The 2022 Global Energy Agenda

The year 2021 began with high hopes for climate action, as many members of the international community—including, once again, the US—rededicated themselves to the effort and looked to deploy resources accordingly. And there were certainly landmark achievements: the Global Methane Pledge was launched, the Paris Agreement rulebook was completed, and the private holders of $130 trillion in assets under management pledged their collective financial muscle to the fight against climate change, among other victories. But as global economic demand roared back from its pandemic-dampened level in 2020, energy supply failed to keep up, inflating hydrocarbon prices, driving countries back to …

North Carolina Offshore Wind Cost-Benefit Analysis

Recently codified in state-level legislation, North Carolina has asserted the carbon-reduction goal of 70% by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. To that end, the Governor’s administration, the North Carolina General Assembly, and Duke Energy have all endeavored to examine pathways to reliably and cost effectively decarbonize the state’s electric grid. While offshore wind has occasionally been an element of these discussions, due to relative cost and nascency of the U.S. offshore wind industry, it hasn’t been evaluated as a primary tool for decarbonization.

Absent from any of the decarbonization modeling or stakeholder processes conducted in the state …

Lifecycle GHG Impacts in Building Codes

NBI’s report presents language to incorporate embodied carbon requirements in building codes. Researchers explain the need to address the embodied carbon of the highest emitting materials and the carbon emission benefits for jurisdictions. Until the report’s release, there was a lack of understanding of what a regulation on embodied carbon would look like in a U.S. base code. The code acknowledges the importance of building materials in the construction industry and aims to achieve practical reductions in climate impact by selecting lower embodied carbon materials. Example code language can be adopted by jurisdictions starting with EPD reporting to target GWP …

Evaluating National and Subnational Carbon Prices: A Harmonized Approach

This working paper presents data and methodology that provide a detailed record of carbon pricing mechanisms worldwide.…

Net-Zero Power: Long Duration Energy Storage for a Renewable Grid

The LDES Council Report is an authoritative analysis of long duration energy storage. Based on data and research provided by council members, the LDES Council Report sets out the requirement for long duration energy storage to accelerate carbon neutrality.…

Storage Futures Study: Grid Operational Impacts of Widespread Storage Deployment

This report, the sixth in the SFS series, uses cost-driven scenarios from NREL’s Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model as a starting point to examine the operational impacts of grid-scale storage deployment and relationships between this deployment and the contribution of variable renewable energy. We use commercial production cost modeling software to evaluate hourly operation of five scenarios that reach between 210 gigawatts (GW) and 930 GW of installed storage by 2050. We find that storage plays an important role in these power systems between now and 2050—by storing the lowest-marginal cost generation (often, overgeneration from solar or wind plants) …

Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation: The Hydrogen Factor

As countries around the world rally behind net zero targets, hydrogen is increasingly seen as a missing piece of the energy transformation puzzle to decarbonise harder-to-abate sectors. The possible pathway on which hydrogen might evolve still involves many uncertainties. With the growing momentum to establish a global hydrogen market comes the need for a deeper understanding of its broader effects, including geopolitical aspects. IRENA has carried out an in-depth analysis of the geopolitics of hydrogen as part of the work of the Collaborative Framework on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation (CF-GET). The report builds on IRENA’s substantial body of work …

Electricity Market Report – January 2022

The year 2021 placed exceptional demands on electricity markets around the world. Strong economic growth, combined with colder winters and warmer summers, boosted global electricity demand by more than 6% – the largest increase since the recovery from the financial crisis in 2010. The fast rebound in overall energy demand strained supply chains for coal and natural gas, pushing up wholesale electricity prices. Despite the impressive growth of renewable power, electricity generation from coal and gas hit record levels. As a result, the global electricity sector’s annual carbon dioxide emissions leaped to a new all-time high after having decreased for …

NDCs and Renewable Energy Targets in 2021

Under the Paris Agreement and COP26, countries enhanced their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and declared ambitious mitigation pledges such as net zero. Despite making a sizeable difference to greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature rise, we still need to set the world on a climate-safe pathway.

Governments, financial institutions, and private sector entities must broaden ambition commensurate to the scale of the climate threat, followed by real, short-term, accelerated implementation: a key feature of the Glasgow Climate Pact made at the COP26.

This report assesses current climate pledges in light of the challenge ahead, and explores the transformative opportunity offered …

Back-end to Innovation: How Disposal of Nuclear Waste is Breaking New Ground

Much of the recent focus regarding innovation in civil nuclear technology has been on advanced reactors and their development, deployment, and commercialization. At the same time, there have been exciting innovations taking place in the management of the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle. Countries that are most advanced in their approach to licensing deep geological repositories (DGRs) for used fuel are leading not only on how they incorporate safety, security, and safeguards (the “3S principles”) into DGR planning, but also how community-driven approaches are addressing—and achieving—what could be called the fourth “S” nuclear principle: social acceptance.…