Already, dozens of large-scale renewable-power projects have been planned for the region, and a number of academic institutions across the West are conducting clean-energy research. Brookings senior fellow Mark Muro noted that Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Nevada have been performing solar research - and he suggested that Arizona and southern Nevada could be a solar-research haven in the near future.
"This whole proposal is about scaling up places where we really have an expertise," New Mexico Business Weekly quoted Muro as saying.
Also present in the Mountain West, he said, are four national energy labs that could contribute significantly to future research efforts.
Muro proposes that four to six federally funded research centers be built in the Mountain West to leverage the region's growing expertise on green energy. The research sites, he writes in the New Republic, would have "total annual federal funding between $1 billion and $2 billion."
