WASHINGTON – Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) Forum today published a white paper, “Crossing the Innovation Valley of Death: Federal Policy for American Energy Dominance,” authored by Michael Yancey, Director of Congressional Policy at CRES Forum. The paper examines the structural barriers preventing American energy technologies from reaching commercial scale and presents a policy roadmap for Congress to ensure the United States leads the next generation of energy innovation.
“Innovation has been the center point of American culture from the invention of the solar cell to the pioneering of hydraulic fracturing, but today foreign adversaries rival, and in some measures have surpassed, U.S. investment in energy research and development. Winning the energy innovation race is not just an environmental or economic imperative, it is a matter of national security,” said Heather Reams CRES Forum President & CEO. “This white paper makes clear the ‘Valley of Death’ doesn’t have to be certain fate. With the right federal policies on permitting, financing and AI, Congress can ensure American-born technologies are commercialized here at home, not handed off to our competitors or adversaries.”
“Federal policy cannot pick winners and it should not try. But it can match the right kind of capital to the right stage of risk, remove structural barriers to deployment and provide the durability that allows private capital to commit alongside it.”
— Excerpt from “Crossing the Innovation Valley of Death: Federal Policy for American Energy Dominance“
The white paper identifies the “Commercialization Valley of Death,” the critical gap between a successful technology demonstration and the first privately financed commercial deployment, as the most consequential failure point in America’s energy innovation pipeline. The paper calls on Congress to act on three fronts: enacting comprehensive permitting reform to unlock deployment, stabilizing the financing architecture for first-of-a-kind projects and harnessing AI as a cross-cutting accelerator across the entire innovation lifecycle.
Click HERE to read the full white paper.