Climate and Advanced Energy

Atlantic Council Global Energy Center staff and nonresident senior fellows share their thoughts on the SPP/ERCOT winter freeze energy crisis and the way forward in this rapid response piece.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an “interdependent” world with “huge issues of inequity,” said Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Without addressing these realities, “we cannot deal with the virus, and it’s the same with climate change.”

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the United States can and must reemerge as a global leader on climate action. Accelerating research, development, demonstration, and deployment of a range of carbon dioxide removal applications is a critical step to achieving US and global climate targets.

Renewable sources of energy are gaining an increasing share of the US energy mix, bolstered by state-level commitments as well as corporate power purchase agreements. However, while renewables have become increasingly cost competitive, they still face challenges, especially related to intermittency and storage. The Global Energy Center’s new issue brief, “Ensuring Energy Security in a […]

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have inherited a country deep in crisis. After the tumult of 2020, the new administration takes the helm amid high unemployment, a sluggish economic recovery, soaring national debt, and a staggering 360,000 Americans dead from a pandemic that shows few signs of slowing before new vaccines can be distributed. At the same time, President Biden has asserted that the United States will regain its mantle of leadership of the liberal order, reset its international partnerships, and, perhaps most importantly, rebuild as a clean, green superpower putting the global community back on track to meet its climate commitments and securing a sustainable trajectory for future economic growth.

Enabling current and future generations to mitigate climate change requires the urgent creation and scaling up of technologies that minimize and reverse the impact of human activities on the environment. The ecosystems that foster innovation in green technologies, and the success factors that enable these ecosystems, must be better understood in order to replicate them around the world.