Virtual Power Plant Metering and Telemetry: Flexible Demand, Inflexible Requirements

Driven by consumer demand, distributed energy resources (DERs) are set to grow by over 170 GW in the next five years. Virtual power plants (VPPs) are low-cost, nimble, and rapidly deployable mechanisms to integrate DERs into the grid in an affordable and reliable manner to address rapid load growth.

However, a major barrier to scaling VPPs is metering and telemetry. The scaling of VPPs across the United States is stifled by onerous or inconsistent metering and telemetry requirements that vary across regions, stringent rules around the usage of pre-approved hardware, and limited data availability that constrains the scope of VPP …

Community Engagement Toolkit: A Guide for Initial Engagement Practices in Rural Communities

With renewable energy projects facing uncertainty from a variety of directions, project developers can build crucial trust and support for their clean energy projects through thoughtful community outreach and initial engagement. Developers that don’t seize this opportunity risk facing significant local opposition that can delay or even cancel projects. Opposition to clean energy projects at the local, county, and state levels continues to increase and affect project success; accounting for the cancellation of 52 gigawatts of projects over the past 10 years, according to Heatmap Pro.

There’s a straightforward and realistic way to improve the odds of these projects.

RMI’s …

Agricultural Carbon Footprints, Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development in Asia

There is a growing concern over environmental degradation and climate change in rapidly developing Asian nations. However, little research has been conducted on the impact of agricultural carbon emissions and renewable energy use on sustainable development outcomes in Asia. This research looks at the relationship between agricultural carbon footprints (ACF), renewable energy consumption (RE), and sustainable development (SD) in nine Asian nations from 2000 to 2022. The study employed the Cross-Sectional Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL), Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MM-QR), and Dumitrescu-Hurlin (DH) panel causality techniques to examine the connection. The findings reveal that the relationships vary significantly …

Grid Infrastructure and Renewables Integration for Singapore Energy Transition

Considering rising environmental concerns and the energy transition towards sustainable energy, Singapore’s power sector stands at a crucial juncture. This study explores the integration of grid infrastructure with both generated and imported renewable energy (RE) sources as a strategic pathway for the city-state’s energy transition to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Employing a combination of simulation modeling and data analysis for energy trading and advanced energy management technologies, we examine the current and new grid infrastructure’s capacity to assimilate RE sources, particularly solar photovoltaic and energy storage systems. The findings reveal that with strategic upgrades and smart grid technologies; …

Race, Rates, and Energy Insecurity: Exploring Racial Disparities in Electricity Costs and Consumption in U.S. Utility Service Areas

Structural racism contributes to energy insecurity via housing and income pathways. However, little is known about the role of energy pricing in (re)producing racialized energy inequities. This study explores the relationship between annual electricity rates and the resulting consumption and billing for the average customer based on demographic characteristics for different types of electric utilities in three states: Alabama, California, and New York. Results indicate that utility service customers in predominately non-white communities pay higher energy prices but consume less energy compared to those in white communities. The association between these utility schemas and the demography of service areas is …

Delivering on the UAE Consensus: Tracking Progress Toward Tripling Renewable Energy Capacity and Doubling Energy Efficiency by 2030

A key aspect of the text of the Outcome of the First Global Stocktake was the explicit recognition of the role of renewable energy in rapidly and drastically reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to align the world with the goals of the Paris Agreement. The text called on all Parties to the Convention to contribute to efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally and double the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

This unprecedented call, agreed by almost 200 countries, for a rapid scaling up of global renewable power capacity was based on the intellectual framework …

Data for Progress Green Housing Survey

From August 15 to 18, 2025, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,419 U.S. adults nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of adults by age, gender, education, race, geography, and recalled presidential vote. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error associated with the sample size is ±3 percentage points. Results for subgroups of the sample are subject to increased margins of error. For more information please visit dataforprogress.org/our-methodology.…

Understanding Supply Chain Constraints for the US Clean Energy Transition

A successful clean energy transition hinges on overcoming supply chain challenges for critical raw materials, as continued availability is essential for deploying key technologies like wind, solar photovoltaic, and lithium-ion battery. This paper presents a multi-year, optimization-based framework to assess how material supply limitations impact clean energy deployment. Unlike conventional projections ignoring material allocation constraints or estimating demand without resource competition, our framework enables goal-oriented planning and trade-off analysis under varied supply chain scenarios. Applied to the US, it integrates trade data, historical production trends (1985–2020), and geopolitical factors. Results show that, due to bottlenecks in nickel, silicon, and rare-earth …

A Comprehensive Optimization Method for Peak Shaving Performance of Combined Cycle Steam Eating Units

The rapid expansion of wind and photovoltaic power has intensified the demand for deep peak shaving in coal-fired power units. Conventional extraction steam heating units are constrained by thermal–electric coupling, limiting their ability to operate flexibly at low loads. To support low-carbon energy transformation, there is a pressing need to develop optimization methods that enhance both flexibility and economic efficiency of combined heat and power operations.…

A Harmonized Dataset of Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the US with Enhanced Metadata

Solar energy generating systems are critical components of our expanding energy infrastructure, yet available datasets remain incomplete or not publicly available–particularly at the sub-array level. Combining the best open access datasets in the US with image analysis on freely available remotely-sensed imagery, we present the Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the United States (GM-SEUS) dataset, a harmonized, open access geospatial and temporal repository of solar energy arrays and panel-rows. GM-SEUS v1.0 includes over 15,000 commercial- and utility-scale ground-mounted solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar energy arrays (186 GWDC) covering 2,950 km2 and includes 2.92 million unique solar panel-rows (466 km2). We use …