Despite global efforts to mitigate climate change by decarbonisation, many industrial sectors such as cement, steel, chemicals, aviation and shipping lag behind in emissions reduction due to a lack of commercially viable and ready-to-implement clean energy technologies.

Potential solutions in the form of technologies and business models often exist at the prototype or demonstration phase, but need further research and development, demonstration, and early manufacturing or deployment as they move from lab to market.

If we are to meet Paris climate goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions, these emerging technologies must be commercialised at a much faster pace than their predecessors.

This raises the question of whether our current public commercialisation institutions (agencies, entities, or programmes—both public and public—in the clean technology space in Europe are suited, or need redesigning, to support this change.

QCF takes a science-led approach to building climate resilience—supporting solutions that reduce climate impacts, lift people out of vulnerability, and help communities adapt to a changing world.

The new donation will support a three-year project evaluating effective design of institutions and supporting policymaking in the UK, Germany and the EU so that the most efficient and effective paths can be followed at pace to bring a suite of clean energy technologies to market.

“Building climate resilience demands robust public institutions and forward-thinking policies that bring emerging technologies to market faster. This research has the potential to shape the commercialisation of clean energy technologies across some of the world’s biggest economies, which QCF is proud to support,” said Greg de Temmerman, Deputy CEO and Chief Science Officer at QCF.

Co-lead principal investigator at Cambridge, Professor Laura Diaz Anadon, is an engineer-economist with a particular expertise in energy innovation processes and policies in the context of climate mitigation. She is chaired Professor in Climate Change Policy at the Department of Land Economy and directs the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance. Professor Anadon said:

“I am excited to join Professor Meckling in generating new evidence to support accelerated innovation in cleantech in Europe, in a way that both reflects and expands the local capabilities and industry across different cleantech sectors. Aided by state-of-the-art methods and data, including machine learning, we will inform policymakers who, at times, feel that we are flying somewhat blind when it comes to industrial policy in cleantech. This project will help us build a critical mass of researchers to answer some of these hard questions.”

Co-lead Professor Jonas Meckling at Berkeley is an expert in the political economy of climate policy and energy transitions.

“We have entered a new era of green industrial policy competition”, explains Professor Meckling. “Countries are trying to create and scale cleantech markets to advance both national competitiveness and decarbonisation. It is paramount to better understand how such government and public–private initiatives are best designed to effectively drive technology commercialisation. That is what we are doing in this project, which complements an ongoing joint project asking these questions for the United States. Taken together, the results will allow us to draw important comparative lessons across major economies.”

With their local research teams and working in concert, the pair will identify the different models of commercialisation institutions, map their different outcomes and analyse how the models and their surrounding politics shape the development of commercialisation support for clean energy technologies in the EU, Germany and the UK. The learning will be shared widely with relevant policymakers, think-tanks and researcher networks to inform discussions on institutional reform and renewal, to facilitate the commercialisation of technologies central to deep decarbonisation.