Investment Trends Highlight Promise of Nanotechnology to Cleantech Industry, but GAO Urges Caution
The Administration is betting that nanotechnology can advance the competitiveness of the US cleantech industry. Since 2009, DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), an Agency focusing “exclusively on high risk, high payoff concepts - technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store and utilize energy,” has identified and funded a wide range of potential game-changing clean-energy technologies, from energy storage and waste-heat recovery to carbon capture, utilizing nanotechnologies. Earlier this year, the Administration announced a new $50 million “signature initiative” in the 2011 budget to support nanotechnology research into solar energy and conversion, with a particular focus on using nanotechnology to improve photovoltaic solar electricity generation, solar thermal energy generation and conversion, and solar-to-fuel conversions. These investments, combined with millions of dollars of private sector investment flowing into nanotechnology research, could change the science and economics of renewable and low-carbon energy production in the next few years.
Yet, even as federal and private investors are place greater emphasis on nanotechnology’s potential, others within the Administration and Congress are voicing concerns that federal regulators remain ill-equipped to understand, let alone control the risks from, these new nanotech applications. A May 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office concluded that “use of nanomaterials in products is growing faster than our understanding of the risks these materials pose to human health and the environment,” and recommended that EPA take additional actions to track and regulate nanomaterials under its existing statutory authorities. Congressional policymakers, in turn, have introduced bills in both Houses that could change the regulatory environment for new and existing nanotechologies and the products that contain them. These regulatory and legislative changes could have profound business and legal consequences for the cleantech industry, effecting issues from intellectual property protection, to regulatory compliance and time-to-market for new products.
Successful investors and companies operating in the nanotechnology space will manage several potentially conflicting messages. Nanotechnology does offer remarkable opportunities to transform cleantech economics, but it is also a relatively uncharted area. Nanotechnology investment will pose technical, regulatory, and legal uncertainties and risks until scientific understanding, and federal, state, and tort oversight mechanisms, catch up. With advance planning and sound regulatory policies, these risks are manageable, allowing US companies and investors to seize a potential competitive advantage in the growing cleantech market. Without adequate business and regulatory planning, nanotechnology, the “science of small,” could create lead to big problems.