There are two historical analogies for big US government spending on energy R&D floating around this month. One is the Carter administration analogy: a new Democratic administration spends on renewables as a way to tackle the energy prices and security following an oil price shock. It is comprehensively explored in this month’s issue of The Atlantic and debated in the National Journal’s weekly energy series.
The other, amid calls for an ‘Apollo programme of energy’, is the anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. There are a few days to go until the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, but Geoffrey Styles decided to commemorate the anniversary of the launch date – July 16 – instead.
When President Kennedy made his speech to Congress in 1961 setting the goal of landing on the moon within the decade, the technology to deliver that outcome did not exist. The first American manned space flight by Alan Shepard had taken place just three weeks earlier, and the first unmanned Saturn V moon rocket wouldn’t be flight-tested for another six years. The financial cost of the moon landing program was so high–roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars–because so much of it had to be designed and built from scratch, from the vehicles to the entire infrastructure to assemble, launch, monitor and control them.
It was an impressive commitment. The US government is putting up some hefty money for energy research now (in fact Apollo’s $150bn is not far off the $167bn given to the Department of Energy for clean energy loan grants and loan guarantees), but is it enough to get those technological breakthroughs needed to reduce carbon emissions at a cost worth bearing? And will it take one or two epic breakthroughs, or a more diffuse and gradual improvements in technology?
The answer to the last question, it seems, is both.
US energy secretary Steven Chu highlighted in March the need for R&D that was ‘game-changing as opposed to merely incremental’ and Nicholas Stern called for investment in technology breakthroughs in a report he led earlier this year. But both also said spending needed to be allocated to existing technologies, particularly in energy efficiency – for which many technologies already exist. They are just a little less sexy.
Related links:
Energy R&D, charted (FT Energy Source, 07/07/09)
Energy R&D: public funding vs the markets (FT Energy Source, 05/05/09)
