Six bold ideas to trigger the next step in sustainable energy innovation

Policies fostering the growth of technology and innovation have rapidly scaled sustainable energy technologies such as solar, energy storage, and electric vehicles over the last decade. However, there is room to accelerate the global energy transition by expanding the spread of sustainability technologies and solutions mature enough for sustainable deployment, said the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its latest whitepaper Accelerating Sustainable Energy Innovation.

The WEF sets out six ideas that could trigger a significant leap forward for sustainable energy:

1. Create national institutions for energy innovation to develop a systemic perspective of the energy system and encourage research sharing and collaboration between energy stakeholders.
2. Establish an independent international sustainable energy innovation fund supported by both public and private sources to finance high-potential energy technology projects too costly or risky for any one nation or company to undertake.
3. Develop instruments for public-private co-investment to better target grant recipients and reduce investment risk. If properly designed, such instruments will stimulate more private money into breakthrough energy projects and significantly improve the success rate and impact of public research, development and demonstration (R&D) grants.
4. Co-define energy technology roadmaps through public-private collaboration to align global policy and industrial innovation efforts and create a credible road-to-scale for high-potential technology areas that are advancing slowly.
5. Make public procurement of pre-commercial energy innovation mainstream to leverage the power of public procurement to scale up the development and commercialisation of innovative energy technologies and solutions.
6. Transparency of government R&D spending to facilitate better data sharing between countries and increase awareness of the public funding opportunities available to entrepreneurs and investors.

For more ideas on how the world can accelerate sustainable energy innovation, refer to the full whitepaper here.

Credit: World Economic Forum