Corporates, Electricity, and Renewables: An Analysis of Industrial Electricity Use and CO2 Emissions Across the Globe

Industrial companies’ use of electricity significantly contributes to global CO2 emissions due to the reliance on fossil fuel-based power generation. The industry is responsible for about 44% of global electricity use. If companies procured electricity from wind and solar sources instead, it would substantially reduce their carbon footprint, helping to mitigate climate change. This report provides an essential analysis of electricity usage and emissions in the manufacturing sector globally and across 22 countries, serving as a critical reference for policymakers, business leaders, and other stakeholders. Most of the selected countries have a coal-intensive power generation.

By understanding the driving forces …

Charging Forward: A Toolkit for Planning and Funding Urban Electric Mobility Infrastructure

The Urban Electric Mobility Toolkit serves as a one-stop resource to help urban communities scope, plan, and identify ways to fund electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, supporting diverse forms of electric mobility including travel by personal vehicle, transit, micromobility (e.g., electric bicycles and scooters), and ride-sharing services. Urban communities, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), transportation providers, businesses, and property owners and developers can use the toolkit to identify key partners for an electric charging project, take advantage of relevant planning tools, and identify available funding or financing to help make that project a reality…

Don’t Overlook Your Aging Substations

Substations are a key part of every utility’s infrastructure, but their quiet dependability makes them a vulnerable part of the power grid. They work until they don’t. When a utility only services substations after a fault or outage, they should expect long, slow, and expensive repairs along with frustrated rate payers.

Regular assessment and preventative maintenance is key to substation resilience, and can ensure that the substations your customers count on keep running with no interruptions. Ensuring that substations and other transmission infrastructure are properly maintained is key to reduced total cost of ownership and customer value creation.…

Remote Monitoring of Distribution Transformers and Breakers

Market factors such as supply constraints, loss of workforce and aging infrastructure are causing utilities to rethink how they manage distribution assets. This is particularly important because power disruptions are trending upwards and causing customers to lose billions in economic activity annually. Utilities are embracing data analytics and intelligent control systems to improve reliability, reduce costs and inform decision-making. Distribution transformers and substation circuit breakers are crucial components of this strategy, and remote monitoring of these assets will likely become standard practice.

This playbook explores the benefits of plug-and-play monitoring devices that utilities can use to enable digital asset management …

A Case Study of Transmission Limits on Renewables Growth in Texas

This paper explores the interplay between projected renewable energy additions onto the electricity grid in Texas operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the region’s existing electrical transmission network.

Without expanding ERCOT’s electrical transmission network and storage capacity, congestion and curtailments will rise. Curtailments are due to both inadequate transmission capacity and surplus generation during high availability periods of variable renewable generation.

Transmission system upgrades could reduce some curtailments that arise from transmission capacity limitations. But curtailments resulting from surplus generation cannot be mitigated by transmission system upgrades and storage. With the addition of variable renewable generating …

Hanford Cleanup

The Department of Energy (DOE) has developed plans for storing, preparing, staging, and transferring a portion of the radioactive liquid waste from decades of nuclear weapons research and production held in tanks at DOE’s Hanford site. The plans cover the first phase of waste treatment and disposal at Hanford’s Low-Activity Waste (LAW) facility, including means of identifying and managing barriers to the plans’ implementation. The plans also identify potential cost and schedule effects to the tank waste management and treatment mission from such barriers, which DOE refers to as risks not addressed. The following table shows some of the most …

Nuclear Waste Cleanup

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) site office at Los Alamos (EM-LA) has taken steps to establish elements of EM’s Program Management Protocol, which contains requirements and expectations for planning, budgeting, executing, and evaluating all work within EM’s program. As of March 2023, EM-LA officials said they had submitted program management documents for approval, including a life cycle cost estimate and risk management plan. However, EM-LA has not taken a comprehensive approach to prioritizing cleanup activities in a risk-informed manner. For example, EM-LA has not analyzed different options for achieving site cleanup objectives, as called for …

A Review of Examples and Opportunities to Quantify the Grid Reliability and Resilience Impacts of Energy Efficiency

Grid reliability and resilience are foundational to meeting electricity needs and have significant economic and societal impacts. Energy efficiency can help meet grid reliability objectives and improve resilience, but metrics and methods used today may not fully recognize these benefits. This paper explains how existing planning processes for bulk power and distribution systems capture the impact of energy efficiency on power system reliability and resilience, with illustrative examples. We identify limitations in using existing reliability and resilience metrics to quantify efficiency and other distributed energy resource (DER) benefits. The paper concludes with opportunities for regulators and utilities to enhance planning …

National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program

The U.S. transportation sector accounts for one-third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions—the largest share of all primary sectors, including electricity production, industry, commercial and residential, and agriculture. Electrified transportation has significant potential to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and help tackle the climate crisis.

Electrifying our transportation sector requires bold action to ensure the necessary infrastructure is in place for Americans to be able to ride and drive electric. According to a recent study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 1.2 million public
charging stations will be needed to support 33 million light-duty vehicles by 2030. The Infrastructure Investment …

Strengthening a Minnesota Community with Solar and Resilience

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) prepared this case study to describe how the community based organization, Ecolibrium3, developed a community solar array and resilience hub to benefit residents of a low-income, historically marginalized community in Duluth, MN. To create these two distinct projects Ecolibrium3 made use of stakeholder partnerships, technical assistance, and community outreach. This case study illustrates how these two projects were developed, what they learned, and what advice they would give to those developing future programs.

This case study was developed as part of CESA’s Solar with Justice: Connecting States and Communities project. The Solar with Justice …