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Choose Your Own Road Trip: A Toolkit for Transportation Electrification

By Camille Kadoch
Electrification of the transportation sector provides an opportunity for states to save citizens money on fuel, improve the local economy, address national security concerns, improve public health and combat climate change. Some of these attributes have more urgency than ever, such as the need for local jobs and improved public health. But experience and studies ... Read More

Why India should keep coal out of its infrastructure story

By Rasika Athawale
As India looks to "build back better" from the Covid crisis, the country would benefit economically, environmentally and socially by investing in clean technologies. In late 2019, the Indian government announced a $1.4trn National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) to jump-start economic growth. This plan includes a high-profile target for the addition of 75GW of t... Read More

可再生能源如何参与电力市场？

By Fredrich (Fritz) Kahrl, Wang Xuan, Max Dupuy
随着中国政府提出的低碳、零碳观念的深入，电力行业首当其冲需要加速扩大清洁电力的渗透率。在各地区探索电力市场设计，逐步完善电力交易规则的新形势下，如何让以光伏发电，风能发电为代表的可再生能源以及新兴的储能资源参与市场是业界关心的话题。 我们前几... Read More

Revisiting the Public Good, Part 2: What Do We Mean by “Good”?

By David Farnsworth
Simple terms can provide a useful framework and help us understand complex things. Raising children, for example, is a highly involved, lengthy and expensive undertaking, but can be reduced to a couple of words: You want your kids to grow up to be strong and kind. Utility regulation is no different, even utility regulation in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. A ... Read More

Revisiting the Public Good, Part 1: A Better Understanding of “Public”

By David Farnsworth
Ensuring the “public good” has been a central regulatory goal since the US Supreme Court decided Munn v. Illinois in 1876, a case in which the court determined that grain elevators — because of their key role in the ability of farmers to get their goods to market — were affected with the “public interest.” Today, nearly a century and a half later, we ... Read More

Efficiency First must tackle implementation issues to be effective

By Jan Rosenow, Zsuzsanna Pató
Efficiency First policy needs to be effectively applied across the EU in order to meet decarbonisation goals. As is the case in many countries in Europe, households in Great Britain can benefit from public subsidies if they install renewable heating systems. This is not surprising given that heating our buildings results in about 20% of the nation’s carbon e... Read More

Heating homes with hydrogen: Are we being sold a pup?

By Jan Rosenow
Hydrogen has an important role to play in the clean energy transition, but there are better options for decarbonising heating in our homes. The expression ‘to sell someone a pup’ comes from an old confidence trick, where a bag purportedly containing a piglet would be sold, only for the new owner to discover that it actually contained a puppy. It was a crue... Read More

Adiós al carbón, bienvenida flexibilidad de demanda: Cómo puede España liderar la transición energética

By Christos Kolokathis
Cuando varias centrales térmicas cierran simultáneamente, aproximadamente 4’6 GW el 30 de junio de 2020, sería de esperar algún comentario sobre la preocupación en torno a los cortes de energía. No así en España: el reciente cierre de la mitad de las centrales de carbón aún existentes no ha sorprendido a casi nadie, y con motivo.  En la última d... Read More

Adios to coal, bienvenido demand flexibility: How Spain can lead the way in the energy transition

By Christos Kolokathis
When a bunch of thermal power plants shut down simultaneously, around 4.6 GW on 30 June 2020, one would normally expect to hear concerns about emerging blackouts. But not in Spain. The recent closure of half of the remaining coal fleet has hardly raised an eyebrow, and rightly so. The country is suffering from an acute overcapacity problem that has persisted f... Read More

California’s Outages Are a Teachable Moment

By Carl Linvill
Two keen observers of the power sector, Jigar Shah and Cheryl LaFleur, have noted that the responses to the rotating power outages in California on August 14 and 15 became a Rorschach test of individual preexisting biases. Before many facts were known, a favorite villain was chosen and a conclusion drawn: too much solar, not enough gas, underperforming gas, corru... Read More

The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP)® is an independent, non-partisan, non-governmental organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future.