Advanced Energy Perspectives

In 1999, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 7, opening up the Lone Star State’s electricity market to competition. Since then, Texas has been at the forefront of energy innovation. Now, nearly 20 years later, distributed energy resources (DERs) are the cutting edge of energy innovation, continuing the two-decade process of making the Texas grid more secure, clean, reliable, and affordable. With the COVID-19 public health crisis changing where and how we use electricity, just as it has changed where we work and how we learn, DERs couldn’t have come along at a better time. 

Florida, the Sunshine State, has always had good reason to develop solar power, but has still lagged behind other states. More recently, the case for Florida solar has strengthened even more. The price of solar has fallen by 36% in Florida over the last five years. This low-cost, fixed-price resource is particularly attractive to companies with commitments to renewable energy, including General Electric and Disney, while cities like Orlando, Sarasota, and Tallahassee that have established 100% renewable energy targets. Despite the economics of solar and commitments from companies and municipalities, Florida has not taken the lead on solar. The recent approval of a major solar program for customers of one utility will not do it all, but it’s a good start.

In the past five years, 100% clean or renewable has become the new standard of ambition in energy policy. As the map above shows, states across the U.S. are embarking on a path to a 100% clean energy supply.  Today roughly one in three Americans lives in a state, county, or city committed to 100% clean energy.  The latest to join the club is Virginia, which in April passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act, making it the first southeastern state to set a 100% target. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when AEE began work in the Commonwealth. But now, for a growing number of states, declining costs and clear economic benefits are making clean energy not just a policy aspiration but a compelling value proposition.

Since 2016, the year when authoritative data first became available, we have been reporting the size and growth of employment in advanced energy on an annual basis. During that time, we have seen U.S. advanced energy jobs grow from 2.7 million in 2015 to 3.6 million in 2019. Each year the growth in advanced energy employment has outpaced growth in U.S. jobs overall, often by a factor of two or more. So it is with the latest numbers. But this is not like any other year. Rather, the job growth of last year is now overshadowed by the immediate job losses resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Now the critical jobs need is sustaining the industry during the lockdown – and making good on the employer expectations of growth coming into 2020 by driving the economic recovery to follow.

I’m sure you don’t need another blog telling you how COVID-19 has changed everything. While I won’t be able to fully avoid some of that here, read on if you want to know what is still happening at some of the state utility commissions around the country where AEE is actively engaged. My colleagues and I are used to traveling to state capitals to engage in regulatory proceedings, and while that obviously isn’t possible, commissions have transitioned much of their work online. There’s some good news here, and if you are like me, you can use all the good news you can get.