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Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

How the Department of Energy Ensures Maximum Impact of Technology Program Investments

December 1, 2014

The following article from the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy describes its efforts to maximize the impacts of the research it funds. Yaw Agyeman, in EETD's Sustainable Federal Operations Group, helped develop and leads training in retrospective impact analysis, which EETD and DOE use to assess how research in energy efficiency and renewable energy has accelerated development and commercialization of technologies and produced a return on public investment that contributes to the nation's economic growth. An excerpt from the DOE article:

"Retrospective impact analyses — a subset of which is referred to as "counterfactual" studies — are grounded in the fields of economics and public policy and have been successfully applied by other government organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology within the Department of Commerce as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture. EERE has previously completed several impact assessments on different programs. For example, a 2013 analysis determined that the Energy Department's $971 million R&D investment in advanced battery technology for electric drive vehicles (EDVs) resulted in to the commercialization of the 2.4 million EDVs sold between 1999-2012 that are projected to reduce U.S. fuel consumption by $16.7 billion through 2020. The study also found that research funded by EERE's Vehicle Technologies Office contributed to 112 patents in energy storage from 1976 to 2012 and is ranked first in patent citations among the top-ten companies."

Read the rest of this article at the link below.