Key Takeaways

Contents

Key Takeaways 1

Introduction. 2

Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Engines of the Energy Transition. 3

From TBED to CEBED: The Regional Moment in U.S. Energy and Climate Innovation Policy 5

Measuring State and Regional Energy Innovation Ecosystems 7

The Index 11

Conclusions and Recommendations 18

Appendix 1: Indicators and Weights 20

Appendix 2: Methodology and Sources 20

Appendix 3: Search Strategies 20

Endnotes 21

Introduction

The United States, along with the rest of the world, has embarked on a transition to clean energy. The transition’s ultimate endpoint is net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to limit the impact of climate change. Energy security, human health, local environmental protection, and economic opportunity also motivate the global community to pursue this important objective. But the path to net zero is strewn with obstacles. Many of the technologies the world needs to stay on it are too expensive, perform too poorly, or are simply unavailable right now. Innovation should therefore be a major focus of any net-zero strategy.[1]

Regional energy innovation ecosystems have great potential to contribute to such strategies. Geographically concentrated networks of technology and service firms, research institutions, and nonprofit and public sector entities could drive price and performance improvements in a diverse array of clean energy sources and uses. This report assesses the potential of energy innovation ecosystems across the United States to contribute to this important mission, drawing on a wide range of data, such as federal and private funding, publications and patents, and state and regional policies and public opinion, covering nine categories of innovation system functions, to compile an index of this potential. Fourteen technology-specific indices, which draw on subsets of the main database, complement the main index and highlight regional diversity.

The index, while inevitably imperfect, provides a baseline against which to measure the future impact of recent federal legislation. Landmark bills passed by Congress in 2021 and 2022 support states and regions that seek to strengthen their energy innovation ecosystems. Quite a few states and regions had already begun to do so before the new federal programs were created, and many more are now responding to these opportunities. The report concludes by offering broad suggestions for sustaining this momentum and improving the odds that the new policies will succeed.

Explore the five accompanying data visualizations for detailed profiles of states, regions, metropolitan statistical areas, combined statistical areas, and metropolitan divisions, respectively:

Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Engines of the Energy Transition

Abundant, affordable, reliable energy is a fundamental requirement of a high standard of living. A small handful of individuals, following Thoreau, may choose a life of voluntary simplicity, but the vast majority of the world’s population seeks the comforts and opportunities that are widely available in high-income countries. While these need not be supplied as wastefully as they are now, especially in the United States, they intrinsically demand substantial energy inputs.

The Industrial Revolution, which brought for the first time a measure of comfort and opportunity to a large proportion of the population in the places it swept through, rested on energy from fossil fuels. That pattern continues today, with these same fuels providing about 80 percent of global primary energy. They remain abundant and reasonably affordable and reliable, but the social costs of burning them have mounted. Most notably, fossil fuel combustion accounts for about 75 percent of the GHG emissions that are driving catastrophic storms, wildfires, and other symptoms of global climate change.[2]

The challenge facing human civilization, then, is to enable all those who desire to live at a high standard to have the quantity and quality of energy they need to do so, while simultaneously and dramatically reducing the harm that would cause. As Gaster, Atkinson, and Righter argue, new and improved energy technologies that emit far fewer GHGs, while matching (or nearly so) the price and performance of the incumbents, lie at the core of any strategy with any chance of surmounting this monumental challenge.[3]

A diverse array of such innovations are needed. Some, such as solar panels and heat pumps, are well advanced, though still capable of significant improvement. Many others, such as green steel and carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal, are early in their development. Many of these new technologies are complex systems themselves, and nearly all must be further integrated with even more complex systems, such as the power grid.[4]

Energy innovation is a subject of discussion in international climate talks and figures into many national policies. Some national governments are making important contributions by funding clean energy research, development, and demonstration, fostering climate-tech venture investments, and the like. But the innovation rubber really hits the energy transition road at the regional level. That’s because innovation, especially innovation in complex systems, accelerates most quickly when dense networks of firms and supporting institutions, clustered in relatively compact geographic areas, pursue it.[5]

The concept of regional innovation ecosystems is an old one, dating back to the 19th century economist Alfred Marshall, who noted “something in the air” in places such as Sheffield, where Britain’s pioneering cutlery makers were concentrated. Modern research has revealed that “something” to have many elements: When working effectively, regional innovation ecosystems foster knowledge exchange, attract specialized labor, facilitate infrastructure investment, and encourage entrepreneurship, among other things. Regions diverge economically in large part because of these ecosystems. Some are home to innovative industries that serve growing markets beyond the regions in which they are located, while others rely on stagnant or shrinking sectors. Silicon Valley and Detroit epitomize these extremes in the public mind.[6]

Digitalization might have been expected to undermine these dynamics, but, as many analysts have noted, “the death of distance has been greatly exaggerated.” Van der Wouden and Youn, for instance, find that while the geographical distance between research collaborators grew substantially between 1975 and 2015, so had the “learning premium” associated with geographical proximity. Those who collaborated locally were far more likely to enter new fields and build their own capabilities than those who collaborated long distance. The effect was especially strong in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines, such as chemistry, materials science, and engineering, which are particularly important in energy innovation.[7]

The systemic nature of energy innovation heightens the importance of collaboration within regions. Innovative low-carbon power, transportation, and industrial systems typically involve diverse components that must be integrated carefully to optimize performance and minimize cost and emissions. These integration processes, in turn, often require learning-by-doing and learning-by-using across organizational and institutional boundaries. Geographic proximity is likely to ease them by facilitating hands-on and face-to-face interactions.[8]

The importance of regional energy innovation ecosystems in the coming decades will be heightened by the vulnerability to disruption of places dependent today on fossil-fuel-based industries. Wyoming’s coal mines, Houston’s petrochemical plants, and Detroit’s auto factories are among those at risk. Hanson, a co-author of 2016’s “The China Shock” paper (a belated recognition of that epochal impact by neoclassical economists) wrote that “the energy transition … is a shock foretold” for such regions.[9]

Whether such “brownfield” regions are willing and able to repurpose their existing assets or build new ones to seize the opportunities presented by the transition will go a long way toward determining their future economic dynamism in a low-carbon world. Wyoming’s effort to position itself as a leader in nuclear power and carbon capture, Houston’s push to become a hydrogen hub, and Detroit’s emerging shift to electric vehicles illustrate these dynamics. Of course, such retooling regions must frequently compete with “greenfield” locations elsewhere, domestically and globally.[10]

That competition has important consequences for the energy transition. If regional innovation ecosystems are able to lower the cost and improve the performance of emissions-reducing technologies, their uptake will expand, feeding ideas and resources back to the regions that make them. This virtuous cycle extending beyond the region will be enhanced and enabled by international agreements and national policies, but ultimately depends on positive feedbacks within the region among laboratories, factories, testbeds, and related facilities, organizations, and institutions.

From TBED to CEBED: The Regional Moment in U.S. Energy and Climate Innovation Policy

Some regional innovation ecosystems specializing in low-carbon technology have emerged relatively spontaneously. Wind energy innovation revitalized Denmark’s central Jutland region, for instance, repurposing older manufacturing assets beginning in the 1970s and later fending off higher-tech competitors elsewhere. Others have been built up more deliberately. The solar power manufacturing cluster in China’s Yangtze River Delta was created in the 2000s in large measure by targeted local, provincial, and national policies.[11]

The deliberate approach to building such ecosystems is likely to dominate going forward, as the need for energy innovation, and the extra-regional export opportunities created by the energy transition, are increasingly evident to policymakers worldwide. China’s success in solar manufacturing is part of a broader strategy to dominate emerging clean technologies. The European Union is pursuing a “smart specialization strategy” with an increasingly green tilt to diversify its regional economies and move them “up the ladder of higher knowledge complexity and value creation.”[12]

Some state and local governments in the United States adopted such strategies in the 2010s. New York has sought to establish its southern tier as a global center for energy storage manufacturing, while Colorado’s Front Range region has become a hub for cleantech start-ups. Until recently, however, the U.S. federal government has not kept pace with its global competitors in this regard.[13]

That changed with the passage of major legislation by the 117th Congress (2021–2022). New programs supported regional innovation ecosystems and technology-based economic development (TBED) across all industries, encouraging many states and regions to propose initiatives focusing on clean energy technologies. Five out of 21 regional coalitions that won the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, funded by the Department of Commerce (DOC) under the 2021 American Rescue Plan, focused on energy innovation. So did 7 of DOC’s 31 regional tech hubs designees and 7 of its 18 regional strategy development grantees, a program authorized by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. (See box 1 for a brief description of this program.) Six of the 10 winners of regional “engine” grants selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (also under CHIPS and Science) are seeking to drive sustainable energy or climate-related innovation as well.[14]

In addition, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act established programs and funding streams specifically to catalyze regional energy innovation. The new DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), for instance, is implementing an $8 billion program to create regional hubs for clean hydrogen production, distribution, and use. OCED has roughly $20 billion more for large-scale demonstration projects in other technology areas, including $6.3 billion for industrial decarbonization. DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has received an additional $3.5 billion to fund direct air capture hubs. More broadly, Congress has explicitly tasked DOE with responsibility for fostering regional competitiveness through clean energy innovation, and given preference to fossil-fuel-dependent communities in many of these programs.[15]

The response to these bills indicates that an increasing number of states and regions in the United States are seeking to enhance their competitive advantages in a world striving for net-zero emissions. (Box 2 briefly describes a regional strategy and box 3 a state strategy.) Their efforts fold into a broader discourse around TBED and “place-based” policies. Best practice in these domains rests on a grounded assessment of existing state and regional assets that allows identification of “adjacent possible” sectors. These are sectors with a realistic potential for future export growth rather than fantastic dreams of building the next Silicon Valley.[16]

This report advances the movement toward Clean Energy Based Economic Development (CEBED) by applying insights from the large corpus of analytical work that underpins TBED. We have compiled a wide range of indicators that measure how well a region’s energy innovation system is functioning today. We hope the findings will inform strategies to build a more prosperous and cleaner future.

Measuring State and Regional Energy Innovation Ecosystems

Energy innovation ecosystems are made up of complex networks of actors, institutions, and resources that contribute to the generation, development, diffusion, and use of innovative energy products and services. To be effective, such systems must perform a broad range of functions, including mobilizing resources, developing and diffusing new scientific and technical knowledge, facilitating experimentation by entrepreneurs, facilitating the formation of supply chains and new markets, legitimizing new technologies in society, guiding the search for new knowledge in certain directions, and guiding its spillover into other related industries.^[22]

Our index is built from the following four subindices that seek to capture distinct groups of these functions:

▪ Knowledge development and diffusion

▪ Entrepreneurial experimentation

▪ Supply chain and market formation

▪ Social legitimation

In this section, we briefly review the categories and indicators included in each of the four subindices. Most indicators are available at the county level and are aggregated to the regional and state levels.

In addition to the main index, our work provides insights into regional technological specializations, which vary greatly across the United States. (See figure 1 for a comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina.) Fourteen technology areas, each of which is covered by an index that draws on a subset of the main database and is constructed in the same fashion, are listed at the end of this section.

A very detailed account of sources and methods can be found in appendix 2.

Subindex: Knowledge Development and Diffusion

Knowledge development and diffusion activities comprise the first subindex. Unless new scientific and technical knowledge is developed and diffused, no new clean energy innovations will emerge, and there will be nothing to scale up. The subindex consists of three categories of indicators.

Category: Research and Development

Mobilization of resources to fund research and development (R&D) activities performed by companies, government laboratories, and academic institutions lies at the base of this subindex. The public sector plays a larger role in energy R&D than in many other sectors, in large part because the transition to clean energy is being driven by the environmental threat of climate change, and markets have not been responsive to it. The category focuses on federal low-carbon energy R&D spending, which far outpaces state and local investments, assessing the ability of states and regions to garner federal awards.

Category: Knowledge

R&D funding contributes to scientific discoveries. The quality of this new knowledge varies considerably. Most discoveries end up having little scientific or commercial value, while highly valued knowledge is ultimately recognized by and diffused through networks of academic and professional peers. We use data on publications as a proxy for new discoveries and data on publication citations to estimate their quality and extent of diffusion.

Category: Invention

R&D funding also to contributes to the development of technical know-how and the generation of new inventions. Like new knowledge, the quality and commercial viability of inventions varies considerably. We use data on patents as a proxy for new inventions and data on patent citations to estimate their quality and extent of diffusion.

Subindex: Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Entrepreneurial experimentation activities comprise the second subindex. These activities largely involve a different set of actors, institutions, and processes than those involved in knowledge development and diffusion, whose aim is to test and demonstrate the commercial viability of new technological innovations in niche markets.

Category: Demonstration

Technology demonstration projects seek to establish the market viability of new clean energy innovations. The public sector plays a larger role in energy demonstration projects than in many other sectors due to the high-risk nature and long development horizons of many emerging energy technologies. We use federal spending data to assess the ability of states and regions to garner federal awards for energy demonstration projects.

Category: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs create new ventures that carry out the high-risk technological, business, and social experiments that must be performed before innovative energy products and services can join the mainstream. These new ventures may receive support from venture capitalists and federal grants and, when successful, scale up by exiting through acquisitions or initial public offerings (IPOs). We use data on federal seed investments, venture capital investments, and successful company exits to assess state and regional contributions to the entrepreneurship function.

Subindex: Supply Chain and Market Formation

Supply chain and market formation activities comprise the third subindex. Successful scale-up of innovations, whether carried out by a new or established business, depends on the availability of inputs at a competitive cost and on a growing array of buyers who find value in deploying these innovations. Some supply chains and markets may lie within the state or region where an innovation is made, although these functions frequently extend beyond these boundaries. Proximity to suppliers and customers can provide valuable feedback as innovations bridge from early adoption to mass markets.

Category: Industry

A central goal of CEBED is to create jobs and steady employment in clean energy industries. We use data on low-carbon energy employment to assess the ability of states and regions to create such jobs and strengthen state and regional supply chains.

Category: Technology Adoption

A long-term CEBED strategy ultimately depends on generating an abundant and reliable supply of low-carbon energy resources to power industrial activities and ensure sustainable economic development. We use data on the supply of low-carbon electricity generation and energy storage resources to assess the ability of states and regions to mobilize resources and facilitate market formation for building clean energy infrastructure.

Subindex: Social Legitimation

Social legitimation activities comprise the fourth subindex. Innovation is an intrinsically social process. Incumbent energy technologies are often buttressed by political, legal, and regulatory mechanisms and embedded in supportive state and regional cultures. The more innovations disrupt legacy systems, the more effort is required for them to break through to widespread adoption.

Category: Public Goals and Strategies

Social legitimation of innovations and CEBED depends on the goals and strategies of policymakers. We use data on published public policy and strategy documents to assess the degree to which states and regions have adopted CEBED strategies.

Category: Social Values

In a democracy, social legitimation and CEBED policies ultimately depend on the values of the general public. We use data on public opinion about clean energy R&D and climate action to assess the extent to which the citizens of states and regions value clean energy innovation and CEBED.

Technological Specialization

A function of energy innovation ecosystems that adds significant depth to the index is guidance on the direction of the search for new technologies, and ultimately, CEBED. The clean energy transition is a deliberate and purposeful attempt to guide the economy away from dependence on unabated fossil fuels and toward a sustainable path of low-carbon energy production and use. Within that overarching framework, energy innovation ecosystems may also be guided toward specific technology areas. The index seeks to capture these technological specializations at the state and regional level. These are measured by subindices covering fourteen technology areas:

1. Advanced energy materials

2. Bioenergy

3. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)

4. Clean energy manufacturing

5. Clean energy transportation

6. Energy efficiency

7. Energy storage

8. Geothermal energy

9. Grid technologies

10.Hydrogen and fuel cells

11.Nuclear energy

12.Solar energy

13.Water energy

14.Wind energy

Limitations

Our measures of state and regional energy innovation ecosystems are imperfect. For instance, private R&D spending is a very important input to these ecosystems, but it is not measured adequately enough to incorporate into the index. Data constraints also limit our visibility into clean energy employment and state and regional clean energy innovation policies in the third and fourth subindices. In the final section of this report, we recommend that federal agencies invest in improved measurement systems so that state and regional economic development strategists can become better informed.

The Index

This section reports illustrative results from the ITIF State and Regional Energy Innovation Index. The weighting scheme used to compile the index is set forth in appendix 1. The full results and the underlying database, which cover all 50 states and the District of Columbia and up to 935 regions (Core-Based Statistical Areas, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget), can be accessed through the ITIF Center for Clean Energy Innovation website. The website allows users to find scores for the overall index, four subindices, and nine functional categories for user-specified states or regions for the years 2016 to 2021. Users can also find the 14 technology-specific versions of these scores and generate charts displaying a location’s functional and technological strengths and weaknesses. The site also features national heat maps of this data.

Table 1 reports the top five and bottom five states in the 2021 Index and their strongest and weakest functional categories and technology areas. States with small populations take the top slots, perhaps because many index categories are scaled by the size of the state population or economy. Nonetheless, the index reveals important strengths and weaknesses. For example, while the Index’s top-ranked state, Vermont, ranks well across most categories, it is especially strong in start-ups (measured by federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, private venture capital investments, and successful company exits). The #2 state, South Dakota, by contrast, does well in technology adoption, thanks to the importance of wind power there, but does relatively poorly in generating and diffusing original research through scientific publications. Neighboring North Dakota, which ranks fifth overall, shows an even sharper contrast, capturing a disproportionate share of federal R&D spending for its size but coming in 48th in the social legitimation subindex due to very low public support for low-carbon energy research and climate action. The technology specializations reveal similar divergences. Hawaii, for instance, ranks last in grid technologies but sixth in solar energy.

Table 1: Top and bottom states and their strengths and weaknesses in the 2021 index

Table 2 reports the top 5 and bottom 5 out of 382 MSAs in the 2021 Index and their strongest and weakest functional categories and technology areas. Like the state index, the regional index reveals important strengths and weaknesses. The top region, which is in central Virginia, for instance, is at the top of the supply chain and market formation subindex, which includes clean energy employment, but only 123rd in the entrepreneurial experimentation subindex. The bottom region, Rome, Georgia, actually matches the top region in the entrepreneurship ranking, but is pulled down by extreme weakness in all the other subindices. Among larger, better-known metro regions, the San Francisco metropolitan region ranks 79th, Chicago 269th, Atlanta 293rd, and New York City 295th out of the 382 MSAs.

Table 2: Top and bottom regions and their strengths and weaknesses in the 2021 Index

Table 3 and table 4 report illustrative results for 5 of the 14 technology areas at the state and regional levels, respectively, for 2021. Vermont’s top ranking in the overall index is reflected in its high ranks in four of these five areas, while Rhode Island, which ranked 34th overall, leads in wind energy technological innovation. Similarly, among MSA regions, Bangor, Maine, ranks 1st in wind energy technological innovation (and 2nd in water technological innovation, which is not shown), but 25th overall and as low as 221st in hydrogen and 230th in nuclear energy.

Table 3: Top ten states across five technology areas in 2021

Table 4: Top ten regions across five technology areas in 2021

Finally, figure 1 and figure 2 compare two states in the middle of the rankings, Massachusetts (ranked 25th) and South Carolina (ranked 26th) to illustrate their functional and technological similarities and differences. Massachusetts outshines South Carolina in entrepreneurship and societal values, while South Carolina displays greater strength in clean energy employment (industry) and technology adoption. Across technological areas, Massachusetts ranks in the top 10 states across most, but in the bottom third in transportation and hydrogen. South Carolina’s top area is nuclear energy, where it ranks 4th, while its worst showing is in energy efficiency, where it ranks 28th.

Figure 1: Functional comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina

Figure 2: Technological comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina

Conclusions and Recommendations

Regional innovation ecosystems have the potential to become vital engines of the global transition to low-carbon energy. The creation and strengthening of agile, geographically proximate learning networks of research institutions, suppliers, and producers, loosely coordinated by public and nonprofit regional organizations, offers a promising pathway to drive price and performance improvements in many specialized domains of clean-tech production and use.

The United States ought to be home to many of these ecosystems. As the world’s largest historic source of emissions, it has an obligation to contribute to climate solutions; as the world’s leader in science, technology, and innovation, it has tremendous potential to do so.

The ITIF State and Regional Energy Innovation Index provides a comprehensive map of that potential. This report summarizes indicators that seek to measure a wide range of energy innovation ecosystem functions including knowledge discovery and dissemination, entrepreneurial experimentation, supply chains and market formation, and social legitimation. These indicators are available at multiple geographical levels, including states and metropolitan regions, and cover 14 technological domains.

Economic development organizations in the United States are increasingly cognizant of the potential benefits of clean energy innovation. Recent federal legislation has amplified that awareness and provided resources to act on it. This index provides a baseline against which to measure the impacts of federal programs growing from that legislation in the coming years.

These prospective impacts would be enhanced by sustaining and improving key features of the new programs. We offer several recommendations to this end.

▪ The federal government should continue to support the development and implementation of innovation-based state and regional development strategies, including those relying on clean energy innovation. The economic development programs created by Congress over the last three years are fundamentally sound and long overdue. The CHIPS and Science Act provides the authority to expand several of them substantially. While fiscal conditions may not allow fully authorized levels to be reached for some time, moderate growth is necessary to sustain the institutional momentum that these programs have created at the state and regional levels. The strong bottom-up interest in clean energy innovation ensures that it will have a robust place in state and local strategies as long as federal resources continue to flow.[32]

▪ Federal programs supporting state and regional economic development strategies should continue to use evaluation criteria that enable clean energy innovation. The new programs generally mandate that federal grants address critical national challenges. The Tech Hubs program, for example, includes “advanced energy” as one of its key technology focus areas that may be tackled by applicants. Both the broad requirement to address national challenges and the specific inclusion of clean energy innovation within it are appropriate. Energy security, reliability, and affordability, and limiting the impact of climate change, are long-term, large-scale challenges to which clean energy innovation, rooted in regional industrial clusters, is an essential response.[33]

▪ Federal agencies should support data collection and related research that enable state and regional economic development strategists to make better-informed decisions about the growth potential and resource and asset requirements of industries drawing on clean energy innovation. A major difficulty in devising economic development strategies is that the industries of the future may not look like industries of the past. The infrastructure, skill requirements, supply chains, and technological foundations will evolve and may even transform. The difficulty is particularly acute for clean energy innovation because unabated fossil fuel combustion is so deeply embedded in the core technologies of many legacy sectors. Electric vehicles are very different from conventional cars, and green steelmaking processes look nothing like blast furnaces. While uncertainty about the future cannot be eliminated, a concerted national research program would help reduce it as well as help align expectations across regions about opportunities and threats posed by the energy transition.[34]

▪ Federal programs should continue to support state and regional capacity-building for clean energy innovation so that bottom-up strategies stand a better chance of success. States and regions vary in their sophistication about economic development and administrative capacity to execute strategies. Congress and federal implementing agencies impose uniform requirements that are challenging for a significant fraction of state and regional applicants to fulfill. For instance, the NSF Regional Engines program requires cross-sectoral partnerships that can translate new research into tangible economic outcomes, which many regions lack. The program recognizes that applicants do not start on a level playing field, and it prioritizes “regions … without well-established innovation ecosystems.”[35] For this approach to succeed, the agency will need to be patient, recognize potential as well as achievement in evaluating proposals, and cultivate that potential in the post-award period by encouraging awardees to build capacity.

▪ Federal programs supporting state and regional economic development strategies should strengthen coordination among themselves to reduce the administrative burdens on applicants to these programs and to ensure the programs are mutually complementary. A common theme in the discourse among participants in state and regional economic development policy is application fatigue. Applications for federal funds are lengthy and complex, and are not uniform across agencies. Congressional mandates bind federal agencies to some degree, but agencies have discretion to make the process easier without sacrificing either its legality or effectiveness. Federal program managers are aware of this challenge and have taken steps to address it. NSF and EDA have entered into a formal memorandum of understanding, for instance. They are collaborating to make their place-based grants with overlapping focus areas and regions of service “stackable” and exploring joint reporting, among other things.[36] DOE’s technology-specific programs seem to be less engaged in these interagency processes.

The U.S. economy’s ability to adapt to changing geopolitical, environmental, social, and technological circumstances has been an enduring strength throughout its history. The nation’s regional economies, individually and collectively, are a key element of this strength. This strength will be tested again by the energy transition and global climate change. Public policy at all levels of governance can and should foster regional clean energy innovation ecosystems to enable the nation to pass this latest test.

Appendix 1: Indicators and Weights

(See the PDF, pages 20–42.)

Appendix 2: Methodology and Sources

(See the PDF, pages 43–59.)

Appendix 3: Search Strategies

(See the PDF, pages 60–68.)

Endnotes