Amy Harder, a veteran journalist, now runs a new site out of Breakthrough Energy called Cipher. She looks at the transition's hard questions, hard slogs, and compelling stories in a casual Zoom with undergraduates.
Swapping this home's systems for clean electric ones is a delicate proposition. (Photo of Peoria, IL by Patsy Wooters.)
Every building in any community tells its own story. To run each story first on electricity, and later on clean electricity, requires coordinated and flexible policies - and a range of financial techniques to meet a series of cost and timing challenges.
Battery storage systems and virtual power plants offer an opportunity for individual ratepayers to improve energy reliability and contribute to Maine’s clean energy goals. Maine has several options for protecting and incentivizing ratepayers, especially low-income ratepayers, to own battery storage systems and join virtual power plant programs.
(Photo by Sam LaRussa via Flickr.) This coal-fired power plant outside Austin, Texas, is one of thousands across the country that owners will have to finance out of service.
Imagine that you are a utility owner. You anticipated your plant would last 40 years and invested accordingly. Now you see the value of coal plummeting, but you can't strand your assets. Someone mentions securitization. You wonder: What's that?
(Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.) A solar array in Virginia stands for the kinds of investment that could crowd in with a properly targeted federal carbon price.
Climate scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report warned that without immediate large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will cause devastating economic and human losses. Policymakers must come together to implement a comprehensive climate change strategy in the United States.
