Atlas Trail
Policy Tools of the Energy Transition
The shift away from fossil fuels has never run on technology alone. Laws, contracts and standards decided which power plants got built, who paid for them, and who bore the cost when they were built and then not needed. This trail follows the working policy tools of the energy transition from the 1978 US law that created the modern power contract, through the incentives and standards that pulled wind and solar onto the grid, to two ideas that name what the transition costs: a promise that workers will not pay for it alone, and a warning that some assets will lose their value before their working life is done.
Stop 1 of 7.
Concepts
The energy transition is the shift from a system built on fossil fuels toward one built on lower carbon sources. It is not a single event but a decades-long process, and every stop on this trail is one of the tools that has shaped how fast, and how fairly, it has actually moved.
Stop 2 of 7.
Concepts
The US Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) first required utilities to buy power from qualifying facilities at avoided cost, turning ad hoc utility purchases into a standardized, legally required contract. That shape is still the power purchase agreement independent power producers sign today.
Stop 3 of 7.
Concepts
A feed-in tariff guarantees a renewable generator a fixed price for the power it sells, a different lever from PURPA's avoided-cost purchase rule: instead of matching what a utility would otherwise have paid, it sets a price meant to make new renewable investment pay for itself.
Stop 4 of 7.
Concepts
Iowa adopted the first US state renewable portfolio standard in 1983, requiring its two largest utilities to procure a minimum amount of renewable generation. Rather than paying for renewable power directly, a portfolio standard sets a target and leaves utilities to meet it, the mandate-based counterpart to the price-based feed-in tariff before it.
Stop 5 of 7.
Concepts
Grid parity is the point at which a new power source produces electricity for no more than what a consumer already pays for grid power, without a subsidy. It is the moment every tool on this trail so far was built to reach: once a source has crossed it, the case for continuing to subsidize it changes.
Stop 6 of 7.
Concepts
Every tool above moves power generation, not the people who worked in the plants it replaces. Union leader Tony Mazzocchi named that gap directly in 1993: "There is a Superfund for dirt. There ought to be one for workers." Just transition is the name now given to that unmet half of the transition's bargain.
Stop 7 of 7.
Concepts
A transition that leaves some power plants and reserves without buyers before the end of their working life creates stranded assets, a phrase Carbon Tracker Initiative's own 2013 report put into wide use, naming coal-fired plants and reserves as its leading example. It is the financial mirror of just transition's human one: the cost of the shift lands somewhere, and this trail has tried to name where.
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