The EIT database has been compiled using only publicly available data from US government websites and the source of each item is identified in the database by its URL.
The specific sources have varied by government agency. The sources that were used included:
- Agency-level budget requests and supporting documents
- Program (or sub-agency) level budget requests and supporting documents
- Project-level documentation
- Grant-level documentation
In some cases there was good text which described the strategy, providing a roadmap for understanding the underlying programs and projects, and in other cases a bottom-up search was required to find the relevant activities.
The decision on what to include and what not to include was done using the definitions found here.
As you can imagine, lacking an overall US energy innovation roadmap which puts the projects in some context means that we have almost surely missed some worthy programs or projects. Please contact us - we’d like to make sure that everything that should be included is.
In addition to projects that we missed altogether, there were other situations where we were unable to make a clear judgement on what to include. Most of this was very small, but there were two areas that are potentially large, and need to ultimately be included:
- Facilities, infrastructure and management overhead. It was (and remains) hard to see how to allocate these accurately to RD&D activities. In cases like the NREL facility it is easy to make the argument that it should be included. In other facilities and staff it is less obvious. This is primarily a problem with DOE, and needs to be rectified at some point. More on the facilities challenge here.
- SBIR grants. This is an analysis which we just haven’t been able to tackle yet.
The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page includes descriptions of how we handled a number of specific situations that showed up in the data gathering.