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On 21–23 September, Mission Innovation and the Clean Energy Ministerial will undertake joint ministerial meetings in Pittsburgh, USA for the Global Clean Energy Action Forum. This Focus issue offers reflections on critical areas of RD&D and innovation policy for Forum delegates. Particular attention is paid to how Mission Innovation could further develop to meet the aims of its recently launched second phase.
At this September’s Global Clean Energy Action Forum, delegates should consider ways to expand innovation goals while protecting collaborations amid a changed energy landscape.
In September, ministers will gather in Pittsburgh to consider how their governments should respond to the energy and climate innovation imperative. Building on Glasgow, the meeting should strive to fill critical gaps in areas such as capital-intensive demonstration projects and innovation-friendly trade in carbon-intensive goods.
In its next phase, Mission Innovation plans to further develop multinational collaborations that include a variety of entities. This may require new governance structures to shield the new collaborations from increasingly protectionist domestic politics while incorporating renewed concerns about climate change and energy security.
Mission Innovation seeks to accelerate deployment of clean energy and make it affordable, attractive and accessible to all. Fully succeeding in these aims will require greater attention to the needs and context of developing countries, concerted focus on capacity building, and increased emphasis on energy access and justice.
Ahead of the Global Clean Energy Action Forum, a joint convening of the 13th Clean Energy Ministerial and 7th Mission Innovation Ministerial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this September, Nature Energy spoke with three members of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee — Drew Leyburne, MI Steering Committee Chair and Assistant Deputy Minister, Energy Efficiency and Technology Sector, Natural Resources Canada; Julie Cerqueira, incoming MI Steering Committee Chair and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of International Affairs, US Department of Energy; Rosalinde van der Vlies, Vice-Chair of the MI Steering Committee and Director, Clean Planet Directorate in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation for the European Commission — to hear their thoughts about the next phase of clean energy technology development.
Public funding and institutions for energy innovation are critical to achieving climate goals, but our understanding of their evolution, variation and drivers is limited. Meckling et al. compile funding and institutional data across major economies and examine how they changed after the financial crisis, Mission Innovation and expanded competition with China.
Critics have opposed clean energy public investment by claiming that governments must not pick winners, green subsidies enable rent-seeking behaviour, and failed companies means failed policy. These arguments are problematic and should not determine the direction of energy investment policies.
Stopping climate change requires revolutionary transformations in industry and agriculture. Ahead of several major climate meetings this year, policymakers struggling to measure progress on climate change should focus less on global emissions, which will be slow to change, and more on technological advances in pioneering niches.
The Paris Agreement’s Mission Innovation initiative to accelerate government spending on clean energy research is currently succeeding in its quest to support carbon mitigation. It should be renewed for an additional five years, with increased ambition, and changed to better integrate the private sector.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy aims to fund high-risk high-reward clean energy technology in the United States, but evaluating its impact is difficult. Goldstein et al. compare startups that won Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy funding to other cleantech startups, and find that Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy awardees tend to gain more patents but that more is needed to help them overcome the valley of death.
Evaluating the impact of renewable energy innovation research funding is important to design more productive research and development programmes. Pless et al. discuss the key challenges in effective evaluation of research funding outcomes and identify solutions.
The US National Labs will continue to play a crucial role in developing energy science and technology, yet their operation is not without its problems. Anadon et al. discuss the challenges faced by the Labs and propose changes that can help them to better meet their goals.