These policy memos were completed as part of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program, which trains and connects rising leaders to catalyze the transition to a clean economy. The application for the certificate’s 2023-24 cohort closes on March 12. You can read what the application entailed, and what the program seeks to do, here.
We invite policy-makers and stakeholders to consider the ideas in these memos and respond. Views expressed in the memos are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of their employers.
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.
In the American Southeast, oil and gas developers have shown interest in learning the economics of offshore wind. States and the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have wanted to encourage this interest. This memo sets out steps for state-federal cooperation to encourage offshore wind deployment around and across the...
Summary: NYSERDA should update its Model Solar Energy Local Law to include sample provisions that incentivize agrivoltaics. This will align agricultural preservation and renewable energy goals and promote community support for solar projects. NYSERDA should also provide training and technical assistance to local governments to help them adopt local law...
New York City's Brooklyn Bridge Park, here on a morning during the Covid shutdown, blends public and private capital to broaden open space access. More neighborhoods need parks like this.
In its $62.7-billion budget, HUD subsidizes 4.5 million units of housing in a portfolio directly owned or controlled through HUD partners. Furthermore, HUD resources are used by private developers through project-based vouchers and HOME funds. HUD has a great deal of power to drive the adoption of higher energy standards...
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...
One proposed solution is to incentivize municipal wastewater treatment facilities to implement anaerobic digestion of biosolids and biogas capturing methods to produce Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), a renewable fuel used in the generation of heat and electricity, onsite or at a nearby centralized facility shared by multiple treatment facilities. This...
(Courtesy Fairfax County, VA.) EV charging looks one way to flatlanders...
Utilities whose businesses span rural and urban terrain can gain when they support the rollout of electric vehicle charging networks. This memo sets a framework for Maine's utility to meet policy objectives and secure market position.
(Photo by Don and Suzan Weller, via Flickr Creative Commons.) As the sun sets over Waterford, CT, an expert proposes a price floor in wholesale electricity markets.
As New England states progress towards decarbonization goals, the electricity spot market will see offers from solar and wind generators that incur no marginal cost. That can harm reliability and put some operators hastily out of business. To retain existing resources and the stability they bring, we need to set...
(Photo by Neal Wellons via Flickr Creative Commons.) This power plant in Painesville, Ohio could come in for big changes if citizens there follow the author's advice.
Community choice aggregation is an enabling policy, currently available in at least nine states, that lets even the smallest cities cost-effectively transition to clean energy. It gives a municipality’s residents and businesses the chance to take advantage of cost-competitive (and, more and more, money-saving) clean energy by creating negotiating leverage.
(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 overWHAMmed, from Flickr Creative Commons). This transmission line in Pelzer, SC, testifies to the market potential for investment in new high-voltage lines.
Can transmission of clean energy become more competitive and more ambitious with a federal tax credit? The author, a sustainable finance professional, argues on a bipartisan basis that it can and that transmission tax credits will tap a multibillion-dollar pipeline of ready projects.
Battery storage systems and virtual power plants offer an opportunity for individual ratepayers to improve energy reliability and contribute to Maine’s clean energy goals. Maine has several options for protecting and incentivizing ratepayers, especially low-income ratepayers, to own battery storage systems and join virtual power plant programs.
(Photo by Patrick Kovarik for Getty Images in Fashionista, September 25, 2020.) Chanel once staged a fashion show with wind turbines. The author argues that assertive tax policy can make renewable wardrobes a fashion-forward investment.
The US, as the largest consumer and highest emitter of carbon per capita, bears a critical share of the responsibility to facilitate a transition to sustainable practices. This article lays out the rationale and a pathway for the US to incentivize the apparel industry’s decarbonization. I propose a preferential tariff...
(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 Billy Wilson, via Flickr Creative Commons.) The author argues that Octopus Energy needs to reach out to occupants of homes like these to make good on its post-carbon promises.
According to this consultant, Octopus Energy must build measurable positive momentum towards the customer-centric (and just) energy transition it implies in its branding. It should invest capital toward changes in marketing and customer support. By doing so, this memo suggests, Octopus can deliver more fully on its promise.
(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.
The current Congress has power to kick-start grid upgrades. Does it want to use that power to the fullest?
The author, an energy professional and Illinois resident, argues for transmission investment as a lynchpin of infrastructure investment. She makes the case that other infrastructure goals need robust clean-energy transmission to become real.
With the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications showing this range of climate concern, should Colorado operate under one electricity provider?
Participants in CBEY's Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program learn technology, finance, policy and climate science. Policy savvy locks in when they write real memos to real players. In this example, a professional in Colorado's community-solar industry encourages a state Senator to work on fostering competition in the state's...
North Carolina has the potential to be a leader in offshore wind development, and the governor’s guidance can help jumpstart the industry. As a new market, however, the industry needs a stronger signal of interest. An executive order setting a goal for offshore wind development will show the wind industry...
Could hydrogen signal a dawn in all sorts of clean infrastructure?
If the United States builds an investment theme around hydrogen, our author argues, a path to prosperity will widen. In this op-ed adopted from Yale's Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate course, an expert argues for building investment around a potentially plentiful and carbon-free source.
The EU needs to open financing channels to more providers to support the intent of the Green Deal.(Photo from Qvinnovindar.)
Why should "prosumers" - individuals who make electricity for others to purchase- encounter brakes on their output in European Union policy? In this memo, which the author wrote first in the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, the case emerges for releasing female prosumers' entrepreneurial energy. A linked interview with...
Delivering clean energy should mean delivering equitable health effects, says a researcher.
The case for joining the
, which Pennsylvania's governor embraced in 2019, asserts that trading carbon credits can marshal market discipline to achieve policy goals for broad decarbonization. In this example from the policy-memo segment of our online Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, our writer argues...
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...
Michigan can unlock energy-saving upgrades for homeowners by passing residential property assessed clean energy legislation. The legislation should guarantee energy savings and protect consumers by including a method for determining eligible energy-saving measures; restrictions to R-
financing amounts and underwriting criteria; and robust consumer protection provisions.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf proposed
(RGGI) legislation in the fall 2019 legislative season. By voting to join RGGI, Pennsylvania can reduce electricity rates, improve the state and regional economy, and make the state a leader in the global effort to combat climate change.
The implementation plan that Arlington County expects to propose in June 2020 needs to include the creation of a green bank – a quasi-public entity established to facilitate private investment into local low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure.
To capture the energy efficiency opportunity across the U.S. economy, the House Energy and Commerce Committee should introduce a bill to establish a national energy benchmarking standard for commercial buildings. Building on the success of local ordinances, the proposed bill would create a national requirement while giving state and local...
(Photo from Energy News.) Wanja Wallemyr contributes millions of kilowatt-hours to a grid that doesn't properly value it.
What would a prosumer-friendly policy achieve? The Financing and Deploying Clean Energy participant who proposed that direction talked to an entrepreneur whose co-op feeds wind energy into Sweden's electricity system. Wanja Wallemyr's experience outlines what a grid full of prosumers can mean for power and empowerment.
