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Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t
seen since the height of the space race. We’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.
Okay, here we go. A big one. Off the ground –
Just as the old DARPA funded ARPANET, which later became the basis of the Internet and
the development of the global position satellite system. Those were truly game-changers in
the way information is generated throughout the world. We need to do the same for energy.
My name is Arun Majumdar. I’m the director of Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy,
or ARPA-E, of the Department of Energy.
We have to realize that we are in a global competition. All the technologies that are
required for global, sustainable economic growth do not exist today.
There are many economies that are growing faster than us and they’re all looking to
do it in a sustainable way.
Because the program managers and the people in the ARPA-E program are so good – top
scientists and engineers in their own right – they can sort through and identify really
new ideas.
There are many reports of how fast we have gone, and that is extremely important because
if you are asking our PIs and proposers and our tech community, entrepreneurs, to increase
their pace, they should ask the government to be fast.
Technically, it’s a new clean-energy revolution, both in the way we use energy much more efficiently
but also the way we generate energy. We are the technological leaders and we will prosper.
We have just found out that the amount of investment that we made in the first round,
which is $150 million – the private sector has seen the de-risking and the progress that
these technologies have made. Okay, not all of them, but a few of them and the amount
of private-sector dollars that have come in has actually exceeded $150 million.
This is the biggest business opportunity that the United States has. If we develop these
technologies, make them locally, sell them globally, that is the answer for our economic
prosperity as well as our national security.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our
time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world. (Applause.)