November/December 2008 / Cover Story
Support Lacking for New Energy Technologies
The energy sector hasn’t experienced significant technological innovation for a long time. Regulation has been the only meaningful response to rising demand, increasing cost and environmental concerns. But, the author says, progress can be made only through deployment of new technologies.
Our collective efforts to address the technology of affordable commercial deployment of carbon-free energy have been poor. No public or private organization tracks and coordinates efforts to develop and deploy clean energy technologies, for example, and none coordinates and leverages these efforts to maximize value for research dollar spent. The total annual budget for civilian technology from the DOE is about two billion dollars per year. Federal research and development funding for energy has declined 85 percent since the early 1980s.
According to The Electric Power Research Institute’s analysis, the best way to stop the growth of carbon emissions from the electricity sector near-term is to emphasize efficiency and renewable energy. To decarbonize the electricity sector long-term, new nuclear and advanced coal-generation with carbon capture and storage needs to be deployed.
The author suggests that prudent business people support efforts to provide additional funding for research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies. For example, a one mill surcharge on all electricity would raise $4 billion per year.