ADVANCED NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGIES

Nuclear power provides a low-cost, greenhouse gas-free electric power source the U.S. and the world needs to combat climate change. But high construction costs, security and safety concerns,1 and difficulty competing in certain markets has threatened the competitiveness of part of our existing fleet.2 Some firms, seeing

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) traps carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants or industrial plants and then transports captured carbon dioxide by pipeline to underground storage. Recent regulatory developments have brought attention to this emerging technology. Future legal challenges notwithstanding,1 EPA’s 2013 New Source Performance

CENTRALIZED SOLAR

Solar panels are becoming extremely efficient at the same time that the price is dropping on the materials needed to create them. For years, solar power was dismissed as inefficient and too costly to compete with other sources of electricity. That was certainly true in

DISTRIBUTED SOLAR

The term “Distributed Solar” is widely used to describe solar generation systems with a nameplate capacity of not more than 20 MW.1 While Americans have traditionally relied on centralized power, that paradigm is now being challenged by new, more competitively priced distributed generation (DG) technologies. This

GEOTHERMAL

Geothermal energy has been in use in the U.S. since our nation’s founding, and today every state uses it to some degree already.1 But only Hawaii, Alaska, and a handful of states in the Western U.S., use that energy to generate electricity.2 This is despite geothermal generation’s

HYDROPOWER EXPANSION

Mention hydropower and most people immediately think of enormous, New Deal-era projects like the Grand Cooley or Hoover Dams. These installations are iconic, but they are not the entire story. Hydropower currently generates 6.8%1 of the electricity used by the United States, but we are not

NATURAL GAS GENERATION

The shale gas boom in the United States has spurred utilities to switch power generation from coal to less expensive and cleaner natural gas. As a result, coal generation has fallen 14% off its average between 2000-2009.1 While estimates vary, evidence suggests the U.S. has sufficient

NUCLEAR ENERGY

Nuclear energy provides almost 20% of all electricity in the United States. It is available 24 hours a day, emits no greenhouse gasses or criteria pollutants, and once built is extremely inexpensive to operate. To date, the hurdles for nuclear have been high capital costs

NUCLEAR POWER UPRATING

With the promise of the “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S. slowed by high capital costs, cheap natural gas, and low demand growth for electricity some focus has shifted from building new reactors to making our existing nuclear fleet more efficient.1 Already nuclear uprates have increased the

WIND

Like rivers that flow through dams, the kinetic energy in wind can be captured and turned into power. Currently, there are 46 gigawatts of wind capacity installed in the U.S.1 Still, much room for growth remains. According to a recent report by the Department of Energy,