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.
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The Kentucky Municipal Energy Agency (KyMEA) is a joint action agency that provides electric transmission and energy services to 11 municipal utilities. One of KyMEA’s member cities, Frankfort, has a goal to reach 100% renewable generation for the city’s electricity load by 2023. By 2030, it seeks to achieve 100% carbon-free city operations and 100% renewable electricity community-wide. The aim of this research was to determine whether the Frankfort city government can reduce its power costs by implementing distribution-tied solar photovoltaics (PV) without cross subsidization from other KyMEA member utilities or other Frankfort Plant Board customers. …
View Full ResourceU.S. efforts to confront the climate crisis have propelled a demand for jobs that will help the country mitigate and adapt to climate change. These climate jobs have been steadily on the rise in the United States. The energy sector as a whole has regained 71% of the jobs lost due to the pandemic in 2020. With a 3.9% growth rate, clean energy job creation outpaced overall job growth in 2022. In total, there were more than 4.2 million climate jobs in 2022.…
View Full ResourceThis brief, Designing and Executing Measurement and Verification Standards for C-PACE Programs: Lessons Learned from Leading C-PACE Programs, examines and explains practices to demonstrate energy savings in existing Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy programs. The brief is designed to inform C-PACE program administrators on the design and execution of measurement and verification (M&V) standards through the experience of C-PACE programs in Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin.
In addition, the brief includes case studies of C-PACE programs: Texas PACE, Lean & Green Michigan, and PACE Wisconsin. Each case study details that program’s technical standards related to measurement and verification (M&V), examines the …
View Full ResourceTo meet clean energy goals, states will need significant capital. Federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will help, including by capitalizing clean energy state revolving loan funds (RLFs). States can leverage state clean water revolving funds to finance even more clean energy improvements. New York and Pennsylvania have used this innovative mechanism to extend the impact of their clean energy loan programs.
For states looking to extend the reach of their clean energy financing programs, the brief:
1) Explains how each state leveraged their state revolving funds,
2) Identifies critical success factors …
In order to scale VPPs and the benefits they offer, a foundation of strong policies and regulation is critical. This brief contains principles for policy and regulation that can support the fair and efficient growth, integration, valuation, compensation, and advancement of VPPs.
These principles can guide policy development and decisions affecting VPP growth in the next one to four years — including informing the initiation and adoption of regulatory proceedings or legislation directly related to VPPs and DER programs, integrated distribution system planning, non-wires solutions, utility business model reforms, wholesale market participation, tariff design, and energy system digitalization. These principles …
Between November 2021 and August 2022, three major economic policy laws were enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Biden. These three laws are the BIL (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law), the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) and the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) Act. In combination, the purpose of these three measures is to support a large-scale expansion of investments in the U.S. in the areas of clean energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure.
This report considers the BIL, the IRA, and the CHIPS Act with respect to their employment impacts within the U.S. economy. This report is …
The waste sector is a major contributor to planet-warming methane emissions, the third largest source behind agriculture and the oil and gas industry. Because methane is a super-potent greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential more than 80 times greater than CO2 in the near term, addressing this short-lived climate pollutant is key to limiting temperature rise. What if we could identify sites where waste methane is escaping into the atmosphere, pinpoint the sources, and implement evidence-based reduction measures?
The Waste Methane Assessment Platform (WasteMAP), a joint RMI and Clean Air Task Force (CATF) effort funded by the Global Methane …
View Full ResourceBuilding energy technologies and distributed generation, including energy efficiency (EE), distributed solar PV (DPV), and building electrification, are critical to meeting decarbonization goals. Rate design may play an important role in determining the customer economics of adopting these technologies, but it is unclear whether – and to what extent – current rate design trends support or impede progress toward these goals. In this study, they answer these questions by quantifying the range of residential customer bill impacts of EE, DPV, and building electrification investments under current and emerging time-based retail electricity rate designs (i.e., time-of-use, event-based pricing, coincident demand charges, …
View Full ResourceIn the PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative, we partner with photovoltaic (PV) fleet owners to collect time-series PV production data and publish aggregated, anonymized results. This report is an update of our previous publications, specifically a FY 2021 performance index publication and a FY 2022 fleet degradation analysis.
In this analysis, we have increased our data participants and system totals by around 10% to 8.5 GW and 24,000 separate inverter data channels. Four major analysis topics are considered in this report— Performance Index (PI) trends, PV system availability, soiling losses, and PV system degradation. …
Each mineral commodity chapter of the 2024 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries (MCS) includes information on events, trends, and issues for each mineral commodity as well as discussions and tabular presentations on domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, 5-year salient statistics, and world production, reserves, and resources. The MCS is the earliest comprehensive source of 2023 mineral production data for the world. More than 90 individual minerals and materials are covered by 2-page synopses.…
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