Advanced Energy Perspectives

Image courtesy of Clean Energy Resource Teams, from a workshop and tour on community solar gardens at Lake Region Electric Cooperative in Minnesota.

More and more, across the U.S., consumers want access to solar energy. However, according to a new GTM market report, only an estimated 13.5% of U.S. households have rooftops suitable for solar. In what many are hailing as the solution - community solar - the remaining 86.5% of households could benefit from solar power as if the panels were installed on their homes. Community solar makes solar an option for everyone: renters, apartment dwellers, owners with shaded rooftops, consumers with sub-optimal credit, people living in historic districts, and those hampered by unfavorable building codes or zoning ordinances.

Photo courtesy of Walmart. Solar panels atop a Walmart and Sam’s Club in Chino California.

This week we saw dozens of major companies join the ranks of those already focused on choosing their own advanced energy future. Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Salesforce, Johnson & Johnson, AEE member Siemens, and others joined ranks with Apple and Google to commit to go 100% renewable.

This blog post is the second in a two-part series on states' reactions to the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Check out Part 1 here.

To comply or not to comply with EPA’s Clean Power Plan? For states, that is the question. In yesterday’s post, we looked at states that are getting ready to develop compliance plans, even those that are planning to fight the CPP in court. Today, we take a look at the states that are showing no sign of preparing to submit a plan, whether they don’t have to, they haven’t decided how to respond, or they just refuse to — in which case EPA will impose a federal plan.

Photo of the Colorado State Capitol courtesy of Ryan Tolene and used under a Creative Commons License. 

Ever since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the final version of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) on August 3, the rule’s 1,560 pages of dense text (and an equally daunting pile of Technical Support Documents) have kept legal analysts and policy wonks busy and bleary-eyed. Perhaps the most important group of readers, however, are state regulators, the officials tasked with producing a state plan for implementation.

Across the country — including in states whose attorneys general are pursuing legal action — regulators are checking where their states stand (see below), asking questions, convening stakeholders, and making plans to comply — or not. In this post, we look at states that are getting ready to develop compliance plans, whether they like the CPP or not. Tomorrow, we will post a look at the states that are showing no sign of preparing to submit a plan, whether they don’t have to, they haven’t decided how to respond, or they just refuse to — in which case EPA will impose a federal plan.

(BAU stands for Business As Usual case, or the reference case.)

As advanced energy has, well, advanced over the past few decades, the conversation has advanced as well. Whereas in decades past the challenge was convincing folks that solar and wind could power anything larger than a 17th century grain mill, the challenge now is getting past the notion that the power grid can handle only so much wind and solar, which are variable resources. But that idea, too, is starting to go the way of the windmills of yore. So says the Wall Street Journal.