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(Photo by Sam LaRussa via Flickr.) This coal-fired power plant outside Austin, Texas, is one of thousands across the country that owners will have to finance out of service.
Imagine that you are a utility owner. You anticipated your plant would last 40 years and invested accordingly. Now you see the value of coal plummeting, but you can't strand your assets. Someone mentions securitization. You wonder: What's that?
On an unspoiled site or an unloved one, a renewable-energy installation navigates tricky economics.
Solar and wind projects are essential to the energy evolution, but most of them take up a lot of space. This story looks at the two main sorts of land developers can use and walks through economics, strategies, and public policies that can foster solar and wind while attending to...
(Photo by Oran Viriyincy via Flickr Creative Commons.) Where can the 20th Century grid consistently carry 21st Century energy across regional lines?
To someone facing a wildfire in California or bunking in a shelter after a flood in Louisiana, what does power supply from a far corner of the country have to do with survival? Quite a bit, as this tale of grid interconnection will show. Connections of supply from one electric...
Swapping this home's systems for clean electric ones is a delicate proposition. (Photo of Peoria, IL by Patsy Wooters.)
Every building in any community tells its own story. To run each story first on electricity, and later on clean electricity, requires coordinated and flexible policies - and a range of financial techniques to meet a series of cost and timing challenges.
Activists in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood have explored whether Clean Peak Standards can address air quality and energy inequity. (Photo by Victoria Belanger via Flickr Creative Commons.)
One state has tried requiring power at peak demand periods to come from clean sources. This mandate can improve air quality in low-income communities. Critics question its effect on emissions, though, and its optimal design as clean-energy storage for utilities evolves.
(Photo by Greg Dunlap, via Flickr Creative Commons.) Ratings of Chevron, and other companies whose fortunes float on the energy transition, can leave asset managers feeling lost at sea.
As ESG becomes an increasingly popular investing strategy, questions about better standardization arise. Ideally, ratings agencies would use objective criteria. Some frameworks are emerging that emphasize transparency and context.
This steel factory in Michigan, captured at sunset, reflects one industry where hydrogen may promise a sort of new dawn. (Photo by Billy Wilson via Flickr Creative Commons.)
Not every analysis concludes that the scale-up costs of hydrogen make it more bankable than wind, solar and hydropower. But since hydrogen production requires less land, and since it can reach hard-to-decarbonize sectors, many investors are giving it a long look. Now you can too.
Each building owner, with a team of investors, needs to work out a particular electrification schedule. Broad public policies, though, can advance new technologies or marketing strategies that can help more buildings go electric sooner. This sequel to our earlier explainer sets out some scalable policies from across the United...
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?
There's too much operating need for carbon-heavy energy, and climate change is too far along, for society to do all its sustainability work through a switch to renewable fuels. Removing carbon from the atmosphere becomes necessary - and financing the removal involves a range of risks.
Could hydrogen signal a dawn in all sorts of clean infrastructure?
Hydrogen investors say the abundant element can replace carbon throughout economies. Hydrogen skeptics (and shorts) say that producing adequate hydrogen supply requires intolerable amounts of carbon pollution. Some startups are looking at chemistry - and tax credit financing via the United States' Inflation Reduction Act - to increase the supply...
Most investment in solar and wind power involves drawing cash from investors who use those technologies' tax credits. The Inflation Reduction Act removes some barriers and doubts about the tax credits, signaling a rise in their use. But nothing is ever simple, and investors are bringing vital questions about timing...
