DOE ‘Manhattan Project’ to Build New Energy Storage Technologies?
December 2nd, 2012There’s just one problem with this analogy.
The Manhattan Project cost about $25.8 billion (in 2012 dollars).
This DOE effort is $120 million over five years. That’s a noise level allocation of resources compared to The Manhattan Project.
Of course, if you need a façade to role out stuff you’ve had sitting on the shelf in the black world for some number of decades… *meh* Maybe $120 million could make a good show of it.
Via: Computerworld:
The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper than today’s within five years.
To accomplish this, U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is taking some lesson from U.S. history.
The DOE is creating a new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that’s intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced an atomic bomb.
“When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,” said Chu at a press conference Friday that was streamed live from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The center will be located there.
The Battery and Energy Storage Hub project will involve six national labs, five universities — Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and University of Michigan — and four private firms, Dow Chemical, Applied Materials, Johnson Controls, and Clean Energy Trust.
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Think of the $120 billion as a small piece of their advertising budget (“Why the DOE really cares about fossil-fuel independence!”). Here’s what a single corporation budgets for their advertising: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0315c95c-d3a9-11de-8caf-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DuwG5jng