doe

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland--Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees the solutions to today's energy challenges in the work of scientists in decades past.

Chu delivered the opening keynote here Tuesday at the first ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, where he used examples of historic technology breakthroughs as the model for making new discoveries in clean energy. The Department of Energy is seeking to re-create the structure of research that yielded great technology jumps, such as the precursor of the Internet or the laser.

ARPA-E, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, was funded for the first time last year. Its goal is … Read more

Tesla Motors will receive a long-sought $465 million loan to build a factory to build its planned Model S electric sedan, the U.S. Department of Energy said on Thursday.

With the loan, Tesla will be able to start making the Model S in volume during 2012 and ramp up to 20,000 units by the end of 2013. The location of the facility is expected to be in Southern California.

The Model S is one of a few highly anticipated electric cars coming out in the next few years. It's designed to go over 300 miles on batteries, … Read more

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Wednesday announced the recipients of more than $80 million in government funding for biofuels research and development.

The bulk of the funding, coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, went to algae research and development, while the rest went toward improving the country's ethanol infrastructure.

About $44 million went to the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB), an organization led by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. The research institute, which hosts the plant science labs of several universities, is coordinating the efforts of private, academic, and public organizations … Read more

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Monday announced the creation of a program to transfer clean-energy technologies to developing countries at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen.

Called the Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative (Climate REDI), the goal is to promote the use of efficient and renewable energy products to cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve the quality of life in poor countries, according to the DOE.

Climate REDI will be coordinated with existing technology transfer programs and organizations. Total spending will be $350 million over five years with the U.S. funding $100 million.

The three areas that … Read more

The Department of Energy is making $100 million in government stimulus money available to researchers with ideas for radically different energy technologies.

The DOE on Monday announced the second portion of the ARPA-E program and said that "concept papers" for three research areas--fuels, capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants, and long-range electric vehicle batteries--are due by the middle of next January. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke unveiled the green-tech research program in conjunction with the start of international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen, which got under way Monday.

The research areas reflect the priorities … Read more

When it comes to the U.S. biofuels strategy, it's no longer just about ethanol.

The Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture announced on Friday that $564 million in stimulus act funding would be used toward constructing biorefineries to make liquid fuels from plants. Out of the 19 projects receiving funding, nearly half focus on the development of "drop-in" replacements for gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. The rest focus on technologies for making ethanol or chemicals from sources other than corn. (Click this PDF for a full list of recipient projects).

In one example, San Diego-based … Read more

The Department of Energy on Tuesday awarded $620 million in smart grid projects, the second major wave of government-led funding to modernize the electricity grid.

The money will come from the stimulus package and be matched by commercial companies, making the total spending $1.6 billion spread across 32 demonstration projects in 21 states. A total of $8.1 billion in smart-grid spending from public and private sources was announced late last month.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the awards at Ohio-based utility AEP, whose GridSmart program is considered one of the more technically advanced.

The bulk of the DOE … Read more

BOSTON--If you attached a cost to putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, how would the energy business change?

Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy and former chief scientist of BP, has thought this question over. Koonin was the keynote speaker Thursday at the Fifth Annual Conference on Clean Energy here, where he offered a big-picture analysis of how the U.S. should convert to low-carbon energies.

The main drivers toward cleaner energy are efforts to improve the country's energy security and to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But there are many paths to that destination … Read more

Injured soldiers and people with disabilities might one day benefit from a hydraulic hand that doubles finger strength. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory say a "mesofluidic" hand could be used to remotely disarm explosives and manipulate IEDs.

Mesofluidics is the study of applying pea-size hydraulics to applications requiring significant power in a limited space.

So far, the team at the Tennessee laboratory has developed an artificial finger made up of 25 moving parts. It can deliver 20 pounds of pinch force, about double that of a human finger, while remaining lightweight and … Read more