Public Energy Research Funding Rankings

Who will lead tomorrow’s energy innovation? Looking at the last 20 years of data of public investments in energy research, development, and demonstration provides interesting trends:

As a percent of GDP, the same countries have consistently ranked at the top of the list – Japan, France, Canada, and the US.

Strong commitments in public investment from the UK and Korea over the last 20 years may shift that dynamic.

Removing the normalizing effect of GDP, we see the US has contributed nearly 40% of all total investment among the peer group, with Japan and France making standout contributions.

While this does not focus on critically important private investment, its arguable that public investment is a proxy for early stage innovation particularly when considering many of today’s innovations were discovered in publicly funded labs a decade or more ago. Yet most of the technologies needed for the energy transition are available today, which may result in greater private funding contributions or a focus on government demonstration investments.

Credit to the The Fletcher School at Tufts University for developing a deep and publicly available data source that was drawn from for this analysis.

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