innovation

Enbridge Inc. is emerging as major corporate venturing partners in the Canadian cleantech scene. It has already acquired more than $3 billion in renewable energy assets.[read more]

With discussions about climate change and energy policy reemerging in Washington, it's important to remember that in the passage of the last fiscal cliff deal, Congress extended one of the most influential policies for wind energy.[read more]

As if to retain some form of pride with the acute awareness that not only does China own a majority of our debt, they most certainly will overtake the United States in terms of economies somewhere in the near future. America’s rebuttal: the academic system in China is not producing innovation due to selection based on skills. Sad truth...[read more]

This Friday at noon Eastern Time I'll be participating in a webinar on The Energy Collective covering the application of innovation to the emissions from oil and natural gas. The topic is timely, not just because of the current debate over the fate of the Keystone Pipeline, but because despite the growing importance of renewable energy,...[read more]

Currently, near-term-focused clean energy policies fall well short of spurring the kind of transformative energy technologies we need. To realize drastic carbon emission cuts, we need significantly better clean technologies in energy storage, solar, electric vehicles, critical materials and biofuels that are cheaper than their fossil fuel equivalents without subsidy in addition to the incremental improvements spurred by deployment policies.[read more]

With the latest round of international climate negotiations coming to an anticlimactic close in Durban, South Africa, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's chief advisor Andrew Charlton offers a pragmatic "Plan B" for tackling the challenges of climate change and energy access. Writing for the Canberra Times, Charlton promotes an agenda centered on technological innovation and the expansion of human welfare.[read more]

 Robert Solow, Nobel laureate and father of neoclassical economic growth theory, says that policymakers’ current economic solutions are nothing more than “drivel” and that spurring innovation – especially energy innovation – must be a central goal of public policy moving forward.   As ITIF and the Breakthrough Institute...[read more]

  It’s worth noting a pair of recent developments on the Defense Department energy front. One is a useful reminder of what DOD can achieve now with the proper support, and a cause for optimism; the other, more pessimistic, illustrates the pressing need for accelerated innovation in the alternative fuels industry more broadly...[read more]

The Washington Post ran a piece in its Outlook section this weekend on government investments in energy that is rightly getting significant push back. The question it poses is: “What does Washington have to show for these investments?” The answer, by all accounts, is Plenty. And plenty more would be gained by increased investment in energy innovation.[read more]

A recent report by the California Council on Science and Technology has rekindled the debate (see Andrew Revkin, Joe Romm, Dave Roberts) over technological readiness in clean energy, and whether we should be committing resources to innovation or deployment. I’m going to argue here that this deployment question is...[read more]

The global market for clean energy products grew to $243 billion in 2010, a year in which China and Germany both captured a greater share of this global investment than the United States. That has led many (myself included) to worry about the erosion of US competitiveness in a set of clean energy technology products--from solar and wind...[read more]

In case you hadn’t noticed, the clean energy community in Massachusetts is having a great week. The Bay State is widely recognized as a national clean energy leader and three items this week underscore why that is. While each of these got some news here and there, it’s worth pulling all three together to demonstrate the state’s envious position in clean energy.[read more]

At Energy Innovation 2010, clean energy advocates, policy experts, and public officials moved the clean energy policy debate in a new direction: an innovation strategy is required to develop the transformative technologies we need to address climate change, achieve energy independence and reap potentially vast economic benefits.This...[read more]

Via Sonia Arrison at Volokh Conspiracy:New technologies are almost always adopted by the rich first, but over time they eventually reach everyone, and the historical record shows that the distribution of new technology is speeding up, not slowing down. For instance, it took forty-six years for one-quarter of the population to get...[read more]

Earlier this week I caught up with two old friends with whom I had not spoken in a while. To my surprise, both told me remarkably similar stories about what they had been doing for the past year. The two individuals, who are experts in their respective fields (neither in energy storage), had each been invited to China by different quasi-public entities. Both were invited to submit a business plan for developing a project to profitability and told that if their host liked their plan, it would hire the individual to execute it and give him equity in the project.[read more]