Jun 19, 2014 - The US Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday presented the list of 32 energy research projects that will receive USD 100 million (EUR 73.6m) in financial support under the second round of the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) programme.
The funding will support the centers in laying the scientific foundation for key advances in solar and bioenergy, electrical energy storage and carbon capture, among others. Over 200 applicants competed for the EFRC financing.
Under the rules of the programme, the winning projects will receive annual funding of between USD 2 million and USD 4 million per center for up to four fiscal years. There is a progress review in year two.
Among the awardees is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Center for Next Generation of Materials by Design: Incorporating Mesastability (CNGMD). It will receive financing for its efforts to transform the design and synthesis of materials for solar energy conversion and solid state lighting using high throughput computation and data mining. The Center for Excitonics (CE), part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will also get a grant to develop new materials and structures using excitons to boost the efficiency of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells. Meanwhile, the Center for Solar Fuels (UNC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will use the DOE funding to develop the scientific basis for solar-driven molecular catalysis of solar fuel reactions.
In the bioenergy segment, the University of Delaware’s Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) will receive financing to work on catalytic processes enabling the viable operation of biorefineries with lignocellulosic biomass feedstocks. At the same time, the DOE award will support Purdue University’s Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio) in its use of chemical catalysis and fast pyrolysis to transform the main components of non-food lignocellulosic biomass directly into liquid hydrocarbons.
The first five-year funding EFRC programme started in 2009 and included 46 projects.
(USD 1 = EUR 0.736)
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