Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Clean energy researchers have recommended more money, a more reliable supply of money, and less oversight over their work to help save the planet.
Clean energy: Experts outline how governments can successfully invest before it’s too late
Date: December 6, 2017
Source: University of Cambridge
Summary:
Researchers distil twenty years of lessons from clean energy funding into six ‘guiding principles’. They argue that governments must eschew constant reinventions and grant scientists greater influence before our ‘window of opportunity’ to avert climate change closes.
Governments need to give technical experts more autonomy and hold their nerve to provide more long-term stability when investing in clean energy, argue researchers in climate change and innovation policy in a new paper published today.
Writing in the journal Nature, the authors from UK and US institutions have set out guidelines for investment based on an analysis of the last twenty years of “what works” in clean energy research and innovation programs.
Their six simple “guiding principles” also include the need to channel innovation into the private sector through formal tech transfer programs, and to think in terms of lasting knowledge creation rather than ‘quick win’ potential when funding new projects.
The authors offer a stark warning to governments and policymakers: learn from and build on experience before time runs out, rather than constantly reinventing aims and processes for the sake of political vanity.
“As the window of opportunity to avert dangerous climate change narrows, we urgently need to take stock of policy initiatives around the world that aim to accelerate new energy technologies and stem greenhouse gas emissions,” said Laura Diaz Anadon, Professor of Climate Change Policy at the University of Cambridge.
“If we don’t build on the lessons from previous policy successes and failures to understand what works and why, we risk wasting time and money in a way that we simply can’t afford,” said Anadon, who authored the new paper with colleagues from the Harvard Kennedy School as well as the University of Minnesota’s Prof Gabriel Chan.
…
The six evidence-based guiding principles for clean energy investment are:
- Give researchers and technical experts more autonomy and influence over funding decisions.
- Build technology transfer into research organisations.
- Focus demonstration projects on learning.
- Incentivise international collaboration.
- Adopt an adaptive learning strategy.
- Keep funding stable and predicable.
…
Read more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171206132223.htm
The referenced nature paper article says more or less the same thing except they used a lot more words.
The science is settled. If we want to save the world from climate change, we need to give clean energy researchers lots of money and not press too hard for results or ask too many questions about how they intend to spend it – especially the international collaboration component of their proposal, which I suspect will require regular expenses paid mass attendance by researchers at important scientific conferences around the world in places like Paris, Rio, Bonn and Cancun.
Eisenhower: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”
Eric ==> I can’t agree with your dismissal of the six guidelines for clean energy research.
We need an energy breakthrough — we need it twenty years ago.
The problems with “clean energy research” cluster around the problem of separating out energy research and the enforced-consensus on global warming. The research area needs serious direction from the Federal Dept of Energy using rigid rules of scientific review. (CSS is NOT an energy production project — it is a Global Warming Consensus Project)
Had funding been maintained for nuclear energy steadily over the last decades, we might not have seen the crazy anti-petroleum movement — most of our energy would be coming from small nuclear plants conveniently located around the country. Now we have to wait while the Chinese perfect the technology and export it to us.
Had funding been thrown at energy storage — and funding supplied for infrastructure — much of our energy storage would be in dual-function pumped water energy storage/fresh water reservoirs. Maybe we’d have a decent battery by now.
The authors of the piece are right — money flow tends to blow this way and that based on public opinion and political expediency — instead of solid scientific goals. And THAT is the problem — CAGW mania is just one of the counter-science forces pushing energy research in silly directions (though there is some overlap with real need).
“We need an energy breakthrough — we need it twenty years ago.”
Fission was demonstrated 75 years ago.
“most of our energy would be coming from small nuclear plants conveniently located around the country.”
We have been doing that since before 1960.
All Light Water Reactors are small. This is important for submarines. This is important when putting a LWR inside a containment building.
Kip is confusing physical size with power output. A 1600 MWe LWR is smaller in size than one than a 5 MWe wind turbine.
“Now we have to wait while the Chinese perfect the technology and export it to us.”
Talk about a solution looking for a problem. There is a market for small power plants in remote areas or islands. Small power plants use a small amounts of fuel.
Duh!
Retired ==> I speak of societal realities, you speak of something else…not sure what.
The landscape is not dotted with nuclear power plants pumping out the power needed by our cities and industries … not in the US and not anywhere. Nuclear still accounts for less than 20% of both US and Global electricity production.
Nuclear could and maybe should …. but there are societal roadblocks that have yet to be overcome.
China is pushing ahead with Generation 3 nuclear power plants located near major cities.
The reality of nuclear power in the world is not the envisioned “near unlimited power” of 75 years ago.
We still need a breakthrough and haven’t seen it yet. Maybe some of the new fusion ideas will come to fruition.
I am unsure what your objection is the the term “small nuclear plants” — submarines and aircraft carriers use small nuclear power plants…satellites use small nuclear power plants…in any case, we still need a major energy breakthrough be it fusion, 80% efficient solar plus storage, something other than just burning stuff.
Kind like paying for a Tesla with BitCoin, amirite?
Green-politicised energy policy has rendered the electricity grids in many European countries fragile and vulnerable to extreme weather outbreaks. The UK following its virtue-signalling coal plant closures is close to running out of natural gas:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/12/fears-uk-gas-prices-could-soar-winter-shock-events-hit-supply/
Seven things have happened causing UK gas prices to climb sharply and for winter supply to sufficiency to be seriously in doubt:
1. Explosion 💥 at the Baumgarten gas facility in Austria where Russian gas enters western Europe.
2. Forties pipeline, largest source of North Sea gas, damaged reducing gas flow for weeks or months
3. Morcambe field gas output halved due to technical problems
4. Gas pipeline between Holland and Britain reduced in flow due to problems with a compressor
5. The Rough subsea gas storage facility off Yorkshire was shut down in the summer due to bureaucratic apathy and ignorance.
6. Norway’s Troll platform reduced gas output significantly due to a power outage
7. Closure of coal power plants in the UK due to green-religious intolerance of sources of energy that are black.
An 8th could be the more than usual uselessness if solar and wind in the winter especially when it is cold.
All these are combining to threaten winter heating for millions of British residents, whose well-being is sacrificed on an alter of CAGW virtue-signalling.
So the UK has become “No country for old men”. One might well pose the question asked by hitman Anton Chigur:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, what use was the rule?”
https://youtu.be/DxZwwP1LgpM
“The landscape is not dotted with nuclear power plants ….”
Why would you dot the landscape when you can get the job done with a few reactors?
“China is pushing ahead with Generation 3 nuclear power plants located near major cities.”
It sounds like Kip does not know what a Gen III reactor is. They are just bigger versions of existing technology. Westinghouse sold reactors around the world including China. France sold their version to China at a time US companies could not sell nuclear technology to China. China made copies.
That is not leadership.
Just for the record, I worked at the French Gen III+ EPR in China and the US version.
“We still need a breakthrough and haven’t seen it yet.”
No! What we have works great. I do object to people with no experience thinking we should invest R&D tax dollars because they like the word ‘small’ instead of ‘big’.