Let’s look at an “Innovation Carbon Price” that ties 20 percent of carbon tax revenue to public energy innovation investments and 80 percent to strengthening corporate tax incentives for training, research, and equipment investments.

Nudges are the best kinds of policy interventions: minimum intrusion, maximum freedom of choice, maximum relative impact. But one area in which this idea comes up short is global warming. That solution would be making polluters pay.

NYSERDA wants to package up energy efficiency loans the same way Mercedes packages leases and sells them to institutional investors. But a lack of prior investment history made it difficult to get securitization and a AAA rating.

Shaheen and Portman took the past bill, made some adjustments and went through the due process of negotiating with over 200 groups and organizations this time around to gain a wide swath of approval within industry.

As countries meet in Germany this week for the next round of climate negotiations it is important to remember that securing a new international legal agreement in 2015 is critical for five reasons.

The good news is that merely by extending existing energy policies, the United States could keep energy-related carbon dioxide emissions flat through 2040. That’s also the bad news — for two reasons.

Almost all of the new generation capacity in the California transmission system operator’s queue for the second half of 2013 is solar — 97 percent, to be exact. There are 1,633 megawatts of new generation capacity in the 2H 2013 queue.