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A Historical Perspective on Energy Policy: A Time of Unusual Change and Uncertainty
U. S. Senate Committee on Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, April 2010, 13 p.
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Chairman Dorgan, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. For the record, I am president of Resources for the Future (RFF), a 58‐year‐old research institution based in Washington, DC, that focuses on energy, environmental, and natural resource issues. RFF neither lobbies nor takes institutional positions on specific legislative or regulatory proposals.
I emphasize that my views today are my own, and not those of Resources for the Future. I have included in an appendix, however, some related key studies and forthcoming research from RFF.
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Beyond Business as Usual: Investigating a Future without Coal and Nuclear Power in the U.S.
Synapse Energy Economics for the Civil Society Institute, May 11, 2010, 91 p.
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The electric power industry in the U.S. is at a crossroads. The nation is struggling to develop an effective mechanism to combat climate change. At the same time we are poised to spend hundreds of billions on new pollution controls at coal-fired power plants, and these controls will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions. Carbon capture and sequestration at coal plants is still in the demonstration stage and cost estimates are
escalating. The nation is also running headlong toward a new generation of nuclear plants. However, cost estimates for these plants are skyrocketing – again – and we still have not established a central repository for radioactive waste. This waste remains stored at nuclear plants across the country. The risk, cost and complexity of a future based on coal and nuclear power look increasingly daunting.
This study investigates a long-term, national strategy to transition away from coal and nuclear electricity and toward increased efficiency and renewable energy. The focus of the study is on what resources would be likely to replace coal-fired and nucleargeneration, where they are located, and what this resource mix would cost relative to a “business as usual” energy future.
The study finds that a future built on more efficient use of electricity and development of the nation’s renewable resources would pose modest near-term costs but would costless than business as usual over the long term
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Life Cycle Analysis of Coal and Natural Gas-fired Power Plants
U.S. DOE, National Energy Technology Laboratory, July 20, 2010, 27 p.
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This presentation summarizes results of a full life cycle assessment on greenhouse gas emissions for five baseload power plant technologies, as conducted for the EPRI coal fleet meeting held on July 20, 2010. Driving factors, global warming potential, energy losses, electricity costs, methane content, air pollutants and upstream emissions are discussed, ranked and evaluated.
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Negligence, Strict Liability, and Responsibility for Climate Change
Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, July 2010, 45 p.
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This paper reexamines responsibility for climate change. Claims of responsibility are based on legal and ethical principles concerning liability for wrongdoing. They are, in essence, tort claims. Tort-law principles might be used in actual legal disputes, to make quasi-legal arguments in a negotiation, or to simply claim moral wrongdoing by a set of actors. The goal, therefore, will be to examine whether tort-law or similar theories of obligation apply to past greenhouse gas emissions
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Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design
Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP - US DOE), February 2010, 28 p. |
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This guide provides an overview of best practices for energy-efficient data center design which spans the categories of Information Technology (IT) systems and their environmental conditions, data center air management, cooling and electrical systems, on-site generation, and heat recovery. IT system energy efficiency and environmental conditions are presented first because measures taken in these areas have a cascading effect of secondary energy savings for the mechanical and electrical systems. This guide concludes with a section on metrics and benchmarking values by which a data center and its systems energy efficiency can be evaluated. No design guide can offer 'the most energy-efficient' data center design but the guidelines that follow offer suggestions that provide efficiency benefits for a wide variety of data center scenarios.
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Clean Energy Trends 2010
Clean Edge, April 2010, 22 p.
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2009 will go down as one of the worst years in economic history. Overall venture capital spending fell to its lowest level in more than a decade. Initial public offerings (IPOs) in the U.S. continued at historic lows, with just 13 venture-backed IPOs in 2009 (up only slightly from a meager six venturebacked IPOs in 2008), according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. Once stalwart financial and market leaders crumbled under new harsh economic realities, with many shuttering their operations or surviving as a mere shell of their former selves. Governments around the world, working to stave off a global depression, announced unprecedented commitments to stimulus programs to keep the global economy on life support. But signs of hope have begun to emerge for the clean-tech sector
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Renewable 2010 Global Status Report
Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, 2010, 80 p.
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The year 2009 was unprecedented in the history of renewable energy, despite the headwinds posed by the global financial crisis, lower oil prices, and slow progress with climate policy. Indeed, as other economic sectors declined around the world, existing renewable capacity continued to grow at rates close to those in previous years, including grid-connected solar PV (53 %), wind power (32 %), solar hot water/heating (21 %), geothermal power (4 %), and hydropower (3 %). Annual production of ethanol and biodiesel increased 10 % and 9 %, respectively, despite layoffs and ethanol plant closures in the United States and Brazil.This 2010 edition of the Renewables Global Status Report is being released together with its companion publication, the UNEP/SEFI report Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010. The joint launch aims to draw attention to the inextricable link between policy and investment in driving the renewable energy sector forward.
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Applicability of post 2012 climate instruments to the transport sector
Netherlands Energy Research Foundation (ECN), 2010, 81 p.
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The Climate Instruments for the Transport Sector (CITS) study, commissioned by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in support of the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), gives an assessment of the current state of affairs with regard to the impact on the transport sector in developing countries by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Clean Technology Fund (CTF). Based on desk analysis and case studies in Asian and Latin American cities, the study also provides recommendations for the successful scale-up of climate finance and capacity building, particularly by the use of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) for the transport secto
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Status of 2nd Generation Biofuels Demonstration Facilities in June 2010 A Report to IEA Bioenergy Task 39
IEA Bioenergy Task 39, 27 July 2010, 126 p.
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Driven by the need to partly replace fossil transport fuels and by food versus fuel and highest possible GHG mitigation considerations, large efforts are dedicated to the development of technologies for the production of biofuels from lignocellulosic raw materials. A high number of projects are being pursued, but only few facilities in the demonstration scale are actually operating. The technologies applied vary widely, as do the raw materials of choice.
This report gives an overview on 66 projects that are being pursued currently, and provides details on the facility size, feedstock in use and technology applied. About 50 companies have provided data on their projects directly to the authors. The report shows that currently many facilities in the demonstration scale are under construction and will hopefully successfully demonstrate biofuels production from lignocellulosic raw materials in the near future. Plans exist to build larger commercial facilities and thus rapidly increase the production capacities. Despite the possibly fast development, the volumes of lignocellulosic biofuels to be produced in the next five years will be small as compared to the current production of conventional biofuels. High efforts still need to be made to pursue these and more demonstration activities and to quickly multiply facilities when technologies have proven their technical and economic feasibility
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