Energy Department gets creative with EFRCs

Here’s some happy innovation news for anyone wondering what’s next  for the environment and the economy:  The U.S. Department of Energy announced last week that it will invest nearly $800 million in 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) to develop clean fuel technologies.

And not just new ways to use solar, wind and other clean, renewable energy sources, but also ways to rid the planet of the bad effects from the fossil fuels we’ve relied on too long.

The funding is going to universities and research centers all around the nation, with particular concentrations in California and the Northeast metropolitan corridor. Some of them, such as Caltech and MIT, you could have predicted. But institutions in Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona and other fly-over states  have also won money for their projects, which range from developing polymers and other novel solid materials for converting sunlight to electricity to exploring ways of storing carbon dioxide geologically.  

This sounds like money well placed. It will lead to science and design that will generate new products, jobs and an improved economy; support education; lead to a cleaner Earth and healthier people; and save the U.S. and other nations from dependence on other nation’s fossil-fuel supplies.  Seven key effects at one blow.

And there’s another one: collaboration. The EFRC has prompted groups of universities – even deadly sports rivals - to pool talent and work together. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, for instance, chemistry professor and project leader Thomas Meyer will join forces with other UNC departments and counterparts at Duke University, North Carolina State, North Carolina Central and the University of Florida to develop solar fuels from photovoltaic technology.     

 Thomas Meyer

Meanwhile, work is going ahead in the for-profit sector on smaller wind turbines for individual buildings that were mentioned in Geniocity.com’s Wind of Change project two weeks ago as one of the cutting-edge ideas in the alternative-fuels industry.