Powerful Partners

Federally funded research laboratories in Colorado — with alphabet-soup acronyms such as JILA, NOAA, NEON, NIST — partnering with the state’s research universities and local companies, constitute the backbone of the state’s high-tech economy. They are leaders in developing new technologies and finding ways to launch them in the commercial world.

The state’s 25 federal labs — from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder to the Centers for Disease Control, in Fort Collins — form one of the largest concentrations of such labs in the United States. The facilities are involved in fields as disparate as managing natural resources and renewable energy to weather prediction and space physics.

Their partnerships with Colorado’s research universities, including Colorado State University, the University of Colorado Boulder and the Colorado School of Mines, translate into jobs and industries pumping more than $1 billion a year into the Colorado economy, according to Boulder-based CO-LABS, a nonprofit group started in 2007 to promote the state’s federal labs as well as connect them with businesses, educational institutions and other government entities.

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“They turn out amazing research and technology that does commercialize into the economy; they convert ideas into jobs, … and they are a competitive advantage for Colorado nationally and globally,´ said Ken Lund, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

“You can point to the density of our federal labs and our three research universities as a real center for innovation,´ said Bill Farland, chairman of CO-LABS.

“Our ability to translate research into solutions to problems, products and spinoff businesses is pretty evident,´ said Farland, who also serves as vice president of research at Colorado State University.

The labs account for more than 16,000 direct and indirect jobs in Colorado, according to the 2013 Colorado Business Economic Outlook compiled by CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. They occupy roughly 5 million square feet of leased and owned real estate, principally in Boulder, Jefferson and Larimer counties.

The labs and their university affiliates contributed $1.5 billion to the state economy in fiscal 2010, up from $1.2 billion the previous year, CU-Boulder research shows. Data from 2010 is the most recent available.

In this time of trillion-dollar federal deficits, local labs face the same budget constraints as other federal agencies, but many believe looming budget cuts will be minimal due to the significance of the labs’ work.

“The good news is, clean energy and the environmental impact of energy are still important to the administration,´ said Bill Farris, NREL’s associate laboratory director in charge of innovation, partnering and outreach.

The genesis of Colorado’s federal laboratories dates to the 1940s, when military research was conducted here. The Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, which studied radio waves, was established in 1946 and evolved into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with a major lab in Boulder. NOAA is involved in predicting weather on Earth and in space, as well as in environmental research, with other offices in Denver, Niwot, Fort Collins, Longmont, Grand Junction and Pueblo.

“Research here at NOAA in Boulder has consistently focused on areas of critical national need, whether it’s understanding the layers of the atmosphere or … predicting the best frequencies for radio transmission,´ said Katy Human, NOAA spokesperson.

U.S. Census Bureau data for 2010 show Colorado has the second-most highly educated population in the country behind Massachusetts; 36 percent of the state’s adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The state has the eighth-highest concentration of science and engineering doctoral degree holders, according to the National Science Foundation.

One of the state’s best-known federal laboratories, the U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL, was established in 1974 after a national energy crisis. NREL, the only government lab in the country devoted to renewable energy, has a 327-acre main campus in Golden and a 305-acre National Wind Technology Center just south of Boulder. NREL employs some 1,700 people and had a 2011 budget of $389 million. Each of Colorado’s research universities has a representative on the board of NREL’s manager/operator, the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.

“We reduce the risk for the technologies that are important to renewable energy and energy efficiency, and push to the point where the commercial world will pick them up,´ said NREL’s Farris.

Arvada-based PrimeStar Solar Inc., for example, uses NREL’s photovoltaic technology. PrimeStar was acquired in 2011 by technology giant General Electric Co., and GE hopes to build the nation’s largest solar-panel plant at a PrimeStar facility in Aurora. The plant, delayed for now due to the economy, is expected to cost $300 million and employ 355 people.

To make sure NREL’s mission remains cutting edge, the lab’s main campus has undergone a $450 million expansion since 2009, adding some of the world’s most technologically advanced, sustainable buildings and creating hundreds of construction jobs. Its newest structure, the LEED Platinum, 182,500-square-foot Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF), is nearly finished and will house one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Not only will the computer help update the U.S. electrical power grid to accommodate renewable energy, but heat it generates also will warm the ESIF building. The ESIF will be one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world, operating at an ultra-efficient power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or lower, according to NREL. The average PUE rating for U.S. data centers was 1.8 in 2011, according to The Uptime Institute, which tracks data center operations.

Noteworthy research at Colorado labs includes:

• The Deepwater Horizon Atmospheric Science Team, a partnership between NOAA and CU-Boulder that was honored by Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2012 for its work in assessing air-quality risks posed by the disastrous 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The team estimated the oil-leak rate and analyzed the impact of that oil on the environment.

• The governor also recognized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Lab in Fort Collins for discovering a gene that, when activated, prevents the bacteria that cause Lyme disease from causing infection after a tick bite.

• The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, an institute within CSU via an agreement with NOAA, is at the forefront of climate-change research.

• NCAR, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and Columbia University scientists recently teamed up to use weather prediction technology to forecast influenza outbreaks by region. The 2012-2013 flu strain is one of the worst and most widespread in recent history, according to the CDC.

• David J. Wineland, a physicist at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics for developing groundbreaking experimental methods that enabled “the very first steps toward building a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Wineland shared the award with French researcher Serge Haroche. Wineland’s research also led to the creation of extremely precise clocks that could be the basis for a new standard of time.

The State of Colorado has identified seven advanced industries it considers economic accelerators, including aerospace, advanced manufacturing, bioscience, electronics, energy and natural resources, technology/information and infrastructure/engineering, according to Lund of the economic development office. The state’s federal labs are key to further developing those industries, which already make up 20 percent of Colorado’s economy and have a global impact as well.

“We feel like if we can grow the capacity of those seven sectors, we will be able to create jobs faster than other states,” Lund said.