J1. Green Tech Industry & Utilities

Winter Storm Fern showed that the integration of flexible resources paired with improved weatherization and better market structures can materially reduce risk during extreme weather, writes Tapas Peshin of PCI Energy Solutions.

Total acres burned fell in 2025, but the Eaton and Palisades fires were hugely destructive and raise questions about the future of California's Wildfire Fund, one expert says.

“Data center demand is hard to project over the next few years,” said Advait Arun of the Center for Public Enterprise. “In a market correction, it's very possible that data centers ... will end up crashing out of their tariff arrangements.”

The three jurisdictions released a draft agreement this week that would add Washington to the largest carbon emissions trading market in North America.

Data shows that renewable standard portfolio and net-metering programs can raise rates, but clean energy deployed outside of these programs has no discernible impact, said the Clean Air Task Force.

Nuclear power can scale with the needs of AI, writes Amentum’s Mark Whitney. Companies and communities relying on renewables will risk outages, higher costs and missed opportunities.

The Court of International Trade on Wednesday directed Customs and Border Protection to remove defunct tariffs when finalizing non-liquidated entries.

TeraWulf’s plan to buy a power plant from GenOn faces opposition at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as hyperscalers at White House meeting pledge to bring their own generation.

The construction permit to a subsidiary of Bill Gates’ TerraPower for a 345-MW commercial nuclear power plant project is the NRC’s first commercial reactor construction approval in nearly 10 years.

Power grid asset owners and operators have growing concern around their ability to protect critical assets from drone attacks as the U.S. government warns energy companies to prepare for possible Iranian retaliation.

CALGARY — JORDEN DYE, director of the Pembina Institute’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre (CDR Centre), made the following statement in response to the Government of Canada and the Government of Australia signing the Australia-Canada Clean Energy...

EDMONTON — Tim Weis, senior director of the Pembina Institute’s Industrial Decarbonization program, made the following statement in response to the National Energy Corridor agreement announcement.“This initiative to work together on a national energy...

This report examines the histories and designs of five major Canadian carbon pricing systems: Alberta’s Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) regulation,British Columbia’s Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS),Ontario’s Emission Pricing...

On November 27, 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a Memorandum of Understanding. The five-page document signals their governments’ willingness to put years of acrimony behind them, and to negotiate agreements...

American electricity customers and their advocates have good cause to be worried. Since 2020, residential electricity prices for urban Americans have risen by 40 percent, and current trends suggest prices will continue to increase. Natural gas, which supplies ~40 percent of America’s electricity, is projected to grow in price in the coming years. Gas turbine shortages and growing obstacles for wind and solar development are limiting new supply. And utilities are upgrading aging infrastructure to better withstand natural disasters, passing costs onto customers.

At the same time, utilities are scrambling to meet ballooning electricity demand. Data center proliferation, along with industrial growth and electrification, could increase annual electricity usage by 32 percent by 2030. This combination of surging demand and constrained supply will further increase prices. And homeowners and renters may suffer the most, as these groups have experienced the largest price increases in recent years compared to commercial and industrial users.

These affordability concerns and rising demand are pressuring legislators, regulators, and utilities to act — and many are turning to traditional approaches. Utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority are proposing large, new natural gas facilities. Large-scale projects can benefit from economies of scale, but they also create financial and reliability risks that, all too often, end up hurting consumers in the long run. Just as investors balance risk and reward by building portfolios of stocks, we should pursue diverse energy strategies.

Portfolios of small, local investments — such as energy efficiency, batteries, renewable energy, and flexible resources such as virtual power plants — offer an alternative means to meet growing electricity demand without compounding risk. By leveraging these technologies, we can create an energy system that is more diverse, more resilient to financial and operational shocks, more affordable, and cleaner.

Putting all your eggs in one basket is risky

A utility’s typical response to serving new load is to build centralized, fossil-fuel generation, including natural gas turbines. Utilities like these facilities because they are familiar and can be turned on when you need them (i.e., they are “dispatchable”). Further, many utilities are allowed to bill ratepayers more when they invest in new capital assets, which incentivizes them to build centralized generation.

However, building large, homogenous generation fleets places several risks on consumers:

• Overbuilding: When a utility builds a large plant, it is making a big, long-term bet. The utility spends lots of money in the hopes that there will be sufficient future electricity demand to justify the expense. Yet utilities routinely overestimate demand growth, on average by 17 percent. Customers and investors are then left footing the bill for underutilized plants. For example, during the Dot Com bubble, utilities built a fleet of gas plants to meet expected future demand. However, electricity usage fizzled after the bubble burst, leaving customers paying for plants they didn’t need. The same issue can occur for renewables projects. The City of Georgetown, TX, contracted for significant volumes of wind energy, expecting future growth that never arrived. As a result, the city was left with excess electricity that it had to sell at a loss.
• Market shifts: Another challenge with large, long-term bets is that energy markets can change dramatically over decades. For example, when communities in Illinois committed to building a new coal plant at Prairie State Campus in 2007, the project looked like a decent investment. However, by the time the plant was finished, innovations in fracking technology had made natural gas far cheaper. As a result, RMI analysis found that these communities paid at least $390 million extra for their electricity over four years.
• Fuel price risk: Reliance on fossil fuels can expose customers to more volatile prices. Between 2020 and 2023, electricity customers in Florida saw their monthly fuel charge double from ~$20 to $40. Today, natural gas prices are again rising and increasing costs for consumers around the country.
• Shared disruptions: Non-diverse energy systems are also less resilient because they share common points of failure. In 2021, many communities in Texas lost power during Winter Storm Uri when natural gas generators and pipelines across the state froze. Other regions, such as New England, are also vulnerable to polar vortexes due to their reliance on natural gas. In fact, the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) flagged the United States’s growing usage of natural gas as a national reliability risk.

Many of these risks are becoming more acute as surging electricity demand, increasingly volatile weather, a dynamic policy landscape, growing geopolitical risk (which can impact fuel prices), and rapid technological innovation increase future uncertainty.

Diversification is a powerful risk reduction strategy

Investing in a diverse set of energy solutions can mitigate these risks and create a more financially and operationally resilient system. This diversity can take several forms:

• Diverse types of generation limit common points of failure and fuel price risk: Generating electricity from a variety of types of facilities increases resilience to extreme weather by reducing common points of failure. For example, it was the City of Springfield’s “balanced portfolio” of renewables and traditional resources that allowed it to successfully weather a severe winter storm. A diverse generation fleet also reduces fuel price risk by dampening the impact of market shifts in any one commodity (e.g., increases in natural gas prices).
• Diverse generation locations protect against localized disruptions: Varying the geographic location of generators can limit the risk that all of them will be impacted by a single event (e.g., a wildfire).
• Staggering contract timing protects against buying when prices are high: Just as investors use techniques such as dollar cost averaging to manage market volatility, building an energy system incrementally over time limits the risk of any one transaction losing a lot of money. Further, staggering purchases provides more regular opportunities to adjust over time as electricity needs and market prices fluctuate.
• Diversifying technology size balances economies of scale with nimbleness: Leveraging smaller, fast-to-deploy solutions can limit the risks of overbuilding to meet anticipated demand. Investments in energy efficiency, batteries, demand response, and flexible resources such as virtual power plants have the potential to be deployed in months rather than years. As a result, instead of making bets years in advance, we can deploy these solutions over time as demand evolves. These local solutions can also significantly reduce costs for consumers. For example, in 2024, ComEd provided residents and businesses with $277 million to reduce electricity waste. As a result, customers will save an estimated $3.2 billion, a more than tenfold return. Similarly, virtual power plants (VPPs), which leverage large numbers of devices to reduce demand at critical times, can provide the same services as a new gas plant at 40-60 percent of the cost.

Case Study: Burlington, VT

These ideas are not just nice theories — communities are putting them into action. Consider the case of Burlington, Vermont. Over the years, Burlington has:

• Reduced residential electricity usage and peaks: Through a dedicated energy efficiency utility, Burlington has consistently made investments to slash waste and reduce homeowner bills. Since the program’s inception, the City’s investments have reduced annual residential energy use by 59,204 MWh — enough to power over 5500 typical Northeastern homes or a bit less than one-third of Burlington’s households. These waste reduction efforts not only reduce homeowner energy costs but also help minimize the utility’s maximum load on any individual day (particularly when combined with the recently launched flexibility programs). Since the electric grid must be sized to meet a community’s highest demand throughout the year, these efforts provide an elegant means to delay or even avoid costly new infrastructure investments.
• Kept bills low and stable: Burlington generates its power from a variety of sources, including biomass facilities, hydro, wind, solar, and oil. This diversity has protected its customers from price volatility and enabled it to retain lower rates. In contrast, Eversource customers in neighboring New Hampshire have been exposed to fluctuating natural gas prices, and experienced higher, more volatile bills. (See Exhibit 1). Importantly, this analysis assumes comparable electricity usage across households, but in reality, Burlington residential users consume 34 percent less than the average in New England, at least in part due to the city’s long-standing energy efficiency efforts. As a result, a typical Burlington homeowner’s actual bills would likely be even lower than what is represented here.

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Exhibit 1: Burlington Electric Department’s and Eversource’s average monthly residential bills over time. 

We can have a less risky, more reliable system

A more diverse, distributed, resilient energy system is possible — but it won’t happen on its own. While state policy makers and regulators can play a critical role in passing policies and regulations to support this adjustment, local governments and communities can adopt policies that help streamline local installations (e.g., permitting reforms).

We also need to collectively rethink how we evaluate investments. Too often today, individual energy projects are evaluated in isolation, where perceived risks about cost effectiveness can delay or cancel projects. This narrow lens too often causes us to overlook the risks we are already exposed to and undervalue the benefits of diversification. To be fair, there will be times when the cost savings from distributed energy resources may be uncertain or, at the end of the day, not realized. Yet communities that take a holistic lens to their investment decisions will be rewarded with a more financially and operationally resilient system.

In today’s uncertain environment, customers need affordable, reliable electricity — without more risk. Portfolios that leverage distributed, local solutions to complement centralized approaches might be just what they need.

The post Why Communities Can and Must Consider Electricity Affordability and Risk Together appeared first on RMI.

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Preventing methane emissions is one of the fastest ways we can slow Earth from overheating right now. Methane isn’t just a damaging waste product. It is also a valuable commodity that is marketed as “natural gas,” which is produced alongside oil. When it leaks into the atmosphere, however, methane massively traps heat and warms our planet at an accelerated rate.

Methane was discovered in Italy 250 years ago due to bubbles arising from marshes. When collected and ignited, methane lit on fire and was initially called “swamp gas.” Although methane (chemical name CH4) has been steadily present in the Earth’s atmosphere at low levels for tens of thousands of years, its volume has increased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution due to increased fossil fuel use, agricultural expansion, and landfill development. In 2025, methane levels were at the highest ever recorded.

This increase in methane accounts for a roughly 0.5°C increase in global temperature, or nearly 30 percent of “forced” or human-made warming to date, which makes tackling methane pollution a pressing climate concern.

What makes methane so dangerous?

While carbon dioxide acts like a heat-trapping blanket around our planet, methane acts like an electric blanket with much more warming power. Methane has a lifetime of about a decade before it reacts to form other climate gases. Over a 20-year span, methane is over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. As methane and other greenhouse gases build up at today’s elevated levels, their “blanketing” effect traps far too much heat. The greater the buildup, the greater the risk of life-threatening, property damaging, and costly extreme weather, wildfires, flooding, and other harms.

As well as being a climate concern, methane also causes substantial problems on the ground. Methane contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone, known as smog. Methane is also co-emitted with deadly contaminants and air toxins that kill and sicken people near where it is released. For example, benzene, a known carcinogen, can accompany methane when gas leaks from wells, flares, tanks, pipelines, chemical plants, and furnaces. Deadly hydrogen sulfide can be co-emitted with methane from oil and gas wells. And super-emitting methane sources that are present in very large volumes can explode and cause fires.

What are the main sources of methane?

The fossil fuel industry, landfills, livestock, and agriculture are the major human-made sources of methane, making up about 55 percent of current methane pollution. Natural sources, like wetlands, swamps, and thawing permafrost, produce roughly 45 percent. Different places have different shares of methane.

Methane is invisible, usually odorless, and under high pressure. This means it can readily leak in every stage of the oil and gas supply chain. It is easily emitted from landfills when food and other organic waste decompose. Some crops release methane as they grow. And animals, like cattle, expel it as a waste product.

How can we cut emissions?

The best place to slash methane is to start where we can make the most immediate impact. Methane from fossil fuels is a prime target because the methane in gas is a valuable commodity that is widely traded. Preventing gas from escaping means that companies can recoup money and prevent exposure to harmful impacts. Stopping leaks, reducing venting, and limiting flaring can quickly cut energy waste and curb methane emissions.

For landfills, a suite of tools is available to stop methane pollution at waste sites. These include reducing food waste, diverting food waste from the waste stream away from the disposal sites to anaerobic digesters or composting facilities, improving landfill cover practices, and enhancing gas capturing efficiency.

Cutting methane from livestock involves changes to waste handling and animal diets. Promising experiments are taking place with novel cattle feeds that reduce overall emissions. And reducing methane emissions from agriculture calls for changes to cultivation practices and other new control methods.

As a backstop, there is also work underway to study methane removal. As this powerful greenhouse gas builds up in the atmosphere, there may be a role to develop methods in the future for its removal in addition to efforts underway to cut methane emissions in each sector.

How can data accelerate action?

To tackle leaks and ultimately prevent them before they happen, we need to make invisible methane visible. This requires sensors and checks on the ground to make sure equipment is working as it should, as well as aerial surveys and even satellites to catch leaks as they happen.

Data-to-action efforts involve updated infrastructure, improved monitoring, and tighter regulations to enable faster responses to unexpected events that can reduce methane releases. The greatest opportunities in tackling methane emissions lie in more accurately measuring the emissions and reducing reliance on the industry’s self-reported emissions, which leads to emissions undercounting, as the exhibit below from Texas illustrates.

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What is being done at the international level to prevent methane pollution?

Countries at COP26 in 2021 signed on to the Global Methane Pledge, which calls for a 30 percent reduction in 2020 methane levels by 2030. The 159 country signatories currently represent roughly 50 percent of the total methane emitted today.

Other initiatives involve incentivizing the production of low-methane oil and gas. The European Union’s methane regulations, which came into force in 2024, apply strict measures, including bans on venting and flaring and a low-methane standard that gas importers must meet.

How is RMI involved in tackling methane?

RMI works at multiple points to slash and prevent methane pollution. Our initiatives help to quantify and visualize methane to support policy adoption and advance market activation.

RMI’s Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+) is an open-source analytic tool that estimates and compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions intensities, including methane, of a majority of oil and gas resources worldwide from extraction to consumption.

RMI also quantifies methane emissions from oil and gas and waste sectors for ClimateTRACE, a coalition tracking greenhouse gas emissions from every global sector.

Through WasteMAP, a partnership between RMI and Clean Air Task Force, we’ve created an open, online platform that aggregates and maps reported, modeled, and observed waste methane emissions data worldwide.

We are also part of the CarbonMapper coalition, which helps shed light on major emitters. Last year, RMI was part of the launch of the Tanager-1 satellite, which has been hard at work tracking super-emitters and speeding solutions.

Source: SpaceX.com footage.

MiQ, a voluntary certification standard developed by RMI and SystemIQ that grades gas production on an A–F scale, has certified a volume of 24 billion cubic feet per day of low-methane-leakage gas. In July, we released an analysis showing that, with Pennsylvania acting as the keystone producer, US output of certified low-leakage gas can meet demand from both domestic and international buyers.

RMI has also mapped the vast number of uneconomic and end-of-life wells —  marginal wells — across the United States. Future work will focus on pinpointing high-emitting marginal wells and stopping their emissions.

What are the benefits from reducing methane?

Methane has a much shorter lifetime in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide. This means that reducing methane now immediately prevents it from warming Earth in the short term. Methane also takes longer to react into dangerous air pollutants, like smog. Any action to prevent or more quickly stop methane leakage protects our health and safety. Rapidly attending to large methane plumes and preventing explosions can prevent risk to people and property.

Driving down methane emissions buys us crucial time to accelerate new technologies and scale the energy transition. Cutting methane means a cooler planet, a healthier environment, and clearer skies — and wasting fewer energy sources.

The post Methane 101: Why it matters, where it comes from, and how to tackle it. appeared first on RMI.

Last November, to much fanfare, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The five-page document signaled their willingness to put years of federal/provincial acrimony behind them and...

VANCOUVER, B.C. — MEGAN GORDON, manager of the Pembina Institute’s Equitable Transition program, made the following statement in response to the federal government’s release of the 2026-2030 Sustainable Jobs Action Plan: “The release of the 2026-2030...

Highlights

• Fuel cost-sharing could have saved North Carolina customers nearly $89 million in cumulative savings between 2020 and 2024.
• Even in high volatility years, a fuel cost-sharing mechanism would not materially threaten utility revenues.
• Expanding cost-sharing to include purchased power and integrating complementary tools — such as fuel management plans, hedging strategies, independent audits, and clean energy investments — can further reduce fuel cost volatility and improve accountability.

The post How Fuel Cost-Sharing Can Deliver Savings for Utility Customers appeared first on RMI.

Ontario’s electricity consumers face heightened risks as the province plans to increase gas-fired power to compensate for nuclear plants shut down for multi-year refurbishments. By 2030, gas generation in Ontario is slated to grow to five times its...