The federal government’s work on next-generation clean energy is too spread out across agencies and should be centralized in a single new agency for energy innovation, Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates said in a statement yesterday.
The “National Institutes of Energy Innovation,” as Gates dubbed the idea, would bring together all the clean energy research and development work that is currently housed in the departments of Energy, Transportation and Defense as well as NASA.
Separate sub-institutes, located across the country in the manner of national laboratories, would concentrate on specific low-carbon technologies or sectors of the economy and would gear all of their work toward getting new inventions out of the lab and into widespread commercialization, under the plan.
The effect, Gates wrote on his personal blog, would be to reduce duplication and create a central office for “evaluating and nurturing great ideas.” He compared the concept to the National Institutes of Health, where research has translated into hundreds of new vaccines, drugs and successful treatments.
That success is attributable to its “apolitical leaders who let independent researchers follow the science, rather than political staff who change priorities every few years,” along with its strong bipartisan support and organizational structure, he said.
A fivefold increase in clean energy spending, which would bring federal investment on par with the $35 billion dedicated to medical research, would mark an important and necessary step, as well, according to Gates.
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