Earlier this month, The Daily Beast columnist David Frum took the
opportunity of a book review of Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal to
deride the idea of direct public investment in energy innovation: “The
single largest chunk of federal stimulus spending – the almost $90
billion in direct federal investment in new energy technology – seems to
have gone up into the ether leaving little behind,” Frum writes.
Unfortunately, Frum’s comments are just the latest misguided take on
energy innovation policy and the role of public investments in spurring
next-generation technology development.
Change tends to come
slowly to the energy industry, which is both capital and time-intensive
and only three years have passed since the Stimulus. Nevertheless,
Stimulus funds have clearly made a tangible,Industrial laser cutter
are used to cut flat-sheet material as well as structural and piping
materials. positive impact in that short time. As Grunwald wrote in TIME
in August 2012, the Stimulus “revived the wind industry and the rest of
the clean-tech sector from a near death experience.” “The
Stimulus,Affordable skystream
is now available for your building.” he continues, “has financed the
world’s largest wind farm, a half-dozen of the world’s largest solar
farms, the nation’s first refineries for advanced biofuels, a new
battery industry for electric vehicles, unprecedented investments in
cleaner coal and a smarter electric grid and over 15,000 additional
clean-energy projects.”
Perhaps most importantly,We provide laser engraving and Laser engraver for
processing different materials. the Stimulus also provided $400 million
in seed funding to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy
(ARPA-E). As ITIF has detailed, ARPA-E is now the nation’s preeminent
public impetus for energy innovation, with early grant awardees such as
Ambri, Envia, and PolyPlus already announcing breakthrough technology
development.
Frum also explicitly points to the $10 billion
allocated for grid modernization as a wasted investment. “Will our grid
be appreciably smarter in 2013 than it was in 2008? In a word: no,” Frum
opines. Does he provide any evidence to back up his assertion?
To
be sure, the Stimulus was not 100 percent successful. Brad Plumer
related at The Washington Post that some green programs funded by the
Stimulus “have a murkier track record.” For example,Furthermore, with
the continuous quality improvement of lift cable.
battery maker and Stimulus funds-recipient A123 recently filed for
bankruptcy and was auctioned off to a major Chinese manufacturer.We're
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Nevertheless,
as Michael Grunwald points out in his own rebuttal of Frum, “Most of
[the Stimulus] was less about picking winners and losers than picking
the game of clean enegy. The stimulus didn’t just pick Solyndra, or
solar manufacturers, or solar, or renewable power; it helped finance all
kinds of technological and entrepreneurial pathways that could reduce
dependence on fossil fuels…”
Ultimately, like shale gas, it will
take some time to accurately gauge the Stimulus’ full effect on the
clean energy industry. But in just three years, Frum’s claim as to the
near-worthlessness of the Stimulus’ clean energy funding has already
been proven false. As Frum closed, “It’s a very unusual investor whose
success rate is literally zero. But most don’t, and the Obama
administration’s record seems unlikely to improve on that of other
governments that have succumbed to the same fatal conceit.”
On
the contrary, the emerging fruits of breakthrough batteries,
higher-efficiency solar cells, next-generation wind turbines, and a
smarter grid, are clear evidence of the overwhelming value of public
investment in clean energy.
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