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Accelerating climate technologies: Innovative market strategies to overcome barriers to scale-up

8am, August 04th, 2015

This report makes the case that (1) the barriers to rapid diffusion of new climate technologies are too great for the private sector alone to surmount and (2) targeted public sector interventions are needed all along the technology development pathway to overcome specific technical, financial, and market barriers.

Two of the case studies analyzed here–Off-Grid Portable Solar Lighting (the Lighting Africa Program) and Agricultural Markets in Africa–offer successful examples of public-private market acceleration approaches to advance climate technology programs. These strategies tap distributed knowledge to overcome market barriers, unleash innovation, and push products to commercialization. The organizations that lead these projects are public agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations that play a neutral broker role with the private sector. This report was produced by the Clean Energy Centre.

The final marine energy case study proposes a similar approach to accelerate hydrokinetic marine energy technology in global energy markets. For each case study, we show the gaps to scaling up technology deployment, present the interventions, and recommend how an international effort could more rapidly and creatively accelerate climate technology markets.

The fundamental message of this report is that new innovation strategies are needed to accelerate climate technologies. The opportunity to harness collective global intelligence and fuel innovation for a sustainable energy future is upon us—if the world’s policy makers are creative enough to embrace it.

Read the report here: Accelerating climate technologies: Innovative market strategies to overcome barriers to scale-up

Institutions Involved

  • Clean Energy Group

Authors

Jessica Morey, Lewis Milford and Lindsay Madeira
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