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innovation

Applying Innovation to Oil & Gas

January 23, 2012 by Geoffrey Styles
with 365 views
3

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]

What Role Should the State's Play in Boosting the Clean Economy?

January 12, 2012 by Matthew Stepp
with 260 views
0

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]

Australia Wants "Clean Energy Cheap Rather Than Dirty Energy Expensive"

December 14, 2011 by Alex Trembath
with 232 views
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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]

Let’s Shelve the Small Talk: Boost Energy Innovation to Reduce America’s 3 Deficits

December 9, 2011 by Matthew Stepp
with 286 views
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 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]

DOD Steps Up Innovation in Installation Energy, Recognizes Limits in Biofuels

November 24, 2011 by Matt Hourihan
with 296 views
1

  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]

Government Energy Innovation: Well Worth It

November 21, 2011 by Walter Frick
with 330 views
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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]

The "How" Of Cleantech Deployment Is Key To Its Success

November 11, 2011 by Matt Hourihan
with 337 views
2

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]

A Clean Energy Comeback Strategy

October 27, 2011 by Jesse Jenkins
with 360 views
8

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]

A Big Week in Clean Energy for Massachusetts

October 21, 2011 by Walter Frick
with 240 views
1

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]

Energy Innovation 2011 Coming To DC

October 13, 2011 by Breakthrough Institute
with 206 views
0

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]

Increasing Rates of Technology Adoption

October 11, 2011 by Alex Trembath
with 290 views
4

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]

Innovate or Die

October 7, 2011 by James Greenberger
with 364 views
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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]

Thiel vs. Khosla on Cleantech: Who is Right?

September 15, 2011 by Robert Rapier
with 302 views
4

This past week PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel — who was also an early investor in Facebook — made headlines when he declared that “Cleantech is an increasingly large disaster that people in Silicon Valley aren’t even talking about any more. The failure in energy and transportation points to a larger failure in clean energy — we aren’t moving any faster, literally, than we were when modern airplanes first came out.” [read more]

Romney Endorses Federal Investment in Energy Innovation

September 7, 2011 by Teryn Norris
with 221 views
0

Today, the Romney campaign released his 59-point economic plan in a 160-page book (PDF here). While most of the energy policy section is spent debunking the “green jobs myth” and calling for expanded domestic fossil fuel production, it endorses a significant role for federal investment in alternative energy research and development (R... [read more]

Washington Must Think Globally And Act Regionally

August 19, 2011 by Peter Rothstein
with 384 views
2

If Washington wants to enable the growth of American’s clean energy economy, it must think globally and act regionally. The global energy industry is in the midst of a multi-decade transformation into a collection of clean energy sectors. The US is lagging China and number of overseas competitors in public and private investments as well as the speed of innovation scale-up an adoption. [read more]