Yolo County, California Case Study. Economic benefits of local renewable transitions accrue to energy users who are able to generate solar energy on property they own. On-site solar investments also strengthen local economies because system sales are subject to sales tax while a significant share of sales revenues recirculates locally, creating local jobs and adding to taxable property values.[1] The table below shows economic benefits of on-site solar electricity production in Yolo County, California.
Estimated Economic Benefits of Yolo County, California On-site Solar Deployment Through 2020
The county has a mix of urban and rural areas with a combined population of roughly 200,000. Its recent experience illustrates how quickly local renewable transitions can progress under the radar of planners and policy makers.[2] County-wide on-site solar deployment in the past five years accounts for most of the local solar capacity that now meets twelve percent of the county’s electricity usage, a percentage that could be significantly higher but for regulatory limits on net annual on-site production.
Benefits to the Yolo County economy include desirable jobs and less money leaving the county to pay for grid electricity imports. Combined annual benefits at the end of 2020 are estimated at more than $90 million. These dollars strengthen the county’s ability to fund implementation of climate adaptation and resilience measures. They can also help address inequities, including the fact that property owners have access to cost-saving locally produced solar electricity and renters do not. Additional economic benefits, harder to estimate because they are not captured unless something bad happens, include mitigation of economic productivity losses during public safety power shutoffs, and faster recovery of local economies in the wake of disasters, physical attacks and cyber-attacks. Based on Yolo County’s population, the sum of accurately quantifiable and hard to quantify benefits is likely in the range $500-1000 per person per year.
Property owner investments deliver significant environmental, economic and resilience benefits to cities and counties. Modest and ever-shrinking differences between unit (per kWh) costs of utility solar electricity supply and unit costs of on-site solar electricity systems point to a growing, beneficial long term role for local systems.
Gerald (Gerry) Braun
© 2021 IRESN
[1] Benefits of more local dollars recirculating locally, of property tax base increases and of increased resilience and faster disaster recovery are harder to quantify but may be even more important than more accurately quantifiable benefits.
[2] A three year old county-wide Community Choice program may result in improved “radar” going forward.