research proposal for renewable energy

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Press Release

U.S. Department of Energy Announces Over $63 Million to Support Commercialization of Transformative Energy Technologies

WASHINGTON, D.C. —  In support of President Biden's Investing in America agenda , the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $63.5 million for four transformative technologies through the Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program. The four projects have demonstrated a viable path to market and represent technologies focused on aerogels for energy-efficient insulated glass units, thermal batteries to supply combined heat and power from renewable electricity, energy-dense solid state batteries, and cement decarbonization. SCALEUP supports the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to advance critical research and development helping to propel America’s energy innovation leadership on the global stage.

“America is an innovation superpower, and President Biden is helping to scale up the next generation of clean energy solutions that will advance the nation even further toward our net-zero goals,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm . “By catalyzing the commercialization of promising technologies, we are empowering the private sector to g“America is an innovation superpower, and President Biden is helping to scale up the next generation of clean energy solutions that will advance the nation even further toward our net-zero goals,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “By catalyzing the commercialization of promising technologies, we are empowering the private sector to go all in to boost American manufacturing, strengthen national security and ensure our competitive edge.” 

The SCALEUP program provides new funding to previous ARPA-E awardees that have successfully de-risked their technology and established a viable route to commercial deployment.

The four projects selected as part of the latest SCALEUP program are: 

• AeroShield Materials (Waltham, MA) will develop a pilot manufacturing facility for aerogels for high-efficiency insulated glass units that will enable residential and commercial buildings to become more energy efficient, meeting current and future ENERGY STAR targets for windows. (Award amount: $14,500,000) 
• Antora Energy (Sunnyvale, CA) will scale up production of its thermal battery technology, which turns low-cost renewable energy into reliable, on-demand heat and power for industrial facilities, enabling rapid decarbonization of the industrial sector. (Award amount: $14,500,000) 
• Ion Storage Systems (Beltsville, MD) will support domestic manufacturing of next generation solid-state lithium-metal batteries and accelerate commercialization of the technology into the electric vehicle market. (Award amount: $20,000,000)
• Queens Carbon (Pine Brook, NJ) will develop an on-site pilot facility capable of producing carbon-neutral supplemental cementitious materials using industry standard raw materials to support decarbonized cement production. (Award amount: $14,500,000) 

This is the third cohort of projects selected under the SCALEUP program, and you can access full project descriptions for the technologies above on the ARPA-E website.

One of the project teams from the initial SCALEUP—Natron Energy, a global leader in sodium-ion battery technology—recently began commercial-scale operations at its manufacturing facility in Holland, Michigan.  LongPath Technologies—another awardee from the initial SCALEUP—has created a paradigm shift in methane detection and mitigation by developing technologies capable of detecting over 90% of methane leaks down to 0.2 kg/hr from nearly a mile away. LongPath recently received an LPO loan guarantee of $189 million. Finally, Sila—a next-generation battery materials company also funded under SCALEUP—was selected to received up to   $100 million in funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL)   to support the build-out of a facility in Moses Lake, Washington. Early ARPA-E funding and SCALEUP support were instrumental in the company’s success, and continued support demonstrates how critical President Biden’s whole-of-government strategy is to supporting energy technology from early stages, such as R&D, to full-scale deployment.   In 2021, ARPA-E issued the second SCALEUP program, which went on to support work in hybrid electric aircraft; high-power density magnetic components; efficient, cost-effective and compact U.S.-manufactured electric vehicle charging equipment; wood products that are stronger, lighter and less expensive than structural steel; rare earth-free permanent magnets; floating offshore wind; and geomechanical energy storage.  The SCALEUP program has successfully demonstrated what can happen when technical experts are empowered with the commercialization support to develop a strong pathway to market, and this latest cohort furthers the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to supporting American energy innovation. 

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New Large-Scale Renewable Energy Solicitation Announced To Deliver Clean Electricity Across The State

Final proposals for large-scale land-based renewable energy projects due in august 2024.

June 20, 2024

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced a new large-scale renewable energy solicitation to deliver clean electricity to New Yorkers. Building on New York’s 10-Point Action Plan , this solicitation seeks proposals for the development of new large-scale land-based renewable energy projects which are expected to spur billions of dollars in clean energy investments and create thousands of family-sustaining jobs in the State’s green economy. Today’s announcement supports progress toward achieving the State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goal to obtain 70 percent of New York’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

“New York is building a clean energy economy that will allow us to drastically lower emissions while creating thousands of new good-paying jobs, boosting billions of dollars in economic growth, and spurring an injection of private investment into our local communities," Governor Hochul said . “Once selected, these projects will help accelerate our mission to power our state with affordable, reliable, zero-emission electricity for the benefit of all New Yorkers.”

The competitive solicitation, administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is the latest in a planned series of procurements of land-based large scale renewable projects. As part of this solicitation, NYSERDA has included key provisions from the latest rounds of renewable energy procurements such as inflation indexing, labor provisions, stakeholder engagement requirements, new requirements emphasizing the importance of climate resiliency in project design, disadvantaged community commitments, agricultural land preservation, and related priorities to maintain the policy objectives introduced in prior solicitations to ensure an equitable energy transition. These elements are outlined within the solicitation documents and are designed to support the development and construction of numerous mature, late-stage renewable energy projects seeking to commence operation in the near term.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen M. Harris said , “By advancing land-based renewable energy projects, New York is expeditiously moving our state forward as a leader in the transition to reliable and clean energy. NYSERDA remains committed to strengthening our renewable energy pipeline and delivering increasing amounts of renewable electricity to further bolster our grid of the future.”

The process for submitting proposals into the land-based renewables solicitation will be conducted in two steps, with eligibility requirements due on July 15, 2024 , to confirm that interested projects are eligible to bid, and final proposals due on August 8, 2024 . More details on the land-based renewable energy solicitation are available on the Large-Scale Renewables Solicitation page  on NYSERDA’s website. Conditional award notifications to selected proposers are expected in September 2024.

New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said , “New York's clean energy sector is not just about creating a sustainable environment; it's also about building a robust and resilient workforce that can thrive in the green economy. Under Governor Hochul's leadership, initiatives like this large-scale renewable energy solicitation are vital in driving economic growth, fostering innovation, and providing thousands of family-sustaining jobs.”

New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Interim Commissioner Sean Mahar said , “Through Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York State continues to advance its strategic efforts to meet our renewable energy targets under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and create the clean energy economy of the future. Today’s announcement demonstrates the State’s commitment to expanding large-scale wind and solar projects and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, helping to ensure a cleaner and healthier environment for future generations.”

New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets Commissioner Richard A. Ball said , “Today’s announcement of new large-scale renewable energy solicitation is a crucial step in New York’s transition to clean energy, which will preserve our natural resources and help New York meet its ambitious climate goals. With key provisions included for agricultural land preservation, NYSERDA’s 10-Point Plan will help the State provide a foundation for a greener economy while also ensuring we are protecting our farmland.”

State Senator Kevin Parker, Senate Energy and Telecommunications Chair said , “Governor Hochul's announcement of the new large-scale renewable energy solicitation marks a significant step forward in New York's commitment to a sustainable future. By accelerating our transition to wind and solar power, we are not only advancing towards our ambitious Climate Act goal of 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030, but also fostering economic growth and creating green jobs across the state. This initiative reaffirms New York's leadership in combating climate change and sets a powerful example for other states to follow."

State Senator Peter Harckham said , “Thank you, Governor Hochul, for spearheading this solicitation to advance New York’s clean energy goals. The Executive and Legislature are in lockstep on building a sustainable future through clean renewable energy. It is important to note that a kilowatt of clean energy is now cheaper to produce than a kilowatt of carbon-based energy. With these large-scale renewable energy projects, we are addressing climate change, saving ratepayers money and creating new green jobs.”

Assemblymember Deborah Glick said , “As the summer heat is already upon us, nothing could make it clearer that we have no time to lose in generating more of our electricity from renewable sources. I applaud Governor Hochul for pursuing an aggressive plan to move us away from our dependency on fossil fuel generated electricity. New York State should continue to lead and with the Governor’s commitment we will see the transition to a cleaner environment by the expansion of renewable energy.”

Alliance for Clean Energy New York Executive Director Marguerite Wells said , "Private renewable energy developers are ready and willing to invest billions of dollars into New York, providing jobs and tax revenue for our local municipalities. We expect numerous quality responses to this RFP, and we look forward to NYSERDA awarding projects that will be built expeditiously to bring benefits to New Yorkers as soon as possible.”

New York League of Conservation Voters President Julie Tighe said , "As we enter what is expected to be another summer with record breaking heat and air quality alerts, the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis has never been more evident. It’s time to transition off of fossil fuels and deliver clean energy, and this solicitation will help do just that. We applaud Governor Hochul and NYSERDA on this progress, because more land-based wind and solar energy projects mean fewer greenhouse gas emissions and better air quality for New Yorkers."

New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said , “Today’s announcement is an important step toward achieving New York’s clean energy goals. We applaud Governor Hochul and NYSERDA for ensuring the projects will be subject to precedent-setting labor standards and protections. We look forward to working together to ensure maximum application of those standards as well as domestic and New York content requirements and preferences so that we create family-sustaining careers while building New York’s clean energy future.”

New York State Building Trades President Gary LaBarbera said , “As New York continues to pursue the energy goals set out by the CLCPA, we must continue to push forward large-scale wind and solar developments that generate thousands of family-sustaining union careers and economic stimulus in our local communities. We applaud Governor Hochul for continuing to push forward these initiatives that will support the delivery of reliable, renewable energy to more New Yorkers and improve the living conditions in our state for generations to come. Our members look forward to having the opportunity to contribute to these projects and pursue the paths to the middle class they pave for them.”

Natural Resources Defense Council Director Jackson Morris said , “The launch of the 2024 solicitation process for new large-scale renewable energy projects, with proposals due in August 2024, builds on the momentum from the successful offshore wind awards for Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind and provides an important opportunity to replace canceled projects so that New York stays on track to meet our ambitious target of 70% renewable electricity by 2030. Accelerating these renewable projects underscores New York’s commitment to a clean energy future and will bring cleaner air, better jobs, and a healthier environment for all New Yorkers.”

American Clean Power Director of Eastern State Affairs Director Moira Cyphers said , “We commend NYSERDA for their responsiveness and proactive efforts to keep New York State's clean energy goals on track. Governor Hochul's leadership is pivotal in driving significant progress to expedite procuring clean energy which will attract new investment opportunities and create well-paying jobs across the state.”

Citizens Campaign for the Environment Executive Director Adrienne Esposito said , “Governor Hochul’s exciting announcement is another surge for New York’s renewable energy sector! We will meet the state’s renewable energy Climate Act goals only by advancing new large-scale wind and solar projects. This week’s heat wave in mid-June is another clear indicator of climate change impacts across New York caused by our continued reliance on dirty fossil fuels. We must transition our energy production and land-based wind and solar energy projects are a key component of that transition. Today’s announcement exemplifies the state’s commitment to providing clean affordable energy to all residents while combating climate change, bolstering the economy, and creating thousands of green jobs. New York’s clean energy future is looking bright.”

New York Solar Energy Industries Association Executive Director Noah Ginsburg said , “As New Yorkers across the state grapple with extreme heat and rising electric bills, accelerating renewable energy deployment has never been more urgent. New York Solar Energy Industries Association applauds NYSERDA and Governor Hochul for their commitment to achieving the clean energy and equity mandates in the Climate Act. Scaling up solar deployment is foundational to New York’s energy transition, and our member companies and solar workforce are at the ready.”

New York State's Nation-Leading Climate Plan

New York State's climate agenda calls for an orderly and just transition that creates family-sustaining jobs, continues to foster a green economy across all sectors and ensures that at least 35 percent, with a goal of 40 percent, of the benefits of clean energy investments are directed to disadvantaged communities. Guided by some of the nation’s most aggressive climate and clean energy initiatives, New York is advancing a suite of efforts – including the New York Cap-and-Invest program (NYCI) and other complementary policies – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. New York is also on a path to achieving a zero-emission electricity sector by 2040, including 70 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and economywide carbon neutrality by mid-century. A cornerstone of this transition is New York's unprecedented clean energy investments, including more than $28 billion in 61 large-scale renewable and transmission projects across the State, $6.8 billion to reduce building emissions, $3.3 billion to scale up solar, nearly $3 billion for clean transportation initiatives and over $2 billion in NY Green Bank commitments. These and other investments are supporting more than 170,000 jobs in New York’s clean energy sector as of 2022 and over 3,000 percent growth in the distributed solar sector since 2011. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality, New York also adopted zero-emission vehicle regulations, including requiring all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks sold in the State be zero emission by 2035. Partnerships are continuing to advance New York’s climate action with more than 400 registered and more than 130 certified Climate Smart Communities, nearly 500 Clean Energy Communities, and the State’s largest community air monitoring initiative in 10 disadvantaged communities across the State to help target air pollution and combat climate change.

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Seven SEAS faculty earn CAREER Awards

By Peter Murphy and Elizabeth Egan 

Published June 26, 2024

Seven faculty members in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have earned National Science Foundation CAREER Awards for projects that could help research teams overcome barriers to collaboration, promote the wider adoption of direct current (DC) microgrids, use protein analysis to understand how much harmful material remains in wastewater after disinfection and more.

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Courtney Faber

Luis C. Herrera

Shaofeng Zou

Zhuoyue Zhao

The recipients include Courtney Faber, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education, Luis Herrera, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yinyin Ye, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Craig Snoeyink, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Shaofeng Zou, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Kang Sun, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering and Zhuoyue Zhao, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. 

Twelve SEAS faculty have received the prestigious honor since 2023, with  five awards presented in the previous year .

Jason Sprowl, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences in The University at Buffalo's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, also received a CAREER Award. 

"We take great pride in our eight faculty members who have been honored with this prestigious NSF award,” said Venu Govindaraju, UB vice president for research and economic development. “Their exceptional research is integral to UB’s mission of fostering a better world for all.”

Among the support that awardees receive is guidance from UB’s Office of Research Advancement, which Chitra Rajan, associate vice president for research advancement, oversees. The office is managed by three co-directors – Joanna Tate, Maggie Shea and Menna Mbah – and provides a comprehensive suite of services, including proposal management, scientific editing, graphics, and help with non-technical parts of the proposal. 

These services, Rajan says, play a critical role in assisting faculty members submit high-quality proposals.

The overlooked barrier: Exploring how research teams negotiate epistemic differences

When a research team is made up of people with various engineering and education backgrounds, different ideas of what knowledge is and how it is acquired can hinder their ability to work as a cohesive team.

Having firsthand experience with this issue, Faber’s goal is to support engineering education researchers who find themselves in a similar situation. 

With a $591,000 grant, Faber aims to facilitate interdisciplinary work by identifying the barriers that research teams might face related to differences in thinking and creating ways to bring them to the surface for discussion before they create a problem.

“It is important for the field of engineering education to be able to do this type of interdisciplinary work,” said Faber. “The problems we are trying to solve are very complex and require an interdisciplinary approach to make space for diversity of thinking.”

The project will involve observing research teams and conducting interviews to see how they function together as well as how the individual members think independently of the group.

With the information she gathers, Faber plans to develop trainings that new and established engineering education researchers can freely access.

She also hopes to create a tool that assists research groups in integrating the varying approaches and goals that might otherwise become problematic for a group. The tool could be as simple as a one-page guide that provides questions to be considered throughout the research process to help identify where a team’s ideas might differ across various aspects of their research, leading to more open discussions. 

Improving energy efficiency through DC microgrids

Herrera’s research lies at the intersection of power electronics, power systems and control theory.

With a $500,000 grant, he is developing different control methods to promote the wider adoption of DC microgrids, which run more efficiently than the more commonly used AC (alternating current) microgrids.

“Currently, DC electrical systems are primarily used in applications such as electric aircrafts, including the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, navy ships and data centers,” said Herrera. “However, most renewable energy sources are interfaced to the AC power grid through an intermediate DC stage.”

More networks operated through DC grids could significantly increase energy efficiency, reduce losses and improve the overall operation of current electrical systems, he says.

This potential creates motivation for DC systems to be implemented in commonly used structures such as residential and office buildings.

Beyond the practical applications of his research, Herrera’s project will also provide educational opportunities for students from graduate to elementary school.

Graduate students on the project will have the opportunity to participate in a summer internship at the Air Force Research Laboratory through a partnership with the University of Dayton Research Institute.

Herrera also plans to create demonstrations regarding the research and present them to elementary, middle school and high school students, aiming to get students excited about STEM early in their academic careers.  

Examining, tracking and removing harmful bacterial proteins in wastewater

Extracellular vesicles (EV) are a mechanism for bacterial pathogens to release their virulence proteins into surrounding environments. These harmful materials move from the human body through feces into the sewer systems, where their fate is not fully understood.

With a $583,000 grant, Ye will monitor EV persistence and stability in wastewater and throughout the wastewater treatment process, and analyze functions of environmental EV and what contents are packed in them. The project will develop a novel environmental analysis method that integrates genome sequencing and proteomic analysis.

“If the vesicles preserve the function of virulence proteins in wastewater, we need to better understand the fate of the vesicles when they go through the treatment chain,” said Ye. “How are we able to minimize the health risks of vesicles after the treatment at the wastewater treatment plants? If they escape the treatment process and are still active, that can have certain health impacts.”

The principles and analysis in Ye’s project will focus on wastewater samples, however, these approaches can be applied to analyzing vesicles and their potential health risks in air dust, drinking water and rainwater, she says. Ultimately, this work will help determine what harmful materials—if any—are still present after the wastewater treatment process and how to remove them most effectively through disinfection.

The project will also create hands-on activities to engage K-12 and undergraduate students in learning wastewater microbiome analysis and microbial risk mitigation for public health and potentially build their interest in environmental engineering.

Training autonomous systems to make better decisions

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a type of machine learning that trains autonomous robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent agents to make sequential decisions while interacting with an environment.

Many RL approaches assume the learned policy will be deployed in the same—or similar—environment as the one it was trained in. In most cases, however, the simulated environment is vastly different from the real world—such as when a real-world environment is mobile while a simulated environment is stationary. These differences often lead to major disruptions in industries using RL, including health care, critical infrastructure, transportations systems, education and more.

Zou’s $520,000 award will fund his work to develop RL algorithms that do not require excessive resources, and that will perform effectively under the most challenging conditions they may encounter including those outside of the training environment. According to Zou, the project could have a significant impact on both the theory and practice of sequential decision making associated with RL in special education, intelligent transportation systems, wireless communication networks, power systems and drone networks.

“The activities in this project will provide concrete principles and design guidelines to achieve robustness in the face of model uncertainty,” Zou says. “Advances in machine learning and data science will transform modern humanity across nearly every industry. They are already the main driver of emerging technologies. The overarching goal of my research is to make machine learning and data science provably competent.”

Mapping pollution like stars through a telescope

Interested in astronomy from a young age, Sun is fascinated by the idea of pointing a space telescope towards the Earth and imaging emission sources like celestial objects.

With a nearly $644,000 grant, Sun will map global emission sources of gaseous air pollutants and greenhouse gasses. Such gasses are invisible to the human eye. While they can be detected by satellites, their images are naturally smeared due to wind dispersion.

“This research removes the smearing effect using a simple and elegant equation that originates from mass balance,” said Sun. “The results are timely and precise estimates of emissions that can inform policy and scientific studies.”

Currently, the two mainstream emission-estimating methods are bottom-up, accounting for activities on the ground and how they emit, and top down, inferring emissions with observations, numerical models and complicated frameworks that are usually region-specific.

Sun’s method will fall within the scope of the later but will work faster, be globally applicable and provide the high spatial resolutions that are more commonly achieved by the bottom-up method.

The results will resemble a space-telescope image, with significant emission sources standing out like galaxies and smaller sources, such as towns and power plants, sprinkled about like star clusters.

By the end of the five-year study, Sun hopes that students and educators may use his open-source algorithms to generate satellite-based concentration and emission maps on their personal computers. 

Harnessing the potential of Dielectrophoretic Molecular Transport

Craig Snoeyink

Water filtration, whisky distillation and blood-based diagnostics are just a few of the real-world potential applications of DMT, a process that uses strong electric fields to push solutes out of water, even those such as sugar and alcohol that do not have an electrical charge.

DMT is not used, however, due to the inaccuracy of current mathematical models.

With a $581,000 grant, Snoeyink will develop and validate models for DMT for use in these applications. With one of the first accurate models of DMT, the process could be used, for example, to clean water as effectively as a water filter, that never needs to be changed.

Snoeyink adds that point-of-care diagnostics are another significant application for DMT. 

“Down the line, we could use this technology to separate blood into components we want to test and stuff we don’t, making medical diagnostics cheaper and more sensitive,” said Snoeyink.

To help with testing and to offer students research opportunities that could propel them into graduate school, Snoeyink will teach a course for students to do research for the project as part of their curriculum. With Snoeyink’s guidance, students will run tests and even create their own hypothesis. He hopes that by the end of the class, the students will have papers based on their research that will bolster their graduate school applications.

Supporting speedy and reliable real-time data analytics

Today’s internet databases hold large volumes of data that are processed at higher speeds than ever before.

A new type of database system, hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP), allows real-time data analytics to be performed on databases that undergo constant updates.

“While real-time data analytics can provide valuable insights for applications such as marketing, fraud detection, and supply chain analytics, it is increasingly hard to ensure a sufficiently low response time of query answering in existing HTAP systems,” said Zhao.

Approximate query processing (AQP) is a faster alternative that uses random sampling. However, many AQP prototypes and adopted systems sacrifice query efficiency or the ability to handle rapid updates correctly.

With a $600,000 grant, Zhao aims to support real-time data analytics on large and rapidly growing databases by enabling reliable AQP capabilities in HTAP systems, leading to increasingly demanding, real-time analytics applications.

“If this problem is solved, it will potentially make it possible to finally adopt AQP in many existing database systems and create sizable impacts on real-world data analytics applications,” said Zhao.

Zhao is also committed to broadening the participation in data system research to all levels of education and plans to incorporate new material into existing UB undergraduate and graduate level courses, as well as offer tutorials and projects in various K-12 outreach and undergraduate experiential learning programs. 

Do you have questions or comments for the Office of the Provost? Let us know your thoughts and we’ll be happy to get back to you.

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Opening Statement of Chairman Lucas at An Overview of the Budget Proposal for the Department of Energy for Fiscal Year 2025

June 26 , 2024.

The Department of Energy was established in response to the oil crisis of 1973 with the mission of “ensuring America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.”

In carrying out this mission, DOE has rightly prioritized fundamental research through the Office of Science and its National Laboratories. Even today DOE remains the largest federal sponsor of basic physical sciences research.

Yet in recent years, DOE has moved away from its core mission of “transformative science and technological solutions” to deploying mature technologies and attempting to lead a forced nationwide green energy transition.

The FY25 budget request continues this concerning trend. Although I am glad to see the Department request an increase to the Office of Science, this budget does little to rebalance the massive shifts in priorities mandated by the recent Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.

Through the IIJA and IRA, DOE established 75 new demonstration and deployment programs and received approximately $100 billion in additional funding.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy alone received an additional $16 billion in the IIJA to supplement its annual appropriations, which have increased by over half a billion dollars since FY21. Meanwhile the IRA appropriated an additional $11 billion to the Loan Program Office to finance large-scale infrastructure projects.

To support these new programs and funding increases, the Department underwent a reorganization, hired over a thousand new employees, and established several new offices.

I’m not hoping for failure, but the growth in bureaucracy and the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse stemming from these bills makes it almost guaranteed to happen.

Perhaps even more concerning, this shift in focus comes at the expense of the Office of Science and its fundamental research. As this Committee knows well, the Office of Science is home to world-class research and user facilities that accelerate advancements in various disciplines, including material sciences, fusion energy, and nuclear physics.

While DOE’s funding for later-stage research and deployment through EERE and LPO has seen big cash influxes, the Office of Science received zero additional funding through the IIJA and only $1.5 billion for the National Labs’ infrastructure in the IRA.

In my opinion, this discrepancy creates a future where DOE picks winners and losers by funding select energy sources but does not carry out the fundamental research needed by industry to make generational breakthroughs for multiple energy sources.

That is the opposite of an all-the-above energy strategy. And if DOE isn’t conducting that early-stage, groundbreaking research, no one will.

Instead of continuing down this alarming path through DOE’s FY25 budget request, we should seek to fully fund the provisions authorized in the CHIPS and Science Act. This bipartisan bill was the first comprehensive reauthorization of the Office of Science and was meant to catapult DOE into the 21st century in key technological areas such as fusion energy, advanced computing, and microelectronics.

While I fully understand we in Congress must play our part and appropriate the funds, it would be helpful to see DOE support our efforts by requesting similar funding levels. But that’s not what the FY25 request does.

Despite that, I am hopeful today’s conversation will be productive. I look forward to hearing from Deputy Secretary Turk on how DOE continues to manage the large funding influxes it has received and how the difficult decisions associated with this budget were made.

Thank you for being here today, Deputy Secretary. I yield back the balance of my time.

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• Full Committee Hearing - An Overview of the Budget Proposal for the Department of Energy for Fiscal Year 2025

Permalink: https://science.house.gov/2024/6/opening-statement-of-chairman-lucas-at-an-overview-of-the-budget-proposal-for-the-department-of-energy-for-fiscal-year-2025

• Committee Schedule

House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Republicans 2321 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: 202-225-6371 Fax: 202-226-0113

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Africa50 pledges $100m to accelerate renewable-energy projects, infrastructure

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26th June 2024

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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Infrastructure investment and asset management company Africa50 has pledged up to $100-million to fund and co-finance renewables-based energy transition projects and infrastructure across Africa through the International Renewable Energy Agency's (Irena's) Energy Transition Accelerator Financing (ETAF) platform.

The collaborative partnership with Africa50 reinforces the ETAF platform's efforts towards sustainable development and climate action across the continent.

“The continent must focus on the dual goals of reducing emissions and accelerating economic development. Investing in and developing transformational renewable infrastructure is a critical step to achieving net zero,” says Africa50 CEO Alain Ebobissé .

“The Irena ETAF platform will be an important launchpad to scaling and accelerating our investments into renewable projects that will ultimately reduce the negative impact of climate change on our people and help build a more sustainable future,” he says.

The partnership leverages Irena’s global membership to attract project proposals through the ETAF platform and Africa50’s expertise in project development and equity financing.

“Renewables represent the most effective, climate-safe solution available, and this partnership with Africa50 will be pivotal in strengthening the ETAF platform’s impact across Africa,” says Irena director-general Francesco La Camera .

“For the first time in a decade, the most recent data show that the number of people without access to electricity has increased significantly. With sub-Saharan Africa representing the majority of those impacted, we must be diligent and committed to urgently addressing this growing issue,” he emphasises.

The ETAF platform, established in 2021 with support from the United Arab Emirates, aims to scale up renewable-energy projects that contribute to Nationally Determined Contributions in developing countries, while also bringing benefits to communities through enhanced energy access and security, and promoting economic growth and diversification.

With Africa50 now on board, the ETAF platform has grown to 14 partners, pledging a total of $4.15-billion, highlighting its role as one of the most inclusive financing platforms for a renewables-based energy transition.

Meanwhile, Irena will co-host the Accelerated Partnership for Renewables in Africa (APRA) Investment Forum with the Kenyan government in September. This will aim to connect project developers with potential financiers through a curated matchmaking programme, as well as projects coming from APRA partners and other international organisations, in support of APRA development goals.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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