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
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Electricity is illuminating, but its generation, transmission, and distribution have long been opaque. Today, however, the once static utility industry is becoming a dynamic and transformative opportunity for the nation’s economic, environmental, and energy future.
An array of technological, competitive, and market forces are changing how the U.S. generates power and the ways that Americans interact with the electric grid. A century-old centralized system is yielding to advanced, distributed-energy generation capabilities—in which power is produced at or near the place where it is consumed—that allow the industry to respond to new market opportunities and evolving consumer desires.
At the root …
View Full ResourceDemand response (DR) is the relatively recent term for the reduction or curtailment of a customer’s electric consumption (demand) in response to market or utility signals of one form or another. Early market opportunities for customer participation allowed loads to respond to emergency conditions, to avoid potential outages. More recently this new resource has become viewed as a form of planned or operating reserve capacity to help increase reliability, reduce outages, avoid unnecessary capital investments, integrate intermittent resources, or even balance the frequency of the power on the grid.
Still more recently, demand response has been allowed to participate directly …
View Full ResourcePower plants, substations, and electricity supplies are at risk today from storm surge and coastal flooding, especially in locations along the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico.
In these coastal areas, a hurricane or other large coastal storm can push water inland in a large and damaging storm surge. Crucial electricity infrastructure is exposed to potential flooding and damage during such events.
Widespread blackouts can occur even when only a few pieces of the electric grid succumb to flooding. We’ve seen it happen with Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Rita, and many other coastal storms.
What’s more, sea levels are rising, …
View Full ResourcePower plants, substations, and electricity supplies are at risk today from storm surge and coastal flooding, especially in locations along the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico.
In these coastal areas, a hurricane or other large coastal storm can push water inland in a large and damaging storm surge. Crucial electricity infrastructure is exposed to potential flooding and damage during such events.
Widespread blackouts can occur even when only a few pieces of the electric grid succumb to flooding. We’ve seen it happen with Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Rita, and many other coastal storms.
What’s more, sea levels are rising, …
View Full ResourceThe United States is in the midst of an energy revolution. Over the last decade, the United States has slashed net petroleum imports, dramatically increased shale gas production, scaled up wind and solar power, and cut the growth in electricity consumption to nearly zero through widespread efficiency measures. Emerging advanced energy technologies provide a rich set of options to address our energy challenges, but their largescale deployment requires continued improvements in cost and performance. Technology is helping to drive this revolution, enabled by years to decades of research and development (R&D) that underpin these advances in the energy system.
The …
View Full ResourceDisruptive forces predicted by electric industry pundits have arrived and are redrawing the power supply and consumption chains in the United States and abroad. New technologies affecting both sides of the meter clash with a regulatory construct struggling to keep pace with rapid innovation. Utilities must maintain generation capacity and transmission networks to safely deliver reliable electricity, even as residential consumers avail themselves of cost protections and new methods of generating, conserving and, in some cases, selling power back to the grid.
For the past two years, the Black & Veatch Strategic Directions: U.S. Electric Industry report has eyed the …
View Full ResourceIn July, ICS-CERT became aware of a spear-phishing campaign by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors that targeted multiple sectors, including Chemical, Critical Manufacturing, Energy, and Government Facilities. The activity involved emails with links that redirected to web sites hosting malicious files that exploited a zero-day vulnerability (since then patched) in Adobe Flash Player (CVE-2015-3113).
In previous incidents occurring in early 2014, the same actors also used various social engineering tactics and social media to perform reconnaissance and target company employees. In one case, the malicious actors used a social media account to pose as a perspective candidate for employment and …
View Full ResourceRamping up renewable energy in California is essential to lowering carbon emissions from the state’s electricity sector. Renewable energy can also reduce emissions in the transportation sector by powering electric vehicles.
As California moves toward increasing renewable energy beyond the current requirement of 33 percent by 2020, the state’s approach to managing the electricity grid needs to evolve to take full advantage of its low-carbon resources.
For example, natural gas power plants could generate electricity and provide reliability services when there is an ample supply of renewable energy available. In this scenario, electricity produced by natural gas power plants could …
View Full ResourceThe AEE Institute contracted with ICF International to perform an assessment of the potential impacts of the EPA Clean Power Plan (CPP) on required gas pipeline capacity. This report responds to concerns raised by some stakeholders, including the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), that states might rely heavily on natural gas generation for compliance with the CPP, creating stress on gas pipeline capacity and ultimately impacting electric system reliability. These parties have suggested that addressing the concerns might require expensive expansion of natural gas infrastructure over a challenging timeframe.
Using assumptions provided by the AEE Institute, ICF International modeled …
View Full ResourceNo matter one’s personal opinions on the climate effects of man-made greenhouse emissions, the Obama Administration’s proposed climate change regulations will exact a high price on Americans and have a negligible impact—if any—on global temperatures. The EPA has already put into place several greenhouse-gas regulations; however, the most far-reaching regulations are set to be finalized this summer. Known as the Clean Power Plan, these regulations have garnered bipartisan concern at all levels of government due to the threats the Clean Power Plan poses to the economy, quality of life, reliability of the national power grid, and constitutional separation of powers. …
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