Recent ArticlesFirst they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then they transform? This week: a look at some positive trends guiding the utility sector. What are power providers that are leading the energy transition doing right? We’re joined by Julia Hamm, the president and CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance. We’re talking about SEPA’s 2021 utility transformation profile -- a survey and ranking system of over 130 electric utilities in the US. There are thousands of power compani...
The pandemic has forced just about every part of society to reckon with resilience, but for cities the question is especially urgent. Will the global trend toward urbanization, which has been underway for more than 50 years, change its trajectory? Will increasing density remain the norm? The intersection of these two issues -- resilience and urbanism -- is relevant in a COVID context, but it's also increasingly important in a climate context. Shayle has talked about how the increasing preval...
The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office might be the most talked about -- and yet least understood -- part of the federal government’s efforts to support climate tech. It has already invested more than $35 billion in everything from Tesla's first big factory to the first two nuclear reactors to begin construction in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It was crucial in getting the first multi-hundred-megawatt solar projects ever developed off the ground. Today it has more than $40 bil...
The lack of progress on offshore wind in America is one of the most perplexing stories in energy. The technology and resource availability are tremendous. Europe has de-risked the technology and proven it can be deployed at scale, and at low cost, with minimal disruption. U.S. states are setting big targets. And at a national-scale, people want it. And yet, we have not been able to get any meaningful amounts of offshore wind capacity in the water. That may be about to change. In late Marc...
here are few areas harder to decarbonize than heavy industry. But the stakes are high. Altogether, industry represents over 30% of global GHG emissions, when counting both direct process emissions and industrial energy use. It’s also a huge opportunity for innovation. This week, Shayle talks with Rebecca Dell, the Director of the Industry Program at The Climateworks Foundation, about the technologies that might transform cement, steel and petrochemicals. Shayle and Reecca go industry by in...
