Expert Dialogue: A Price on Carbon

OurEnergyPolicy (OEP) hosted two discussions on carbon pricing—an online discussion “Time for a Price on Carbon” led by Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL-22) on his Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 763)—and a live panel discussion “Accounting for the Cost of Carbon” (part of OEP’s New York Energy Leaders Luncheon Series) with three experts giving remarks on the policy, economic, and business challenges of carbon pricing.

This summary features excerpts of comments and remarks from both discussions.…

Advancing Electric System Resilience with Distributed Energy Resources: Key Questions and Resources

Advancing Electric System Resilience with Distributed Energy Resources: Key Questions and Resources, provides a foundation for state public utility commissions to frame how they review proposed utility investments that could offer resilience benefits and includes a list of relevant resources to  improve regulators’ ability to oversee resilience investments and obtain better outcomes for customers.…

Advancing Electric System Resilience with Distributed Energy Resources: A Review of State Policies

Advancing Electric System Resilience with Distributed Energy Resources: A Review of State Policies addresses the role of state regulators in electricity system resilience, the relationship of distributed energy resources to resilience and how states can implement policies to expand DER deployment to improve resilience.…

Three Prongs for Prudent Climate Policy

For three decades, advocates for climate change policy have simultaneously emphasized the urgency of taking ambitious actions to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and provided false reassurances of the feasibility of doing so. The policy prescription has relied almost exclusively on a single approach: reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other GHGs. Since 1990, global CO₂ emissions have increased 60 percent, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have raced past 400 parts per million, and temperatures increased at an accelerating rate. The one-prong strategy has not worked. After reviewing emission mitigation’s poor performance and low-probability of delivering on long-term climate goals, we …

Consumer Fuel Buying Trends Report

As the travel and navigation app that is used by more North Americans to save money on gas than any other, GasBuddy’s Pay with
GasBuddy™ program processes millions of fuel transactions from nearly 750,000 consumers across the United States. Since its launch, Pay with GasBuddy has captured more than $454 million in total purchase volume and has saved drivers nearly $13 million at the pumps. In this report, we examine the fuel purchasing patterns of American drivers throughout the first quarter of 2020.…

PANDEMIC CRISIS, SYSTEMIC DECLINE: Why Exploiting the COVID-19 Crisis Will Not Save the Oil, Gas, and Plastic Industries

In the three months since it began, the global pandemic precipitated by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has sickened 1.7 million people and counting, displaced and jeopardized vulnerable populations worldwide, and shut down large parts of the global economy. The converging public health, human rights, and economic crises spurred by the pandemic are forcing governments to act worldwide, including by adopting some of the largest public investment measures the world has ever seen.…

Wind Powers America Annual Report – Executive Summary

The U.S. wind industry success story powered forward to reach new heights in 2019. The rapid expansion of wind power in America is delivering economic growth, more jobs, rural economic benefits, clean energy, and a diverse power mix.

Today, the U.S. wind industry powers more U.S. families and businesses than ever before and employs a record 120,000 men and women across all 50 states. The industry is at the center of a transformational change in the country’s electricity sector—a change bringing consumers affordable, clean, and reliability energy.

AWEA’s Wind Powers American Annual Report 2019 describes how wind has become a …

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS): An Overview

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requires U.S. transportation fuel to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuel. The RFS—established by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-58; EPAct05) and expanded in 2007 by the Energy Independence and Security Act (P.L. 110-140; EISA)—began with 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel in 2006 and is scheduled to ascend to 36 billion gallons in 2022. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has statutory authority to determine the volume amounts after 2022.

The total renewable fuel statutory target consists of both conventional biofuel and advanced biofuel. Since 2014, the total renewable fuel statutory target …

Interpreting Tradable Credit Prices in Overlapping Vehicle Regulations

The rapid transformation of the US transportation sector is partly due to three policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from light duty vehicles: the federal corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas (GHG) standards and the state-level zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandates. Each policy includes a credit-trading program to reduce compliance costs for manufacturers and to allow flexibility for meeting the separate requirements. The prices of these credits can indicate the cost of reducing GHG emissions, either through fuel economy improvements or the sale of zero-emissions vehicles.

This study examines the effects of these overlapping regulations on manufacturer …

Safe Geologic Storage of Captured Carbon Dioxide: Two Decades of DOE’s Carbon Storage R&D Program in Review

A recently released report, “Safe Geologic Storage of Captured Carbon Dioxide: Two Decades of DOE’s Carbon Storage R&D Program in Review” dives into how the department and NETL and other national laboratories, research organizations, and industry stakeholders have worked collaboratively to meet the challenge of addressing the emission of greenhouse gases while ensuring the continued use of fossil fuels that underpin our nation’s economic prosperity.

One of the most successful pillars of DOE’s Carbon Storage Program is the NETL-managed Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (RCSP) Initiative, which began in 2003 with a characterization phase that focused on collecting and analyzing data …