Meeting Growing Electricity Demand Without Gas

Electricity demand is spiking due to data centers, a manufacturing boom, and electrification. This is good news – federal policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and CHIPS Act are working as intended to drive sustained economic growth through a clean energy economy. New Energy Innovation research finds we don’t need to fill the gap with more natural gas. Regulators and utilities can meet the need for more electricity, continue cleaning the grid, and maintain reliability by taking a holistic approach instead of just building more fossil generation or extending the life of fossil plants slated for retirement.…

Communities Conditionally Support Deployment of Direct Air Capture for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States

Direct air capture has gained traction as a method for carbon dioxide removal. How and whether direct air capture can be deployed requires securing social license to operate, and increasingly demands environmental justice and just transition principles. Here we use a nationally representative survey to evaluate public perceptions of direct air capture, paired with focus groups to assess community perceptions across four communities in the United States: Houston, Texas; Monaca, Pennsylvania; Bakersfield, California; and Rock Springs, Wyoming. We find conditional support for direct air capture deployment among focus group participants, and majority support for direct air capture deployment among national …

International Governance of Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal: Recent Developments and Future Directions

With the impacts of climate change intensifying, and progress in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it continuing to lag, the parties to the Paris Climate Agreement have emphasized the need to accelerate efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while simultaneously curbing emissions. As the parties have recognized, the ocean is already a major carbon sink, and could play an important role in future carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”) efforts. Scientists have proposed a variety of ocean-based CDR approaches, but most require further research to fully evaluate their efficacy, benefits, and risks. In-ocean testing of the approaches, and …

The Landscape of Carbon Dioxide Removal and US Policies to Scale Solutions

As the speed, scale, and complexity of achieving US economy-wide decarbonization are better understood, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is gaining more attention as an important piece of the puzzle. CDR is a broad set of processes and technologies that result in the net removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Because of policies implemented over the past few years, the US is now a global leader in policy support for CDR. However, more federal policy support is needed to expand the portfolio of CDR options and ensure a robust CDR market exists to support the goal of mid-century decarbonization. In this …

NRC Should Take Actions to Fully Consider the Potential Effects of Climate Change

Climate change is expected to exacerbate natural hazards—including heat,
drought, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and sea level rise. In addition, climate change may affect extreme cold weather events. Risks to nuclear power plants from these hazards include loss of offsite power, damage to systems and equipment, and diminished cooling capacity, potentially resulting in reduced operations or plant shutdowns.…

Unlocking Community Resilience: Innovative Strategies to Access Climate Adaptation Funding

Community efforts to adapt to the physical impacts of climate change are lagging despite unprecedented financing available for resilience in the United States. Local and state governments and organizations are pioneering approaches to address key challenges and improve community access to resilience funding. These innovative strategies include:
– boosting local capacity to plan projects and access funding, featuring Colorado’s Regional Grant Navigators
– stacking public and private funding to implement and scale projects, featuring Downtown Denver Partnership’s Urban Forest Initiative
– streamlining access to multiple financial resources for end users, featuring Impact Development Fund’s Disaster Recovery Program

Case studies from …

Power of Flexibility: Facilitating the Energy Transition with Hybrid Hydropower Solutions

The objective for a hydropower hybrid is to take maximum advantage of the integrated technologies by maximizing their utilization, the benefits they bring, and their efficiency. It is widely known that stand-alone hydropower plants and other technologies can help manage the variability of VRE in the power system. However, with increasing shares of VRE, there is also a growing importance of understanding the advantages to manage this variability before power is injected into the power system.…

Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection As of the End of 2023

Electric transmission system operators (ISOs, RTOs, or utilities) require projects seeking to connect to the grid to undergo a series of impact studies before they can be built. This process establishes what new transmission equipment or upgrades may be needed before a project can connect to the system and assigns the costs of that equipment. The lists of projects in this process are known as “interconnection queues”. The amount of new electric capacity in these queues is growing dramatically, with nearly 2,600 gigawatts (GW) of total generation and storage capacity now seeking connection to the grid (over 95% of which …

Advancing the Growth of the U.S. Offshore Wind Industry: Federal Funding and Incentives

The Biden-Harris Administration is using every tool available to grow an American offshore wind industry that will power millions of homes with clean electricity, create thousands of good paying jobs across the country, and strengthen our energy security while reducing dangerous climate pollution.
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda includes historic support for offshore wind
development. This document highlights key programs from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as well as other resources from the Departments of the Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Transportation available to support the Administration’s goals of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 …

California’s Blueprint to Leverage Green Ammonia Production as a Key Decarbonization Tool

In recognition of the reality that California will need a broad portfolio of renewable resources to reach its decarbonization goals, experts and policymakers worldwide and within California are looking to renewable hydrogen to complement electrification since it can provide an alternative pathway to decarbonization for these hard-to-abate sectors. Hydrogen – which is the most abundant element in the universe – can be used for energy storage and load balancing, as a feedstock, and as a fuel across the transportation, industrial, agricultural, and power sectors. Interest in renewable hydrogen has only increased in the U.S. since the federal government passed two …