DEPLOYMENT - the new war-cry for policies.

You see it everywhere and soon it will be in bold capital letters - DEPLOYMENT. Advisors and decision-makers have found their pet-project: speed up the dissemination of technologies and save the planet! The APEC-energy ministers used it in their Darwin declaration end of May. WRI also used it in a recent publication called "Scaling Up". The IEA arranges a workshop on Learning and Deployment. We could probably detect the impatience of policy-makers as a driver behind this wish for acceleration of technology development and quicker market uptake. 

We may, however, have to be careful and take a step back to consider for a moment how fast the deployment can be. The problem is that some of the technologies that are so strongly desired are still in a very immature state. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) does not yet exist at full-scale. The new generations of nuclear are also in their infancy. The IEA report called Energy Technologies Perspectives have put some hope into those two and still they did not reach the top of the list of useful technology areas.

The most useful area is energy efficiency. Most technologies are well-developed and costs are well-known, but they are still not fully disseminated to the market. Also, this is a DEPLOYMENT case, but one different from that where the technology is still not developed. To fully understand the problem and possibilities with deployment, one should study how markets are transformed and created more carefully.

In a recent book, The Shock of the Old, David Edgerton has pointed at the fact that most of the technology the world uses is old and is an adaptation of old technology. Hoping for and only focusing on brand new, not-yet tested or proven technolgy is a risky thing if we are to solve the huge problem ahead of us.