President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget, released April 10^th, contains many of the energy initiatives previously outlined in his Energy Blueprint. Programs such as the Race to the Top energy efficiency challenge and the Energy Security Trust are included, along with slight adjustments to the enacted budgets of the primary agencies that shape energy policy – the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Specifically, the DOE budget would see total funding growth of 8%, with funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy increasing 40%. The DOI budget would increase … [read more]

A battle is heating up in California regarding the State’s net metering policy as the California Public Utilities Commission is reviewing the policy’s costs and benefits.  Net metering is an incentive that allows consumers who produce their own electricity, from rooftop solar panels for example, to sell excess back to the grid (often) at full retail price.

Opponents of net metering contend that the volumetric retail rate includes fixed costs that are essential to the long-term stability of our utility infrastructure. They claim that net metering customers get the benefit of using the grid, but pay less to do … [read more]

The increased focus on oil and gas exploration in the Arctic has identified numerous issues. Oil and gas exploration is a significant challenge for policy makers at all levels of government. In the recent Review of Shell’s 2012 Alaska Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration Program, the Department of Interior identified seven critical principles for safe and responsible offshore drilling, including improved management of contractors and integrated government oversight.

It has been noted that with the substantial oil and gas resources believed to exist in the Arctic, geopolitical considerations will greatly impact domestic policy. A Center for Climate and Energy … [read more]

Thanks to breakthroughs in seismic imaging, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the US in 2012 reduced its reliance on much dirtier coal by shifting to gas-fired power plants. This trend is expected to continue, spurred by low gas prices and increased regulation on coal. The move to shale gas is being heralded as a key to economic prosperity and a clean energy future. But there are other options for displacing baseload electricity from retired coal plants, the principals being nuclear, renewables and energy efficiency. Will the gas bonanza enable or postpone the transition to these cleaner options?

While natural gas … [read more]

A recent report by analysts at Ernst and Young predicts that the global LNG market will shift away from its current pricing model, tied to international crude oil prices, to more spot or hub-based pricing. The report, “Global LNG: Will new supply and new demand mean new pricing?” explains that strict oil indexation will become less tenable because “From the global supply side, oil is becoming somewhat scarcer while gas is more plentiful,” thus creating the “inherent conflict of persistently-high oil prices and a growing surplus of natural gas.”

More specifically, the report concludes that oil indexation of … [read more]