Energy innovation
Energy innovation refers to the development and implementation of new technologies and methods aimed at addressing the growing demand for energy while ensuring environmental protection. This process is not linear, as historical innovation has often involved complex interactions among various stakeholders, including manufacturers, consumers, and governments. Energy innovations can be categorized into three modes: incremental improvements to existing technologies, disruptive innovations that change production methods, and radical innovations that transform fundamental energy systems.
The shift toward cleaner energy solutions is increasingly essential in the context of climate change, with a focus on renewable resources like solar and wind power. Governments are encouraging this transition through funding, prizes, and regulatory measures to support the research and commercialization of sustainable energy technologies. However, the adoption of these innovations also involves social dynamics, as consumer behavior and expectations significantly influence energy usage patterns.
Understanding these interconnected factors is crucial for policymakers aiming to enhance energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By addressing both technological and behavioral aspects of energy use, the goal is to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions, leading to a more sustainable energy future.
Energy innovation
Summary: Energy innovation is a central process to meet growing demand for energy amid concern about the safety of supplies and appeals for environmental protection.
A common view of innovation is that innovation proceeds in a more or less linear direction, with diffusion from research through engineering and applied development to commercialization. Today, however, the growing adoption of a prior discovery in science does not reflect the dominant processes by which most innovation has occurred historically. Looking beyond research and development (R&D) at the firm level, multiple perspectives highlight the innovative capacity of the energy sector.
Energy is a major feature of social life, and the stakeholders dealing with new energy technologies are not only academics and experts but also manufacturers, retailers, consumers, governments, and international agencies. A starting point for understanding the innovation issue consists in examining the production and consumption of energy as the outcomes of long evolutionary processes of technical and organizational development.
Large-Scale Innovations Through History
Energy-using products have totally changed people’s lives and the nature of human society. Energy innovations are neither individual acts nor isolated artifacts. The material assemblages that organize and disorganize them evolve through very long time horizons, which explains why innovations are never simply introduced in their final forms. The history of the windmill, for example, suggests a period of development that must be measured in centuries. Likewise, the steam engine developed very slowly. The adoption of the Watt steam engine as part of a new factory system occurred in Britain after about 85 years of cumulative improvements to the steam engine and after related innovation in coal mining reduced fuel costs.
Large-scale innovations in the energy sector therefore involve the processes of collective inventions. Even Thomas Alva Edison—the inventor generally regarded as the most prolific of all time and the author of perhaps the most important electric innovation of the 19th century, the lightbulb—was not the first to experiment with electric light. When Edison began testing possibilities for incandescent lamps, electrical lighting was already being used to illuminate streets, department stores, and other large areas. The electrical network was effectively linked to lighting technology that was first public and then private. As a result, lighting completely modified both the spaces and the time frames of human activity, transforming everything from work to urban nightlife.
The whole complex of scientific knowledge, engineering practices, infrastructure, product characteristics, skills, and procedures makes up the totality of a technology. From this perspective, innovation has many modalities. Three modes of innovation can be distinguished from their very different features. First, incremental innovation consists of enhancements of existing technologies. Even if this type of innovation does not fundamentally change the core characteristics of present techniques, their economic impacts are not insignificant. Second, innovation can also derive from new ways of performing existing technical functions, changing how products are created. Innovation in this sense is considered as disruptive innovation. Examples are the substitution of candles and oils lamps for distilled gas or the shift from incandescent electric lamps to fluorescent lamps. Finally, a radical form of innovation brings about a full-scale change in the fundamental enabling technologies of the economy. For instance, such a shift occurred in the transition from traditional labor-intensive agricultural production, dependent on muscular energy, to manufacturing and social services that depended on other sources of power, such as fossil fuels.
Thus, the economist Joseph Schumpeter defined the process of innovation as creative destruction in his early contributions to innovation studies. More recent research has focused on a phenomenon called lock-in, which refers to the fact that existing technologies may be repeatedly used in place of new technologies that do not benefit from the competitiveness of long trajectories or paths of development. Understanding how this phenomenon may be overcome, for example, appears to be central to the issue of climate change.
and Cleaner Energy Innovations
In the modern era, the expansion of the energy sector is increasingly shaped by the need to ensure environmental protection. To reduce greenhouse gas impacts, sustainable development requires energy innovations such as the diffusion of nonhydrocarbon energy technologies for the security and reliability of energy supply. Energy that can be produced by renewable resources—biomass such as wood, the sun, or wind, for example—is considered increasingly necessary.
In the energy sector, a broad definition of green economy includes all innovations that conserve energy and minimize the environmental load of human activities. The technological challenges to meet this imperative cover the spectrum from power generation to storage, distribution, and use. Each of these areas needs innovation, but innovation of different types, as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change demonstrates. Whether innovation concerns renewable energy, carbon sequestration, or energy efficiency, the underlying objective consists in finding new ways to accelerate the decoupling of energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from economic growth. Efficiency is indeed defined as the ratio between output and input, or between benefits and costs.
Improved energy efficiency is a shared policy goal of many governments around the world. The benefits of more innovations that increase energy efficiency are not only environmental benefits. By using less energy to provide the same level of service, the efficient use of energy also implies reduced investments in energy infrastructure, lower dependency on nonrenewable fossil fuels, increased competitiveness, and improved consumer welfare. In the case of the residential lighting sector, for example, policies to decrease and eventually eliminate the use of incandescent bulbs, which are known to be the most inefficient lamps, are currently being implemented. One alternative is gas discharge lamps in the form of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs), whose energy efficiency is four to five times greater than that of incandescent lamps.
Governments are currently utilizing a variety of methods to accelerate the development of clean energy. In doing so, they hope to reduce the impact of global climate change. Some of these methods involve using public resources to fund the development of national laboratories. Other methods include motivating and directing research firms through prizes and competitions and sharing government resources with research firms. Major areas of focus include wind power, solar power, and a viable replacement for gasoline-powered vehicles.
Social Patterns of Use
Not all considerations in the development and dispersion of new energy-efficient products and services are purely technological. Behavioral interference in the diffusion of new technologies is studied from the perspectives of different disciplines—including psychology, sociology, and economics. According to sociologist Everett Rogers in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, the adoption of an innovation follows an S curve when plotted over a length of time. The relative speed with which members of a social system adopt an innovation depends on successive groups of consumers: early adopters, the early majority, and laggards. In this collective process, society has a persistent habit of using new technologies in ways that often prove surprising to the innovators.
This is notably the case for technical improvements in energy efficiency. Over the past 30 years, the energy use of appliances has been steadily decreasing as awareness of the importance of efficient innovations in technologies has increased. However, overall household energy consumption for this period has risen, due to larger homes, new services (such as Internet service for computers and telecommunications devices), and new appliances. Consumers’ expectations of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience have changed radically over the past few generations, leading to an increase of energy demand in both developed and developing countries. Different rebound effects of energy-efficient equipment and associated consumption are indeed at stake. The direct rebound effect is the increase in demand for an energy service (for washing, heating, refrigeration, lighting, and so forth) when the cost of the service decreases as a result of technical improvements in energy efficiency. Examples are households keeping their old refrigerators when buying a new one, or putting efficient lamps in places previously not lit. This indirect rebound effect can be considerable: The energy saved through innovations leading to increased equipment efficiency can be offset by the increase in the variety and proliferation of equipment and its more frequent use.
Thus, energy innovations are influenced by social considerations: patterns of education and training, infrastructures, forms of production organization, modes of technology use, and modes of consumption. Policymakers must consider devoting more attention to influencing people’s lifestyles and behaviors in order to shape the use of energy innovation and increase energy efficiency—for example, by increasing consumers’ awareness of the impact of energy use on global warming and energy security. Moreover, to achieve energy conservation objectives, financial and regulatory instruments need to be further developed.
Bibliography
"Clean Energy Innovation." Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, www.energy.gov/eere/clean-energy-innovation. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.
Ferrario, Federico. "Infrastructure Solutions: Power for Clean Energy Innovation." European Investment Bank, 20 Sept. 2022, www.eib.org/en/essays/green-energy-innovation. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.
Geels, Frank. Technological Transitions and Systems Innovation. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005.
Hughes, Thomas. “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe Bijker, et al. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: The Free Press, 1962.
Stern, Nicolas. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Utterback, James. Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994.