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This is part of a series of brief posts on ‘clean energy jobs‘ opportunities for sparking meaningful employment, quickly, in the United States as discussed in Clean Energy Jobs: Stimulate Me.

Clean Energy Jobs Fill Labs: $4 billion per year for 60,000 jobs

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Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in 2007 but ARPA-E didn’t really get off its feet until earlier this year, with $400 million of the stimulus dedicated for ARPA-E grants. Earlier this year, ARPA-E announced a $150 million grant program using this money. Nearly 4000 proposals flooded in. (And, there are many reasons to believe that this was ‘tip of the iceberg’ due to, for example, institutions limiting the number of applications to improve the chances for ‘preferred’ projects.) Last month, ARPA-E announced the awards from this process: 37 proposals, or less than 1 percent of applicants, received grants that totaled $151 million [note 26 Oct 09 press release]. (On one, for example, see ARPA-E Bets on Disruptive Technology Synthesizing Fuel from Bacteria.)

To provide perspective, I had the chance to speak with senior members of several DOE review committees while they were going through these grants. [NOTE: To be clear, my questions steered clear of seeking any form of improper knowledge of the process and their comments gave zero information as to any specific grant, their deliberation process, etc …] The core question: ‘Roughly, if you had full funding, roughly what percentage of the applicants would merit funding from the Federal government based on your years of experience?’ The answers varied from 25 to 35 percent. (In another way of looking at, meaning roughly 1000 to 1400 grants from the roughly 4000 applications.) As a follow-up question, ‘if we were to be a little more aggressive, willing to take more risk of failure, would that change your estimate’. One quite emphatically stated that the ‘roughly 25 percent’ figure was good, with no more (and, well, no less) meriting funding while the others raised their estimates by about 10-15 percent. (Another way of looking at this, ‘higher risk’ would see about 1000-2000 of the 4000 applicants funded.) (Related to this, one of the involved reviewers commented that the 4000 applications quite probably represented more work time value in their preparation than the $150 million could fund.)

All of this suggests a tremendous pent-up demand in terms of viable clean-energy related projects for funding in the nation’s laboratories.

When asked about this, following his presentation to the Council on Competitiveness’ National Energy Forum, DOE Secretary Steven Chu basically threw up his arms and said something like ‘if I had the resources …’

If funded, these projects would not just create and sustain clean energy jobs throughout America today but would also help create a flood of innovation to help the United States seize a leadership position in the clean energy revolution and thus foster even more clean energy jobs tomorrow.

Quite roughly, the ARPA-E grants averaged about $4 million dollars. Assuming that 1000 that merited funding would average the same, that quickly leads us to a $4 billion program. (Which, quite likely, still leaves the ARPA-E program underfunded against real requirements and opportunities.) If funded, this program could leap ahead quickly simply by quickly asking the top 1000 (or top 1500) applicants if they still would like to be be considered for funding. And, then, quickly moving funding to the top 200 (e.g., 5%) unfunded efforts with closer reviews as the review teams move down the list. Of the $4 billion, perhaps $1-2 billion could be moved quickly via that earlier grant application while the doors are opened for new (and continuing) rounds of grant applications.

Clean Energy Jobs Fill Labs: $4 billion per year for 60,000 jobs

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Clean Energy Jobs series posts:

• Clean Energy Jobs Go To The Cleaners
• Clean Energy Jobs Blow In (not Blow Up) Coal River Mountain
• Clean Energy Takes the PHE School Bus
• Clean Energy Jobs Go to the Market
• Clean Energy Jobs Go to School
• Tips for the Job Summit: Can we say Clean Energy Jobs?
• Clean Energy Jobs: Stimulate Me