The CEMI announcement was made at the ribbon cutting of the Department’s Carbon Fiber Technology Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a new advanced manufacturing facility to reduce the cost of carbon fiber. (Earlier post.) Officials from DOE, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Ford Motor Company, and Dow Chemical launched the facility.

Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative. Key elements of the initiative include:

• Increasing funding for clean energy manufacturing research and development that will accelerate US-based manufacturing of cost-competitive clean energy technologies, from wind, solar, and geothermal to batteries and biofuels.

  DOE has released a $15-million funding opportunity to reduce the manufacturing costs of solar energy technology, including photovoltaics and concentrated solar power, and demonstrate cost-competitive innovative manufacturing technologies that can achieve commercial production in the next few years.

  In the coming months, DOE plans to issue a new funding opportunity that supports a new manufacturing innovation institute.

• Providing additional energy productivity training and technical assistance for manufacturers that build on current efforts like the Industrial Assessment Centers that offer no-cost energy efficiency assessments for manufacturers and the Better Plants Challenge.

• Leveraging the capabilities of our National Laboratories to conduct targeted analysis that evaluates the US competitive position in manufacturing and prioritizes strategic investments that strengthen American competitiveness in the global energy market.

• Hosting a series of regional and national summits to gather input on manufacturing priorities, identify barriers and opportunities for growing clean energy manufacturing competitiveness and showcase national and regional models that address these priorities.

• Launching new public-private partnerships focused on improving US clean energy manufacturing competitiveness. For example, the US Council on Competitiveness is partnering with the Energy Department to convene a series of dialogues among government, small business, industry, research institutions and labor leaders to help develop and recommend strategies for growing the US clean energy manufacturing sector.

Awards. The latest selected projects were picked through a competitive application process and are supported by research teams working on foundational process and materials technologies—technologies that have high impact, use project diversity to spread risk, target nationally important innovation at critical decision points, and contribute to quantifiable energy savings.

The selected projects, announced for negotiations today, cover R&D in computational modeling and simulation for automation and equipment; steel fabrication processing; steel heat treatment processing; high value petrochemicals’ and waste heat minimization manufacturing. The selected project recipients and DOE funding request are:

Carbon Fiber Technology Facility. Now open to US manufacturers, this facility provides clean energy companies and researchers with a test bed for the development of less expensive, better performing carbon fiber materials and manufacturing processes.

Carbon fiber is a strong, stiff, lightweight material that can lower the cost and improve the performance of fuel-efficient vehicles, wind energy and energy storage components, electronics, power transmission, and aerospace technologies, among others. Next-generation lightweight materials, such as carbon-fiber composites, could reduce passenger car weight by 50% and improve fuel efficiency by about 35% without compromising performance or safety, according to DOE.

The Energy Department estimates that through the strategic use of carbon fiber, automakers could cut the weight of cars and trucks by up to 750 pounds by 2020.

Currently, carbon fiber materials are more expensive and complicated to manufacture than more traditional materials like steel and aluminum. The Carbon Fiber Technology Facility will help industry and researchers develop better and cheaper processes for manufacturing these materials. It will produce up to 25 tons of carbon fiber each year, providing US companies with enough material, infrastructure, and technical resources to test and scale-up different approaches to lower carbon fiber costs and efficient production.

Supported by a $35-million Energy Department grant, the 42,000-square foot facility features a 390-foot-long melt-spun fiber line to produce raw fiber materials and expects to add an additional conversion line in the coming months. The facility has attracted a consortium of more than 40 private and public sector partners, including Ford, Dow Chemical and Volkswagen of America.