Day: March 9, 2023

DOE releases Industrial Demonstrations funding notice

On Mar. 8, 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for approximately $6 billion to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in energy-intensive industrial subsectors through transformational, commercial-scale demonstration projects. This FOA seeks to demonstrate the technical and commercial viability of industrial decarbonization approaches to promote widespread technology implementation and help the U.S. lead in low- and net-zero carbon manufacturing. DOE will provide financial assistance through cooperative agreements to fund up to 50 percent of the cost of each project while prioritizing a portfolio of projects that offer deep decarbonization, timeliness, market viability, and community benefits.

Eligible applicants include for-profit organizations and owners or operators of a domestic, non-federal non-power industrial or manufacturing facility engaged in energy intensive industrial processes as stated in the Inflation Reduction Act. These include:

  • iron, steel, & steel mill products
  • aluminum
  • cement
  • concrete
  • glass
  • pulp & paper
  • industrial ceramics
  • chemicals, and
  • other energy intensive industrial processes, including food & beverage manufacturing.

Concept papers are due April 21. Only applicants who have submitted an eligible concept paper will be eligible to submit a full application.

Closing the gender gap in the climate change space

Read the full story from RMI.

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and despite being in the 21st century, we still have a ways to go to close the gender gap that exists in technical fields. We have come a long way for sure, but currently, women make up only 32 percent of the renewable energy workforce. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is innovation and technology for gender equality. Therefore, we are highlighting some of RMI’s work that is helping to close the gender gap in the climate change space.

As momentum for new climate change legislation stalls in Washington, states look to pick up the slack

Read the full story at Yahoo News.

States are building on federal climate action by instituting renewable energy standards and new clean car rules.

Made-in-Ohio solar panels benefit from federal incentives, supply chain politics

Read the full story at Energy News Network.

About two decades after cadmium telluride solar panels were commercialized in Ohio, the maturing technology is finding momentum thanks in part to its domestic manufacturing and supply chain.

Jimmy Carter, the president who tried to save the planet

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

He installed solar panels on the White House. He urged Americans to turn down their thermostats while sporting a sweater. And he pressured Congress into putting tens of millions of acres in Alaska off limits to development.

Despite serving a single term, Jimmy Carter ranks as one of the most consequential U.S. presidents when it comes to environmentalism, according to historians, conservationists and several former federal officials.

A sudden rush to make sustainable aviation fuel mainstream

Read the full story in the New York Times.

United Airlines and other companies have started a $100 million fund to invest in jet fuel that produces fewer greenhouse gases.

Workers are dying in the EV industry’s ‘tainted’ city

Read the full story at Wired.

In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials.

How the ‘electrify everything’ movement went mainstream

Read the full story at Grist.

“Building electrification,” once a subject embraced only by energy and climate nerds, is going mainstream.

In 2019, Berkeley, California passed the nation’s first ordinance banning new buildings from hooking up to the natural gas system. That required homebuilders and developers to install electric heat pumps, electric dryers, and, perhaps most controversially, electric stoves. The city council considered it a necessary step to cut carbon emissions, about a tenth of which here in the U.S. comes from burning fossil fuels inside homes, offices, and other sites. 

Less than four years later, this approach has proliferated. If you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a good chance you live somewhere that has followed Berkeley’s lead. A report published Wednesday by the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to getting fossil fuels out of buildings, estimates that one in five Americans now reside in a place that encourages or requires landlords and developers to eschew gas.

Where U.S. house prices may be most overvalued as climate change worsens

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

While individual homeowners stand to collectively lose billions as hurricanes and heavy rains intensify flooding, local governments that rely on property taxes also could suffer crippling decreases in revenue

These natural gas ads are full of hot air

Read the full post at Heated.

Gas companies say their clean energy claims are backed by science. They fail to mention the science is fossil fuel funded.