Right now, a new political team is stepping in to lead the Department of Energy. This comes mere days after mass layoffs of probationary federal employees and while payments on existing contracts are still stalled due to widespread internal confusion about guidance and even basic process. Ultimately, these cuts and chaos will set the administration back on its goals of energy dominance and economic growth by preventing the most innovative and cutting-edge American technologies from ever reaching the market.

DOE offices specializing in technology commercialization, applied energy offices, and national labs conduct necessary, dedicated work to advance technologies from the laboratory, where ingenuity and research can test a hypothesis, to the field. With congressional funds, many of these offices and their staff have made pivotal breakthroughs, from silica for solar panels to the technology that enabled the fracking boom and secured our position today as the top exporter of natural gas.

Now, new energy technologies are on the brink. In LaMoure County in North Dakota, Morrow County in Oregon, and Manitowoc County in Wisconsin, pilots that are part of the FUZES (Front-of-the-meter Utilization of Zinc Bromide Energy Storage) project aim to demonstrate the potential of zinc-bromide battery storage in large-scale, renewable energy applications. By using low-cost, abundantly available materials, the technology demonstrated by FUZES could help lower costs and improve efficiency in the energy storage sector as a whole. The impact of a project like FUZES reaches well beyond the pilot plants covered by this specific cost-share agreement with DOE. The lessons learned from FUZES will provide essential data that de-risks and accelerates adoption of other similar long duration energy storage technologies, while signaling to private-sector leaders that this type of technology is worth investing in. Indeed, a bipartisan Congress selected the technology areas that offices like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (which made this award last year) tackle specifically because these technologies need federal support to overcome the research to commercialization valley of death. If DOE support falls through or continues to stall, they might never make it out of the lab and into the field.

Public funding is critical to de-risking and scaling clean energy solutions for industrial sectors of the economy where emissions are not predicted to decline without new technology interventions – including in production and manufacturing of cement, steel and chemicals refining.

OCED’s Industrial Demonstrations Program has made gains in this direction funding projects like the First Commercial Electrochemical Cement Manufacturing project led by Sublime Systems. This project aims to demonstrate an innovative way of making cement – the highest emitting part of concrete manufacturing – using an abundantly available feedstock and electrochemical process in place of carbon-intensive limestone and high heat. It’s based in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and will support around 70-90 local jobs once operational. This is exactly the type of high-impact public investment that would have ripple effects because it will de-risk and demonstrate the efficacy of an American-led technology for low-carbon cement.

Moving from testing in the field to bigger pilots that validate the use of new energy technologies is a vital step. Overcoming this valley of death has only been possible for American innovators with the support of teams at DOE and recent bipartisan authorizations and appropriations to expand investment in critical areas.

Another example is the Baytown Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Project led by Calpine. Baytown CCS is a pioneering effort to capture CO2 emissions from the Baytown Energy Center, a natural gas combined-cycle power plant in Baytown, Texas. Using Shell’s CANSOLV CO2 capture system technology on a natural gas plant is a critical step at this important adoption stage for a commercialized technology that has faced other risks in deployment around the United States. The captured CO2 will be sequestered in Gulf Coast saline storage sites, exploring innovative cooling methods to reduce freshwater use. By demonstrating CCS technology on such a large scale, the project could pave the way for widespread adoption in both the energy and industrial sectors, driving decarbonization across critical U.S. infrastructure and accelerating the deployment of similar technologies nationwide.

Innovation shouldn’t be political. There are early-stage clean energy and industrial technologies that are at stake right now. Are we entering a decade of energy dominance led by American innovators, universities, and workers? Or will the technologies of the future be created and manufactured by foreign companies, sold to the U.S. while the economic benefits are instead felt by communities abroad? 

This is a critical moment for American leadership on clean energy. We know the story of innovation through deployment, which is at its zenith right now in renewable energy technologies like wind and solar. Without a DOE leading with strong teams, healthy budgets and spending, and continued work to improve efficiency, the early innovators and projects will fail. That is what is truly at stake in the coming days.