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High-risk energy research agency gets a leader

Energy-efficiency researcher Arun Majumdar will, if confirmed by the US Senate, take the reins of the controversial new federal agency tasked with coming up with brilliant new insights into energy independence. majumdar.jpg

Congress allocated money to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) earlier this year in hopes of replicating the success of the Pentagon’s own high-risk, high-return research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pretty much everyone in government wants a DARPA spin-off these days; there’s an intelligence version too, IARPA, and some people want NASA to have one too.

But ARPA-E has both the best shot at actually producing useful breakthroughs, and the highest chance of getting mired in federal bureaucracy. In 2007, for instance, Nature columnist David Goldston pointed out that the ARPA-E approach blithely takes “the technocratic path of assuming that US energy problems are largely the result of an inadequate supply of fresh ideas. But there’s ample evidence that a bigger problem is the lack of demand for new ideas in the marketplace.”

Others are more optimistic. In a news release announcing Majumdar’s nomination, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works, notes that “ARPA-E’s goals are to create technologies that have the potential to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign energy supplies, reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency.”

Few would disagree that sounds like a good goal. The problem is getting there. ARPA-E has reportedly had problems filling its all-important positions of program managers, and Science’s Jeffrey Mervis reported in August that researchers were griping about how the first round of grant proposals was handled.

Majumdar has held several key management positions at Berkeley Lab, including serving as associate lab director for energy and environmental sciences. If he makes it through the Senate, those management skills will surely be put to the test.

Image: LBNL

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