To Meet Future Global Energy Demand, New BPC Report Series Says America Needs an Industrial Strategy
Washington, DC — With global energy demand projected to rapidly expand in the coming decades, the United States has an opportunity to lead the world in creating the energy sector of the future. To begin charting a strategic course, today, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a series of case studies analyzing various policy tools that have historically been utilized to kickstart domestic manufacturing.
The report series, Forging the Future: Insights on a U.S. Industrial Strategy for Energy, evaluated three policy mechanisms: the Defense Production Act; Sematch, a key public-private partnership in the semiconductor industry; and tax policies that were effective in addressing domestic gaps in critical manufacturing capacity.
Underscored by the bipartisan passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have signaled their support for a strong U.S. manufacturing sector that will enhance American competitiveness and resilience to global challenges.
“If America is going to lead in the next century, we need a serious energy industrial strategy to develop, manufacture, and deploy these technologies at commercial scale,” said Tanya Das, senior associate director of the Energy Program at BPC. “While crisis has been a common enabler of past policies, we cannot—and should not—wait for the sector that literally powers our entire economy to be compromised.”
This report series includes lessons for lawmakers and federal agencies about how these policy tools, when layered effectively, empowered domestic entities to establish and manufacture products critical to the national interest. The series offers five key insights to lay the baseline for a U.S. industrial strategy for energy:
- Energy security is national security, and U.S. industrial strategy should reflect this.
- Efforts to advance domestic manufacturing are more likely to be successful when policy tools are integrated into a package.
- Successful public-private partnerships depend on complementary goals, flexibility, and trust.
- Tax policies can encourage short-term investment in manufacturing, but their durability and long-term impact are uncertain.
- Some clean energy technologies are too early in the commercial process for manufacturing policy interventions.
The United States is entering a new phase of industrial competition. Making these energy technology advancements at home will enhance supply chain security, create jobs, and position U.S. businesses to export best-in-class systems to the world, all while moving towards America’s goal of decarbonizing by mid-century.