(Excerpt) According to climate scientists, averting the worst consequences of climate change requires that the increase in global temperature should be limited to 2°C (or 3.6°F). to achieve that objective, global emissions of green house gases (GHGs)—the main human cause of global warming—must be reduced to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.

The key to successful climate change abatement at those scales lies in leveraging the collective actions of developed and developing countries. Cumulatively, developed countries have been responsible for most human emissions of GHGs. that picture will be quite different in the future as emissions from the developing world take over the top mantle. Given this dynamic, there is a general agreement internationally that developed countries will lead emissions reductions efforts and that developing countries will follow with “nationally ap- propriate mitigation actions.” turning that agreement into environmentally beneficial action requires close international coordination between the developed and developing countries in allocating the responsibility for the necessary reductions and following up with credible actions. However, the instruments employed so far to promote the necessary collective action have proved to be insufficient, unscalable, and questionable in terms of environmental benefit and economic efficiency.

Currently, the most important and visible link be- tween developed and developing countries’ efforts on climate change is the Clean development Mechanism (CdM). the CdM uses market mechanisms—the “carbon markets”—to direct funding from developed countries to those projects in developing countries that lead to reductions in emissions of warming gases. In reality, the experience with the CdM has been mixed at best since its inception in 2006. while the CdM has successfully channeled funding to many worthy projects that reduce emissions of warming gasses, it has also spawned myriad projects with little environmental benefits. overall, the CdM has led to a significant overpayment by developed countries for largely dubious emissions reductions in developing countries.

The traditional approach to demand response of paying for a customer's electricity consumption reductions relative to an administratively set baseline is currently being advocated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) as a way to foster the participation of final consumers in formal wholesale markets. Although these efforts may lead to greater participation of final consumers in traditional demand response programs, they are likely to work against the ultimate goal of increasing the benefits that electricity consumers realize from formal wholesale electricity markets, because traditional demand response programs are likely to provide a less reliable product than generation resources. The moral hazard and adverse selection problems that reduce the reliability of the product provided by traditional demand response resources can be addressed by treating consumers and producers of electricity symmetrically in the wholesale market. Several suggestions are made for how this would be accomplished in both the energy and ancillary services markets. A specific application of this general approach to the California wholesale electricity market is also provided.

Coal is the major primary energy which fuels economic growth in China. The original Soviet-style institutions of the coal sector were adopted after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. But since the end of 1970s there have been major changes: a market system was introduced to the coal sector and the Major State Coalmines were transferred from central to local governments. This paper explains these market-oriented and decentralizing trends and explores their implications for the electric power sector, now the largest single consumer of coal.

The argument of this paper is that the market-oriented and decentralizing reforms in the coal sector were influenced by the changes in state energy investment priority as well as the relationship between the central and local governments in the context of broader reforms within China’s economy. However, these market-oriented and decentralizing reforms have not equally influenced the electric power sector. Since coal is the primary input into Chinese power generation, and power sector reform falls behind coal sector reform, the tension between the power and coal sectors is unavoidable and has raised concerns about electricity shortages.

This paper analyzes the potential contribution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the U.S. electricity sector.  Focusing on capture systems for coal-fired power plants until 2030, a sensitivity analysis of key CCS parameters is performed to gain insight into the role that CCS can play in future mitigation scenarios and to explore implications of large-scale CCS deployment.  By integrating important parameters for CCS technologies into a carbon-abatement model similar to the EPRI Prism analysis (EPRI, 2007), this study concludes that the start time and rate of technology diffusion are important in determining the emissions reduction potential and fuel consumption for CCS technologies. 

Comparisons with legislative emissions targets illustrate that CCS alone is very unlikely to meet reduction targets for the electric-power sector, even under aggressive deployment scenarios.  A portfolio of supply and demand side strategies will be needed to reach emissions objectives, especially in the near term.  Furthermore, the breakdown of capture technologies (i.e., pre-combustion, post-combustion, and oxy-fuel units) and the level of CCS retrofits at pulverized coal plants also have large effects on the extent of greenhouse gas emissions reductions.