Greater Engagement for Improved Demand Response

Utilities are well aware of climate risks, and they’re actively developing solutions to improve grid resilience. That includes looking at new solutions to improve existing load flexibility and demand response (DR) approaches. Utilities already rely on customer participation in DR programs to shift electricity away from periods of peak demand. But traditional DR programs often come with barriers to participation. For example, they may require the customer to enter their utility account number, which customers may
not know how to locate, let alone have readily available, at the time of enrollment. They also require reading and accepting program terms and …

Core Carbon Principles, Assessment Framework and Assessment Procedure

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (Integrity Council or ICVCM) is an independent governance body for the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Its purpose is to ensure that voluntary carbon markets accelerate progress toward the objective of combatting climate change. It will set and enforce a global threshold standard for carbon credit quality, drawing on the best science and expertise available, with a view to also ensuring that high quality carbon credits efficiently mobilize finance towards urgent climate action.

This publication includes the Program-level criteria of the Assessment Framework and the Assessment Procedure. This will enable carbon-crediting programs to …

Global Energy Outlook 2023: Sowing the Seeds of an Energy Transition

Recent policy developments in the United States, increased ambition in the European Union, and efforts by other nations are sowing the seeds of an energy transition. Although coal, oil, and gas consumption are at or near their all-time highs globally, climate ambition and action are growing in public and private sectors. How quickly, and at what scale, will these seeds bear fruit?

Global energy additions have continued, rebounding from the lows of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, global coal demand roughly equaled its previous peak, and preliminary 2022 data from IEA show it reaching an all-time high. Oil …

Enabling Global Decarbonization through Digital Industry Technologies

Decarbonizing our economy is arguably the biggest challenge of our time. It is not just a matter of avoiding climate change, although that alone warrants giving decarbonization the highest possible priority. But even if climate change were not a threat, a society based on fossil fuels will at some point run out of energy. Moving to lowcarbon production and consumption models is thus of critical importance to our long-term survival. And we have limited time to act.

Because of this, it is important to focus on actions that can have the highest impact. This paper is the first in a …

The Hidden Climate Impact of Residential Construction

New home construction in the US creates over 50 million tons of embodied carbon emissions annually, equivalent to the emissions from 138 natural gas–fired power plants or the yearly emissions from entire countries such as Norway, Peru, and Sweden. However, the sector has a unique opportunity to reduce tens of millions of tons of emissions and become a leading contributor to US climate targets, quickly and efficiently. Understanding and reducing overall climate impact requires paying attention to the upstream, or embodied, emissions that result from producing building materials such as concrete and insulation in addition to the downstream operational emissions …

Offshore Energy Assessment Validation

DNV has been producing Energy Production Assessments (EPAs) of proposed wind farms for over 35 years and has developed a well-defined methodology that is continually updated as new research and information becomes available. Validations serve a dual purpose: they provide DNV with a feedback loop used to direct methodology improvements and provide the industry with valuable insights into the levels of accuracy achieved by DNV’s current best practice.

The results show a slight negative bias in the prediction of P50 energy output and show some spread in project performance relative to the pre-construction prediction. Overall, the risk of projects underperforming …

Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to …

Sustainable Aviation Fuel: Agencies Should Track Progress Toward Ambitious Federal Goals

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector, the White House announced a SAF Grand Challenge in September 2021. The Grand Challenge goal is to supply 3 billion gallons of SAF per year by 2030 and 100 percent of expected domestic commercial jet fuel use by 2050. GAO was asked to review the federal role in SAF.

This report (1) discusses the state of SAF production and use for the U.S. commercial aviation industry and factors shaping this market, and (2) identifies how federal agencies have supported SAF and assesses how they will monitor progress toward Grand Challenge goals.…

Temporal Trends of Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Population Exposures to Upstream Oil and Gas Development in California

People living near oil and gas wells are exposed to pollutants that may adversely affect their health. We investigated whether racially or socioeconomically marginalized people in California had disproportionately higher exposure to wells. We also assessed whether disparities were wider in areas with more intensive oil and gas production. We examined changes in neighborhood-level sociodemographic characteristics in three time periods: 2005–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019. For each neighborhood and time period, we estimated the number of wells and the total volume of oil and gas produced within 1 km (0.62 miles). We estimated that approximately 1.1 million Californians (3.0%) lived within …

Innovation for Resilience

For the past year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) studied how the U.S. government can better position itself to promote resilience across four connected focus areas: the workforce, climate security, supply chains, and cybersecurity. Through independent research and a series of roundtables and expert interviews with current and former government officials, academics, think tank practitioners, and industry leaders, the CSIS project team investigated the current capacity for resilience within each focus area, barriers to creating greater resilience, and opportunities for enhancing overall resilience between the focus areas. This report is a compilation of the four research commentaries …