At the request of several members of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and recognizing the need to reevaluate the way the United States spurs innovation, the National Academies released a 2006 report,
“Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that included the recommendation to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) within the Department of Energy (DOE).
The America COMPETES Act, signed into law in August of 2007, implemented many of the recommendations in the National Academies’ report. ARPA-E was authorized but without an initial budget until it received $400 million of funding in February 2009 through the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act). Then in early January 2011, the
America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 made additional changes to ARPA-E’s structure; this structure is codified in
Title 42, Chapter 149, Subchapter XVII, § 16538 of the United States Code. ARPA-E is modeled after the successful
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for such technological innovations as the Internet and the stealth technology found in the F-117 and other modern fighter aircraft. Specifically, ARPA-E was established and charged with the following objectives:
- To bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission to energy research that will attract many of the U.S.’s best and brightest minds—those of experienced scientists and engineers, and, especially, those of students and young researchers, including persons in the entrepreneurial world;
- To focus on creative “out-of-the-box” transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support due to its high risk but where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation;
- To utilize an ARPA-like organization that is flat, nimble, and sparse, capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; and
- To create a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.