Energy Resources & Access

Utilities are increasingly getting it right on the customer satisfaction front, but a rising tide leads to even more competition for the utility industry's top spots. Some industry frontrunners have seen their leads erode over time as their fellow utilities gain ground in the annual review. What can utilities do to stay ahead?

In detailing their much-scrutinized marriage and love story at the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton also took care to list his wife’s numerous legislative and foreign policy achievements. Among them: "She put climate change at the center of our foreign policy. She negotiated the first agreement ever — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions."

Cornell University biological engineers have deciphered the cellular strategy to make bioethanol, using an anaerobic microbe feeding on carbon monoxide – a common industrial waste gas. “Instead of having the waste go to waste, you make it into something you want,” said Ludmilla Aristilde, assistant professor in biological and environmental engineering. “In order to make the microbes do our work, we had to figure out how they work, their metabolism.”

Fellow Heather Coleman of Oxfam America writes we need to chart a more coherent climate finance policy agenda and determine how progress on climate will be measured.

Given the existing low-cost competition in a no-growth market, renewable developers face tough investment challenges absent new policies. A carbon tax could substantially increase market demand for renewable power and encourage the retirement of pollution-intensive coal-fired power plants.

Chris Madsen needed a career change. After owning and operating his own construction business for over 20 years, a hand injury propelled him to look in other directions. At 45, the father of two enrolled in the plant operations program at Walla Walla Community College. “An area that is focused on heavily [in the program] is the chemical process we use in order to utilize bioenergy,” says Madsen, who also completed a summer internship at biorefinery developer ZeaChem, an industry partner of the Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest project.

Climate change-related food scarcity can lead to 500,000 deaths around the world by 2050, a new study has found. The research was the first to come up with an estimated number of deaths, based on changes in diet composition due to global warming.

It’s music to an environmentalist’s ears: Six Flags Great Adventure wants to power its park with solar energy by installing a solar panel farm on a portion of the 134 acres of land it owns in Jackson, New Jersey. But as the company spells out its plan, the needle scratches across the record: To make room for the panels, it plans to level 66 acres of trees. ...

I think the agreement has the potential to transform collective action on climate change. Whether the long-term goals of holding warming well below 2 degrees C, or even 1.5 degrees C, are met will depend on how Parties implement their existing commitments and also the extent to which they come forward with greater ambition in the future.