Washington (Platts)--23Dec2009/521 am EST/1021 GMT

The US Department of Energy on Tuesday said it would launch a new research model at the agency by creating three new "energy innovation hubs" to focus manpower and resources on solving broad energy challenges.

"The DOE Energy Innovation Hubs represent a new, more proactive approach to managing and conducting research," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in announcing the funding.

Chu, himself a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the product of Bell Laboratories, said the idea was modeled on the way industrial labs did business during their most productive periods.

"Their achievements -- from the transistor to the information theory that makes modern telecommunications possible -- are evidence that we can build creative, highly integrated research teams that can accomplish more, faster, than researchers working separately," Chu said.

Under the hub concept, researchers from various scientific disciplines will be housed under one roof, all rubbing shoulders and working on solving one broad energy problem. In addition to working on basic research problems, they would also look at engineering and commercialization challenges.

Each hub will focus on one of three energy areas: production of fuel from sunlight; energy-efficient building systems and the use of computer modeling and simulation to build better nuclear reactors. DOE will spend $122 million for each hub over five years for a total expenditure of $366 million and hopes to have Congress fund others if the first three are successful.

DOE intends to award the hubs competitively to universities, national labs, non-profit organizations or companies and is already accepting applications for its fuels-from-sunlight hub. The deadline for those applications is March 29 and DOE expects to issue funding opportunities for the other two hubs soon.

The hubs are one of three research models DOE has recently adopted. In August, the agency funded 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, which are smaller in scale and involve collaborative basic research across institutions.

Also this year, DOE created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, which is aimed at funding specific high-risk, high-reward research that has the possibility to make "transformational" breakthroughs.

--Derek Sands, derek_sands@platts.com