ITIF Welcomes DOE’s New Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations

WASHINGTON—Responding to the U.S. Department of Energy’s announcement that it has established a new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, as required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading think tank for science and technology policy, released the following statement from the director of ITIF’s Center for Clean Energy Innovation, David Hart:

The DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) will fill the most glaring gap in the United States’ clean energy innovation system, conducting large-scale projects that establish whether low-carbon technologies, like clean hydrogen, energy storage, advanced nuclear power, and carbon capture, can meet cost and performance targets that satisfy commercial buyers. When fully staffed, OCED will give the DOE the capacity to manage these projects—which are too risky for the private sector to carry out on its own—far more effectively than in the past.

The United States will not be able to reach ambitious climate targets by relying only on deployment of existing commercially-available technologies. Rather, the nation must continue to invest in innovation to accelerate the development of solutions for challenges that are far from solved.

For more on this issue, please see:

• David M. Hart, “Building Back Cleaner with Industrial Decarbonization Demonstration Projects,” ITIF report, March 8, 2021.
• Robert Rozansky and David M. Hart, “More and Better: Building and Managing a Federal Energy Demonstration Project Portfolio,” ITIF report, May 18, 2020.
• David M. Hart, “Beyond the Technology Pork Barrel? An Assessment of the Obama Administration's Energy Demonstration Projects,” Energy Policy 119:367-376 (2018).