Clean energy transactions in the United States totaled $180 billion across 108 deals during the first quarter of 2026. That sounds like a booming market. Look closer, though, and the picture gets complicated. The clean energy market is not growing uniformly. It is splitting into two.
The era of selling "green" as a moral premium has faded. What comes next will be built by founders whose products are simply better, faster, and cheaper than the high-carbon incumbents they aim to replace.
How rural electrical cooperatives can become champions for clean energy—insights from the Yale School of the Environment’s panel, “Winning the Future of the Energy Transition in Rural America”.
On April 8, 2026, Jim Levitt (Yale College, BA1976; Yale SOM, MPPM 1980; Yale SOM Donaldson Fellow 2009; and co-founder of the International Land Conservation Network at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) presented a compelling case for environmental optimism grounded not in aspiration, but in structural trends already visible in data.
Even as renewable energy continues its rapid expansion, electricity demand in the United States is accelerating at an even faster pace, partially driven by the explosive growth of AI data centers. To achieve net zero by 2050, large technology companies are pivoting toward nuclear power, with small modular reactors (SMRs) emerging as the most prominent solution.
A guide to different electricity markets: spot, day-ahead, energy-only, capacity. Electricity markets are layered precisely because electricity is physically unlike every other commodity.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis exposes not just the fragility of fossil fuels, but the geopolitical trap waiting inside the clean energy transition itself.
Recapping a recent panel at Yale Law School examining what present societies owe future generations and how policy views “rights to nature” and “rights of nature.”
Africa holds 60% of the world's best solar resources and vast reserves of critical minerals. Yet its sovereign balance sheets are buckling — and the world's climate ambitions are helping to break them.
As global temperatures rise and cooling demand accelerates, experts convened at Yale to explore how refrigerant management, policy innovation, and new technologies could transform cooling from a climate problem into a major climate solution.
Electricity and the New Industrial Order: the age of combustion shaped the modern world. The age of The Stack — energy, electronics, and industrial depth fused together — is reshaping it.
Emerging markets are not short on ambition or even capital in the abstract. They are short on standardized systems that make risk legible to investors. Climate ambition is not the constraint; the constraint is in the way current systems (or lack thereof) are.
Iván García Kerdan is a systems engineer and 2026 Climate Fellow at Yale University. The Forum spoke with García Kerdan about energy systems modeling, sustainable construction materials in Mexico, and how technical feasibility interacts with policy and governance.
