Unlocking Energy Innovation ─ How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System

Energy innovation offers us our best chance to solve the three urgent andinterrelated problems of climate change, worldwide insecurity over energy supplies, and rapidlygrowing energy demand. But if we are to achieve a timely transition to reliable, low-cost,low-carbon energy, the U.S. energy innovation system must be radically overhauled. Unlocking EnergyInnovation outlines an up-to-the-minute plan for remaking America's energy innovation system bytapping the country's entrepreneurial strengths and regional diversity in both the public andprivate spheres. The authors map three waves of energy innovation to show how we can speed up theintroduction of new technologies and business models and accelerate their deployment on a massivescale. "Business as usual" will not fill the energy innovation gap. Nor will wishfulthinking--common enough today, with politicians and others talking up some technologies, talkingdown others, and claiming that if we price it, or if we mandate it, or if we simply say it often andinspiringly enough, the innovations will flow. Only the kind of systemic, transformative changes toour energy innovation system described in this provocative book will help us avert the most direscenarios and achieve a sustainable and secure energy future.

Richard K. Lester is Japan Steel Industry Professor and Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and Founding Director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center. He is the author or coauthor of The Productive Edge, Innovation--The Missing Dimension, Made in America, Making Technology Work, and other books. David M. Hart is Professor in the School of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy at George Mason University. He is the author of Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921--1953. He is Assistant Director for Innovation Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President.