ARPA-E Funds $92 Million in Energy Research Leading to New Green Jobs

While the fossil fuel industry has been busy destroying jobs in the Gulf Coast (to say nothing of destroying jobs in Appalachia), the federal government has been providing more support for creating more new green jobs in clean energy. This week, a group of small businesses, big companies, research universities, national laboratories and non-profits received $92 million in energy conservation grants to develop new technologies for powering American into a cleaner, safer, and far less riskier future.

The funds were distributed by ARPA-E, the Advanced Projects Research Agency – Energy.  It’s the new civilian version of a Department of Defense program called DARPA, which provided the government funded research that created a wee bit of transformative technology called the Internet. Expectations are just as high for ARPA-E, if not higher. The director of the agency greets visitors to the ARPA-E website with a statement about our continued dependence on fossil fuels that was posted before the BP oil spill and has gained new urgency since then: “Business as usual is not an option, as the outcome will be devastating.”

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