President Biden has created a new Climate Innovation Working Group as part of the National Climate Task Force to advance his commitment to launching an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate (ARPA-C). The working group is intended to help coordinate and strengthen federal government-wide efforts to foster affordable, game-changing technologies that can help achieve the goal of net zero economy-wide emissions by 2050.

The working group will be co-chaired by the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, Office of Science of Technology and Policy, and Office of Management and Budget.

The Administration outlined key planks of the agenda the Climate Innovation Working Group is intended to advance:

• Zero net carbon buildings at zero net cost, including carbon-neutral construction materials;

• Energy storage at one-tenth the cost of today’s alternatives;

• Advanced energy system management tools to plan for and operate a grid powered by zero-carbon power plants;

• Very low-cost zero-carbon on-road vehicles and transit systems;

• New, sustainable fuels for aircraft and ships, as well as improvements in broader aircraft and ship efficiency and transportation management;

• Affordable refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pumps made without refrigerants that warm the planet;

• Carbon-free heat and industrial processes that capture emissions for making steel, concrete, chemicals, and other important industrial products;

• Carbon-free hydrogen at a lower cost than hydrogen made from polluting alternatives;

• Innovative soil management, plant biologies, and agricultural techniques to remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the ground; and

• Direct air capture systems and retrofits to existing industrial and power plant exhausts to capture carbon dioxide and use it to make alternative products or permanently sequester it deep underground.

As a first example of the widespread innovation effort, the US Department of Energy announced $100 million in funding (OPEN 2021, earlier post) via the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support transformational low-carbon energy technologies.

In addition to supporting technologies that are near commercialization, the Climate Innovation Working Group will also emphasize research to bolster and build critical clean energy supply chains in the United States and strengthen American manufacturing. As it coordinates climate innovation across the federal government, it will focus on programs at land-grant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and other minority-serving institutions.