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.
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The United States depends on a variety of fuels to generate electricity, including fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil), nuclear power, and renewable sources. Power plants that burn fossil fuels provide about 70 percent of U.S. electricity, but they also produce substantial amounts of harmful air emissions. In particular, electricity generating units at fossil fuel power plants are among the largest emitters of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which have been linked to respiratory illnesses and acid rain, as well as of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Of the three fossil fuels, coal is …
View Full ResourceBackground: Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems can provide a range of benefits to users with regards to efficiency, reliability, costs and environmental impact. Furthermore, increasing the amount of electricity generated by CHP systems in the United States has been identified as having significant potential for impressive economic and environmental outcomes on a national scale. Given the benefits from increasing the adoption of CHP technologies, there is value in improving our understanding of how desired increases in CHP adoption can be best achieved. These obstacles are currently understood to stem from regulatory as well as economic and technological barriers. In… View Full Resource
The confluence of four powerful trends underway across the nation’s electric energy system is
driving the need for a drastically different approach to managing our grid system in the twenty first century: (1) the rapid penetration of intermittent renewable resources, including distributed wind and solar photovoltaics (PV), (2) the expected proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), (3) the recent and continued advances in power electronics such as DC/AC inverters and smart batteries, and (4) a large-scale deployment of a sensing, control, and two-way communication smart grid infrastructure.
Together these trends create both new levels of risk to electric grid reliability, stability, …
View Full ResourceMany countries—reflecting very different geographies, markets, and power systems—are successfully managing high levels of variable renewable energy on the electric grid, including that from wind and solar energy. This study documents the diverse approaches to effective integration of variable renewable energy among six countries—Australia (South Australia), Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the United States (Colorado and Texas)—and summarizes policy best practices that energy ministers and other stakeholders can pursue to ensure that electricity markets and power systems can effectively coevolve with increasing penetrations of variable renewable energy. There is no one-size-fits-all approach; each country has crafted its own combination of …
View Full ResourceThe Blueprint’s actions and recommendations will unify the State’s efforts to create an energy infrastructure that will serve the State’s residents and businesses in the decades to come. Construction of the new transmission capacity called for under the Blueprint would solve a decades-old problem: the limitations of the State’s electric grid to transmit available, cheaper upstate power to downstate when demand is high. The Blueprint achieves this public policy goal with a first-of-its-kind solicitation of new transmission projects. The Blueprint’s call for immediate development and initial implementation of detailed contingency plans to address potential power plant closures demonstrates the State’s …
View Full ResourcePopulation growth, increased energy demand, and the expansion of renewably generated electricity require the modernization of the electric grid to ensure its reliability and meet future needs. Upgrades and new electric transmission lines are necessary, but the siting of lines is complex. Multiple levels of regulation, environmental concerns, citizen opposition, permitting procedures, and public lands are just a few of the variables that further complicate the process
for investor-owned utilities (IOUs), government officials, and stakeholders.
The regulatory structure is different in each state, so the following has been written as a general description of the process an IOU needs to …
View Full ResourceThe purpose of this document is to inform members of the public who are involved in a study of their preferences for ways that Idaho can meet future electricity demand. It is intended to provide only a baseline of information and was written to intentionally not lead the reader to specific conclusions. The study is being conducted by researchers at the Energy Policy Institute (EPI), part of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES). CAES is a collaboration of Boise State University, University of Idaho, Idaho State University, and the Idaho National Laboratory.
The information covers Idaho’s electricity situation as …
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