Harvesting Sunshine: How Productive Uses of Minigrid Electricity Make Farmers Richer and Energy Cheaper

Income-generating productive uses of energy (PUE) allow rural entrepreneurs to utilize clean electricity to support their businesses and increase their incomes. PUEs also boost revenues for rural utilities struggling to achieve profitability and maintain reliable energy services because of limited demand. The Energizing Agriculture Programme (EAP) recognized PUE’s potential to transform livelihoods and improve the economics of energy access. It brought together Nigerian energy and agriculture companies to design and test business models that deliver affordable PUE equipment to rural customers.

The EAP confirmed the value proposition of PUEs. By switching from fossil fuel-powered equipment to electric PUE alternatives, agribusiness …

The State of Managed Charging in 2024

The industry has seen tremendous shifts since SEPA began writing about managed charging in 2017. Why are we still discussing managed charging seven years later? While EV adoption has increased significantly, with more than three million EVs on the road today, managed charging has not scaled proportionally. At scale, implementing managed charging is complex because it is both a programmatic solution involving customer enrollment, incentivization, and billing and a technological solution requiring extensive data and communication exchanges across several devices and platform systems. The newest edition of the State of Managed Charging series highlights the challenges associated with managed charging …

Comprehensive Guide to Financing the Zero-Emission Trucking Transition in India

Decarbonizing India’s trucking sector is crucial for the nation to achieve its carbon-neutrality goal, enhance energy security, and improve public health. Recognizing the benefits of zero-emission trucks (ZETs), government and industry stakeholders have begun to set the groundwork for their deployment. For fleets, manufacturers, and charging infrastructure providers to transition to ZETs, access to financing is essential. Developing financial strategies that lower risks and make funding more accessible will help bridge the cost gap between diesel trucks and ZETs, accelerating their adoption across India.

While the technology, risks, and economic viability of diesel trucks are well understood by banks and …

Solar and Storage Integration in the Southeastern United States: Economics, Reliability, and Operations

Solar energy has the potential to be a core energy resource for the southeastern United States. To better understand the implications of higher levels of solar PV (27%-43% of total generation capacity) and electricity storage (13%-49% of peak load) would affect electricity system reliability, costs, and operations in the U.S. Southeast, this study sought to address two main questions. First, how would higher levels of solar PV and electricity storage impact the costs, reliability, and operations of electricity systems in the Southeast in 2035? Second, at different levels of solar PV and electricity storage, what are the benefits of operational …

2024 Workforce Report

Energy Workforce & Technology Council (EWTC) announced the release of the 2024 Workforce Report developed in collaboration with Accenture. The report provides a detailed analysis of the current state of employment within the energy services sector, focusing on job growth, workforce composition, and granular insights into diversity metrics.

During February through June 2024, the Energy Workforce & Technology Council canvassed workforce data from 23 companies on their 2023 data, covering approximately 346,600 working men and women globally — including almost 189,000 employees in the United States. Companies with less than 1,000 global employees were specifically included, in addition to the …

Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear

The Pathways to Commercial Liftoff reports aim to establish a common fact base with the private sector around the path to liftoff for critical clean energy technologies. Their goal is to catalyze more rapid and coordinated action across the value chain for deployment. The Nuclear Liftoff Report was published in March 2023 as a “living document” to be updated as the market evolved. This updated report, published September 2024, adds new content and refreshes original content.…

Transitioning China’s Industries: Creating Clusters for Large-scale Green Hydrogen Integration

The industrial sector is currently China’s largest consumer of hydrogen and is expected to continue dominating hydrogen utilization — at an estimated 60 percent of the overall consumption.

China has carried out extensive efforts in green hydrogen and its utilization in industry. The large-scale utilization of green hydrogen in industry requires addressing two main challenges: (1) the supply of green hydrogen must reach a significant scale and stability, and (2) the high cost of hydrogen utilization needs to be addressed.

To address these challenges, this research introduces a “cluster development” model for efficiently deploying green hydrogen on a large scale …

Techno-Economic Analysis of Geothermal Combined with Direct and Biomass-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal for High-Temperature Hydrothermal Systems

Limiting global temperature rise to between 1.5 and 2 °C will likely require widespread deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to offset sectors with hard-to-abate emissions. As financial resources for decarbonization are finite, strategic deployment of CDR technologies is essential for maximizing atmospheric CO2 reductions. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), using either direct air capture (DACCS) or bioenergy (BECCS) technologies has a particular synergy with geothermal electricity generation. This is because expensive geothermal infrastructure can be leveraged to transport dissolved CO2 for storage in subsurface reservoirs.

Here, the researchers present a techno-economic comparison of renewable electricity generation coupled with either …

Datacenters Amplify Grid Congestion Challenges as Renewable Curtailment Rises

With renewable energy developers deploying record amounts of solar and wind capacity in the US due to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, all eyes are now turning to grid adequacy, transmission bottlenecks and rising curtailment levels.

Fast-steepening projections for datacenter energy demand — now expected to top 760.7 TWh annually by 2029, up from an estimated 371.6 TWh in 2024 — are magnifying these issues, particularly in geographies expected to experience significant datacenter IT capacity expansions, notably Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the US southeast, where relatively short mileages of transmission lines are currently planned.

Is the rising …

Air Quality Life Index: Indonesia Fact Sheet

Fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) shortens the average Indonesian resident’s life expectancy by 1.3 years, relative to what it would be if the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline of 5 µg/m³ was met. In the most polluted parts of the country, such as parts of Sumatera Utara and Jawa Barat, Indonesians are at risk of losing more than 2.5 years of their lives as a result of exposure to air pollution.…