The 3rd National Risk Assessment: Infrastructure on the Brink

Changing environmental conditions are driving worsening flood events, with consequences for counties, cities, towns, and local communities. Individuals whose homes were spared the impact of a particular flood event are increasingly likely to find their local roads, businesses, critical infrastructure, utilities, or emergency services affected by flooding, indirectly threatening their quality of life, safety, and wellbeing. A truly comprehensive understanding of individual flood risk from a changing climate must therefore consider the resiliency of local communities to flood, and determine the extent to which physical and soft infrastructure are at risk.

This report will provide the first ever nation-wide understanding …

Energy Efficiency Jobs in America

More than 2.1 million Americans now work in energy efficiency (EE), representing the biggest part of the entire energy sector. Workers in every state and community pull on their gloves and boots daily to help make our homes, offices, schools and other buildings more efficient. And some “boot up” in an office rather than out in the field, like developers of advanced energy management software, architects and designers, and administrative staff.

Whether EE workers upgrade heating/cooling systems or improve building enclosures, manufacture Energy Star equipment and appliances or install advanced lighting systems, they’re also helping American consumers, businesses and local …

Using Digitalization to Achieve Decarbonization Goals

Digital technologies—such as sensors, networked devices, and data analytics—are already changing how energy is used and consumed across the economy. As digitalization expands, it is creating new opportunities to optimize energy use and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Opportunities in key sectors include the following:

Power: Digitalization can improve the grid’s ability to integrate more variable renewable energy, create an interconnected grid with multi-directional power flow, and expand the use of demand response strategies (including smart charging of electric vehicles).

Transportation: In addition to enabling electric vehicles to provide flexible load and storage resources for the power grid, digitalization of transportation …

Solar Futures Study

Dramatic improvements to solar technologies and other clean energy technologies have enabled recent rapid growth in deployment and are providing cost-effective options for decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid. The Solar Futures Study explores the role of solar in decarbonizing the grid. Through state-of-the-art modeling, the study envisions deep grid decarbonization by 2035, as driven by a required emissions-reduction target. It also explores how electrification could enable a low-carbon grid to extend decarbonization to the broader energy system (the electric grid plus all direct fuel use in buildings, transportation, and industry) through 2050.

The Solar Futures Study uses a suite of …

Concrete Solutions Guide: Six Actions to Lower the Embodied Carbon of Concrete

Concrete and cement are some of the most carbon-intensive materials in our built environment. The carbon “embodied” in concrete and other materials makes up more than one-quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions from the global building sector. These embodied carbon emissions arise from the manufacture, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials.

With efforts to reduce embodied carbon emissions in buildings and infrastructure, the demand for low-embodied-carbon concrete is growing rapidly.

The Concrete Solutions Guide provides a user-friendly overview of proven and scalable solutions to reduce concrete’s contribution to climate change. This guide highlights six key opportunities to reduce …

Building Decarbonization Code: An Overlay to Model Building Codes on the Path to Net-Zero

The Building Decarbonization Code is a groundbreaking tool aiming to deliver carbon neutral performance. The Version 1.2 code language from NBI serves as a building decarbonization overlay to the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) and is now compatible with ASHRAE 90.1. It is designed to help states and cities working to mitigate carbon resulting from energy use in the built environment, which accounts for 39% of U.S. emissions. It also offers market insight into rules that will determine how new buildings are designed and constructed in the future in order to curb the worst impacts of climate change.

The …

Assessment of Backup Diesel Generators in New York City

Largely excluded from emissions inventories and often unreported to state and local authorities, New York City’s vast and poorly documented fleet of backup diesel generators makes our air dirty, contributes to climate change, and is disproportionately sited in our most vulnerable communities. Diesel generators, or diesel generating sets, consist of a diesel engine and an electric generator that produce electricity. Emergency, or backup, diesel generators are used to supply electricity when power from the grid is unavailable during a power outage or other service disruption. Reliable backup power is important to electric customers—especially hospitals, fire stations, and …

Assessment of Backup Diesel Generators in Massachusetts

Largely excluded from emissions inventories and often unreported to state and local authorities, Massachusetts’ vast and poorly documented fleet of backup diesel generators makes our air dirty, contributes to climate change, and is disproportionately sited in our most vulnerable communities. Diesel generators, or diesel generating sets, consist of a diesel engine and an electric generator that produce electricity. Emergency, or backup, diesel generators are used to supply electricity when power from the grid is unavailable during a power outage or other service disruption. Reliable backup power is important to electric customers—especially hospitals, fire stations, and other essential …

Equity-Focused Climate Strategies for Colorado

In the face of a warming climate and associated climate change impacts, the State of Colorado is embarking on an ambitious multi-decade effort to dramatically cut carbon emissions while confronting a growing need to build climate resilience. The State recently set targets to expand renewable electricity generation while slashing economy-wide greenhouse emissions. It is now developing pathways and policies to achieve these goals.

To better understand the technical approaches Colorado could follow to achieve its climate targets, Evolved Energy Research—working with Sierra Club, NRDC, and GridLab—recently modeled four potential decarbonization pathways from 2020-2050. These pathways rely on energy efficiency, …

America 3.0 The Resilient Society: A Smart Third Industrial Revolution Infrastructure and the Recovery of the American Economy

We are on the cusp of a Third Industrial Revolution. The digitized broadband Communication Internet is converging with a digitized Continental Electricity Internet, powered by solar and wind electricity, and a digitized Mobility and Logistics Internet made up of autonomous electric and fuel-cell vehicles, powered from the electricity internet. These three internets are continuously being fed data from sensors embedded across society that are monitoring activity of all kinds in real time, from ecosystems, agricultural fields, warehouses, road systems, factory production lines, retail stores, and especially from the residential, commercial, and institutional building stock, allowing humanity to more efficiently manage, …