The Killing of U.S. Alternative Energy R&D.

• Author: Renner, Michael
• Position: Brief Article

In U.S. government funding for energy research and development (R&D), serious investment in renewables has been all but abandoned. R&D funding for renewables has declined by 87 percent, from more than $2 billion in 1980 to just a quarter billion a decade later. After Ronald Reagan left office, some of the investment was restored. But now, the Bush-Cheney team is proposing a further 27 percent retrenchment in its budget request for fiscal year 2002--the second-lowest budget in more than 20 years. Wind power R&D is slated to take a 49 percent hit, and solar a 44 percent cut.

This comes at a time when wind and solar energy face otherwise increasingly bright prospects. Wind electricity-generating capacity has grown 10-fold during the 1990s, to about 18,100 megawatts worldwide in 2000, and wind turbines are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil-fuel power plants. The market for solar photovoltaic cells is soaring, too, with PV production having increased 10-fold since 1987. Both energy sources are still small players in the overall energy mix, but they are essential to any policy concerned with reducing carbon emissions.

With such meager and unsteady government R&D support over the years, the United States no longer provides the kind of leadership in developing wind and solar technologies that might be expected of the world's most energy-consuming country. Today, European companies control about 90 percent of worldwide wind turbine sales. In solar PVs, Japanese companies are now the leaders, poised to extend their lead in coming years, and the United States may soon be overtaken by Europe in this sector as well.

U.S. funding for efficiency R&D has been a hit less anemic than that for renewables, though it is still only a pittance of what is allocated for subsidizing programs like coal gasification or offshore oil drilling. After being slashed in half during the...