Without a single, comprehensive tool for evaluating the costs and benefits for emissions reductions, policymakers are often left to cobble together expectations for various policies from a hodgepodge of reports and studies that rarely share the same data and methodologies. Last month, San Francisco-based think tank Energy Innovation (EI) unveiled its Energy Policy Simulator, a one-stop shop for testing dozens of decarbonization strategies in the U.S. economy and evaluating their costs.

Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based think tank, has created what may be the coolest tool for energy nerds I’ve ever seen. It’s called the Energy Policy Simulator, and it lets anyone see the impacts of their energy policy choices on a whole range of outputs, including US greenhouse gas emissions.

Considering the magnitude of the climate change issue, commitments at the national scale are necessary if the world is to feel any sort of emissions reduction impact. That said, an efficient and effective way to meet these commitments comes from the cities within a nation.

Thanks to San Francisco-based clean energy think tank Energy Innovation LLC, we now have a grip on the 15 most cost-effective policies for accelerating US clean energy and reaching our 2025 decarbonization targets.

There’s a lot of data out there — sometimes it can seem like too much — and a lot of it is unreliable. Climate data visualizations can help you sort through the noise to get at the signal.

Two experts consider what the demand-response market will look like if the Supreme Court kills FERC’s landmark rule. While this ruling potentially affects DR in capacity and ancillary service markets, their exchange focuses on the future of DR in wholesale energy markets.

Energy Innovation’s Energy Policy Simulator lets you model over three dozen different energy policies—from fuel economy standards to extending the life of existing nuclear to rice cultivation measures—to see how much they will cost and what impact they will have on greenhouse gas emissions.

Emissions data, temperature data, fossil fuel extraction data: the climate debate is awash with numbers. But it can be hard to find answers in the mass of information. Here are seven tools that can help.

Think of it like a low-fi SimCity, except instead of municipal policy, you get to tweak nationwide approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The immensely detailed Energy Policy Simulator is a digital tool that shows the impact of an astonishing variety of climate change policies.

The new Energy Policy Simulator is a responsive, thought-provoking way to understand what kind of system would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, how much it might cost, and which individual energy policies really move the needle.

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.

Comparing two regions with similar total installed wind capacity, WECC and Texas, demonstrates the importance of good transmission planning. The lesson for transmission planning is clear: if you build it, wind will come.

Los Angeles’ Mobility 2035 plan shouldn’t be feared by residents. It will help solve gridlock and create true mobility by creating more transportation options, which is the best way to solve traffic congestion in California, home to three of the five most congested metro regions in America.

To the untrained eye, beautiful skylines, impressive subway systems, and lively public parks characterize great cities. However, there are also a number of invisible design features that characterize the best cities – urban growth boundaries, transit-oriented development, walking and biking pathway density, and small blocks are among the most important of these design features.

California wants to reduce emissions 40% by 2030. Smart growth policies would help the state achieve this target, save the government billions on infrastructure and health costs, and save residents thousands annually in transportation costs, all while empowering economic growth and housing equality.

For as long as renewable energy has been a threat to the conventional power sector, it has been plagued by warnings that too much wind and solar would destabilise the grid. Intermittent renewable energies could never power advanced economies unless they were backed up by large-scale affordable battery storage — a technology that had always seemed a distant dream. Yet, the dream seems to suddenly be not only achievable, but imminent and inevitable.

The National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) released a working paper designed to provide states with ideas on low cost energy efficiency approaches that can help them address the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Power Plan.

As with any investor-owned company, managers of investor-owned utilities are obligated to maximize shareholder value. So how can regulators help to align shareholder value creation with the public interest? Enter performance-based regulation.

The Obama administration is continuing to carve out a middle ground when it comes to energy policy—satisfying neither environmentalists nor the energy industry in the process. This article summarizes Obama’s energy strategy and actions (arctic drilling, methane emissions regulation, Clean Power Plan, etc.), and discusses what else the President can do to solidify his energy legacy.

This article responds to Pilita Clark’s recent Financial Times article, “Solar and wind could end up victims of their own success,” in which she argues that increasing zero-marginal cost renewables on the grid threatens electricity market revenue. Sonia Aggarwal responds that this is only the case because electricity market operations are out-of-date, and ought to be updated to take advantage of new opportunities like renewables.