Bridging the Gap: How Emerging State Policies are Making Energy Storage Affordable and Accessible

As energy storage becomes an increasingly integral tool to deliver numerous benefits to communities and to the electric grid, the question of how to make this new technology broadly affordable and accessible becomes more urgent, particularly for state agencies tasked with meeting clean energy goals. This report compiles the results of independent research conducted by the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) and Sandia National Laboratories, providing a summary of emerging affordability and accessibility approaches in leading state energy storage programs. The intent is to create a body of reference material that can be used in state energy storage policymaking across …

Utility Engagement Playbook for Industrial Customers

While industrial electrification must play a critical role in decarbonizing the U.S., utilities often lack clear pathways to support industrial customers’ electrification efforts. Electricity costs frequently make such transitions financially unfavorable compared to natural gas.

The Utility Engagement Playbook for Industrial Customers: Addressing Power Sector Barriers to Electrification, prepared for the RTC by Synapse Energy Economics and the World Wildlife Fund, provides a comprehensive roadmap industrial companies can use to overcome electrification barriers by engaging utilities and policymakers.

This Playbook aims to:
– Describe the barriers to industrial electrification related to the electric utility sector.
– Explore potential utility, regulatory, …

Attention and Positive Sentiments Towards Carbon Dioxide Removal Have Grown on Social Media Over the Past Decade

Scaling up CO2 removal is crucial to achieve net-zero targets and limit global warming. To engage with publics and ensure a social licence to deploy large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), better understanding of public perceptions of these technologies is necessary. Here, they analyse attention and sentiments towards ten CDR methods using Twitter data from 2010 to 2022. Attention towards CDR has grown exponentially, particularly in recent years. Overall, the discourse on CDR has become more positive, except for BECCS. Conventional CDR methods are the most discussed and receive more positive sentiments. Various types of users engage with CDR on Twitter …

Summary Report of RBA Emissions Management Tool

In 2023, the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) introduced the Emissions Management Tool (EMT) to help RBA member companies streamline the collection of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data from their supply chains. The EMT enables respondents to report on critical emissions data, including energy and fuel consumption, renewable energy use, and emissions reduction efforts. The EMT includes questions at both the corporate and facility levels. Data from the EMT is intended to inform RBA members’ Scope 3 calculations, increasing visibility into their supply chain emissions and making it faster and easier to report GHG emissions data to customers and external entities …

Fuel Economy Guide

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) produce the Fuel Economy Guide to help car buyers choose the most fuel-efficient vehicle that meets their needs. The Guide is available on the Web at fueleconomy.gov.

This guide provides annual fuel cost estimates, rounded to the nearest $50, for each vehicle. The estimates are based on the assumptions that you travel 15,000 miles per year (55% under city driving conditions and 45% under highway conditions) and that fuel costs $3.05/gallon for regular unleaded gasoline, $3.61/gallon for mid-grade unleaded gasoline, and $3.96/gallon for premium. Cost-per-gallon assumptions for vehicles …

Climate Disclosure and Target Setting in the Agriculture Sector: Lessons from the Canadian Market

This paper analyzes approaches for emissions accounting, target setting, and transparent disclosure of emissions related to agriculture portfolios in Canada. The paper underscores the significant role financial institutions can play in supporting the sector’s transition to net-zero emissions as well as the challenges they face in this complex sector.…

Harnessing The Ocean: How Closed System Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (MCDR) Can Contribute to Meeting Global Decarbonization Goals

Durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is critical to meeting global decarbonization goals, particularly as emissions reductions alone could leave 6–10 Gtpa (gigatons per annum) of CO₂ unabated by the year 2050. In the near term, if companies proceed with meeting declared net zero targets by 2030, CDR demand could range from ~40–200 Mtpa (megatons per annum) CO2 to as high as ~1.1–1.6 Gtpa CO2. This contrasts sharply with an expected supply of just 15–32 Mtpa, requiring the adoption of all viable carbon removal pathways.

The recent agreement reached at the COP29 on Art. 6, promoting the establishment of a global …

Fourth International Workshop on the Indemnification of Damage in the Event of a Nuclear Accident: Workshop Proceedings, Lisbon, Portugal

The Fourth International Workshop on the Indemnification of Damage in the Event of a Nuclear Accident took place in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2019. It was organised in collaboration with the Instituto Superior Técnico and the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon (Portugal). This workshop focused on topics identified during an earlier workshop, held in Bratislava, Slovak Republic in 2017, as fit for further discussion: the determination of the nuclear damage to be compensated and transboundary claims handling. The workshop was attended by more than 150 participants from 29 countries.

This report summarises the work that took place …

Dynamic Cycling Enhances Battery Lifetime

Laboratory ageing campaigns elucidate the complex degradation behaviour of most technologies. In lithium-ion batteries, such studies aim to capture realistic ageing mechanisms to optimize cell chemistries and designs as well as to engineer reliable battery management systems. In this study, they systematically compared dynamic discharge profiles representative of electric vehicle driving to the well-accepted constant current profiles.

Surprisingly, they found that dynamic discharge enhances lifetime substantially compared with constant current discharge. Specifically, for the same average current and voltage window, varying the dynamic discharge profile led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of …

Retail Electricity Price and Cost Trends: 2024 Update

Berkeley Lab’s Retail Electricity Price and Cost Trends summarizes recent trends in retail electricity price levels and price drivers in the United States. This report is intended to serve as a reference document for the diverse set of decision-makers impacted by changes in retail electricity prices and to provide a factual basis for assessing recent changes in retail electricity prices and key underlying drivers. National, regional, and state trends are reported for 2019 through 2023 using publicly-available data for:

– Average retail electricity prices, retail sales, and utility revenues
– Utility capital expenditures, operations and maintenance costs, and fuel and …