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President Obama released his fiscal year 2012 budget proposal mid-February, proposing several changes to levels of funding for federal offices engaged in energy-innovation projects.

On the overall energy investment front, the budget proposal requests an increase of the DOE’s budget by 11.8 percent over FY2010′s current appropriation levels, or $3.1 billion dollars.  However, not all of these increases lie with funding for energy innovation. Using the Energy Innovation Tracker (EIT), we’ve broken out investments in energy innovation (defined in the tracker as Basic Science, RD&D, and Education investments) from general energy investments in measures such as deployment, facility construction, and program management.

To do so, we’ve calculated the share of total budgets for each of these programs in FY2010 dedicated to energy innovation spending, using EIT. By conducting a query in EIT for all 2010 projects within the DOE, and downloading the results as a CSV file, we were able to sum investments in energy innovation projects by DOE office. We then used that sum to calculate percentages of each DOE office total budgets devoted to energy innovation projects in 2010.

We have then assumed, for discussion’s sake, that an equal proportion of each proposed FY2012 program budget is intended for energy innovation spending as in FY2010 budgets.  The FY2010 budget is used rather than FY2011 budget request, as federal agencies are currently operating with a continuing resolution under FY2010 budget levels. The summary table for a selection of these energy innovation measures is presented below. Please note that these are ballpark figures. For a more extensive discussion of the methodology behind these assumptions for each DOE office, see the bullets immediately following Table 1.

Table 1: Selected DOE Program Energy Innovation Budgets, FY2010 and Estimated Proposed FY2012 ($ millions)

• The DOE’s Office of Science (OS)’s budget is proposed to increase by 9.2 percent from FY2010 appropriation levels to $5.4 billion, mostly to continue funding basic energy research and to fund workforce development programs. However, not all of the Office of Science’s funding goes towards energy science research, as the office also is a major funder of the nation’s fundamental physical science research. With approximately $1 billion, or 20%, of the Office of Science’s FY2010 budget devoted to basic energy science research, $1.1 billion, an increase of $100 million over FY10, of the OS’ budget will be devoted to basic energy science through this proposed budget.

• The Administration is requesting a $550 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to continue funding early-stage transformational energy research projects, an increase of $350 million from ARPA-E’s original funding of $400 million over two years through the ARRA stimulus package. 88% of ARPA-E’s funding through ARRA was apportioned to energy-innovation RD&D, thus about $487 million of this $550 million can be expected to be spent on energy-innovation RD&D through the FY12 proposed budget.

• The budget proposes an increase in funding for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)’s budget, from $2.2 billion in FY10 to $3.2 billion, to continue funding research, development, demonstration and deployment on renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Of EERE’s FY10 budget, 48% was spent on energy innovation-related RD&D and training programs, thus we can assume roughly $1.5 billion will be spent to energy-innovation related programs through the FY12 proposed budget.

o In the vehicle technology realm, the Administration proposes an 93% increase in the DOE EERE’s Vehicle Technologies budget to $588 million to advance R&D for innovative transportation technologies. With an 80% dedicated to energy innovation funding in FY2010, we can assume that almost $486 million will be spent on energy innovation related projects in the Vehicle Technologies program through the proposed budget.

• The Administration is proposing a decrease of 0.6% in the Office of Nuclear Energy’s (NE) budget, from $858 million to $853 million. 40% of NE’s FY10′s budget went towards energy-innovation spending, and resultantly we would expect about $349 million of Obama’s proposed Office of Nuclear Energy budget to go towards nuclear energy innovation projects.

o Amidst growing interest in the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology, the FY 2011 DOE budget request was the first to propose a project specifically geared towards supporting RD&D of SMR technologies, a $39 million project through the Reactor Concepts RD&D program. Obama’s budget proposes a $125 million budget for the Reactor Concepts R&D program, which will reportedly include R&D on advanced SMR designs.

• Calculations for share of proposed FY12 budget devoted to energy innovation for the Fossil Energy R&D program differed from calculations used for other offices, as the Administration stated throughout the proposed budget its goal of phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Thus, it was assumed that the proportion of budget devoted to energy innovation would have increased in the FY12 proposed budget, and this share was calculated by summing: the changes listed in the FY12 proposed budget for the Carbon Capture & Power Systems Programs, the Advanced Energy Systems Programs, and a portion of the FY10 energy innovation budget that was assumed to be unchanged from lack of indication otherwise.