A transmission tower falling into the Mississippi River in late August sent New Orleans into weeks of darkness, highlighting the need for capital to speed deployment of small-scale clean power systems around the world’s waterfront cities. A few weeks earlier, Tesla showed how an established software-driven fix called a virtual...
The administration can tee up safe, low-carbon transit in cities like Charlotte, NC and others without a cooperative Congress.
The United States, under its Paris Agreement commitments, must become carbon-free by 2050. Its Congress appears nowhere close to passing laws that would spark an energy transition, though. So the government's executive branch should craft a green industrial policy that mixes incentives, procurement, tax credits and other tools to bring...
Rio Pramudita contributed this photo of an off-grid installation in Berau on Kalimantan.
To nearly triple renewables' role in Indonesia's economy, the state-owned utility needs to either step back or invite in more collaborators and competitors. It shows no sign of stepping back. Alternatively, venture-like investors and corporate decisionmakers are finding means of working around and with the utility to increase solar for...
We showcased this Nigerian minigrid last summer. We're now sharing a warning that ambitions from multinational investors had better grow more maximalist.
The sweep of nations from Central America across to Asia contains billions of people and untold potential for climate-smart infrastructure. The sweep of capital across those nations, we learned in a panel, looks tepid in light of the job. A set of reports from the International Energy Agency zooms in...
A view from above, courtesy CIFOR, of a promised capital city for Indonesia. Do you see a place for a solar grid?
Indonesia's president promised to stoke economic development by relocating the capital city. Can this project spark a pattern of investment in utility-scale solar? It can, but activists and investors need to see through a tangle of loyalties among the government, the state-owned utility and the coal business. This chronicle explains...
The President made promises. His cabinet looks promising. What do you watch for now?
Jennifer Granholm, former governor of the auto-manufacturing mecca in Michigan, became the United States secretary of energy on February 25. Granholm now oversees a revamped agency that includes energy-justice advocate Shalanda Baker in a key role and other clean-energy doers in high places. Is this a downpayment on President Joe...
When you fiddle with spreadsheet cells or engineering models all day in pursuit of clean energy, the sound of stasis can clang in your ears. So after local and national politicians blamed wind turbines for a power outage that interrupted water supplies and left people freezing for days across the...
Now that we needn't think of solar as an "alternative" source, we also can find alternatives to a system in which way more of solar goes to affluent whites.
Look behind the dominant curve, on which solar power becomes cheaper to supply while corporate commitments, voters' priorities and scientific data goose demand for solar. You'll see that too many people find themselves locked out of the solar market or barred from influencing its direction. Two speakers challenged Yale audiences...
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...
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...
