Where Should Funding for Renewables Come From? – Guest Blogger Geoff Nicholson

Guest Blogger Geoff Nicholson writes:

I’d like to comment on your recent post about public sector support of renewables. 

I spent the better part of my aerospace career in R&D. My experience was that private entities couldn’t plan for longer than one product development cycle. For aircraft and jet engines that tended to be about 5 to 10 years. Their ability to create a basic research vision and hold to a technology development plan was not very good, except for corporate research groups that had lots of research ideas but couldn’t care less how or when the technologies were introduced into real world products.

 If it weren’t for government funding of critical, long-term research projects/programs, we would still be flying propeller airplanes. All of yesterday’s and today’s jet engines/aircraft were really developed under military government contracts from the ’40s through the ’80s. The commercial sector didn’t have the capital to individually or, for that matter, collectively fund the myriad of technology development programs necessary to field a jet aircraft. It was too big a hurtle for the private sector.

 Since the end of the cold war, government R&D funding for aircraft has all but dried up compared to before. And, arguably no revolutionary product innovation has occurred since — only incremental improvements. The most noteworthy development has been a painfully slow and halting move toward composite airframe structures to reduce weight. No wholly new propulsion schema has been innovated. No truly revolutionary airframe schema has succeeded. We still suck, burn and blow air in engines that have the same basic design since the 1940s. We still fly tubes with wings on them. We just do it more efficiently than before while trying to drive the cost of manufacturing down. In other words, aviation has slumped into the mature end of the product life cycle curve without the impetus of government R&D funding.

 And, the rest of the world has substantially caught up to us. What used to be dozens of US aircraft manufacturers have consolidated into less than a handful. Airbus, Embrear, Bombardier and others have taken market share from US companies, hand over fist.

So, is there a need for government involvement? Yes. Should the government fund basic R&D? Yes. Should government fund end product development? Maybe, but only for a few pilot programs but not for the vast majority of end products since the government doesn’t care too much about market demand for product features and functions and the various combinations of desirable product features.