Permanent CO2 Storage for Direct Air Capture

When paired with geological storage, Direct Air Capture (DAC) can permanently remove carbon dioxide (CO2) at a scale that can help achieve global climate goals. There is a substantial body of evidence that allows for an in-depth assessment of the safety and permanence of geological CO2 storage, since the practice has been harnessed at a commercial scale in the United States for decades. When properly sited, constructed, tested and monitored in accordance with frameworks like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Class VI Underground Injection Control program, geological storage of CO2 is both durable and safe. Safety concerns around geologic …

The Energy Transition to Renewables

The U.S. energy sector is undergoing a fundamental transition to a cleaner and more distributed future. Increasingly favorable economics, corporate commitments, and state and federal actions, like the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, are all spurring the deployment of renewable energy resources.

Included in this trendline:
– Renewable energy M&A is entering a new paradigm, LevelTen Energy says
– Solar PPA prices are creeping up again, but it’s mostly because of conditions in a single state
– Louisiana colleges aim to build state’s offshore economy into a nerve center for wind energy…

Financing Building Decarbonization: Leveraging a Sector-Wide Emissions Model to Prioritize Capital Flows

Real estate actors across the United States are at the precipice of a major climate opportunity. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the increased focus by investors, lenders, regulators, and policymakers on building decarbonization, positions the sector to take meaningful action.

To inform this opportunity, RMI conducted a bottom-up carbon analysis of the US building stock to determine the relative operational emissions for each segment. To the knowledge of RMI, this is the most detailed US buildings emissions model created to date. This report provides a breakdown of US building carbon emissions by segment, subsegment, and building size …

Legal Challenges Related to Nuclear Safety

There are many types of legal challenges that can be raised in the context of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Each country’s framework for legal challenges related to the peaceful use of nuclear energy depends on its national legal system. Because each country’s national legal structure is distinct, it is important for lawyers, as well as law- and policy-makers, to have a comparative understanding of the different frameworks for legal challenges.

Focusing only on legal challenges related to nuclear safety, the aim of this report is to provide insights into the frameworks for legal challenges related to nuclear safety …

From Sun to Roof to Grid

From Sun to Roof to Grid: The Economics and Policy of Distributed Photovoltaics explores the benefits, challenges, and risks of DPV, with special attention to the economics of its deployment and its uses for utilities. The challenges addressed include inadequate electricity supply, energy access for low-income groups, natural disasters, decarbonizing the grid, and supply diversification. The report also offers a new paradigm to design policy packages for systems with more decentralized generation. In the new paradigm, DPV facilities can be better promoted by aligning the incentives of various stakeholders and distributing costs and benefits in a fair and efficient manner. …

Participant Outcomes in Residential Pay As You Save® Programs

In this report, we review the energy and financial outcomes for households participating in several programs based on successive versions of the Pay As You Save® (PAYS®) system. PAYS® programs offer non-debt financing for energy efficiency (and sometimes other technologies) in residential buildings and collect repayment through a tariff attached to the home’s utility meter that is designed to be offset by project savings.

We collected and analyzed project financial data from five PAYS® programs and analyzed the electricity and gas usage impacts of one program (Midwest Energy) using weather-normalized methods applied to metered energy consumption data. We also calculated …

National Wind Energy Workforce Assessment: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Needs

Understanding the workforce needs to meet U.S. wind energy deployment goals is essential for successfully transitioning to a clean energy future. Recognizing how key levers, which are defined as actions that influence workforce supply and demand (e.g., automation, acceptance rates, perception of wind energy industry jobs), impact behaviors and estimations can provide insight into actions to equitably and sustainably develop the wind energy workforce. The increased need to further develop a domestic wind supply chain along with the ever-present wind workforce gap has revealed the urgency of enacting or expanding programs and policy to help grow a qualified wind industry …

Russia’s Turn to the East: Energy Exports to China and India

The long-standing effort by Russian officials to increase energy exports to Asia has ramped up since Western sanctions and cuts in Russian pipeline natural gas exports have slashed European imports from Russia. China and India have been Russia’s principal target markets; the two nations bought about 90% of Russia’s crude oil exports in 2023. Russia and its trade partners as yet lack infrastructure necessary to yield a similar market for natural gas exports.…

The Key to Electric Grid Reliability: Modernizing Governance

The U.S. electric grid is under strain, with blackouts on the rise and the system’s reliability more frequently tested than ever before in the face of more frequent storms, heat waves, hurricanes, and the like. In diagnosing the causes of diminishing grid reliability, policymakers and experts have pointed to aging grid infrastructure, growing cyber threats, more natural disasters and weather extremes, and overreliance on renewable energy—such as solar and wind.
This white paper argues that the primary cause of our unreliable grid is not the changing energy mix but rather a failure of grid governance. The grid governance system consists …

A Roadmap for Tandem Photovoltaics

Combining two or more junctions into a tandem solar cell promises to deliver a leap in power conversion efficiency that will help to sustain continued growth in installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity. Although tandems are now on the roadmaps of many PV manufacturers, much work remains before they are ready for mass deployment. Accelerating their development requires advances on many fronts. In this article, we outline the fundamentals and status of tandem PV, considering multiple PV technology pairings and architectures. We then present the challenges that must be overcome and a general timeline of activities that are required to translate tandems …