Putting the news in context sometimes requires a beat and a pinpoint. In this column, CEFF's editor focuses on how local officials responding to local pressures govern how far and how fast renewable projects can deploy in any economic context.
(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.
The main line is the main event. Transmission of clean electricity, combined with storage, means that every state and nearly every community can effectively live on fossil-free power. Financing and permitting involve economic, political, and engineering knots. This explainer takes in the breakthrough ideas and baseline for speedier deployment.
(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 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 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...