Climate scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report warned that without immediate large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will cause devastating economic and human losses. The world can no longer afford inaction. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle must come together to implement a...
Can transmission of clean energy become more competitive and more ambitious with a federal tax credit? The author, a sustainable finance professional, argues on a bipartisan basis that it can and that transmission tax credits will tap a multibillion-dollar pipeline of ready projects.
At the local level, a Green New Deal can crowd in private capital. In this update of a Financing and Deploying Clean Energy policy memo, the sustainability director for Ithaca, NY explains the holistic economic and energy-justice strategy driving the city's project to decarbonize all its buildings.
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(Photo courtesy of FERC.) This conference, in 2018, preceded today's need for infrastructure. Will the current Commission's new rules speed the response?
With the Infrastructure and Jobs Act allocating $65 billion for the construction of new transmission lines and boosting the Federal Energy Regulation Commission’s (FERC) authority in development, the nation looks poised for a rapid transformation of the grid. Right? That depends on how one defines terms. A recent FERC conference...
The current Congress has power to kick-start grid upgrades. Does it want to use that power to the fullest?
The author, an energy professional and Illinois resident, argues for transmission investment as a lynchpin of infrastructure investment. She makes the case that other infrastructure goals need robust clean-energy transmission to become real.
(Courtesy Billy Wilson, via Flickr Creative Commons.) The author argues that Octopus Energy needs to reach out to occupants of homes like these to make good on its post-carbon promises.
According to this consultant, Octopus Energy must build measurable positive momentum towards the customer-centric (and just) energy transition it implies in its branding. It should invest capital toward changes in marketing and customer support. By doing so, this memo suggests, Octopus can deliver more fully on its promise.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the world's leading asset manager, has called on all managers to align with climate goals. Do ESG metrics do that? (This photo shows Fink with the then-chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Duncan Niederauer, at the FT CNBC Nightcap in Davos in 2014. Courtesy the Financial Times.)
There’s an elephant in the fund: Earlier this year, some of the most vocal and proactive ESG firms, each with multiple commitments towards a net-zero future, actively funded lobbying efforts against President Biden's infrastructure bill and Build Back Better Act. These bills contain some of the most assertive climate provisions...
Illinois' government made policy while the political sun shines on renewable targets. What happens next? (This image comes from the Chicago Sun-Times.)
This September, on a sunny late summer morning in Chicago, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker signed a comprehensive piece of environmental legislation called the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA). Standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, just outside the world-famous Shedd Aquarium, Pritzker heralded the bill as a major...
A container ship on its way to a commercial port...or is it? (Photo by Ana Ulin, courtesy Creative Commons.)
With slowdowns affecting shipping and severe weather affecting demand, the price of natural gas soared and overwhelmed all other energy strategies across Asia and Europe this fall. The price crisis reveals how the world's decarbonizing economies remain tethered to fossil fuels and to the antidemocratic states that often control them...
Financing and Deploying Clean Energy: Program Insights
Nothing succeeds like exceeding. In this policy memo, which she wrote as part of coursework for the certificate in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy, attorney Joan Beckner makes a nonpartisan argument for delivering all of Texas' energy from clean sources by 2050. The memo Beckner wrote for her class includes...
(Photo from Energy News.) Wanja Wallemyr contributes millions of kilowatt-hours to a grid that doesn't properly value it.
What would a prosumer-friendly policy achieve? The Financing and Deploying Clean Energy participant who proposed that direction talked to an entrepreneur whose co-op feeds wind energy into Sweden's electricity system. Wanja Wallemyr's experience outlines what a grid full of prosumers can mean for power and empowerment.
The Center has worked virtually this fall with dozens of professionals earning certificates in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Learners in the program study the history, physics, innovation pathways and technological possibility sparking the carbon-free economy. One learning strategy involves crafting policy memos and op/ed pieces on issues where public...
CBEY introduced a certificate program in 2019 that teaches professionals the policy, science, finance tools and innovation paths that define the path to a carbon-free future. As the second year of the certificate revs up next month, certificate holders reflect on how the program taught them what to ask, what...
The EU needs to open financing channels to more providers to support the intent of the Green Deal.(Photo from Qvinnovindar.)
Why should "prosumers" - individuals who make electricity for others to purchase- encounter brakes on their output in European Union policy? In this memo, which the author wrote first in the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, the case emerges for releasing female prosumers' entrepreneurial energy. A linked interview with...
