Ben Wa, I'm hoping you took my label of "Ben Wa-breath" for the light-hearted poke I meant it to be.
I pointed out specific examples of leading edge semiconductor and compound semiconductor technologies being developed at Sandia National Labs, and being commercialized by leading technical companies. If you poke around the Sandia, Los Alamos, Argonne, or Oak Ridge websites for any length of time, you'll see many examples of applied R&D leveraging the core science-base of the labs to solve long-standing industrial problems.
You labeled the Next Generation Lighting Initiative Act "a dubious government boondoggle that will muck up what the free market is already doing." I strongly disagree with your assessment. The free-market occupants (commercial companies like CREE, Agilent, and Emcore) are conducting applied research and fighting production problems on a day-to-day basis. Their current products are gaining traction, but not fast enough to change the energy needs of the nation. Brightness is not good enough, yields aren't high enough, reliability isn't good enough...all these issues drive costs up and retard market penetration.
Some of these companies have long-term proprietary research sponsored at universities, as well as agreements with the labs to solve their thorniest problems. When the issues are deeper than they can solve themselves, but they need solutions in far shorter time than the time constant of a university professor, the labs are a good resource. The link to the Emcore story illustrates this.
My understanding of what's being proposed is to dramatically shorten the time to commercialization of next generation lighting (take the energy conversion efficiencies much closer to those theoretical possible) by conducting pre-competitive research on the challenging materials, processing, and diagnostics issues. The payoff for the companies that participate is new products at a faster pace at a lower cost. The payoff for the US taxpayer is drastically reduced energy consumption for lighting and associated parasitic loads - this is a huge payoff. The nation is a lot better off if we have to import less energy, and I'd rather see an investment in this type of approach that a pointless drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
Although I have significant breadth myself (technically and around my mid-section), it would be good to hear why you think such an effort would be a waste of resources. I'd be willing to bet tootsie-roll money that CREE is a backer of the bill, and that if it passes, CREE will be one of the first companies to commit to participation. jbk |
