A 2015 Harvard Business School study estimated that by enabling producers to get more natural gas out of the ground, fracking contributed $430 billion to the U.S. economy just in 2014. Not every investment has proved this successful, especially in well-publicized cases of grants and loan guarantees for specific companies, such as Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that failed in 2011 after receiving millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees. [...] a federal research program with few failures would be too conservative. All in all, the National Research Council study indicates that the Energy Department’s investments have paid off, with energy efficiency showing a 300 percent return on investment, and even fossil fuel programs showing a 2 percent return. Batteries are also a good bet at a time when budgets are limited because the money needed for research is relatively small, compared to the large investments required for nuclear research or demonstration projects for fossil fuel electric generation technologies. [...] in an earlier study, colleagues and I found that federal investments have a strong chance of significantly lowering the costs of advanced batteries. Even better, burning biomass such as trees or corn stover (stalks, leaves and cobs) along with fossil fuels would actually lead to a net reduction of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, since it would sequester carbon that the plants absorbed from the air as they grew. [...] that’s one reason we have federal funding.