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Recovery Act Funding will create high-tech jobs, strengthen energy security

Today Congressman Tim Bishop announced that Long Island will be home to two of the nation’s new multi-million-dollar Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). The centers will be located at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton. The EFRCs, which will pursue advanced scientific research on energy, are being established by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms across the nation.“Finding practical alternatives to foreign oil is critical both for our future national security and our economic growth,” said Bishop whose district includes both new centers. “This funding will create high-tech jobs on Long Island and bring together the best scientific minds in the pursuit of affordable, American energy technologies that can break our dangerous dependence on Middle East oil.”

The 46 EFRCs, to be funded at $2-5 million per year each for a planned initial five-year period, were selected from a pool of some 260 applications. Selection was based on a rigorous merit review process utilizing outside panels composed of scientific experts. Researchers will take advantage of new capabilities in nanotechnology, high-intensity light sources, neutron scattering sources, supercomputing, and other advanced instrumentation, much of it developed with DOE Office of Science support over the past decade, in an effort to lay the scientific groundwork for fundamental advances in solar energy, biofuels, transportation, energy efficiency, electricity storage and transmission, clean coal and carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear energy.

Stony Brook University

Stony Brook University will be home to the new Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center (NOCESC), which involves a team of experimentalists and theorists at SBU (Clare P. Grey, Director and Peter Khalifah), Brookhaven National Laboratory (Jason Graetz and Xiao-Qing Yang), Rutgers, Binghamton University, MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U. Michigan, Argonne National Laboratory, and U. Florida.

“This award is a great example of the world-class energy research that is being conducted at Stony Brook University,” said Dr. Shirley Kenny, Stony Brook University President. “Clare Grey is an outstanding scientist; she is to be congratulated for her successful efforts in collaborating with colleagues from other institutions in this critical area.”

“I am very excited by the opportunity to bring together a team of world experts at Stony Brook, Brookhaven National Laboratory and other leading US institutions to attack a series of key fundamental research issues that directly impact our ability to use lithium ion batteries in a wider range of applications -- particularly in combination with new renewable energy sources and in the field of transportation,” said Clare Grey, who will be leading the project. “At Stony Brook, in addition to synthesizing new materials we propose to develop new diagnostic tools to determine how batteries function and why they sometimes fail, so as to use this information to help design the next generation of lithium ion batteries.”

The design of the next generation of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) requires both the development of new chemistries and the fundamental understanding of the physical and chemical processes that occur in these complex systems. The specific goals of this new center are to develop a fundamental understanding of how electrode reactions in LIBs occur, and how they can be tailored by appropriate electrode design (doping, particle size, shape, composite structure, etc.), so as to identify the critical structural and physical properties that are vital to improving battery performance, and use this information to design new battery systems. The center will also develop new diagnostic methodologies of relevance to the entire battery community. An emphasis will be placed on the development of in situ methods that use multiple experimental tools simultaneously or that combine imaging with spectroscopy.

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory will lead the new Center for Emergent Superconductivity. By understanding the fundamental physics of superconductivity, the center will help discover new high-temperature superconductors and improve the performance of known superconductors. BNL will work together with scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and University of Illinois and will perform neutron scattering experiments at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and angle-resolved photoemission experiments at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source as Argonne National Laboratory.

“We at BNL are delighted to have been chosen to lead a DOE EFRC together with our partners at The University of Illinois and Argonne National Lab,” said Doon Gibbs, BNL’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology. “In our research we will be seeking to understand the underlying nature of superconductivity in complex materials so we can improve the critical properties of known superconducting materials and accelerate the search for new superconducting materials. Ultimately this research is aimed at improving the capacity, efficiency, and reliability of the electric grid. These are crucial issues for Long Island and New York State especially as demand continues to rise and as we integrate substantial renewable energy sources like the sun and wind. We are also excited at the way this research will leverage many unique Brookhaven facility strengths including the National Synchrotron Light Source for characterizing material properties and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials where novel nanoscale phenomena will be studied.”

Of the 46 EFRCs selected, 31 are led by universities, 12 by DOE National Laboratories, two by nonprofit organizations, and one by a corporate research laboratory. The criterion for providing an EFRC with Recovery Act funding was job creation. The EFRCs chosen for funding under the Recovery Act provide the most employment for postdoctoral associates, graduate students, undergraduates, and technical staff, in keeping with the Recovery Act’s objective to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery.

Additional information is available at http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/EFRC.html.

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