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Schwarzenegger seeks $95M for green research
2006-12-27
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed nearly $95 million in state spending on "clean" energy, biotech and nanotech research, the governor's office said on Wednesday. Much of the proposal -- $40 million -- would be spent only if California universities win a $500 million grant for research from oil giant BP to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Lease revenue bonds would be used to fund $70 million of the proposals, including the $40 million to chase the BP grant. The proposed spending will be part of Schwarzenegger's state budget plan which will be presented in January to the state legislature. Schwarzenegger is recuperating from surgery performed on Tuesday for a broken right femur. He was injured while on a skiing holiday on Saturday with his family in Sun Valley, Idaho. Schwarzenegger three months ago signed a landmark global warming law to make California the first U.S. state to mandate cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent, which would be 1990 levels. Four projects are center in the proposals. They are: -- Lease revenue bonds totaling $40 million if BP picks either the University of California-Berkeley or the University of California-San Diego, which are among five universities in the running for the half a billion dollars. BP wants to fund a "BP Energy Biosciences Institute;" -- Lease revenue bonds totaling $30 million for research into clean energy in the Helios Project at the University of California's Berkeley Lawrence National Laboratory; -- From the state's general fund, $19.8 million for operating costs of the existing California Institutes for Science and Innovation (CISI), which combines work at several University of California campuses and private companies. The research mentioned by the governor's office focuses on information technology, biomedical, and nanotechnology research; -- The first $5 million increment in state matching funds to enhance the University of California's bid for a competition to build a $200 million petascale supercomputer system, which is named for the superspeed of what would be the world's fastest. This computer system -- thousands of microcomputers working together -- would be capable of performing a quadrillion operations a second, which is 1,000 times faster than the fastest computer now, which can perform a trillion calculations a second, said Bruce Darling, executive vice present for university affairs for the UC system. The petascale supercomputer would help find better drugs through computational chemistry and help design buildings more resistant to earthquakes, Darling said. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, said part of the funding for the Helios project will go for research on nanotechnology that could lead to better photovoltaic cells to make solar power. Also, Chu said, the funds could help develop biofuels beyond the current popular answer to conventional gasoline, ethanol, which uses a lot of fossil fuels in its production.
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