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Most governments provide some kind of financial assistance to boost energy supply or reduce prices for certain energy consumers. Fossil fuels have been widely subsidized for decades. The exact scale of these subsidies is not known because a comprehensive study has never been undertaken. What is clear is that fossil-fuel subsidies can drain government budgets and increase greenhouse gas emissions. In recognition of these unwanted impacts, the leaders of the Group of Twenty (G-20) countries agreed in September 2009 to phase-out inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies in the medium term. The Global Subsidies Initiative is well aware of the complex issues surrounding fossil-fuel subsidies and their reform. That is why last year, in anticipation of the current calls for such reform, it commenced an ambitious program to identify, measure, and analyze the effects of fossil-fuel subsidies. Key findings from the first five in-depth reports, which together make up the series Untold Billions: Fossil-fuel subsidies, their impacts and the path to reform, are summarized above. Below, each of the individual reports can be freely downloaded. Support for one of the papers, Gaining traction: the importance of transparency in accelerating the reform of fossil-fuel subsidies, was generously provided by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

President Jimmy Carter signed a bill calling for 10,000 megawatts of OTEC capacity to be up and running by 1999. Then oil prices stabilized, administrations changed, and other than a few demonstration projects, nothing happened.

“When people actually have to build stuff that’s got to survive in the ocean and be insured, costs double. Insurance premiums triple,” he said. “And all of a sudden, what looked good when you announced it, you can’t actually get finance to build.”

Binger added that many small island nations still haven’t recovered from the debt they incurred during the oil crisis that began in 1979.

The new IDTechEx report, "Zero-Emission Electric Vehicle Charging: Off-Grid 2020-2040" examines how the electric vehicle business is finding it profitable to respond to criticism that clean vehicles should not be charged with fossil fuel electricity. The purpose of this 230-page report is to enable materials, component, vehicle and infrastructure suppliers and putative suppliers, and all others in the value chain, to understand this large emerging opportunity for off-grid zero-emission OGZE charging of electric vehicles land, water and airborne.