For energy breakthroughs: Promise of the "e-DIIs"

WASHINGTON — President Obama is promising us an energy future that’s clean, efficient and job-generating. But how do we get there unless we’re far more innovative, prompting our universities, laboratories and corporations to combine forces for accelerated inventions and processes?

That’s the question–and challenge–that grows out of a Brookings Institution proposal that the federal government help create a network of energy-discovery innovation institutes (e-DIIs for short) based in metropolitan and multistate regions across the nation.

The stark fact is that federally-initiated research and development investments in new energy technologies have deteriorated to one-sixth their level of the early 1980s, argues James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan and co-inventor of the potential new strategy with presidents Michael Crow of Arizona State University and Gordon Gee of Ohio State University.

Just as serious, the energy industry itself spends a lower fraction of its revenues on R & D than the dogfood industry–and a tenth what the pharmaceutical industry invests. Use-inspired research and development leading to new products and processes is rarely done by energy firms because of quarterly earnings pressures (thank you again, Wall Street!).

So we’re in a tough spot. To cure it, the Brookings proposal looks to annual merit-based competitions for e-DIIs, some financed at as much as $100 million a year, with eventual federal cost at $30 billion annually. Overwhelmingly, they’d involve alliances of universities with national laboratories, addressing such critical issues as energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, biofuels, solar and nuclear power.

The United States, in short, would try to pick itself up by its energy R & D bootstraps, both pushing new products to market and discovering ways to get big energy conservation dividends by recrafting incentives for individuals and businesses, expanded public transportation and smarter land use.

If the Obama dream of a nationwide green energy revolution is to come true, this may be a critical part. Obama administration officials have expressed interest, and the idea will get a big public airing at a Feb. 9 conference in Washington.

But will the effort be rooted sufficiently in the metro (and some cases smaller city or multi-state) regions in which the country’s modern economy is so solidly rooted? Will it oblige highfalutin national research laboratories and major research universities to work with inventive businesses on actual applications, and with community colleges in training workers who can learn the specialized new skills?

For a model, the Obama crew might look at a rare Bush administration initiative sensitive to regional needs and potentials–the WIRED (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development) program developed by the Labor Department’s assistant secretary for employment and training, Emily DeRocco.

In three competition rounds, WIRED challenged coalitions of universities, businesses, community colleges, foundations and economic development organizations to work jointly to produce inventive new business and workforce development strategies.

The winning regions–for example the Greater Kansas City bistate area, coastal Maine, North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad, Metro Denver counties–received up to $15 million each to leverage their assets including recruiting “angel” investors in new enterprises.

The new alliances have begun to achieve breakthroughs–in digital graphic arts in New York’s Rochester-centered Finger Lakes district, for example. In the Mid-Michigan arc from Flint to Bay City ravaged by auto industry layoffs, a business-college alliance called Primus Civitas has focused on training machinists to work on a burgeoning wind farm propeller industry, as well as specialized training for workers in LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified construction projects.

WIRED is proving that with some federal money, communities, industries, regions do come together more quickly to pool assets, invest and train workers for economic success. They see the promise in university-based research, spawning clusters of nearby start-up firms, collaborating to raise capital.

WIRED’s weakness is that some projects are handicapped because Labor Department dollars can’t, by law, be used for such support activities as equipment purchase, trade show costs and creating angel investment funds.

What does that say for the ambitious e-DII energy project? It’s to write the legislation to encourage and reward regional initiatives. But it is also to mandate clear coordination–including perhaps a White House role through its new Office of Urban Affairs–to overcome the barriers of historically “silo’ed” federal departments accustomed to going their own separate and independent ways.

A strong energy R & D focus, clear central coordination, competitive rewards for inventive regional initiatives–the principles may sound contradictory. But combine them smartly and the hopes for fresh breakthroughs in this new era could advance dramatically. Investing forward, smartly, to make us all winners.

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