With another blustery federal budget forecast nipping at the university research community, a project at Philadelphia’s historic Navy Yard may be providing one of the relatively safe harbors.
There, at the 235-year-old former base just south of downtown along the Delaware River, a group of 11 universities is beginning a five-year, $129-million venture that will try to figure out ways to make homes and buildings more energy efficient. The concepts will be tested on Navy Yard buildings.
It’s not Manhattan Project-scale money. But at a time when many government programs face another year of no net increases, the “energy-innovation hub,” led by scientists at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, is one of the most likely survivors in the entire federal budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which begins in October.
“It about doubles our effort in the architectural-engineering department,” said James D. Freihaut, an associate professor of architectural engineering at Penn State, who is due to give President Obama a tour of his lab when the president visits the campus on Thursday. The visit is intended by the administration to emphasize why federal budget cuts should spare the energy-innovation hubs it has proposed—with research work to be performed by dozens of universities and other public and private partners.
In his annual State of the Union address on January 25, Mr. Obama endorsed a five-year freeze in domestic spending, saying “painful cuts” will be a necessary response to the country’s tough economic condition. Mr. Obama said he’d seek exceptions for areas that include scientific research, calling such work “crucial to America’s success.” But it’s not clear how much success he’ll have in getting Congress to follow through, given that Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have vowed to reduce federal spending to 2008 levels.
Unpredictable Financing
“The dangerous deficits America is running don’t allow for sacred cows,” Rep. Kevin P. Brady, Republican of Texas, told The Chronicle when asked about any exceptions for research. “Any university president outspending their budget by 40 percent, as Washington is doing—and I doubt many are—certainly understands the gravity of the challenge we face,” said Mr. Brady, who last month introduced a bill proposing more than $150-billion in budget reductions over five years, including some research expenditures.
The Association of American Universities, the main lobbying group for research institutions, is hopeful for its members, but it isn’t sure what to expect when Mr. Obama issues his 2012 budget plan this month. “It’s a little bit unpredictable,” said an association spokesman, Barry Toiv. “We’ve always believed that basic research has had a bipartisan base of support, and we hope that that will continue to be the case.”
The single largest provider of federal money to research universities, the National Institutes of Health, has had a cumulative budget growth of only about 8 percent over the past five years, below the rate of inflation. The second largest, the National Science Foundation, has spent most of the past several years with stagnant or negative growth.
Over all, according to NSF tallies, total federal support for research-and-development work on university campuses has fallen below inflation since the 2005 fiscal year. The main exception was the $787-billion economic-stimulus bill approved by Congress in February 2009, which provided a one-time sum of $21.5-billion for research, with about half directed to university labs.
Obama’s Push on Energy
In the State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama made a point of highlighting the energy-innovation hubs. His administration has proposed a total of eight, including the one at the Navy Yard and two others that have already been approved. The hubs would do research in fields that include solar electricity, power distribution, batteries and energy storage, energy-efficient buildings, and nuclear energy. Mr. Obama commended the California Institute of Technology for its work in one of those eight areas, trying to convert sunlight and water into automotive fuel.
Other specific areas of research identified by the administration as worthy of emphasis, beyond energy, include developing advanced wireless broadband systems, helping companies improve their manufacturing technologies, better equipping individual U.S. soldiers, and fighting cancer and autism.
The administration appears determined to fight for such exceptions to the expected budgetary bloodbath on Capitol Hill. Even after a predicted winter storm blocked his plan to visit Penn State on Wednesday, to see how Mr. Freihaut proposes to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, the president immediately found a way to reschedule the trip for Thursday. “It kind of shocked me,” Mr. Freihaut said Tuesday. “I just figured the whole thing would go down the tubes a few days ago when I saw the weather report.”
The other universities working with Penn State on the project are Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Morgan State, Princeton, Purdue, and Rutgers Universities; the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Virginia Tech; and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh.
Tackling the Issue From All Angles
Their task involves a lot more than solving technological hurdles. In fact, much of the science behind energy-efficient buildings is already known. The problem centers on adopting more energy-efficient practices, by overcoming the many political, corporate, regulatory, and even cultural conditions that have hindered their use. As such, it’s a project that will require help from a wide range of university disciplines, Mr. Freihaut said.
And while headlines on energy policy often focus on the hunt for alternative sources, such as solar and wind power, the nation’s overall progress will be limited if it can’t address energy waste in homes and buildings, as they account for 40 percent of total energy use, Mr. Freihaut said. The country last made a major push for improving the energy efficiency of its buildings in the late 1970s, he said. Solutions then, however, were largely limited to reducing ventilation rates and sealing buildings tighter, he said. That ignored a host of side effects, including higher levels of humidity, mold, and dust mites. Allergen levels have been “epidemically increasing ever since,” he said.
Government support for such work is crucial because the building industry is so divided into segments that nobody has the financial incentive to tackle the subject holistically, Mr. Freihaut said. The energy-innovation-hub project means his department’s average of about $5-million in annual federal support will double, and his team of about 100 graduate students will grow 40 percent.
But a $25-million-a-year federal allocation is arguably still well below the size of the problem, given that the nation has about 100 million residential buildings and five million commercial buildings, and the construction industry spends close to $1-trillion a year. The example makes clear, said Henry C. Foley, vice president for research at Penn State, that even those projects deemed worthy of federal support these days can’t get nearly the amount of money they see as necessary.
Five of the eight proposed energy hubs haven’t even won Congressional approval. And entire swaths of university research face perhaps grimmer prospects. Medical schools that got a boost in 2009 from the stimulus measure are now bracing for what they’re calling the “cliff effect,” in which the NIH won’t be able to continue supporting many of the new projects it just started.
One of the most hopeful developments for university research came last month when Mr. Obama signed legislation reauthorizing the America Competes Act (HR 5116), which promises to eventually double the budget of the NSF and the research budgets of the Energy Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There’s no set period for the doubling, though the administration is asking Congress to interpret that as covering an 11-year period beginning in 2006, meaning annual budget increases of around 6.5 percent.
That timeline might slip, however, given that Congress still hasn’t approved a budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which began last October, and instead has been passing budget extensions that keep agencies financed at their 2010 levels.
Of all the budget dilemmas confronting the nation, university research does still enjoy a rare measure of bipartisan support. “It’s all about setting priorities,” Representative Brady said. “I believe basic research and forms of applied research will remain a high priority, especially when compared against obsolete agencies, duplicative programs, and wasted dollars now diverted to low-priority items in the federal budget.”
