Call For Great Lakes Network Of Energy R&D Centers

Jun 8: The Brookings Institution has release a policy brief entitled, Hubs of Transformation: Leveraging the Great Lakes Research Complex for Energy Innovation. According to the brief, America needs to transform its energy system, and the Great Lakes region (including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and western New York) possesses many of the needed innovation assets. For that reason, the brief says that the "Federal government should leverage this troubled region's research and engineering strengths by launching a region-wide network of collaborative, high intensity energy research and innovation centers."

 

    The brief indicates, "The Federal government should systematically accelerate national clean energy innovation by launching a series of "themed" research and commercialization centers strategically situated to draw on the Midwest's rich complex of strong public universities, national and corporate research laboratories, and top-flight science and engineering talent. Organized around existing capacities in a hub-spoke structure that links fundamental science with innovation and commercialization, these research centers would engage universities, industries and labs to work on specific issues that would enable rapid deployment of new technologies to the marketplace. Along the way, they might well begin to transform a struggling region's ailing economy. Roughly six compelling innovation centers could reasonably be organized in the Great Lakes states with total annual funding between $1 billion and $2 billion."

    To achieve this broad goal, the brief recommends that the Federal government should: Increase energy research funding overall; Adopt more comprehensive approaches to research and development (R&D) that address and link multiple aspects of a specific problem, such as transportation; and Leverage existing regional research, workforce, entrepreneurial and industrial assets.

 

    Access an overview and link to the complete brief and a video (click here).