The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy are picking clean energy companies to receive federal help and money under special cooperative agreements that allow private companies to benefit from federal expertise.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Tuesday that his agency signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the Israeli company Water-Gen to develop advanced mobile water generators that can take water vapor directly out of the air to provide drinking water. Outspoken lawyer Alan Dershowitz is a member of the company’s board.
Pruitt said the goal of the project is to dramatically improve “access to potable water during shortages or contamination events,” such as those that occurred during last year’s hurricanes that cut off water supplies in Puerto Rico and Texas.
Pruitt said he struck 54 similar agreements in fiscal 2017 under the Federal Technology Transfer Act, which allows the government to enter into agreements with the private sector to advance a technology to commercial scale.
The idea of tech transfer appears to be spreading across the Trump Cabinet. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, for example, is working with his agency’s fleet of national laboratories to facilitate breakthroughs in new energy technologies.
Perry on Tuesday awarded the first company under a competitive grant program to advance new forms of solar energy. The Energy Department let the company, Maryland-based SolarWindow, Inc., announce the award, while Perry was traveling to California to tour national lab facilities there.
The company makes glass that turns windows into solar energy-generating panels.
“SolarWindow is the developer of transparent electricity-generating glass, which when fabricated into windows, could turn entire buildings into vertical power generators,” the company said.
The award includes technical assistance from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other lab complexes. The company estimates a $100 billion market for its product.
Perry announced the $3 million American Made Solar Prize competition in January soon after President Trump announced he would be impose tariffs on solar imports, despite wide protests from the solar industry.
The solar prize will help catalyze a new public-private “network” that will allow the Energy Department to bring together universities, energy incubators, and the agency’s fleet of 17 national laboratories “to create a sweeping portfolio of innovations primed for private investment and commercial scale-up,” the department said.
