The Center focuses on strengthening opportunities for West Virginia and its residents in the context of nationwide trends to reduce carbon emissions and pursue sustainable energy policies.
The Center’s activities revolve around the following issues:
- Training the next generation of energy and environmental attorneys. An important feature of the Center is its location at the WVU College of Law, which enables law students to be integrally involved in virtually all of the activities of the Center as well as the inter-disciplinary research being conducted on energy issues across the WVU campus.
- Securing West Virginia’s role in the new energy economy. The Center is involved in the development and implementation of emission-reducing policies and practices for the energy industry of the future. These policies include encouraging the development of renewable energy resources (e.g., wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro), distributed energy resources (e.g., demand response and virtual power plants), energy storage, energy efficiency, and industrial carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology.
- Assisting West Virginia’s utilities in achieving clean energy objectives. Energy utilities play an integral role in pursuing clean energy objectives through their procurement policies, implementation of energy efficiency programs, and management of existing power plants. The Center assists utilities in pursuing these objectives in an effective manner with a focus on benefiting customers and strengthening the West Virginia economy.
- Reclamation and remediation of West Virginia’s mountains, valleys, and streams. The extraction of fossil fuels has resulted in adverse impacts on West Virginia’s land and natural resources. The Center supports efforts to reclaim and remediate areas that have suffered from these adverse impacts.