Environment & Climate Change

The Belfer Center’s Energy Technology Innovation Policy group is co-organizing a major workshop with China’s Tsinghua University on “Energy Technology Innovation on the “Backdrop of the U.S./China Emissions Deal.” Belfer Center’s Professors Laura Diaz Anadon, Henry Lee and Venky Narayanamurti are planning the June event with Tsinghua University Professor Su Jun, a former Science, Technology, and Public Policy fellow.

This article reviews the concept of an energy technology innovation system (ETIS). The ETIS is a systemic perspective on innovation comprising all aspects of energy transformations (supply and demand); all stages of the technology development cycle; as well as all the major innovation processes, feedbacks, actors, institutions, and networks.

A group of American and European academics working on understanding the future prospects of energy technologies and the role of governments shaping these prospects gathered at Harvard Kennedy School in April. Hosted by Laura Diaz Anadon, director of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy.... the group discussed the need to incorporate uncertainty around technical change, the challenges of utilizing expert elicitations to inform policy decisions using models, and future collaborative work combining different expert elicitations and different energy-economic models.

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 U.S. government could save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year by 2050 by spending a few billion dollars more a year to spur innovations in energy technology, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The three-year project by the Belfer Center's Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group calls for doubling investment and adopting policy changes in energy technology.

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.

Dramatic growth in nuclear energy would be required for nuclear power to provide a significant part of the carbon-free energy the world is likely to need in the 21st century, or a major part in meeting other energy challenges. This would require increased support from governments, utilities, and publics around the world. Achieving that support is likely to require improved economics and major progress toward resolving issues of nuclear safety, proliferation-resistance, and nuclear waste management. This is likely to require both research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of improved technologies and new policy approaches.

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.