By Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, Isabel Leigh, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber, Mareldi Ahumada Paras, Michael Mastrandrea, Michael Wara
The passage of historic climate legislation in the past year—both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—could lead to a revolution in clean energy generation in the United States. These federal resources have the potential to accelerate a broad energy transition; but, that transition will only be successful if we grapple with technical challenges and infrastructure issues inherent to the current energy system.
This set of facts elevates key energy system characteristics, especially within electricity production, that will be consequential to the clean energy transition in the near term and merit policymaker attention. Electricity production is not only the focus of recent legislation but also where evolving technologies will deliver the most rapid change, and where—because of the system’s highly regulated nature—that change is likely to encounter the greatest limitations. During this rapid evolution, the electricity system must reliably meet the fundamental challenge that electricity generation and consumption must be equal at all…
