Integration

Integrated Implementation of Community Solar and Community Choice

Integrated Implementation of Community Solar and Community Choice

California and other states need a way to capture the environmental and economic benefits of community solar. Other states have found a way. California’s CCE industry should ask the California legislature to consider allowing California CCEs to use all or a portion of annual CPUC mandated PCIA charges to put local renewable projects on an equal economic footing with projects that require new high voltage transmission capacity to deliver electricity locally. This will increase CCE capacity and flexibility to address local energy resilience needs and to provide equitable access locally to the environmental and economic benefits of solar electricity.

Collaborative Renewable Energy Integration

Collaborative Renewable Energy Integration

When IRESN took up the topic of “integrated renewable energy systems” a decade ago, we imagined an expanding renewable integration challenge driven by community-scale and building-scale renewable energy systems as well by utility-scale power plants.  Now new technologies are changing what we imagined into a real and urgent challenge.  The figure summarizes vectors of energy sector change that are already in effect.  Collaborative planning will need to be local as well as regional.