Climate and Energy

Publisher:
Wiley
Publication date:
2024-07-08
ISBN:
2692-3823

Latest documents

  • Redefining the Regulatory Compact

    Over the past three decades, utility regulators have increasingly strayed from traditional methods of setting utility revenue requirements to improve performance, help achieve public policy goals, and reduce costs. Under the traditional regulatory compact, utilities are allowed to collect revenues from customers sufficient to cover the costs of providing services. This includes recovery of all operating costs, power purchase costs and other pass‐throughs, and return of and on investment necessary to maintain safe and reliable service to all customers regardless of size, type, or demands they place on the system. And utility services are to be provided at a fair and reasonable cost, as determined by regulators.

  • Fifth National Climate Assessment Reveals Urgent Action Needed to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) was released in November 2023 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The Assessment evaluates the impacts of a changing climate across 10 US regions and a wide range of biodiversity and other interests, including water, forests and ecosystems, coasts and oceans, agriculture and rural communities, the built environment, energy and transportation, health and air quality, and economic and social systems. The Assessment is the fifth such report released by the US government since 2000, using science‐based data by more than a dozen US agencies and approximately 750 scientists tracking the impacts of climate change, and peer‐reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).1 The details outlined within the Assessment are not optimistic. In fact, the extensively peer‐reviewed report further quantifies the need to take immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. Immediate actions will require both increased mitigation measures to reduce GHG emissions and adaptation measures as we attempt to live with the impacts of a changing climate.

  • Loss and Damage Fund—Operationalized at COP28 but Funding and Allocation Process Unresolved

    The 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was hosted by the United Arab Emirates. While there were many competing priorities on the COP28 agenda, climate finance was “front and center.”1 Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, President‐Designate for COP28, in a pre‐COP letter, stated the need to “radically scale up climate financing” by “delivering on old promises” and “setting the framework” for new finance.2

  • Powering Innovation: The Comprehensive Impact of Generative AI

    Understanding the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the energy and utility sector necessitates distinguishing it from traditional AI applications. AI generally encompasses machine capabilities for tasks that require human intelligence, such as discerning patterns and making decisions. GenAI is a specialized subset of AI and goes further, by creating entirely new content—text, images, or data—through learning from existing datasets and generating new, unique outputs (Figure 1).

  • Technological Trends Driving Utility Residential Energy Efficiency Program Savings

    In 2023, with increasingly broad adoption of conventional utility energy efficiency programs such as rebates or customer incentives on water heaters, furnaces, and home insulation levels, new and next‐generation energy efficiency programs will likely involve increasingly connected devices and technological interventions. This article identifies four technological trends driving utility residential energy efficiency programs for the future. These trends include: (1) home energy reports (or comparative usage efficiency reports); (2) connected reinforced programs including utility pledge programs and demand response programs; (3) smart thermostats; and (4) smart lighting. This article indicates that ultimately, greater convergence around technology is likely to persist given utility investment in Automated Meter Integration (AMI) systems and broader customer‐driven technological adoption. Ultimately, this article advocates for continued broad‐based adoption of these programs to save energy and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

  • Changing Energy Market Landscape Drives NAESB’s Industry‐Initiated Standards Development in 2024

    Ten billion dollars—the amount of money the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates could be saved through the deployment of virtual power plants (VPPs), simultaneously helping to meet the estimated 200 gigawatt (GW) of peak demand growth expected by 2030.1 While there are variations within the industry on the construct of VPPs, one common definition of a VPP is “aggregations of [distributed energy resources] DERs that can balance electric loads and provide utility‐scale and utility‐grade services like a traditional power plant.”2 DOE is actively supporting VPPs, as evidenced by the issuance of the September 2023 report Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Virtual Power Plants, as well as the announcement that same month of a $300 billion commitment to Project Hestia, an effort to make DERs, and the accompanying consumer‐facing software to enable a nationwide VPP infrastructure, more widely available to American homeowners.3 This backing, combined with recent legislative and regulatory actions, such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order No. 2222, which established a framework for DER aggregations that meet minimum size requirements of 100 kilowatts (kW) to participate in organized wholesale markets, is likely to promote greater deployment and participation of DERs in the market and could result in a large influx of such resources in a relatively short time span.

  • The Road Less Traveled: Another Path for the Energy Transition

    Broad consensus calls for more US transmission infrastructure to speed the entry of new renewable generation into the resource mix. Many types of possible transmission projects vie for a role in pursuing that goal, including the three selected for partial support with $1.3 billion in recent commitments from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).1 These projects reflect the DOE’s stated goal of promoting “clean energy” in diverse forms—onshore wind and solar electricity in the West and Southwest regions of the United States and the entry of new offshore wind in New England. These projects are “bi‐directional”—transmission that can handle new wind and solar generating sources moving electricity one way when available, with more traditional “dispatchable” moving the other way when not.

  • Regardless of its Merits, Carbon Capture Faces Several Challenges

    A theme I have struck multiple times in this column is the reality that energy policy designed to eliminate atmospheric carbon as quickly as possible must—to be genuinely sustainable through political cycles and reliability challenges—recognize that natural gas will be here and play an important role in our energy mix for a very long time to come. Even the Biden Administration, with its stated objective of phasing out all fossil fuels, has recognized this reality, through the projections of its own U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). In the 2023 Annual Energy Outlook prepared by EIA, one of its cases in assessing the future energy mix includes one in which non‐hydro resources, primarily solar and wind, become low‐cost enough to be competitive leaders in the marketplace. Figure 1 depicts EIA’s projection, which does see renewables surpassing natural gas in market share by the late 2040s but still leaves natural gas with a 25 percent share of domestic energy consumption, down only 8 percent from current levels. Of course, when exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are added to this, as the largest exporter of LNG in the world, the natural gas line is much flatter.

  • Ten Resolutions for the Energy Industry in 2024

    Welcome to the fourth edition of the annual Top Ten Resolutions for the utility industry. These ten resolutions illustrate a renewed vigor and determination entering the New Year to make progress toward accomplishing so many things. Now armed with unprecedented federal funding and a majority of public support, the call for modernizing our energy system action and subsequent acceleration of this action is louder than ever. While utility priorities continue to change as the industry and world transform to a clean energy economy, utilities continue to rise to the occasion, and utility leadership continues to seize opportunities with a continued mission to deliver safe, reliable, clean, and low‐cost energy.

  • The Private Virtual Network Operator Model for Field Area Network

    Uninterrupted grid edge connectivity is essential for distribution utilities driving towards a future where efficient, secure, and reliable field area network (FAN) operation is not just preferable but required. Communications and network connectivity have been rapidly evolving over the last several years and will continue to do so—including in the areas of spectrum options, carrier solutions, device manufacturers, core manufacturers, and network management options. Utilities have a greater choice of options to deploy, while needing to remain prudent in their investments. One of the options gaining traction in the United States is the private virtual network operator (PVNO) model.

Featured documents

  • The Emerging Certified Natural Gas Market

    The natural gas industry is increasingly utilizing certified natural gas as a means to address Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) commitments, with a particular emphasis on the reduction of methane emissions. Certified natural gas has emerged as a multi‐faceted commodity that has stirred...

  • Making Climate Change Local: Municipalities and Communities Key to Decarbonization

    In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body tasked with assessing climate change and providing information for member nations, published a report including a call to action for world leaders to act quickly to prevent warming beyond 1.5°C. Governments...

  • Future Low‐Carbon Technology Options for a 100 Percent Decarbonized Power Sector

    Recent studies have modeled 100 percent decarbonized or renewable power sectors and proposed technical solutions to address costs, reliability, and other challenges, specifically related to meeting the last 10 percent of energy demand and eliminating carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas (GH...

  • Clean Energy Goals Driving Utilities to Accelerate Pipeline Replacements and Leak Detection Technologies

    Maintaining pipeline safety is a primary function of natural gas utilities, referring to a publicly acceptable condition in which society is protected against leak incidents that can lead to explosions, fires, and death. Replacing pipelines is a difficult task, especially those in densely populated ...

  • The Inflation Reduction Act: Impacts on Utilities and Power Producers

    The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed by the 117th U.S. Congress on August 16, 2022 and signed into law by President Joe Biden. The wide‐ranging Act invests in domestic energy production and manufacturing, funds energy and climate provisions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and...

  • Utilizing Private LTE to Increase Grid Resiliency

    Utilities have long relied on telecommunication systems and infrastructure to perform critical functions such as teleprotection (TP), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution automation (DA), advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and workforce communications. The information ...

  • The 2021–2022 European Natural Gas Disaster: Was Reagan Right and Thatcher Wrong?

    Europe's energy supply is in crisis this winter. Owing to the evident Russian manipulation of its natural gas exports to the European Union (EU) in advance of its invasion of Ukraine, prices have spiked wildly—24 times the prevailing EU natural gas price in the summer of 2020 and up to 10 times...

  • A Practical Tax Policy to Fight Climate Change: The Utility Savings Account

    Underneath the labyrinth of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax rules is a sophisticated system designed to generate revenue for the government, redistribute wealth among US citizens, and motivate certain investment and consumer behavior. Government is empowered to choose what and how and whom to...

  • Lessons Learned in Applying Benefit–Cost Analysis to Grid Modernization

    Utility modernization efforts across the United States have contributed to more than $1 Trillion (USD) in total capital investment from investor‐owned utilities (IOUs) in the last decade. During the same time period, utility modernization regulatory filings have generated much discussion among...

  • Environmental Justice and the Energy Transition: How the Energy Industry Can Do Better

    Environmental justice (EJ) communities are defined as “a community with significant representation of communities of color, low‐income communities, or tribal and indigenous communities, that experiences, or is at risk of experiencing higher or more adverse human health or environmental effects.” As ...

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