Shining new light on global public investments in energy RD&D
By Zdenka Myslikova
As Mission Innovation (MI) prepares for its Annual Gathering later this month, the Climate Policy Lab has launched a new, expansive global dataset on RD&D expenditures. The data appear as an interactive visualization of annual public investments in energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) across 39 countries since 2000. This visualization is the culmination of a major effort to provide a global picture of energy RD&D investments based on the review of local documents. We aim to improve the accessibility of these important RD&D data so that everyone can better understand how much countries spend in this critical area of technological innovation.
CPL’s effort began with the annual compilation of a comprehensive database on the U.S. Department of Energy RD&D and deployment spending by Kelly Sims Gallagher and Laura Diaz Anadon. Gallagher et al. (2011) expanded the dataset to include Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, China, and South Africa (the BRIMCS countries) from 2000 to 2008. We then built on this effort by collating the most up-to-date information for the BRIMCS countries and adding Chile, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to the dataset.
For the countries that are members of the International Energy Agency (IEA), we use data from IEA’s comprehensive Energy Technology RD&D Budget database, which tracks the expenditures for its member countries in eight technological categories since 1974.
Many of the countries inventoried are members of Mission Innovation (MI), an initiative committed to developing and scaling breakthrough clean energy technologies at substantial cost reductions. It is currently comprised of 23 countries and the European Union, as indicated in our visualization. The members originally agreed to double their clean energy RD&D expenditures between 2015 and 2020. They didn’t reach this goal, but showed positive trends indicating the need for MI to continue, as we argued in a 2020 article. Among other takeaways, the MI initiative highlighted the value of and need for transparent and reliable tracking of public energy RD&D expenditures. As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
The MI member countries have invested more than USD25 billion every year since the MI initiative was launched in 2015. In total, their investments in fossil fuels were between USD2 and 3 billion, while their investments in renewables are approximately double fossil energy amounts. The Chinese government has invested the highest amount in renewables. India, Japan, and the US have led the way in investments in nuclear RD&D. Annual investments in energy efficiency have been above USD6 billion in the last three years, largely due to the US investment being over USD1 billion annually with the balance coming from the other 23 MI members.
Despite our extensive efforts to collect and provide comprehensive data, there are gaps in the records: some countries struggle to report on time or per technological category, and in other cases, we are unable to access a particular datapoint. However, we continue to collect available data, and we plan to publish new 2021 data later this year.
Several MI members are only now setting up their internal tracking systems, and we have delved into their budgetary documents and other reports to tease out information on their energy RD&D spending. This is the case for Brazil, India, Mexico, China, and South Africa. For all these countries, our visualization uses data we collected from local documents. The methods sheet, found in the downloadable spreadsheet, includes details on the key sources and categories.
For these countries, the database includes only direct government spending on energy RD&D. The spending by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which have historically been a large source of greenhouse gas emissions and large contributors to energy RD&D budgets, will be included in a separate visualization. Another recent CPL project has explored the role of some of the major SOEs and their energy innovation capacity in more detail.
For China, our data reflect the most up-to-date information we were able to find in publicly available sources. These include information from the Bloomberg data terminal and China’s official reports to Mission Innovation for categories we couldn’t estimate from domestic statistical reports. Note that for 2020, the available sources do not allow us to tease out information on renewables and energy efficiency. These two technological categories accounted for nearly USD2.5 billion and USD0.5 billion respectively in 2019. The picture of Chinese RD&D public spending is hence incomplete for the latest year, and in the visualization China drops behind some countries that have lower total budgets but complete information.
Also, note that Mexico became a member of the IEA in 2018, at which point they retrospectively added data from 2013. Brazil initiated their harmonized data collection thanks to the Energy Big Push project in 2019 and, with the assistance of the IEA, set up a new reporting platform (Inova-e) in 2021. The visualizations for both countries include limited RD&D data for 2018 (Mexico) and 2020 (Brazil). In both cases, this reflects the change in data availability in local reports. We continue collecting these data for Brazil and Mexico from local reports in parallel to the data available from the IEA database—a process that allows us tease out spending by government and SOEs.
The data in our visualization for these five countries – Brazil, India, Mexico, China, and South Africa – reflect government spending that does not include expenditures by local state-owned enterprises (SOE)—notably, Petrobras, NTPC, Pemex, PetroChina, Sasol or Eskom, for example—some of which are the largest local players in energy RDD in these countries. We have collected data for SOEs separately.
In the process of building this dataset, we saw the critical need for transparent reporting and the value of local sources. Ideally, every value in a country’s official spending statistics would be traceable to local government reports. This is not currently the case. Our database reflects the effort to provide a comprehensive picture that reflects current data availability. It is a foundation to build on in future efforts to document spending on energy technological innovation.
We are thankful to the IEA for their collaboration. We will be updating the data twice a year, following the updating schedule of the IEA, and expanding the dataset to incorporate new sources of information. Our intention is for this dataset to be a valuable resource to other scholars and professionals in government, business, and nonprofit sectors. We welcome your feedback and sharing of any additional sources that would make the existing data more complete. Dive in, and reach out to Zdenka.Myslikova@tufts.edu with any suggestions.
Zdenka Myslikova is a Post-doctoral scholar at the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.