In this piece, Dan Reicher and Alicia Seiger of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance identify key strategies to catalyze investment in clean energy resources.

With global energy consumption rising exponentially, scientists, lawyers, and financial experts all over the world are teaming up to find ways to expand energy production while minimizing the impacts on the atmosphere and environment. At Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) Research Symposium October 13, Dan Reicher and Alicia Seiger told a crowd of hundreds, “By the year 2030, we need to increase clean energy investment to one-trillion-dollars per year to combat climate change.” They proceeded to explain how to finance such a daunting task.

“We need a lot of money spread across a complicated spectrum of solutions that will likely span decades,” said Reicher, the executive director of Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. “There are two big challenges as we move clean energy technologies out of the lab to full-scale deployment. One is innovation, taking ideas out of the lab and proving that the idea works at a small scale. The second is commercialization, scaling up the technology to full-sized deployment. We call these the ‘valleys of death.’”

The sardonic nickname seemed to become more and more appropriate as Reicher and Seiger showed example after example of cleaner energy technologies taking decades to move from the lab to full-scale deployment, if they made it that far at all. Even a technology like hydraulically fracturing bedrock to access natural gas reserves, which has seen wide deployment throughout the US and the rest of the world, took 65 years to cross the financial valley of death, Reicher said.

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