Future Caucus legislators create bipartisan coalitions to advance innovative policies related to energy and the environment. There is a generational consensus on the need to deliver results.
Our national reckoning with the impacts of a changing climate grows more urgent by the day. Fortunately, the avenues to address these challenges are increasingly tangible and new technologies continue to expand the options available to policymakers. In the face of evolving threats, lawmakers can build stronger, more prosperous communities by prioritizing common sense solutions that bolster resiliency and capitalize on innovation. The move to renewable technologies and the reevaluation of our nation’s power grids provide an opportunity to address America’s changing energy needs and create additional jobs. Lawmakers across the country have introduced hundreds of alternative technology and energy infrastructure measures in recent years as states explore innovative ways to best harness new energy possibilities. These initiatives are increasing energy independence, improving infrastructure resilience, reducing carbon emissions, and creating new careers.
2024 Energy & Environment Innovation Fellows
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The U.S. electric grid faces a crisis decades in the making. The grid suffers dually from protracted underinvestment and increasingly complex demand models. Instances of significant power outages have grown dramatically over the last several decades, and incidents like 2021’s Texas power crisis, where extreme weather brought about a loss in electricity generation capacity with severe social economic consequences, demonstrate the risk of failing to adequately prepare. Cybersecurity of the energy infrastructure and grid is a growing concern across all levels of government, and much of the grid is overseen by state regulators and municipal or cooperative governance.
New technologies are emerging that hold the potential to revolutionize energy production and consumption. States are pursuing innovative approaches to onboard more renewable distributed energy resources, such as community-scale solar installation and other creative approaches that remove barriers to renewable technology for consumers, mitigate cost-shifting, cut emissions and energy prices, and create new jobs.
Enabled by the same technologies pushing the nation’s transition to a smart grid, microgrids are important factors in onboarding new energy generation and boosting resilience. Microgrids integrate distributed generation resources and electrical energy storage (EES) facilities into a localized distribution service area that can be decoupled (often referred to as ‘islanded’) from the main grid. Microgrids effectively coordinate local distributed generation, improve energy economics for generators and consumers, and provide fine-tuned demand response while serving as a reliable backup to the larger grid. Microgrids help create more resilient and economically dynamic communities that are well-equipped to respond to shifts in energy supply and potential disasters. They are also a bulwark against the threat of a large-scale attack on the nation’s electric grid and provide life-saving electricity in times of natural disaster.
Developing and implementing a federally coordinated, multi-agency program to accelerate plastic waste reduction and support recycling research and development is a critical step to increase the nation’s economic independence, improve the nation’s environmental quality, and strengthen national security.
The increase in distributed power generation and the variability of some renewable resources creates new, and sometimes problematic dynamics of energy transmission and delivery. While the overarching goal of smart grids is to optimize these dynamics, scenarios arise where power demand cannot be met by typical sources or there is an excess of power capacity. The ability to “smooth” out these sporadic imbalances in supply or demand can be met with electrical energy storage (EES) with the bonus of boosting resiliency. Electrical energy storage systems, sometimes referred to as battery energy storage or utility-scale battery energy storage systems, convert and store generated electrical energy that can be reconverted and deployed when needed. These systems aid the adoption of intermittent renewable resources, provide quick responsiveness during demand spikes, add a layer of resilience during generation outages, and improve grid dynamics by reducing instances of curtailment—the suspension of clean renewable power generation when supply on the grid has been met at the moment. Given the potential multiplier of EES to renewable adoption and impact and its importance in boosting resiliency, many states have recently implemented new rules urging the development of new energy storage capabilities. Energy storage programs are also important in accelerating the adoption and expansion of electric vehicles, as a lack of charging infrastructure is the main barrier to electric vehicle adoption.
Carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) is a new technology in the fight against climate change. CCUS captures airborne carbon and “either reuses or stores it so it will not enter the atmosphere.” The technology is still in its early days and many states are working to understand the potential benefits to local economies, both through commercial applications of stored carbon and in creating new jobs while also exploring the impacts of conservation on removing carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon capture can also incentivize conservation efforts as researchers and policymakers seek to quantify the sequestration capabilities of natural ecosystems such as wetlands.
In 2019, Future Caucus launched the Energy Learning Network to advance a national conversation on innovative energy solutions and engage members in peer-to-peer dialogues and expert-informed discussions.
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