Climate

At a recent Columbia Business School gathering focused on cement decarbonisation, Maher Al-Haffar, chief financial officer at Cemex, one of the world’s largest cement companies, had a message for his peers: “There’s a misconception that for any emitting industry, the cost of transition is value-destructive to shareholders,” he said. “In our industry, we actually think it’s value-creating.”

Projects with high societal impact--such as biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation--often offer financial returns that are too low, or too risky, to attract private capital. Under such circumstances, it can be difficult to raise adequate financing for these projects. A potential solution is blended finance, that is, the blending of concessional funding (e.g., from governments, multilateral development banks, or philanthropies) with private capital.

If you knew your home would burn down exactly one year from today, you’d take immediate action. You’d clear out flammable clutter, upgrade alarms, and perhaps install fireproof doors or sprinklers. You’d also prepare for the worst — updating insurance, setting aside savings, and making an evacuation plan.

The temptations are all too real. Headlines come to those with creative, innovative, first-of-its-kind solutions. But successful climate finance means the opposite: boring, replicable leverage of limited public funds to channel profit-seeking investments in the right direction.

Electric power systems are undergoing a major transformation as they integrate intermittent renewable energy sources, and batteries to smooth out variations in renewable energy production. As privately-owned batteries grow from their role as marginal "price-takers'' to significant players in the market, a natural question arises: How do batteries operate in electricity markets, and how does the strategic behavior of decentralized batteries distort decisions compared to centralized batteries?

In theory, a cost of capital channel can incentivize green investments like a carbon tax. This channel requires that firms perceive the cost of green capital as lower than that of brown capital. Using hand-collected data, we show that green firms have indeed perceived their cost of capital to be 1 percentage point lower since 2016, when climate concerns by financial investors and governments surged. Moreover, some energy firms have used a lower cost of capital for their green divisions.

Ørsted has replaced its chief executive, as the world’s largest offshore wind developer seeks to boost its share price and deal with the impact of the Trump administration’s energy policies on its US expansion plans.

Solar panels have become so cheap so quickly, that they have gone from curiosity to commodity in less than four decades.

The global glut means panels have fallen in price dramatically, leading to widespread proliferation. They are sometimes considered cheap enough to be used as an alternative material for garden fencing; in some locations, new panels enable households to sever their connection to the grid.