Page 12 RAIN February/March 1978 ·D.O.E. -A.T. Grants Program: It feels very good to finally be able to say some thing nice about a U.S. Dept. of Energy program which, although still flawed by underfunding, has an enormous potential for positive benefits to our country and is politically popular as well. The Appropriate Energy Technology (AET) piiot program, implemented through DOE's San Francisco Operations Office and covering four Western states and the Pacific Trust Territories, produced over a thousand proposals requesting a total of over $21 million for small-scale technologies. The ideas submitted are now undergoing an evaluation process consisting of technical analysis and peer review, and grants ranging from less than $10,000 up to $50,000 are scheduled to be awarded in spring 1978. In addition, to help figure out the next steps, DOE has invited a number of appropriate technologists, energy researchers and consumer advocates to attend a public briefing in Washington, D.C., Jan. 26th, on the "DOE Role in Support of Appropriate Technology, and to form a national steering committee to design and work on regional and state meetings. The invitees include myself, Pliney Fisk (Max's Pot, Austin, Texas), Fran Koster (U. Mass, Amherst, Mass.), Malcolm Lillywhite (Domestic Technology Institute, Lakewood, Colo.), Lola Redford (Consumer Action Now, NYC), Bill Olkowski (Urban Integrated Control, Berkeley, Calif.), Cecil Cook (Bainbridge, Ohio), Beth Hagens (Acorn, Park Forest, Ill.), Paul Rich (Texas Rural Legal Aid-Winter Garden Project, Crystal City, Texas), and David Goldberg (Center for Energy Policy, Boston, Mass). Others who will be attending include Ken Bossong (Citizens Energy Project), illustrated by Marie McAuliffe Good, But Underfunded Harriet Barlow and David Morris (Institute for Self-Reliance), and Craig Decker, all of Washington, D.C. Busy Bees vs. Greedy Bears The California Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT), which coordinated the AET program in California and received the largest number of proposals, 842, has issued a fourpage analysis which is reproduced below. Of particular importance is their observation that "the average proposal request was for slightly more than $20,000." Certainly one way to prevent university and R&D think-tanks, with their multitude of pipelines to taxpayer grant and contract dollars, from getting AET money at the expense of indigent inventors and capital-strapped small businesses, whose access to such financial support is nil, is to reduce the maximum grant amounts from the present $50,000 (for demonstration projects) to, say, $25,000, and the $10,000 category (for concept development-i.e. "a paper study") to $5,000. More could be done for less, more ideas inexpensively tried, by letting the busy (and cost-effective) bees at the honey and not the greedy (and high overhead and salaried) bears. Rather than an outright prohibition, it seems more sensible to simply shrink the honey-pot in size so it's not worth their expensive time to go after it. This suggestion will be reinforced by further analysis which compares 1) the source of proposals to 2) the amount requested. Also important are the OAT notes that, although there are 85 to 100 proposals which should be funded, only 20 of them can be and that the need for $2 million to fund all the good proposals is thus very easily seen.
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