2024 Reliabilty Performance and Regional Risk Assessment

Electricity is the key driver of modern life and the foundation of our digital future. The North American BPS faces mounting resource adequacy challenges from surging demand growth to power our increasingly electrified economies combined with thermal generator retirements. The Texas RE/ERCOT Region (hereafter “Region”) is at the forefront of these changes. The Region is forecasting unprecedented load growth that is primarily driven by the integration of large loads associated with new data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) services, as well as increased demand from the oil and gas sectors. ERCOT currently forecasts an additional 70.5 GW of new load …

Regulatory Sandboxes and Other Processes to Expedite Utility Adoption of Advanced Grid Technologies

Advanced grid technologies are increasingly important to enable electric transmission and distribution systems to meet growing demands. However, traditional regulatory processes typically lag technological advancements. Regulatory sandboxes, which provide a structured environment for testing new technologies and business approaches under modified rules to increase the speed of adoption, aim to bridge the gap between grid needs and opportunities to deliver solutions at scale.…

The Importance of Natural Gas to Illinois

The severe economic burden that forced electrification would place on families across the state, with particular harm to the 37% of Illinois households already living below the ALICE (Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed) threshold. Currently, Illinois consumes the eighth highest amount of natural gas in the country, with nearly 8 out of 10 Illinois homes relying on natural gas for heating.

In this report, CEA found that if Illinois households had been forced to switch to all-electric heating, their utility bills would have increased by $7.6 billion statewide or $2,631 per household.…

Taking Inventory

Pennsylvania is ground zero for the abandoned oil and gas well crisis in the United States. The state’s long history of drilling, dating back to the late 1850s, has culminated in hundreds of thousands of unplugged wells that are spread across the state. Many of these wells are leaking harmful pollutants and hazardous chemicals that pose significant risk to human health, the environment, and the climate. Left unplugged, these wells can lower property values, contaminate the soil and groundwater, and leak harmful methane into the air. Improperly plugged oil and gas wells, including decommissioned shale gas wells, can also leak …

Hedging Natural Gas Shocks

Congress is considering raising the tax burden on electricity investment and production supported through tax credit ( ITC & PTC) enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). These provisions support building generation capacity across a range of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, energy storage, wind, solar, and hydro, thereby diversifying a sector currently led by natural gas. Part of the justification for the ITC & PTC was the additional development and returns to scale that could be unlocked from otherwise underinvested sources and technologies.…

Assessing Impacts of “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” on U.S. Energy Costs, Jobs, Health, Emissions

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” being considered by the U.S. Senate would repeal multiple federal policies, funding programs, and tax credits that drive American energy manufacturing and deployment. The text claws back unobligated funding, expands new oil and gas leasing, changes or eliminates energy and manufacturing tax credits, and repeals some Clean Air Act programs.…

Modernizing American Energy Innovation

Modernizing American Energy Innovation: Five Ways to Re-energize DOE (June 2025) analyzes challenges and opportunities at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as it increases end-to-end support for energy innovation.

DOE has long played a key role in driving innovation and economic growth, supporting national security, and maintaining U.S. competitiveness. With unprecedented resources granted by Congress through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA), DOE is positioned to scale energy innovation like never before. However, the department’s outdated structures are struggling to keep pace with its evolving clean energy mission; recent cuts …

Short-Term Energy Outlook

The U.S. macroeconomic outlook we use in the Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) is based on S&P Global’s macroeconomic model. S&P Global’s most recent model reflects the tariffs announced in April and includes the 90 day temporary suspension of tariffs granted to certain countries. S&P Global finalized its most recent model before the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled on May28th to temporarily halt the implementation of all reciprocal tariffs. As a result, our macroeconomic forecast assumes lower tariffs on China’s products compared with last month’s STEO and 10% tariffs on countries subject to the 90-day temporary suspension. These differences in …

Beyond LCOE: A Systems-Oriented Perspective for Evaluating Electricity Decarbonization Pathways

Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) is a widely used standardized metric to assess electricity generation project costs per expected generation output. Often used to compare technology costs, LCOE has become a ubiquitous metric used in electricity industry literature, cost forecasts, project business cases, and policy making.

The LCOE metric is popular in part due to its simplicity and standardization and has been used widely to display LCOE declines of solar and wind. LCOE is calculated by summing the discounted project cost, primarily capital and operating expenditures, and dividing those costs by the discounted expected electricity generation over the life of …

A Study of Terminal Decline Rates of Oil & Gas Wells

In the United States alone, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there may be nearly 4 million inadequately decommissioned oil and gas wells. These wells and associated surface facilities represent material health and safety risks for people and nature in their immediate surroundings. They also collectively are a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, a driving force behind global warming. 

A climate mitigation business model is emerging in which a project developer undertakes to properly plug a leaking abandoned wellbore (or a leaking orphaned well, which is a subset of abandoned wells that lack a viable owner) to stop its …