Hydrogen Deployment at Scale: The Infrastructure Challenge

Clean hydrogen is experiencing unprecedented momentum as confidence in its ability to accelerate decarbonization efforts across multiple sectors is rising. New projects are announced almost every week. For example, an international developer, Intercontinental Energy, plans to build a plant in Oman that will produce almost 2 million tons of clean hydrogen and 10 million tons of clean ammonia.¹ Dozens of other large-scale projects and several hundred smaller ones are already in the planning stage. Similarly, on the demand side, hydrogen is gaining support from customers. Prominent off-takers such as oil majors like Shell and bp, steelmakers like ThyssenKrupp, and …

America 3.0 The Resilient Society: A Smart Third Industrial Revolution Infrastructure and the Recovery of the American Economy

We are on the cusp of a Third Industrial Revolution. The digitized broadband Communication Internet is converging with a digitized Continental Electricity Internet, powered by solar and wind electricity, and a digitized Mobility and Logistics Internet made up of autonomous electric and fuel-cell vehicles, powered from the electricity internet. These three internets are continuously being fed data from sensors embedded across society that are monitoring activity of all kinds in real time, from ecosystems, agricultural fields, warehouses, road systems, factory production lines, retail stores, and especially from the residential, commercial, and institutional building stock, allowing humanity to more efficiently manage, …

Global Investors Move Into Renewable Infrastructure: Reviewing the World’s Top Renewable Energy Financiers

Low carbon energy transition assets are creating investment opportunities, and they have also demonstrated significant resilience, consistently attracting capital despite the COVID–19–induced global economic crisis.

In financial year (FY) 2020, the clean energy sector received record investment commitments totaling US$501 billion –9% more than the previous year. The renewable energy segment led with US$303bn in 2020, which is 60% of total investment committed into the overall low carbon energy transition sector.

In addition to the inherent advantages of investment in the clean energy sector such as relatively higher risk–adjusted returns and …

Challenges of a Clean Energy Transition and Implications for Energy Infrastructure Policy

The United States faces the challenge of dramatically reducing carbon emissions while simultaneously ensuring the reliable supply of on-demand energy services that its residents have come to expect. Federal policy will be instrumental in driving investments in energy infrastructure that will be required to transition the U.S. energy supply to zero-emissions sources. This paper discusses the major barriers that policy will need to overcome in order to successfully execute this transition at a reasonable cost. A core problem is that wind and solar generation are intermittent. Provision of reliable zero-emission supply therefore requires combining wind and solar resources with investments …

Economic Perspectives on Infrastructure Investment

To determine the appropriate level of infrastructure spending, there is no alternative to aggregating the results of project-by-project cost-benefit analysis. With widespread variation in both the benefits and costs of projects within broad infrastructure asset classes, it is important to recognize that the returns to some additional highway lanes are much higher than others, and that the costs of extending wire-line broadband coverage in some locations may exceed the benefits relative to the next-best alternative technology. Because comprehensive project evaluation is enormously information-intensive and can be gamed, many of the widely discussed estimates of the infrastructure gap in the United …

Plugging Abandoned Wells: Effects of the Draft Energy Infrastructure Act

The US EPA estimates that abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States emit roughly 280,000 metric tons of methane each year, though this estimate is uncertain. Per ton, methane’s global warming potential (GWP) is 34 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period and 86 times the impact over a 20-year period. Using the 100-year GWP, annual methane emissions from abandoned wells are roughly equivalent to the CO2 emissions emitted by all of the power plants in Massachusetts each year. Plugging abandoned wells presents an opportunity to provide jobs in the oil and gas industry while …

Wildfire Risk Reduction: Effects of the Draft Energy Infrastructure Act

This issue brief examines the potential reduction in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from forest fuel treatments on federal land proposed in West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s draft Energy Infrastructure Act.

In 2020, 58,950 wildfires burned more than 10 million acres across the United States. Seventy percent of burned acreage was on US federal lands. Fuel treatments can reduce wildfire hazard potential and, if strategically located, lower burned area, fire intensity, loss of life, and damage to structures and other property. Fuel treatment may also reduce greenhouse gas emissions through declines in the extent and intensity of future wildfires which, in …

Advanced Clean Energy Infrastructure: Effects of the Draft Energy Infrastructure Act

Advanced energy technologies have received growing attention in recent years as nations look to decarbonize power sectors and drive dramatic emissions reductions goals. These low-, no-, and negative-carbon options may undergird power sector decarbonization, but they are more likely to be able to function at scale and in a cost competitive manner if they receive funding to support additional research, development, and demonstration (RD&D). The Energy Infrastructure Act, proposed by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, would appropriate funding for advanced nuclear, geothermal, diurnal storage, and carbon capture technology RD&D. The legislation would also appropriate funding for electricity transmission investment and …

Addressing NEPA-Related Infrastructure Delays

President Joseph Biden’s infrastructure negotiations with Congress have renewed interest in infrastructure investment policy proposals. Due to this interest, it is worth returning to the topic of the National Environmental Policy Act’s (NEPA) role in infrastructure deployment timelines. Delayed infrastructure deployment can result in economic impacts from delayed productivity, as well as reduced incentives for infrastructure investment. Further, from an environmental perspective, NEPA is increasingly becoming an involuntary impediment to clean energy and conservation-related projects. This is especially problematic given that this analysis finds 42 percent of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) active NEPA projects are related to clean energy, …

Bringing Infrastructure Home: A 50-State Report on U.S. Home Electrification

The home is the keystone of our national infrastructure. We spend a lot more time in our homes than on our highways — more time on our porches than in our ports. The great news is that a public investment in electrifying our 120 million American households can reap significant benefits for every U.S. resident, and all of the technology we need to electrify our homes already exists.

Electrifying the U.S. economy will have immense benefits in terms of climate, household savings, and job creation, as well as the health benefits of improving indoor and outdoor air quality. In this …