Federal Funding Needed for Airborne Wind Energy

Federal funding is needed to accelerate R&D of airborne wind energy and to capture the interest of significant venture capital. To date, about $50 million in U.S. private investment capital from diverse funders such as Google and Boeing has launched the industry. Funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) would validate the potential of this promising technology and spur venture capital investment.

ARPA-E is the Energy Department entity charged with ensuring U.S. leadership in development and deployment of advanced energy technologies. The new agency aims to maintain technological leadership by developing and deploying advanced energy technologies — “especially by accelerating transformational technological advances in areas that industry by itself is not likely to undertake because of technical and financial uncertainty.”

Director Arun Majumbar, Ph.D., has put together a team of top-notch energy scientists and a responsive business infrastructure to enable a rapid response to emerging green energy technology. Now what the agency needs is enough funding to make investments in enough promising technologies to successfully meet its goals.

With China taking a commanding lead in public and private funding of clean energy innovation, the U.S. needs to dramatically increase funding to overcome a decades-long trend of declining investment in energy research, both from the government and the private sector. The 2011 Department of Energy (DOE) budget request for ARPA-E is $300 million. (In 2010, ARPA-E received $400 million in ARRA funds.) Let’s hope that’s enough investment to move innovative energy technologies forward fast enough.

Airborne wind energy technology presents just the sort of potential “game-changing innovation” the Agency is explicitly seeking to fund. An ARPA-E Funding Opportunity Announcement would quickly advance research, development and deployment of airborne wind energy technology.

Another avenue of Federal support includes establishing an Airborne Technology Research and Development Program within the DOE. Funding would be directed to efforts that focus on the technology’s technical, regulatory, and environmental risks and promote joint research efforts between universities, industry, federal regulatory agencies and DOE’s National Laboratories.

Developing better and cheaper clean energy technology is central to addressing climate change, securing U.S. energy independence and creating new clean energy jobs. Nations are seeking competitive advantage in this rapidly growing, high technology sector and the stakes are high. The U.S. can choose to remain an importer of energy and clean technologies, and lose the jobs related to them, or it can emerge as a global leader, driving exports and high‐wage jobs.