| The Energy Department on August 21 announced $17.6 million in funding for 14 cooperative agreements with small businesses and institutions of higher education to develop and deploy efficient and environmentally friendly highway transportation technologies. The funding will go towards projects that pursue breakthrough approaches to vehicle efficiency, while lowering costs and reducing impacts on the environment. The projects selected today will support innovative technologies and solutions in the areas of energy storage, power electronics and electric motors, advanced combustion engines, materials technologies, and fuels and lubricant technologies. Awardees are in 13 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin. Some awardees include: -
The University of Colorado at Boulder will receive $2 million to develop a new 30-kilowatt power converter that utilizes both silicon and wide-bandgap devices to address the fundamental power conversion, loss, and component stress mechanisms. -
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive $672,000 to develop and test a micro-jet-enhanced fuel injection and combustion system. -
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will receive $874,000 to use alternative fuel ignition to improve engine efficiency. See the Energy Department news release and the complete list of awardees .   Eight Energy Department national laboratories will collaborate with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other partners in the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, a new effort funded by the Energy Department's Office of Science to address the most challenging and demanding climate change issues. Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Brookhaven, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia national laboratories will use high-performance computing (HPC) to develop and apply the most complete climate and Earth system model. Over a planned 10-year span, the aim of the ACME project is to conduct simulations and modeling on the most sophisticated HPC machines as they become available. The team initially will use the Energy Department's Office of Science Leadership Computing Facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories. Four academic institutions and one private-sector company will also contribute. The initial focus will be on three critical topics related to climate change: the water cycle, biogeochemistry (the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles), and cryosphere systems (ice and snow). See the Lawrence Berkeley news release and the ACME Project Strategy and Initial Implementation Plan . The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) on August 19 held the nation's third competitive lease sale for potential wind energy development in federal waters with an offering of nearly 80,000 acres offshore Maryland. The provisional winner is US Wind Inc. with a bid of about $8,7 million. The lease sale, conducted by DOI's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, included two areas: the North Lease Area (32,737 acres) and the South Lease Area (46,970 acres). These areas together comprise the Maryland Wind Energy Area, located about 10 nautical miles offshore Ocean City, Maryland, which has the potential to support between 850 and 1450 megawatts of commercial power generation, according to the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. When fully built, wind turbines in the Maryland Wind Energy Area could generate enough energy to power about 300,000 homes. See the DOI news release. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that when addressing climate change, the savings on health care spending and other costs related to illness can potentially offset the costs of cutting harmful emissions from sources such as power plants and vehicles. In the study published in Nature Climate Change, MIT researchers compared the health benefits to the economic costs of three potential climate policies: a clean-energy standard, a transportation policy, and a cap-and-trade program. The three scenarios were designed to resemble previously proposed U.S. climate policies at the federal level. The researchers found that savings from avoided health problems could recoup 26% of the cost to implement a potential transportation policy, but up to 10.5 times the cost of implementing a cap-and-trade program. The difference depended largely on the costs of the policies, as the savings—in the form of avoided medical care and saved sick days—remained roughly constant. Policies aimed at specific sources of air pollution, such as power plants and vehicles, did not lead to substantially larger benefits than cheaper policies across three scenarios. See the MIT news release. |
| This year at the Detroit Auto Show, Ford Motor Company made waves when it unveiled a new lightweight F-150, knocking nearly 700 pounds off the popular truck. Now the company is one step closer to developing an affordable, lightweight passenger car with its new Lightweight Concept vehicle—a prototype that is nearly 25% lighter than an equivalent conventional vehicle, thanks to the use of a mix of advanced materials. The use of lightweight materials isn't a new idea. For years, materials like aluminum and advanced high-strength steel—twice as strong as traditional steel—have been used in airplanes, racecars, and even some luxury vehicles to cut fuel use without impacting performance or safety. While these materials can be found in key components of high-volume passenger vehicles, their high cost has made them too cost-prohibitive to use extensively until recently. As automakers look for ways to increase vehicle efficiency and lower emissions to meet new fuel economy standards—all while maintaining a range of vehicle options—more and more companies are exploring ways to incorporate strong, lightweight materials. And this could translate into big fuel savings for consumers. Reducing a vehicle's weight by just 10% can improve fuel economy by 6 to 8%. One example is the recent partnership between Ford and Magna International, a leading automotive supplier. With support from the Energy Department, the two companies teamed up to explore different weight-reduction options and how those options can work together to increase a vehicle's gas mileage. For the complete story, see the EERE Blog. |
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