Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution

Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution
Author: Charles Weiss
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2012-01-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 026226126X

An argument for a major federal program to stimulate innovation in energy technology and a proposal for a policy approach to implement it. America is addicted to fossil fuels, and the environmental and geopolitical costs are mounting. A public-private program—at an expanded scale—to stimulate innovation in energy policy seems essential. In Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution, Charles Weiss and William Bonvillian make the case for just such a program. Their proposal backs measures to stimulate private investment in new technology, within a revamped energy innovation system. It would encourage a broad range of innovations that would give policymakers a variety of technological options over the long implementation period and at the huge scale required, faster than could be accomplished by market forces alone. Even if the nation can't make progress at this time on pricing carbon, a technology strategy remains critical and can go ahead now. Strong leadership and public support will be needed to resist the pressure of entrenched interests against putting new technology pathways into practice in the complex and established energy sector. This book has helped start the process.

Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors

Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors
Author: William B. Bonvillian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019937452X

The American economy faces two deep problems: expanding innovation and raising the rate of quality job creation. Both have roots in a neglected problem: the resistance of Legacy economic sectors to innovation. While the U.S. has focused its policies on breakthrough innovations to create new economic frontiers like information technology and biotechnology, most of its economy is locked into Legacy sectors defended by technological/ economic/ political/ social paradigms that block competition from disruptive innovations that could challenge their models. Americans like to build technology "covered wagons" and take them "out west" to open new innovation frontiers; we don't head our wagons "back east" to bring innovation to our Legacy sectors. By failing to do so, the economy misses a major opportunity for innovation, which is the bedrock of U.S. competitiveness and its standard of living. Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors uses a new, unifying conceptual framework to identify the shared features underlying structural obstacles to innovation in major Legacy sectors: energy, air and auto transport, the electric power grid, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, health care delivery and higher education, and develops approaches to understand and transform them. It finds both strengths and obstacles to innovation in the national innovation environments - a new concept that combines the innovation system and the broader innovation context - for a group of Asian and European economies. Manufacturing is a major Legacy sector that presents a particular challenge because it is a critical stage in the innovation process. By increasingly offshoring production, the U.S. is losing important parts of its innovation capacity. "Innovate here, produce here," where the U.S. took all the gains of its strong innovation system at every stage, is being replaced by "innovate here, produce there," which threatens to lead to "produce there, innovate there." To bring innovation to Legacy sectors, authors William Bonvillian and Charles Weiss recommend that policymakers focus on all stages of innovation from research through implementation. They should fill institutional gaps in the innovation system and take measures to address structural obstacles to needed disruptive innovations. In the specific case of advanced manufacturing, the production ecosystem can be recreated to reverse "jobless innovation" and add manufacturing-led innovation to the U.S.'s still-strong, research-oriented innovation system.

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Author: William Boone Bonvillian
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-01-09
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1783747943

The authors have done a masterful job of charting the important story of DARPA, one of the key catalysts of technological innovation in US recent history. By plotting the development, achievements and structure of the leading world agency of this kind, this book stimulates new thinking in the field of technological innovation with bearing on how to respond to climate change, pandemics, cyber security and other global problems of our time. The DARPA Model provides a useful guide for governmental agency and policy leaders, and for anybody interested in the role of governments in technological innovation. —Dr. Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars This volume contains a remarkable collection of extremely insightful articles on the world’s most successful advanced technology agency. Drafted by the leading US experts on DARPA, it provides a variety of perspectives that in turn benefit from being presented together in a comprehensive volume. It reviews DARPA’s unique role in the U.S. innovation system, as well as the challenges DARPA and its clones face today. As the American model is being considered for adoption by a number of countries worldwide, this book makes a welcome and timely contribution to the policy dialogue on the role played by governments in stimulating technological innovation. — Prof. Charles Wessner, Georgetown University The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

Pioneering Progress

Pioneering Progress
Author: William B. Bonvillian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-10-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262380382

An expert exploration of the foundations of America’s science and technology policies, and the dynamics of its innovation system. Why study science and technology policy? What role does innovation play, and how do we foster it? Economics tells us technological innovation drives economic growth and societal well-being, but technology is always a double-edged sword—great technological advances offer both opportunities and threats. In Pioneering Progress, William Bonvillian explains the complex science and technology innovation system and discusses the challenges of emerging industrial policies. Drawing on in-depth case studies on critical areas such as energy, computing, advanced manufacturing, and health, with an emphasis on the needed public policy and the federal government R&D role in those systems, Bonvillian reviews the foundations of economic growth theory, innovation systems theory, and innovation organization theory. Bonvillian, a highly respected expert who has worked as a deputy assistant secretary of transportation in the federal government and a senior advisor in Congress, reviews a new theory of direct and indirect economic factors in the innovation system. He describes the innovation-based competitive and advanced manufacturing challenges now facing the US economy, reviews comparative efforts in other nations, studies the varied models for how federal science and technology mission agencies are organized, and explores the growth of public-private partnership and industrial policy models as a way for science mission agencies to pursue mission agendas. Pioneering Progress places particular emphasis on the organization and role of medical science and energy innovation agencies and how we can address the gaps in the health, energy, and advanced production innovation economic models.

The Survival Nexus

The Survival Nexus
Author: Charles Weiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2021-09-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0190946288

Technology and science can enable us to create a richer, healthier, sustainable, and equitable world, but they can also lead to global disaster. After all, human technical, political, economic, business, and ethical decisions determine the impact of scientific discoveries and technological innovations... In this book, Charles Weiss explores the intertwining of science, technology, and world affairs that affects everything from climate change and global health to cybersecurity, biotechnology, and geoengineering. Compact and readable, the book ties together ideas and experiences arising from a broad range of diverse issues, ranging from the structure of the energy economy to the future of work and the freedom of the internet. The Survival Nexus highlights opportunities to mobilize science and technology for a better world through technological innovations that address global health, poverty, and hunger. It alerts the reader to the Earth-in-the balance risks stemming from the decline in the international cooperation that once kept the dangers of pandemics, climate change, and nuclear war in check. It warns of the challenge to democracies from the multi-faceted global information and cyber-wars being waged by authoritarian powers. Central to the global problems it explores are questions of basic ethics: how much are people willing to respect scientific facts, to act today to forestall long-run dangers, and to ensure equitable sharing of the benefits, costs, and risks arising from advances in science and technology. Weiss clearly explains the technical principles underlying these issues, showcasing why scientists, policy makers, and citizens everywhere need to understand how the mix of science and technology with politics, economics, business, ethics, law, communications, psychology, and culture will shape our future. This important nexus underpins issues critical to human survival that are overlooked in the broader context of world affairs.

The Power of Renewables

The Power of Renewables
Author: Chinese Academy of Engineering
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2011-01-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309160006

The United States and China are the world's top two energy consumers and, as of 2010, the two largest economies. Consequently, they have a decisive role to play in the world's clean energy future. Both countries are also motivated by related goals, namely diversified energy portfolios, job creation, energy security, and pollution reduction, making renewable energy development an important strategy with wide-ranging implications. Given the size of their energy markets, any substantial progress the two countries make in advancing use of renewable energy will provide global benefits, in terms of enhanced technological understanding, reduced costs through expanded deployment, and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to conventional generation from fossil fuels. Within this context, the U.S. National Academies, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), reviewed renewable energy development and deployment in the two countries, to highlight prospects for collaboration across the research to deployment chain and to suggest strategies which would promote more rapid and economical attainment of renewable energy goals. Main findings and concerning renewable resource assessments, technology development, environmental impacts, market infrastructure, among others, are presented. Specific recommendations have been limited to those judged to be most likely to accelerate the pace of deployment, increase cost-competitiveness, or shape the future market for renewable energy. The recommendations presented here are also pragmatic and achievable.

Water Chemistry

Water Chemistry
Author: Stanley E. Manahan
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2010-08-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1439830681

Carefully crafted to provide a comprehensive overview of the chemistry of water in the environment, Water Chemistry: Green Science and Technology of Nature's Most Renewable Resource examines water issues within the broad framework of sustainability, an issue of increasing importance as the demands of Earth’s human population threaten to overwhelm the planet’s carrying capacity. Renowned environmental author Stanley Manahan provides more than just basic coverage of the chemistry of water. He relates the science and technology of this amazing substance to areas essential to sustainability science, including environmental and green chemistry, industrial ecology, and green (sustainable) science and technology. The inclusion of a separate chapter that comprehensively covers energy, including renewable and emerging sources, sets this book a part. Manahan explains how the hydrosphere relates to the geosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and anthrosphere. His approach views Planet Earth as consisting of these five mutually interacting spheres. He covers biogeochemical cycles and the essential role of water in these basic cycles of materials. He also defines environmental chemistry and green chemistry, emphasizing water’s role in the practice of each. Manahan highlights the role of the anthrosphere, that part of the environment constructed and operated by humans. He underscores its overwhelming influence on the environment and its pervasive effects on the hydrosphere. He also covers the essential role that water plays in the sustainable operation of the anthrosphere and how it can be maintained in a manner that will enable it to operate in harmony with the environment for generations to come. Written at an intermediate level, this is an appropriate text for the study of current affairs in environmental chemistry. It provides a review and grounding in basic and organic chemistry for those students who need it and also fills a niche for an aquatic chemistry book that relates the hydrosphere to the four other environmental spheres.

Electric Power and Energy in China

Electric Power and Energy in China
Author: Zhenya Liu
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2013-12-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1118716353

The acute energy problems facing China today are characterized by their own histories and realities. Some have come about because of China's energy endowment and stage of development, while others have been created by a combination of domestic and global factors. Some are the results of an accumulation of longstanding contradictions, while others are new challenges posed by the new order. There are no "miracle cures" to solve these problems instantly. What is needed is a tireless enquiry, with goals, planning and procedures, guided by a clear energy strategy. With China's increasing dependence on foreign energy sources, and the global energy situation and greenhouse gas issue exerting an increasingly prohibiting effect on China's energy development, energy diplomacy has become an important component of Chinese diplomatic affairs. Based on a "broad energy outlook", this book studies and analyzes China's energy issues and energy strategies from the perspective of electric power. Discusses a variety of issues, including energy transportation and allocation, end-user consumption, markets, early warning and emergency, technical innovation As a leading player in the power and energy area, China’s strategies attracts global attention Proposes the innovative idea of "Macro Energy Perspective" As a key player in China's energy industrial circle, the author's perspective can help global audiences to understand China's energy strategies better Electric Power and Energy in China is ideal for government energy policy makers, engineers, scientists and enterprise managers to understand China’s strategy in electric power and energy. It is also a good reference for energy economics researchers, consultants and university students.

The Business of Global Energy Transformation

The Business of Global Energy Transformation
Author: M. Larsson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137024496

One of the first books to analyze business and financial aspects of sustainable transport and fuels systems and provides novel insights for researchers, managers, and politicians who work in energy and sustainability related areas.

Philosophy and Engineering: Reflections on Practice, Principles and Process

Philosophy and Engineering: Reflections on Practice, Principles and Process
Author: Diane P Michelfelder
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400777620

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2008) held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT-2009) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET-2010), held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines.