Center for Law, Energy & the Environment

The Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) channels the expertise of the Berkeley Law community – faculty, staff, and students – into pragmatic, creative policy solutions to critical environmental and energy challenges.

March 2021

Priorities for Sonoma County’s Wildfire Settlement Vegetation Management Funds

In 2017, the Sonoma Complex Fires burned hundreds of thousands of acres in the county, destroyed over 5,000 structures, and took two dozen lives. After reaching a legal settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric (whose equipment sparked the fires), Sonoma County allocated $25 million of the settlement funds to vegetation management in order to reduce future fire risk and protect ecosystems and agriculture.

February 2021

Data Access for a Decarbonized Grid

California’s electricity infrastructure is entering a period of profound change, with state leaders striving to achieve 60 percent renewable sources by 2030 and 100 percent zero-carbon power by 2045, while increasingly severe heat waves and wildfires threaten the reliability and resilience of the grid. Developers are introducing a range of flexible grid technologies to meet these challenges. While these technologies are becoming increasingly mainstream and affordable, effective and efficient deployment relies on a key resource—energy data—that can maximize the flexible use of diverse energy resources. Abundant energy data already provide the information needed to operate a modern, flexible grid. However, state regulators, electric utilities, technology developers, and customers face a thicket of regulatory, privacy, and incentive-based challenges to optimizing the generation and management of this data.

January 2021

Building towards Decarbonization

California’s drive toward statewide carbon neutrality by 2045 will hinge on shifting as many energy sources and fuels to electricity as possible. Accordingly, transitioning buildings from natural gas to electricity is among the state’s highest priorities for the coming decade.

December 2020

Capturing Opportunity 

California has enacted ambitious climate goals, including a statewide carbon neutrality target by 2045. While much of the required greenhouse gas reductions will come from clean technology and emission reduction programs, meeting these targets will necessitate new methods of actively removing carbon from the atmosphere and capturing difficult-to-mitigate emissions, including via technologies broadly known as engineered carbon removal. These processes — such as carbon capture and sequestration from industrial and fossil fuel facilities, biomass energy production with carbon capture, and direct air capture of atmospheric carbon — can complement nature-based solutions but are mostly still in the early development stages

December 2020

Redefining Value and Risk in Agriculture

In June 2020, the Berkeley Food Institute and UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment convened farmers, policy experts, advocates, investors, and other stakeholders in the farming community for a virtual roundtable on public-private solutions to advance regenerative agriculture. We agreed on the problem, yet our diverse perspectives necessitated discussion of the broad range of potential and existing solutions. From reforming crop insurance and promoting regenerative practices to implementing policies that prioritize equity, explore these recommendations and more in Redefining Value and Risk in Agriculture. 

December 2020

Insuring Extreme Heat Risks

Extreme heat is a leading climate-related health risk, responsible for thousands of deaths and hospitalizations per year in the United States, a number that will grow significantly this century. Local governments are developing resilience plans that include comprehensive extreme heat elements to help address the expansive risks posed by extreme heat, including not just physical health but also mental health, educational success, birth outcomes, worker productivity, transportation networks, and utility infrastructure. But extreme heat impacts are especially diffuse and difficult to address, and they disproportionately affect vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. CLEE’s new report, Insuring Extreme Heat Risks, studies the potential for insurance and other financial risk-transfer mechanisms to help local governments respond to and mitigate the extreme heat risk they will face with increasing regularity in coming decades.

September 2020

The California Roadmap

July 2020

Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain

The global transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to battery electric vehicles (EVs) will require the production of hundreds of millions of batteries. This massive deployment frequently raises questions from the general public and critics alike about the sustainability of the battery supply chain, from mining impacts to vehicle carbon emissions.

To address these questions, CLEE and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) are conducting a stakeholder-led research initiative focused on identifying strategies to improve sustainability and governance across the EV battery supply chain. The new report “Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain” identifies key challenges and possible responses that industry, government and nonprofit leaders could take to ensure battery supply chain sustainability.

June 2020

Clean and Resilient: Policy Solutions for California’s Grid of the Future

California’s electrical grid is both at the core of the state’s aggressive decarbonization goals—with targets of 60 percent renewable power by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045—and a major source of community vulnerability. Technologies like distributed renewable generation, microgrids, energy storage, building energy management, and vehicle-grid integration will be essential to promote community safety and resilience while advancing the effort to decarbonize the grid. But these investments will require significant policy and financial support to achieve these dual state goals over the coming decade.

To address this need, CLEE and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law convened a group of California state energy regulators, local government leaders, grid experts, and clean energy advocates for a convening on California’s electrical grid of the future. Our report, Clean and Resilient, is based on this expert group’s findings.

April 2020

Legal Grounds: Law and Policy Options to Facilitate a Phase-out of Fossil Fuel Production in California