The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released America’s first plan to ensure security and increase its energy independence. The report, “America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition,” lays out dozens of strategies to build a secure, resilient, and diverse domestic energy sector industrial base.
The report was produced in response to President Biden’s Executive Order 14017, America’s Supply Chains, and is supported by 13 supply chain assessments across the energy sector—ranging from solar energy to semiconductors to cybersecurity.
“America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition” provides seven key areas for boosting supply chain resiliency and rebuilding American manufacturing:
- Increase availability of critical materials – Critical minerals, such as cobalt for batteries and rare earth elements like neodymium for offshore wind, are key components to the clean energy technology we need to achieve our national climate and economic goals.
- Expand domestic manufacturing capabilities – There is opportunity to boost America’s manufacturing capabilities Through efforts such as increased funding for workforce development, investments in manufacturing programs to support the clean energy transition, and coordinating with manufacturers and state, local, and tribal governments to support the establishment of regional clean energy industrial clusters.
- Invest and support the formation of diverse, reliable, and socially responsible foreign supply chains – This will complement domestic opportunities to diversify clean energy supply chains, such as promoting the adoption and implementation of traceability standards to improve global supply chain mapping capabilities. These actions will instill integrity of product custody, and support carbon footprinting of energy supply chains, as well as build on current efforts to support investments in America’s supply chain security—such as investing in a graphite mine in Mozambique—a mineral key to lithium-ion battery manufacturing.
- Increase the adoption and deployment of clean energy – By leveraging federal purchasing power, we can provide a sustained demand signal for both domestic clean energy products and the capability to manufacture them in the United States, advancing activities to grow and sustain the demand signal for sustainable transportation fuels and associated supply chain industries.
- Improve end of life energy-related waste management – This includes advancing technologies to recycle and recover valuable materials like batteries, aluminum, and steel that can continue to feed domestic clean energy supply chains safely and effectively.
- Attract and support a skilled workforce for the clean energy transition – By working across government to embed strong labor standards and support for organized labor in federal funding for the energy sector industrial base, and engaging key stakeholders, we can set strategic nationwide plans to encourage the creation of good, family-sustaining, union jobs with competitive wages and benefits.
- Enhance supply chain knowledge and decision making – Developing supporting studies that assess and quantify the economic, environmental, social, and human rights impacts of different aspects of the energy supply chain for all clean technologies, and the creation and maintenance of a manufacturing and energy supply chain office as well as database and analytical modeling capabilities, will help ensure supply chain policy and investment decisions are grounded in an understanding of critical factors such as risks, dependencies, material availability, and supply chain and market dynamics.
