The U.S. national energy labs, funded by taxpayers to the tune of $12 billion a year, produce too many dead ends and too few transformative clean technologies, some critics say. And they tend to ignore the local entrepreneurs who would love to collaborate.
Now a wave of new thinking seems to be afoot at the Department of Energy, which oversees the labs. A few pilot programs are nudging the labs to get their clean-technology ideas to market by working with regional tech firms.
Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, situated in the hills above the San Francisco Bay Area, is among the national labs trying new ways to collaborate with their regional economies. Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley.
