Local Renewable Energy Transition Strategies[1]
The US renewable energy transition re-started about a decade ago, leveraging scale up and maturation of solar and wind industries that expanded globally after California’s pioneering wind and solar deployment in the late 1980s.[2]
Figure 1 imagines waves of economic disruption. Are we facing a sudden but persistent COVID recession, followed by an overdue cyclic recession, then followed by a long, deepening recession driven by climate change? If localized climate impacts proliferate and cause regional and local economic collapse, how can the US and other viable democracies lead a just and timely global energy transition?
Figure 1. Waves of Economic Disruption
An integrative US strategy that accelerates decarbonization and provides for local energy resilience will include:
1. Balanced attention to electricity and fuel sector decarbonization.
2. Both maintenance of existing centralized energy infrastructure and new local investment in zero/negative carbon energy conversion and usage technologies;
3. Re-purposing local energy systems to better match clean, resilient local supply to local demand.
4. Changing rules that, in the US, undermine cost-efficient local energy investment in numerous ways.
California GHG inventories[i] are professionally researched and documented. Carefully examined, they suggest that about half of all California and other US greenhouse emissions result from energy use in buildings and personal vehicles. This means that about half of all decarbonization opportunities in the US are locally actionable. So are energy resilience opportunities. Climate-driven disasters in many US states continue to disrupt local energy supplies and local economies. Urgency for both energy resilience and decarbonization is greatly amplified in areas recovering from recent climate related disasters. Local public investment options may be limited in these areas and many other cases, creating a need for local planning[3] that carefully quantifies and evaluates costs, benefits, and risks.
On-going expansion of centralized renewable energy supply enables less reliance on large power plants that convert fossil fuels to electricity. However, without massive usage changes necessary to capture decarbonization benefits of large renewable projects, investing exclusively in them is an incomplete decarbonization strategy that becomes more costly as renewable penetration increases and that fails to mitigate local electricity service disruptions.[4] Parallel expansion of local renewable supply is key to a more timely, just, and safe renewable energy transition.
Extended service disruptions devastate local economies. Energy resilience is the local capacity to restore energy service quickly and indefinitely. Increased local renewable energy production and judicious renewable fuel use can provide at least partial energy resilience, thus mitigating local energy service vulnerabilities. Once technical and institutional impediments are removed, home and business energy investments[5] can be integrated with smarter local energy “distribution” infrastructure to make local energy service fully resilient.[6]
Energy security enables local economic vitality. Economically insecure neighborhoods need to be more, not less, energy secure than their economically secure counterparts. Fairness requires that the benefits of local renewable energy supply be available to all. For example, in places where solar energy saves money and backs up traditional energy service for local businesses and homeowners, it must do the same for renters, who, on average, may have greater need for cost savings and energy security.
Where local energy transitions are moving forward apace, energy user investments are now the primary driver. Experience shows that supportive state and local policies can accelerate decarbonization and resilience investments by home and business owners. Achieving acceleration requires:
1. Recognition that local investments in on-site solar electricity and heat production, can now deliver compelling life cycle cost savings in most of California, and attractive savings in many other states. These investments have become the climate action gold standard by quickly replacing grid electricity and natural gas with zero carbon energy and enabling local retail energy businesses to grow and prosper.
2. Reliance on local energy management expertise to inform climate local decarbonization and resilience planning, and on local businesses for climate action implementation capacity. Technically and economically informed local energy transitions pay for themselves when local clean energy planning and implementation capacities are competent and mature.
3. Follow up on integrative and collaborative decarbonization and resilience plans with detailed implementation plans. Deployment of mature, cost-saving technologies can be emphasized in the first five years of implementation, along with interventions to open new local energy transition pathways as promising emerging technologies become cost-effective and commercially available.[ii]
Such planning starts with community self-assessment to identify and quantify local trends and opportunities. Above all, local decarbonization and resilience plans should aim to maximize benefits to energy users and the local economy without doing environmental harm or societal injustice locally or elsewhere. Note that local energy transitions can strengthen local economies in ways that cities and counties rarely consider, e.g. job creation and taxable assets.[7] [iii] Maximizing benefits and accelerating decarbonization and resilience progress may require temporary incentives.
Reshaping one piece of the local energy puzzle affects the others. Each community must decide trade-offs between: 1) on-site solar and community renewables, 2) imports and local production, 3) new projects and retrofits, 4) zero carbon and fully energy resilient, 5) expedient vs. cost-efficient actions, 6) formerly affordable and newly affordable technologies, and 7) readiness for action now vs. later.
Getting the trade-offs right requires creating local energy system models, updating them and checking progress against them.[8] [iv] Inputs to integrated local energy analysis and planning need to be extracted from multiple databases. So, planning and decision-making must be intensely collaborative, starting with data sharing.[v]
Opportunities, Barriers and Models. Getting local trade-offs right, capturing opportunities and lowering barriers is near impossible without collaboration among local governments and energy utilities.[9] Monopolistic utility service models have held up well over many decades. But now they impede decarbonization, oppose barriers to equitable local renewable energy production, and enmesh local climate action in bureaucratic inertia. What to do? Some strategies to consider:
1. Empower Local Solar Investment. Radical shifts in solar energy production costs over the past decade are summarized in Figure 2.[vi] They fundamentally change the trade-off between delivered electricity costs of centralized vs. local solar production.[10] They expand the cost-effective scope for local action, thus creating new opportunities for timely local energy transitions in California (and most other places). Note that comparative economics of centralized vs. local solar production will continue to shift in favor of local production as large projects come on stream and drive a need for longer duration and more costly energy storage.
Figure 2. Progress of Solar PV Cost Reduction - US
2. Close the Community Renewables Gap. Community renewables are key to equitable local energy transitions. Figure 3[vii] shows every California county producing renewable energy. Each exporting county’s renewable product mix differs from all others. Most electricity generated by “utility scale” solar power plants is exported via the state-wide power grid to other areas. Escalating transmission charges on these exports now exceed production costs by a factor of two. Locally produced solar electricity is typically unavailable to renters or residents of low income neighborhoods. Can expansion of renewable energy production be accelerated if grid access charges for community solar and other community renewable projects accurately account for local energy resilience benefits and project-specific grid usage? How much expansion of regional transmission systems can be avoided by expanding local renewable energy production?
Figure 3. Renewable Electricity Production by County - California
3. Expand Local Energy Collaboration. Figure 4 shows a solar micro community in a new net-zero-carbon Florida city. The city will have a population of twenty thousand when fully built out. A utility-owned 150MW solar power plant already operating on land donated by the developer will supply electricity to residents and businesses at the same prices the utility charges customers elsewhere in its service territory. Could settled US cities collaborate with their energy utilities and/or wholesale energy providers[11] to achieve comparable results?
Figure 4. Solar Micro Community
Summary. Expansion of local renewable supply is key to more timely, just, and safe state and national renewable energy transitions. US cities and counties should encourage private investment in local solar energy production because it enables faster local decarbonization and energy resilience - also because it strengthens local economies in many ways. Community solar and renewable fuel production makes local energy transitions more timely - also more equitable. Local decarbonization and energy resilience progress requires technically and economically informed planning, which in turn requires greatly expanded collaboration among local governments, energy utilities and local businesses, including energy equipment contractors and retailers, fuel distributors, and major local employers.
References:
[i] https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/ghg_inventory_trends_00-17.pdf
[ii] https://www.iresn.org/s/Local-Gas-Fuel-Decarbonization-and-Resilience-for-Southern-California-7-5-20.pdf
[iii] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619015001104
[iv] https://www.iresn.org/s/Integrated-Energy-Analysis-for-Davis-CEC-500-2016-015-AP-D.pdf.
[v] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619019302969
[vi] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
[vii] https://cecgis-caenergy.opendata.arcgis.com/pages/pdf-maps
Footnotes:
[1] The third in a series of articles outlining what a just and timely US energy transition would look like. See also All Hands on Deck and Planning for Local Decarbonization and Climate Resilience.
[2] California’s initial renewable power deployment was aborted in the early 90s as California regulators restructured California’s electricity systems to expand natural gas generation. Since 2001, while California’s population and economy expanded, new natural gas and renewable electricity generators helped reduce GHG emissions from California’s in-state electricity generation by about a third, to nine percent of total state-wide emissions in 2017.
[3] A decade ago, California began to encourage local “climate action and adaptation” planning. The latest such plans tend to give more balanced attention to faster “decarbonization” and increased "energy resilience”.
[4] Energy resilience, long a concern in disaster-prone areas, e.g. coastal areas in the southeastern US, is now a concern in California in the wake of recent, unprecedented wildfires. Technically and economically informed state-wide decarbonization and resilience planning has become a critical need, but responsibility and authority to make it happen remains diffuse. Regional energy utilities rely heavily on out-of-state imports and have divested, or retired, portions of the energy production fleets they once owned while the state relies on commodity energy markets it operates to attract investment in new in-state supply.
[5] I.e., in on-site solar heat and electricity production, community renewable gas and electricity production and battery and fuel cell electric vehicles that exchange electricity with local electricity grids.
[6] “Full resilience” means the ability to quickly restore unrestricted and uninterrupted 24/7 energy services.
[7] Benefits of more local dollars recirculating locally are harder to quantify but may be even more important.
[8] Getting local energy trade-offs right is work public employees must learn to do more and outsource less, though consultants can fill gaps in local skill sets and knowledge.
[9] Collaboration does not come naturally to bureaucratic and/or monopolistic organizations. So, some may need to add organization-wide cultural change to their “to do” list.
[10] The cost difference between residential and utility scale production has decreased by a factor of ten to around $.02/kWh, suggesting a need for fresh thinking about policies that throttle local solar production and rely on centralized production to meet state-wide goals.
[11] E.g., including mature Community Choice providers now operating in some states.