Berkeley already. Out of a clear blue sky Sunday afternoon the power went out. Sun went down. Gas still worked of course. Neighbors Dirk and Betty came across the street with soup. Mrs. Tracker had soup on the stove too. Slurped and talked by oil lamp and candle light. After they said good night the electric lights came back. On second thought, don’t make the grid perfect. It was wonderful.

More Major Media Stories on ARPA-E :

• NYTimes – Andrew C. Revkin (blog): The Energy Quest Begins ; One expert reporter’s analysis of the news that his colleague Matthew Wald heralded in yesterday’s paper. His first conclusion: The mix of awardees “seems to imply that the Obama administration sees the private sector as more apt to be the source of game-changing breakthroughs.” A question however: how many of these companies are spin offs from university and nat’l lab research programs done with taxpayer help? He also runs a plot showing that this bolus is barely a blip in overall R&D $$$ trends.
• Wall St. Journal – Keith Johnson (blog): Lab Rats: DOE Awards $150 Million to ‘Breakthrough’ Energy Projects. He sees greener transportation, via better batteries and biofuels, as the DOE’s big target. And he gets in a wisecrack about Arizona State University.

And some of the regional, specialty, and advocacy outlets:

• Power Engineering Int’l: Research projects get $151mn in stimulus funds ;
• Treehugger – Matthew McDermott: Dept. of Energy Invests $151 Million in tomorrow’s Transformative Technologies: That’s a pretty optimistic hed, “invests” and flat equation to tomorrow’s stuff. Again, one can always hope.
• Boston Business Journal: Six Mass. projects get energy grants ; Tiny piece, but it links to an interesting, if p.r.-heavy, piece in an event tinier pub, masslive.com, by Stan Freeman: FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. of Wilbraham awarded $8.3 million to help develop new turbine. And here’s the pic of its idea plus a happy bull elk.
• Delaware News Journal – Aaron Nathans: State energy projects in line for $13.4M in funding ;
• New American – James Heiser: Energy Dept. Funds Speculative Science ; A pub. that doesn’t like taxes and is sour on most things they’re spent on. But it describes the grants fairly before asking a question that all fiscal, business-minded conservatives ask, about government’s business picking winners and losers.
• Minneapolis Star Tribune – Thomas Lee (blog): BioCee Inc. wins big DOE grant ;
• Phoenix Business Journal: Two ASU projects get federal funding totaling $10.3M ;

Could go on. But all in all, not much coverage. If one of these ideas works as well as its boosters think it might, that’ll be the time for the banner heds. In the meantime, one supposes most of these grants are opportunities for some digging, and for features on the gambler’s streak that drives inventive entrepreneurs – including post-docs and professors giddy with what they saw happen in small scale lab tests – to decide to try to change the world (and get rich too).

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.