The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
Resource Library
1 to 10 of 677 item(s) were returned.
Between 2020 and 2024, PSE Healthy Energy partnered with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) to identify opportunities to build solar+energy storage resilience hubs at schools, community centers, and places of worship across California. APEN defines resilience hubs as “physical institutions that offer space for community members to gather, organize, and access resilience-building social services on a daily basis, and provide response and recovery services in disaster situations.” Our analysis focuses on solar+storage resilience hubs, which can deliver distinct advantages for community resilience by keeping essential services online during power outages and providing …
View Full ResourceOn behalf of the Southern Environmental Law Center, Researchers Chirag T. Lala and Joshua R. Castigliego, Senior Economist Tyler Comings, and Assistant Researcher Elisabeth Seliga prepared a report that models the costs to consumers of alternatives for the soon-to-be retired Kingston Fossil Plant—a coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee that is owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). TVA’s Alternative A plan replaces Kingston with a gas-heavy portfolio that constructs gas combined cycle (CC) and combustion turbine (CT) plants, while Alternative B focuses on replacing Kingston with a clean energy portfolio that relies on solar and battery storage …
View Full ResourceHydropower plays a key role in the United States energy generation mix, representing nearly a third of U.S. renewable energy generation today. Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) currently represents 96% of utility-scale energy storage capacity and 70% of grid storage capacity and supports grid stability and reliability across the country. Despite the potential of these technologies to support the U.S. clean energy transition, new public and private investment in hydropower projects of all sizes lags other renewable energy generation sources such as wind and solar). Between 2005 and 2022, the United States substantially increased its solar and wind generation capacity, adding …
View Full ResourceThe intent of this document is to provide recommendations and guidance for states seeking to develop distributed or behind-the-meter (BTM) energy storage incentive programs. It is intended to help states decide how to structure incentive programs and how to set incentive rates.
As states increasingly adopt energy storage targets, develop storage policy and regulation, and seek to drive energy storage deployment, numerous incentive programs have emerged. These vary greatly in design, making it difficult to compare incentive rates from one program to another. For example, some incentive programs offer rebates, while others provide performance payments over a fixed period. Other …
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is an emerging set of technologies, practices and approaches to remove carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and store it. Marine CDR (mCDR), a subset of CDR solutions, can potentially
complement the ocean’s natural carbon cycle and carbon storage capacity.
CDR pathways are recognized by the U.S. federal government, the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the private sector, including companies like Microsoft, as a necessary tool for achieving net-zero commitments.
Examples of mCDR technologies include electrochemical processes, direct ocean capture, ocean alkalinity enhancement, as well as macro- and microalgae cultivation …
View Full ResourceGeothermal power technology has shown compelling advances that can enable it to become a key contributor to secure, domestic, decarbonized power generation for the U.S. as a source of clean firm power.
Next-gen geothermal vastly expands the total resource available for geothermal power generation and creates a unique value proposition as a clean firm technology with the potential for flexible generation/energy storage, a minimal footprint, and broad geographic availability.
Next-gen geothermal approaches leverage technologies developed by oil & gas to engineer human made reservoirs from ubiquitous hot rock, rather than hunting for naturally-occuring reservoirs in unique locations. In a world …
View Full ResourceThe Clean Energy States Alliance has published a report showing the potential impact of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s $7 billion Solar for All competition. This report provides the first public look into the range of state proposals that have been submitted in response to this competition.
For this report, CESA received exclusive access to the Solar for All applications submitted in 33 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The report summarizes trends across these applications and presents data on the impact that Solar for All programs could have on the low-and-moderate-income solar market. The report includes information …
A broad suite of performance metrics is required to provide a holistic picture of how energy efficiency (EE) and distributed energy resource (DER) upgrades affect each stakeholder, and how their value varies by home. This report quantifies the relative and combined value of EE and DER investments within the residential, single-family home sector. The new workflow developed combines multiple tools from both the buildings and the solar plus storage domain to enable this analysis from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. This allows simulations to be performed for residential buildings to be modeled anywhere in the country with any efficiency features, …
View Full ResourceToday, interconnecting new generation to the grid is a years-long process that can involve costly upgrades to the transmission system. Surging levels of new clean generation and storage projects in development as well as rapidly rising demand for electricity have come up against an aging grid that is nearing maximum capacity. This bottleneck poses major problems for grid reliability, economic development, and climate policy.
More transmission is needed to accommodate this expansion of both generation and load, but in the near term, there are tools we can use to ensure we’re getting the most out of the grid we have. …
As the adoption of solar plus storage technology is rapidly increasing, there is a need for a more wholistic view of homes adopting them. In homes, both energy efficiency (EE) upgrades and DERs provide value not just to the homeowner, but to utilities and even society at large through emissions. Traditionally, EE and DERs are separate sectors, which makes it difficult to understand the co-benefits of their adoption. To address this, we created a novel workflow of tools that allows for a complete analysis of both efficiency and DERs. We also looked at a suite of metrics designed to capture …
View Full Resource