This site in Lynchburg, VA evokes tobacco production - but the whole region can embrace clean energy generation. (Photo by Kipp Teague, via Flickr Creative Commons.)
The Tobacco Region of Virginia, as its name shows, knows economic transitions. It can use its expertise in workforce development and industrial support to train workers and incentivize investors to speed the clean energy transition through this historic section of a rapidly changing state.
A container ship on its way to a commercial port...or is it? (Photo by Ana Ulin, courtesy Creative Commons.)
The Pacific Coast of North America is home to five of the 10 largest continental ports, more than 55 million people and an economic output of $3 trillion (Pacific Coast Collaborative, 2022). Collaboration on the scale of the Pacific Coast can provide a cohesive approach to maritime industry decarbonization to...
(Photo by Kevin Oliver via Flickr Creative Commons.) It was no precipitous proclamation about traffic that reprogrammed New York City's economy.
Many have boiled down the seminal Inflation Reduction Act, and many are burrowing into it. To set boundaries and context beyond the timing of tax credits, consider an analogy to how another blockbuster set of policies altered one of the world's more emissions-intensive cities.
At a deal level, tax equity never looked easy. At an institutional economy-nudging level, its harder still. This installment sets out some structural blocks and ways over them.
In San Francisco, youth are protesting the climate crisis as pledges emerge in Glasgow. (Photo outside BlackRock's San Francisco office by Peg Hunter, via Flickr Creative Commons.)
A bumper crop of climate pledges and plans land in your inbox, but how many make it to your term sheet? This investigation follows a few global finance pledges, setting them against capital needs and focusing on partnerships and local efforts as units of action.
Apeel, a startup that's recently drawn venture investment, makes an edible coating to extend produce's shelf life. (Photo courtesy apeel.com .)
Financing through each stage of a venture's growth is possible - and increasingly available for climate-related startups. How do startups keep gaining investors as they grow into commercial companies and build their emissions-reduction bonafides at the same time?
(Courtesy Governor Phil Murphy's Flickr account.) A new capacity market framework for PJM could make offshore wind from this segment of New Jersey more competitive more quickly.
Now, to advance the buildout of renewable energy, FERC should set a process and timeframe for adopting a new market structure. That structure should be adaptable and transparent, advance state offshore wind policy goals, meet consumer clean energy and equity goals, and maintain reliability.
(Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.) A solar array in Virginia stands for the kinds of investment that could crowd in with a properly targeted federal carbon price.
Climate scientists in the latest
Report warned that without immediate large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will cause devastating economic and human losses. Policymakers must come together to implement a comprehensive climate change strategy in the United States.
(Courtesy of Jo Zimny Photos via Flickr Creative Commons.) Ithaca took its buildings off fossil fuel. It aims to take its job base in the same direction.
At the local level, a Green New Deal can crowd in private capital. In this update of a Financing and Deploying Clean Energy policy memo, the sustainability director for Ithaca, NY explains the holistic economic and energy-justice strategy driving the city's project to decarbonize all its buildings.
(Photo courtesy of FERC.) This conference, in 2018, preceded today's need for infrastructure. Will the current Commission's new rules speed the response?
With the Infrastructure and Jobs Act allocating $65 billion for the construction of new transmission lines and boosting the Federal Energy Regulation Commission’s (FERC) authority in development, the nation looks poised for a rapid transformation of the grid. Right? That depends on how one defines terms. A recent FERC conference...