ETA 2021 Strategic Plan - Flipbook - Page 6
In addition, analysis by ETA researchers has
contributed to adoption of dozens of national
appliance efficiency standards over the past 25 years.
Standards adopted through 2016 are expected to
save nearly 142 quadrillion British thermal units of
energy by 2030 – more energy than the entire nation
consumes in one year.4
Evolution of Our Response
to the Climate Crisis
* U.S. energy facts explained. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/.
Despite the tangible impacts of our legacy of research,
and since the publication of the ETA’s 2017 Strategic
Plan, a number of challenges have hastened the
release of this update: the escalating uncertainty
of a changing climate, the emergence of a global
pandemic, and increased natural disasters, in both
volume and intensity. There is consensus in the
scientific community that focusing on mitigation as the
only strategy for addressing the climate crisis will not
be sufficient. We need to research scalable ideas for
adaptation and negative emissions at the same time.
In addition, this plan recognizes and invests in
negative emissions technologies (NETs) discussed
in Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable
Sequestration: A Research Agenda.5 These technologies
will play a large role in limiting average global
temperature rise. A diverse portfolio of
technologies will evolve over the next several years,
including enhanced weathering; direct air capture;
bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration;
ocean fertilization, alkalinity enhancement, and
direct capture; land carbon sink management; and
coastal ecosystems. ETA will focus on scientific
foundations for NETs, technologies that remove
and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2), pathways that
accelerate market uptake of those technologies,
and policies and toolkits that measure and validate
their performance.
4 Saving Energy and Money with Appliance and Equipment Standards in the United States. 2017. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/
files/2017/01/f34/Appliance%20and%20Equipment%20Standards%20Fact%20Sheet-011917_0.pdf.
ETA’s vision of sustainable, energy-efficient,
resilient, and increasingly productive cities
and rural communities has always included
climate adaptation technologies and
strategies, with feedback loops that cross
agricultural, industrial, and water sectors.
For example we spearheaded cool surfaces
research to address the pressing impact
of urban heat island effects and modeled
energy use in buildings under a reduced
load scenario in case of power outages. In
the last three years, however, that vision
has expanded and evolved to emphasize
a greater focus on technologies and
strategies that can meet new and rapidly
changing needs.
This 2021 refreshed Strategic Plan contains work that
will help us mitigate and adapt to evolving effects of
climate change as they arise:
• Resilient communities that continue to improve
and thrive despite the new challenges presented
by extreme weather stressors
• Industries that drive economy-wide value with
manufacturing processes and technologies that
deliver low-carbon solutions for high-volume,
high-value chemicals (the building blocks of those
resilient infrastructures) while ratcheting down
the climate threat for future generations
• Storage solutions that will support decarbonized
energy generation and beneficial electrification
across all end-use sectors, including
transportation, the built environment, industrial
applications, and the grid that connects them
— ensuring reliable electricity delivery through
planned and unexpected power outages
5 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2019. Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A
Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25259.
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