Science, Technology, and Public Policy

John P. Holdren won the 2018 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize. He delivered the annual Moynihan Lecture on May 17, 2018, at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C.

"The Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Laboratories are a core engine of the U.S. national innovation system but one in urgent need of a tune-up if the United States is to meet the pressing challenges of energy security and climate change mitigation. The next administration and Congress must modernize the policy framework shaping the National Labs to allow them to more effectively drive the innovation necessary to meet energy policy priorities."

The United States and the world need a revolution in energy technology—a revolution that would improve the performance of our energy systems to face the challenges ahead. In an intensely competitive and interdependent global landscape, and in the face of large climate risks from ongoing U.S. reliance on a fossil-fuel based energy system, it is important to maintain and expand long-term investments in the energy future of the U.S. even at a time of budget stringency. It is equally necessary to think about how to improve the efficiency of those investments, through strengthening U.S. energy innovation institutions, providing expanded incentives for private-sector innovation, and seizing opportunities where international cooperation can accelerate innovation. The private sector role is key: in the United States the vast majority of the energy system is owned by private enterprises, whose innovation and technology deployment decisions drive much of the country's overall energy systems.

The report, Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation, released on Nov. 22, 2011,is the result of a three-year energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) project of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy (ETIP) research group at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The ERD3 project was funded by a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to produce and promote a comprehensive set of recommendations to help the U.S. administration accelerate the development and deployment of low-carbon energy technologies.

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

"The focus of the workshop was on the demonstration stage of the technology innovation cycle. Current policies do not adequately address the private sector’s inability to overcome the demonstration "valley of death" for new energy technologies. Investors and financiers fear that the technology and operational risks at this stage of the cycle remain too high to justify the level of investment to build a commercial-sized facility."

"There is broad political consensus that the current energy system in the United States is unable to meet the nation's future energy needs, from the security, environment, and economic perspectives. New energy technologies are required to increase the availability of domestic energy supplies, to reduce the negative environmental impacts of our energy system, to improve the reliability of current energy infrastructure (e.g., smart grid, energy storage), and to increase energy efficiency throughout the economy."

"Since last year, American Electric Power Mountaineer has employed CCS on a smaller scale of about 30 megawatts and, as such, is a unique example of CCS technology working today. As CCS scales up from this small size, the risks of capture and transport are negligible, making larger plants possible. Because renewables, for various reasons, cannot be implemented at the large scale sufficient to meet the 80 percent emissions reduction goals, we must deploy CCS for larger-scale commercialization. As a crucial means of decarbonizing some industrial processes, CCS will reduce emissions across industries, allowing chemical producers, for example, to meet their targets."

This policy brief is based on Belfer Center paper #2010-02 and an article published in Energy Policy, Vol. 38, No. 3.

Oil security and the threat of climate disruption have focused attention on the transportation sector, which consumes 70% of the oil used in the United States.
This study explores several policy scenarios for reducing oil imports and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

Melissa Chan and Laura Diaz Anadon of the Energy Research, Development, Demonstration & Deployment (ERD3) Policy Project presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).