Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation was a report released after a three year research project by the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group at the Harvard Kennedy School. The study was released on Nov. 22, 2011 at a Washington, D.C. event for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The United States and the world need a revolution in energy technology—a revolution that would improve the performance of our energy systems to face the challenges ahead.
I was approached in April (2011) for what I thought was a fairly straightforward project, and ended up working on it (in between various re-writes, edits, and additions) for the next 6 months. The size of the report made it necessary to split it into 3 different books; an executive summary, the main report, and a robust 150 page appendix. I don’t think the client or I realized how massive the final product would be. The book(s) ended up at almost 500 pages—much larger than either of us originally anticipated.
The text included close to 200 graphs, tables, charts and mathematical equations which needed to be re-drawn or re-formatted to fit the publication.
The report focused on some specific energy initiatives (nuclear energy, fossil energy, solar energy, utility-scale energy storage, and energy efficiency), and how best to invest in those initiatives going forward. With the diverse set of topics, as well as the technical nature of the text, I was glad to have the extra time this project afforded to create a concept for the cover. I ended up using those initiatives as the basis for the images on the cover and then re-worked it as necessary to co-ordinate with the specific content for each chapter spread.
I have included the alternate covers here as well as some of the chapter spreads.
