ARPA-E

And, uh, we did replicate his work on the second attempt, um, and we replicated a number of times after that.

We found some extraordinary, uh, um, things going on in that system, and ultimately that led to European funding, and then I, I wrote a letter, uh, that was read to Congress, and that led to, uh, ARPA-E funding, I think, which is still ongoing.

And that kind of stimulated funding in, in Russia and, uh, in, in, um, India, and, uh, all Japanese have come together with the car manufacturers there.

And so it's kind of really off to the races now, and so our humble little project o- of people that didn't know what they were doing, um, e- ended up by stimulating a lot of work around the world.

which have been critical, by the way, for life science innovation globally, mainly in the U.S., but globally, because these research projects are often global.

The investments by DARPA or by ARPA-E, which was set up by Obama after the financial crisis in Europe, we were, you know, committing lots of self-harm with austerity, while here Obama had an $800 billion stimulus program.

Initially, he wanted it to be directed towards a greener economy.

He brought in Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, to run the DOE.

He set up ARPA-E to emulate DARPA, so kind of an energy sustainability agency.

And

what happened?

No, seriously, are they? Is the Tea Party still around? Have they just changed names? But anyway, it really got stunted.

The US actually had a massive fiscal stimulus, an 800 billion fiscal stimulus under Obama.

With the Secretary of Energy, they set up ARPA-E, like DARPA, but for energy, but they also started to give out all these guaranteed loans in a portfolio approach, so trying not to put all their eggs in one basket, to different companies that were in that kind of, you know, clean tech, renewable energy revolution because they wanted a green stimulus.

Some companies got the loans, were companies like Solyndra, which ended up going bankrupt.

They got 500, uh, million in a guaranteed loan.

Will brings a background in physics and building early-stage energy technologies.

Previously, he helped launch research programs at ARPA-E and later built energy and climate technology initiatives at Google X, including founding Alphabet's Mineral Division.

And Will is joining us from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Will, welcome to Earthlings 2.0.

Back in 2012, a small team out of UC Berkeley, Power Standards Lab, which was a small sensor company, came together.

They built a distribution-facing PMU, a micro PMU, and they received an Open Innovation Award from ARPA-E.

And they built the micro PMU and they deployed it.

And so at the end of this three-year project, they were deploying these sensors, these micro PMUs.

So growing that new company formation is really, really important to our longer-term economic success.

We've found that Of the startup community, there's a program within the federal government called ARPA-E that invests in early-stage energy breakthrough disruptive technologies.

They've invested about $85 million in the last 15 years in Houston-based companies.

Not universities, but just the companies.