The Power of Change Innovation for Development and Deployment of Increasingly Clean Electric Power Technologies (2016) / Chapter Skim
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Intense interest in low- and nonpolluting electric power generation technologies started in earnest during the oil embargoes of the 1970s. The desire to mitigate climate change impacts has both revived and intensified that interest.
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Also in accordance with its statement of task, the committee deliberated on what policies, legislation, or other actions -- current and plausible -- would best encourage adoption of increasingly clean power technologies, taking into account market conditions, likelihood of impact, and at what cost. During the course of the study, the committee concluded that a binary categorization of technologies as "clean" or "dirty" may be counterproductive given that producers are compelled to use the most abundant and affordable primary energy resources they can readily access and use for power generation.
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In most locations within the United States, prices for increasingly clean power technologies are higher than those for less clean, incumbent technologies. While costs have declined over the past several years for some increasingly clean technologies -- notably solar photovoltaics -- natural gas supplies have opened up, causing dramatic decreases in natural gas prices.
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While the challenge may be great, it also creates an opportunity for the United States to continue to lead in the pursuit of increasingly clean, more efficient electricity generation through innovation in advanced technologies. Recommendation 2-2: Congress should consider an appro priate price on pollution from power production to level the playing field; create consistent market pull; and ex pand research, development, and commercialization of in creasingly clean energy resources and technologies.
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Finding 3-1: Market failures and nonmarket barriers for increasingly clean power technologies exist at all stages of the innovation process. Finding 3-5: Regional efforts that leverage regional energy markets and initiatives by states, universities, entrepreneurs, industry, and others can complement federal actions to help bridge funding and commercialization gaps.
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program has a tremendous opportunity to help overcome these funding barriers to demonstration, early-adoption, and scale-up activities. For example, allocating up to 20 percent of current SBIC funding to create new venture capital funds focused on early-stage increasingly clean power technologies could stimulate significant levels of private investment.
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In addition to being essential to limit costs, downselecting at each stage would provide opportunities to identify at earlier stages of the innovation process technologies that are unlikely to succeed commercially (in their current form)
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Beyond DOE, the rest of the federal government is positioned to lead by example through direct efforts to promote energy efficiency. The federal government owns or operates more building space than any other entity in the world, and the administration has issued an executive order requiring the head of each federal agency to promote building energy conservation, efficiency, and management.
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A third obstacle that uniquely deters nuclear innovation in the United States is the continued lack of progress in resolving the spent fuel management issue. The absence of a national policy and plan for interim storage and final disposal of spent fuel is a major impediment to private investment in the development of advanced nuclear power plant technologies.
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of electricity sold in retail markets could yield billions of dollars for RD&D of a range of increasingly clean energy technologies with minimal impact on the electricity bills of residential ratepayers. 4 Finding 5-6: The risks involved in transporting and storing CO2 and the lack of a regulatory regime are key barriers to developing and deploying technically viable and commercially competitive CCS technologies for the power sector at scale.
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Still, in regions with the most cost-effective renewable resources and market development efforts, competitive proposals for wind, solar, and other resources, including natural gas, may produce more efficient results. Pricing pollution, such as GHGs, would produce less costly reductions in GHG emissions and provide better incentives for innovation.
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Electric Power System Developing and deploying cost-effective increasingly clean energy technologies will require an electric power sector with systems, regulation, and infrastructure that encourage and accommodate those technologies. Developing such a power sector will, in turn, require technological changes to the power system so that it is capable of integrating these new technologies and in greater quantities.
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For example, DOE could provide additional resources and training, and perhaps serve as both a coordinator and repository for best practices and lessons learned, as states undertake regulatory reforms. Moreover, the electric power industry typically budgets very small amounts for innovation compared with other technological industries.
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Financing Energy Technologies Finally, with respect to government support for innovation in energy technologies and technological shifts, history suggests that such supports as direct subsidies and tax exemptions tend to continue well after technologies have matured and are market-competitive. While subsidies can serve important public policy functions in helping to establish industries, they work best when they are predictable and structured to be performance- or outcome-oriented without regard to specific technologies, and to include sunset provisions so they expire either after a specified length of time or once a certain performance has been achieved, as is the case with the recently renewed production tax credits for power from wind and solar.
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