The US Department of Energy announced it has awarded USD 92 in funding for research projects that will contribute to innovation in clean energy technologies, as well as create new jobs and help increase America's competitiveness in the global clean energy market.

The research grants are spread out over six areas of research, grouped in three groups of research. They are as follows:

Grid-scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage (GRIDS) – economically viable large-scale energy storage is regarded as a game-changer for the US electrical grid. In order to bring in more wind and solar power to the power grid, due to their intermittent nature, large energy storage facilities are needed to compensate for low-generation times, and reduce the load on the power grid.

Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT) – the focus is on significantly improving the efficiency and cost of power conversion and switching, both processes that currently cause significany losses in the power grid. One of the major research topics in this project are high-voltage transistors, which will allow operators to control the power grid as if it were a large electrical circuit.

Building Energy Efficency Through Innovative Thermodevices (BEET-IT) – will focus on building technology, introducing new approaches that should result in more efficient energy consumption in buildings. Cooling is one of the major processes which today consume the bulk of all electricity used in buildings. New cooling technologies are needed, that will make better use of natural processes, and reduce the dependency on electricity.

Out of the 529 initial concept papers submitted to ARPA-E, 164 were invited to submit full applications.

As usual, the acronyms are very immaginative – GRIDS, ADEPT, BEET-IT – cool

[source: US DoE]