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Electricity from competitive wholesale power markets keeps the lights on for two-thirds of all Americans, but things may be about to change – for the better. Four factors will make 2016 a turning point for policymakers, clean energy providers, and wholesale market operators to work together and modernize America’s regulated wholesale power markets.
China’s urbanization offers incredible promise, but stronger action is needed to implement the goal of “building cities for people” for it to truly succeed. California and the United States have learned firsthand the high cost of building cities around cars. It’s not too late for China to avoid making these same mistakes.
With the Paris talks just ending and policymakers thinking about how to meet national commitments, it is a useful time to review the current status of U.S. power sector emissions and energy trends shaping the next decade.
China Development Bank Capital, Energy Innovation, and the Energy Foundation have released the Green and Smart Guidelines for Urban Development. This series looks more closely at the issues related to sustainable urban development in China.
Now that the Paris conference on climate change has wrapped up, it is an ideal moment to take stock: Can we land the world on a reasonable climate future? What is required to do so?
Market forces are precipitously changing the role of utilities. Private companies are offering customers more choices and control over their electricity through energy efficient products and services, demand management, self-generation like rooftop solar, smart electric vehicle chargers, and on-site storage. At the same time, the role of utility-scale wind and solar is growing, as costs have plummeted since 2010.
Many policymakers understand the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they face a bewildering variety of policy options that may—or may not—help achieve this goal. There has never been an objective way to assess the impacts of energy policy and how numerous policies can work together. On October 20, Energy Innovation launched Energy Policy Solutions, a tool that does just this.
One year ago, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided to vacate FERC Order 745, holding that demand response could not be traded in wholesale energy markets. Now that the Supreme Court has held oral arguments in the appeal of the case and a final resolution is imminent, we contemplate how DR will fare and how the market might evolve.
If Charles Dickens were an energy analyst, he’d probably say the past ten years have been the best of times and the worst of times for wind power in America. Yet comparing the two regions with similar total installed wind capacity adds another twist to the story: the importance of good transmission planning.
A new report from America’s Power Plan investigates the question, “who should own and operate distributed energy resources?” It turns out there there are many options for who can own and operate DERs—and any of them can work, as long as the revenue streams are designed or adjusted appropriately.
