As Director of the Innovation Initiative at the Clean Economy Project, Farah Benahmed works at the intersection of policy, technology, and institutions, focused on fixing the systems that determine whether innovation actually reaches the real world.
In this CleanEcon Leadership Spotlight, Farah shares her perspective on what is holding clean energy back, what needs to change, and how leaders can think more holistically about impact.
What’s the biggest structural barrier standing between clean energy innovation and real-world scale, and how do we break it?
At the most basic level, we are not investing at the scale required. Historically, when the United States has treated innovation as a national priority, such as during the Manhattan Project, we have seen transformative results, including nuclear energy generation. That same level of ambition has not yet been applied to all clean energy solutions, even though the stakes are just as high.
Funding alone is not the whole story. There are many non-cost and non-technical barriers to commercializing energy solutions that further complicate this story. The innovation process is non-linear and filled with feedback loops and valleys of death that can delay a critical technology from ever reaching the market without the proper funding and support. Within the federal government, particularly at the Department of Energy, there is no clear, coordinated pathway to move technologies from the lab into the market.
If a startup is given support in the early stages of its development by the federal government, as it continues to move through the innovation process, there is no formal handoff between federal offices that work on different innovation stages.Innovators are left to navigate a fragmented landscape of inconsistent office norms, solicitations, often having to burn more cash and spend more time learning about red tape than focusing on the development of their solution.
At the same time, there is a major gap in the federal government for supporting the mid-stages of the innovation process. Startups looking for pilot- or large-scale demonstration support, for example, struggle to find public programs across the federal government that have the right amount of funding and tools to support. Lastly, the Energy Dominance Financing Program is a great program for debt financing but has traditionally operated too conservatively and slowly to bring critical emerging technologies to market.
Breaking these barriers requires completely reimagining how the federal government prioritizes innovating new energy technologies and building them at home and abroad for the benefit of our economic competitiveness and national security.
What within the clean energy or climate space most needs to be challenged right now?
I’ve been in the philanthropic space for about six years, building grantmaking strategies and watching how my peers build theirs. Too often, funding is tied to individual technologies, sectors, or narrow solutions, forcing difficult tradeoffs about which topics and organizations deserve priority. That approach misses the bigger picture.
This space is a constant moving target. The political environment shifts quickly, as do innovation, research, and advocacy. Advancing technologies one by one doesn’t deliver the scale or durability required. What matters is whether the ecosystem can support innovation across stages and over time.
Progress depends on thinking more holistically and flexibly about grantmaking. Policy experts and advocates need the freedom and support to move at the speed of the moment. That means more abundance and more strategic thinking at every level.
Funders should provide flexible support, build organizational capacity, and enable work across near- and long-term horizons. If we want durable climate, economic, and competitiveness outcomes, we have to stop treating innovation as a series of disconnected bets.
Where do you see the greatest opportunity to align policy, capital, and deployment to move faster?
The biggest opportunity right now is developing policy solutions for the emerging clean solutions in the middle- to late- stages of the innovation process. They’re so close to reaching the market and this ecosystem is powering through to support. There is intense activity right now. Private capital is experimenting with new financing structures, energy buyers are pushing boundaries, and many actors are trying to solve the same challenges in parallel.
Take next generation nuclear power. Yes, I have favorites too. Nuclear companies are demonstrating their technology, moving through the licensing process, building a new fuel supply chain, and rejuvenating the nuclear workforce. There are plans to build new nuclear power across the United States and around the globe. It’s truly a remarkable sight to see.
The opportunity is in alignment. Policymakers, financiers, NGOs, and the private sector need to be learning from each other in real time, sharing information about barriers, constraints, and what is actually working. That feedback loop makes it possible to design smarter policies to step in where the market genuinely cannot go on its own.
What experience most shaped how you lead and make decisions today?
It’s really the combination of experiences across government, advocacy, and philanthropy.
Early in my career, I worked in the front office of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) across the Obama and Trump Administrations, supporting the Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy and the NE enterprise. That role gave me a front-row seat to how decisions are made, from budgeting to communications to overseeing a national lab, and how the government interacts with an entire budding industry. It also showed me where systems break down and where change is needed.
Later, working at a leading energy policy NGO (s/o to Third Way) taught me how policy ideas are developed, how coalitions function, and how advocacy actually moves. At Breakthrough Energy, I learned how funders think, how to assess the landscape holistically, and how to collaborate with various actors toward a shared goal.
I draw on all of those perspectives depending on the challenge in front of me and the policy goal at hand.
What should the next generation of energy advocates focus on now to drive durable impact later?
Whatever your area of focus, whether it’s a specific technology, sector, or near-term policy priority, it is critical to step back and think systemically.
Specialization matters, but durable impact comes from understanding how your work fits into a broader ecosystem. The more advocates can connect their efforts to the whole, rather than treating problems in isolation, the more effective we will be at driving long-term change.
What innovation pathway or technology area is under-discussed today but critical for long-term scale?
One underappreciated area is clean firm power.
Our grid needs clean, 24/7 energy technologies to operate reliably. And clean firm solutions bring down the overall cost of decarbonization. Clean firm technologies can also provide clean industrial heat, produce clean hydrogen, desalinate water, power deep space missions, develop radioisotopes for the medicine, and more.
Therefore, philanthropy and advocates need to scale their efforts to bring these solutions to market and deploy them at scale at a record we have never seen before. Clear and effective messaging of their benefits to economy-wide decarbonization, national and energy security, and economic competitiveness must ramp up not just in the beltway, but across the United States at every level.
We also need to resolve the project financing challenge. Clean firm power is often more expensive than existing options, and our energy bills continue to increase for everyday consumers through utility bills. If we do not proactively spread the financial risk of building first-of-a-kind clean firm projects and create an effective feedback loop, we risk losing all the potential that comes with bringing these new innovations to market. And we risk losing the public’s support just when we need it most.
How should the federal innovation system evolve to move emerging technologies from promise to deployment faster?
There are two paths to consider. One assumes unlimited resources and staffing. The other is rooted in today’s reality, constrained budgets, limited staff, and an evolving political environment.
Right now, the focus has to be on changes that can deliver outsized impact with limited resources. There are ways to improve coordination and processes, access to effective tools, reduce friction, and better support innovators without major new funding, and that is one area in which we are concentrating our work.
At the same time, we are thinking ahead. If another political window opens for more ambitious reform, we want to be ready with a clear vision of what the system should look like. For now, the work is about staying grounded in reality while building toward something bigger.
