GOLDEN - Colorado will become the home of the Center for Revolutionary Photoconversion if a proposal by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Colorado's three research universities is chosen by the Department of Energy.

The decision, which would bring $21 million in federal money to the state over the course of three years, is expected in May.

The two project leads, Arthur Nozik, a senior research fellow at NREL, and Carl Koval, a chemistry professor and interim faculty director of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Renewable and Sustainable Energy Initiative, are optimistic.

"We did everything we could do (to win)," Koval said. "This kind of proposal is enormously hard to write. We wrote a good one, we got good reviews and did well on the site visit."

The state agreed to chip in $3 million if the proposal is approved, and the universities - CU-Boulder, Fort Collins-based Colorado State University and Golden-based Colorado School of Mines - another $1 million between them.

The center would be the first major initiative of the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory, a joint research project already in place between the lab and the three schools. If fully funded, the center will be able to support more than 100 people, Nozik said, including about 60 postdocs and graduate students, 25 faculty and 25 NREL staff.

The proposal is aimed at third-generation solar energy conversion, including improving photovoltaic cells and direct solar-to-hydrogen conversion.

NREL has been working on these techniques since it was formed in 1978, said Nozik, who also teaches chemistry at CU. Progress has been good for the amount of funding the lab has gotten, "But to push the field ahead faster we're proposing a center."

The proposal's major selling point is NREL's mission is to commercialize its technology. Unlike most federal laboratories, "NREL is an applied laboratory," Nozik explained. NREL's sponsor is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewal Energy, an office of the Department of Energy that doesn't fund long-term basic science. "They want something now. We can transfer the technology very quickly into the marketplace."

The Department of Energy's request for solar energy proposals garnered 900 responses, which were whittled down to about 300 that were encouraged to continue, Nozik said.

Of those, only four were for centers, including NREL's. The center competitors include the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab run by the University of California; Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab run by Stanford University, also in California; and Argonne National Lab, run by the University of Chicago.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.