In the basement lab of Nitash Balsara, at the University of California, Berkeley, are the ingredients of a lighter, more-potent battery to power the cars of the future. To build it, he needs President Barack Obama’s stimulus package to pass.
Balsara, a chemical engineer, has assembled a team of 15 scientists that applied for $25 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to improve batteries by modifying their materials. Money for energy projects is part of an $819 billion stimulus, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, that Obama says is critical to saving the economy.
Researchers at U.S. universities, led by Berkeley, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are targeting the $2 billion in energy research funds contained in the House recovery bill. The research dollars will produce jobs, reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and stem the production of greenhouse gases, according to the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 schools that conduct research.
“We see it as a huge opportunity, and there is huge interest on our campuses,” said Tobin Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based association. “I’m very optimistic. You have an administration coming in that says it’s important.”
Obama’s New Energy for America Plan, as explained on the White House Web site, calls for creating five million jobs by spending $150 billion, over 10 years, “to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.”
Senate Debate
The stimulus approved on Jan. 28 by the House contains at least $2 billion for research on renewable energy and efficiency, said Kei Koizumi, who analyzes the federal budget for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington advocacy group.
The Senate version of the legislation contains $2.6 billion for energy research. Debate in the Senate is scheduled to begin today.
“At the moment, we are all pleasantly surprised there is so much money for basic research,” Koizumi said. “Clearly, the new administration sees the stimulus as a way to get its vision of a green economy started through R&D.”
To press their case for increased energy-research funding, universities and their lobbyists drafted letters and petitions to Obama and sent professors to testify before Congress.
“Energy and climate could be our Sputnik challenge, a new way to infuse our best talent into our science and technology system” said Maria Zuber, a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, testifying before the House on Jan. 7.
Carter Administration
Research funding at the Energy Department reached its peak in the Carter administration, which spent $7.5 billion (in 2008 dollars) on science in 1978 after oil-price shocks sent the cost of gasoline soaring.
Funding hit a post-Carter low of $1.6 billion, adjusted for inflation, in 1998 and has climbed back to about $3 billion a year, Koizumi said. The stimulus package would almost double the energy-research money contained in separate appropriations legislation.
Balsara, 48, a native of Mumbai who earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, works in his lab with four graduate students. The scientists are developing solid compounds called polymers to replace the organic liquid that conducts ions essential to storing electricity. The experiments are funded by a $400,000 Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy grant, from the Energy Department, that renews annually.
‘We Don’t Know a Lot’
Balsara aims to form an Energy Frontier Research Center, under a new U.S. program designed to unite investigators at multiple universities. If funded, Balsara would form a team of scientists, from Berkeley, New York University and Stanford. The group would tackle all of the parts of rechargeable batteries, whose structure hasn’t changed since their invention in 1859, he said.
“We don’t know a lot about how batteries work,” Balsara said in his office. “We’re trying to get a microscopic and molecular handle on what’s going on in batteries, with the view of radically improving battery technology.”
More-efficient batteries can make electric cars more affordable and help enable the transmission of electricity from solar cells and wind turbines over the power-distribution grid, he said.
“People say all the grid problems become trivial if you have storage,” Balsara said. “There are many, many applications that suffer because of the limitations of batteries.”
260 Applications
Through Dec. 5, the Energy Department received 260 applications for Energy Frontier Research Center grants, from about 3,800 scientists at 385 institutions. The program, which calls for $100 million to be spent on the centers annually, may be fully funded by the pending stimulus, Koizumi said.
Other proposals for Frontier grants include using nanotechnology to improve the energy efficiency of computers; investigating how underground storage of carbon dioxide affects surrounding rock; and developing solar cells from organic materials.
Every grant would support the research of 15 senior investigators, each of whom would use the money to employ 15 to 20 graduate students, said Eric Rohlfing, a division director for the Energy Department.
“There is a lot of demand,” he said. “There is a virtual army of young scientists eager to tackle this problem.”
Internet Model
Energy research can also be funded through increasing the number of grants made by the Energy Department’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences and through the Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy, a program designed to identify technologies not funded elsewhere. The House stimulus includes $400 million for ARPA-E, which is modeled on a similar Defense Department program that led to the creation of the Internet.
Ultimately, the government should increase spending on energy research by billions of dollars annually, said Daniel Kammen, the director of Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.
“It’s certainly not that much money, especially considering the numbers being thrown around today for an economic-stimulus package,” said Kammen, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which advanced knowledge about man-made global warming.
Kammen contrasted funding of energy research with U.S. spending on the National Institutes of Health, which doubled its annual budget from 1998 to 2003 and now gets $29 billion a year.
“We need research in every area” of energy, Kammen said. “There is no area that you would say is overfunded.”
‘True Scientist’
Universities are encouraged by Obama’s choice of Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist and Berkeley professor, as energy secretary.
“Steve is a true scientist,” said James Sweeney, a Stanford economist who studies energy policy. “He believes in the importance of basic, fundamental research. As secretary of energy, he will want more money to go into the office of science.”
Universities are also turning to the private sector for energy-research dollars. BP Plc, Europe’s second-largest oil company, has pledged $500 million to Berkeley to fund the Energy Biosciences Institute to study how fuel can be derived from plants.
Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, which aims to develop technologies for lowering greenhouse gases, is funded by a $225 million contribution from Exxon Mobil Corp., General Electric Co., Schlumberger Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corp. The project awards grants to researchers at Stanford and other universities for work on developing solar cells, storing carbon and improving engine efficiency.
‘A Lot to Do’
There are far more ideas that merit backing, said Franklin Orr, the former director of the project.
“We could deploy a much greater amount here at Stanford that we have available,” said Orr, now the head of a different Stanford energy-research initiative. “There’s a lot to do. It’s exactly the sort of challenge good universities should help solve.”
