59 item(s) were returned.
Founder and CEO
SMART WATER, SMART CITY LLC
Around the country, a new conversation is emerging among municipal leaders and utility executives as they explore the energy/water nexus. While Senator Murkowski started the discussion at the federal level in 2014, local leaders are just beginning to question the impact of the energy/water nexus. The water/energy nexus deals with the need for water to produce energy, and for energy to treat and distribute clean water. Water infrastructure is an essential public service in any city and is intrinsically linked to energy. Smart technologies and smart strategies for water and energy utilities are needed to address conservation challenges and form… [more]
View InsightSenior Policy Analyst
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Whether or not the world has all of the clean energy technologies it needs to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions is an important ongoing debate among the climate policy community. Buoyed by steep cost reductions for wind and solar power technologies during the past decade, proponents argue political will is the major factor holding clean energy back from dominating the global energy market. Critics counter that even with recent cost reductions clean energy still isn’t realistically competitive with fossil fuels everywhere without the help of unsustainable subsidies and contentious government mandates. The debate over whether clean energy is ready for… [more]
View InsightSenior Tax Counsel
United States Senate Committee on Finance
As part of his efforts to comprehensively reform the tax code, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) released a staff discussion draft on December 18, 2013 that proposed a dramatically simpler set of energy tax incentives that are technology-neutral, more predictable, and promote cleaner energy that is made in the United States. Policymakers have included tax breaks for energy in the tax code for nearly one hundred years. These incentives were created with good intentions to create jobs, promote energy security, and help reduce air pollution and environmental damage. But over the years, the number of provisions has ballooned… [more]
View InsightA recent “60 Minutes” segment essentially called the cleantech industry a failure, eliciting a flurry of criticisms defending the green technology sector. “Hoping to create innovation and jobs, [President Obama] committed north of $100 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks to cleantech. But instead of breakthroughs, the sector suffered a string of expensive tax-funded flops. Suddenly cleantech was a dirty word,” said “60 Minutes’” host, Lesley Stahl. One of the main criticisms against the CBS segment was that it conflated the cleantech venture capital sector of Silicon Valley with the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. The critics have… [more]
View InsightSenior Policy Analyst
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Most clean energy advocates believe that the world has all the low-carbon technologies needed to effectively address climate change. In their view – what we describe as the Clean Energy Deployment Consensus – the world doesn’t need technology breakthroughs, but political breakthroughs to drive widespread deployment of clean energy technologies. This translates to a policy environment heavily weighted towards deployment subsidies, mandates, and carbon prices. But The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) argues in its new report, “Challenging the Clean Energy Deployment Consensus,” that the world needs a more comprehensive Innovation Consensus that focuses on developing and deploying affordable… [more]
View InsightPresident
Micro-Utilities, Inc.
The President was on target during his speech on climate change at Georgetown University when he announced new initiatives to curb the release of greenhouse gases and thereby slow down the effects of climate change. However, a key aspect to meeting this huge challenge is to set national goals based on specific timetables. Without President Kennedy setting a goal to land an American on the moon by a specific date, it is doubtful that we would have ever achieved this. President Obama’s goal-setting in his recent speech was incomplete and rather imbalanced. There was a goal to double renewable energy… [more]
View InsightJ.C. Ward Jr. Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering
Cornell University
The premise of Robert Stone’s newly released documentary, Pandora’s Promise, is that despite the scary features of nuclear radiation, nuclear power is the best chance we have to avoid the catastrophe projected from burning fossil fuels to power the growing world economy. The documentary’s approach is rather unique – former anti-nuclear environmentalists describe how and why they became pro-nuclear, in spite of even the recent major Fukushima Daiichi reactor disaster. It is important to add that Director Robert Stone is not arguing that standard “light water reactors” (LWRs) should be pursued, but rather newer designs, such as inherently safe breeder… [more]
View InsightProfessor of Public Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology
Thanks to breakthroughs in seismic imaging, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the US in 2012 reduced its reliance on much dirtier coal by shifting to gas-fired power plants. This trend is expected to continue, spurred by low gas prices and increased regulation on coal. The move to shale gas is being heralded as a key to economic prosperity and a clean energy future. But there are other options for displacing baseload electricity from retired coal plants, the principals being nuclear, renewables and energy efficiency. Will the gas bonanza enable or postpone the transition to these cleaner options? While natural gas… [more]
View InsightDistinguished Professor of Energy
University of California, Berkeley
If Peabody Energy, SSA Marine and Goldman Sachs really want to stimulate jobs in Washington State, as they claim in their support of the Gateway Pacific project, they can find much better ways to do so than building the sprawling $665 million coal terminal northwest of Bellingham, WA. They could use the money instead to fund energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects, which per dollar invested, would create twice as many jobs at minimum. Modern coal terminals are highly mechanized facilities, and few workers are needed to operate them. As estimated in official project documents, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would support only… [more]
View InsightSection 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was designed to attract private investors to renewables projects by offering investors a cash reimbursement equal to and in lieu of the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit. According to a recent NREL report, the program has awarded $11.6 billion to around 38,000 projects – which have received $38.6 billion in total investment – and has supported the installation of 16.9 GWs in new renewable capacity. To put that in context, in 2007 third-party tax equity financing provided about $6.7 billion to renewable project developers. In 2009, in the heart of the financial… [more]
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