Former head of Energy Dept. research agency heads to Google

The former head of an Energy Department research and development program is heading to Google to lead its energy strategy.

Arun Majumdar will join Google after leaving his most recent post as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in June.

“One of the world’s biggest challenges is bringing reliable, sustainable and affordable energy to everyone. We need a new energy blueprint for the future — the latest advances in technology have the potential to bring us closer to that goal than ever before,” Matthew Stepka, vice president of Google.org, said Monday of Majumdar’s hiring on the Internet giant’s “green blog.”

Though partisan splits on how to fund energy research have widened since the federal stimulus, ARPA-E has received broad support across the aisle.

ARPA-E — which was first established in 2007 but didn’t receive funding until 2009 — invests in so-called high-risk, high-reward projects to develop "transformational" energy technologies.

The program offers funding for meeting a technological goal — for example, an affordable electric car battery that can go a certain number of miles without recharging — but does not prescribe how to get there.

During his time as ARPA-E chief, Majumdar also served as Acting Undersecretary of Energy. Before that, he was associate director of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and taught engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

— This story was updated at 4:36 p.m.

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