Prof. Richard L. Revesz and Dr. Burcin Unel provide a useful, albeit no longer current, review of electric energy storage in Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Managing). The energy storage market has continued its rapid technical and manufacturing evolution. Those advances may reasonably be expected to impact today’s regulatory aims and frameworks, just as prior technological progress influenced administrative goals and processes.

In their paper, Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Richard L. Revesz and Burcin Unel of New York University School of Law (NYU team or authors) highlight a critical (and often times contentious) issue that the energy industry is attempting to address: how to quantify and incorporate a societal value of decreased greenhouse gas emissions into the dollar value of incremental energy that is provided to the electric system.

The view that promoting the use of energy storage systems produces environmentally attractive results has been standard in policy circles. Policymakers have been enthusiastic about energy storage systems primarily because of their belief that cheaper and more prevalent storage options could help facilitate the integration of increased renewable energy generation and speed up the transition to a low-carbon grid. This beneficial outcome, however, is not guaranteed.

There is a movement among companies to use more renewable energy and less energy obtained from fossil fuels. Some are pledging to go “100% renewable,” while many others have set goals to rely on substantial percentages of renewable energy. In addition to setting these goals, many companies report on how much renewable energy they currently use, and convey this information in annual sustainability reports or in publicly issued statements and news releases.

On November 4, 2016, DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division convened an extraordinary group of legal scholars and practitioners to discuss “The Future of Environmental Law.” Speaking before the presidential election but mindful of the transition possibilities, the symposium panelists identified and discussed cutting-edge issues in administrative law, natural resources law, and environmental enforcement that will be crucial going forward for both government lawyers and the environmental law profession as a whole.

Climate change has important implications for the management and conservation of natural resources and public lands. The federal agencies responsible for managing these resources have generally recognized that considerations pertaining to climate change adaptation should be incorporated into existing planning processes, yet this topic is still treated as an afterthought in many planning documents. Only a few federal agencies have published guidance on how managers should consider climate change impacts and their management implications.