By Kristen Cheriegate: Senior Policy Analyst | Ms. Cheriegate navigates ICAST through the policy world to obtain real-world solutions, funding resources, and networks with potential partners to provide more services to low- and moderate-income households.

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Summit, the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28), took place in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between November 30 and December 12. What happened inside the Summit seemingly yielded positive results. Politico and Vox summarized them as follows:

• A new fund was created to help developing nations rebuild after climate disasters, a historic agreement that island nations had spent decades campaigning for.
  • The UAE and Germany announced contributions of $100 million each, contributing to the total of $800 million pledged overall towards the new fund by the end of the Summit.
  • The UAE also announced that it is creating a $30 billion climate investment fund.
• The vast majority of countries signed non-binding declarations focused on making the world’s food supply and healthcare systems more resilient against climate impacts.
• COP28 secured a commitment to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.
• Some countries signed pledges to scale up nuclear power and accelerate the end of coal.
• More than 150 countries signed on to the Global Methane Pledge, which promises to cut methane by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Large methane emitters offered more details about how they will regulate this greenhouse gas.
  • Private companies stepped up too. Dozens of oil and gas firms signed the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, which commits them to ending methane pollution by 2050.

Although media coverage primarily followed the numerous events inside the conference, the most critical piece was being developed behind the scenes. Representatives from almost 200 countries spent hours upon hours negotiating an agreement that would guide the next round of climate action plans under the Paris Agreement to be put forward by 2025.[1] The result was a deal that called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner [...] so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Read more here

Energy efficiency standards advanced by the Biden administration will save consumers almost $1 trillion over 30 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE’s energy efficiency standards for refrigerators and freezers were last updated in 2011. The agency has been working through a backlog of overdue standards updates and said that effort will continue in the new year.

The agency “will continue to move quickly in 2024 — together with our industry partners and stakeholders — to update and strengthen outdated energy efficiency standards,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.

The new energy efficiency standards will go into effect in January of 2029 or 2030, depending on the configuration of the refrigerator or freezer.  Read more here.

Originally published in the New York Times, November 8, 2023

Four electric school buses in South Burlington, Vermont represent a test of the idea that electric vehicles could be a buffer that soaks up power when there is too much and provides it when demand for electricity surges. While buses sit idle during school hours the local utility, Green Mountain Power, puts their batteries to work storing excess renewable energy so it can be pumped back into the grid when needed. Any suitably equipped EV can be used to store surplus electricity, but school buses work especially well because they have big batteries and spend much of the day parked. Tethered together with the help of software, the collective capacity of such devices to generate and store energy can be more than enough to avoid a blackout when power plants falter or strong winds take down a transmission line. Read more here.

New York Opens States First Publicly Funded Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Using federal funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, Kingston New York opened the state's first public electric vehicle (E.V.) charging stations. This is part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America agenda to build a reliable E.V. network connecting 79,000 miles of roads and highways. By the end of 2024, N.Y. Power Authority plans to open more than a dozen additional NEVI-funded stations. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation worked with all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico, to advance the goals of the NEVI program. Additional NEVI-funded charging stations in the northeast will be operational in the coming months, with Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Maine having already broken ground.

New Mexico Approves Solar Home Improvement Funding

The New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority (MFA) Board of Directors has approved $3.5 million in funding from the 2024 New Mexico Housing Trust Fund to support solar systems for homes that are receiving NM Energy$mart Weatherization Program services. From 2010 through the present, MFA has managed Energy$mart program, which has fully weatherized over 10,000 homes, averages 27% energy savings per home, and annually saves 21.7 metric tons of carbon in each weatherized home.  Read more here