The Climate Action Protocol: Navigate the Complexity To Make Confident Climate Claims

Increasing frameworks and guidance on climate action claims have created a confusing range of options which can take time to understand and navigate.

Climate Impact Partners’ expert team has reviewed all the requirements and launched The Climate Action Protocol, enabling companies to make confident climate claims, based on internal reductions and high-quality carbon credits.

The Climate Action Protocol, covering Climate Impact Partners’ CarbonNeutral certification, ISO’s 14068 Carbon Neutral Standard; ISO’s Net Zero Guidance; SBTi’s Net Zero Standard; and VCMI’s Carbon Integrity Claim, provides the tools to compare and contrast requirements in order to make the right choice for your business. …

Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator: The Corps Network

From 2020 to 2023, The Corps Network participated as a partner in Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator (BBWA). The BBWA is a Department of Energy initiative seeking to raise the level of building science and energy efficiency knowledge in the nation’s building-related workforce. Through the BBWA, DOE engaged industry partners in activities that build interest and awareness, streamline pathways, and improve skills for people pursuing green building careers.…

Financing the Low-Carbon Transition in Heavy Industry

China’s heavy industry sectors are large in scale, carbon-intensive in both feedstock and fuel use, asset-heavy, and have a long life cycle in nature. Ensuring a successful low-carbon transition is challenging and requires large amounts of capital investment. The rapidly evolving green financing mechanisms have successfully channeled capital to support a wide range of decarbonization activities. However, due to the misalignment between the high emitting nature of heavy industry and the original definitions of green finance, existing financial support is still insufficient to meet the heavy industry’s decarbonization needs. Therefore, there is an urgent need for innovative financing mechanisms.

This …

TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant: An Economic Assessment of Replacement Alternatives

On behalf of the Southern Environmental Law Center, Researchers Chirag T. Lala and Joshua R. Castigliego, Senior Economist Tyler Comings, and Assistant Researcher Elisabeth Seliga prepared a report that models the costs to consumers of alternatives for the soon-to-be retired Kingston Fossil Plant—a coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee that is owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). TVA’s Alternative A plan replaces Kingston with a gas-heavy portfolio that constructs gas combined cycle (CC) and combustion turbine (CT) plants, while Alternative B focuses on replacing Kingston with a clean energy portfolio that relies on solar and battery storage …

Hydropower Investment and Public-Private Ecosystem Assessment

Hydropower plays a key role in the United States energy generation mix, representing nearly a third of U.S. renewable energy generation today. Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) currently represents 96% of utility-scale energy storage capacity and 70% of grid storage capacity and supports grid stability and reliability across the country. Despite the potential of these technologies to support the U.S. clean energy transition, new public and private investment in hydropower projects of all sizes lags other renewable energy generation sources such as wind and solar). Between 2005 and 2022, the United States substantially increased its solar and wind generation capacity, adding …

Forecasting a Realistic Electricity Infrastructure Buildout for Medium- & Heavy-Duty Battery Electric Vehicles

Numerous new pressures are being placed on the trucking industry. States and the federal government are examining regulations to quickly transition the industry by 2040 to full electrification with the goal to reduce commercial vehicle carbon emissions. The Clean Freight Coalition contracted a study with Roland Berger to determine the added costs to the freight industry and utilities if commercial vehicles reach 100% electrification. This study examined two scenarios- one with current vehicle and charging technology offerings, and the other with modest improvement in both vehicles and chargers- to determine the realistic electricity infrastructure buildout scenario for medium- and heavy-duty …

The Visual Effect of Wind Turbines on Property Values is Small and Diminishing in Space and Time

Renewable power generation is the key to decarbonizing the electricity system. Wind power is the fastest-growing renewable source of electricity in the United States. However, expanding wind capacity often faces local opposition, partly due to a perceived visual disamenity from large wind turbines. Here, they provide a US-wide assessment of the externality costs of wind power generation through the visibility impact on property values. To this end, they create a database on wind turbine visibility, combining information on the site and height of each utility-scale turbine having fed power into the U.S. grid, with a high-resolution elevation map to account …

Texas Oil and Gas Association Quarterly Energy Economics Outlook

In the ever evolving economic and energy landscape, the outset of 2024 brings with it updated economic forecasts, particularly in the face of broad expectations for a slowdown. Yet, emerging data show resilience and unexpected growth, challenging preconceived notions and setting the stage for a reevaluation of this year’s prospects.

This article delves into the latest insights from TXOGA’s quarterly monitoring and analyses of economic and energy markets, with critical implications for American households and businesses, core to energy security and affordability, and especially important to Texas.…

The Carbon Dioxide Removal Gap

Rapid emissions reductions, including reductions in deforestation-basedland emissions, are the dominant source of global climate mitigation potential in the coming decades. However, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will also have an important role to play. Despite this, it remains unclear whether current national proposals for CDR align with temperature targets. Here they show the ‘CDR gap’, that is, CDR efforts proposed by countries fall short of those in integrated assessment model scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 °C. However, the most ambitious proposals for CDR are close to level sin a low-energy demand scenario with the most-limited CDR scaling and aggressive …

U.S. Congressional Action Needed to Accelerate Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal Solutions

Covering more than 70 percent of the planet and holding about 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, our ocean plays a big role in helping to stabilize our climate. But this natural process comes at a cost. Too much greenhouse gas pollution in the air, blunted by the ocean, has cascading effects, making the ocean more acidic, increasingly starved of oxygen, less productive, and less habitable for fish and marine wildlife. Today’s climate challenges require urgent solutions.
To this end, scientists around the world are evaluating whether and which ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (oCDR) approaches can safely and permanently …