Green Energy Technology Breakthroughs get $150 Million ARPA-E Funding to Encourage Innovation in Technology

According to a recent press release the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) has issued a $150 million funding opportunity to encourage innovation and the advancement of technologies which could lead to ‘green’ and sustainable energy solutions. The funding is open to all transformational energy technologies in support of the Obama Administration’s all-of-the-above approach to solving our nation’s most pressing energy challenges.

The release promotes the Open Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) as, “a call to our country’s brightest scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to propose early-stage research projects that would not otherwise be able to attract private investment, but could lead to breakthrough energy technologies.”


“Today we are calling on our nation’s best and brightest to catalyze energy breakthroughs in all areas imaginable through this Open Funding Opportunity Announcement, which illustrates the true purpose of ARPA-E,” said Director Majumdar. “Innovation is our nation’s sweet spot, and it is critically important that we look at every possible energy solution in order to ensure America’s future prosperity and security.”

In 2009 ARPA-E released a similar open funding opportunity, this is a follow on to support additional research and advancements in the field. Other similar programs have included the Methane Opportunities for Vehicular Energy (MOVE) – which will make $30 million available to find ways to harness our abundant supplies of domestic natural gas for vehicles and was announced by President Obama last week at the University of Miami.

Under the program individual awards under the Open FOA will range between $250,000 and $10 million. To date, ARPA-E has funded a total of more than 180 projects, for $521.7 million in awards across 12 program areas. Demonstrating the success ARPA-E has already seen, the Agency announced last year that eleven of its projects that received $40 million from ARPA-E for innovative research, were able to use this funding to demonstrate results, which allowed these teams to secure more than $200 million in outside private capital investment.

ARPA-E was launched in 2009 by the Obama administration to seek out transformational, breakthrough technologies that are too risky for private sector investment but have the potential to translate science into quantum leaps in energy technology, form the foundation for entirely new industries, and in the future have large commercial impact.