Energy Innovation - Fuels from Sunlight

The Department of Energy will launch three Energy Innovation Hubs in FY2010: Fuels from Sunlight, Energy Efficient Building Systems Design, and Modeling and Simulation for Nuclear Reactors. The Secretary of Energy has identified the problems in these topic areas as presenting the most critical barriers to achieving national energy and climate goals while having proven resistant to solution by conventional Research and Development enterprise structures. In a new Research and Development structure modeled on the Department's successful Bioenergy Research Centers, each Hub will comprise a highly collaborative team, spanning multiple scientific, engineering, and where appropriate, economics, and public-policy disciplines. By bringing together top talent across the full spectrum of Research and Development performers, including universities private industry, non-profits, and National Laboratories, each Hub is expected to become a world-leading Research an d Development center in its topical area. The Hubs will seek to rapidly drive energy solutions to their fundamental limits. Each Hub will support cross-disciplinary Research and Development focused on the barriers to transforming its energy technologies into commercially deployable materials, devices, and systems. The ultimate goal of each will be to advance a highly promising area of energy science and technology to the point that the risk level will be low enough for industry to deploy solutions into the marketplace. After nearly 3 billion years of evolution, nature can effectively convert sunlight into energy-rich chemical fuels using the abundant feedstocks of water and carbon dioxide. All fuels used today to power vehicles and create electricity, whether from fossil or biomass resources, are ultimately der