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...
Officials like Max Joel say New York's willingness to support planning and study will help kick-start local solar projects.
People who live in areas where it's hard to own a home and hard to breathe clean air often also find it hard to tap solar power. The New York State Economic Research and Development Authority just signaled an intent to right this imbalance. The agency's new solicitation for bids...
“Flow batteries,” which last many more years and many more hours than the kind we carry in our phones, could make storage of solar or wind power much more straightforward. Firms that make them have commanded high valuations all spring, sometimes with grand and mysterious promises of energy revolution. To...
(Courtesy City Forest Credits.) Beyond soothing imagery, urban trees measurably lift air quality, energy affordability and employment. City Forest Credits aims to quantify what that's worth.
City Forest Credits matches nonprofits and cities to fund urban trees. It describes its mission as one to make “American cities greener, healthier, and more equitable.” By computing value of rainfall interception, air quality benefits and energy savings, the outfit aims to define premium price for nonprofit organizations to charge...
