New international energy forum focuses on innovation

Author:
Varun Sivaram and Graham Pugh

Last month, energy ministers from around the world gathered in San Francisco for the annual Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), which for the past seven years has focused on deploying existing clean energy technologies around the world. But for the first time, clean energy innovation was on the gathering’s agenda as well. In a parallel “Mission Innovation” Ministerial (MIM), twenty countries and the European Union — accounting for over 80 percent of the world’s public energy research and development (R&D) funding — committed to collectively double R&D funding to $30 billion by 2021.

The new MIM joins a crowded field of international compacts focused on inventing and scaling the next generation of clean energy technologies. But just as the CEM added a valuable forum to the thicket of international efforts to deploy clean energy — by elevating clean energy cooperation to the highest political levels — so too can the MIM raise the profile of innovation. That would improve the world’s chances of forestalling catastrophic climate change, which will require both clean energy deployment, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and innovation, to make deeper emission cuts possible tomorrow.

Clean energy deployment and innovation have not always been able to share the stage. In 2009, the United States convened the CEM and focused its mandate squarely on deployment to signal its willingness to act on climate. At the time, the Obama administration was eager to shed the resentment of international partners (especially in Europe) who faulted U.S. policy inaction to curb its greenhouse gas emissions.

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