AI is creating new opportunities for climate solutions. But whether it can be a force for good in the impact sector will depend upon the decarbonisation of its power systems, says Impax Environmental Markets’ Thomas Morris-Brown.
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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
ESG Exposed: Matt Moscardi on the Real Power Behind Corporate Boards
In this episode we’re joined by Matt Moscardi, a pioneer in rethinking corporate governance and accountability. Matt is the founder of Free Float, a platform dedicated to unpacking the hidden layers of corporate power and influence.
With a sharp wit and a no-nonsense approach, Matt and his team at Free Float explore how companies make decisions that impact us all—from boardroom dynamics to shareholder influence.
In this conversation, we’ll dive into his work at Free Float, how he’s challenging traditional ESG norms, and why transparency in corporate behavior matters more than ever.
Meet the Changemakers: Join the TBLI Mixer
Date: November 16h - 16:00 CET
Join Us for an Extraordinary Networking Experience: TBLI Virtual Mixer.
Free to attend - no charge.
Free to attend - no charge.
Imagine a networking event where you don’t have to sell anything – just be yourself.
Through our TBLI virtual mixers, we’ve reimagined how professionals can connect. This is where people who care deeply about sustainability, impact, and creating real change come together. Meet non-extractive, authentic eccentrics – people from diverse industries who think beyond the ordinary and act for a better world.
The conversation flows, the connections are meaningful, and every participant brings something unique to the table.
Why Share This Event? Whether you’re looking to build partnerships, share your ideas with new minds, or simply want to meet people who get it – this is where you want to be. TBLI Mixers don’t just create connections, they spark movements. So share this with your network, and help create a world where real connections lead to real impact. Let’s redefine networking – together!
The race for clean energy is local
By: Emily Jones & Gautama Mehta - Grist
A couple hundred overlooked public officials control the U.S. power grid — and some of them are on your ballots.
The U.S. power grid is at a critical crossroads. Electricity generation, like every other industry, needs to rid itself of fossil fuels if the country is to play its role in combating the climate crisis — a transition that will have to happen even as energy providers scramble to meet what they claim is an unprecedented spike in electricity demand, attributed to the rise of AI.
Considered as a physical object, the North American grid is the world’s largest machine; in its political form in the United States, however, it’s a mess of overlapping jurisdictions. So whether the country meets this newly rising demand for electricity in a climate-friendly way or by prolonging the fossil fuel industry’s dominance will largely be up to the 200 or so regulators who sit on state utility commissions. No single person or body of government is in the driver’s seat — the humble, arcane, and largely out-of-sight utility commissions are in control of the grid and its future. Their mandate is to approve or deny the utility companies’ expenditures and the rates they collect from their customers to pay for them. This means federal policymakers can implement all the incentives they want for clean energy, but these efforts will amount to nothing if state-level regulators don’t require utilities to build it.
Every state has a regulatory panel known variously as a public utilities commission, public service commission, corporation commission, or even railroad commission. Most are appointed, typically by the governor. In 10 states, utility regulators are directly elected by voters. Eight of those states are holding elections for at least one seat on November 5.
Three seats on Arizona’s utility commission (known as the Arizona Corporation Commission) are up for grabs. In the short time that body has had a 4-1 Republican majority, it’s gone on a spree of approving the construction of new gas plants, alongside rate hikes and new fees for rooftop solar installations. In Louisiana, a Republican commissioner is retiring, and the choice of his replacement is pivotal because he has been the commission’s lone swing vote. And on the Montana Public Service Commission, which is currently entirely Republican, Tuesday’s election will prove a test of voters’ dissatisfaction with the 28 percent rate hike approved for customers of the state’s largest energy company last year. The results of these elections — and the makeup of commissions across the country, elected and appointed — will quite literally determine whether states add more fossil fuel capacity or transition to clean fuel sources over the next several years, driving how quickly the U.S. cuts emissions nationwide.
How did state utility commissions get so much power? And what can they do with it in this pivotal moment?
For decades after General Electric — the company at the leading edge of electrifying society — was founded in 1892, electricity remained a high-cost luxury. Most people who could afford electricity service, in urban centers like New York City and Boston, were customers of utilities owned by their local municipality. Samuel Insull, an enterprising Brit who started his career as Thomas Edison’s secretary, sought to change that by distributing electricity more widely and selling it more cheaply. In 1912, Insull founded the Middle West Utilities Company, a holding company based in Chicago; because Middle West owned and controlled smaller and more local subsidiaries throughout the region, it gave Insull the reach, and capital, to pioneer centralized power plants that operated nonstop.
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Viewpoint: AI’s double-edged role in the sustainability revolution
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has far-reaching consequences. Already disrupting entire sectors, AI’s rapid growth has also come at a high cost in terms of increased electricity and water consumption, with a direct impact on global aspirations to conserve the earth’s resources. Addressing these issues, as well as the technology itself, is creating manifold opportunities for investors in environmental markets companies.
The scale and scope of the AI revolution
The AI revolution is driven by three key factors: the exponential increase in data availability, advancements in computing power, and recent scientific breakthroughs, particularly in machine learning and AI model architectures.
The explosion of digital data from various sources (including social media, the Internet of Things, and business transactions) has provided the raw material needed to train complex AI models. According to McKinsey Global Institute, the amount of digital data in the world doubles every three years, and other reports estimate it to total 175 zettabytes by 2025.
Advances in graphics processing units (GPUs), technology, cloud computing, and specialised AI hardware have made it possible to train large-scale models that were previously unimaginable.
Equally, innovations in AI, such as transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) have drastically enhanced its ability to understand and generate realistic human-like content.
For investors in environmental markets, AI is already proving invaluable in enabling climate solutions, including energy efficiency and forecasting, but it is also raising questions about environmental impact.
Energy efficiency
Building energy use is determined by a constantly changing thermal flow, dictated by occupancy and weather. Understanding these dynamics is crucial to the efficient operating of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. However, it is difficult to observe directly. AI tools can help simulate how building occupancy, structure, design and the weather interact to affect thermal flow and predict how it may change.
In manufacturing, AI is already used in robotics and predictive maintenance software to reduce operational downtime, maximising resource efficiency. Meanwhile, in transport, AI is used to optimise routing and operate autonomous vehicles.
AI is also helping to develop more efficient clean technologies and reduce the impact of existing technologies.
Forecasting
AI is proving particularly powerful in forecasting the behaviour of complex systems. In weather forecasting, AI models have proven more accurate than supercomputers and operate in a fraction of the time. These capabilities can provide life-saving advanced warnings ahead of extreme weather events.
Such forecasting also has applications across the economy, particularly in improving agricultural productivity. In the long-term, AI models can help better predict the impacts of climate change, ultimately guiding decisions on adaptation-related investments.
Meeting the resource efficiency challenge
However, the benefits promised by AI must be weighed against its environmental impacts – specifically the carbon emissions associated with its energy use and the water required for fabrication and cooling. A search using AI takes 10 times the computing power, and therefore electricity, as a conventional internet search.
Given this, the International Energy Agency projects that data centre energy consumption is set to double between 2022 and 2026 to 1,000 TWh, roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of Japan.
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Britain’s green energy pledge ‘credible’ if planning fixed, says system operator
State-owned Neso says Britain could be net exporter of green electricity by end of decade at no extra cost
A plan to create a clean electricity system by 2030 promised by Labour before the election is “immensely challenging” but still “credible” if ministers take urgent action to fix Britain’s sluggish planning system, the energy system operator has said.
Britain could become a net exporter of green electricity by the end of the decade at no extra costs to the energy system under the plans and bills may even fall if ministers make the right policy changes, according to the operator.
The newly formed National Energy System Operator (Neso) put forward the conclusions as part of its official advice to new ministers on how to reach Labour election pledge to decarbonise the power system by 2030.
Fintan Slye, the chief executive of Neso, said: “There’s no doubt that the challenges ahead on the journey to delivering clean power are great. However, if the scale of those challenges is matched with the bold, sustained actions that are outlined in this report, the benefits delivered could be even greater.”
Labour has faced questions over whether the 2030 target can realistically be met. The Neso report said Britain’s regional power networks would need to grow at a pace more than four times faster than in the past decade, while the UK’s high-voltage transmission network would need to be built at twice the rate of the previous 10 years in the next five.
Neso said there would also need to be “urgent action” from the industry, regulators and government officials to reduce the time it took to consent to big projects and overhaul the planning process so that all changes could be delivered “simultaneously, in full and at maximum pace”. Keir Starmer has pledged to “throw everything” at getting the UK to net zero by making sweeping changes to the planning system.
Slye said: “A clean power system for Great Britain will deliver a backbone of homegrown energy that breaks the link between volatile international gas prices; that is secure and affordably powers our homes and buildings; that decarbonises the transport that we take to school and work; that drives the businesses of today and catalyses the innovations of the future.”
Neso said there were two pathways towards the government’s goal that would lead to Britain generating more low-carbon electricity than it consumes each year.
The first route relies heavily on a surge of new renewable energy projects, including plans to more than triple the UK’s offshore wind capacity to 50 gigawatts in the next six years.
The second path calls for lower levels of offshore wind in favour of a greater reliance on nuclear power by extending the life of existing reactors and building new ones within the six years, alongside gas plants fitted with carbon capture technology.
In both pathways the UK will need to double its onshore wind capacity from 13GW in 2023 to 27GW by 2030, and triple its solar power from 15GW to 47GW by 2030. The ambition will also require the market for flexible power demand – typically asking consumers to shift their use from times of high demand – from about 2GW last year to between 10GW and 12GW by 2030.
Under both scenarios, the UK would continue to use gas-fired power stations to generate electricity when renewable or stored electricity is unavailable – but that this would make up less than 5% of the country’s power consumption.
Total net greenhouse gas emissions in the EU dropped by 8% last year
By: Lucy Purdy - Positive.news
The reduction is close to that recorded in Europe at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when flights were grounded and factories shut
Total net greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union dropped by 8% last year, new figures reveal, meaning that greenhouse gas pollution in the 27-country bloc is now 37% below 1990 levels. It was despite GDP growing by 68% over the same period.
Emissions linked to buildings, agriculture, domestic transport, small industry and waste all dropped in 2023, which experts say is a result of a significant decline in coal use and soaring use of renewable energy. The reduction is close to matching the drop recorded in Europe at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions grounded planes and many factories halted production.
The stats was revealed in the latest European Environment Agency (EEA) Trends and Projections report published on Thursday, with the EEA saying it marks “significant progress towards climate neutrality for the EU”.
“The impact of climate change is accelerating,” said the EEA’s executive director, Leena Ylä-Mononen. “This leaves us no choice but to strengthen our resilience to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Because there is still a gap to close. Current policies from member states are expected to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 from their 1990 levels. Planned measures that have not yet been enacted would bring this up to 49% – say experts – still leaving a gap of six percentage points.
The EU Climate Law sets ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions: a net 55% reduction below 1990 levels by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050, to deliver European commitments under the international Paris agreement.
In 2023, the biggest reduction in pollution came from the energy sector, the EEA found, due to the rapid rollout of renewable energy, which has accelerated the shift away from fossil fuels.
Industrial emissions fell 6%, as some factories improved efficiency and others reduced production, while similar progress was made in the construction sector.
Progress in other sectors was less impressive: emissions from farms fell by just 2% last year, while the transport sector’s emissions reduced by only 1%.
Source
California pushes major airlines to adopt renewable fuels
By: Andrew Barber - Equities.com
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has announced a new initiative to nudge major airlines to transition to sustainable aviation fuel.
The goal of the new program is to ramp up sustainable aviation fuel use in California airports to 200 million gallons by 2035. Based on CARB estimates, the goal would meet about 40% of current intrastate demand and represent a tenfold increase from current levels of sustainable aviation fuel usage.
Sustainable aviation fuel made from renewable biomass and/or waste has been proposed as a significant step forward for major U.S. airlines targeting net-zero carbon emissions in the decades ahead. By issuing state-level requirements, CARB is also opening the door for pushback from other states.
For renewable fuel investors, the potential impact of the new effort could have a massive impact. California leads the nation in air travel by a wide margin with 214 airports.
For companies like Darling Ingredients DAR and Valero Energy VLO
who are active in the sustainable aviation fuel sector, the push to ramp up capacity to meet this fresh demand will be significant. Both firms recently announced new contracts to supply sustainable aviation fuel for delivery to both Midway International Airport in Chicago and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The Department of Energy reports that production capacity of sustainable aviation fuel in the United States could increase from around 2,000 barrels per day to nearly 30,000 barrels per day in 2024 if all announced capacity additions come on line.
Two massive projects — the Phillip 66’s facility in Rodeo, California and the Diamond Green Diesel facility in Port Arthur, Texas — are expected to account for the lion’s share of this growth.
While the industry group Airlines for America estimates that jet travel accounts for only 2% of U.S. carbon emissions, the organization’s member pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 has made it a highly visible voice.
Source
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