The failure of Congress to pass a new budget after the November elections could put a successful energy innovation program at death's door.
The failure of Congress to pass a new budget after the November elections could put a successful energy innovation program at death's door. The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), which funds teams of entrepreneurs to develop high-risk, high-reward energy breakthroughs that could deliver game-changing results, is at risk of being zeroed out of next years budget.
The agency was first authorized in 2007 under President Bush, but didn't receive appropriated funding until the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus legislation, which allocated $400 million to the program. The program is widely viewed by business leaders as a success, and has successfully committed competitive grants to many of the countries top entrepreneurs and innovators.
Yet, as ARRA funds expire, ARPA-E is in danger of not receiving the federal commitment it needs to survive at the same time as other nations are redoubling their efforts to invest in clean energy innovation.
Here's the deal: Rather than pass a new budget, Congress recently passed a "Continuing Resolution" to temporarily extend fiscal budgets from FY 2010--which ended on September 30--until December. However, ARPA-E only received $15 million in FY2010, just enough to keep the lights on. If Congress comes back after the election and passes another Continuing Resolution into next year rather than passing a new budget, ARPA-E could be inadvertently zeroed out, unable to make new grants and fund innovative research projects that help create a clean energy economy and have the potential to drive economic growth.
In a letter sent last week, the Breakthrough Institute, Third Way, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation urged House and Senate leaders to support ARPA-E after November. You can read the letter below, or download PDF copies here (House) and here (Senate).
September 30, 2010
Senator Daniel Inouye
Chairman, Appropriations Committee
S-128 U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. 20510
Senator Thad Cochran
Ranking Member, Appropriations Committee
S-128 U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. 20510
Senator Byron Dorgan
Chairman, Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
322 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510
Senator Robert Bennett
Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
431 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Inouye, Senator Cochran, Senator Dorgan, and Senator Bennett:
We are writing to urge you to fully fund the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at $300 million for 2011 before the 111th Congress adjourns. This program embodies the kind of smart, targeted use of tax dollars to develop next generation technologies that helped propel American economic growth throughout the 20th century. By providing this funding, we can help ensure that affordable clean energy innovations are developed and commercialized in the United States, leading to the cutting-edge American companies and new jobs that will help drive private sector growth well into the 21st century. A failure to fund ARPA-E this year would essentially zero out a program that is critical to America's ability to compete in the global market and transition to clean energy. Much of the world is moving to clean energy. Countries from China and India to Spain and South Korea are no longer willing to tolerate the costs of pollution, security threat of relying on foreign oil and the dangers of a warming planet. These nations are investing billions of dollars to develop, manufacture, and adopt affordable, new technologies that can produce clean energy as cheaply as fossil fuels. The countries that do this first will reap enormous economic and environmental benefits.
America excels at precisely this kind of challenge. Throughout this country's history, mission-focused government agencies and America's entrepreneurial private sector worked together to develop dozens of new technologies and entire new economic sectors, from commercial aviation and nuclear power, to microchips, the Internet and biotechnology.
Despite America's long history of effective public-private innovation partnership, the U.S. has not followed this successful model with clean energy. Well into the 2000s, neither the private sector nor government dedicated the money or brainpower needed to solve practical, commercially applicable clean energy challenges.
In 2007, the 110th Congress passed, and President Bush signed into law, legislation to create ARPA-E, modeled on the extremely successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Over the last four decades, DARPA's small staff and budget has had a huge impact, giving birth to a number of significant innovations including the Internet, Global Positioning Systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Today, ARPA-E can do the same for clean energy, leading to new energy storage systems, air-based wind turbines or advanced vehicles as groundbreaking--and with as much potential to spur economic growth--as the DARPA-led innovations of the past. At a time when we are competing against countries like China, which is investing $738 billion over the next ten years to beat us to market with cheap, clean energy technologies, we cannot afford to stand still.
Congress recognized the importance of ARPA-E when it provided $388 million for the program in 2009. Without investments like this, started under President Bush and continued by President Obama, we will be abandoning the kind of targeted innovation that fueled an American century of new ideas and economic growth. That is why Congress should keep ARPA-E's research on track and fully fund it this year, so America's engineers and entrepreneurs can keep doing what they do best: invent cutting-edge technologies that will move us to clean energy and drive economic growth.
Sincerely,
Josh Freed
Director, Clean Energy Program
Third Way
Michael Shellenberger
President
The Breakthrough Institute
Rob Atkinson
President
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
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