A Rapid in Time

Optimizing energy R&D investments

A new Harvard Belfer Center report  makes four recommendations:

(1) The U.S. government should dramatically expand its investment in energy RD&D, focused on a broad portfolio of different energy technologies and stages of innovation.

(2) The U.S. federal government should implement policies that create market incentives to develop and deploy new energy technologies, including policies that have the effect of creating a substantial price on carbon emissions, and sector-specific policies to overcome other market failures.

(3) The U.S. government should take a strategic approach to working with the private sector on energy innovation, expanding incentives for private sector energy innovation, and focusing on the particular strategies likely to work best in each case.

(4) The U.S. government should strengthen its energy innovation institutions, particularly the national laboratories, by giving them clear missions and direction; considerable management authority and flexibility with clear accountability for results; stable funding; a culture willing to invest in high-risk, high-payoff projects; and opportunities to lend their insights to the design of the policies and approaches they are helping to implement, including public-private partnerships.

(5) The U.S. government should undertake a strategic approach to energy RD&D cooperation with other countries, to leverage the knowledge, resources, and opportunities available around the world, incorporating both top-down strategic priorities and investment in new ideas arising from the bottom-up.

Loan guarantees

The whole Solyndra pseudo-scandal is absurd. The DOE loan guarantee program is supposed to facilitate clean energy investments that are too risky for the private sector to undertake alone. It’s supposed to have a high-risk portfolio. DOE’s web site indicates that it’s currently supporting $36 billion of loans, so Solyndra constitutes about 1.5% of the total program. If even 5% of the loans were to fail, that strikes me as an unacceptably low rate of failure for a program intended to support a high-risk portfolio. 

Ozone lesson: do your cost-benefit analysis better!

Today’s New York Times has a front page article on the White House’s decision to reject an EPA proposal to tighten ground-level ozone rules prior to the regularly scheduled 2013 update. The article insinuates that the White House decision was driven primarily by Bill Daley and secondarily by Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) chief Cass Sunstein, and primarily by political concerns. I don’t know what political considerations were involved in the decision-making process, but having looked at the draft regulatory impact analysis EPA undertook, I would venture to say that OIRA would have made the same decision in a political vacuum.

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Goodbye, Steve!

Via Nature News, Steve Koonin, currently DOE’s Undersecretary for Science, will be departing for the Institute for Defense Analysis on November 18. Koonin’s office just recently finished DOE’s first Quadrennial Technology Review.

Koonin’s departure leaves DOE with vacancies in both of the main Undersecretary positions, the Undersecretary for Energy and the Undersecretary for Science. (The actual roles of the two Undersecretaries is complicated, but to first order the Undersecretary for Energy oversees the applied programs, and the Undersecretary for Science serves as the agency’s chief research officer and oversees the director of the Office of Science.)

The last permanent Undersecretary for Energy was Kristina Johnson, who departed in November 2010. Johnson was succeeded as acting Undersecretary by Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Cathy Zoi, who departed in March for a VC firm. Zoi was succeeded by the current acting U/S, Arun Majumdar, the Director of ARPA-E. I believe U.S. law limits acting officers to 210 days, which should me Majumdar will be hitting his time limit soon. Perhaps there’s some exemption from the relevant time limit.

DOE does have a third Undersecretary, the director of the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA), Tom D’Agostino — but NNSA is essentially a separate world from the energy deployment/demonstration/research part of DOE. (That portion, by the way, is a minority of DOE’s total budget, even though it’s what most people associate with DOE.)