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CHERYL MARTIN: I'm Cheryl Martin.
I'm the acting director of ARPAE, the Advanced Research
Projects Agency for Energy.
ARPAE is focused on the development and the deployment
of transformational energy technologies.
Our funding is both catalytic an accelerative,
where we fund across the energy landscape, everything
from battery technologies for the grid
or for the automobile to carbon-capture technologies
to advanced fuels.
We partner with a wide variety of stakeholders, academics,
industry, other government partners from the beginning
of our projects in order to accelerate the way
that these ideas could potentially
be embraced in the marketplace.
ARPAE truly challenges the whole idea
of what is possible, from both the technology as well
as a model for how to do government funding.
The ARPAE summit, I think, represents
a lot of what ARPAE is all about.
It's about knowledge and networks.
The summit brings together every awardee
that ARPAE is funding, as well as a number of other companies,
small companies, large companies, who
have innovative technologies, with corporate partners
and other partners and sponsors.
And in that time together over the three days,
people learn about each other's innovations
and so with those fortunate contacts that
happen when people are in the same place focused on changing
what's possible in energy, people form relationships that
go on to be partnerships to move projects forward,
potentially to fund projects in the future,
or potentially a place where someone
may want to acquire somebody else's technology
to move something forward that they already
have going on in the market.
ARPAE projects are three-year, $3-million projects.
And so we ask the question all the time--
what happens at the end of that three years?
What happens at month 37?
And so we focus significantly on hand-offs.
And there's a variety of types of ways
that hand-offs could happen for energy technologies.
They may go on to another government partner
for more advancement in a test bed
with potentially the military or other parts
of the Department of Energy.
They may spin out into small companies, which
are taking those groundbreaking ideas with entrepreneurs
into the marketplace and going for further funding.
We also have a significant amount
of strategic partnerships, everything from MOUs
to develop technology to outright acquisition
of those technologies.
This really is technology that could impact the global energy
picture, and I think the combination of our innovation
here with what is the constantly changing dynamic
around the world of people's energy costs policies,
and own needs is going to provide, hopefully,
a lot of places where these technologies could
be deployed and find benefit for truly the world citizens.