Addressing the Scale-Up Challenge for Clean Energy Process Technologies - CleanTechnica

The article by Dhruv Soni highlights the critical challenge of scaling up clean energy process technologies in the United States amid the urgent need to address climate change. While the U.S. leads in early-stage innovation across sectors like carbon capture, hydrogen, sustainable fuels, and battery materials, it currently lags in scaling these technologies to commercial levels—a role increasingly filled by countries like China. The traditional model of innovation ("zero-to-one") followed by external scale-up ("one-to-one-hundred") is no longer sufficient given intensifying environmental crises, geopolitical shifts, and the pressing timeline to meet 2030 and 2050 emissions targets. Scientific innovation is no longer the bottleneck; rather, the key challenge lies in deploying technologies at scale and rebuilding domestic industrial capacity. Scale-up in chemical engineering involves increasing process throughput from lab or pilot scales to commercial scales, a transition fraught with technical, financial, and operational complexities. Physical and chemical behaviors do not scale linearly, and first-of-a-kind