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.
Resource Library
11 to 20 of 163 item(s) were returned.
Atomic energy activities supported by the federal government generated large amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste over several decades of nuclear weapons production and energy research following World War II. This waste has contaminated soil, groundwater, and structures at sites across the country, posing potential risks to human health and the environment.
The Corps is responsible for cleaning up or controlling contamination at some of these sites through FUSRAP. GAO was asked to provide information about the Corps’ efforts to clean up contamination under FUSRAP. This report, among other things, (1) describes the reported environmental liabilities associated with active FUSRAP …
View Full ResourceMicrogrids have the potential to provide customers with clean, low-cost, and most critically, resilient power. SEPA hosted a briefing for Microgrid Controller Standards IEEE 2030.7© and IEEE 2030.8© to provide an overview of the standards and explore the challenges and next steps for microgrid standards. The briefing focused on the adoption and testing associated with IEEE 2030.7© or IEEE 2030.8© by providing:
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An update on the newest version of these standards
A review of potential gaps in the testing standard (IEEE 2030.8©), and
A look at potential future work or development the discussion group hopes to see
The IEA has long described fossil fuel subsidies as a ‘roadblock’ on the pathway to clean energy systems and provided data and advice to support their removal. The methodology is a “price gap approach” where we establish a market reference price and then compare it with the price paid by consumers. When the end-user price is lower than the reference price, it is counted as a subsidy.
But this approach does not reflect the environmental costs of fossil fuels such as carbon prices. To deal with this issue, this report suggests “price gap-plus approach”, which explores whether, and how, it …
View Full ResourceThis paper from Evergreen and NRDC outlines an updated roadmap toward 80 percent clean power by 2030 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 now that the IRA is law. With two years remaining in his first term, President Biden must continue to pursue his agenda using standards, investments, and justice to tackle the climate crisis and build a thriving, just, and inclusive clean energy economy.…
View Full ResourceAmerica’s built environment consists of 124 million residential and 5.9 million commercial buildings, which together generate toxic amounts of air pollution and account for 13 percent of national carbon pollution. For the Biden administration to meet its ambitious climate goals, the White House must now implement rigorous pollution and efficiency standards to swiftly transition America’s buildings to efficient, clean appliances like heat pumps and induction stoves.
The first two years of President Joe Biden’s administration have included historic progress for climate action, but there remains so much more to do. In order to meet his target of a 50-52 percent …
View Full ResourceThe pace of clean energy expansion is accelerating rapidly, thanks in large part to states putting in place goals, standards, and public funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve community resilience, and advance energy equity. The 2022 State Leadership in Clean Energy Awards recognize six outstanding programs that are providing the benefits of clean energy expansion to the people in their states, while demonstrating to others how they could establish similar programs.
This marks the 8th time these biennial awards have been given to highlight state programs and policies that have helped change the trajectory of clean energy. Without exception, …
View Full ResourceShocks from the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are disproportionately affecting emerging and frontier economies – and having especially severe effects on their energy sectors. Progress toward universal access to energy has already stalled, putting achievement of SDG7 at risk. We identify four interlocking squeezes disrupting both grid and off-grid energy development across emerging and frontier markets:
1. Supply chain squeeze. Supply chain hurdles are leading to delays and increasing costs of logistics and inputs.
2. Contract squeeze. Utilities are caught between rising costs and fixed power purchase agreements, pushing investors to find workarounds.
3. Cost of capital …
States use interconnection and net metering policies to integrate customer-sited, distributed energy resources (DERs) into the electric grid or to encourage greater investment in these resources. DERs are electric generation, demand response, or energy storage systems located on the distribution system, typically close to load, used individually or aggregated to provide more value. These resources can help meet electricity needs, reduce emissions, enable customer cost-savings, and improve energy security and resiliency. Interconnection standards and net metering rules can support the development of DERs by providing clear and reasonable requirements for connecting clean energy systems to the electric utility grid for …
View Full ResourceWe categorize the primary incentive-based mechanisms under consideration for addressing greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation—pricing carbon, setting intensity standards, and subsidizing clean energy—and compare their market outcomes under similar expansions of clean electricity generation. While pricing emissions gives strong incentives to first eliminate generation with the highest social cost, a clean energy standard incentivizes earliest phaseout of the generation with the highest private cost. We show that the importance of this distinction depends on the correlation between private costs and emissions rates. We then estimate this correlation for US electricity generation and fuel prices as of 2019. The results …
View Full ResourceOn the Road to 100 Percent Renewables explores actions at one critical level: how leadership states can address climate change by reducing heat-trapping emissions in key sectors of the economy as well as by considering the impacts of our energy choices. A collaboration of the Union of Concerned Scientists and local environmental justice groups COPAL (Minnesota), GreenRoots (Massachusetts), and the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, with contributions from the national Initiative for Energy Justice, assessed the potential to accelerate the use of renewable energy dramatically through state-level renewable electricity standards (RESs), major drivers of clean energy in recent decades. In addition, …
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