January 9, 2008.  The FY 2008 appropriations for BES  (H.R. 2764, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008, signed into law by the President on December 26, 2007) included no funding for this solicitation.  All of the proposals not already funded in FY 2007 are now declined due to lack of funds.  Principal investigators will receive written notification of the declination and anonymous reviews of their proposals.

May 22, 2007.  The Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $22.7 million for basic research over three years aimed at improving the capture, conversion, and use of solar energy.  DOE’s Office of Science selected 27 projects to be initiated in FY 2007 that will focus on fundamental science to support enhanced use of solar energy.  (DOE Press Release; PDF file; List of Awards)

Background.  The joint Congressional resolution (H.J.R. 20) funding for Basic Energy Sciences (BES) in FY 2007 provided approximately $8 million for Notice 06-15, Basic Research for Solar Energy Utilization (SEU).  The proposed FY2008 budget contained full funding for the original SEU initiative ($34.1M) plus additional funding ($5.9M), for a total of $40.0M for SEU.  All full applications submitted in response to Notice 06-15 that were not funded in FY2007 were held in consideration for funding in FY 2008.   However, the FY 2008 appropriations for BES (H.R. 2764, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008, signed into law by the President on December 26, 2007) included no funding for this solicitation.  All of the proposals not already funded in FY 2007 are now declined due to lack of funds. Principal investigators will receive written notification of the declination and anonymous reviews of their proposals.

BES received 656 pre-applications and pre-proposals in response to FY 2007 Office of Science Notice 06-15 and DOE Laboratory Program Announcement 06-15, Basic Research for Solar Energy Utilization.  Each of these submissions was independently reviewed by at least four DOE program managers. Two criteria were used in this review process:  i) whether the proposed activities represented Basic Research, and ii) whether the proposed research was responsive to the specific research goals described in the Notice. Based on the recommendations of DOE program mangers, principal investigators of 346 submissions have been encouraged to submit full proposals.  A detailed breakdown by research category is given in the table below. There is no appeal process for discouraged pre-applications, nor is there any additional guidance/information that we can provide regarding discouragements.  According to the rules set forth in the Notices, discouraged pre-applications or pre-proposals cannot be used to submit full proposals.  Email messages informing the principal investigator of the encouragement or discouragement of a full proposal were sent prior to August 11, 2006.

	Received	Encouraged
Solar to electric conversion (Categories 1-3)	279	129
Solar fuels productions (Categories 4-8)	191	115
Solar thermal energy utilization (Category 9)	58	33
Novel nanoscale and self-assembled materials (Category 10)	96	51
Theory, modeling, and simulation (Category 11)	32	18
Totals	656	346

BES received 309 full proposals by the deadline of November 14, 2006.  The formal proposals were externally peer reviewed according to well-established guidelines.  Twenty-seven of these proposals were funded in FY 2007 (see above).