Response Doctoral Program

America’s recently passed climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), provides strong support for accelerated adoption of clean vehicles in the US. Subsidies are generous for consumers looking to go electric, but only for vehicles that meet strict geographic requirements for critical mineral sourcing, battery manufacturing and vehicle assembly. Unabashedly, the US is seeking to shift the EV supply chain from China to North America, but at what cost?

RESPONSE fellow Bessie Noll discusses whether the isolationist IRA is the right move for the US and, more importantly, the climate.

Read Bessie Nolls’ Energy Blog article.

Response Doctoral Program

America’s recently passed climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), provides strong support for accelerated adoption of clean vehicles in the US. Subsidies are generous for consumers looking to go electric, but only for vehicles that meet strict geographic requirements for critical mineral sourcing, battery manufacturing and vehicle assembly. Unabashedly, the US is seeking to shift the EV supply chain from China to North America, but at what cost?

RESPONSE fellow Bessie Noll discusses whether the isolationist IRA is the right move for the US and, more importantly, the climate.

Read Bessie Nolls’ Energy Blog article.

Bessie Noll is currently a fellow in the RESPONSE Doctoral Program (DP) «RESPONSE – to society and policy needs through plant, food and energy sciences» funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 847585.

Citation: Noll, Bessie. “America’s Inflation Reduction Act is asking too much of car manufacturers and electric vehicle supply chains”, Energy Blog @ ETH Zurich, ETH Zurich, December 6, 2022, https://blogs.ethz.ch/energy/inflation-reduction-act/

Featured photo is ETH-licensed from Adobe Stock.

Response Doctoral Program

“No” says Bessie Noll et al. (2021) in a synthesis paper as renewable energy technologies have significant advantage over current non-traditional nuclear reactor designs.

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Linda Frattini contributed to a policy report that evaluates possible governance frameworks for establishing a European CCS network. In principle, CCS projects are eligible for support through different European and national funding tools, but more ambitious support schemes for CCS projects through national governments seem to be necessary.

From the report:

CCS technologies are poised to help attain the EU’s 2050 net-zero target, mainly by effecting emission reduction in energy-intensive industries and underpinning carbon removal solutions. For this to happen, there is a need for a carefully planned and well-coordinated scale-up of emerging CO₂ transport and storage networks, and for national governments to come forward with. This is particularly important for the Just Transition of many industrial regions and clusters in Central and Eastern Europe, where CCS can complement the deployment of renewables, especially in places where clean electricity is not available at the scale and within the timeframe required by the EU’s 2030 and 2050 emissions reduction targets.

Background:

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the process of capturing CO₂ either through post-combustion capture [1]  [FL1] or via direct air capture[FL2]  [2], transporting it and storing it for centuries or millennia in deep geological formations or sequestering in mineral carbonates from CO₂.