The Pace Energy and Climate Center is happy to announce that four Elisabeth Haub School of Law student interns have joined the Center for the Spring 2025 semester. The interns, Opeyemi Naimot Dawodu, Tamika Thomas, Elizabeth Wescoe, and Brooke Wood, will be working on a broad set of issues including district geothermal codes and associated municipal permitting, thermal energy networks, expanded use of geothermal by municipalities, and related training to be offered by the Center. They will also be researching legal approaches to improving indoor air quality in underserved communities, opportunities under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other international agreements to advance conflict resolution and collaboration on the climate crisis, and strategies to mediate domestic multi-stakeholder conflicts on renewable energy.
The interns will conduct research and writing, attend meetings, and assist with the ongoing work of the Center. The interns bring to the Center a range of experience and backgrounds, and we are very grateful that they have joined us. Their bios can be found here.
I’m honored to have joined the Pace Energy and Climate Center in January as its Interim Executive Director as we transition to the next permanent Executive Director. For four decades, under the leadership, vision, and wisdom of founder Dean Emeritus Richard Ottinger and successive Executive Directors, the Center has been a powerful voice on decarbonizing the energy sector, utility rate regulation to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency, solar markets, distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy justice, international energy policy, and other strategies to address climate change.
The Center has made advances in these areas by establishing and leading coalitions of organizations that share a common regulatory and policy agenda, participating in utility rate cases, issuing cutting-edge reports, partnering with government agencies and non-profits, and advising renewable energy companies and municipalities. Perhaps most importantly, through the Center’s innovative work, it has trained generations of law students who are now leaders in the field, as they transform the energy sector and tackle the climate crisis.
In the last several years, and continuing into 2025, the Center has maintained its leadership role through its innovative work on geothermal energy. The Center has been working with government partners to engage communities on district geothermal (also known as thermal energy networks), and is developing curriculum with its non-profit partners to train communities on regulatory options for geothermal energy development. The Center has also advised district-scale thermal energy developers and municipalities on regulatory requirements for geothermal energy.
In addition, the Center continues its long tradition of serving as a convenor in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency, for example, by co-convening a coalition of clean energy organizations, and leading a network of clean energy and utility rate design experts. The Center also continues its work on community-scale solar, community choice aggregation and community distributed generation, with a particular focus on underserved communities.
Consistent with its long history of publishing groundbreaking reports in the clean energy field, the Center is poised to issue several reports on geothermal energy in the coming weeks and months. With the help of the Center’s Haub School of Law interns, we will profile some of these reports on this blog in the near future.
On Earth Day, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University’s Energy and Climate Center and its partner the Westchester County Association (WCA), were honored for their work developing a Clean Energy Program Portal at the 3rd annual Westchester County ECO Awards. The portal is a dynamic, searchable guide which serves as a clearinghouse that enables businesses to easily find clean energy programs and incentives available in Westchester County and the surrounding region. The ECO award recognizes outstanding contributions to the environment and sustainability made by residents, students, schools, municipalities, businesses, and other organizations throughout the county. Read more: https://www.pace.edu/news/westchester-county-honors-pace-energy-and-climate-center-and-partner-wca-eco-award?law
The Pace Energy and Climate Center conducted a study in upstate New York showing how solar farming can have significant positive socio-economic benefits for local farming communities. The report estimates that a 350 MW solar farm generates between $177 million to $229 million in revenues. Other benefits for the local community include stabilizing family farms that provide the land, benefits to local businesses from additional household spending, municipal revenues, and job opportunities throughout the region.
Read the report: https://peccpubs.pace.edu/viewresource/8a9093d18f72d63/Strengthening+Small+Farms+and+Their+Communities+Through+Solar+Farming+-+Ridge+View+350+MW+Solar+PV+Project+Social+and+Economic+Assessment?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0HQtutWUrH09-aD6dBwrTVWEy3eS2Zu7kUEwlG7db7gmVVKb0zs_QpmA8_aem_m7_I-9J9NTRteAu_jwfhEA
Pace Energy and Climate Center mourns the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and all victims of police brutality and racially motivated violence. We are in solidarity with those protesting for justice for Black and Brown people and the reform of prejudicial policing systems, and condemn the police responding to these protests with further brutality. As advocates for equitable energy policy and environmental justice, we know that those goals are inseparable from, and cannot be attained without, racial justice in all areas of society. The primary among these is the right for the Black community to live without fearing for their lives. The Pace Energy and Climate Center, in coordination with our allies, will continue to advocate for justice in our work while listening to and learning from communities of color, and we will hold ourselves accountable to identify and respond to systemic racism within our own lives, work, and institution.
We wish everyone a joyous Juneteenth, and for true freedom and equality for all to come quickly.
Seven years ago homes, businesses and factories in New York, on Long Island and across large parts of New Jersey were without power, hot water and heat. A handful of sites, including New York University (NYU), the Long Island Home (Amityville, NY), and the Breevort (New York City) continued to provide electricity to employees, students, patients, customers and residents. They had invested in combined heat and power (CHP) systems capable of delivering high efficiency, environmentally superior and resilient power and heat at their facilities. The U.S. Department of Energy publication “Combined Heat and Power: Enabling Resilient Energy Infrastructure for Critical Facilities” March 2013, includes 14 case studies of CHP facilities that ran through Superstorm Sandy and other storms and blackout events in other regions of the country.
The U.S. Department of Energy provides the following definition at their Combined Heat & Power eCatalog site:
Combined heat and power (CHP), also known as cogeneration, produces both electricity and thermal energy on-site, replacing or supplementing electricity provided from a local utility and fuel burned in an on-site boiler or furnace. CHP systems can be designed to operate independently from the electric grid providing reliable power and thermal energy to keep critical facilities running during grid outages.
Most of the existing CHP systems utilize natural gas. CHP systems that operate for a large portion of the year and perform at a high total system efficiency yield social benefits in the form of reduced air emissions, lower greenhouse gases, greater levels of energy efficiency when compared with separately provided power, heating and cooling systems.
Well designed and operated CHP systems represent a smart way to use natural gas in an efficient, environmentally responsible manner to meet the energy needs of businesses, factories, healthcare and university complexes and multifamily and mixed use campuses. As states, metro areas and cities transition to a carbon free energy future, CHP technologies should play an important role in a clean energy roadmap.
In recognition of social benefits, renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are often rewarded with state incentives, favorable utility regulatory treatment and federal and state tax preferences. CHP systems provide many of the same benefits as renewable and efficiency technologies that qualify for preferential state and federal treatment. Yet the same societal benefits provided by CHP are either not rewarded at all, or not in a manner that’s nearly commensurate with qualifying renewable and efficiency technologies.
Smartly designed CHP systems remain an invaluable component in building an effective bridge from our existing energy structure to the energy ecosystem of the next generation. Smartly designed policies are best when fashioned to be technology neutral and awarded on the basis of demonstrated, measured outcomes that society desires.
Author: Tom Bourgeois, Deputy Director of the Pace Energy & Climate Center and Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s New York / New Jersey Combined Heat and Power, Technical Assistance Partnership. He is primary or contributing author of numerous reports, briefs, presentations on the topic of combined heat and power. Mr. Bourgeois was a co-author of Combined Heat and Power: Enabling Resilient Energy Infrastructure for Critical Facilities. Prepared for Oak Ridge National Labs, ORNL/TM-2013/100. March 2013.
