The Global Energy Agenda

The Atlantic Council surveyed hundreds of leaders in the energy field, and this report summarizes their responses. The energy agenda for 2021 should be to realize the opportunities created by COVID-19 to build a more sustainable energy system. The energy transition is not inevitable, and the private sector can only do so much; governments, therefore, have a critical role to play in ensuring a sustainable future.…

Mapping Green Innovation Ecosystems: Evaluating the Success Factors for the World’s Leading Greentech-Innovation Centers

Enabling current and future generations to mitigate climate change requires the urgent creation and scaling up of technologies that minimize and reverse the impact of human activities on the environment. The ecosystems that foster innovation in green technologies, and the success factors that enable these ecosystems, must be better understood in order to replicate them around the world.

The new Global Energy Center issue brief, “Mapping Green Innovation Ecosystems: Evaluating the Success Factors for the World’s Leading Greentech-Innovation Centers,” by Peter Engelke, Margaret Jackson, and Randolph Bell assesses the value of greentech-innovation ecosystems. It identifies commonalities between the places and …

Housing Precarity & the COVID-19 Pandemic: Impacts of Utility Disconnection and Eviction Moratoria on Infections and Deaths Across US Counties

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the adoption of a number of policies that aim to reduce the spread of the disease by promoting housing stability. Housing precarity, which includes both the risk of eviction and utility disconnections or shut-offs, reduces a person’s ability to abide by social distancing orders and comply with hygiene recommendations. Our analysis quantifies the impact of these various economic policies on COVID-19 infection and death rates using panel regression techniques to control for a variety of potential confounders. We find that policies that limit evictions are found to reduce COVID-19 infections by 3.8% and reduce deaths …

Use it When We Have it: How to Use more Clean Energy and Decarbonize the Grid with Demand Flexibility

This report examines the challenges facing demand flexibility programs and focuses on the technologies, policies, market mechanisms, and equity strategies that can enable demand flexibility for all communities, leading toward an equitable and affordable clean economy for everyone.…

Role of Hydrogen in a Low-Carbon Electric Power System: A Case Study

The European Union set a 2050 decarbonization target in the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 90–95% relative to 1990 emission levels. The path toward achieving those deep decarbonization targets can take various shapes but will surely include a portfolio of economy-wide low-carbon energy technologies/options. The growth of the intermittent renewable power sources in the grid mix has helped reduce the carbon footprint of the electric power sector. Under the need for decarbonizing the electric power sector, we simulated a low-carbon power system. We investigated the role of hydrogen for future electric power systems under current cost projections. The …

Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator: Opportunities for Long-Term Deployment

In a new whitepaper released today on behalf of the Coalition for Green Capital, economists at The Brattle Group have identified potential roles for a new, federally sponsored financial institution to promote economic recovery via decarbonization: the Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator (the “Accelerator”).…

Emergency deployment of direct air capture as a response to the climate crisis

Though highly motivated to slow the climate crisis, governments may struggle to impose costly polices on entrenched interest groups, resulting in a greater need for negative emissions. Here, we model wartime-like crash deployment of direct air capture (DAC) as a policy response to the climate crisis, calculating funding, net CO2 removal, and climate impacts.…

UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2020

The fifth edition of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report looks at progress in planning for, financing and implementing adaptation – with a focus on nature-based solutions. …

Disconnected: The Need for New Generator Interconnection Policy

This report examines America’s disconnected transmission grid and highlights the need for new generator interconnection policy.

America’s system for planning and paying for the nation’s transmission grid is causing a massive backlog and delay in the construction of new power projects. While locally produced electric power is gaining in popularity, most of the lowest cost new power production comes from projects which are located in rural areas and, thus, depend on new electricity lines to deliver power to the urban and suburban areas which use most of the nation’s power. Project developers must apply for interconnection to the transmission network, …

Clean Energy Unemployment Claims in COVID-19 Aftermath, December 2020

The U.S. clean energy sector added 16,900 jobs in December, leaving 429,250 clean energy workers out of work since February of this year – a 12 percent decline over pre-COVID-19 employment levels, according according to the latest analysis of federal unemployment filings prepared for E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs), E4TheFuture and the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) by BW Research Partnership.…