Clean Energy Finance Forum

Where oil has flowed for decades, plunges in oil price can't make fossil fuels outshine solar in terms of cost.

BP has become the biggest oil and gas company to promise to cut its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Bernard Looney, BP’s new chief executive, said that it was “no longer enough” to provide reliable and affordable energy, it had to be cleaner too.

"In the latest attempt by the Trump administration to obstruct the clean energy transition and artificially revive a dying coal industry, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — or FERC — has issued an order creating new rules that unfairly favor electricity from coal plants over cleaner and less costly alternatives."

Though 45% of utility employees surveyed in Utility Dive's 2020 State of the Electric Utility Survey see the transition's cost — including stranded assets — as a top risk for the sector, only 18% see generation retirements and stranded assets as a top concern and just 14% said stranded assets present a major challenge to a changing fuel mix.

So-called transition bonds are designed to help issuers in dirty industries, such as oil production and coal mining, finance their shift to cleaner ways of doing business.

The country’s foremost utility geeks descended on San Antonio to let their inner wonks run wild. The conference, DistribuTech International, featured the nation’s largest utilities mingling with service providers demonstrating their latest technologies and offerings on impressively large screens and surprisingly intricate displays.

Microsoft unveiled plans to invest $1 billion to back companies and organizations working on technologies to remove or reduce carbon from the earth’s atmosphere, saying efforts to merely emit less carbon aren’t enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Researchers have looked at historical buying patterns across multiple countries and U.S. states, and found that starting near $1,000/kW of net present value broader uptake of residential solar begins, at $3,000/kW the market is really overheating, and at $7,000/kW it’s projected that 50% of viable home owners would be financially motivated to adopt solar power.