ARPA-E Announces $60 Million in New Funding

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) on May 14 announced $60 million in funding for 23 new projects to foster new technologies in dry cooling and fusion power.

The Advanced Research In Dry cooling (ARID) initiative, one of ARPA-E’s newest projects, will provide $30 million to support 14 project teams developing high-efficiency air-cooled heat exchangers and new types of cooling systems. The announcement highlighted one project at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which will develop radiative-cooled cold storage modules and a system called RadiCold to enable efficient, low-cost supplementary cooling for power plants.

Dry cooling methods are becoming the preferred approach for power plant cooling, especially in areas such as the western U.S. where water is scarce, but efficiencies remain well below wet cooling technologies.

The fusion power initiative, Accelerating Low-cost Plasma Heating and Assembly (ALPHA), is intended to help build foundations for new pathways toward fusion power.

According to ARPA-E, ALPHA is focused on approaches in the intermediate ion density regime between lower-density magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) and higher-density inertial confinement fusion (ICF). This intermediate density regime is not as well explored as the more mature MCF and ICF approaches, but it may offer new opportunities for fusion reactors with energy and power requirements that are compatible with low-cost technologies such as pulsed power or piston-driven compression.

—Thomas W. Overton, JD is a POWER associate editor (@thomas_overton, @POWERmagazine)