Climate Change
Every day, engineers are leading the way to build a greener and more environmentally sustainable energy future.
Last fall, IEEE PES commissioned a nationwide survey to gauge the public’s perception of climate change, and specifically the role of engineers in driving solutions to combat climate change.
The results indicate that:
Climate change and extreme weather are top environmental concerns nationwide.
A majority are optimistic that technology is the key to addressing our climate future.
Believe engineers play an important role in environmental protection
Agree that engineers are leaders in the fight against climate change
Feel confident that engineers can develop solutions to help address climate change
Source: Park Street Stategies Survey, commissioned by IEEE PES, November 2023.
View the full survey results here. [PDF 1.7MB]
IEEE PES can and should be more vocal about the innovative work engineers are doing to progress climate solutions.
Some Key Takeaways
- 72% view an outdated electric grid presents the biggest energy-related challenge, followed by government mandates and net-zero goals being misaligned with the current energy infrastructure realities.
- 50% worry that it may be difficult to reverse climate change on a global scale but 60% believe that technology is the key to addressing it.
- More than a third has little understanding of the role that engineers play in addressing climate change.
- Even so, respondents trust engineers the most to find solutions to achieving a clean energy future, more so than researchers, environmental advocacy groups, utility companies, or government agencies.
- 79% believe that engineers have the knowledge and skill set to research and develop new forms of renewables.
What does that mean for IEEE and PES?
- Most respondents view engineers positively and acknowledge that they play a key role in addressing climate change, but do not understand what that role is. Educating the public about their role would be beneficial.
- A large majority – 82% – expressed an interest in learning more about what engineers are doing, or planning to do, to address climate change.
- Messages that provide concrete examples of what engineers do to address climate change (e.g., constructing green buildings, monitoring environmental conditions, reducing electronic waste, etc.) resonate the most.
- Engineers are most often described with positive terms such as “innovative,” “creative,” and “smart.”
When it comes to describing our energy future, the word “sustainable” resonates the most, followed by “cleaner.” Words like “smart,” “modernized,” and “engineered” resonate less.
Other IEEE Climate Change Resources
Every day, engineers are leading the way to build a greener and more environmentally sustainable energy future.
Last fall, IEEE PES commissioned a nationwide survey to gauge the public’s perception of climate change, and specifically the role of engineers in driving solutions to combat climate change.
The results indicate that:
Climate change and extreme weather are top environmental concerns nationwide.
A majority are optimistic that technology is the key to addressing our climate future.
Believe engineers play an important role in environmental protection
Agree that engineers are leaders in the fight against climate change
Feel confident that engineers can develop solutions to help address climate change
Source: Park Street Stategies Survey, commissioned by IEEE PES, November 2023.
View the full survey results here. [PDF 1.7MB]
View the full survey results here. [PDF 1.7MB]
IEEE PES can and should be more vocal about the innovative work engineers are doing to progress climate solutions.
Some Key Takeaways
- 72% view an outdated electric grid presents the biggest energy-related challenge, followed by government mandates
and net-zero goals being misaligned with the current energy infrastructure
realities. - 50% worry that it may be difficult to reverse climate change on a global scale but 60% believe that technology is the key to addressing it.
- More than a third has little understanding of the role that engineers play in addressing climate change.
- Even so, respondents trust engineers the most to find solutions to achieving a clean energy future, more so than researchers, environmental advocacy groups, utility companies, or government agencies.
- 79% believe that engineers have the knowledge and skill set to research and develop new forms of renewables.
What does that mean for IEEE and PES?
- Most respondents view engineers positively and acknowledge
that they play a key role in addressing climate change, but do not
understand what that role is. Educating the public about their role would
be beneficial. - A large majority – 82% – expressed an interest in learning more about what engineers are doing, or planning to do, to address climate change.
- Messages that provide concrete examples of what engineers do to address climate change (e.g., constructing green buildings, monitoring environmental conditions, reducing electronic waste, etc.) resonate the most.
- Engineers are most often described with positive terms such as “innovative,” “creative,” and “smart.”
When it comes to describing our energy future, the word “sustainable” resonates the most, followed by “cleaner.” Words like “smart,” “modernized,” and “engineered” resonate less.
IEEE’s mission is to advance technology for the benefit of humanity. Today the world faces its largest modern-day threat—climate change. We recognize this global crisis and are committed to helping combat and mitigate the effects of climate change through pragmatic and accessible technical solutions and providing engineers and technologists with a neutral space for discussion and action.
IEEE PES Perspectives
Our members have made climate change initiatives a priority. Read what they have to say about power and energy, and how we can make a difference through the smart applications of technology.
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Green Gas to Replace SF6 in Electrical Grids
Environmental considerations are increasingly taking a front seat in all arenas of our daily lives—political, industrial and societal. Not least among the major concerns are global warming and the greenhouse gases that contribute to it, as their concentration in the air reaches new heights. Hence the power industry's focus on sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) and the need to find a suitable alternative for it in industrial applications. Grid Solutions, a GE and Alstom joint venture, has identified a fluoronitrile based gas mixture dubbed ‘g3–green gas for grid’ that is such a alternative.
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Analysis of a Wave Front Parallel WEC Prototype
Nowadays, clean renewable energy extraction solutions are becoming a crucial practice in society. Many different sources are being developed including ocean energy and in specific, ocean waves. In deep water conditions, ocean waves can become very power dense, continuous, and forecastable. Wave height, velocity, and frequency are all variable wave characteristics making it challenging to capture wave power economically. The RTI F2 is a promising wave energy conversion device that is currently under research. Its method of power capture is a buoyant vessel oriented normal to oncoming waves.
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IoT-Enabled Humans in the Loop for Energy Management Systems: Promoting Building Occupants’ Participation in Optimizing Energy Consumption
The governments of various countries continue to be alarmed by the adverse environmental impact of fossil energy, which could result in additional pollution, polar glaciers further melting, and intensified natural disasters. Around the world, the consumption of fossil energy is a socioeconomic and sociopolitical calamity. However, remedies in such circumstances depend, to a great extent, on the availability of cleaner energy resources and governmental policies on energy pricing, consumption, and conservation. Consequently, corrective countermeasures and effective policies are essential to cope with energy production and consumption.
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On the Path to Decarbonization: Electrification and Renewables in California and the Northeast United States
Climate change threatens our quality of life and the habitability of planet Earth for many species. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, to reduce the risk that global temperature increases more than 2 °C above preindustrial levels, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in developed countries must fall by approximately 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. A number of states and regions in the United States have committed to reducing long-term GHG emissions by this level, including California, New York, and New England.
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Deploying Electric Vehicles Into Shared-Use Services: Amping up Public Charging Demand to Justify an Investment in Infrastructure
This past October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report, "Global Warming of 1.5?C: A Summary for Policymakers." A total of 91 authors and review editors from 40 countries worked on the report, basing their projections and conclusions on peer reviews and the more than 6,000 studies they examined. Lobbying by low-lying island states and others who were concerned that the assumptions and agreements from the Paris Climate Change Conference and Treaty might not be aggressive enough prompted the report's creation.
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Stochastic Generation Capacity Expansion Planning Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
With increasing concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, a least-cost generation capacity expansion model to control carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions is proposed in this paper. The mathematical model employs a decomposed two-stage stochastic integer program. Realizations of uncertain load and wind are represented by independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random samples generated via the Gaussian copula method. Two policies that affect CO 2 emissions directly and indirectly, carbon tax and renewable portfolio standard (RPS), are investigated to assess how much CO 2 emissions are expected to be reduced through those policies.
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Powerlines and Wildfires: Overview, Perspectives, and Climate Change: Could There Be More Electricity Blackouts in the Future?
Overhead powerlines cross extensive areas of forest and grasslands, and these areas are often flammable and can burn. Wildfire is a natural phenomenon important to many ecosystems around the globe, but also capable of considerable damage to people and communities. As a result of human activity in natural spaces, people have altered wildfire regimes over time, and wildfires have become a threat to people, to their property, and infrastructure.
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Electrification in the United Kingdom: A Case Study Based on Future Energy Scenarios
For the United Kingdom, one of the main drivers for a green ambition is the Climate Change Act of 2008. This forms the basis for the country's approach to responding to climate change and legally commits the U.K. government to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This level of commitment to reducing emissions was further confirmed in the Paris Agreement, the aim of which is to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C.
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Obstacles to the Success of Fuel-Cell Electric Vehicles: Are They Truly Impossible to Overcome?
Cities with substantial population growth continue to encounter economic, social, and environmental challenges in their daily operations. This growth has led to public outcry demanding that societies curb their dependence on fossil fuel consumption to limit global warming. In fact, major cities' usage of fossil fuels constitutes 75% of global energy resource use and accounts for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, despite occupying only approximately 5% of the planet's total land mass. Rapid urbanization also contributes to multiple types of serious environmental pollutants (e.g., air, soil, and water), which affect the people's health and the quality of life.
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Smart Cities for a Sustainable Urbanization: Illuminating the Need for Establishing Smart Urban Infrastructures
Cities with substantial population growth continue to encounter economic, social, and environmental challenges in their daily operations. Figure 1 shows how the urban population, in which more than 55% of the globe's people currently live, has nearly quadrupled since the 1950s. Globally, urbanization is expected to encompass 70% of the world population by 2050, resulting in an unprecedented increase in the consumption of existing resources.
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VOLTTRON: An Open-Source Software Platform of the Future
Buildings consume more than 30% of the total primary energy expended worldwide and contribute to a third of the world?s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the United States, buildings consume more than 40% of the total energy and contribute almost 38% of GHG emissions. In addition, the buildings in the United States consume more than 75% of the electricity generated. The need to mitigate climate change is driving efforts to make U.S. electric power generation cleaner, and this provides new impetus for improving the operating efficiency of buildings at scale and increasing the hosting capacity of distributed renewable generation..
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Data-Driven Dynamical Control for Bottom-up Energy Internet System
With the increasing concern on climate change and global warming, the reduction of carbon emission becomes an important topic in many aspects of human society. The development of energy Internet (EI) makes it possible to achieve better utilization of distributed renewable energy sources with the power sharing functionality introduced by energy routers (ERs). In this paper, a bottom-up EI architecture is designed, and a novel data-driven dynamical control strategy is proposed.
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Changing Household Energy Usage: The Downsides of Incentives and How to Overcome Them
To combat climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) calculated that greenhouse gas emissions in the energy domain should be reduced by 90%, compared to 2010 emissions, between the years 2040 and 2070. In Europe, residential households consume about a quarter of total energy used (excluding the energy that is embodied in products). To contribute to the carbon emission reduction targets set by the IPCC , households need to reduce their fossilenergy use.
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DAFT-E: Feature-Based Multivariate and Multi-Step-Ahead Wind Power Forecasting
At the recent 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference last year, more than 140 countries pledged to achieve net-zero emissions to combat climate change. And in a dramatic appeal to attain sustainability in the skies, Europe’s Flightpath 2050 initiated a bold effort to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide by 75%, NOx emissions by 90%, and the noise footprint by 60% by the midcentury mark.
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CHEETA: An All-Electric Aircraft Takes Cryogenics and Superconductivity on Board: Combatting climate change
At the recent 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference last year, more than 140 countries pledged to achieve net-zero emissions to combat climate change. And in a dramatic appeal to attain sustainability in the skies, Europe’s Flightpath 2050 initiated a bold effort to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide by 75%, NOx emissions by 90%, and the noise footprint by 60% by the midcentury mark.
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Advancements in Clean Air Insulation Technologies for Switchgear and Circuit Breakers
Our power systems and grids are rapidly transforming to help realize a CO2 -neutral world. Reducing CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases (GHG) is an important step to address global warming. Power systems must phase out the most potent GHG, sulfur hexafluoride (SF6 ), to achieve this CO2 -neutral society. SF6 has the highest known global warming potential (GWP) of all GHG, estimated to remain in the atmospheric environment for 3,200 years. There is also no SF6 gas waste management system commercially available today. At the same time, utilities must ensure transmission performance and reliability are maintained or increased.
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Electric Vehicles and Climate Change: Additional Contribution and Improved Economic Justification
Climate and weather patterns are changing in California and across the planet. Extreme weather events such as wildfires are happening more frequently, precipitation has become increasingly variable, heat waves are more common, and temperatures are warming. Climate and weather scientists have tracked the observed changes since the mid-20th century and linked them mainly to human activity and influence. The human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, has led to a significant release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which disrupts the global carbon cycle and leads to global warming.
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PES PES Day ’22 Panel Session: Climate Change Awareness
PES Day panel on Climate Change Awareness Conference Panel Video
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Modeling of Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Communities
To mitigate the climate change issues, our communities are adopting more and more renewable energy, which bring new challenges in the community energy system design and operation.
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Impact of Climate Change on the Power Grid
This super session is comprised of the folllowing presentations: Decarbonization and the Grid of the Future, Marginal Emission Rates: The needed metric of carbon displacement in an increasingly electrified world, Research needs for grid to adapt t and mitigate climate change, Integrating Massive amounts of Variable Renewable Energy into Power Grids, How Utility Companies Manage Wildfire Risk, Integrating Climate Impacts and Resiliency Research for the Electric Power System, Climate Change, Reliability and Energy Efficiency, Climate Change, Extreme Weather and the Evolving Grid: Separating Facts, Myths and Speculation, Scalable Markets for the Energy Transition: A Blueprint for Wholesale Electricity Market Reform.
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The Role of Grid Technologies in Responding to Climate Change
Effectively integrating clean energy technologies is a necessary element of the strategy to mitigate and adapt to the realities of climate change. Grid technologies that enable the wide-scale adoption of zero-emission generation, as well as electrified use-cases for transportation to manufacturing are helping drive policy discussions and decisions across the world. This panel will explore case studies and examples of how power systems technologies, from microgrids to market mechanisms, are helping not only directly reduce the carbon footprint of communities and support the resiliency of the grid and those who rely upon it, but are also encouraging a larger conversation about the role of grid technologies in promoting sustainability and resiliency equitably.
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Late Breaking News 2015 IEEE PES General Meeting
This super-session discusses latest news related to resilience and reliability in the context of energy solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
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Grid Technologies Driving Responses to Climate Change
This panel looks at how advanced grid technologies, from DERMS to microgrids to HVDC, are enabling clean energy resources that are helping to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It will talk about case studies of how such solutions have been deployed in the past, emerging best practices, and future directions to accomplish the clean energy transition.
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Importance of T&D Grid Modernization to Mitigate Impacts from and Adapt to Climate Change
The electric industry is undergoing one of its most dramatic transformations in a century driven by the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels for generation, integrate clean energy technologies, and adapt to the realities of climate change. The grid is also being increasingly tested by weather events exacerbated by climate change that bring extreme weather conditions with greater frequency and intensity, as well as by human-made threats like physical and cyber-attacks.
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Other IEEE Climate Change Resources
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