By Juliana Williams, Originally Posted at It’s Getting Hot in Here
Yesterday, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) joined Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute in releasing a new report that calls for the creation of a new “National Institutes of Energy” and a dramatic increase in federal funding for energy research and development. The report, titled Jumpstarting a Clean Energy Revolution with a National Institutes of Energy, argues that these two measures are necessary to make clean energy cheap and get America running on clean energy.
Modeled after the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a National Institutes of Energy (NIE) would be designed to most effectively channel R&D funding toward the development of new, low-cost commercial clean energy technologies. The NIE would function as a nationwide network of regionally based, commercially focused and coordinated innovation institutes.
“Clean energy is the future of our nation, but it can also create jobs now,” Sen. Brown said. “Done right and well funded, increased research and development of new clean energy technologies will drive innovation and reduce our dependence on foreign energy.”
The report also calls for a sustained increase of $15 billion in annual federal clean energy R&D funding, as proposed by President Barack Obama. This would result in a total clean energy R&D budget of $20 billion per year. The purpose of both the R&D increase and the NIE is to close what the authors call the “clean energy price gap” – the difference between the current low price of carbon-intensive energy production like coal and the comparatively higher price of today’s non- or low-carbon emitting technologies.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that is it a “myth [that] we have all the technologies we need to solve the energy challenge…We need new technologies to transform the [energy] landscape.”
Housed within the Department of Energy (DOE), but largely autonomous like the NIH, the NIE would coordinate and focus energy research, leverage expertise through regional research institutes, and ensure long-term research into commercializing breakthrough technologies. Current DOE research lacks coordinated priorities, primarily focuses on basic science rather than deployable technologies, and is chronically underfunded.
Congressman Holt explained that the government must invest in ‘as-of-yet undiscovered clean energy technologies,’ because “five years into the process after we’ve used the readily available technologies, we don’t want to say ‘Okay, now who was in charge of phase 2?’”
While critics might argue that private R&D will be sufficient to develop new energy technologies, according to the report, large industrial firms invest less than one quarter of one percent of their revenues on energy research, compared to the biotechnology, health care and information technology industries which routinely invest 5 to 15 percent of revenues on R&D. In comparison, South Korea plans to invest 2 percent of its GDP into expanding the growth of clean energy technologies.
“Private industry risks having innovations reverse engineered by competitors,” said Michael Shellenberger, President of the Breakthrough Institute. “It is the traditional role of the U.S. government to incubate breakthrough technologies. We need to be continually creating and improving clean energy technology through a multi-decadal commitment to this research.”
The NIH has consistently been ranked as one of the most popular federal agencies according to the report, with 75% of the public rating the agency positively, and the authors seek to apply its model to energy research. Joshua Freed from Third Way explained that the NIE will coordinate but not dominate from Washington, like the NIH. “What we need is the ability to effectively secure continued energy R&D funding and then spread it in a way that allows a million flowers to bloom,” said Freed.
