Environmental Justice Update: Three Areas to Watch in Spring 2024

While environmental justice (EJ) concerns continued to drive policymaking in early 2024, EJ efforts increasingly faced headwinds coming from various and sometimes unexpected directions. This report will summarize recent developments in the EJ space and outline three areas to watch for the regulated community in spring 2024.…

President Biden’s First Term: Building America’s Energy Independence

The Biden Administration has managed to do what many thought was impossible: grow our economy and push the clean energy transition forward at the same time. President Biden and Congressional Democrats understand that clean energy won’t succeed if it increases costs for working families or disproportionately benefits other countries. For a successful energy transition, the US has to address working families’ concerns, and the Biden Administration has done just that, ensuring the switch to clean energy creates good-paying jobs, boosts domestic manufacturing, and lowers household costs. Their strategy is working: the past three years have been a period of unprecedented …

Transforming Through Uncertainty

DNV’s Energy Industry Insights research – now in its 14th year – explores the confidence, sentiment, and priorities for the energy industry in the year ahead.
The research draws on our annual survey of more than 1,000 senior professionals and a programme of in-depth interviews with leaders and experts. It is developed and created by teams from DNV and FT Longitude (a Financial Times company).
The research was conducted during February and March 2024. Survey respondents were drawn from across the energy industry, including publicly listed companies and privately held firms, and spanning electrical power, renewables, oil and gas, industry …

Building Community Resilience Across California

Between 2020 and 2024, PSE Healthy Energy partnered with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) to identify opportunities to build solar+energy storage resilience hubs at schools, community centers, and places of worship across California. APEN defines resilience hubs as “physical institutions that offer space for community members to gather, organize, and access resilience-building social services on a daily basis, and provide response and recovery services in disaster situations.” Our analysis focuses on solar+storage resilience hubs, which can deliver distinct advantages for community resilience by keeping essential services online during power outages and providing …

Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector

The U.S. Department of Energy led the development of a Blueprint for decarbonizing U.S. buildings by 2050 to lay out a national strategy for aggressively reducing building greenhouse gas emissions while delivering equity, affordability, and resilience benefits to communities. The vision includes action the federal government can take to meet specific targets for increasing building energy efficiency, accelerating onsite emissions reductions, transforming the grid edge, and minimizing embodied life cycle emissions.

The national strategy reflects the central role that buildings play in achieving economy-wide climate goals while delivering cost savings, healthier environments, and high-quality jobs for the American people. Federal …

How the Cloud and AI Can Help Utilities Modernize Asset Management

Utility executives oversee a vast network of assets that includes transmission lines, power plants, substations and transformers. But all these assets are geographically dispersed and disconnected from each other. Without clear insights into the performance of these assets, how are utilities supposed to make data-informed decisions and improve productivity, resiliency and energy efficiency?

This latest playbook looks at how utilities can use the cloud, AI and other state-of-the-art technologies to modernize their asset management systems and increase the reliability and productivity of their systems. The report includes:

– Why it’s critical for utilities to modernize their asset management systems
– …

Restoring America’s Nuclear Energy Leadership and Exports

Today’s international environment is profoundly different from that of the Cold War era—a period of intense U.S.–Soviet competition, but also a time when the United States and its allies led in many technological fields and dominated the global economy—and its aftermath, when geopolitical rivalries eased. Yet many institutions and policies, domestic as well as international, originated in these periods, when circumstances, priorities, threats, and opportunities were different from those of today. As a result, many U.S. approaches are no longer suit America’s needs.
The gap between institutions and policies, on one hand, and international realities, on the other, is especially …

Oceans of Opportunity

The Global Maritime Forum and RMI (founded as the Rocky Mountain Institute), under Mission Innovation’s umbrella, released a report outlining strategies for ports to become first movers in providing green methanol and ammonia bunkering. The report provides insights into the sources of green methanol and ammonia that could be available to the shipping industry and how ports can secure supply to meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) target of at least 5% use of zero-emission fuels by 2030.

As the maritime industry transitions towards decarbonization, there will be significant changes in the sourcing and distribution of marine fuels. The report …

NEA Specialist Workshop on Advanced Measurement Method and Instrumentation for Enhancing Severe Accident Management in a Nuclear Power Plant: Summary Report

The NEA Specialist Workshop on Advanced Measurement Method and Instrumentation for Enhancing Severe Accident Management in a Nuclear Power Plant addressing Emergency, Stabilisation and Long-term Recovery Phases (SAMMI-2020) was held online from 7 to 9 December 2020 and hosted by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). Considering lessons learnt from severe accidents (SAs) that have occurred in commercial nuclear power plants, this workshop aimed to gather and summarise advanced measurement methods and instrumentation dedicated to severe accident management (SAM) at nuclear power plants, along with revised SA guidance based on instrumentation survivability insights in order to prevent, mitigate and recover …

Steel Decarbonization Policy Levers

The steel sector, the most emissions-intensive heavy industry, is responsible for about 1 percent of US emissions and about 7 percent of global emissions. It is a key input to the modern economy, and the next decade will be a critical period for the evolution of US primary steel production capabilities. Global overcapacity concerns, new international trade benchmarks, and modern production advances will influence the transition strategy for the sector, affecting US-based workers and communities.

The United States steel industry faces a major fork in the road: lock in legacy, dirtier coal-based production methods, or reinvest in modern production assets. …