David M. Hart

If the United States is to win its fair share of highly competitive global markets for clean-energy goods, the public, private, and academic sectors must work together effectively, David Hart writes for Energy Collective.

The Trump administration is proposing to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for passenger vehicles on the theory that weaker regulation will help domestic carmakers. But, as David Hart writes for the Detroit Free Press, it would instead lock the United States into a dirtier, increasingly out-of-touch status quo.

As David Hart writes for Morning Consult, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, has an opportunity to pursue the agency’s objectives in a more sophisticated way: using regulation to stimulate technological innovation.

There’s no magic bullet to ensure firms will respond to environmental regulation by innovating. But a literature review shows certain conditions that will raise that likelihood, pointing the way to some important rules of thumb for policymakers.

As David Hart and Stephen Ezell writes for Crain’s Cleveland Business, bringing the Energy Department’s voucher program to all national labs could help small businesses across the country.

Accelerating energy innovation by manufacturers in America would boost economic growth and global competitiveness, while addressing key national security and environmental goals. But market failures lead to gaps in the private sector’s response to this imperative. That’s where the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing USA innovation institutes come in.

Today’s grid-scale battery market is dominated by a single family of technologies. But as ITIF’s David Hart and MIT’s William Bonvillian write for The Hill, long term clean energy innovation will require a diverse array of alternative energy storage technologies.

Congress should continue on the path toward doubling federal energy RD&D funding, which would fulfill a commitment the United States made along with 19 other countries to accelerate the global transition to cleaner, more affordable, more reliable energy.

As Congress considers the next budget, ITIF’s David Hart and Colin Cunliff write for Utility Dive that it should reject cuts to spending on energy research, development and demonstration.

Governor Cuomo's battery plan is pointed in the right direction. But as David Hart writes for the Syracuse Post-Standard, it won't get near the finish line without help from Washington to constrain China.

Most private investors don’t have the deep pockets and patience to wait for clean, cheap energy technologies to mature. We need smart public policy to solve the problem.

DOE invests about $14 billion per year in its 17 national research laboratories. That is a lot of money, and it supports many brilliant minds, but too often the ideas these investments lead to, and the skills that they nurture, are trapped inside the fence line of the labs.