All Publications

The United States has failed to create a comprehensive energy policy that provides robust and consistent support for innovation. Although the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulated public investments in energy innovation, many of these programs and incentives have since expired or concluded, leaving the energy innovation ecosystem underfunded and skewed towards supporting deployment incentives over technology R&D, demonstration, and manufacturing.

This report analyzes these investments by innovation stage and technology to inform policymakers and advocates of the state of the energy innovation ecosystem. Constructing a successful and enduring energy innovation ecosystem requires significant public investment, substantial policy commitment to the development of clean energy technologies, and considerable, smart policy options that can continue to drive energy innovation forward. A comprehensive strategy for meeting these challenges in the future is incomplete without a thorough understanding of current policy.

A version of this analysis was originally posted over several weeks on Matthew Stepp’s ‘Fueling Innovation’ column of Energy Trends Insider.

Long considered an innovation powerhouse, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has supported some of the most integral technological breakthroughs of the past century. In recent years policymakers and advocates have become interested in DOD’s investments in clean energy innovation. Despite this ongoing interest, there has been little effort to communicate the characteristics of DOD’s investments to determine their potential impacts on national clean energy policy. As a supplementary report to ITIF’s 2011 report, and using the Energy Innovation Tracker, this report finds that DOD has invested $5 billion in clean energy innovation since 2009, indicating potential commercial spillover effects when mission-oriented research and procurement investment align.

A summary of the report is available here.

A high-level analysis of overall federal energy investment trends across agencies, technologies and innovation phases was conducted using data from the Beta version of the Energy Innovation Tracker, as of 12/7/2010.

EIT facilitates the development of comprehensive baselines for needs assessments of federal energy innovation spending. This analysis presents one such example- comparing how detailed information on actual federal investments in energy innovation provided by EIT measures up to various expert recommendations, technology development road-maps, or federal research spending on other national innovation priorities and technological innovations (both past and present). This analysis was compiled using data from the BETA version of the EIT database, as of 12/7/2010.

The unprecedented level of detail with which EIT catalogs energy innovation projects allows for comprehensive and in-depth analyses of federal research efforts focused on particular technologies.  Users can query the EIT database to elicit project details by technology, and download results into a spreadsheet to conduct their own analysis of these projects.  This case study illustrates one such technology analysis, conducted using results from a query in EIT for federal innovation investments focused on nuclear energy. This case study was compiled using data from the BETA version of the EIT database, as of 12/7/2010.