Green Bonds
What are green bonds, and how can they help mobilize private capital to fund energy transition and climate change mitigation measures? What kinds of things can green bonds be used to fund?
Energy featured
Energy from Waste, or Waste from Energy?
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. Biking along the Lake Ontario shoreline one autumn afternoon, I passed the new and just-barely operational Durham-York Energy Centre and a question popped into mind. If this incinerator produces a lot of electricity, where are all the wires? The question was prompted in part by the … Read more
Expanding Tar Sands Will Kill Paris Targets and Climate Stability, Report Finds
Canada can’t increase tar sands production or build more pipelines if the world is to achieve the targets on global carbon emissions set by the Paris Agreement on climate. That’s the central conclusion of a new report by Oil Change International(OCI), a U.S. research and advocacy group dedicated to exposing the full costs of fossil fuel extraction.
How NREL Supports Energy Transition
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Golden, Colorado provides a wide range of research, guidance, and policy support to the whole government stack in the U.S., from the local and city level all the way up to the federal and tribal level.
G20 Climate Risk Report is a Wake-up Call for Fossil-Fuel Investors
It is rare for a report to hold the potential to change the world, but one study published last month may do just that. The Recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD — a group of experts assembled by the G20’s Financial Stability Board) aims to give investors, lenders and insurers visibility of how climate-change risk will affect individual businesses, and a road map for reacting to it.
Analysis: UK Wind Generated More Electricity than Coal in 2016
The UK generated more electricity from wind than from coal in the full calendar year of 2016, Carbon Brief analysis shows. The milestone is a first for the UK and reflects a collapse in coal generation, which contributed just 9.2% of UK electricity last year, with 11.5% from wind. The coal decline saw its output fall to the lowest level since 1935.
Peak Uranium: The Uncertain Future of Nuclear Energy
Declining uranium production will make it impossible to obtain a significant increase in electrical power from nuclear plants in the coming decades.
Transition in the North Sea and Netherlands
The North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative would knit together the power grids of the countries adjacent to the North Sea, and enable a far greater share of renewables—especially offshore wind—on the northern European grid than would be possible otherwise.
Will the US Really Be a Major Energy Exporter?
The analytical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy now says the United States will become a major energy exporter in a few years. Will this eventually prove to have been an accurate prediction? The forecast is contained in the Energy Information Administration (EIA)’s Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) for 2017, released on January 5th. In the publication’s Reference Case scenario, America is energy self-sufficient by 2026 and a net exporter thereafter.
2017: The Year When the World Economy Starts Coming Apart
Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the “coming apart” process started in 2016, in my opinion we are going to see many more steps in this direction in 2017. Let me explain a few of the things I see.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
The “canary in a coal mine” is a metaphor originating from the time when caged birds were carried into the mines as an early warning system; the canary would die before methane and carbon gases reached levels hazardous to humans.
Energy Independence: Why Bother?
In a global economy where we drive cars built in Japan, work on computers made in China and eat shrimp caught and peeled in Thailand, why do we hesitate to use oil pumped in Saudi Arabia? Do we fear oil shortages or embargoes? We’ve weathered those before. The oil exporting countries can only hold back so long- they have to sell the stuff. Camels won’t drink it, and you can’t make vodka from it.