To be honest the way I read it the funding on this sounds like it is mostly about material science. I think this is well spent money as it expands the possibili

To be honest the way I read it the funding on this sounds like it is mostly about material science. I think this is well spent money as it expands the possibilities of what we can do beyond the intended target application of electrocaloric heat pumps. A big fraction of what we do better today than say, 4 decades ago, is due to improvements in material science, not because we are more intelligent or better planers (although, some of the software aided planning that happens on big projects nowadays would not have been possible back then).