Energy Insights
This is Energy Insights—OurEnergyPolicy’s online platform where energy experts can share their unique outlook, offer feedback, and provide recommendations on how to solve the sector’s leading challenges. These Expert Insights help to inform and elevate the national conversation and improve the policymaking process.
We publish pieces from energy leaders across the public, private, and non-profit sectors who are committed to informing and elevating the national conversation, as well as improving the policymaking process. All U.S. energy professionals are welcome to participate. Through this platform, we make important and unique points, comments, and articles available to our broader network including journalists, key stakeholders, and congressional offices.
Contact us at info@ourenergypolicy.org if you would like to contribute an article or register here if you would like to comment. You can stay informed on the release of new insights and conversation by registering for our weekly newsletter.
When leaders from across our industry gathered recently for the Energy Workforce of the Future Summit, we agreed on the biggest task facing us: building the workforce to power the energy transition. This isn’t just the most important challenge in our sector, it’s one of the most important challenges in the country and across much of the world.
More than ever, society needs us to build a bridge to a new low-carbon era, filled with all forms of energy through top quality, rewarding, well-paying jobs. Now, those who have long been left out of the industry want to finally …
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There is an increasing disconnect between the sort of climate objectives that are advocated for politically (1.5 degrees Celsius, net-zero emissions by 2050, etc.) and the feasibility of achieving a massive global clean energy transition within the ever-shrinking carbon budget. This widening gap is reflected in seminal “transition scenarios” like the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net-Zero Emissions Report, or the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) 1.5 Pathway report attempting to lay out a roadmap to these hoped-for climate objectives. The kicker is that these studies can’t make the math work without leaning heavily on huge amounts of carbon capture …
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The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) invests $369 billion in climate and energy security, including tax credits for clean energy generation. Despite the hefty price tag, it does little to fix how we build the energy infrastructure needed to bring generated power to consumers. The IRA and 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law combined constitute just a fraction of the policy changes we need for a clean energy economy. Lack of necessary transmission is already a bottleneck in bringing more clean energy online and has catastrophic consequences in extreme weather. Without more interstate transmission, decarbonization will be slower and more expensive. We must …
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Once again, the Atlantic hurricane season has demonstrated the impacts of climate change. Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida as a category 4 storm in late September. It rapidly intensified to a “500-year flood event,” per Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, leveling communities, leaving millions without power, killing an untold number of people, and likely leaving behind billions of dollars in property damage. This follows a year of droughts, wildfires, and unrelenting heat. Clearly, the climate crisis is here.
But we have answers to that crisis if we are willing to use them.
Governments at all levels are already working towards …
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The global heating catastrophe being fostered by humanity’s proclivity to burn fossil fuels for energy is an emergency. An all-hands-on-deck emergency. An employ-every-tool-in-the-toolbox emergency. Despite that, a myth persists that blocks humankind’s use of the most powerful possible energy source that won’t add to the CO2 load.
The energy source being vastly underemployed is nuclear. And the myth that stands in the way, so widely accepted as truth, is that “nuclear power is dangerous.”
The acceptance of this four-word declarative statement as truth is pretty widespread. People’s fears about nuclear energy emerged in the 1970s due to misinformation and media …
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