The US Department of Energy is to fund 46 so called Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) with 777 million dollars over the course of the next five years (see news here). 
Quite a commitment to basic research in times of a global economic crisis &ndash although the decision has been taken years before, with thematic workshops starting in 2003.
Some of the centers will focus on photovoltaic energy conversion, partly with a strong focus on organics!
- Center for Interface Science: Hybrid Solar-Electric Materials, University of Arizona (Director: Neil R. Armstrong)
- Center for Inverse Design, National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorada (Director: Alex Zunger)
- Center for Excitonics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Director: Marc Baldo)
- Polymer-Based Materials for Harvesting Solar Energy, University of Massachusetts (Director: Thomas Russell)
- Solar Energy Conversion in Complex Materials, University of Michigan (Director: Peter Green)
- Solar Fuels and Next Generation Photovoltaics, University of North Carolina (Director: Thomas Meyer)
- The Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics, Los Alamos National Laboratory (Director: Victor Klimov)
- Re-Defining Photovoltaic Efficiency Through Molecule-Scale Control, Columbia University (Director: James Yardley)
- Understanding Charge Separation and Transfer at Interfaces in Energy Materials and Devices, University of Texas (Director: Paul Barbara)
The list can be found here, and there are also details available.
Well, strong competition coming up for us European researchers… but what could be better for driving a field forward? ;-)
Notes on Disordered Matter 