Thousands of towns and communities across the country have been providing the power and fuel needed to run America for decades. While many of these “Energy Communities” are still booming, others have experienced plant closures or waning extraction efforts. Congress has passed new financial incentives to encourage investments in these areas, but now we need to fix permitting to allow the developers to build.

The industrial sector encompasses a vast array of energy-intensive processes and is the fastest growing source of emissions in the U.S. Therefore, low-carbon innovative solutions that don’t compromise productivity are essential. The suite of new or enhanced federal programs, investments, and incentives have demonstrably jump-started industrial decarbonization.

This second edition of “Clear Path to a Clean Energy Future” updates the inaugural edition, tracking the power sector, clean technology, and policy trends in America. In our previous report, we identified that utility commitments contribute to significant additional reductions in emissions beyond what was projected in our reference case. Still, underinvestments in new technologies and retirement of the existing nuclear fleet could result in a rebound in emissions out to 2050.

Hundreds of gigawatts of energy projects spend years in the interconnection process, where projects undergo evaluation by transmission providers, regional grid operators or utilities, to determine their impact on the broader transmission system. The interconnection queue, the list of projects under evaluation for grid connection, has become so dysfunctional that some transmission providers are freezing their process to work through the project backlog and pausing the acceptance of new applicants.

A Case Study of Local Opposition and Siting Challenges for More Wind Energy in Iowa Overview Reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require a massive infrastructure build-out over the next 28 years, involving deploying enough clean electricity generation to meet all our needs while building the infrastructure necessary to electrify industry and transport along…