Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Marty Hoffert joined a panel of energy experts from both industry and academia at an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel on energy innovation held in Washington D.C. this week. The panel of experts called for major, direct government investments and targeted public policies designed to spur high-risk, high-reward energy innovation.

Businesses and the private sector are ill-suited to perform the kind of critical, long-term energy research needed to solve national energy challenges, panelists said, calling for targeted public policies and investments designed to drive improvements and lower costs of clean energy technologies.

They also encouraged federal energy R&D initiatives to not overlook some of the more outlandish proposals for new energy and climate technologies, including space-based solar power and geoengineering techniques. With early-stage R&D a low-cost investment, putting money behind these potentially high-payoff technologies has no downside, they say.

Read on for excerpts from Energy and Environment Daily's coverage of the AAAS panel...

ENERGY POLICY: Don't overlook outlandish R&D proposals -- panel 
(Friday, March 6, 2009) by Jenny Mandel, E&E reporter (Subscription required)

Energy researchers need new government mandates for everything from high-risk, high-reward projects like harvesting solar energy in space to fine-tuning engineering processes, an expert panel agreed yesterday.

Representatives from academia and industry speaking at an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel agreed that a combination of financing and policy approaches would be required to find answers to U.S. energy questions.

A key gap, they said, lies in exploring outlandish ideas like capturing solar power in space or finding the elusive solution to making cheap, virtually unlimited power from nuclear fission.

"Some of this is a little crazy, yeah, but sometimes that kind of research produces amazing results," said Martin Hoffert, a professor emeritus of physics at New York University. "Technological evolution is like biological evolution: Most mutations are undesirable, but if you don't have mutations, you don't have evolution."

Stephen Eule, vice president of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and former director of the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program at the Department of Energy, said a program like DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, could be a good forum for such work if given the right structure.

It is crucial that the home for high-risk research work be an independent office, free of earmarking on its funds and other political pressures, and that it does not just represent a reshuffling of money from other DOE programs, Eule said.

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A bill introduced in the Senate this week would allow the agency to manage grants, contracts and other transactions separately from DOE, which could help to ensure some of the independence that researchers want for the agency. The same measure would double DOE research and development funding over four years and make other changes in the department to boost research -- a key priority for Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the Obama administration. ...

Targeted policies

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While agreeing on broad areas for further research, the panelists differed on how far regulatory approaches like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade regime can go in spurring the necessary work.

"'Regulation' tends to be a scary, bad word," said Gallagher, but she said no single carbon regime being discussed on Capitol Hill, like a tax or cap-and-trade system, can bring about the needed change. For example, she said, even a relatively high penalty for emitting carbon would not sufficiently raise gasoline prices to drive innovation toward low-carbon fuels.

Eule contrasted the U.S. focus on innovation with a European tendency toward regulation. But he said regulatory approaches that do not take into account technological readiness -- and thus cost -- can backfire. If the costs become too high because solutions are not available, he said, Congress can always change the rules.

Businesses, the panelists agreed, are ill-suited to performing the kind of long-term research that energy innovation often requires.

Eule said a more consistent tax structure for R&D investments can help industry develop research plans. But Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center at the Electric Power Research Institute, underscored: "Most of these energy companies are businesses, so they have to operate efficiently at the end of the day." That reality leads to safer, if potentially less desirable, [private sector] research investments, he said.

Geoengineering has 'no downside'

Asked whether the U.S. government should fund research on geoengineering, or ways to alter the earth's ecosystems to ward off devastating climate change, the panelists agreed that it should.

Geoengineering is sensitive politically, Eule said, because it is seen as giving up on changing the energy system. But given the relatively low cost of conducting early research projects on it, doing so has no downside.

Such research should be reversible, NYU's Hoffert noted, to avoid causing new harm. But given the way humans have affected the atmosphere already, "the fact is, we are geoengineering the planet," he said. "The question is not whether we should do this, but should we do R&D on it."