U.S. not ready to lead green energy revolution.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSEWATCH

* The Defense Department's research arm, DARPA, changed the world when it invented the Internet. So why couldn't its counterpart at the Energy Department, ARPA-E, unleash a similar revolution to free us from the tyranny of oil?

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"I get that question a lot," says Arun Majumdar, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

The answer will disappoint green-energy enthusiasts and may surprise those who have been wondering whether the Gulf Oil Spill will be a catalyst for lasting change.

Majumdar, an accomplished scientist and engineer who's been running ARPA-E for just eight months, says it could take a decade or more for the agency to come up with the "equivalent of the Internet."

There is no shortage of good ideas, Majumdar tells a conference of energy experts hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. The problem is not a lack of innovation but rather the enormous hurdles that promising clean-energy technologies must overcome to gain acceptance in the larger market.

"The biggest challenge is the scaling," says Majumdar. He worries that the next big technological breakthroughs in green energy will be conceived in the United States but will be mass-produced and marketed elsewhere--most likely in countries where governments and investors are less afraid of betting on technologies that are considered financially risky in the United States.

It has happened over and over, Majumdar says. A number of seminal technologies that revolutionized the energy industry originated in the United States but never were manufactured in large volumes here.

A mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas in Austin, John Goodenough, invented lithium-ion batteries. Yet the United States only makes 1 percent of the global production of those batteries. Scientists at Bell Labs created the modern solar cell but the United States today has less than 10 percent of the manufacturing share.

When ARPA-E announced plans to award more than $150 million worth of contracts to companies that came up with ground breaking concepts, it received almost 4,000 papers. The agency only was expecting 500, at most. The Department of Energy's computer system crashed from the unanticipated volume.

Just 37 projects were funded at about $4 million each, over three years. They include new techniques to make cellulosic biofuel at lower cost, and novel ways to store electricity in a smart grid.

Many of the...