Federal Energy Department Official in Rochester

By Zack Seward

Rochester, NY – An official from the Obama administration's Energy Department was at the University of Rochester Wednesday, talking about his agency's "high risk, high reward" approach to alternative energy R & D.

Eric Toone is the deputy director of the Department of Energy sub-agency that looks for possible alternative-energy game-changers.

Armed with $400 million in Recovery Act money, Toone's mission is to find the cutting edge technologies that could put a real dent in the country's fossil fuel addiction.

His Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, known as ARPA-E, last year funded about 40 wide ranging projects, covering everything from battery technology to biofuels to carbon capture.

Toone says they're all thing that could one day be like GPS: developed by the government 15 years ago, but life changing and ubiquitous today.

"It's the scale of these problems that's just so hard to wrap your head around," said Toone. "Nibbling away at the edges is not going to get it done for us, right? We need to hit some home runs. We need some real game-changing things that put us in different places. That GPS of energy."

ARPA-E will need help from Congress if it wants to continue its quest. For the agency to get more money to invest in university and small company research, it'll have to be written into a Congressional budget bill.