Communities Tackle Energy Injustice
Author
Herb Stevens - New Partners Community Solar
New Partners Community Solar
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
Parent Article
Building Solar Justice

Every day, we use the sun’s energy to power our lives — in this way, the sun is every human’s birthright. So when we seek energy justice we do so because this essential resource should be shared among all persons. I formed the nonprofit New Partners Community Solar with my partner at the law firm Nixon Peabody, Jeff Lesk, to address energy injustice. Our mission is to find new ways to bring solar energy access equitably to entire communities.

We discovered that a powerful way to achieve these goals is through a new law in the District of Columbia allowing for “community solar.” It in turn is based on a program in Colorado that allows homeowners to share energy in their neighborhoods. D.C.’s law and our program utilitizing it converts the western state’s program to an urban setting.

Our new model helps large commercial building owners in D.C. deliver the financial benefits of their rooftop solar energy to low-income families across town. By requiring the electric utility to convert the power going into the grid to cash, the money can be distributed to residents through credits on their electric bills.

This leap is a big one — the families sharing the financial benefits of solar do not need to own their own homes; they can be renters or condo owners and still see a financial benefit each month. Instead of restricting the benefits of solar energy only to those individuals and businesses that own property, the solar panels can be placed anywhere in the utility grid and serve all people.

The community also gets the benefit of more renewable energy, which reduces dangerous pollution and fights climate change, and unused roof space is turned into sites for green jobs that employ people in the local neighborhood.

Although 19 states and D.C. have recognized the benefits of community solar by encouraging its growth through policy and programs, most have not. As a first step to achieve energy justice, all states should enact robust community solar programs with true access for all built into the law.

Each state should also require its utility regulator to remove the electric grid barriers to distrib-uted solar energy production. We have so many places in urban or rural areas that solar could be put — such as office rooftops, churches, schools, and apartments — but putting solar in these new places exposes the deficiencies of an older electricity system, which does not always allow distributed power to feed into the grid. Removing these barriers not only improves infrastructure resilience but also helps provide more equal access to solar in our communities.

States will need to create more balanced incentive programs. Right now, the federal tax credit and the value contained in solar carbon credits are only available to people and businesses that can own solar panels. This shuts out access to renters and people of low income.

We are not treating the sun’s energy as a basic human right when we make low-income families pay a disproportionate amount for their energy. Energy for a low-income family can be three times the burden compared to a wealthier family in America, when considering the proportion utility bills takes up in their monthly budgets.

States can use different incentives to address this disparity, as well as the lack of access to capital to build or buy solar systems. The District of Columbia, for instance, uses penalty payments each year for utilities that do not meet the renewable energy standard for solar and uses these payments to subsidize a “Solar for All” program.

Years ago, at a seminar, I saw a map of my city that showed dots where all the solar installations were. Then laid over it, they showed the income levels throughout the city. One person in the audience spontaneously shouted out, “It looks like the sun shines only on the rich.” Let us work to change that.

We’d love to hear your ideas and get your support on this important mission. Email our executive director, Sasha Srivastava, at engage@npsolar.org.

Energy Transition an Equity Opportunity
Author
Yesenia Rivera - Solar United Neighbors
Solar United Neighbors
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
Parent Article
Building Solar Justice

Our energy system is changing. This transition presents a tremendous opportunity to build in democracy, justice, and equity. Distributed solar energy like rooftop and community solar is uniquely able to repair the harms caused by our current fossil-fuel-dependent model.

A transition to solar, if done correctly, can also create an equitable economic recovery. It can lower the energy burden for low-income families, and it can expand who participates in the emerging renewable-based energy system.

The cost of fossil-fuel-based energy is increasing. These costs fall hardest on low- to moderate-income families. An under-resourced family can spend as much as 30 percent of its income on electricity. The federal government spends billions on energy assistance programs. These programs provide support on a year-to-year basis. Currently, they only serve less than a fifth of the eligible population. Distributed solar provides a more sustainable solution to reducing and controlling energy costs on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, financial barriers keep too many families from benefiting from solar ownership.

The federal government should increase funding to energy assistance programs to enable the people who most need help with energy bills to invest in solar. Adding support to build solar would also create long-term integrity and solvency for these programs. Both the Department of Health and Human Services’ low-income home energy assistance program and the Department of Energy’s weatherization assistance program can cover the cost of solar installations. These programs and others can easily be adapted to address the financial barriers keeping families from benefiting from solar.

Cost is not the only barrier to a just transition to solar. Homeownership status is a barrier as well. More than 30 percent of U.S. households are renters. Even when families own their homes, their roofs may not always be suitable for solar. This is especially true if they live in multi-family buildings and condominiums.

Community solar can help all families access the benefits of solar energy, but legal and financial barriers remain. These barriers are high for locally owned community solar projects and projects that serve low- and moderate-income communities.

The federal government can help address this barrier by amending the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act. It should require state-regulated utilities and non-regulated electric utilities to develop equitable community solar programs. The Department of Energy should also create a new program to provide loans and loan guarantees for equitable community solar projects.

By addressing the policy and financial barriers to community solar, we can ensure that all households can access the benefits of solar, regardless of homeownership or financial status.

For the transition to solar to be a just and equitable one, we must address all the barriers preventing millions of households from going solar. Cost and homeownership are just two of the barriers keeping us from achieving solar justice. We must also address the lack of information and education surrounding solar energy, the policy barriers suppressing deployment, and the need for access to solar jobs for marginalized communities.

While there are barriers that states can address, the federal government already has the templates and programs that can be modified to dismantle the systemic barriers keeping low- and moderate-income families and environmental justice communities from achieving solar equity. The federal government can significantly reduce the upfront cost to solar transition, streamline solar deployment, and reduce unnecessary barriers.

We must address the harms caused by our current energy system and ensure that marginalized communities and environmental justice communities finally benefit from the transition to clean energy. An investment in solar power can help in the economic recovery and lift millions of families in the process.

Building Solar Justice
Author
Philip Warburg - Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy
Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
Building Solar Justice

We are living in a time of rage about forgotten and neglected segments of American society. That rage has been directed at police brutality targeting African Americans. It has focused attention on the higher Covid-19 death rates and slower access to vaccination among people of color. And it has surfaced a panoply of economic injustices that stand in the way of lower-income Americans meeting basic needs with the limited resources at their disposal. Unequal access to clean, affordable energy is one of those injustices.

On the campaign trail and now in the White House, President Biden has signaled his determination to make environmental justice a centerpiece of building a more robust, sustainable energy economy. Breaking through the barriers that have slowed the adoption of solar power by low-income households and communities of color needs to be part of that agenda.

A key messenger of the Biden administration’s commitment to greater energy equality is Shalanda H. Baker, recently appointed deputy director for energy justice at the Department of Energy. A law professor on leave from Northeastern University, Baker recently published a manifesto called “Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition.” In it, she decries “climate change fundamentalism,” a tendency among mainstream — predominantly white — environmental leaders to focus on maximizing the shift to non-carbon fuels while ignoring the deep inequities embedded in many proposed reforms. Revolutionary power, as she sees it, is “an approach that centers the voices, hopes, and dreams of the poor, people of color, Indigenous people, and those marginalized by the old energy system in the redesign of the new system.”

One of the more powerful, though lopsided, policy reforms of the solar era is the federal Investment Tax Credit. Since the ITC was adopted in 2006, the solar industry has grown by an average of 52 percent per year, in no small part due to the economic boost that the tax credit has catalyzed. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allowed the tax credit — then set at 30 percent — to be converted to a grant for certain businesses, Congress stopped funding the grants program in 2011. Since then, the ITC has been the exclusive domain of homeowners and businesses with sufficient tax liability to take advantage of the credit. Non-profit organizations and the low-income communities they serve have been outside that loop of federal largess.

While the federal government has done little to strengthen solar access by low-income households and minority populations, the spirit of inclusion has found its voice elsewhere — in states and cities large and small, in community organizations seeking energy justice, and in civic-minded entrepreneurs using a variety of policy and financing tools to give racially and ethnically diverse, low-income Americans a stake in our clean energy future.

California was an early pioneer in breaking the income barrier for solar ownership. In 2006, the California Assembly ordered that at least 10 percent of the $2.2 billion ratepayer-funded California Solar Initiative be dedicated to bringing the benefits of solar energy to low-income households. Three years later, the Single-Family Affordable Solar Homes (SASH) program was launched, with a budget of $108 million to be spent on up-front support for solar arrays installed on homes with household earnings no higher than 80 percent of the area median income. Small, one-kilowatt photovoltaic, or PV, arrays were fully subsidized under SASH for the lowest-income households; others received partial support for higher-capacity systems. Foundation grants and donated equipment helped close the funding gap for these larger installations.

Grid Alternatives, the non-profit hired to administer SASH, has done much more than facilitate the adoption of solar power by low-income households. Though it relies heavily on short-term volunteers to assist with PV installations, it has also made workforce development a priority, partnering with job training programs that work with re-entry populations and at-risk young adults. Job trainees have logged in nearly a quarter of the 84,000 workdays at SASH installation sites.

By 2015, GRID Alternatives had installed 4,500 PV arrays. That same year the California Public Utilities Commission allocated another $52 million to SASH and authorized a form of third-party ownership that stretches the available funds to a greater number of households. Under this model, homeowners do not own the PV on their rooftops, but they receive bill credit for all the solar electricity. Sunrun, a leading solar installer, is the third-party owner of these systems. Along with being compensated by SASH for the free solar electricity that customers receive, Sunrun earns Solar Renewable Energy Certificates attributable to the solar power. As a for-profit company, it also qualifies for the federal Investment Tax Credit.

As of July 2020, cumulative SASH installations had reached 9,200 low-income households — a doubling of the program’s impact since 2015. But as most of the solar arrays installed by SASH since 2015 are owned by Sunrun, this success has come at a price. To solar advocates who see ownership as fundamental to advancing energy justice, this new brand of SASH participation falls short of the imperative to build new wealth in low-income communities, along with easing household energy burdens.

Lower rates of solar adoption in low-to-moderate income communities have been well documented in recent years. Wide disparities in solar deployment have also been found between predominantly white communities and those with Black and Hispanic majorities, even after correcting for lower rates of home ownership in the latter. Further afflicting communities of color is the higher level of exposure to environmental harms caused by polluting factories, abandoned brownfield sites, adjacent highways, and deteriorated housing with hazards such as lead, mold, and asbestos.

To narrow these racial, ethnic and economic gaps, a number of states have begun to focus their solar outreach efforts on underserved areas variously defined as environmental justice or, in California’s case, “disadvantaged” communities. In 2018, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a slate of new programs to provide these communities with easier access to renewable energy. One of them is the Disadvantaged Communities–Single-family Solar Homes program, known as DAC-SASH. It too is run by GRID Alternatives using a data resource called CalEnviroScreen to locate census tracts bearing the state’s heaviest environmental burdens that are also afflicted by poverty, high rates of unemployment, low educational attainment, and linguistic isolation.

Operating within these census tracts, GRID Alternatives has faced costly hurdles in identifying low-income homeowners who are ready to make the leap to photovoltaics. “For many communities of color in California, solar is not number one on people’s wish list,” says Danny Hom, a member of GRID Alternatives’ strategy team. “It is regarded as something for the richer and whiter communities.”

Financially strapped homeowners are wary of being preyed upon by purveyors of home improvement products and services that sound better than they may turn out to be. Moreover, at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a particularly heavy toll on household budgets, many recoil from the prospect of spending money to repair an outmoded electrical system or an aging roof before solar can be safely installed.

While 35 percent of low-income Californians own their homes, the rest are renters who must rely on their landlords to tap solar on their properties. Even if landlords do so, there is no guarantee that the benefits will trickle down to tenants. The Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing program seeks to address this problem, focusing, like DAC-SASH, on disadvantaged communities. Funded by up to $100 million per year in greenhouse gas allowance payments from the state’s investor-owned utilities, SOMAH offers up-front incentives to multi-family building owners who install photovoltaic arrays, provided that tenants receive at least 51 percent of the generated power as credits on their electric bills.

Across the continent, the District of Columbia has made its own strides toward solar democracy. In 2017, it launched a Solar for All program that set a target of supplying the benefits of solar power to 100,000 low-income households by 2032. Under the terms of this program, income-qualified households can expect at least a 50 percent reduction in their pre-solar electric bills. Funding is generated by alternative compliance payments made by the local utility, PEPCO, to comply with one of the nation’s most ambitious renewable portfolio standards, which requires that 50 percent of the District’s retail electricity come from qualifying renewable sources by 2032.

In Solar for All’s pilot phase, the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment made a number of grants to field-test a range of approaches to expanding low-income solar access. Single-family homes have been one target, with cost-free PV installations being offered to participating households.

Solar United Neighbors, a local non-profit, was one of two organizations focused on single-family homes during the pilot phase. SUN’s recruitment efforts demanded an intensive commitment of staff resources to community meetings and follow-up with potentially interested homeowners.

“For eighteen months we were out in the community every week — several times a week sometimes. We went to civic association meetings, Advisory Neighborhood Commission meetings, all the way down to districts inside of every ward,” recalls Yesenia Rivera, SUN’s director of energy equity and inclusion. Senior citizens were particularly interested in Solar for All’s offering. “It’s an easy way for seniors to age in place and reduce some of the burden because they’re on a fixed income. Everything else keeps going up, but this lets you control your electric bill.”

There were obstacles, however, to bringing single-family households in from the cold. Before solar could be effectively deployed, funds were often needed to make electrical upgrades, roof repairs, and other structural improvements. SUN had limited success in securing funds from home energy conservation programs such as the federally supported Weatherization Assistance Program. In all, SUN landed solar arrays for 73 single-family homes — a small number, but Rivera says that it is “a pathway to prosperity” for the participating families.

Beyond the painstaking work involved in placing solar on single-family homes, Solar for All faces a numerical challenge as it works toward the District’s 100,000-solar-household goal: fewer than 92,000 households in the District pay their own electric bills; the rest live in master-metered public housing. It was clear that the program’s implementers would have to come up with alternative ways to pass along solar benefits to these households.

The National Housing Trust, a nationwide non-profit with a strong D.C. presence, took up this challenge. In the first two years of Solar for All, NHT installed solar on 14 of the housing projects it owns and operates in the District, serving 761 low-income households. “The idea is that the program should be cost-neutral to the property owner,” reports Andrew Martin, asset manager at NHT. “Any savings realized in lower energy bills go toward providing direct services to residents or upgrades to common spaces at the property.” These have included community meals and groceries for residents, rent relief to families affected by Covid-19, free Metro cards and other means of transportation, improved security, fitness classes, and intergenerational art classes.

Free subscriptions to community solar projects are another vehicle being used to reach low-income D.C. residents through Solar for All. Unlike Illinois and Minnesota, where a number of shared solar facilities have been built on open farmland many miles from the subscribers they serve, there is little open land that can be deployed for solar in the District of Columbia. Instead, churches and commercial buildings are typical hosts of community solar projects.

One of these projects draws solar power from a 43-kilowatt rooftop array and a 125-kilowatt solar canopy at the Dupont Park Seventh Day Adventist Church in Southeast D.C.’s Ward 7 neighborhood. The project’s developer, a non-profit called Groundswell, channels 100 percent of the electricity from these installations to 48 low-income families, using funds from Solar for All. Savings per family are estimated at $500 per year — about half the average annual household bill for electricity, says Emily Robichaux, Groundswell’s chief financial officer. At three of the projects Groundswell has developed in D.C., a fourth-generation, minority-owned local business has taken the lead on construction.

Speaking to the value of siting projects like this in the communities they serve, Robichaux says: “We have this abundant renewable resource at our fingertips. How can we make it something that drives economic development in communities that have been excluded from the clean energy sector?”

Solar for All initially provided full grant funding for community solar projects like those developed by Groundswell, but now these projects receive an incentive per installed watt that falls short of covering costs. Robichaux notes that the feasibility of these projects therefore hinges on third-party financing by for-profit investors with tax liability sufficient to draw on the federal tax credit. The tax credit has already dropped from 30 percent to 26 percent and, by 2024, it will have phased down to 10 percent for commercial solar installations and zero for residential systems. Robichaux argues that it should be maintained at its current level and should be convertible to a grant for non-profit solar developers like Groundswell as well as individuals with little or no taxable income, like many low- and moderate-income households.

A few years into its effort to bring the benefits of solar power to D.C.’s low-income community, Solar for All has begun to move the needle toward its 100,000 household goal. Not surprisingly, progress toward delivering solar to single-family residences has been slow, with only 382 home solar systems installed by the program as of March 2020. Recruiting participants house by house has been painstaking; less than complete funding for installations has dampened homeowner interest in the program; and the difficulty of pairing solar investments with necessary building repairs and energy conservation measures has highlighted the need for stronger inter-program coordination and substantially greater government support.

Much more promising are the projects that have delivered solar benefits at scale. Free subscriptions to community solar projects have reached over 6,000 households while another 5,600 residents of public housing equipped with solar arrays have benefited from a range of in-kind services offered by their building managers. To meet the 2032 goal, all these approaches will need to step up in the years ahead.

My home state of Massachusetts now gets over 18 percent of its electric power from the sun — a dramatic jump above solar’s tepid 2.3 percent share of electricity generation nationwide. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that solar power generated in the Bay State is sufficient to meet the needs of more than half a million households. What that number doesn’t reveal is how few low-income families benefit from PV on their homes.

“Exploring Equity in Residential Solar,” a study conducted by Synapse in 2019, found that there were 13 residential solar installations per 1,000 Massachusetts households with incomes below $75,000 — the statewide median income. In the $75,000 to $240,000 income range, solar installations were nearly three times more common. Disparities in disposable income are clearly a major contributor to this discrepancy, but tax incentives have widened the solar access gap. Both the federal tax credit for renewable energy investments and a 15 percent state investment tax credit are beyond the reach of most low-to-moderate income households.

The Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program, adopted in 2018, counters at least some of the forces working against low-income solar. SMART is a tariff-based system that sets a fixed price per kilowatt-hour for the output of new solar installations, extending over 20 years. The tariff more than doubles for small PV arrays serving low-income households. Community solar projects with at least 50 percent low-income subscribers also qualify for a low-income escalator, as do property owners where all the solar electricity is credited to low-income housing.

Ben Underwood is the co-founder and co-CEO of Resonant Energy. Though it is a for-profit company, Resonant is a certified B Corp with a mission, as Underwood describes it, “to fundamentally change how the profits of the solar industry are distributed and whom they benefit.” Over the past four years, Resonant has installed more than 3.5 megawatts of solar power on affordable housing, individual homes, and houses of worship.

One of Resonant’s recently completed projects is a community solar installation at Temple Emunah in Lexington, a Boston suburb. Resonant’s team arranged for half the power generated by the synagogue’s solar parking canopies to reduce the electric bills of low-income customers in the same utility service area; the other half will offset Temple Emunah’s power consumption. Underwood and his colleagues identified a clean energy investor willing to finance the project, Cambridge-based Sunwealth. With 50 percent of the power going to low-income subscribers, the project qualifies for an elevated low-income tariff under SMART, making it both profitable for Sunwealth and a socially responsible investment.

Allan Telio is senior vice president at Nexamp, another Boston-based solar company that works on community solar projects in Massachusetts and several other states. Making these projects more accessible to low-income subscribers is one of his big concerns. Rather than having a single 50 percent threshold for SMART’s low-income community solar tariff, he suggests that the incentive for bringing in low-income subscribers should be proportional to the percentage of low-income subscribers that a developer enrolls in a project. “Companies that are more efficient at handling low-income customers would be rewarded by additional incentives. They would be compensated for the extra effort that they are putting in, and they would be able to reap more benefits by spending more time and focus in this area.”

Telio also favors making proof of low-income status less onerous and intrusive. “The hoops people are asked to jump through to prove that they are poor is a deterrent to the ability of these programs to be successful,” he warns. Demanding tax returns, Social Security numbers, and other personal information only heightens the suspicions of people who are already wary of outsiders coming into their communities to market their wares.

Along with his call for “100 percent carbon-pollution-free power” by 2035, President Biden has declared his commitment to giving underserved communities a stake in America’s clean energy future. There are several concrete steps his administration should take to deliver on this ambition.

Reshaping and revitalizing the now-fading renewable energy Investment Tax Credit is a top priority. By 2024, the ITC’s sunset will be nearly complete, with only a 10 percent tax credit still applicable to commercial and utility-scale solar installations and nothing available to homeowners. In addition to restoring the full tax credit and extending it for ten years, the credit should be convertible to an up-front grant for those who need it most: low-to-moderate income households and the non-profit organizations serving them.

Federal resources must also be freed up to prepare older homes for solar installation. To date, only a few jurisdictions have pried loose funds for roof repairs and electrical system upgrades from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Weatherization Assistance Program. Earmarked funding for these outlays is essential, ensuring that the necessary resources do not encroach on existing functions of energy assistance programs.

To make solar power more broadly affordable, there needs to be better coordination among the federal agencies serving the energy, employment, economic development, and housing needs of environmental justice communities. The current fragmentation of these programs is itself a deterrent to energy justice.

If cost-effectiveness is defined as the ability to deliver the largest number of solar electrons to the grid at the lowest cost, utility-scale solar on open land is the hands-down winner. But equalizing access to energy ownership and energy security has its own social value. We need to bring that value to the households and communities that have been the primary victims of environmental neglect and racial discrimination.

California, the District of Columbia, and Massachusetts are just a few of the jurisdictions that have begun to venture down this path. They and others are worthy partners to the Biden administration as it delivers on its commitment to clean energy and environmental justice. TEF

COVER STORY “We have this abundant renewable resource at our fingertips. How can we make it something that drives economic development in communities that have been excluded from the clean energy sector?”

FERC Could Soon Be Building a Transmission Line to the Future
Author
David P. Clarke - Clarke Communications Consulting
Clarke Communications Consulting
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
David P. Clarke

For the first time in over a decade, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members have taken a step toward a reform initiative that could produce far-reaching changes in how the United States plans and pays for national electric transmission lines. These are needed to connect rapidly proliferating but remotely located wind and solar installations to major population centers and energy consumers.

In a July 15 advance notice of proposed rulemaking, FERC called for public comments on a “more forward-looking approach” to building the transmission system of the future,” a system that will be indispensable for meeting the Biden administration’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035 and an economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Commenting on the announcement, FERC Chair Rich Glick underscored that a “piecemeal approach to expanding the transmission system is not going to get the job done,” at least not efficiently and in a way that results in “just and reasonable” rates and is not “unduly discriminatory or preferential.”

Today’s transmission planning and cost-allocation are traditionally piecemeal, reactive, and blind to the ineluctably emerging future resource mix, with planners only making incremental upgrades necessary to interconnect individual generators’ plants, says Rob Gramlich, executive director of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, a leading coalition advocating modernization. FERC’s Federal Power Act mission is to ensure just and reasonable rates, and that, perforce, means future planning that accounts for the emerging mix of new electricity generation sources that “everybody in the industry recognizes” is coming, Gramlich says.

Lending support for better planning, in June the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a multiyear “renewable integration” analysis that concluded more cooperation among regions with different energy resources could provide up to $180 billion in net benefits, with transmission playing “an important role in minimizing costs.”

FERC’s rulemaking announcement indicates that the independent agency may pursue a nationwide, comprehensive transmission reform, “exactly what we’re hoping for,” says Gramlich. In January, his coalition released a report titled “Planning for the Future.” Its calls for comprehensive reform received strong support from a bipartisan group of nine former FERC commissioners. If FERC implements the anticipated reforms, it would be “probably the most significant action any policymaker could take nationally for clean energy,” Gramlich adds.

By extension, new transmission linking clean energy would be the cornerstone for a national GHG-reduction strategy that will require electrifying transportation, buildings, and in time industrial manufacturing.

But while the call for climate action is increasingly urgent, transmission reform will take a while. An advance notice could take up to six months, and the actual notice of a proposed rulemaking the same. That needs to be followed up by regional implementation. In June, however, FERC and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, representing state regulators, announced the establishment of a joint federal-state task force on electric transmission. So FERC is already taking steps to engage essential state partners to cooperatively identify policy and other barriers inhibiting transmission development.

FERC’s advance notice of a proposed rulemaking comes as high-level policymakers recognize the importance of large-scale transmission both for grid resilience and climate mitigation. The Energy Infrastructure Act, for example, passed 13-7 on July 14 by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, directs FERC to fix transmission planning and provides a small but helpful $2.5 billion grid loan program. The House CLEAN Future Act contains provisions supporting grid modernization and establishing a national policy aimed at overcoming barriers to transmission investments. And the Biden infrastructure plan calls for building thousands of miles of new transmission to facilitate renewable energy expansion.

Notwithstanding the growing calls for new transmission policies and climate action more broadly, Congress remains deeply divided, so “we have to be practical and realistic” about the potential for legislation, Gramlich cautions. Still, FERC has “very strong authority” to act on transmission planning and “it’s looking like they will.” In addition, the departments of Energy, Transportation, and Interior can use their limited authorities to help move transmission projects forward, with targeted congressional directives helping to remove some barriers.

FERC Could Soon Be Building a Transmission Line to the Future.

Joe Biden Has Lofty Goals but Must Navigate Political Minefield
Author
Bob Sussman - Sussman & Associates
Sussman & Associates
Current Issue
July-August 2021
Issue
4
Bob Sussman

Joe Biden has aimed high on climate change. And with good reason. His proposals present the nation with a stark choice — either take radical steps to decarbonize the U.S. economy or accept irreversible warming trends that have dire consequences. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this choice. After decades of half-measures, we are nearly out of time to avoid unsustainable global temperature increases.

Given the imperative of acting against this threat, Biden’s recently announced goals for US greenhouse gas reductions — a 50-52 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2030 leading to net-zero emissions by 2050 — should be unassailable. However, reductions of this magnitude are far beyond any we have achieved before and will require an unprecedented national commitment to decarbonization.

Under President Obama, the replacement of coal with natural gas for power generation achieved a painless and largely voluntary decline in emissions. In 2015, Obama raised the stakes, committing the United States to a 24-26 percent emission reduction by 2025. But this goal was abandoned in the Trump years and emissions were only 12 percent below 2005 levels in 2019.

Making up this shortfall by 2025 and then reducing emissions by another 25 percent by 2030 are possible only with a rapid, across-the-board transition away from fossil fuels. While a hydrocarbon-free future has always been a vision of climate advocates, oil and gas still remain embedded in all sectors of our economy. A world without fossil fuels is deeply threatening to many Americans who sense upheaval and dislocation rather than opportunity. Can Biden persuade a divided public and polarized Congress to take this leap forward?

There is reason for cautious optimism. Climate science is no longer under attack and there is tacit acceptance that planetary warming is real and linked to human-induced CO2 emissions. The business community has moved from near monolithic opposition to emission reductions to measured and in some cases full-throated support. Pressure by activist investors, sensitivity to public criticism, and corporate sustainability programs have all contributed to this shift.

But the biggest factor is that, with rapid improvements in technology, mainstream companies in the electric power and transportation sector are embracing low-carbon business models and committing to ambitious goals backed by robust capital investment.

This dynamic creates an opportunity to align business with Biden’s climate agenda. To court the business community, he is pursuing a carrots-and-sticks strategy. His Jobs Act offers incentives and subsidies to build out the infrastructure — such as transmission lines and charging stations — necessary to accelerate the market penetration of zero-emission electric power and vehicles.

In return, he is proposing to set binding near-zero emission targets for 2035 that would be implemented legislatively (a clean energy standard for electric power) or under existing law (tailpipe emission standards for new vehicles under the Clean Air Act). The Biden team is banking that businesses already committed to clean energy will support these targets in order to obtain the largess of the Jobs Act and the regulatory certainty they need for long-term planning and investment.

However, Republicans are not on board and have little interest in joining forces with their traditional business allies. Their focus is on next year’s mid-term elections and they hope to rally their base by portraying Biden’s agenda as expensive, leftist, and deeply threatening to the status quo. Without explicitly denying the reality of climate change, the Republican strategy is to stoke the fears of the electorate by conjuring up dark images of job loss, energy shortages and outages, wasteful government spending, higher taxes, and less freedom of choice.

The president has a powerful answer: the clean energy transition will create new jobs and business opportunities and maintain U.S. competitiveness as China and other rivals race to achieve global dominance in electric vehicles and renewable power. But Republicans are discounting this message and betting that their supporters will see the clean energy future and its promise of economic growth as a mirage. Better to do nothing, they imply, than risk declining incomes, a lower quality of life, and heavy-handed government intervention.

As the Biden team undoubtedly knows by now, a bipartisan mandate for his climate proposals is not in the cards. However, if Democrats hang together, the Senate reconciliation process provides a narrow but viable path forward in the face of Republican opposition. This path carries political risks and Democrats could pay a price at the polls in 2022. However, the stakes for the planet are too high to retreat.

Bob Sussman is principal of Sussman and Associates, an environmental consulting firm. He can be reached at bobsussman1@comcast.net.

Joe Biden Has Lofty Goals but Must Navigate Political Minefield.

Infrastructure: The Rocky Path to a Carbon-Neutral Economy
Author
Craig M. Pease - Ph.D Scientist and Former Law School Professor
Ph.D Scientist and Former Law School Professor
Current Issue
July-August 2021
Issue
4
Craig M. Pease

Physical infrastructure is the backbone of modern society, as evidenced by the recent failures of the Texas electric grid and Colonial gas pipeline, and the temporary halt of Mississippi River barge traffic due to a cracked bridge. Critically, most of our existing physical infrastructure was designed for, or derived from, fossil fuels.

To transition to a carbon-neutral economy, we must replace most existing infrastructure. Many assume the proposed spending will facilitate a transition to neutrality. Yet infrastructure is also technology. And there lies the rub.

Consider the perennial darling of infrastructure spending — the ubiquitous two-lane undivided highway. Simple though it be, embedded in it are the technologies inherent in the manufacture and transport of asphalt, gravel, and culverts, and all the technologies present in the facilities that manufacture heavy equipment. That road’s civil engineering allows it to withstand rain, snow, ice, and the heavy trucks that transport goods for our supply chains. When we spend money on infrastructure, we simultaneously purchase technology, engineering, and institutions.

Infrastructure spending faces a Hobbesian choice. Fossil fuel technologies have a record of success but put society at risk of a climate catastrophe. Newer, more carbon-neutral technologies have no guarantee of success. Developing and deploying any new technology faces severe practical problems. Most novel technologies fail before full commercialization. I am not surprised that most of the proposed infrastructure spending relies on fossil fuel-era technology such as roads, with only a small slice directed to newer technologies such as lithium batteries and solar panels.

Human societies are limited in how rapidly they adopt new technologies. The environmental scientist Vaclav Smil identifies only three energy transitions in human history as momentous as the proposed transition from fossil fuels: fire (capturing energy in wood), agriculture (a new way to capture solar energy), and the industrial revolution (transition from wood to fossil fuels). The most rapid was the adoption of fossil fuels. It took over a century and played a central role in a world war.

The Technology Readiness Level scale, originally developed by NASA and now employed more widely, quantifies the long road a new technology faces, from initial proof of concept in a research laboratory, to full commercialization. At TRL levels 1 to 5, the technology is entirely within science and engineering laboratories (e.g., fusion and many novel battery technologies), while at TRL levels 6 to 9 the focus shifts to the real world, with pilot programs (e.g., carbon capture and storage), and increasingly broad commercialization (e.g., solar panels, and software to control residential electricity demand).

When initially deployed in the real world, new technologies are typically not economically competitive. Before reaching full market penetration, even superior technologies typically face substantial economic barriers. Each doubling of market size reduces cost modestly. Full commercialization entails many doublings, with a huge decrease in unit cost.

SunEdison founder and energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah now heads the Department of Energy’s obscure Loan Programs Office. It is critical to efforts to transition the United States from fossil fuels, by providing loans and loan guarantees to help overcome the economic barriers to commercialization.

Solar panels, modern batteries, wind turbines, silicon chips, and hard drives are incredibly complex technologies. They contain over 30 metals, some one-third of all metals in the Periodic Table of Elements, including tantalum, neodymium, terbium, gallium, cobalt, lithium, and molybdenum. Some of those metals are rare earths, and there is exactly one rare earth mine in the United States, with its relatively strong environmental and labor protections.

Most of the supply of those metals is sourced internationally, from Bolivia, Congo, Vietnam, Russia, and China, among many others. The metals underlying these “green” technologies carry a litany of problems, including human rights violations, immense water use, pollution, political corruption, lax labor protections, financing wars, and displacing Indigenous peoples.

Moreover, these green technologies would not exist without global supply chains, operated by multinational corporations and protected by the U.S. Navy, which institutions burn massive amounts of fossil fuels.

To address climate change, there is an alternative great technology that is readily available, reliable, and cheap. Using primarily the technology of 1900, augmented in small and critical ways with modern tech, we could provide everyone on Earth with a high quality of life. Before we ever try that, we will no doubt first make a futile attempt to transmogrify our existing fossil fuel infrastructure.

Craig M. Pease is a Ph.D. scientist and former law school professor based in New England. Email him at: pease.craig@gmail.com.

Infrastructure: The Rocky Path to a Carbon-Neutral Economy.

Promoting Energy Efficiency as a Part of Decarbonization Strategy
Author
Joseph E. Aldy - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Current Issue
July-August 2021
Issue
4
Joseph E. Aldy

Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to zero, on net, by 2050 will require dramatic changes in the way energy is produced and consumed. Reducing use — by improving the efficiency of energy services, such as more fuel-efficient cars, electricity-sipping appliances, and more — will play a critical role in any decarbonization strategy.

The International Energy Agency recently estimated that the rate of energy efficiency improvements will need to triple the average rate of the past two decades as part of a mid-century net-zero strategy. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report indicated that energy efficiency — measured by the amount of energy per unit of economic output — would need to improve by 90 percent over this century to prevent warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius.

The challenge in improving energy efficiency lies in designing effective public policy. Energy efficiency has frequently been described as the cheapest energy resource, costing less to reduce demand than producing more energy to meet demand. Engineering studies suggest large potential opportunities in reducing the energy necessary to deliver a desired service, such as to light a room. Some analysts have claimed that efficiency investments have negative costs: the lower energy bills associated with the investment more than pay for the higher up-front cost. In practice, however, our policies have often fallen short of this potential.

Consumers vary considerably in their attitudes and preferences related to energy and the environment. One individual may be willing to buy a more energy-efficient car or an EnergyStar-rated refrigerator at current prices, while another individual would only do so in response to a significant subsidy. One challenge lies in effectively targeting subsidies — such as rebates and tax credits — to those individuals who would not otherwise adopt the more-efficient option. The typical eligibility for such subsidies, however, usually requires only the purchase of a qualifying technology and fails to distinguish among these types of consumers. In practice, many individuals claiming subsidies would have bought the efficient option even in the absence of the payments.

In the context of weatherizing the homes of low-income households, recent research has shown dramatic variation in the quality of the energy efficiency work, with savings varying by 40 percent across projects. Some weatherization contractors are simply much better at their jobs than others. As a result, the Department of Energy has attempted to address these problems through guidance promoting quality projects.

Regulatory standards could promote new, even more efficient technologies, but these approaches take time to have meaningful impacts on consumption. The relatively long lifetimes of energy-consuming durables — a decade or more for appliances, nearly two decades for cars — means that any new standard will be implemented slowly with the turnover of the existing capital stock.

Moreover, to the extent that such standards may increase new product prices, they may slow the turnover of the existing stock and sustain use of less-efficient technologies. For example, higher new vehicle prices under fuel economy standards have extended the operating lifetimes of older, less-efficient vehicles in the used car market, offsetting approximately 15 percent of the energy savings gains associated with these standards.

In light of these lessons, let me briefly describe three ways to design policies to promote energy efficiency. First, we should take advantage of the wealth of microdata to better target subsidies for efficiency. Just as the private sector has learned how to target advertising and sales, energy efficiency programs can be designed to leverage big data and associated analytics to enhance the targeting of efficiency subsidies to drive consumer decisions toward more efficient options.

Second, we should design and implement energy efficiency policies with the intent of learning, revising, and updating programs over time. Integrating program evaluation in the design phase of an energy efficiency policy can ensure rigorous estimates of the impacts of the policy and provide evidence of what works and what can be improved.

Third, we should recognize that policies that raise energy prices can increase energy efficiency. Several recent studies of carbon taxes and fuel taxes suggest that they induce greater reductions in gasoline consumption than would a comparable increase in fuel prices that resulted from conventional market forces. This may reflect the greater salience of taxes or the recognition that a tax-related increase in prices is likely to be more permanent than fuel price swings resulting from transient shifts in supply and demand.

Joseph E. Aldy is an economist on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. You can contact him at Joseph_Aldy@hks.harvard.edu.

Promoting Energy Efficiency as a Part of Decarbonization Strategy.

States Are Striving to Implement Full Potential of Energy Storage Systems
Author
Linda K. Breggin - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
July-August 2021
Issue
4
Linda K. Breggin

Energy storage is widely viewed as a game changer — an essential component of efforts to modernize the nation’s electric grid. Recognizing the value of storage for integrating renewable energy into the grid, states are mixing and matching approaches in an effort to remove barriers and provide incentives. According to a recent National Conference of State Legislatures report, 27 states approved 77 energy storage measures in 2019 and 2020. Thus far in 2021, four more states have adopted measures.

Storage technologies, like the policies that govern them, are not all alike. The Electric Storage Association, or ESA, categorizes the technologies as: batteries, thermal energy storage, mechanical energy storage, pumped hydropower, and hydrogen energy storage. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, lithium-ion batteries produce electricity quickly but have limited duration. In comparison, pumped hydropower offers large capacity but can be used in limited locations — and raises environmental concerns, as evidenced by the recent outcry over a proposed facility in New York’s Catskill mountains.

Energy storage technologies offer myriad benefits, in addition to supporting renewables. NCSL explains that storage also “can increase resiliency, provide backup power during power outages, stabilize the grid, lower the cost of meeting peak power demand
[and] reduce transmission infrastructure costs.” And, many of the technologies can be deployed at utility-scale facilities as well as residential and commercial sites.

While many states are advancing energy storage in conjunction with climate initiatives, NYU Law School’s Richard L. Revesz and Burcin Unel have emphasized in their scholarship that “cheaper storage could also facilitate a higher usage of fossil fuels,” and “it is important to design policies that help ensure that the increased use of energy storage leads to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.” California, for example, modified its incentive program for self-generation technologies to address the concern that storage had increased its carbon footprint.

Although the federal government and regional market policies govern aspects of energy storage, the ESA emphasizes that state policies are the “primary driver” and central to helping the industry reach its 2030 target of 100 gigawatts of energy storage. Similarly, in announcing its new Storage Advocacy Network, the Solar Energy Industries Association emphasizes that it will be “putting its full weight behind” state policies that advance energy storage, thereby helping to achieve SEIA’s 2030 goal of solar accounting for 20 percent of electricity generation.

To advance energy storage, states are adopting an array of measures that include establishing procurement targets and, in some cases, mandates. As ESA’s Jason Burwen explains, when a state sets a procurement target it helps catalyze action by sending signals to developers, investors, and utilities. Leading the pack is California, which set its first target in 2010. Additional states with targets include Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Oregon, and Virginia.

States also are updating regulatory requirements developed prior to the emergence of storage technologies. Vanderbilt Law School Professor Jim Rossi explains: “Utilities need to consider storage as an integral part of a cost-effective energy-resource portfolio, but this will depend on states removing regulatory barriers to the integration of storage into the power grid.”

For example, the planning processes used by many utilities to identify future grid investments may rely on models that do not adequately account for the value and role of storage. States such as Colorado, South Carolina, and Virginia now require utilities to consider or include energy storage in their planning processes. In addition, Oregon and South Carolina have adopted measures aimed at ensuring that energy storage systems connect efficiently to the grid.

Also front and center are incentive programs that foster research and development as well as deployment. Some state programs incentivize storage when it is paired with renewables, including Oregon’s rebate program and Maine’s procurement program, or as part of grid modernization efforts, such as New Mexico’s grant program. In other states, including California and Virginia, some incentives are aimed at supporting on-site backup energy systems.

Other states offer various forms of tax incentives (Maryland and New Hampshire) and financing (Illinois and Washington). In addition, some state incentives advance technologies, including programs in Oregon and Washington that support the development of longer-duration pumped hydro storage.

Taken together, these state initiatives are laudable, but their efforts will need to accelerate — and more states will need to jump on the bandwagon — if storage is to realize its transformative potential.

Linda K. Breggin is director of ELI’s Center for State, Tribal, and Local Environmental Programs. She can be reached at breggin@eli.org.

States Are Striving to Implement Full Potential of Energy Storage.

Tech Need for Rare Earth Elements May Fuel Rare Bipartisan Response
Author
David P. Clarke - Clarke Communications Consulting
Clarke Communications Consulting
Current Issue
July-August 2021
Issue
4
David P. Clarke

Some Democrats and Republicans want to end the U.S. dependence on China for rare earth elements. REEs are essential for electric vehicles, energy storage batteries, and solar panels. They are also used in jet fighters and other military materiel. At the same time, President Biden wants U.S. greenhouse gases to be slashed 50 percent by 2030, unthinkable without a massive deployment of clean energy technologies. Is this a rare opportunity for bipartisan policy?

According to U.S. representatives from Texas Lance Gooden (R) and Vicente Gonzalez (D) and others, the answer is a clear yes. “This should not be a partisan issue,” the lawmakers said in introducing their Reclaiming American Rare Earths Act in April. The bill, one of several REE proposals, would enact a permanent tax deduction for mining, reclaiming, or recycling REEs in the United States and support developing domestic supply chains for the materials. Currently China dominates 80 percent of REE supply chains.

Both Biden and former President Trump recognized the need for domestic production of these critical minerals with government support, Gooden and Gonzalez said in emphasizing the issue’s bipartisan nature.

Case in point: On February 24, Biden signed an executive order that launched a 100-day review of U.S. supply chain strengths and weaknesses across four key industries, including critical minerals.

In June 2019, the Trump State Department announced a multinational Energy Resource Governance Initiative to help build sustainable REE supply chains. At his April 23 Leaders’ Summit on Climate, Biden embraced the initiative, noting that its focus has expanded to include “greening mining operations” in addition to re-using and recycling key REEs.

Although safeguarding REE supplies should be bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans are “talking past each other,” says Joe Britton, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a full supply chain coalition advocating for 100 percent EVs by 2030. During a May 5 House hearing on decarbonizing the transportation sector, GOP lawmakers focused on China’s REE advantage and African child labor concerns as a reason not to invest in EVs, while Democrats see dozens of reasons for doing so.

In testifying at the hearing, Britton stressed that the United States “cannot be on the sidelines” while China and other countries continue solidifying their control over sectors like critical commodities, processing, and manufacturing. He noted that Tennessee’s Republican governor called a $2.3 billion EV battery plant facility being built in Spring Hill the “largest single investment of economic activity in the state’s history.”

“That’s our opportunity,” Britton said. In expanding the EV and clean energy sectors, the United States will prioritize materials needed to achieve net-zero emissions and could support that with such policies as tax incentives. Britton believes that with “critical mass” for battery manufacturing and a “strong market signal” on the U.S. economy’s direction, investments will arise to relocate the full REE supply chain domestically, including the processing market that China now controls. Creating a domestic REE supply chain must be a top priority, he said.

But despite the minerals’ essential role in EVs and clean energy, mining and processing the materials can be environmentally damaging. It generates toxic air, water, and waste pollution that has left China wrestling with a “toxic aftermath,” a Yale Environment 360 article states.

Concerns about environmental impacts as the U.S. and allies move to recreate domestic REE supply chains prompted the Energy Department in January to announce $28.35 million in federal funding for projects to advance U.S. REE processing.

According to Jordy Lee, program manager with a Colorado School of Mines program, it is probably less difficult to create a sustainable U.S. REE sector than many believe, though “it depends on what you mean by sustainable.” Generally, “we don’t really know about the full rare earth environmental impacts,” Lee says.

When the United States was the REE world leader, environmental oversight was limited, so a lot of impact information is missing, Lee says. Today, the country lacks the expertise and infrastructure, and China is not very open about sharing environmental data from its decades of controlling production, he adds.

According to the State Department, REE demand could rise as much as 1,000 percent by 2050 as the world tackles climate change. Will urgency over the environment merge with urgency about rebuilding REE supply chains and pave a bipartisan pathway?

“We don’t really have a choice,” says Britton. The United States is poised to get REEs and clean energy right or forever cede control.

David P. Clarke is a writer and editor who has served as a journalist, in industry, and in government. Email him at davidpaulclarke@gmail.com.

Tech Need for Rare Earth Elements May Fuel Rare Bipartisan Response.

Momentum Is Surging for Green Hydrogen in Clean Energy Future
Author
David P. Clarke - Clarke Communications Consulting
Clarke Communications Consulting
Current Issue
May-June 2021
Issue
2
David P. Clarke

As the Biden administration pursues an aggressive climate change strategy, a technology that has received growing attention is hydrogen, an energy carrier that Arshad Mansoor, the CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, recently said was “always ten years away.” But not now. In February, Mansoor told state energy regulators that hydrogen’s moment has arrived. That sentiment was echoed by Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, who in March, at a major energy conference in Houston, urged oil and gas industry officials to seize the “huge opportunities” for producing and transporting hydrogen in less “damaging and carbon-intensive” ways.

Today’s hydrogen momentum began internationally, says Bill Zobel, executive director of the California Hydrogen Business Council, an advocacy group that is in the forefront of hydrogen development. While the United States has been blessed with abundant fossil fuels, other nations have been less fortunate and relied on imports.

But now, post-COVID-19, import-dependent nations have decided to develop hydrogen as an energy carrier that can be made from water and other sources and “integrate it into their economies in a big way” because it is applicable to almost any economic sector, says Zobel. With huge international investments underway, “We’re now starting to get into that.” In addition, with Biden’s decarbonization efforts as another driver, “We’ll continue to see a lot of different areas of the [U.S.] economy move in that direction,” he adds.

The business council’s diverse membership, including utilities, automakers, and other sectors, “all see opportunities” in hydrogen and are working together to promote policies that will open markets. That broad interest was reflected in the February 2 announcement of a new 11-company Hydrogen Forward coalition whose members include Shell, Toyota, Cummins Inc., and CF Industries, the world’s largest ammonia manufacturer.

Hydrogen is “definitely enjoying some interesting momentum” for several reasons, says Rachel Fakhry, a climate and energy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. First, countries worldwide are adopting ambitious climate goals, and hydrogen is seen as a great resource to clean up challenging sectors, such as shipping, aviation, and manufacturing, to help meet national goals. Second, the costs of renewable energy have plummeted dramatically and completely changed the dynamics of hydrogen use. Cheap wind- and solar-generated electricity can be used to split water and produce emissions-free “green hydrogen,” California’s main target. And third, fossil fuel companies “are really getting behind this” because producing, storing, and using hydrogen has a lot in common with fossil fuels, thus giving the sector a lifeline to continue having a role in the emerging decarbonized economy.

While the confluence of forces is creating momentum, Fakhry says there are reasons to be cautious. A fundamental issue concerns the “forms of supposedly clean hydrogen” that are actually being incentivized, she says. Bills are being offered that encourage a wide range of low-carbon hydrogen forms rather than truly clean forms. “So, we are concerned,” Fakhry says, even though NRDC recognizes the real potential for hydrogen to clean up hard-to-decarbonize sectors. For example, in long-distance aviation clean hydrogen is “a leading solution,” and it can play a key role in shipping and long-distance trucking.

Another concern, however, is that hydrogen is so versatile that it could be used in sectors where it should not apply, such as to heat buildings, in passenger cars, and other applications. It doesn’t make sense economically or for other reasons to use hydrogen indiscriminately wherever it can be adopted, Fakhry says. Buildings can be less expensively electrified, for example. However, groups are touting hydrogen for expansive applications, thereby derailing investments in existing cheaper solutions that could be readily deployed. NRDC’s goal is to channel hydrogen into “really high-value” applications that are more cost-effective than alternative solutions.

So far, the Biden administration has been “pretty hazy” on hydrogen, expressing support for the resource while focusing mainly on lowering the cost of green hydrogen to compete with natural-gas-based hydrogen, Fakhry says. But the Department of Energy is starting to pursue an interesting “pivot” from its past interest in hydrogen-fueled passenger vehicles to how hydrogen could fit into a “whole economy-wide decarbonization” effort.

It is “a million-dollar question” what size role hydrogen will play in achieving the goal of net zero carbon by 2050. But based on studies by NRDC and others on decarbonizing the economy, hydrogen will probably play a smaller part than wind and solar. While relatively marginal, however, hydrogen’s role will be “absolutely key” in addressing aviation, manufacturing, and other areas, Fakhry says.

Momentum Is Surging for Green Hydrogen in Clean Energy Future.

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