Endowed Energy Innovators

Looking to Yankee ingenuity for breakthroughs

"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. "

--Gulliver's Travels

Like that innovative inventor in the land of Balnibarbi, the U.S. is scrambling to discover new energy supplies as well as different and unusual ways of using and saving its energy. But while many bureaucrats, multinational companies and politicians see nuclear power, coal and more oil finds as the solution, the nation's growing number of energy enthusiasts promote the idea that the answers to the fuel crisis already exist somewhere, unrecognized and underused. The only difficulty, they argue, is getting them out of some creative minds and into practice.

Appreciating that breakthroughs very often come from individuals rather than from the labs of giant corporations, the Department of Energy has expanded its three-year-old program of small grants to spur research and support small-scale energy innovators. This year DOE will spend $12 million to finance about 800 different projects around the country, vs. $8 million and 584 projects in 1979. The department's local offices loudly promoted the program with radio and television pitches that urged anyone with an idea to write and ask for a grant before last month's deadline. Says Rex Williams, deputy director of the program: "This program is aimed at individuals and small business. There is nothing in the Federal Government that is really directed at those two groups. We are going after Yankee ingenuity and whatever the Southern equivalent of that is."

The DOE accepted proposals in just about every energy field, including wood, wind, solar, biomass, hydropower and the general area of conservation. To get money, however, the applicants must first go through a rigorous winnowing process that is designed to eliminate technically unfeasible ideas and those that do not meet regional and state energy needs. The maximum available to any one scheme under the awkwardly named Appropriate Technology Small Grants Program is $50,000, but grants as small as $200 will be made. The 800 or so lucky applicants will be culled from 19,329 proposals received by the DOE, with two-thirds of the total funding being distributed among states on the basis of population. The other third, or $4 million in aid, will go to areas that submit the most per capita applications. Alaska, where one out of every ten households requested application forms, is expected to be the runaway leader.

So far only one project has been judged worthy of nationwide promotion. As part of the 1977-78 pilot program that distributed $1.3 million in four Western states, Guam and the Pacific Islands trust territory, the DOE gave Stanley Mumma of Arizona State University $11,000 to develop a curriculum for teaching people to build solar hot-water systems for their homes. Using methods learned in the course, more than 1,500 residents of the Phoenix area have installed solar systems. The DOE will now spend $1 million to establish the same kind of workshop in every other state.

On a smaller scale, the DOE is financing many other ideas, like the proposal submitted by Robert Jones, 43, a Los Angeles salesman of kitchen exhaust systems. He received $8,000 last year to help finance his idea for using the hot air coming off cooking ranges rather than simply pumping it out the exhaust fan. With the money, he built a prototype "hydro-coil" that gathers the heat in radiator-type fins and recycles it to heat other rooms in the house and the water system. Gas bills dropped 15% to 20% during testing, and Jones has interested a national restaurant chain in his device.

Aden and Marjorie Meinel, a husband-and-wife research team at the University of Arizona, got $50,000 to develop their idea of using tumbleweed, the huge spheroid plant that grows wild on arid lands in the Southwest, as a burnable fuel. After harvesting, the bush is ground to the consistency of coarse flour and then compacted into log shapes held together by its natural resins. The 7.5-lb. "tumblelogs" have a heating value equivalent to a similar amount of hardwood.

Other projects that have received funding range from $39,000 for a windmill in an abandoned area of New York's South Bronx that provides the electricity to turn vegetable waste into compost, to $7,450 for an artificial lagoon in Hercules, Calif., to purify water and make methane gas. This year Robert Witkoff, 40, an industrial designer and builder of electric cars in Glen Cove, N.Y., is asking for $50,000 to help develop an integrated windmill system that would use gently blowing breezes both to drive household appliances and to recharge the batteries of an electric car.

One of the unique aspects of this program is that the innovators can elect to retain all of their patent rights. Normally, federal programs specify that any scientist receiving Government money loses his patents. But the DOE is willing to waive this rule on the grounds that the producer of a new energy-saving device will only do the work if he is guaranteed a profit payoff.

Though the DOE grants have spurred energy innovation, the program has also collected its critics. Last December Senator William Proxmire awarded his monthly Golden Fleece award to the DOE for spending $1,200 to build and test "an above-ground aerobic and solar-assisted composting toilet," an outhouse elevated 2 yds. or 3 yds. above ground, where the human waste is caught on a wire mesh and exposed to sunlight to aid decomposition. Developer Douglas Elley of Lupus, Mo., plans to market his invention as "The Skycrapper," and he proudly praises "the pleasing and aesthetic moments of meditative contemplation in a small sunlit room perched 6 ft. to 8 ft. above a backyard or garden view."

Some of the ideas are undoubtedly impractical, but many could reduce, in a modest local way, U.S. dependence on imported oil. The $12 million grants program, which is easily lost in DOE'S $7.7 billion budget, could perhaps even help some American tinkerer find a way to capture sunbeams from cucumbers.

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