(Washington Insider)

Former White House climate adviser George David Banks said President Trump could be poised to reverse his decision to exit the Paris climate change accord.

“There’s nothing in it for the president this year,” Banks told E&E News in an interview after he stepped down last week. “There’s nothing in it for the president next year.” But in 2020, Trump is “going to want victories” to win re-election, he said.

The U.S. cannot formally exit from the Paris agreement until the 2020 presidential election year under the United Nations’ rules for withdrawal. Trump often has said that there might be a way to renegotiate the U.S.’s terms of the agreement. But others such as French President Emmanuel Macron have said that would impossible to do unless the U.S. was intent on increasing its commitments under the agreement.

Banks pointed out that the U.S. will be hosting the Group of Seven industrialized nations, or G7, in 2020, which the president could use as a foil to renegotiate the Paris deal.

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(Daily Energy Insider)

The Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) published a white paper this week that concludes modernizing the electric grid will require changes in the pricing structures electric utilities use, including moving beyond a traditional two-part rate.

The paper, Forging a Path to the Modern Grid: Energy-Efficient Opportunities in Utility Rate Design, is the product of the Rate Design Initiative, a two-year effort led by ASE and involving representatives from utilities, technology companies, regulatory experts, environmental groups, consumer advocates and other industry leaders.

The initiative sought to identify themes and opportunities related to rate designs that incentivize energy efficiency and other environmental and social objectives, while also enabling adequate cost recovery for utilities.

“Developing utility rates that are fair to all stakeholders is a perennial challenge, but the dramatic shifts happening in our power systems are forcing us to think more creatively,” Natasha Vidangos, director for research at ASE, said. “The old-fashioned cost recovery and rate design models we’ve traditionally used simply don’t match tomorrow’s needs. As an organization that works closely with the wide spectrum of utility sector stakeholders, we took this on to try to identify areas of agreement, opportunity and lessons learned. In rate design, there are rarely simple solutions, but the potential benefits are extraordinary if we get it right.”

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(Bloomberg Markets)

Americas are spending the least of their paychecks on electricity in at least 58 years as gains in energy efficiency leave more for food, vacations and gadgets.

Consumer spending on electricity fell to 1.3 percent of personal consumption in 2017, the lowest in records dating to 1959, according to a report Thursday from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. That’s down from a peak of 2.3 percent in 1982.

The savings come amid a modest increase in retail power prices last year and higher spending on gasoline and other motor fuels. Spending on natural gas rose slightly last year to 0.4 percent of personal consumption, down from 1.3 percent in 1983.

The entire U.S. economy is becoming more energy efficient as a long-term shift away from manufacturing means the same amount of energy is now delivering more to GDP.

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(Yale Center for Business and the Environment)

Before the federal government discontinued the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Qualified Energy Conservation Bond (QECB) program in 2017 as part of its tax reform package, states like Virginia leveraged this program to accomplish energy efficiency goals.

When evaluating how to use Virginia’s QECB allocation, decision makers considered the increased flexibility of Green Community Programs (GCPs) relative to traditional QECBs and “qualified” projects.

GCPs can issue bonds for any mix of public and/or private projects. In contrast, under the traditional QECB structure, a maximum of 30% of allocations can be issued for private projects.

In addition, GCPs are not subject to the 20% energy-reduction requirement. This broad scope and relaxed requirements allow them to be structured and operated on a case-by-case basis, leaving significant room for creativity and adaptability to different states, locations, and projects.

Read the case study here. 

With a little more than a year elapsed since President Trump’s inauguration, progress on federal appliance standards has slowed to a crawl, while state efforts are picking up steam. Although the administration affirmed or completed several important Obama-era standards during its first months, others remain in limbo. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has now missed multiple legal deadlines and, in December, released a regulatory plan that puts the government on track to miss many more in 2018 and beyond. State policy makers have not wasted any time stepping into the breach; this year is already shaping up as a big one for state standards.

Status of standards at risk

With President Trump and Congress both focused on cutting regulations, 2017 opened with all eleven standards finalized during the last year of the Obama administration on the chopping block. Some good news: seven of these standards are now safe from rollbacks and efforts to protect the other four are underway. Here’s the rundown:

• Manufacturers, consumer groups, and environmental advocates all urged preservation of four major standards developed through the negotiated rulemaking process. In spring 2017, after reviewing public input, the administration affirmed new standards for central air conditioners and heat pumps, beverage coolers, swimming pool pumps, and walk-in coolers.
• Three standards developed through the more common, non-negotiated rulemaking process were on some target lists for repeal by Congress. But deadlines for Congressional repeal passed with no action to remove the new standards for ceiling fans, battery chargers, and dehumidifiers.
• Four other standards remain in limbo. Although signed and issued in late 2016, final standards must wait 45 days for publication in the Federal Register to allow stakeholders to identify errors, and this error-correction period spanned the change in administrations. The only error correction request filed was non-substantive, yet a year later the Trump administration has still not officially published standards for portable air conditioners, air compressors, commercial boilers, and uninterruptible power supplies.

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NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Miami and other U.S. cities most at risk from disasters exacerbated by global warming are also among those whose high energy consumption is fuelling temperature rise, data from clean-energy company Arcadia Power showed on Tuesday.

The coastal city of Miami, battered last year by Hurricane Irma, was the least energy-efficient in a sample of 15 cities, with its monthly energy consumption 25 percent above the national average, the data showed.

Such cities are “shooting themselves in the foot” because their immoderate energy consumption emits avoidable greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet and causing climate change, said a statement from Arcadia.

The Florida city averaged energy consumption per household of 1,125 kilowatt hours (kWh) per month, far exceeding the 2016 national average of 897 kWh.

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