Clean Energy Has Highest Documented Rate of Return of Any Federal Program

I don't see the Republicans saying the space program was a failure because there were several spectacular failures.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/13/367252/clean-energy-return-federal-program/

By Joe Romm on Nov 13, 2011 at 12:32 pm

The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2001 that a handful of clean energy technologies returned about $30 billion on an R&D investment of about $400 million. The United States is an amazing venture capitalist when it comes to clean energy R&D.

But the all-Solyndra, all-the-time stenographers of the status quo at the Washington Post put out this context-free nonsense:

[article has picture of newspaper headline]

If you read the Post article (wearing multiple head vises), you’ll see that Mufson and the Post don’t understand the first thing about venture capital nor have they done even the minimal amount of homework on the myriad major independent studies of the value of clean energy research.

You’d never even know from the article that most private sector VC investments go bankrupt or have no positive return. It is a risky business that investors put money into for the few really big wins. You’d never know that VC investments are judged by their portfolio return — and by that criteria you would have to say that federal clean energy investments are wildly successful.

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Yes, the Post uses the $172 billion figure to create outrage over how much the federal government has spent on energy research, but the overwhelming majority of it didn’t go to energy efficiency and renewables. The Post makes the briefest passing mention to a key point:

Many policy experts say some of government’s biggest energy investment payoffs have come in the small stuff, such as testing the use of magnesium alloys to make lightweight car batteries more efficient or developing ballasts that make compact fluorescent bulbs more efficient.

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Of course, you can’t know a priori which investments will pay off and which won’t, so you need to invest in many technologies, just to have a few winners.

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