Clean Energy Innovation

ITIF’s spring seminar course explores core emerging technologies and issues that are reshaping our world and, in the process, creating public policy challenges and opportunities. The course is open to congressional and federal staff only.

Clean energy only scales when it matches fossil fuels on price and performance—but Biden-era policy bet big on tech that never will.

Watch now for expert panel discussion exploring how the United States can take advantage of opportunities to develop cleaner industries that are more globally competitive.

Even if it were possible to radically slash U.S. emissions with today’s technologies, it still would do little to curb global warming because the United States accounts for just 13.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. It’s time to recognize that the climate crisis can only be solved with innovation.

Solar and wind are rapidly replacing coal, and many expect it will simply replace natural gas as well. But that’s a mistake: In fact, solar and wind for decades to come will depend on gas to fill variability gaps when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.

According to a recent paper, between $84 billion and $188 billion could be saved in public health expenditures between 2022 and 2050 by prohibiting the sale of new combustion-powered vehicles. However, these impacts can only be fully realized if electricity is powered by low-emitting sources, such as renewable energy, hydrogen, and nuclear power.

This bipartisan bill is a welcome effort to use government policy not to force change, but to enable change, through the widespread development of the clean energy technologies we need to drive costs down to meet the price and the performance levels of dirty energy.

Researchers find that in the long term, hurricanes positively impact green innovations in small island developing nations.

Wind and solar power will replace consistently dispatchable electricity from fossil fuels with variable and more unpredictable clean energy. Seasonal shifts and annual variations cannot be handled with batteries or other proposed storage solutions like hydrogen. Natural gas will have to bridge the gap for many decades.

An estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute approximates that the demand of electricity by data centers will increase from 4 percent to 9 percent of total electricity in the United States by 2030.