Sustainable Finance

Protecting nature is lovely but climate tech is cool. Learning from the success of the latter could be essential to bolstering the former: we need to move nature from the realm of nice-to-haves and place it firmly at the heart of the modern economy. While the climate fight is far from won, there is cause for cautious optimism. In 2022, the EU produced more power from wind and solar than from gas. The US Inflation Reduction Act marked the single largest-ever climate action taken by the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. Global climate pledges, including from developing nations, have reached the point where they would keep the world well below 2C of warming if fully implemented.

Climate investments have also weathered the broader market slump. Last year saw a record near $500bn invested in renewable energy. There were over 1,000 venture and growth equity investments into climate start-ups in 2022; the number of deals grew in every quarter, with over $40bn deployed.

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We are excited to announce our keynote for the 2023 Sustainability 2.0 Conference, scheduled for October 24, 2023, at the Alumni Memorial Union at Marquette University. With the pending SEC Climate Disclosure Rule, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, 70% of companies intend to comply with the new rule, but questions remain not only on the timing and future of the regulation, but also on the ability of companies, organizations and governments to meet targets sufficient toward addressing the climate crisis. 

As one of the SEC’s chief advisors and architects of the new rule, Kristina Wyatt, now the Chief Sustainability Officer for Persefoni, a leading climate disclosure and carbon management solution, she continues to provide leadership to industry on the issue of decarbonization.

Kristina Wyatt, Chief Sustainability Officer

Persefoni

We are excited to welcome Kristina along with other thought leaders and experts from across industry for the fourth annual event, the Midwest’s largest conference on sustainable finance and business. Last year we hosted investment firms representing $3.2 trillion in assets under management and companies with a market cap of nearly $500 billion. See link to the conference website: https://www.marquette.edu/business/companies/sustainability.php

The world is focused on the wrong scoreboard. Progress on global climate goals is hidden inside hard-to-parse documents that countries submit to the United Nations.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-09/why-nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs-are-so-important?leadSource=uverify%20wall

 A new study prepared for Google by energy analysts from The Brattle Group explores the cost and ability to serve critical resource adequacy needs from an emerging resource: virtual power plants (VPPs). These distributed energy resource (DER) portfolios – which can include technologies such as rooftop solar, smart thermostats, smart water heaters, electric vehicles, and distributed batteries – are actively controlled by utilities and energy service providers to benefit consumers, the power system, and the environment.

Real Reliability: The Value of Virtual Power provides an introduction to VPPs and models their value and performance versus conventional resource adequacy options. It compares the net cost of providing 400 MW of resource adequacy from three resource types: a natural gas peaker, a transmission-connected utility-scale battery, and a VPP composed of residential demand flexibility technologies. The study also identifies key near-term activities for enabling the deployment of VPPs, which currently are adopted well below their market potential.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/virtual-power-plants-vpps-could-save-us-utilities-1535-billion-in-capacity-investment-over-10-years-301813589.html

https://www.wpr.org/wisconsins-rural-governments-are-disadvantage-when-it-comes-competing-federal-climate-funds

The federal Inflation Reduction Act provides historic clean energy incentives to local governments across the country, including in Wisconsin. But taking full advantage of those opportunities is often more difficult for rural communities than urban cities.

The law offers financial incentives for renewable energy projects and electric vehicles, as well as several grant opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing pollution and addressing environmental justice. It also boosts investment in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program.

But Wisconsin’s small cities, towns and villages may be at a disadvantage in terms of their ability to apply for grant funding because they have fewer administrative staff to work on applications or plan clean energy projects, according to Toni Herkert, director of government affairs for the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-gas-power-subsidies-energy-wind-power-senate-dan-patrick-republicans-ae6d2367

Fed­eral tax cred­its have en­cour­aged an over­sup­ply of wind power, which Lone Star State Re­pub­li­cans as­sisted last decade by charg­ing rate pay­ers $7 bil­lion to build thou­sands of miles of trans­mis­sion lines from West Texas and the Pan­han­dle to big cities. So­lar and wind sup­ply about 30% of Texas power on av­er­age but some­times can pro­duce more than half.

Wind gen­er­a­tors pocket a tax credit for every kilo­watt hour they pro­duce no mat­ter if the grid needs it. A sur­feit of wind is in­creas­ingly dri­ving whole­sale power prices neg­a­tive—i.e., gen­er­a­tors have to pay to off­load their power. Wind pro­duc­ers can still make money be­cause of the tax cred­its, but fos­sil-fuel plants that pro­vide base­load power can’t.

https://ig.ft.com/one-trillion-trees/

More than 100 countries had just pledged to spend $19bn of public and private money to reverse forest loss. “We have lost 3tn trees on our planet,” Benioff said, punctuating his words with a clap.“We need to plant a trillion trees.” This amount, he added, would absorb 200 gigatonnes of carbon — the equivalent of two-thirds of existing human-made emissions.

Their intentions are commendable: draw down carbon, nourish biodiversity and improve livelihoods by returning trees to planet Earth. But the simple idea is now rubbing against a complex reality, as some scientists raise myriad concerns — from a dearth of free land to the unreliability of new trees when it comes to carbon storage.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says protecting and restoring the world’s forests is critical for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but many argue political and business leaders are focusing too much on “restoring” rather than “protecting”, and latching on to methods they hope will offset emissions rather than prevent them.

The northern polar jet stream is weakening in strength as a result of climate change. That’s causing the band of wind to sway off course. Meteorologist Marion Maturilli is carrying out research to understand the wide-ranging impact of this trend.

https://www.dw.com/en/when-the-jet-stream-weakens/video-62097932