The billions flowing to cleantech from the federal stimulus plan and the budget are good news, but we’re a long way from riding off into a photovoltaic sunset. The $277 million the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides for the Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers is a big boost that will help jumpstart these centers. Each center will be formed by one or more research organizations — universities, national labs, nonprofits and companies — to study fundamental properties of matter and energy at the nano, atomic and subatomic scales in the context of generating, storing and transmitting energy. Each center will be awarded $2 to 5 million a year over five years. The DOE is also slated to get the $100 million originally requested for the centers in the 2009 budget. The question is, is that $377 million the bulk of the money the program is ever going to see or is it truly just the beginning? According to the Department of Energy, the centers will “accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.� In other words, these are the research centers that will go after the fundamental breakthroughs that will turn perennially promising technologies like solar cells, batteries and hydrogen fuel into mainstays of the world’s energy systems. We need to boost support for the materials science, biology, chemistry and physics research that can crack many of the tough science and engineering problems that limit much of today’s renewable energy production. What are the charge separation and carrier transport properties of this nanostructure? What is the environmental sensitivity of that microbial metabolic pathway? What is the temperature dependence of those metal organic frameworks? We need armies of scientists exploring questions like these if we want renewable energy technologies to progress along a steep enough curve to significantly displace fossil fuels in the next couple of decades. Research organizations have applied for $4.9 billion over five years through the Energy Frontier Research Centers program. This works out to $980 million per year. Though not all of the applications necessarily warrant taxpayer money, I can’t help but wonder what worthy research will lose out on the $377 million, and I worry about funding levels in subsequent years when there may not be stimulus packages. Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.