Environment & Climate Change

The behavior of EV users themselves could play a role in modulating electricity demand and providing needed flexibility in electric grids, said Christine Gschwendtner, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, during an Energy Policy Seminar.

Antonio Perry MPP 2024 and Monserrat Ocana MPP 2024 had the opportunity to intern with Iceland’s National Energy Authority (NEA) and contribute to the country’s ambitious climate journey. 

In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, Henry Lee welcomes California's aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.
 

Surging demand and dizzying price hikes have raised concerns that inadequate metal and mineral supplies may impede the clean energy transition. Given the urgency of reducing fossil fuel use, the science and policy worlds must solve two main challenges: how to ensure the availability and affordability of critical metals in the quantities needed, and how to manage the environmental impacts related to mining and processing them. The latter issue is likely to be much trickier than the former, argue Henry Lee and Xin Sun.

How can China make good on its pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060? In Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China, a team of experts from China and the United States explains how China's near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for a smoother and less costly national energy transformation.

This study provides a whole-systems simulation on how to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050, compared to 2010, with an emphasis on technologies and costs, in order to avoid a dangerous increase in the global mean surface temperature by end the of this century.

This policy brief describes the persistent challenge of poor electricity reliability in India and how it interacts with key regulatory policies, analyzes Delhi’s experience with outage compensation since 2017, and highlights areas for additional economic and policy research on this topic.

Growing concern around climate change has ignited recent interest in carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies and generated a series of studies on its global market potential.

This study group will explore the role of the private sector in evolving energy systems, and how corporations might change in a climate constrained world. 

The Tesla Semi is a battery powered electric long haul truck currently in the prototype phase. Since cost and technological barriers have prevented electric vehicles from making significant inroads into the market for long haul trucks, the announcement of the Tesla Semi marks one of the first major attempts to bring electrification to on-road long haul freight transport. China, as the world’s largest carbon emitter, is an important market for truck electrification. China has a bourgeoning passenger electric vehicle market but, like the rest of the world, is reliant on heavily polluting diesel trucks for on-road freight transport. 

This paper addresses two main questions:

1. What are the potential impacts on carbon emissions of electric long haul trucks in China? 
2. What are the barriers to the adoption of electric long haul trucks in China?