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Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems / Varun Sivaram. Council on Foreign relations, June 2018, 138 p. ISBN 978-0-87609-748-9 https://www.cfr.org/report/digital-decarbonizationOverview : A digital revolution is sweeping the global energy sector. As energy industries produce ever more data, firms are harnessing greater computing power, advances in data science, and increased digital connectivity to exploit that data. These trends have the potential to transform the way energy is produced, transported, and consumed.An important potential benefit of this digital transformation of energy is a reduction in global emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change; the elimination of such emissions from the global economy is known as decarbonization. By enabling clean energy systems that rely on low-carbon energy sources and are highly efficient in using energy, digital innovations in the energy sector can speed decarbonization. Yet they are not guaranteed to do so. In fact, digital innovations could well increase global greenhouse emissions, for example, by making it easier to extract fossil fuels.To determine the potential for digital technologies to speed a clean energy transition and to make recommendations to promote this outcome, the Council on Foreign Relations convened a workshop in New York, on February 22 and 23, 2018. Participants laid out a wide range of areas in which digital technologies are already enabling clean energy systems and could achieve much more; they also cautioned about serious risks that will attend the digitalization of energy and need to be managed; and they articulated actionable recommendations for policymakers in the United States and abroad to ensure that digital innovations bring societal benefits and, in particular, speed decarbonization. Digital Decarbonization summarizes the insights from this workshop and includes contributions from fourteen expert authors delving into these topics.Energy Over the Next 20 Years: It’s Not All About the US / Anna Mikulska, and Michael D. Maher. Baker Institute for Public Policy, 2018, 8 p. (issue brief no. 06.15.18) https://www.bakerinstitute.org/files/13042/Thanks to the “shale revolution,” the US is well on its way to becoming the world’s top oil and gas producer and a major exporter of both products. As such, the country does and will continue to influence global energy markets by providing greater predictability and security of supply...Electricity Markets in MENA: Adapting for the Transition Era / Rahmat Poudineh, Bassam Fattouh, Anupama Sen. Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, May 2018, 22 p. (OIES paper: MEP 20) https://www.oxfordenergy.org/publications/electricity-markets-mena-adapting-transition-era/Resource-rich economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are pursuing two parallel strategies with regard to their electricity sectors: (i) increasing the role of renewables and integrating them into their power generation mix to mitigate the impact of rising domestic oil and gas demand on their economies and to boost their hydrocarbon export capacities; and (ii) conducting power sector reforms to attract investment in generation capacity and networks, remove subsidies, and improve operational efficiency. These goals imply that the design of power sector reforms (including regulations governing wholesale and retail markets and networks) needs to be carried out with a view to the possibility of a rising share of non-dispatchable resources. The lack of an integrated approach to simultaneously address these two strategies is likely to lead to several misalignments between renewables and the various components of future electricity markets, when the share of intermittent resources increases in the generation mix. The key challenge is that the ‘ultimate model’ that will reconcile these two goals (liberalization and integrating renewables) is as yet unknown, and is still evolving due to uncertainties around the development of technologies, institutions, and consumer preferences. We argue in this paper that resource-rich MENA countries can, however, move towards adopting a transition model of electricity markets, the individual elements of which can eventually be adapted to suit either centralized or decentralized future electricity sector outcomes. We outline the key components of this model for the wholesale market, retail market, and network regulation, considering the objectives of governments and the specific contexts of the region.