R&D Advancement, Technology Diffusion, and Impact on Evaluation of Public R&D

In a 2001 report titled 'Research at DOE: Was It Worth It?', a National Research Council (NRC) committee defined a set of simplifying rules to estimate the net economic benefits from technologies supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). This NREL paper evaluates the efficacy of the NRC rules compared to published literature on acceleration of technology introduction into markets, technologydiffusion, and infrastructure change. It also offers considerations for revisions of the rules that call for the use of technology and sector-specific data, advanced forecasting techniques, and sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the methodology.