America’s electric companies are leading a clean energy transition and are committed to getting the energy they provide as clean as they can as fast as they can, while keeping customer reliability and affordability front and center.
To achieve this goal, new clean energy technologies will be needed, and advancing the commercialization of breakthrough clean energy technologies is a top priority for electric companies and other key stakeholders. Building on the foundation laid by the Carbon-Free Technology Initiative and other industry initiatives, the Edison Foundation launched the Institute for the Energy Transition (IET)—a new program that will assess the key 24/7 zero-emitting technologies necessary to achieving carbon emissions reduction goals reliably and affordably. IET will continue to explore the demonstration of these key technologies, adding a new focus on the current economics of each technology, expected future cost curves and potential timelines for adoption. IET also will focus on identifying and proposing solutions to the legal, regulatory, and policy issues that must be addressed to ensure that these technologies can be deployed as soon as they are demonstrated and economic.
These key technologies include hydrogen, battery electric storage and long duration energy storage, carbon capture utilization and storage for power generation, and advanced nuclear technologies. IET’s goal is to provide an assessment for each technology in the next year and then to engage in periodic updates to reflect significant developments, including scheduled deployments and improved economic fundamentals.
Other initiatives IET will undertake during 2023 include:
- Identifying critical barriers to deployment, including technological, commercial, and regulatory impediments, as well as other factors, such as supply chain constraints or public acceptance, that would impede the ability of electric companies to deploy these technologies.
- Providing accessible qualitative summaries of the current economics of key carbon-free technologies based on a rigorous and defensible assessment of their development status.
- Summarizing takeaways from key demonstration projects underway or already undertaken domestically and abroad.
- Developing public education materials about these technologies, focusing on their costs and the key issues that need to be addressed to deploy them reliably and affordably.
Partnerships with experts and other stakeholders are crucial to the success of these efforts. IET will be working with industry-leading experts, including researchers from EPRI and DOE’s National Labs, as well as electric company leaders, to achieve its goals.
Learn more about the Carbon-Free Technology Initiative
Learn more about the Edison Foundation
