This paper makes an effort to collect, harmonize, and describe data on power-related R&D and innovation for a sample of 16 countries over the years 1995-2007. We focus on the upstream energy sector (power) due to its relevance for energy security concerns both in developed and in developing countries and its importance with respect to climate policy. A novel contribution of the paper is a methodology based on inter-sectoral trade flows to estimate an upper bound of private power-related R&D in a given country. This allows gauging the extent to which energy R&D investments are embedded in intermediate inputs. We compare our estimates of private and public R&D with those available in the literature, which often refer to shorter time frames and fewer countries, as well as with data coming from top innovators in the energy sector and venture capital (VC). Finally, we combine the resulting R&D time series with trends in patent statistics to provide a qualitative assessment of R&D effectiveness.