Getting to Scale
Carbon neutral cities require three components: policy and institutional innovations; organized capital; and extensive outreach, education and public engagement.
This Climate Solutions program is no longer active.
In 2016, Climate Solutions completed the seventh and final year of our successful New Energy Cities program. Combining research on urban carbon reduction best practices and partnering with Northwest cities and counties, we helped local communities accelerate carbon emissions reduction through climate and clean energy goal-setting, clean energy transition planning, policy development, program design, and implementation.
Our New Energy Cities program continued to work with the King County-Cities Climate Collaboration (K4C), a voluntary coalition of King County and 13 cities united in their goal to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 supporting efforts to get underway with achieving its 90% renewable electricity by 2030. New Energy Cities formed a partnership with Stockholm Environment Institute to provide energy maps and carbon wedge analyses for Everett, WA (Snohomish County) and Olympia, WA (Thurston County). Our existing partnership with Tukwila, WA showed encouraging progress, with city leadership and staff eager to make deep carbon reductions in their community.
Climate Solutions is proud of New Energy Cities and its seven years of success. Although we phased out the program at the end of 2016, Climate Solutions will continue to help our city and county partners create political momentum to inform policy and drive carbon emissions reduction at the state and regional levels.
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Carbon neutral cities require three components: policy and institutional innovations; organized capital; and extensive outreach, education and public engagement.
Do current utility models have anything to offer us in solving our energy dilemma – transforming our system by driving radical efficiency improvements, smart infrastructure, and multiple kinds of distributed, renewable energy technologies?
Investors and customers continue to embrace solar.
Letha Tawney of the World Resources Institute addresses the benefits of public investment in energy innovation.
The price of installed solar PV has plummeted and is approaching the point at which we no longer should even pretend that solar is a more expensive alternative than other forms of energy.
In the September 15 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Brookings expert Bruce Katz called out a “metropolitan moment,” in which municipal and regional leaders are “adapting the discipline of private sector business planning…to the task of revitalizing and restructuring metropolitan economies.”
Of late, a rising set of rational Republican voices can be heard affirming the assessment of 95 percent of the scientific community that the earth is warming at an alarming rate due to burning fossil fuels.
While fuel cell technology is still advancing, certain applications are on the market right now, providing jobs at over 630 companies and labs across the United States.
Are we wrong to always assume households act economically rational when considering efficiency? A growing interest in behavioral frameworks for energy efficiency programs is challenging this assumption and several recent studies support a shift from pure economic incentive to a greater behavioral focus.
To be successful, energy efficiency programs can employ strategic marketing principles - focusing on audience, strategic messaging and media, and engagement with contractors - to involve residents in retrofitting their homes.