In Our Backyard: How to Increase Renewable Energy Production on Big Buildings and Other Local Spaces

(Essential reading! Interesting that it comes out the same week as Black and Veitch’s radical re-projections of the future of Distributed Generation. I wouldn’t call it a tipping point, but I would say that suddenly DG is gaining an awful lot of credibility as a potential source of inexpensive renewable power. –Rory)

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/In_Our_Backyard_Dec_3_2009(1).pdf

Executive Summary: In California’s effort to combat climate change, few other sectors present as many opportunities as renewable energy. Transitioning from fossil-fuel based energy to renewable sources will result in significant greenhouse gas reductions and more jobs and economic growth.1 And with its abundant wind, solar, and geothermal resources, California is well-situated to capitalize on this effort. While the state has developed programs to promote small-scale renewable energy options, such as solar photovoltaic panels on individual homes and small businesses, much of the political and legislative effort for increasing renewables has focused on large-scale, centralized wind and solar developments, usually located far from the majority of energy consumers. Many of these proposed developments require new, expensive transmission lines and face significant land-use and related hurdles. Siting and construction will take years.

But climate change and the state’s aggressive renewable energy requirements (mandating that renewable energy sources constitute 20 percent of electrical power for the state by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020) require immediate action. As a result, there is considerable interest in installing renewable energy technology on the rooftops of large commercial and government buildings, and in other spaces such as wastewater treatment plants, the aqueduct, and highway rights-of-way. Many of these systems could be considerably larger than the small-scale solar panels on individual homes while still allowing the power to be generated close to the customers using it. This type of decentralized electricity production is a critical alternative and complement to large-scale renewable developments. It represents the single most immediate and feasible means to produce renewable energy on a broad scale without reliance on long-distance transmission lines, some of which have yet to be built.

Unfortunately, decentralized energy generation also faces financing and regulatory barriers. State incentive programs need improvement, such as net metering, which allows renewable energy generators to offset their electricity bills with credits from the energy they provide to the grid; and the feed-in tariff, which provides cash payments for renewable energy.

To address these barriers and formulate solutions, a group of leading renewable energy suppliers, policy advocates, public agency leaders, and large private company representatives met at the UC Berkeley School of Law in June 2009. The group identified and prioritized the most critical barriers to promoting widespread decentralized generation on large buildings and other local spaces that are sometimes in our own backyard. Based on that discussion, this paper identifies the immediate and longer-term actions that government leaders, private industry, and public agencies must take to address the barriers. The key finding is that policy makers must expand and improve the net metering and feed-in tariff incentive programs.