Posts Tagged ‘clean energy’
White House: Tough year ahead for R&D funding
Thursday, September 9, 2010, 7:59 pmIncreases in federal funding for research and development in the past 10 years – from the doubling of biomedical research dollars to the stimulus money – have created jobs and supported the economy in R&D hot spots like North Carolina’s Research Triangle area.
Kei Koizumi
But concerns about the rising U.S. deficit now threaten to slow the flow of federal R&D funding to universities, research institutes and companies developing new technologies. Budget proposals for the fiscal year starting October 2011 are due Monday and the Obama administration has asked all federal agencies to cut funding requests by 5 percent.
The five months of budget negotiations that are ahead will determine whether R&D funding can be protected from the cuts, Kei Koizumi, assistant director for federal R&D in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wednesday.
Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, Koizumi said, “it’s going to be a very tough year.”
With the same amount of money or less to go around, more new research projects might languish for lack of funding and existing projects might have to be scaled back in favor of others with a higher priority.
Health, clean energy, global climate change and security remain among the R&D priorities of the Obama administration, Koizumi said. But the budget may also include some new funding ideas, such as experimental approaches to bring new technologies to market and a shift in how to balance research that is relevant today and high risk-high return research that could prove transformational in the long term.
Results of these policy discussions and budget negotiations will reverberate in R&D hot spots, where federal R&D funding supports a significant part of the local economy.
U.S. industry, nonprofits and taxpayers invest about $400 billion every year in R&D.
The federal government’s share is about 37 percent, or $147 billion. That’s up about 50 percent since 2000 thanks to initiatives to boost biomedical research and advances in clean energy and engineering.
Meanwhile, R&D spending in the Research Triangle about doubled.
In 2008, Duke University, UNC-CH, N.C. State University and RTI International, a research institute in Research Triangle Park, spent about $2.34 billion on R&D, according to a survey by the National Science Foundation and RTI’s annual report.
North Carolina was also among the states that benefited the most from stimulus money earmarked for R&D in the past 18 months – the three universities and RTI were awarded more than $225 million just from the National Institutes of Health.
Hundreds of R&D jobs have been created in the Triangle backed by stimulus funds and university researchers are already asking what will happen with these jobs once the funding runs out.
“There’s not going to be another stimulus,” Koizumi said. “There is some adjustment coming.”
What does a plug-in vehicle have in common with the iPad?
Thursday, August 5, 2010, 9:58 pm
Duke Energy's Tesla
Duke Energy’s silver Tesla in the parking lot at Research Triangle Park headquarters was off-limits – you could touch and take pictures but not drive it or ride in it.
In that respect, Wednesday’s forum on plug-in electric vehicles resembled events featuring 20th century combustion engine technology with expensive sports cars spurring unattainable dreams amongst autophiles.
That the Tesla remained parked was unfortunate. It’s exactly the driving of a plug-in electric vehicle, or PEV, that would have provided a clue how shifting from fossil fuel to electricity might change daily life.
PEVs come in different flavors, from hybrids like the plug-in version of the Toyota Prius and the Chevy Volt to all-electric cars like the Tesla and the Nissan Leaf. But as the Leaf, the first mass-produced, affordable electric car, hits U.S. roads in December and January, the future of driving might feel more and more like the future of reading.
So, does the all-electric car promise to be to driving what the iPad or the Kendle promise to be to reading?
That’ll depend on how many people will buy the Leaf and whether they like what they buy, panel members at the forum, from Nancy Mansfield, Nissan’s electric vehicle regional manager, to Duke Energy’s John Langston and Progress Energy’s Mike Waters, agreed.
Nissan Leaf
More than 17,000 people in the U.S. have spent $99 each to reserve a spot on the list to order one of the first 50,000 Leafs, Mansfield said. The cars, which will be imported from Japan until U.S. production starts in 2012, will not be sold through dealerships.
First orders will be accepted by the end of the month and filled by December, Mansfield said. Orders from Tennessee, California, Arizona, Oregon and the state of Washington will be taken and filled first.
Of the 288 reservations in North Carolina, 139 came from the Research Triangle area, she said. The first local deliveries are projected in April.
That may not sound like a lot, considering that the National Auto Dealers Association put the number of cars on North Carolina roads at more than 3.6 million. But the Leaf sets the stage. In the next two years, automakers plan to bring to market about two dozen PEV models and despite lingering concerns about battery technology and ability of the electric grid to keep up, the number of federal incentives is set to increase.
Already, federal tax credits reduce the price of the Leaf and the cost of installing a charging station at home, because PEVs promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel imports.
But PEVs are more than cars without tailpipes. Owning one will change habits and routines. For starters, an electrical engine makes no noise and needs neither a transmission nor an oil change.
PEVs do need charging stations, however, in homes, parks, public parking lots, schools, hospitals and shopping centers. The RTP area is projected to get about 200 of them within the next 18 months, according to Jeffrey Barghout, director of Transportation Initiatives at Advanced Energy in Raleigh.
But the bulk of the charging is expected to be done overnight at home. Forget the stop at the gas station on the way home. Many PEVs will be refueled in the garage or at neighborhood charging stations. To completely recharge the Leaf’s batteries on a 110 Volt circuit takes up to 21 hours, so Nissan recommends installation of a 220 Volt charging station. That costs about $2,200 and requires a city permit.
The permitting process attracted officials from Cary, Raleigh, Durham and other communities in the RTP area to the forum. Some of them, like the Town of Cary, also reserved a spot to order a Leaf.
For more information about PEVs, check out Web sites by the Electric Drive Transportation Association, the industry’s lobby group; EV World, an online publication by electric vehicle aficionados; Plug-In America, an online publication by clean energy advocates; and Project Get Ready, an initiative of the Rocky Mountain Institute to prepare for the arrival of PEVs.
Still, a test drive is the best way to get a feel for how different PEVs are. Check out this video of a Tesla test drive (not Duke Energy’s car):
RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub
Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pmNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.
The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.
RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.
“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.
Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 amTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
Homegrown innovation: MegaWatt Solar
Monday, April 19, 2010, 10:28 am
A concentrated photovoltaic "solar tree" designed by MegaWatt Solar. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)
I recently wrote a two-part post here reporting on a forum in Research Triangle Park which focused on barriers to homegrown global business innovation in the Triangle and in North Carolina. While contemplating the themes of the forum, and skimming today’s science news, I stumbled across this article in Popular Mechanics magazine which looks into the advances in concentrated photovoltaics over the past few years — and leads with the example of MegaWatt Solar, a renewable energy start-up in our own backyard. The company was formed by three professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who seek to create utility-scaled concentrated photovoltaic systems to supplement fossil fuels-based energy production. (They’ve also been featured in UNC’s Endeavors research magazine, and have landed a story or two in the News & Observer, no longer available in their web archives.)
It struck me that MegaWatt Solar is a good example of the applied research that our area universities can generate to solve real-world problems, and also of the links that can be established between professors with marketable ideas and business-savvy entrepreneurs that can help carry the ideas from the research bench to the bank. Their story is truly one of homegrown innovation, though to be fair they are still in the pilot study phase and working out some kinks.
Because I’ve already written this story, I’m not going to write it again… Below is a reprint of the cover story article I penned about the people behind MegaWatt Solar, and their mission, for the fall 2009 issue of UNC College of Arts & Sciences magazine. It is reprinted here with full permission from the editors.
UNC Arts & Science cover, fall 2009, with MegaWatt Solar founders.
The Power of 20 Suns
MegaWatt Solar is a small start-up energy company in Hillsborough, N.C., backed by $17 million from Norwegian venture capitalists and mentally powered by three researchers in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Tucked away in a brick textile-mill-turned-office-park, the company is poised to bring a new concentrated photovoltaic system to market that could provide the cheapest large-scale renewable source of electricity available anywhere.
But they didn’t design it for your home. They designed it for your utility company, to offset peak energy demand, which tends to coincide with the sunniest portions of the solar day. The term MegaWatt describes their goal of producing one megawatt of electricity from over a thousand solar “trees” spread across about 10 acres. The solar trees rotate on a dual axis mount that tracks the sun across the sky vault. One megawatt of electricity — one million watts — is enough to power about 800 homes.
MegaWatt Solar was founded by astrophysicist Chris Clemens, theoretical physicist Charles Evans, computer scientist Russ Taylor and a private sector power-grid systems engineer, Dan Gregory. They built their alpha version in spring 2006 in Evans’ driveway from what he describes as “an aluminum erector set for adults,” with parts bought off E-Bay, cheap advertising signboard and a highly reflective material scavenged from the interior of a Solotube skylight.
The best part? It worked.
“Boy, it was bright, “Evans said. “Everyone ran to get their sunglasses.”
They measured its electrical output and knew they were on to something red hot. Read more…
RTP Weekahead 11/30
Sunday, November 29, 2009, 4:17 pmEvents taking place the week of Dec. 30 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public:
