The 3rd National Risk Assessment: Infrastructure on the Brink

Changing environmental conditions are driving worsening flood events, with consequences for counties, cities, towns, and local communities. Individuals whose homes were spared the impact of a particular flood event are increasingly likely to find their local roads, businesses, critical infrastructure, utilities, or emergency services affected by flooding, indirectly threatening their quality of life, safety, and wellbeing. A truly comprehensive understanding of individual flood risk from a changing climate must therefore consider the resiliency of local communities to flood, and determine the extent to which physical and soft infrastructure are at risk.

This report will provide the first ever nation-wide understanding …

View Full Resource

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Could Reshape DOE’s RD&D Portfolio Over the Next 5 Years – in a Good Way

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate in August and is slated to be voted on by the House of Representatives in late September, presents a major opportunity to accelerate clean energy and climate innovation. It would go far toward rebalancing the research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) portfolio of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), so that it tackles deep decarbonization challenges that have largely been neglected in the past.

This rebalancing would be consistent with the recommendations of Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, which the Information …

View Full Resource

Federal-State Partnerships: Tackling Climate through Infrastructure

From January–July 2021, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions (NI) and the Center for the New Energy Economy (CNEE) conducted a series of conversations with state leaders and have identified several specific policy priority areas relevant to infrastructure proposals. These policy areas and approaches have been repeatedly highlighted by state leaders contacted by NI and CNEE. This report highlights either emerging areas for states or cross-cutting needs that were consistently cited by states as important. This is not a list of state priorities for programmatic funding—such as how much funding should go to specific public investments—but areas that states …

View Full Resource

How Are We Going to Build All That Clean Energy Infrastructure?

Most analyses find that to manage climate change, the United States will need to double or triple the size of its electric transmission system to move low-cost wind and solar energy around the nation and back it up with always-on power plants. But new report from Clean Air Task Force and the Niskanen Center finds that the current piecemeal, project-by-project approach to expanding U.S. electricity transmission won’t get us there. It instead calls for a new system to rapidly scale capacity — including by potentially establishing a National Transmission Organization that would plan, site, and fund a national grid to… View Full Resource

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 …

View Full Resource

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, …

View Full Resource

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 …

View Full Resource

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 …

View Full Resource

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 …

View Full Resource

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 …

View Full Resource