Understanding the lifecycle of energy technologies is important for policymakers interested in modeling and predicting the likely future path of technological development.  The situation is complicated because many novel technologies draw from other related fields, with such knowledge spillovers playing an important role in technological advancement.  Funds from this grant support work by a team led by Erin Baker and Anna Goldstein at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst  who are studying the pathways of two newly developed energy technologies: offshore wind energy and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.  Through a careful analysis of patent records, the team will attempt to quantify where each technology is in its lifecycle, how much of the technology represents genuinely new innovation, and how much of their technological development is the application of more mature technologies from neighboring fields. For instance, in the case of newly viable offshore wind farms, in order to assess the potential for future growth it is important to understand how much the viability of these technologies depends on advances in wind tower or blade design taken from their land-based counterparts and what can be leearned from applying processes originally developed for offshore oil and gas rigs. The same goes for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which draws on drilling and related technologies developed for other applications. Since both wind and bioenergy will play an increasingly central role as the U.S. transitions to a low-carbon economy, the project promises to advance our understanding of the likely pace of innovation of these two crucial technologies in the energy sector.