Finally, we heard some success stories that are, unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule. Exelon\u2019s Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Gould, described a partnership with Argonne\u2019s energy storage hub so successful it has even given rise to a venture fund. We also heard that DOE\u2019s contracting and personnel rules, designed to protect nuclear secrets, must be reformed to facilitate such partnerships and encourage DOE personnel to spend time in industry and vice versa\u2014another hallmark of Bell Labs. As former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine told us, the best way to move technology is to move people.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nPrinciple #2<\/h4>\n
The federal government should invest in early commercial versions of clean energy innovations alongside end-users who are willing to adopt them. Advanced energy technologies can be extremely risky for a host of reasons. Absent government support for projects to demonstrate their technical and financial viability to potential users and investors, these technologies will be slow to deploy.<\/p>\n
Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT\u2019s serial battery entrepreneur, lauded ARPA-E\u2019s new pilot program to support the demonstration and scaling of high-risk technologies. Success in these projects will allow U.S. innovators to raise capital and avoid having to sell their intellectual property to deep-pocketed foreign competitors.<\/p>\n
Norm Augustine described the particular challenge facing large energy systems such as carbon capture that must be demonstrated at scale. To fill this critical gap in our innovation system, he proposed creation of an independent government corporation, modeled after In-Q-Tel, whose funding would come primarily from the Federal government. John Deutch has long championed a similar approach. In the closing session, former Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz voiced support for the idea as well and said the government corporation might even take over the function of DOE\u2019s loan program office.<\/p>\n
More broadly, Arati Prabhakar, who ran both DoD’s legendary Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a cleantech venture capitalist, urged DOE to bring the same professionalism to demonstration and scaleup activities that it brings to basic research. We need to be able to make bold bets and abandon things that don\u2019t work, she said.<\/p>\n
Principle #3<\/h4>\n
The federal government should formulate clean energy innovation policy with an eye to global opportunities. As the world takes on the climate crisis, enormous markets\u2014for power equipment, vehicles, industrial machinery, and even basic materials\u2014will be up for grabs. China has set its sights on being a clean energy superpower, and other countries in Europe and East Asia are not far behind.<\/p>\n
To help U.S. industry seize these opportunities, Varun Sivaram of Columbia University recommended five ways in which U.S. foreign policy could advance clean energy innovation, including leading international efforts to get agreement on technical standards, aligning our trade policy and export finance priorities with our domestic strategy for clean energy innovation, and partnering with our non-China allies to promote competition based on innovation as opposed to commodity prices.<\/p>\n
Like Sivaram, Stanford\u2019s Arun Majumdar, the founding director of ARPA-E, and his successor Ellen Williams called for a sectoral approach to key technologies such as grid storage and batteries for electric vehicles. As a possible model, several speakers cited SEMATECH, a partnership between DARPA and U.S. chipmakers to shore up their equipment suppliers.<\/p>\n
Some speakers stressed the need for competition to remain \u201cfriendly.\u201d David Victor from the University of California San Diego asked how we would have the large global markets needed to generate clean energy innovation if current U.S. conflicts with China continue. And Harvard Business School\u2019s Willy Shih cautioned against the push for broad-scale \u201clocalization\u201d (i.e., insourcing) we are seeing now in response to COVID-related shortages, which he believes will be prohibitively expensive given U.S. labor costs. In a different vein, Moniz said it should be easier to get global cooperation on technologies that address the tragedy of the commons\u2014carbon capture, sequestration, CO2 removal\u2014than on technologies with more proprietary intellectual property.<\/p>\n
Finally, various speakers highlighted the key role of state and regional innovation systems, tailored to local energy resources and other assets, in achieving U.S. competitive and climate goals. Richard Kaufman, the head of the New York State Energy R&D Authority, described how NYSERDA leverages the state\u2019s strengths as opposed to simply awarding individual grants. For example, its recent offshore wind procurement aggregated demand from multiple states and used New York\u2019s authority to reduce bidders\u2019 soft costs, which often exceed hard costs.<\/p>\n
Principle #4<\/h4>\n
Policies to enhance clean energy innovation should emphasize manufacturing, broadly defined. As many of the proposals described above recognize, the benefits Americans receive from international competition in clean energy will depend considerably on where the manufacturing occurs. To avoid the fate of solar PV\u2014a technology invented by Bell Labs but now produced almost entirely abroad\u2014we need federal policies that support a strategy of \u201cinnovate here, manufacture here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of our speakers emphasized the importance of U.S. supply chains. Ellen Williams noted that every big technology we need is dependent on hundreds of smaller ones, and Laura Diaz Anadon of Cambridge University cautioned that suppliers of the more complex components of wind turbines are found in ever fewer countries. Willy Shih, in arguing for selective (as opposed to broad-scale) insourcing, called for heavy investment in process innovation, which can generate the kind of market disruptions that advantage higher-cost firms.<\/p>\n
Process innovation is critical for another reason: the deep decarbonization needed to meet our climate goals will fundamentally alter advanced manufacturing. We devoted an entire session to this topic. Our speakers emphasized the need for DOE\u2019s Advanced Manufacturing Office to focus squarely on the challenge of industrial decarbonization. They highlighted the critical role of synthetic biology and biomanufacturing. Here, again, regional innovation systems are key: many U.S. firms conduct their fermentation abroad because the regional infrastructure does not exist. Finally, our speakers urged DOE and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to tackle this issue jointly.<\/p>\n
Let me close with three quick points that came up repeatedly in the workshop. One, as the example of biomanufacturing illustrates, climate is not DOE\u2019s problem alone to solve. It requires a whole-of-government approach. Two, timing is everything. We need to double down on innovation in the coming decade so that we are ready for\u2014and have options for\u2014the massive deployment to come. As Arun Majumdar said, innovation-wise, this needs to be the Roaring 20s. Three, this is not a moon shot; we need something the scale and scope of the Cold War.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IGS Blog | Climate requires the federal government to step up its game on energy innovation\u2014working with industry to reduce risk, accelerate technology commercialization, and promote manufacturing (“innovate here, manufacture here”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15145,"featured_media":8773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[418,74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8357"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12346,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions\/12346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}