Energy without emissions causes more job creation and less climate risks. To expand across the recovering nation, energy needs to come with priorities, prices and placements that emphasize justice for people who have lived with systematic racism. In this summary and exploration, scholar Dan Kammen lays out the case for...
Construction near forests can't cohere with insurance premiums. (Courtesy Elmer Frederick Fischer/Corbis.)
Bring in the ethicists, actuaries and silviculturists to figure out how to insure homeowners who buy lots at the edge of wilderness that gets more combustible each year. Then, to really complicate things, reckon with the costs to insure utilities in the same territory. In California, nobody from the insurers...
Delivering clean energy should mean delivering equitable health effects, says a researcher.
The case for joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which Pennsylvania's governor embraced in 2019, asserts that trading carbon credits can marshal market discipline to achieve policy goals for broad decarbonization. In this example from the policy-memo segment of our online Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, our writer argues...
In 2020, absolute decarbonization pledges mark software companies' elite rank as surely as triple-digit IPO share prices did in 1999. But Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google all set distinct strategies for keeping their promises. Google's parent company, through the words of its CEO and the analysis of those who follow...
(Courtesy Sol Systems.) The world will turn ever more to solar, but steep complexities lie ahead.
Krisztina Pjecska’s been advancing on a mission to extend solar energy’s reach, to the point that she and her colleagues at Sol Systems have started reckoning with a twist in the path. Solar has become economical, reliable and more popular. It’s also become harder to site and insure. “The more...
Drawing a line in the sand, SunZia worked for 14 years on its transmission progress.
When planning to decarbonize the grid, many analysts see transmission lines as analogous to "political will." It's necessary and it's rarely possible to summon it from scratch. In the Southwest, though, a private enterprise has pushed forward on work to deliver renewable power from a windy swath of New Mexico...
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...
Is this the direction for decarbonizing- and for big hydrocarbon concerns? (Image courtesy of Pixabay.)
Equinor Strategy Summit, Norway, 2019 – Executives of Equinor (formerly known as Statoil) were holed up in a room drinking hot chocolate after a day of skiing. Strategy staff members presented them with a list of unidentified companies (“Company 1,” “Company 2,” “Company 3”) along with historical and projected returns...
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...
Perspectives from State Experts
For Joseph Fiordaliso, progress toward a fossil-free economy flows from top-level leadership to street-level entrepreneurship.
What's on the horizon for New Jersey after the Covid-19 crisis? When we spoke with Joseph Fiordaliso, the president of the state's Board of Public Utilities, the vision includes electric cars and buses, wind turbines in the ocean, and busy factories making wind-energy equipment. A Newark native with a crackly...
In this interview, Susan Glickman, Florida director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, discusses the status of clean energy development in the state. Glickman lays out policy battles over renewable portfolio and energy efficiency standards, the state’s history of natural gas consumption, growth in utility solar programs, and an...
South Dakota is a national leader in the proportion of its electricity mix coming from wind energy. CEFF spoke to South Dakota Public Utilities Commission Vice Chairman Chris Nelson about the status of clean energy in the state. He contends that the rise of wind in the state is traceable...
Texas offers an instructive case study for the growth of renewable energy. Most of the state’s electricity is delivered through the deregulated Electric Reliability Council of Texas market. The state has long since surpassed its mandated renewable portfolio standard, so market dynamics dictate the ongoing pace of renewables growth. Nonetheless...
