Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

"Richard Lester and David Hart offer a thoughtful analysis about the special challenges of innovation in energy. Their book will generate discussion and indeed debate about the relative roles of government and markets in bringing innovation about." -- Daniel Yergin, author of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World "Lester and Hart have perceptively described what a vastly improved U.S. energy innovation system would look like and the significant economic and environmental benefits it could deliver. Equally important, they have laid out a thoughtful initial approach to building this system over the near and long-term." -- Dan W. Reicher, Executive Director, Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Experts outline a plan to overhaul the U.S. energy innovation system for accelerated, large-scale adoption of reliable, low-cost, low-carbon energy technologies. 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.