ARPA-E is a high-risk, high-reward agency that changes what’s possible in energy. With the help of our awardees, supporters, and other stakeholders, we achieved a striking amount in 2021. The Technology ARPA-E launched 11 new programs covering a range of energy applications in 2021, including focused programs, Exploratory Topics, OPEN 2021, and SCALEUP. Focused programs are the foundation of this mission-driven agency. Program Directors lead program development with their team through up to a year of intense effort, culminating in a detailed Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), to…
What if the key to unlocking low-carbon, nitrogen-rich fertilizer came to you in a flash? That’s exactly what happened to ARPA-E awardee Nitricity, who developed a way to create their own lightning that separates nitrogen from the air with practically zero carbon dioxide (CO2) impact. For those of us who’ve forgotten most of our high school chemistry and physics, lightning is key to allowing plants to grow. Nitrogen is an essential nutrient that plants take up from the soil. Lightning fixes nitrogen to fertilize plants by creating an electric field so strong that it turns the air into a…
ARPA-E's REMEDY (Reducing Emissions of Methane Every Day of the Year) program is a three-year, $35 million research effort aimed at reducing methane emissions from three specific point sources from the coal, oil, and gas sector. These three sources are responsible for 10% of anthropogenic methane emissions. REMEDY seeks technical solutions that can achieve 99.5% methane conversion and commercial scalability. If successful, REMEDY systems could dramatically reduce U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at low cost. ARPA-E Program Director Dr. Jack Lewnard leads the REMEDY program and focuses…
Fuel cells use the chemical energy in fuels to produce clean, safe, and efficient electricity. Fuel cells can also be used to provide distributed power generation (DG), which refers to electricity generation located at or near the site where it will be used. Efficient, fuel-flexible, cost-competitive DG systems provide reliable stationary combined heat and power (CHP) for a variety of applications, including commercial buildings and data centers. There is a critical need to develop fuel cell technologies that can enable DG at low cost and with high efficiency. These technologies have…
On September 7, 2021, WHOOP launched its latest wearable fitness device, WHOOP 4.0, which will feature Sila Nanotechnologies’ new battery technology. Their technology replaces graphite anodes with silicon (Si) to increase the energy density of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which can reduce battery size without sacrificing safety or performance. Sila Nanotechnologies’ anode technology helps enable the WHOOP 4.0’s slim design. Compared with the previous model, the WHOOP 4.0 has…
Over the past several years, ARPA-E has funded a number of fusion “capability teams” through the Fusion Diagnostics “Exploratory Topic” (2019) and the BETHE program (2020) to accelerate fusion-energy R&D via public-private partnerships. These capability teams, drawing predominantly from federally funded researchers at U.S. national laboratories and universities, bring state-of-the-art tools (including diagnostic instruments and computational modeling) and expertise to help ARPA-E-supported fusion concept teams (and other federally and privately supported fusion teams) accelerate progress…
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced it selected four projects to receive a combined $9.4 million to develop technology focused on removing sulfur hexafluoride—a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide—from the U.S. power grid. The four projects selected to receive funding include the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Conn.; Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Ga.; GE Grid Solutions, LLC in Charleroi, Pa.; and Toshiba International Corporation in Houston, Texas. “The climate crisis is already devastating…
The Grid Optimization (GO) Competition—managed by ARPA‑E—is a series of challenges aimed at developing software management solutions to address challenging power grid problems. The competition’s intent is to create a more reliable, resilient and secure American electricity grid. The GO Competition began with Challenge 1, which tasked participating teams to find solutions to a security constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) problem. Challenge 2 expands upon the SCOPF problem posed in Challenge 1 by adding new features including transmission line switching, adjustable…
On August 17, 2021, a New York Times article proclaimed a fusion energy release of 1.3 megajoules from 1.9 megajoules of incident laser energy, achieved at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The announcement of such a significant physics result rocked the fusion world, renewing discussions on R&D to enable commercially viable embodiments of laser-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF). While the NIF result equals the decades-old record tokamak scientific…
ARPA-E has kicked off a 3-year, $38M research program called REPAIR (Rapid Encapsulation of Pipelines Avoiding Intensive Replacement) to rehabilitate cast iron, wrought iron, and bare steel natural gas distribution pipes. The goal of the program is to use robots to create a new pipe inside the old pipe. For the program to be successful, the new pipe must meet utilities and regulatory agencies’ requirements, have a minimum life of 50 years, and possess sufficient material properties to operate throughout its service life without relying on the exterior pipe. Considering that gas utilities have…