Following up on her testimony before Congress yesterday, MIT President Susan Hockfield writes in the Washington Post today that the U.S. needs a Manhattan Project-scale investment in renewable energy R&D.
Drawing on the metaphor of Vannevar Bush's pact between government and science, Hockfield describes that part of the problem is the absence of serious R&D investment from the major energy companies, despite what they might tell us in TV advertisements:
Today, the United States is tangled in a triple knot: a shaky economy, battered by volatile energy prices; world politics weighed down by issues of energy consumption and security; and mounting evidence of global climate change.
Building on the wisdom of Vannevar Bush, I believe we can address all three problems at once with dramatic new federal investment in energy research and development. If one advance could transform America's prospects, it would be ready access, at scale, to a range of affordable, renewable, low-carbon energy technologies -- from large-scale solar and wind energy to safe nuclear power. Only one path will lead to such transformative technologies: research. Yet federal funding for energy research has dwindled to irrelevance. In 1980, 10 percent of federal research dollars went to energy. Today, the share is 2 percent.
Research investment by U.S. energy companies has mirrored this drop. In 2004, it stood at $1.2 billion in today's dollars. This might suit a cost-efficient, technologically mature, fossil-fuel-based energy sector, but it is insufficient for any industry that depends on innovation. Pharmaceutical companies invest 18 percent of revenue in R&D. Semiconductor firms invest 16 percent. Energy companies invest less than one-quarter of 1 percent. With this pattern of investment, we cannot expect an energy technology revolution.
While industry must support technology development, only government can prime the research pump. Congress must lead.
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It seems to me that the government's roll should be to directly encourage and support all efforts to reducing the very use of hydrocarbons as an energy source, particularly those powering the nations auto fleet. That would only be a first step however, and by shifting the huge financial backing reserved for an oil industry, that literally has no future, to renewables, the process of transforming the industry can begin. The government once aided the auto industry by paving an intricate and expensive system of roads, bridges and tunnels that allowed the people, in their new cars, to actually go somewhere, and at the same time aiding the nation in becoming a great world power. At the very least, if some form of competition can be allowed a fighting chance to challenge oil's hegemony, the price at the gas pump can be expected to stabilize, if not lowered.
This is simply a bad idea. First, government R&D works best when the research is so basic there is no immediately forseeable application, a very specific goal needs to be accomplished even at considerable expense (Manhattan Project, space program, etc), or a standard needs to be developed (development of TCP/IP). Cost effective development of marketable products simply isn't something that the goverment does effeciently.
Second, the author fails to consider that for the forseeable future, absent a highly restrictive C-tax or cap and trade program, fossil fuels will remain the cheapest source of energy in most situations. It's simply a matter of physics and chemistry that it's easy to produce energy by the oxidation of hydrocarbons. There isn't more R&D because the probability of improving current alternative energy technology suffciently that it can compete with combustion of fossil fuels at current prices is vanishingly small. Alternative technologies simply don't have that much room to improve - when the transition occurs it will be because fossil fuels became expensive, not because alternative energy became cheap. Despite their commercials, innovation in energy production isn't going to come from the fossil fuel industry - their areas of technical expertise (geology, fluid mechanics, separation processes, hydrocarbon processing) are mostly irrelevant to alternative energy technologies; they're far more likely to end up as chemical producers specializing in hydrocarbon products than continuing to be major players in a post-fossil fuel energy industry.
I hope MattXIV is incorrect that this is SIMPLY a bad idea, because I hope to have energy in my future even though fossil fuels will inevitably increase in price. But I agree that--maybe except for some breakthrough in nuclear fusion--a Manhattan Project is likely to help much very quickly. What makes more sense to me is for the government to get back in the business of building infrastructure. We need more efficient buildings, electric powered mass transit--and it would help a lot if the gov sponsored large purchases of solar and wind power, so the price of manufacture would come down.
Matt makes some good points, although I don't agree with some points. He is right that the innovation will not come from the fossil fuel dinosaur corporations.
But he is wrong that more innovation isn't possible in the realm of alternate energy sources. I think a lot of innovation is possible, and a lot can be done without much innovation because the technologies already exist. We know how to cheaply separate the hydrogen out of water, and in fact kits for this kind of conversion are selling already around the country.
We know the electric car works. GM proved it, making fully marketable products that customers were extremely happy with. Then due to political pressure, they destroyed their whole fleet of them I believe GM would now be the world's #1 auto company and would have forced a revolution from the oil industry and the automakers because the electric car would out-compete them. That would have actually been the free market working its magic. But the free market doesn't exist in America; tightly controlled markets dominated by just enough corporations to prevent monopolization litigation (along with the megabucks to fight any lawsuits) is what we have instead.
Also, I don't like the Manhattan project analogy for a number of reasons. First is morality. The purpose of the Mahattan project was to create a weapon capable of damaging the planet and killing other humans on a nearly unimaginable scale. That cannot be the purpose of the type of technological revolution we need now. The purpose instead has to be to enable the planet to thrive in a way we have have never been able to before. The technology we need now cannot be driven by the desire to destroy as much as possible as fast as possible.
Second is we have managed to turn America into a science-hating country. We have managed to elect and empower quite a number of politicians and lobbyists whose express desire is simply to crush science altogether. The way they intend to do it is by cutting off funding for it. We are seriously close to electing a President and VP who would continue an openly hostile approach to funding science. This is after eight years of one such president already.
This isn't funny. The bloggers here know exactly how serious this is, and what devastating impact it is having on our society as a whole.
So the government won't fund a Manhattan scale energy project because it hates science. Sorry to have to say it straight out like that, but that's how it is. I make no apology for just saying so. Because it is so. And we are the ones that have to change it.
No, we need a revolution in how we think. I see encouraging pockets of understanding here and there, but overall, we aren't making the evolutionary transition that our environment is demanding of us.
This isn't partisan, or left-right. I see pockets of conservatives who understand this, and I see liberals who miss the point. It's about survival. Only this time, it isn't about killing in order to survive. Now our survival depends on being able to see how we fit into the web of life and strengthening that web.
We are so conditioned into connecting survival with killing, that we may not be able to survive when the challenge is to enhance the life of others in order to ensure our own well-being.
But I think we just don't get it. I think we will simply kill-and-drill our way into oblivion. And point fingers of blame at each other when situation is unfixable.
Please prove me wrong. I truly want to be absolutely wrong on this one.
It seems to me that the government's roll should be to directly encourage and support all efforts to reducing the very use of hydrocarbons as an energy source, particularly those powering the nations auto fleet. That would only be a first step however, and by shifting the huge financial backing reserved for an oil industry, that literally has no future, to renewables, the process of transforming the industry can begin. The government once aided the auto industry by paving an intricate and expensive system of roads, bridges and tunnels that allowed the people, in their new cars, to actually go somewhere, and at the same time aiding the nation in becoming a great world power. At the very least, if some form of competition can be allowed a fighting chance to challenge oil's hegemony, the price at the gas pump can be expected to stabilize, if not lowered.
Well, the idea that government sucks at research is a just the popular mantra some people have. There's not real evidence to support that assertion, but they say it anyway because it sounds good. Most of the time government can't get anything done, it's because there's someone deliberately interfering with it to make it private.
The Manhattan Project itself was way more than basic science. There has to be political will and a desperation to so something, combined with the smartest minds grouped in one place, but it would work.
However, we already have a perfectly good source of alternative, clean energy course in the form of nuclear power. Not being frequent on this blog, I'm not sure if this has ever been discussed at all, but nuclear power is one of the best examples of bad science framing.
Some of you've misunderstood my position, which is that throwing a bunch of extra R&D money after improvements in alternative energy is a bad idea since the improvements in efficiency will be relatively small. I'm talking about energy production, so electric cars, hydrogen, etc aren't particularly relevant, since distribution technologies affect alternative and fossil fuel sources similarly. The technologies involved have reached the mature phase of the development, where the rate of efficiency improvement will be small. See the example of solar pannel efficiency here. Wind power relies on mature technologies - we're not going to revolutionize the way we make turbines. Fission is mature and fusion seems to be improving only in small increments. Suddenly throwing large sums of money in R&D is often a bad idea since there is only a fininte number of lines of research to investigate for a technology at a time, so returns on additional spending diminish very sharply after a certain point. Because it builds upon itself, research can't be rushed beyond a relatively modest degree via additional funding.
As for gov't vs industry R&D, it matters which kind of R&D is being done since the different institutional structures and experience bases handle different tasks better. Small incremental improvments in efficiency and production cost for large scale production are best left to industry since they have experience with it and the organization structure provides strong rewards for them. The benefits of basic R&D are hard to predict or quantify, industry doesn't have strong incentives to invest in it. The current alternative energy technology situation matches the first scenario fairly well, so industry R&D will handle it best.
My recommendation is that we adopt a policy that attaches an appropriate cost to carbon emissions, remove subsidies that distort the energy market (this is important not just in the case of fossil fuels, but in the case of the various alternative technologies as well since we want to replace our infrastructure with the best technology, not the one that manages to wrangle the most subsidies), and limit spending to balance the budget, since high interest rates caused by increasing the debt will make replacing existing infrastructure more costly, delaying adoption of new technologies as well as limiting economic growth overall.