R&D Advancement, Technology Diffusion, and Impact on Evaluation of Public R&D

Technical Report · Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1219251· OSTI ID:1219251

Moore, M. C. ^[1]; Arent, D. J. ^[1]; Norland, D. ^[1]

---

1. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

In a 2001 report titled "Research at DOE: Was It Worth It?", a National Research Council (NRC) committee defined a set of simplifying rules to estimate the net economic benefits from technologies supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). This NREL paper evaluates the efficacy of the NRC rules compared to published literature on acceleration of technology introduction into markets, technology diffusion, and infrastructure change. It also offers considerations for revisions of the rules that call for the use of technology and sector-specific data, advanced forecasting techniques, and sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the methodology.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Analysis (EI-30) (Energy Analysis Corporate)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-99-GO10337
• OSTI ID: 1219251
• Report Number(s): NREL/TP-620-37102; 5222
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

National Research Council
R&D investments
net present value
return on investment
economic-benefits evaluation