Deep within the Department of Energy is a small agency devoted to supporting cutting-edge energy research: the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E. It’s only about 10 years old and not widely known or appreciated by the public — but among energy geeks, it is beloved.
By all accounts, ARPA-E is a rousing success. The National Academy of Sciences conducted an extensive assessment in 2017 and concluded as much. Of the roughly 500 grants the agency had given out at that point, about half had resulted in peer-reviewed research, about a quarter went on to leverage funding from the private sector, and around 13 percent resulted in new patents. And that’s with a deliberate focus on “high risk, high reward” investments.
The agency — originally created in 2007 by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers, fully funded by President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, and put on firmer footing by Congress in 2011 — was consciously designed to mimic the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA), created way back in 1958 to do advanced research for the Department of Defense.
ARPA-E’s purpose is to identify promising advanced energy technologies and help them bridge the “valley of death” between basic research and commercialization — oh, and “to bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission to energy research that will attract the U.S.’s best and brightest minds.”
In its modest way, it has done that. Naturally, because it is a successful agency associated with Obama, Donald Trump hates it.
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