Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Friday, February 8, 2008

U.S. BUDGET 2009: Near-Term Energy Research Prospers

Eli Kintisch

Business is booming at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, DOE's flagship facility for greening the nation's energy supply. Its budget has skyrocketed by 80% in the past 2 years, to $378 million. In addition to hiring more than 100 scientists, the lab has launched programs to integrate windmills into the nation's electrical grid, broadened work to facilitate solar panel manufacturing, and beefed up its biofuels research. "Everybody's busy; we're expanding," says Robert Thresher, who manages the lab's wind energy science program.

Although the president's 2009 request would keep research dollars at NREL steady, its recent rapid growth reflects the strong support in Congress for research aimed at tackling global warming by making near-term adjustments to the country's existing energy sources. NREL gets most of its money from DOE's $1.5 billion office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which has received boosts of 27% and 18% in the past 2 years. At the same time, legislators have rejected increases of similar magnitude requested for the past 2 years by the president for DOE's $4 billion Office of Science, which typically funds research that is less likely to provide immediate answers to the nation's energy problems. Undeterred, President George W. Bush has asked for 17.5% more for the Office of Science in his 2009 budget.

Filling the hopper. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is expanding work on biofuels.

"I'm happy that EERE got a big boost [in 2008], but there are mid- and longer term research priorities that need to be attended to," says Nobelist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Other energy researchers also lament the zeroing out in 2008 of a $150 million contribution to the $6 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor being built in Cadarache, France. The project, to design and build a prototype fusion reactor, represents a field whose goal of a cheap, sustainable source of energy has remained stubbornly out of reach for decades.

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