Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
另一封 Mail Shot，直接上机器翻译，Jingyi 会阅读一遍然后控制篇幅大意。
01 译文
核能淘汰，氢能进入：各国投入能源研发资金的地方
By Nathaniel Bullard
自50年前国际能源署成立以来，它已经汇编了
31个成员国政府 用于能源的研发预算数据。这让我们详细了解了有能源意识的发达国家是如何随着时间的推移优先考虑研究的。
国际能源署的数据系列始于1974年，当时正值第一次油价冲击。数据显示，从1974年到1980年，能源研发翻了一番，然后在十多年的时间里，随着油价暴跌并保持低位，能源研发稳步下降。研发在2000年后又开始上升。在这一点上，有几个因素占据了主导地位。
首先，不仅是油价上涨，而且能源和大宗商品价格普遍上涨，在2008年全球金融危机之前飙升。
第二个是政府重新对赞助能源研究和创新感兴趣，无论是在大衰退复苏期间，还是在2010年代末和2020年代。按实际美元计算，
国际能源署成员国 现在为能源研发投入的资金比过去50年中的任何时候都多。
（如果你想知道为什么 2009 年在上图中是如此明显的异类，那么作为
《美国复苏和再投资法案》的一部分，美国政府在这一年投入了 160 亿美元用于公共能源研发。不用说，自那以后，这笔支出就再也没有重复过。）
与最重要的数字一样重要的是特定技术或技术组的研发预算随时间的变化。
在数据集涵盖的几乎整个时期，
核能获得的研发预算是所有技术中最多的 。它始于20世纪70年代中期，每年近80亿美元的公共研发，到20世纪80年代初，这一数字将再次增长一半以上。然而，自那以后，核预算大幅下降，从20世纪90年代中期起又回到了40亿至50亿美元之间。它的预算再次增加，但仍远低于近50年前的水平。
与核能一样，
可再生能源在 20世纪70年代的研究预算不断增长，在20世纪80年代初达到了类似的峰值。1986年，总额回落到10亿美元以下，直到2002年才两次超过10亿美元。随后稳步上升，2009年得益于美国的大力推动，自2014年以来一直保持在30亿美元的区间。
1973年，能源效率获得了全部3亿美元的公共研发资金，但它遵循了不同的模式。与核能或可再生能源不同，它的预算几乎每年都在稳步增长，尽管它也经历了20世纪80年代中期的平静。效率从本世纪初的不到20亿美元增加到2021年的60亿美元，增长了两倍，现在是国际能源署成员国能源研发预算的最大接受者。
数据中还有一些其他模式值得注意。第一个是化石燃料研发资金，与核能一样，该资金在20世纪70年代达到峰值（2009年再次出现峰值）。该预算包括对碳捕获和储存的研究，因此值得关注的是，随着政府对CCS的新承诺，这一数字将如何随着时间的推移而变化。
第二个是“交叉技术”的研发，这些技术结合了多个领域的努力。1974年，这一群体获得了9.85亿美元（占总预算的9%），去年获得了近39亿美元（约占总预算15%）。
最后，还有氢。 直到2002年，它才作为国际能源署成员国的项目出现，当时它只收到5700万美元。然而，资金正在跳跃式增长：2005年达到10亿美元，2015年缓慢下降到不到5亿美元，然后在2021年达到近14亿美元，2022年达到31亿美元。在这个水平上，氢气的研发与可再生能源的研发支出相差不远。鉴于全球对氢气的补贴在两年内翻了两番，达到2800亿美元，公众对氢气研发的投资似乎将继续增加。
在所有这些数字中，最重要的是最基本的：247亿美元，这是国际能源署31个成员国去年在能源研发方面的公共部门支出总额。这些美元的部门构成值得注意和关注，因为它反映了国家在能源技术发展和安全方面的优先事项。但最重要的是整卷。用于基础研究的每一美元都很重要。想象一下，如果20世纪80年代初的研究资金在此后的几十年里继续以同样的水平甚至更高的水平流动，全球能源会如何发展。
02 原文
Nuclear is out, hydrogen is in: Where countries put energy R&D money
By Nathaniel Bullard
Since the International Energy Agency was founded five decades ago, it has compiled data on the government research and development budgets devoted to energy in its 31 member countries. This lets us take a detailed look at how energy-conscious developed countries have prioritized research over time.
The IEA’s data series begins in 1974, during the first oil price shock. The numbers show energy R&D doubling from 1974 to 1980 and then falling steadily for more than a decade as oil prices tumbled and remained low. R&D begins rising again after the year 2000. And at that point, a couple of factors take hold.
The first is not just rising oil prices, but rising energy and commodity prices in general, spiking just before the global financial crisis in 2008. The second is renewed government interest in sponsoring energy research and innovation, both during the recovery from the Great Recession and again during the later 2010s and into the 2020s. In real dollar terms, IEA member countries now allocate more money to energy R&D than they have at any point in the past 50 years.
(If you’re wondering why 2009 is such a distinct outlier in the chart above, it’s the year the US government devoted $16 billion to public energy R&D as part of the American Recovery and Re-investment Act. Needless to say, that outlay has not been repeated since.)
Just as important as the topline figures are the changes in R&D budgets for specific technologies or groups of technologies over time.
For almost the entire period covered by the data set, nuclear energy has received the most R&D budget of any technology. It began with nearly $8 billion of annual public R&D in the mid-1970s, a figure that would rise by more than half again through the early 1980s. Since then, however, the nuclear budget has fallen significantly, back into the range of $4 billion to $5 billion from the mid-1990s onward. Its budget is increasing again, but still well below where it was almost 50 years ago.
Renewable energy, like nuclear power, saw growing research budgets through the 1970s and a similar peak in the early 1980s. The total then fell back below $1 billion in 1986 and only twice exceeded $1 billion until 2002. It then rose steadily before receiving a huge boost in 2009, thanks to the US, and has remained in the range of $3 billion since 2014.
Energy efficiency, which received all of $300 million in public research and development funding in 1973, follows a different pattern. Unlike nuclear or renewables, its budget has grown steadily almost every year, though it too experienced a mid-1980s lull. Having tripled from less than $2 billion at the start of the century to $6 billion in 2021, efficiency is now the single largest recipient of IEA member countries’ energy R&D budgets.
There are a few other patterns worth noting in the data. The first is fossil fuel R&D funding, which like nuclear peaked in the 1970s (with the exception, again, of that spike in 2009). This budget includes research into carbon capture and storage, so it will be worth watching how this figure changes over time with new government commitments to CCS.
The second is R&D into “cross-cutting technologies” that combine efforts in more than one sector. This group received $985 million (9% of the total budget) in 1974, and almost $3.9 billion (or 15% of the total) last year.
Finally, there is hydrogen. It doesn’t even show up as an IEA member-state line item until 2002, when it received just $57 million. Funding is growing in leaps, though: It reached $1 billion in 2005, slowly declined to less than $500 million in 2015 and then reached almost $1.4 billion in 2021 and $3.1 billion in 2022. At that level, hydrogen research and development is not far behind renewable energy R&D spending. Given that global subsidies to hydrogen have quadrupled in two years, to $280 billion, it seems probable that public investment in hydrogen R&D will continue to rise.
Of all these numbers, the most important one is the most basic: $24.7 billion, the total public-sector spend by 31 IEA members on energy R&D last year. The sector composition of those dollars is worth noting, and watching, as it reflects country priorities for energy technology development and security. But it is the full volume that is most important. Every dollar devoted to fundamental research matters. Just imagine how global energy could have evolved if the research dollars of the early 1980s had continued to flow at the same level, or even higher, in the decades since.
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