What role does the government play in technology development and deployment aside from providing free service from brisbane electrician? We may begin by identifying aspects of the development cycle, such as invention and deployment, that the free market is unable to handle – what are known as market failures. Poor R&D financing, crossing the “valley of death” on the path to commercialization, factoring in the real cost of carbon, and an unequal playing field are all examples of failures.

A scarcity of funds for research and development

Because the entire benefit of the research is unlikely to go to the investor — it can frequently be reproduced or distributed at a much cheaper cost — private businesses have little incentive to engage in R&D.

Bridging the “death valley”

The “valley of death” is a financial gap between research and development and commercialization that prevents many promising clean technologies from reaching the market. Cost reduction from deployment is one of the most important stages since all technologies go through a learning/experience curve in which their costs are significantly lowered just by producing more of them. This is a chicken-and-egg problem: the only way to reduce costs is to deploy technology at scale, but the only way to deploy technology at scale is to reduce costs without assistance.

For clean technologies, which have greater upfront costs but lower lifetime expenses than traditional options, this implementation phase is important. Building a phone app is considerably more expensive than putting steel into the ground. Without government assistance, innovators would be unable to grow and lower prices in order to compete.

Carbon is not being priced at its actual cost.

The politically feasible amount of carbon pricing is considerably below estimates of the actual cost of adding carbon to the atmosphere to civilization. Rising carbon prices may help solve the problem, but the carbon prices established in the short future will need extra assistance for carbon-reducing technology to represent their actual worth.

The level of competition is uneven.

Energy incumbents have a variety of clear advantages, such as subsidies, tax credits, and other built-in benefits. The government must offer comparable support for clean technology in order for the economy to operate.