Who will lead tomorrow’s energy innovation? Looking at the last 20 years of data of public investments in energy research, development, and demonstration provides interesting trends:
- As a percent of GDP, the same countries have consistently ranked at the top of the list – Japan, France, Canada, and the US.
- Strong commitments in public investment from the UK and Korea over the last 20 years may shift that dynamic.
- Removing the normalizing effect of GDP, we see the US has contributed nearly 40% of all total investment among the peer group, with Japan and France making standout contributions.
While this does not focus on critically important private investment, its arguable that public investment is a proxy for early stage innovation particularly when considering many of today’s innovations were discovered in publicly funded labs a decade or more ago. Yet most of the technologies needed for the energy transition are available today, which may result in greater private funding contributions or a focus on government demonstration investments.
Credit to the The Fletcher School at Tufts University for developing a deep and publicly available data source that was drawn from for this analysis.
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