A Booster Shot for Alternative Energy
April / May 2009
Volume 7 Number 2
Perhaps never before has energy garnered so much of the attention of our elected leaders, the media and public. And quite frankly, that's fortunate. Not only from the standpoint of those of us in the energy business, but also for the well being of our nation.
The predicaments we have with the economy, climate change and national security all are intertwined. They all relate to how we generate and use energy. We cannot make serious progress on any one of these without finding solutions for the others.
The good news is that we have gained some momentum on solving our energy challenges by harvesting the federal investment made in energy over the past three decades. But solving our energy challenges going forward will require new and sustained investment—€”going far into the future.
We are in new territory. More than ever, it is crucial to feed the energy technology pipeline with innovation. But to transform our energy system will require more than innovative science, we need a new approach to getting new energy technologies into the marketplace faster—€”and at a larger scale. Federal R&D investment has gotten us a long way, but clean energy R&D funding tends to track almost perfectly with the cost of a barrel of oil. When oil prices are at historic highs, we care about energy efficiency and coming up with alternatives to oil. During these times, we have put money into developing new energy technologies. When prices recede, we return to unsustainable energy-wasting ways. We've lost ground on finding alternatives and let progress on new energy technologies slip away out of neglect, lack of interest and reduced financial support.
That's obviously been true for publicly supported R&D but it's also true for private R&D efforts. In the early 1980s, R&D investments of energy companies outpaced the investments of pharmaceutical firms. Today, drug companies' R&D spending is more than 10 times that of energy companies.
Study after study has found significant and broad benefits to society and the economy from federal funding of technology research and development. Investment in innovation pays off in both the short and long term.
Given our current standing with energy issues, climate change, economic recession and national security threats, what is demanded is a national, and in fact, international, research and development effort around clean energy technology—€”on an unprecedented scale. This will require us to radically change our view of energy, from being a least-cost commodity, without concern for the numerous economic, environmental and security challenges, to a high-tech, high-growth industry that helps drive our economy while protecting our environment.
We must accelerate the rate of technology development. But we also must increase the scale of applications and deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies in order to make a substantial impact on the nation's energy security, environmental and economic goals.
At NREL we've recently implemented a new commercialization and deployment approach that will help achieve the acceleration and scale-up required to help change the clean energy landscape. One way we are doing this is by helping to support clean energy companies in the early stages of starting up. We are launching a Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Center that will provide hands-on management coaching and critical services that startups need, such as help raising capital, in order to give these early stage companies the best possible chance for success.
Another shift in commercialization efforts at NREL is a greater set of resources that will be used to reduce market risk in nascent technologies to attract commercial companies that will move these technologies into products. NREL's new operating contractor, the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, has committed $1.75 million over the next five years to facilitate the introduction of a privately funded technology transfer program to increase the resource base for the development of clean energy innovations.
We also believe that engagement with key market leaders provides a critical view of barriers and opportunities for new energy technologies and deployment approaches to increase the speed and scale of adoption of energy innovation.
Through industry advisory panels, we already have begun to glean critical insights into the barriers that affect deployment of renewable and energy efficiency innovations. This input will guide NREL's programs to facilitate deployment at scale. This valuable industry input also will be leveraged to identify issues that can be addressed through multi-party, "precompetitive" Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) that will benefit an entire industry by solving common problems through common funding. This collaboration model adds an additional mechanism beyond single-party CRADAs, which typically focus on solutions that are proprietary to one company, to leverage DOE's funding for clean energy technology commercialization.
The federal energy research program always has benefited from the understanding of decision makers of the crucial link between basic science and economic competitiveness. All this makes federal research vital to address the nation's most vexing energy challenges. At NREL, we're responding to those challenges in a way that provides the most impact in the marketplace and the most benefits to the nation.
At our National Center for Photovoltaics, for example, we can see how R&D on one technology is actually a complex program of interrelated research on a variety of promising materials, processes and component solutions. One major push is to create silicon wafers with better efficiencies. We are developing ink-jet printing methods for silicon electrical contacts and making significant efforts in a variety of PV thin films technologies. We are pursuing high-efficiency concentrating cells. At the same time, NREL supports promising work on dye-sensitized cells and organic PV materials.
Each of these areas of research aims to increase efficiencies and lower costs in partnership with industry, academia and our global partners. As we do so, the most opportune concepts move to commercialization, and we move on to find further improvements. This pattern holds true in all of NREL's research endeavors.
In this fashion, research continues to feed the technology pipeline in the near, mid and long term, providing industry and society with the best options for solving our energy problems. The challenges are great—€”we don't have a moment to waste.
Dan Arvizu is the director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
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