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Energy innovation offers us our best chance to solve the three urgent and interrelated problems of climate change, worldwide insecurity over energy supplies, and rapidly growing energy demand. But if we are to achieve a timely transition to reliable, low-cost, low-carbon energy, the U.S. energy innovation system must be radically overhauled. Unlocking Energy Innovation outlines an up-to-the-minute plan for remaking America's energy innovation system by tapping the country's entrepreneurial strengths and regional diversity in both the public and private spheres. \"Business as usual\" will not fill the energy innovation gap. Only the kind of systemic, transformative changes to our energy innovation system described in this provocative book will help us avert the most dire scenarios and achieve a sustainable and secure energy future.

Long-duration energy storage (LDES) is a potential solution to intermittency in renewable energy generation. In this study we have evaluated the role of LDES in decarbonized electricity systems and identified the cost and efficiency performance necessary for LDES to substantially reduce electricity costs and displace firm low-carbon generation. Our findings show that energy storage capacity cost and discharge efficiency are the most important performance parameters. Charge/discharge capacity cost and charge efficiency play secondary roles. Energy capacity costs must be ≤US$20 kWh –1 to reduce electricity costs by ≥10%. With current electricity demand profiles, energy capacity costs must be ≤US$1 kWh –1 to fully displace all modelled firm low-carbon generation technologies. Electrification of end uses in a northern latitude context makes full displacement of firm generation more challenging and requires performance combinations unlikely to be feasible with known LDES technologies. Finally, LDES systems with the greatest impact on electricity cost and firm generation have storage durations exceeding 100 h. Wind and solar energy must be complemented by a combination of energy storage and firm generating capacity. Here, Sepulveda et al. assess the economic value and system impact of a wide range of possible long-duration energy storage technologies, providing insights to guide innovation and policy.

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained? For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge. One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing. But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.

Global Taiwan examines the impact of globalization on the industry and economy of Taiwan since the spectacular growth of the 1990s. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with firms in Taiwan, China, the United States, Japan, Europe, and other areas, the book analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwanese firms at a time when they face new competition from powerful global leaders and new producers in China. The contributors cover topics of enormous importance for Taiwan as well as the rest of the world, including transformations in the international economy, technological advances that enabled modularization and fragmentation of the production system, contract manufacturers, regionalization, and links with Chinese industry. The book addresses such questions as: Can Taiwanese companies be maintained and expanded with the same corporate strategies and public policies as in the past? Can these strategies still work for other countries? If changes are required, what resources can be mobilized in the public and private sectors? As massive relocation of manufacturing and services moves plants and jobs to low-wage countries like China and India, what will remain at home in societies like Taiwan? 1. Globalization and the Future of the Taiwan Miracle, Suzanne Berger and Richard K. Lester; 2. Industry Co-Evolution: A Comparison of Taiwan and North American Electronics Contract Manufacturers, Timothy J. Sturgeon and Ji-Ren Lee; 3. Leading, Following or Cooked Goose? Explaining Innovation Successes and Failures in Taiwan's Electronics Industry, Douglas B. Fuller, Akintunde I. Akinwande, and Charles G. Sodini; 4. A Tale of Two Sectors: Diverging Paths in Taiwan's Automotive Industry, Edward Cunningham, Teresa Lynch, and Eric Thun; 5. Moving Along the Electronics Value Chain: Taiwan in the Global Economy, Douglas B. Fuller; 6. From NAFTA to China? Production Shifts and Their Implications for Taiwanese Firms, Marcos Ancelovici and Sara Jane McCaffrey; 7. Innovation and the Limits of State Power: IC Design and Software in Taiwan, Dan Breznitz; 8. Cross-Straits Integration and Industrial Catch-up: How Vulnerable Is the Taiwan Miracle to an Ascendant Mainland? Edward S. Steinfeld

This book presents fifteen cases of technology applications in the energy and environment sectors, including solar, wind, fuel cell, nuclear, coal combustion and emission control technologies. The case studies demonstrate the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, integrating technical and non-technical aspects of the problem. They also introduce a toolbox of analytical techniques useful in the context of realistic technology application. These techniques include energy and mass balances, project financial analysis tools, treatment of external costs and benefits, probabilistic risk assessment, learning curves, regression analysis, and life cycle costing. Each case study presents a description of the relevant technology at a level accessible to anyone familiar with elementary concepts in basic science and engineering. The book is addressed to upper-level undergraduate students in the natural sciences, engineering and the social sciences who are interested in learning about problems of technology application, as well as technology practitioners in industry and government.

Since natural uranium currently accounts for only 3 percent of the total cost of nuclear generation, even $300 per kilogram would be attractive and well below the break-even cost for competition with a mixed-oxide fuel cycle scheme with plutonium recycle in light water reactors or with fast burner reactors.19 The issues we have outlined here are generally well understood within the energy, technical, and policy communities ; but it is unfortunately also true that nuclear energy policies, as they have been implemented both in the United States and abroad, have been largely at odds with these considerations. [...] the public policy and technical communities are on a joint learning curve : For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

The high costs and risks of demonstrating new clean energy technologies at commercial scale are major obstacles in the transition to a low-carbon energy economy. To overcome this barrier, the authors propose a new, decentralized strategy for energy technology scale-up, demonstration, and early adoption, with a greater role for states and regions and a new kind of partnership between the federal government, the states, and private innovators and investors. The challenges of scaling up new technologies are well known. What works in the laboratory or in a small-scale prototype often doesn't work nearly as well at full commercial scale, at least initially. Building, operating, and debugging full-scale prototypes invariably reveals new problems that must be solved. Moreover, new technologies are hardly ever deployed in isolation. More often, they must be incorporated into a pre-existing technological and organizational system, and the task of integration is often very demanding. Often, too, complementary technologies such as new manufacturing processes and logistical systems must be developed and scaled up in parallel.