Existing climate pledges won’t be sufficient to keep global temperature rise under the 2100 target in the Paris Agreement, increasing the likelihood that governments will resort to more stringent actions that risk "severe" economic impacts, according to a new report from Oxford Economics. The report outlines the effects of a...

FERC on Tuesday approved a set of CAISO tariff revisions intended to prevent the kind of supply shortages that triggered rolling blackouts in California last summer during an extended Western heat wave (ER21-1536). The changes, the product of an expedited effort to head off shortages this summer, originate from the...

Pacific Gas and Electric (NYSE: PCG) will sell its iconic San Francisco headquarters to a real estate venture for $800 million, the company said Monday. The deal with Hines Atlas US includes PG&E properties at 77 Beale St. and 245 Market St., in the heart of the city’s high-priced financial district.

FERC issued a set of orders Thursday that indicate that the myriad disputes around the Western energy crisis of 2000/01 might finally be winding down two decades after California’s nascent wholesale energy market was paralyzed by widespread market manipulation. The most significant of the orders dealt with a complaint by...

Oregon will require a 4,404% growth in public chargers to meet the demands arising from its 2035 electric vehicle targets, according to a state-funded study to be delivered to Gov. Kate Brown next month. The draft final report by the Oregon Transportation Electrification Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TEINA) Advisory Group shows...

Solar industry employment fell 6.7% in 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and increased labor productivity, while the sector installed a record 19.2 GWdc, in part, because of those productivity gains, a new report shows. Solar jobs fell to 231,474 last year, their lowest level since 2015, in response to...

The Western Energy Imbalance Market provided its members $101.01 million in economic benefits during the first three months of 2021, an increase of 75% over the same period a year ago and a first-quarter record, CAISO said last week. The ISO estimated participant savings of $15.77 million in January, $61.7...

The need for uniform electric vehicle charging standards and the limits of state efforts to price carbon highlighted FERC’s technical conference on electrification and the grid of the future Thursday. How electrification of the economy will unfold over the next few decades is unclear, speakers said, but there’s no question...

In a sign of the growing threat of utility-sparked wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration will this summer join the ranks of Western transmission providers adopting a public safety power shutoff (PSPS) plan. The plan will allow BPA to pre-emptively de-energize specific power lines under conditions of...

In a move that rankled some power industry participants, FERC voted Thursday to approve a supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would scale back a transmission rate adder designed to encourage utilities to join RTOs. The vote represented a sharp turnabout from last March, when the commission advanced a proposal...