Clean Energy Finance Forum

A smallish company's CEO held forth to CNBC on December 9 about a partnership with a slightly bigger outfit called General Motors to source and supply EV battery components from a site in California.

Venture investors and auto-company directors rarely take strategic pointers from urban-planning activists. In light of this November 19 essay pinpointing electric SUVs' sustainability failings, perhaps they should.

This June 8 article, riffing off an architectural association's awards, shows how green engineering can lower a building's energy cost and improve its returns.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc and EDP Renovaveis SA agreed to sell power from a wind farm they’re building in the Atlantic Ocean for a record-low price. The 804-megawatt Mayflower wind farm, located south of Martha’s Vineyard, will supply electricity to utilities in Massachusetts for $58 a megawatt-hour over the life of the contract.

Now, in states from New York to California, the focus of the conversation has moved from: How can utilities weather the shift toward distributed energy without suffering big losses? to: How can utilities, their customers and the electric grid as a whole best harness the benefits of distributed energy resources?

Early this month, three community-choice aggregators and one municipal utility serving much of California’s San Francisco Bay Area launched a 30-megawatt distributed energy storage-plus-solar solicitation. It breaks ground on multiple fronts.

Though Vivint sales representatives knock on “millions of doors a year,” CEO David Bywater said on the company’s Q3 earnings call that recent power outages have pushed many potential customers to reconsider renewables and storage.

In a nutshell, the state needs utilities that partner with communities to maximize local resilience and self-sufficiency, and whose financial fortunes are tied to their performance in that pursuit.

Bill Johnson is a utility executive, not a climate scientist. That didn’t stop the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) CEO from wading into California’s complex climate conditions. Noting that Northern California’s wildfire risk has grown exponentially in recent years, Johnson placed much of the blame on climate change, not PG&E’s compromised electricity grid.

Rival developer teams filed formal proposals with Connecticut regulators to build massive new wind farms off New England’s southern coast, with the state having mandated that 40% of its electricity be generated from renewable sources within a decade’s time.