The United States and individual states have many reasons to encourage a strong innovation and commercialization system for emerging technologies, including for energy technologies. New technologies can create new industries and improve the productivity and competitiveness of existing ones. These then can drive income and employment growth to benefit communities, states, and the nation.

In the energy arena, technological advances can support state energy policy objectives that include not only economic development opportunity but also energy affordability, reliability and resilience, and environmental sustainability.

According the Energy Futures Initiative and University of Maryland Global Sustainability Initiative, approximately 7,000 clean energy, or “clean tech”, companies exist across the United States, part of a broader energy technology “ecosystem” that includes hundreds of research universities, Federal and industrial research laboratories, public and private utilities, investors, state and local governments, and others.

State Energy Offices are well-positioned to advance energy technology-based economic development by offering programs, funding, financing, partnerships, and policies that can facilitate technological innovation and the commercialization of new and improved technologies. Through the NASEO Innovation Advisory Group, State Energy Offices can learn from one another as well as connect and partner with experts from laboratories, entrepreneurs, and the investment community on strategies for advancing energy technologies.

New and Recent:

  • U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) released a solicitation seeking innovative technology demonstration proposals for funding beginning in FY 2026. The solicitation covers multiple energy, water, and environmental topic areas as well as a topic area for innovative technology transfer approaches. ESTCP projects reduce the technical, cost, and execution risks associated with novel technologies by demonstrating and validating them at DoD installations. Pre-proposals are due by March 6, 2025, at 2:00 pm ET. Pre-proposal instructions and details about the specific Topic Areas are available at here.

  • Adoption Readiness Levels (ARL): A Complement to TRL - To get to deployment, a technology must be de-risked, and ecosystem economics established so all players in the value chain have a viable economic model. Managing a technology portfolio solely through the well-understood and widely used Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) stage-gates is not enough. To describe adoption risks, the DOE Office of Technology Transitions (OTT), in partnership with others, developed an Adoption Readiness Level (ARL) framework to complement TRL. The framework assesses the adoption risks of a technology along 17 dimensions in four core areas, which is translated into a readiness score, representing the readiness of a technology to be adopted by the ecosystem. The Commercial Adoption Readiness Assessment Tool (CARAT) that integrates these dimensions into an assessment of ARL can be downloaded here.