Disclosure to Decarbonization: A Guide to Setting and Achieving Your Climate Goals

Today, sustainability plays an increasingly vital role in corporate strategy and operations, with expectations on sustainability leaders growing as climate risks become more material. As those expectations grow, many organizations are encountering challenges as they endeavor to turn their sustainability goals into concrete, impactful initiatives.

The process of developing smart strategies, getting buy-in from leadership and stakeholders, and mapping out decarbonization pathways can drive home the scale of changes – and investments – that will be required to achieve bold climate goals and overcome existing challenges. As a result, sustainability leaders must shift their approach from one built around data …

Defining Carbon Removal for Policy

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is an essential pillar of climate action, along with strong prioritization of steep emissions reductions and adaptation to our already rapidly changing climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines CDR as purposeful human activity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and durably store it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products. Definitions of CDR in some policies to date have been incomplete and narrowly focused on specific CDR approaches. The Carbon Business Council strongly favors a clear and consistent definition of CDR for policy that is method-neutral, criteria-based, and …

The Unequal Economic Consequences of Carbon Pricing

This paper studies the economic impacts of carbon pricing. Exploiting institutional features of the European carbon market and high-frequency data, I document that a tighter carbon pricing regime leads to higher energy prices, lower emissions and more green innovation. This comes at the cost of a fall in economic activity, which is borne unequally across society: poorer households lower their consumption significantly while richer households are less affected. The poor are more exposed because of their higher energy share and, importantly, also experience a larger fall in income. Targeted fiscal policy can help alleviate these costs while maintaining emission reductions.…

Community Resilience Options: A Menu for Enhancing Local Energy Resilience

This document highlights areas of potential community resilience improvements, especially those that relate to clean energy deployment for communities and municipalities. While there is no single resilience solution that will apply to every community or geographic location, there is a need for resilience solutions as a best practice. This document introduces 10 high-level categories of resilience-enhancing energy-related projects, intended for community members, planners, and decision-makers new to the topic to build their understanding of which solutions fit their community best. System resilience leads to community resilience by neutralizing threats, minimizing disruptions, and providing enhanced day-to-day security and social cohesion for …

2022 in Review: A Year of Federal Climate Investments

In 2022, implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) began in earnest. As the funding goes out, there is considerable interest in what the funding will enable and where it will go. This report begins to answer those questions by focusing on six programs, updates on key tax credits, other implementation efforts and an overview of the tracking and modeling to understand the climate, economic, and health benefits of the two laws.…

50 States of Electric Vehicles Q1 2023 – Executive Summary

The purpose of this report is to provide state and local lawmakers and regulators, electric utilities, the electric power industry, the transportation industry, and other energy stakeholders with timely, accurate, and unbiased updates about how states are choosing to study, adopt, implement, amend, or discontinue policies associated with electric vehicles. This report catalogues proposed and approved legislative, regulatory, and utility rate design changes affecting electric vehicles during the most recent quarter, as well as state and investor-owned utility proposals to deploy electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.

In Q1 2023, 49 states plus DC and Puerto Rico took a total of …

Emissions from Oil and Gas Operations in Net Zero Transitions

Today, oil and gas operations account for around 15% of total energy-related emissions globally, the equivalent of 5.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. In the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, the emissions intensity of these activities falls by 50% by the end of the decade. Combined with the reductions in oil and gas consumption in this scenario, this results in a 60% reduction in emissions from oil and gas operations to 2030.

Fortunately, oil and gas producers have a clear opportunity to address the problem of emissions from their activities through a series of ready-to-implement …

Low-cost Finance for the Energy Transition

The need to scale up the deployment of technologies such as green hydrogen, energy storage and offshore wind has become increasingly critical to the success of the global energy transition and to meeting global climate goals. To this end, access to low-cost capital for project financing in G20 Member Countries and beyond is vital. However, this remains challenging – particularly amid the current global tightening of monetary policies – given that a substantial portion of the necessary investment in energy transition technologies has yet to be sourced.

This report, prepared by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in close collaboration …

Understanding the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on NYISO prices

The IRA is expected to spur development of clean energy technologies across the country by providing lucrative tax credits and helping developers lower their levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). However, in New York, lower LCOE will be accompanied by falling Index REC payments from the state. Consequently, while some projects will see appreciable gains in net profitability, a majority will see only marginal impacts. We find that developers of onshore wind upstate, and well-sited solar downstate and Long Island, stand to benefit the most from the IRA. After ITC and PTC, some projects—under certain scenarios—may find merchant revenues more than …

50 States of Power Decarbonization

The purpose of this report is to provide timely, accurate, and unbiased updates to a broad audience of state lawmakers and regulators, state agencies, utilities, the clean energy industry, and other energy stakeholders, about how states are choosing to study, adopt, implement, amend, or discontinue policies associated with power decarbonization and how utilities are planning for and implementing future generation resource additions and retirements. This report catalogues proposed and approved executive, legislative, and regulatory changes affecting electric power decarbonization during the most recent quarter, as well as actions related to investor-owned utility resource plans and generation capacity changes.

The 50 …